Seeing “Apostates” Clearly: Reconsidering the Legitimacy of Ex-Member Testimony in Documentary Representations of Scientology

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes popular and academic reviews of the book and film Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief in relation to scholarly debates over the status of “apostate” testimony in the study of New Religious Movements (NRMs). Using a Foucauldian discourse analysis – an examination of contested statements of “truth” – it accounts for the significance of ex-member testimony in recent Scientology exposés and argues the tendency to dismiss such testimony as automatically unreliable needs to be reassessed. Using these exposés and the debate surrounding them as a case study, we can see that considering ex-member testimony as disputed but productive discourse, documentary and journalistic representations of controversial new religions can operate as important sources of information, helping us better map a larger discursive domain wherein allegations of harm intermix with claims of benefit in remarkably complicated ways.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The research for this study was conducted in 2019 with all online links tested in September, 2019; it accounts for discourses between 1968 and 2019 but emphasizes those from after 2009.

² Interestingly, none of the articles in this collection address either the book or film Going Clear in depth, but the Church’s campaign against the film is discussed briefly in the introduction (Raine, 2017).

³ Much of the film’s testimony had already been accounted for in a series of St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Bay Times) articles (Childs & Tobin, 2009), Reitman’s Inside Scientology (Reitman, 2011), and the British documentary Scientologists at War (Martin & Clark, 2013). But as an HBO production, Going Clear exposed Rathbun’s and Rinder’s testimony to a larger audience and paved the way for A&E’s Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath (Reiff et al., 2016–2019).

⁴ The fact that all Rathbun’s negative posts about Scientology leader David Miscavige can still be accessed on his blog (Rathbun, n.d.) strongly suggests he has not rejoined the Church.

⁵ Walet may have faced disciplinary procedures or left the Church after this. A Google search of her name and “Scientology” mostly provides links to accounts of Reitman’s book; however, Natalie Leona Walet is listed on a parishioner page promising personal stories. But every link on that page either leads to an official Scientology homepage or is dead (What Is Scientology? n.d).