Introduction and Welcome

Part 1 of 4 · Ep. 1195

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Foreign.

Guest [00:00:10] Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under Support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

Chris Shelton [00:00:53] Cry baby cry. Everything is gonna be all right. You gotta.

John Dehlin [00:01:08] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host John Dehlin. It is October 21, 2019 and we are so thrilled to be holding our concluding episode for now with ex Scientologist and YouTuber and author and blogger Chris Shelton. For those of you who have not been following our latest Mormon Stories podcast episodes, we recently did two lengthy sit downs with Chris Shelton. The first Sit down did three, three and a half hours on L. Ron Hubbard and the Rise of Scientology, paying explicit attention to the parallels between L. Ron Hubbard's life and Joseph Smith's life and the beginnings of Scientology and the beginnings of Mormonism. My listeners have really enjoyed pondering and thinking about those parallels. They also enjoyed the in depth coverage that we were willing to give to any topic. Nowadays, oftentimes podcasts are highly produced, super short, and that's a great format. But here on Mormon Stories, our mode is to go long form and to really go in depth and we appreciate those who support that approach. So that was the first series that we did with Chris Shelton. The second series that we did with Chris Shelton was on David Miscavige and the Rise of Modern Scientology and kind of comparing that to the rise of modern Mormonism from Brigham Young until the present. And again, we found lots of cool parallels. This series follows several other interviews that we've done with other cult members or cult explorations of religions or unhealthy religions. From Tara Westover and her book Educated to Tova Mirvis and her life as an ex Orthodox Jew and her book the Book of Separation to what else? Also of course, Amber Skora as an ex Jehovah's Witness and her book Leaving the Witness, we have really enjoyed covering other cults or unhealthy religions and we look forward to doing more of those in the weeks and months ahead. And of course our interview with Steve Hassan was really important where we talked about the bite model, the ways that unhealthy organizations and or Cults use behavior, information, thoughts and emotions, thought control and emotions. And if I want to say that more accurately, limits on behavior, limits on information, limits on your thoughts and emotionally manipulative tactics, either fear or guilt or shame on the one hand, or, you know, huge promises of things like being together forever with your family, joy, flow, choirs, emotion to hook you. Anyway, interviewing Steven Hasson on the by IT model was super important. And so that's where that's where we are. And we're going to be interviewing Chris Shelton today to complete this series, talking specifically about his life as a Scientologist. Before we do that, I just want to make a really quick plug. For those of you who don't know, the Open Stories foundation and Mormon Stories is a proud sponsor of Thrive. Thrive is a you can think of it as a general conference for post Mormons, but basically it's an event that we're holding November 17th in Salt Lake City as a way to promote healing and growth and community for post Mormons. And so we're bringing Wayne Sermon from Imagine Dragons, I Believe, along with his wife Alex, to Salt Lake City. We're bringing Amber Skoroff, author of Leaving the Witness to Salt Lake City. And then we're going to have a bunch of phenomenal speakers, including Christian Moore, Natasha Alfred Parker, Stephanie Sorensen Larsen. The list is super long. But we're going to have just a day celebrating post Mormonism focused on positive things, healing and growth. And we're just going to try and get as many post Mormons together to show that we're out, to show that we're proud, to show that we're healing and growing and moving on and to make friendships and to build community and frankly, to help figure out what's next. So the Open Stories foundation has, you know, has signed up to be a sponsor of Thrive. Thrive is being run under a for profit only for the sake of expediency. But just to be really clear, Thrive is not a for profit event. It is guaranteed to lose money. We price the tickets at $15 a person. Just the venue and the audio, visual and the marketing that we're doing is going to put it at least in the $20,000 range. And there's virtually no way that we're going to get enough people to sign up to pay that off. So it will operate at a loss. We have a few underwriters that are supporting it, but we just want to make sure, even though it's being run under an LLC for the sake of expediency and by the request of the underwriters. It is not a for profit event. It will lose money, but we're willing to do it and our underwriters are willing to do it because we care passionately about people leaving Mormonism and helping them find healing and growth. So if you, if you want to support a worthwhile thing, please come to Thrive. You can go to thrivebeyondmormonism.com and you can register there. Please share it with friends and family. We'd love to get a few thousand people there. And right now registration is around 780, I think, but we'll be thrilled with 780. That's phenomenal. But please join us and please share thrivebeyondmormism.com Please sign up, please tell your friends, and we'd love to have you. All right, so without any further ado, let's get to the main reason why we're doing this interview. Chris Shelton, we're so thrilled to have you back on Mormon Stories podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Chris Shelton [00:07:40] Thank you for having me. This has been a lot of fun and I think people, there's been a lot of real fun, positive comments back on this. So it's a good thing we're getting this done.

John Dehlin [00:07:49] Yeah. So I'm just curious, have you gotten any specific feedback and if so, tell us a little bit about what you've heard.

Chris Shelton [00:07:57] Yeah, no, it's been great. I was sharing the, the playlist that you put up of our podcasts previously and our live streams, and people were really happy. They were happy you and I had gotten together. They were happy to get a full, you know, one shot. Here's the story of, you know, L. Ron Hibbard. Here's the story of David Miscavige told all in the, you know, in detail so that people could kind of see some of the behind the scenes of it and not just the generalized picture of it and stuff. And I was, I've never had a chance to break it all down in this lengthy kind of format before all in one go. And I think there's been some appreciation of that.

John Dehlin [00:08:39] Yeah, well, I'm thrilled, yeah. Just because I've received the same very positive feedback from so many people already. Chris, about this, what is it, do you think about seeing another religion through someone else's eyes that helps you connect to your own experience and see your own experience more clearly? Do you have a theory about that?

Chris Shelton [00:09:05] Well, it's fascinating because it actually, this has been something we've known about for a long time. Is that one of the ways that And I think, if I recall correctly, that it was Steve Assange who first made the observation that by educating or talking about other destructive cults, one is able to, you know, with defenses down, see parallels, start making connections between that group, which they're not invested in emotionally. So they're not. So the hackles don't come at the defenses don't come up. They're going, oh, those crazy Scientologists, right? And oh, L. Ron Hubbard does this and this and this, and Scientologists believe this and this and this, and they act like this and this and this and maybe. And the person watching go, now, wait a second, that sounds kind of familiar. And they start connecting dots. But they're doing it because it's being presented to them as an education, and it's not being presented to them as your group is X label that they can't deal with. So that way the data kind of goes in and it's more acceptable to receive it that way, and then the dots start connecting. It's not a guaranteed way of getting across to people, but it is. But it is a proven way of doing it. And I think that's something that the watchers of this from both our camps have thought was a positive of this.

John Dehlin [00:10:38] Yeah. And I'll be curious to explore this with you later. I've been pretty open and consistent throughout my 14 years career as a podcaster. My goal is actually not to get people to leave Mormonism. And I'll be curious if you end up agreeing with this. I actually see, and this may be bias, this may be ignorance, but I actually see Scientology and Jehovah's Witness sort of as they are in 2019, especially because of the explicit shunning or the designation of people as subversive persons or whatever you guys call it. SPs.

Chris Shelton [00:11:13] Suppressive.

John Dehlin [00:11:14] Yeah, yeah, that Taking, you know, taking them to a level where it's even way worse than Mormonism. And so even though I talk about cults and we explore cults, I want to make clear that my goal is not to get people out of Mormonism per se. It's just to help people see what they're a part of, see the harm that it's causing, and then help them make more informed decisions about their life. And if that means staying in the church, but just doing so with the full awareness of the harm and the cost and the benefit of, that's great. Now, Chris, maybe at the end you can share your motives for what you do. I think we'll get to that as we talk about Activism.

Chris Shelton [00:11:58] Yeah, no problem.

Chris Shelton's Parents and Their Path to Scientology

John Dehlin [00:12:00] All right, Chris, so let's begin with your story, but I want to start before you. I think I recall you saying that your parents were Scientologists. Is that right?

Chris Shelton [00:12:11] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:12:11] Okay, so I'm going to go back in your genealogy to the point where no one in your family was a genealogist but was a Scientologist. And I want to see were they secular or were they religious before they converted to Scientology, and whoever that is. If it's okay, let's start there. Or earlier, if there's something that's really important for the story.

Chris Shelton [00:12:33] Yeah, no problem. My parents both grew up in the Midwest. My dad in Kansas, my mom in Illinois. My mom grew up in a deeply Catholic home. Big family, I think nine brothers and sisters, and she was, I believe, the oldest. And my father grew up in a similar large family, I think seven or eight brothers and sisters. He kind of grew up on a farm sort of situation, rural Kansas. And he joined. He got out of that life, joined the Navy, got stationed out in Wisconsin, Illinois or something, and ended up meeting my mom. My mom had gone to nursing school, Catholic nursing school, and was just kind of getting out and about and, you know, learning the world and all that. And they met up and hooked up and ended up getting married. And my dad, actually was not Catholic, was not very, very overtly religious, and my mom was, you know, not so super excited about Catholicism anymore, but she'd been raised with it, so that was kind of the worldview. So they had a Catholic wedding. My dad had to go and do some classes and stuff and meet with the Catholic priest and all that, and they did the Catholic wedding. And I think after that, they pretty much dropped it because they never mentioned or said much of anything about Catholicism after that. My dad was in the Navy. They bounced around here and there and other places. Eventually, in 1969, my mom got pregnant with me, and.

John Dehlin [00:14:08] Okay, so we were born the same year.

Chris Shelton [00:14:10] Yeah, I'm 40. Yeah, I'm 49.

John Dehlin [00:14:12] Okay, so I'm 50.

Chris Shelton [00:14:14] Yeah. December I turned 50. So, yeah, and, yeah, so December 69, I was born. I was born at a naval hospital in California, Port Winemi. And at this point, my parents were pretty much, you know, lapsed. I think my. I think I would say, from what I understand that my mom was a lapsed Catholic at this point. She wasn't, you know, practicing or anything, and my dad certainly wasn't. He had started going to college and stuff on the GI Bill, and. And he was pursuing computer science. And this was, you know, in 1969, 1970, 71. Right. So computer science was still big, reel to reel, magnetic, you know, tape. And there weren't. There were no floppy drives. There was no Internet. There was none of that stuff at that. At this point. So he was doing programming and systems analyst stuff. Anyway, my. My folks got divorced when I was 2. They had had a contentious, I guess, somewhat rocky relationship, fighting and stuff, and. And they ended up breaking up and getting to. Getting officially divorced, and they had joint custody of me. I would go back and forth, and I barely remember. I have just a couple memories from this time period, right. Being 2, 3, 4 years old. When I was. I believe when I was four years old, my father's brother was out and living out in Vegas, we were still out in California. And he did a communications class, as I understand it. He did some kind of. One of their simple com course, what they call the comm course, the communications course. And this is a course that teaches how to communicate better, interpersonal relationship sort of thing. Very simple common sense kind of drills or practical exercises that you do, like practicing looking somebody in the eye for long periods of time, practicing, you know, getting somebody sort of taunting you or teasing you, and being able to just kind of sit there and deal with it, not have to react or get violent or weird or whatever in response. That's kind of a skill, you know, being able to deliver a communication, being able to hear somebody acknowledging. I mean, simple stuff. And I stress this because later, years later, this is how I got into Scientology, too, is through this class. So I convinced my dad he did it and thought it was good stuff, and he wrangled my mom into it. They had been having. My mom had been having some rough times emotionally, some ups and downs during that time, and he kind of got her into Scientology by convincing her that it was the thing that was going to help her with that. And even though they were. They were still divorced, I guess they were still friendly, and. And she went in and started doing that, and they eventually got some marriage counseling. This is another service Scientology offers, is counseling services. And there's a whole array of them. And I won't get into all the details because it would take hours just to explain all that. But the counseling for marriage counseling involves having both people in the room, both partners in the room at the same time, and basically having the counselor ask them back and forth, what have you done to your marital partner and what have you withheld from your marital partner? So it's a way of sort of clearing the air and getting all of the, you know, things you did that you don't want them knowing about stuff, getting all the secrets out, you know. And for some relationships, that's a great way to heal a relationship. It's not, you know, universally workable, but of course the way Scientology works is it claims that its methods will work on every single person every single time. So, you know, they always over promise and under deliver. But it's not that their services are completely useless, especially at the lower levels. The communications class and this marriage counseling are good examples of that. Where my parents bit. They got something out of it, so much so that they actually decided to get back together and they got remarried.

John Dehlin [00:18:23] Wow, that's cool.

Chris Shelton [00:18:25] Yeah.

Scientology Beliefs and Missionary Work

John Dehlin [00:18:26] Interesting. I don't want to say maybe I shouldn't say cool, maybe I should say cool. I don't know. But it's interesting. Can I just tell you a couple things really quick?

Chris Shelton [00:18:33] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:18:34] So as I think about Mormonism, number one, Mormonism tends to target, through its missionary efforts, two groups of people. One is super poor people in third world countries like Latin America, Philippines, Africa or the United States. Just anyone who's super poor, who needs a leg up, who needs a community, who's trying to advance to a higher station socioeconomically. And that is the vast majority of our missionary efforts. And you know, huge percentage, you know, you're either born into Mormonism or you're converted. And you're likely converted as someone in a third country who's super poor, a third world country who's super poor. And then another group that the Mormon missionaries target are just people whose lives are on the down and out. People who have, who are just broken, sad, depressed, feeling, a sense of meaninglessness. And that's how these organizations often work. And then the second thing I'll think I just noticed is this idea of missionary work through service is so, I don't want to say insidious, it's sneaky or it's profound or I guess if you're a sincere believer, it's just, it's effective. But you know, when I think of Mormon missionaries, they often go to these countries like Japan or Korea. What do they do to get Russia? What do they do to get people in the doors? They offer English lessons. Right. So again, they're targeting, you know, people on the lower socioeconomic end of a certain country and then they offer a service. So in your case it's mental health services or counseling services. In Mormonism's case, the 19 year old boys certainly aren't, or 18 year old boys now 19 year old girls certainly aren't going to be offering marriage counseling to people, but they certainly can offer English lessons because they know English. And again, focusing on the down and out and, or offering a service is just such an effective way to end up bringing people into your organization.

Chris Shelton [00:20:53] For sure, for sure. And one comment I'll make on that, because this is a point where Scientology and Mormonism diverge actually, so I'm glad you brought this up, is that Scientology is, is definitely looking for people who are having traumatic episodes or episodes of stress, trauma, loss, you know, looking for some kind of help, but they are not interested in poor down and outers. And Scientology is very specific about this and it's actually kind of interesting as a difference. Scientology is not in a position to be able to afford to do that. L. Ron Hubbard was clear in, in Scientology that it is, it is to make the able more able, which is code word for people with money. And because the people who are able are people who are getting along in life, who are taking self sufficient, taking care of themselves. So clearly these are people who have income potential. And my father was one of those people. I mean, sure he had a divorce, there was an emotional component there and a loss, same with my mom. But my dad was a computer programmer. I mean he was ex Navy, he was doing just fine in life as far as I understand, financially and stuff. And my mom was a nurse. I mean she was pulling down money, she was a pediatric nurse. So they both were financially not, not bad off. And of course the similarity, the component that is the same between what you described and what I'm talking about is that you. Somehow the cult has to, or the group has to help the person, somehow they have to get some assistance rendered to the person so as to convince them that this group is helpful, useful, something they want in their life, be open to receiving more help from them. Which is when the religious stuff comes in with the Mormons and with the, when the bridge to total Freedom comes in in Scientology where, you know, we've literally got a bridge to sell you, but it's not a physical bridge, you know. Yeah, I find that interesting.

John Dehlin [00:23:05] And then the only other thing I'll mention is, and this is going to come up a lot, I'm guessing during this session, just the central component of these private, I'll call them ecclesiastical interviews. You know, Mormonism right now is being rocked by Sam Young's efforts to expose how abusive these, how seemingly innocuous but ultimately abusive these ecclesiastical interviews can be. Where a church leader gets you behind closed doors and starts asking you super private and personal questions, you think that it's just them trying to help you. And I'm not going to say that that never happens. In fact, I know they're going to be, in our case, Mormon bishops and Mormon leaders that genuinely just want to help and that genuinely are helpful. But there's this idea of gathering information, and then somehow it being used or leveraged against you. In Scientology, we know that that's way more intense, and we're going to learn about that with today. But in Mormonism, it's just. It's getting you on that treadmill of guilt and shame where you feel awful about yourself because the church has information that it gleaned from these private interviews that make you feel beholden to the church or guilty, that make you feel like you need the church to get better. So I just. I'm just calling that out because as I hear parallels, I'm gonna want to. I'm gonna want to make those associations.

Chris Shelton [00:24:31] Absolutely. Of course. And that's a common manifestation with almost all of these groups. They're looking to solve a problem you have, deal with a stress you have deal with the trauma you have, or help you in some other substantial fashion, some substantive fashion that you agree was help. And once you can get that, that's a massive piece of trust that you gain from a person. If you help them in some fashion, they will automatically be more friendly, open, and less defensive toward your efforts, even to get money out of you. So that's the component there that works for recruitment, and it worked for my parents. And I was 4 years old at the time. I wasn't really paying a whole lot of attention, but I was happy to. I assume I was happy to have my parents together again. And that's what I remember. And we ended up moving to Pasadena, California, and we got an apartment there. We had not yet purchased a house. My folks had been apartment livers. And I started going to school, and there was kindergarten, and then there was actual grade school in Pasadena. And the Scientology aspect of my life, for me, manifested in various expressions of a disciplinary nature or them trying to use science principles on me. And I'll give you a couple examples, because they're kind of unique and different from anything in Mormonism or any other groups, really. There's a concept in Scientology of a reactive mind, that your mind is divided into different. Actually three different parts. There's a somatic mind, reactive mind, and analytical mind. And the reactive mind is the one that gets all the attention it's maybe comparable to Freud's id, or. It's not the same thing. It's its own thing. The reactive mind in Scientology is the part of your mind that stores all the moments of pain and unconsciousness of your life. And unconsciousness could be for a microsecond. It doesn't have to be for a long time. Every time you experience pain, you have a. A hammer hit your thumb. You have that microsecond of unconsciousness. Now, this is all Hubbard's nonsense. This is not how this stuff really works. But Hubbard says that you hit your hand with a hammer and you have pain and you have unconsciousness. And what that does is it reverses how your mind's working, where you're operating on your analytical mind and your rational mind, your thinking, you're aware, your memories, all that, that goes into sort of in operation, and the reactive mind goes into operation, and it starts recording everything that's happening. So that in the future, should you run across similar contextual circumstances, and maybe you hear the same things, maybe you smell the same things, maybe there's something about your current environment that's similar to the time you got hurt, it's going to go into activation again to try to prevent you from hitting your hand with a hammer again or getting bit by the dog or getting hit by a car, whatever it was that happened to you. Those moments are called engrams. It's an old medical term for a cellular memory trace on a cell. And Hubbard avoided structure. Originally, he said, we don't know how the mind is storing this stuff or where the mind is located. And eventually he said, it's not the brain. It's some energy field around you, which is, you know, which you can't detect, of course, but it's. It's there. And. And this reactive mind has all this, you know, compounded experience of your life, and later on says that this includes your past lives, because in Scientology, you are an immortal, spiritual being who has lived forever. And so you've accumulated lots and lots, thousands, tens of thousands, millions of engrams from your past lives, and you're carrying those all around with you also.

John Dehlin [00:28:54] And I just have to say. I just have to say. And it sounds like an engram is kind of like a sin, right? It's basically something bad that's associated with you, right?

Chris Shelton [00:29:04] Yes, but it's not an immoral act. A sin has a moral component to it. A. An engram is simply an unfortunate accident or incident that happens to you that has pain and unconsciousness.

Guest [00:29:16] Okay?

John Dehlin [00:29:17] That's interesting. Okay, that makes sense. The other thing is, note that religions like to tell you things about yourself that you don't know that they don't know, but that they tell you they know because it makes you feel good. And telling you that you existed before you were born and that they know you existed before you were born, and they may even try and tell you who you were before you were born fills an existential hole or a question that you would have about yourself. And, you know, it's why people go to mediums. It's like, tell me about, oh, my loved ones died and how are they. Yeah, your mind would want to pay someone to get that information. And that's why mediums exist, and religions provide that function. In Mormonism, they tell you that you were a spirit that existed in a pre existence with a loving heavenly father, and that you chose the side of Jesus over Satan in the pre existence, and that gets you excited. And I'm just noting that Scientology has what we call a pre existence theology as well.

Chris Shelton [00:30:30] Very much so. Almost all of Scientology is founded on this principle of a thetan, or spiritual entity. Right. That is. That is the true you. You are not your body. You are a thetan.

John Dehlin [00:30:42] And Morgan's. It's a spirit.

Chris Shelton [00:30:43] It's a spirit or a spirit. Yeah. Hubbard has used the word spirit or soul because there's a lot of other religious baggage connected with those terms. So I take care to make the same differentiation, only because it's not exactly the same thing.

John Dehlin [00:30:58] No, I want that.

Guest [00:31:00] So keep.

Thetans, the Reactive Mind, and Core Doctrine

Chris Shelton [00:31:01] I want to be clear about that. A thetan has no existence in the physical universe. And this is. This is one of the weird contradictions of Scientology that doesn't really make any logical sense, but you buy into it because it sounds like it makes kind of sense until you think about it too much. But in Scientology, you are an immortal, spiritual being called a thetan comes from the Greek letter theta. Hubbard just said, okay, thetan, you know, theta, sticking in on it. And we'll call it a thetan. And life force or life energy is. Or the component of a thetan that makes it a thetan is theta. And it's this sort of energy, but it's not a. It's not a manifold. It's not physical manifestation. It's not energy, like, you know, like butane lighters. And you see the gas, you know, that's not that kind of energy. It's a higher, non physical kind of existence. So. So it's not ectoplasmic. It's not interdimensional. It's not of this universe at all. It's foreign to this universe. It came into this universe 4, quadrillion years ago and manifested a life force that has driven the causative life elements of this universe for four quadrillion years. And that sounds like a ridiculously large number. But Hubbard said that the physical universe is much, much, much, much, much older than earth science has discovered or allows for. And Hubbard loves to contradict science and stuff. And we'll get to more of that, I'm sure, later. But the important part here that I want to get to is that how I was raised was. I was raised with these ideas, like, this was how the world works. There are thetans. You are a thetan. You are not your little body. You are a spiritual entity. That was one of the first things I remember learning from a Scientology aspect. Right. And so the reactive mind is also sometimes referred to as the bank. It's a bank, like a storehouse of pictures of pain and unconsciousness. And so they call it the reactive bank. It's just another term in Scientology. Well, for children growing up in Scientology, you're not told about the reactive mind. You're told about your bank. And when you're acting up and crying and out of sorts, you know, because you're hungry or tired or whatever's going on, you're told, stop being Banky. Because that's supposed to be. All the crying and all the other nonsense is a manifestation of your reactive mind, you see? And so you need to stop doing that. You need to stop being Banky. This was a phrase I heard all through my childhood. You know, other people might grow up with, you know, if you want something to cry about, I'll give you something to cry about. My parents were not physically abusive. They didn't do anything like that. They would just talk to me sternly and tell me that I needed to stop being Banky. I grew up with this idea that there was a part of my mind that definitely existed which held all these, you know, these uncomfortable, harmful parts of my life and would, you know, sort of use those back on me and make me upset, make me angry, make me, you know, fearful, make me griefy. All of these are what are called minus emotions or mis emotions in Scientology. This is also something I learned early on. So there's negative emotions, and there's positive emotions, and these are on a scale in Scientology called the Emotional tone Scale. It's an actual numbered chart where Hubbard charted or plotted emotions and gave them numbers and gave them a rank order and said that, you know, at the top is serenity of beingness and happiness and aesthetics and joy. And as you come down and you go into boredom and antagonism and anger and hate and fear and a tone called covert hostility and grief and apathy. And then at the bottom, at zero is body death. You're dead. And this gradation of emotions has a tremendous impact on Scientologists, especially Scientology kids, because now your emotions have a numerical value connected with them, and there are good emotions and there are bad emotions. And initially, this might sound great as a disciplinary measure to teach your kids to not be misemotional and not cry and have tantrums and be angry. But what this does is it creates a situation where, as a child, I was being taught to suppress my natural reactions to things. And I'm not saying that children should be allowed to just run around and be a little hellions and temper tantrum, you know, purveyors. But, you know, there's nothing wrong with curbing unsocial behavior or inappropriate behavior in a social setting. But this carries over to when you're by yourself. And I would get angry or get upset or I'd get. You know, I would experience a loss, and I would feel grief, and I would tell myself, stop being Banky. Yeah, Stop experiencing that. That's not you doing that. This is the import. This is actually right here is the actual damaging part of this. You're not the one who's causing that emotion to occur. Therefore, it's some other external thing called your reactive mind. Therefore, you need to learn to control your emotions by eschewing that and being happy. Let's be happy. Let's come on. Put a smile on your face Turn that frown upside down. All this kind of stuff taken to an extreme, right? And so right out of the starting gates of my life, I was being taught to suppress my emotions. And I can just tell you that for me and other people I've spoken with at length about this, that kind of behavior is not good for a child, and it's not good for an adult. You know, it leads to bad. You know, going to bad places and doing bad things.

John Dehlin [00:37:43] So there's several. Can I just say, this is so great. There's several connections. First of all, you just triggered one. There's a primary song we sang as kids. If you chance to meet a frown, do not let it stay quickly turn it upside down and smile that frown away. Yeah. So, yeah, this idea that emotions are bad, but it goes much deeper. Mormons are taught, and Christians are often taught that there are satanic spirits out there that are trying to influence you and to get you to do bad things. Also, Mormons have a long history of being anti science and anti mental health. And what I'm getting at that I think is really insidious and dangerous in the long run is this idea, number one, that these folk weird theories that these religious leaders come up with about how the mind works and how, how behavior works that are anti science or based on just the weird theories of people who haven't done any studies on human behavior of the mind teaches you that there are external forces that really don't exist that are influencing you. And they also teach you that you're not necessarily fully in control of what's going on, that instead you're this force being acted upon by these weird external forces that really don't exist. But more importantly, they're just basically training you to understand the world and yourself and your mind and your behavior in ways that have no empirical validity. So it's a way, I don't know, it seems, how can it not be doing a disservice to be teaching people that they have everything, that they don't have everything they need to be? Well, in other words, what if you taught people that emotions were healthy, that emotions were important, that anger and sadness were just as important as happiness, and more importantly, that if you could base your behavior on valid principles of empirically supported mental health, then you could find wellness in a viable way versus being hooked into a weird anti science based theology and framework that really ends up sort of serving the purposes of the organization, but not necessarily the well being of the individual adherent. Am I making sense?

Chris Shelton [00:40:20] No, absolutely. That's exactly. I agree completely. One, all of this is pseudoscientific nonsense. I mean, grading emotions with some arbitrary numbers and putting in a scale of sequence and saying this is the way people act and every single person goes up and down this scale uniformly. You will always go from boredom to antagonism, to anger to grief to apathy, that that's always the sequence. Well, it's not always the sequence and it's observably not always the sequence. But they've always got some answer as to why what you think you're seeing is what you're not seeing. So there's all of that and there is the control aspect of it too. But I really feel that when you assign your own personal feelings or emotional experience or emotional life to some external force, you remove the causative ability Of a person to be the architect of their own experience. Because it turns out we do generate our own emotions. Of course we do. It's an interpretation of our experience of going through life. But when you are teaching children that there's some boogeyman in their mind and that's what's causing them, or demons or spirits or, you know, angry spirits or some nonsense, then you're. You're teaching the child that they can't ever truly control their emotional life or experience because there's these monsters around them that somehow they have to telepathically or have conversations in their heads with. It almost begs the child to become schizophrenic. It's really crazy making it's damaging to people psychologically to teach them nonsense like this in their formative years. It has taken me years to overcome this nonsense. Since coming out of Scientology, I could not accept experience loss or healthily experience the stages of grief. One, in coming out of the cult, and two, losing somebody that I actually wanted to marry in coming out of the cult. I had both of those things hit me pretty hard. And it took me a long time longer than it should have, and it's already going to be a bad enough experience. So these formative teachings that the scientologists or mormons or anybody is imparting to children, we're only now really, really starting to understand from a scientific end or view why this is damaging to children. But it's been known for a long ass time. Don't beat on your kids. Don't feed them a stable of comforting lies, and don't tell them things that are absolutely true when they're not absolutely true. It's not helpful to the child at all. You are setting them up to fail. And I get on a roll about this because I really hate what some people do to their kids. They set them up for such losses with this nonsense.

John Dehlin [00:43:40] Yeah, and then I think about Mormonism, conversion therapy, or reparative therapy. That's just one extreme instance of where the science is pretty clear that you can't voluntarily change your sexual orientation. And yet when a religion has a motive, which is we can't have gay people, they're gonna reject what the scientific evidence shows and then come up with these strange theories about how borrowing on Freudism, Freudian sort of concepts, somehow trans or LGB youth can be converted to a straight orientation. It just causes mental illness and depression and ultimately suicide. And it's really reckless. I wish. But what it comes down to is the religion needs to be the authority in all things, it can't allow science to be an authority, or else the religion gets undermined. And so it's oil and water from the very beginning.

Chris Shelton [00:44:42] And the people who are doing that probably believe it because they're raised to believe that it's demons, it's devils, it's the devil in you, or it's some bad angel, or it's some bad thought you had when you were four or something, or you looked at porn and. How dare you. And, I mean, the reasons why these people believe that people are LGBT or even are having a temper tantrum are ludicrous, but they're all based in these models of reality that have no. As you mentioned, no empirical proof or evidence or any. There's no evidentiary basis for any of this nonsense. And it's just some idiot's idea of how the world works, and people adopt it as though it's, you know, sacred lore. And they raise their kids with this stuff, and then they wonder why the kids are stressed out all the time and acting out and acting out even more as teenagers. And, you know, and there you go. So, okay, so let's see here, getting back to my story.

Ethics, Emotions, and Scientology's Pseudoscience

John Dehlin [00:45:51] So you were talking about how your parents would talk about the bank.

Chris Shelton [00:45:55] Yeah. So don't be Banky. I'll give you all that exposition so that that statement would make sense to you. Right. Don't be Banky. Don't be mis. Emotional. Right. Get your emotions in check. You know, control yourself. This kind of thing. Not an uncommon refrain for parents to their children. I'm not saying that I'm unusual in that regard, but I'm trying to stress this point about the bank because I want people to get that this sets up this. This idea of how the world is. And I would try to explain this to my friends, and, of course, they would laugh at me, because they did. They had their own indoctrination from their parents about how the world works. You know, there's nobody smarter about how the brain works than a second grader. You know, so. So I started. You know, so I kind of grew up with this. And there were also Scientology procedures that my parents would try to apply with me as it. As a young child to get over injuries or accidents. There is a thing called an assist. There's lots and lots of different kinds of assists in Scientology, but there are little physical remedies that you do to supposedly resolve accidents so that they don't necessarily go into your reactive mind or they don't come back and bite you in the butt. Later on so hard. And this consists of, for example, let's say I fall down and scrape my knee. So there's this thing called a touch assist where you go back through the motions in slow motion. You go back through the motions of the accident and you touch or contact. Sorry, this is a contact assist, not a touch assist. It's contact assist. The actual, let's say it was my elbow. So I can show you here. Let's say I scrape my elbow on the ground. Well, I'm going to go back and I'm going to put myself in the position and I'm going to recontact the exact place on the ground where I hurt myself. And by continuing to do this motion, I am running out the accident. I'm re experiencing the accident in real time. And that is supposed to remove the harmful elements of it from my reactive mind. This was something I was raised to do. And again, this took years to undo this stuff, right? And these little contact assists and touch assists and this assist and that assist, they don't work, they don't do anything, but you can convince yourself that they do. And again, I was four years, five years old, six years old when I was first learning about this stuff. So the idea of having a critical thinking response to. To it, or questioning it or looking at it and going, well, that doesn't make any sense. That's no part of my six year old brain. That's not what's happening. When I'm six or seven years old, my parents say, do this, and this is what I do. And they tell me this is what it's doing, and I believe them. And so this is, you know, these assists were another part of growing up. So was a near hysterical level looking up words in dictionaries. Now it definitely helped me to become a more literate person to look up words in dictionaries, but Scientology takes it, of course, to the nth degree. You know, when you look up a word in a dictionary, you don't just find the definition that fits for how you're using it. You have to go through all of them and make up sentences and understand every single definition, the derivation and where the word comes from, and all the various uses of it, and idioms and synonyms, and it's this big, long affair. And this was drummed into me that this was the only way to learn. Because in Scientology, the only thing that keeps you from learning something is if you don't have, you know, is making sure that you understand all the words. And of course, this is not True. This is empirically not true. It's absolutely not true. But this is what I was taught, right? So I was. I was. I was raised with this sort of paranoia about words and how I need to understand them. And this carried on all through my Scientology life. And again, you know, a side effect of it was that I'm a pretty literate person, but I'd prefer to not have to have endured the hours and hours and hours of tears, of being, of the frustration of trying to understand things that were way above my head. Because if there's a word in the definition you don't understand, you got to go look that one up in the dictionary and do the whole drill on that word, and then go back, and then if there's another one, you got to clear that up. So you could end up spending hours in a dictionary just trying to understand one sentence of a 20 page paper you're trying to read. You know, this would happen to me in high school, and it was just like, ah, you know, it made study torturous and. And learning not really a whole lot of fun. And I was somebody who enjoyed learning things because I liked learning new stuff. But the methodology that Scientology makes you go through to learn this stuff and. And try to be a good Scientologist by using and following Hubbard's advice, it was just. It was crazy making, you know, so. So those were some of the basic principles of Scientology that were. That were given to me as a child to use. Then there was the ethics system. Okay, so let me. Let me tell you about this. I'll tell you a story. Instead of talking in theoreticals, here in, I think around fourth grade, we went to the planet. We went to a planetarium and got a little lecture from the woman there, really nice lady, about the sun, the moon and the stars. And, you know, and we were shown, you know, graphics and all this stuff, and it was really cool and we were having a good time. And she. I was a cut up in school. I was the kid who would never stop talking. And I know that's going to be a shock to everybody who's ever heard me talk, but I was like all the time in school. And so during this talk from this planetarium person, she says, yeah, they used to think that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the sun went around the Earth. And I, you know, I just couldn't help myself. I was. I think I was like said in fourth grade and I just said, blurted out right in front of everybody. Well, that was stupid. What a. You Know, what a bunch of stupid idiots they were, right? Because of course, we had just learned that the Earth was not the center of the universe, right? And this stopped everything. And she kind of looked at me and the teacher frowned, and, you know, a couple people tittered. And it was not really that big of a deal, but it was made into a big deal because the teacher reported me to my parents and sent me home with this note about what a bad kid I was for speaking out and being so rude and disrupting the whole presentation. And so this is where I learned about Scientology ethics. And I had to do a series of steps that were called a liability formula. In Scientology, there are what are called conditions of existence, and they have these, you know, at any time you're in this condition and it's normal. You know, it goes from affluence, normal, emergency, danger, non existence, liability. And liability is when you. You have become a bad person and you're now acting against the interests of whatever group you're involved in or acting against the interests of yourself. And there are these steps you have to do in order to get back in the good graces of the group that you have now become a liability to. And my mother determined that because I had spoken up and made this embarrassing gaffe, that I was now a liability to my class and specifically to my teacher, and I needed to make up for this. And the formula for the liability, the steps you have to do is you have to decide who are your friends, and then you have to deliver an effective blow to the enemies of the group you've been pretending to be part of, despite personal danger. That's a big mouthful, and it was a huge mouthful for me when I was in fourth grade and I had to spend hours and hours figuring out how I was going to make up the damage to my teacher. I try. I was, you know, like, what was important to me as a fourth grader. My 25 cent allowance every week was really important to me. So I said, well, I could give her my allowance for this week. That'll, you know, I'll try to do something to help her and, you know, and somehow suffer through as an atonement or something. Because it's basically what liability is. It's like you're making. You're making amends or atoning for your sins. And my mom laughed at me and said that was ridiculous. What was my teacher gonna want a quarter with? You know, And I was, you know, just sitting there and I was supposed to solve it myself. I was supposed to figure this whole thing out, and I don't remember exactly. I think I ended up writing her a big apology. I think I wrote her this big sorry note and told her how sorry I was. And it was just. The whole thing I remember is very grueling and very torturous and very much not something I understood why I was doing this. You know, like, it's kind of odd that you're made to go through all these steps, and this happens in Scientology all the time. You're made to go through all these steps because somebody else has judged that your behavior is immoral or improper or inappropriate. But if the final lesson of going through all that atonement is not a recognition on your own part that what you did was wrong and a true reckoning, that you should be making amends, you should be doing something, or you should somehow curb that behavior in the future. If that's not the end result of the activity, then it's just a big waste of time. You're just checking boxes and satisfying somebody else's demands of how the world should work. That was basically end result of this thing. I just sort of felt sorry for speaking up, but I never really was sorry. I didn't think I. What I had done was that bad. And again, it was just hours and hours of getting, you know, lambasted for this. So. So that was where I first first encountered Scientology ethics. What would be many encounters with Scientology ethics. On the brink of perforation, you think you're losing your religion. You second guess your own existence.

Guest [00:57:04] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org. Rabbit Hole, an album chronicling the heartaches and rewarding discoveries of her Mormon faith crisis. You can purchase her album on itunes or by visiting mindygledhill.

John Dehlin [00:57:30] Do. The dark to appreciate the light.

Part 2 of 4 · Ep. 1196

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Foreign.

John Dehlin [00:00:10] Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

Chris Shelton [00:00:53] Cry baby, cry. Everything is gonna be all right. You gotta.

Growing Up Inside Scientology

John Dehlin [00:01:10] In the Mormon world and maybe in the Christian world as a kid, your first memories of church are going to be going to church, sitting in, you know, sacrament meeting as they call it, a Mormonism, going to primary, learning the songs. So sort of a regular church attendance every week and getting together with other families or other children and the kind of children or youth programs that emerge throughout childhood and adolescence of religious instruction, of song, of community building. Does any of that play into the life of a child growing up in Scientology or to your life? What was the weekly, we'll just call religious observance like?

Chris Shelton [00:01:59] Well, in Scientology there is not a. There are not. There are Sunday services, but that came way, way, way, way, way later. Scientology doesn't have weekly rituals as such. What they have is they have classes that they offer and they have counseling and those are the services that Scientology provides. In many, many ways, Scientology is a lot more like a business than it is a religion. It sells classes, it sells counseling by the hour, and you pay set donation rates for those services or for those classes. And of course they're selling books and lectures that of Elrond Hubbard's. So those are its main, those are supposed to be its main income streams and Sunday services, prayers, things like that, none of that's really a thing in Scientology. There's no God figure in Scientology. I wasn't raised to believe in God. God was a non entity for me growing up. It was somebody that I was familiar with the concept of God because other children were being raised with God belief. And I sort of, I didn't really know what to think about it. I was sort of like, well, what do my parents think about it? And they seemed kind of ambivalent about it. Didn't seem really clear cut one way or the other. And. And Scientology doesn't really get into God very much. So none of that was part of the upbringing. Right. Scientology prides itself on being a practical, applied religious philosophy. So it's all about assists and the tone, scale and auditing and these things that you do in your life is what Scientology is more kind of how. More how it operates. And so. But there is definitely a social life in Scientology. And I was going to mention that my parents very much started hanging around with other Scientologists, having them over. All of our friends growing up were Scientologists, not my friends. I met friends at school and stuff who obviously were not Scientologists. But because I didn't go to private school, I went to public school. My parents couldn't afford private school because they were paying for Scientology with all their money. So all of our money was pretty much going to Scientology. And we did buy a house. We bought a very, very cheap fixer upper in Pasadena as our first house. And we moved into that when I hit fourth grade. And so I started going to Linda Vista in Pasadena. We kind of lived just. Just by the Rose bowl in Pasadena. And that was where my. That was where our first house was. And my dad started fixing that up. And they were actually starting to work for Scientology now at the Pasadena Mission. It was not an official full blown Scientology organization. What we call an org, they don't call them churches, they call them orgs. I mean, that kind of gives you an idea of the flavor of how people think about Scientology in the world of Scientology. Nobody thinks of Scientology as a church. They call it a church, but they don't think about it that way. They think about it as a place that you go to do classes and get counseling. So my parents were working at the Pasadena mission, and for years they did that, and they made friends with all the other staff. And we had parties and things, and all those people would come over, we'd go over to their houses or whatever. Our best friends, my parents best friends were Scientologists. And so I grew up around all these people. So it was, you know, it was interesting how my parents ceased having non Scientology friends. I watched that happen. We were just surrounded by other Scientologists and the attitude and the things they would say, right? And this is another thing that spills over and it's another aspect of things that happen in your formative years. You know, I overheard conversations because I was there during these parties and stuff. You know, they'd be sitting around drinking and laughing and listening to music. And the kids would run around and I would hear them have conversations about the wogs. Okay, now, wog is a very derogatory racial term in Britain. I didn't know this. Right. This was a term Hubbard used to describe Non Scientologists. You know, in the same way that in the Harry Potter world, you know, if you're. You're either in the wizarding world or you're a Muggle, Muggles are people who don't have the magic. Right, Right. Well, in Scientology, if you're a wog, you don't have the magic. You know, you literally don't. You know, you're not a Scientologist. You haven't. You haven't learned the truth yet. So you're a walk. And. And again, I know that this is a derogatory term, and I'm kind of stressing it because I know that now, at the time, you know, that we were using it, I didn't even know it had a RA component to it. But I would listen to the parents and my parents and their friends talking about the wogs and how stupid and idiotic and dumb the wogs are, and how none of nobody, you know, none of the wogs get it, and the wogs are destroying the world and the this and the that. So it was. So the us versus them. They didn't have to even talk to me directly to set that up. I just had to overhear them talking about it because my dad would go on a roll, man. And if there was somebody who influenced my opinions growing up, it was my dad. You know, when he got on terror about something, I was like, all ears, because I wanted to know how the world worked. And I thought my dad and my mom were the. Were the purveyors of truth. Right. So I learned growing up that all the non Scientologists were the ones who were destroying the world, and it was the Scientologists who were trying to save it and stop all of that. And. And we were the good guys and they were the bad guys. So before I even became officially a Scientologist, I thought Scientologists were the ones who were saving the world, and all the non Scientologists were the ones actively trying to destroy it.

John Dehlin [00:08:08] Yeah. And then. And again, Mormons are going to really pick up on the parallels here. This idea that you are the chosen people, this sort of Mormon exceptionalism, that literally you're not just here to be good, you're here to save the world. In Mormon's case, we're here to usher in the coming of Jesus Chris. We're chosen by God in the last days, but you only hang around Mormons. And so that's certainly going to limit your vulnerability to outside information. It's going to limit the thoughts you're able to have, and it's going to condition you to not ask certain questions or to not behave in certain ways because the group ends up being a really strong reinforcer of the organization's values and of their boundaries and of their limits. And so you think you're better than everyone else. You only hang around people like you and you look down on the people that aren't part of your in group. And this isn't just Mormonism or Scientology. This is just classic human tribalism. And it happens in almost, you know, if you're a Redskins fan, you know, it's that way. It's whatever organization you're in. If you're a feminist, you know, you're gonna feel that way about non feminists. If you're, you know, a Trump supporter, an Obama supporter, you're gonna hate the other side. But it's just, it's very clear that religions all rely on this, it seems. And, and so what I hear you say, Chris, is that it's not go to church every Sunday, sing songs, hear a pastor talk in Scientology. It's more you go to the org, the local org, and you receive the trainings or the therapy or the instruction. And then your social circles are still very much with other Scientologists.

Chris Shelton [00:10:01] Exactly. Exactly right. One other comment that I'd like to make real fast about childhood indoctrination, though that I think is relevant and important to this conversation is that children don't have critical thinking skills. You know, it's not like our brains are attuned to be critical thinkers. And so adults have had a chance to examine their beliefs from an adult point of view and decide whether they should or shouldn't believe them for themselves. And you know, I'll give an adult any as wide a median as he needs or wants or latitude to believe whatever the hell they want. If they can reason through why they should believe that, at least they have the ability to reason it through. Their reasons might be ludicrous, you know, flat earthers come to mind, but at least they have some idea of why they have reasoned it through that they can explain to you. A child doesn't have that ability. When you tell a child he's an immortal spiritual being, he just takes it and he doesn't have any reason to believe it except you told him and he just accepts it as true. And this is the real problem with second gen, third gen cult members. But it's also a problem with how we indoctrinate our kids as we give them these truths that are not evidentiary based as Though they are, and we insist that they believe them. And in fact, in some households, children are beaten if they ask questions or express doubt. So, you know, I think this. I think we really, really do need to look at how we are raising our children because religious indoctrination is not helping them. You know, at least I don't think so. And I think for the reasons I just explained is because if you. If you're giving children information and they have no understanding of why that information is useful, important, or true, then they're not going to be able to think critically about it and ever, you know, and that's where fanaticism comes from eventually. So, anyway, just wanted to comment on that.

John Dehlin [00:12:11] No, that's great. Okay.

Childhood Indoctrination and Chosen-People Mentality

Chris Shelton [00:12:14] Okay, so let's move forward a little bit because there's a lot to the story. Okay. So I haven't talked this much about my childhood in a long time.

John Dehlin [00:12:23] Thank you for doing that.

Chris Shelton [00:12:24] Yeah. So, okay, so high school, let's. Okay, so I guess the next official stop here would be when I was 15 years old. So I was a D and D player. I said I was a voracious reader. I was kind of nerdy.

John Dehlin [00:12:39] Wait, wait, let me ask you just a couple quick questions.

Chris Shelton [00:12:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:12:42] Were there dietary restrictions? So things you could and couldn't eat or drink? I'm going to ask you like a list of sort of behavioral things just in like five minutes. Were there things you couldn't. Couldn't eat or drink as a Scientologist? No. Okay, so alcohol is okay.

Chris Shelton [00:13:00] Alcohol is okay. Drugs are not okay.

John Dehlin [00:13:03] Cigarettes are okay.

Chris Shelton [00:13:04] Cigarettes okay? Scientologists smoke like chimneys. Especially in the 70s. When I grew up, it was smoking and it was drinking. In fact, my dad actually had an alcohol problem, which I didn't learn about until later because they covered it up pretty well. But yeah, alcohol and cigarettes are okay.

John Dehlin [00:13:20] Okay. Is there a dress code? Are there things you can and can't wear?

Chris Shelton [00:13:27] No. But if you were to be overly sleazy, let's say walking into a Church of Scientology, especially now more so than in the 70s, somebody's going to talk to you about it. But there's no official dress code or guidelines or anything like that. That's not. They're not the Quiverful Duggar, you know, types, as far as that goes.

John Dehlin [00:13:53] And when you say sleazy, you mean like a woman with a low cut

Chris Shelton [00:13:56] dress or a. Yeah, you know, with, you know, wearing goofy shorts, you know, or Speedos or something? I mean, somebody's gonna have something to say about that.

John Dehlin [00:14:04] Okay. Okay.

Chris Shelton [00:14:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:14:06] What about, like, control of sexual behavior? Of, like, masturbation, of looking at pornography, of premarital sex? Were there guidelines around sexuality for children,

Chris Shelton [00:14:17] youth, or adults in the 70s? No, not so much. In the 80s and beyond is when the clamps started coming down on that. And masturbation is a. No, no. This is not written down anywhere. It's all sort of in the culture of Scientology at this point. And this. This came from Miscavige, more so than Hubbard, that there is to be the masturbations bad sexually. It's called sexually restimulating yourself. You know, and the idea is that you're pulling mental image pictures when you're fantasizing. You're pulling these pictures from your mind, and some of these pictures might be coming from your reactive mind. So you're kind of reactivating that, and you're reactivating past stresses and trauma as a result of doing that. And so it could be harmful to your mental health. So you shouldn't be fantasizing too much or too heavily, and so therefore, you shouldn't be jerking it too often, because that's always connected with fantasizing, and so that's why it's potentially bad for you. And this was based on one sentence that Hubbard wrote in a book back in 1952. 51. And taken. They take that one line. I mean, Hubbard literally said, masturbation is not that big of a deal. Lots of species do it, and that's what's written. But then Miscavige took it and said, oh, no, look, it's very harmful to you. It's very stimulative. You should not be doing it. And has used that to bludgeon Scientologists and control their sex lives and their masturbatory lives since the 1980s.

John Dehlin [00:15:58] Okay. Is adultery frowned on?

Chris Shelton [00:16:01] Yeah, very much so.

John Dehlin [00:16:03] What about just stealing and lying and the basic Ten Commandments?

Chris Shelton [00:16:07] Yep. So nothing about, obviously, taking the Lord's name in vain or any of that. There's no sanctity in Scientology. But there is. But there are rules about being moral. There are lots of morality rules in Scientology, but most of them are pretty common sense. You know, don't steal, don't lie, stuff like that. You know, don't hurt a person of good intent.

John Dehlin [00:16:31] Do all those come from some writings of L. Ron Hubbard versus the Ten Commandments or.

Chris Shelton [00:16:36] Yeah, there's a book called the Way to Happiness.

John Dehlin [00:16:37] Okay, you mentioned that.

Chris Shelton [00:16:39] Yeah, we talked about that, I think. And that was where he codified a moral code, and that didn't exist in Scientology until 1980. So up until then there was what was called the Code of Honor, and that came out in like 1952 or 53. And it was a. Hubbard said it was a self disciplinary code. It couldn't be enforced on you, but most Scientology ethics officers will try to enforce it on Scientologists. And the code of honor has things like never disparage, you know, an ally or something, and oh God, there's a whole bunch of stuff in there. But now all of it, of course, is escaping me right now. But you can look it up online. The code of Honor is on the Scientology website.

John Dehlin [00:17:27] But. But that was in some way replaced by the way to happiness or whatever.

Chris Shelton [00:17:31] Yeah, it's sort of. The code of honor was a pretty steep hill to climb for most people that's got some pretty tough restrictions on it, which is one of the reasons why Hubbard said it was so it's only self. You know, it can only be enforced on a self disciplinary measure way. But Scientology will enforce on you. No adultery, no. You know, don't be promiscuous. They're not really into promiscuity, stuff like that. Take care of yourself, you know, take care of your body, stuff like that.

Scientology's Authority Structure and L. Ron Hubbard

John Dehlin [00:18:03] Okay, you've kind of already addressed this, but I want to really hit it explicitly. So whether or not there's a God, whether or not Jesus lived, whether or not Jesus died for our sins, a Bible. How does Scientology approach all those things?

Chris Shelton [00:18:20] Hubbard calls it all nonsense, basically. Yeah, absolutely. Hubbard regarded organized religion and especially the Christians in the Catholic Church. He was really down on the Catholic Church all the time. He basically considered the organized religion was a control operation used to control populaces. And he thought that the priesthood, which he talked about in those terms, the priesthood, you know, these kind of things, were people who were taking advantage of the masses for their own personal wealth and. And ego and that kind of thing. And he wasn't wrong. I mean, you know, it's not like you can't find lots and lots of instances of this, but he just said. He just wrote the whole thing off. And he said that they were sending their prayers up to a myth, that the Christian God was a bit of a myth, and that there was this very long religious tradition that was sort of spiritual in nature and it was sort of a good thing. And he would talk appreciatively about Buddhism and about the long spiritual tradition of the Vidas and the Vida Kims and the Indian Hindu traditions, but he was pretty down on Western religion, and he just thought that they were out to get people's money and out to get people's, and out to control people's lives. And again, he's not particularly wrong. I've developed my own ideas about organized religion since leaving Scientology that parallel some of those, but they're not based on Hubbard's nonsense. I've come to my own conclusions about stuff.

John Dehlin [00:20:03] What about God?

Chris Shelton [00:20:04] Yeah. God is just something that Hubbard really doesn't address very often. What he said. There's one line that I've always remembered, which is that you will not actually be able to understand God or the infinite or the infinite being that is the creator until you have gone through all of Scientology's levels to the point that you have clear understanding of every other kind of life that exists in the universe. And I'm paraphrasing right now, there's another principle in Scientology called the dynamics. Sorry, I got to give you this exposition so this sentence will make sense. But Scientology divides all of life into eight parts. Those parts are represented as concentric circles with you in the middle, you for yourself as an entity, which is called. The first dynamic is you. The second dynamic is sex as an act. And your family, your immediate family, right? They're all second dynamic. The family you create and the family you come from, that's all second dynamic. The third dynamic is groups. Any group you're part of is part of your third dynamic. You could call your work your third dynamic. You could call a club. You go to your third dynamic. It's just part of groups that you're part of. So you see these concentric circles start moving out in volume and size and influence, right? So the fourth dynamic is mankind as a whole. All people, men and women. Right? Everybody. That's the fourth dynamic. Fifth dynamic is animal life, plant life, any other kind of life except people all over the universe. This is not just on Earth, right? All life. Fifth dynamic. Sixth dynamic is the material universe, matter, energy, space, and time. The seventh dynamic is spirits, all spiritual entities. Any spiritual existence. Anything having to do with that is seventh dynamic. And finally, the eighth dynamic is God or infinity. So Hubbard said that you will not be able to understand the eighth dynamic until you have advanced through and understand all of these first seven dynamics. So that's the actual thing that he said and the context of it. So, you know, when you say something like that to a bunch of Scientologists, what they interpret that to mean is that they have to advance to the same level that Hubbard. That at the top of the hierarchy of services and counseling that you do in Scientology, you have to get all the way to the top of that and then you'll have some concept of what God's all about.

John Dehlin [00:23:03] So it mirrors for us this continual striving for worthiness and this continual striving for advancement. It's almost like Boy Scouts on steroids. You got to get the Star Mare badge and then the Tenderfoot, then the star, then the life, then the Eagle.

Chris Shelton [00:23:22] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:23:23] You got to do all these things to earn it. And by the way, it costs a crap ton of money and time.

Chris Shelton [00:23:29] But exactly how the bridge works, you

John Dehlin [00:23:32] can achieve this super high level thing.

Chris Shelton [00:23:36] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:23:36] Really quick, I have to ask this question about authority then. This is fascinating. Mormonism. Well, like in Catholicism, it's like, well, Jesus ordained Peter and then Peter had Chris's permission and then he started the church because Jesus said upon this rock, well, I, blah, blah, blah. And then Protestants had the problem of like, how do we break off from Catholicism but still claim to have the authority? And I don't know how they figured that out, but that's why Joseph Smith basically said that when all the churches fell into apostasy, God had to come down and ordain Joseph Smith himself, or through angels, angelic spirits, as the anointed one to lead the church in the modern day. So Joseph had to claim some sort of authority, divine authority, to be able to call himself God's prophet on the earth. What did L. Ron Hubbard use to convince his followers that he had any authority or was special in any way where he deserved, you know? Cause he's coming up with all these theories and it's very clear that just like Joseph Smith, he's taken pop psychology, he's taken maybe Freudism, he's taken pop science or just his own crazy theories and just weaving a bunch of stuff together and coming up with all these levels and all these approaches and all this key to happiness, just like any of us could. How did he convince his followers that he had any authority or, you know, sort of like divine blessing to be telling us what truth is? Like, what made anyone pay attention to this guy?

Chris Shelton [00:25:19] Yeah, no, he claimed it was all a research trail. He claimed he was doing scientific research. He didn't come at this from a profit status. In other words, he didn't come at it as though he was, you know, giving divine revelation. Hubbard's assertions were always that his discoveries were an outgrowth or product of his research and that he was researching and studying man as a spiritual entity. Right. And that originally with Dianetics as You'll recall it was a science of the mind. So Hubbard wasn't making spiritual claims with Dianetics, he was making mental claims about the modern science of mental health. People had some gain from some of those practices. Again, a small percentage of people who tried it liked it. So they said, well, there must be something to this. Hubbard must be on to something. He must be a good researcher. And he claimed that he was an independent scientist, basically a non funded, self funding sort of scientist. And when Dianetics came out, he continued doing research and lecturing frequently, I mean weekly, and claiming that he was doing case studies and he was tracking the progress of people with different Dianetics techniques. And they were trying this and they were trying that. And when the second book came out called Science of Survival in 1951, it was called, it was subtitled Faster Simplified Dianetic Techniques. So it was continuing the idea that he was generating a science through research. Through those researches, Hubbard got people to take him seriously about the spiritual claims because he said that what was coming up in the research was past lives. He wasn't insisting that people had past lives, they were. And he was the one, he said, who just had to follow where the research took him. You know, because he's being a good scientist. And we already know that his researches, quote unquote, had, you know, zero to do with case studies. There was no peer review, and that he was asking very leading questions and driving people where he wanted them to go in their counseling sessions. So it wasn't real research, but this was how Hubbard drummed up support for himself as he was a philosopher and a researcher. That's fascinating through those methods that he claimed to be an authority figure.

John Dehlin [00:28:00] That is fascinating because for a couple reasons. One is I do have a PhD. I have done science or social science research and I understand that just understanding how statistics work. Most people in the world are never going to be able to fully understand how statistics work and then from there to become scientifically literate. It's just a bar that a huge percent of the world is just never gonna obtain. So it sounds like he did this sophisticated play that I, that I don't know who else has done this successfully. Instead of just claiming divine authority, which is sort of a shortcut or a cop out to sort of gaining authority. He's basically relying on the authority of science, but only his interpretation, science, which is actually pseudoscience. So he's borrowing on the virtue of science, which is that science is evidence based and empirically supported. So that everybody who doesn't have the Interest or the ability or the intellect or the luxury or the privilege of really understanding science. You know, so that those people that can't really engage scientifically think that they're engaging in something scientific and credible and empirically supported, but in reality it's just pseudoscience. So he's borrowing on the virtues of science while not being scientific and then discrediting anything scientifically valid if it doesn't align with his pseudoscience. That's a real mind cluster F, if

Chris Shelton [00:29:45] I can say that it is. And that was exactly how he maintained the con for all those decades, because he counted on people's ignorance, their inability to do fact checking, especially pre Internet. He had no concept that the Internet was coming, ever. He claimed to have all this knowledge about past intergalactic civilizations, but he never anticipated the Internet. You know, I mean, like, come on, dude. But he didn't, you know, he didn't anticipate any of that stuff. And he often made these wild ass claims, but he would make them on the basis that this was stuff that had come up in people's auditing sessions. And the implication was that it had come up in more than one person's auditing session. So therefore it was being cross verified. Right. These information about past civilizations and about past lives and about our spiritual abilities. And all of this was coming from research, from doing auditing and this counseling on people and taking them into these past lives. And if you look at how Hubbard did his auditing, you see that he led them down the garden path, but he was pretty crafty about it. And they thought that they were coming up with their own memories when he was clearly implanting or making suggestions about them. So he was clever, he was canny, you know, and not everybody bought into this. I mean, mind you, there were more people who came in and left Scientology over the years than are still in it. But for the people who would believe it, you know, come in and watch it and be part of it for a while, they would buy into this stuff. And that included my parents. You know, they definitely. My dad went all in on this. And my dad was one of the smartest people I've ever known. You know, he was. He was a smart cookie. But intelligence doesn't have anything to do with it. You know, like I said, you help somebody and you can convince them of all kinds of things.

John Dehlin [00:31:37] Yeah. In the human experience, emotion and pain trumps intellect. And so many Mormons, when they leave the Mormon Church and no longer believe, they're like, how can intelligent people still. How Can Richard Bushman. How can Terrell Gibbons, and these are names you won't know. But how can these Mormon scholars still believe in Mormonism? And the whole point is, it's not just trump and lived experience, intellect, sorry, emotion. And lived experience trumps intellect every single time. If you're down and out and miserable, it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you're miserable and you want to die, and if someone can provide you with a life framework that can make you feel happy and healthy and like you're part of something meaningful, that is going to Trump intellect 99 times out of 100 for most people. And so, because life can be messy and because it sucks to be alone, because it's hard to figure out what's true. Religion is always going to be formed by ingenuous or what's the word?

Chris Shelton [00:32:45] Disingenuous.

John Dehlin [00:32:47] By industrious entrepreneurial types that basically are going to say, I figured out the way to happiness. And here it is. So that somebody who can't figure it out or who can't find happiness can just hold on to that way as the way because they can't figure it out themselves.

Chris Shelton [00:33:07] Exactly. That's exactly right. I agree with everything you just said.

Childhood Exposure to Criticism and Leaving for Staff

John Dehlin [00:33:11] Okay, so let's go back to your childhood.

Chris Shelton [00:33:13] How did it progress? Okay, so my effort at critical thinking, the one time I really tried to take a stab at Scientology before I got involved with it was when I was a teenager and I had started high school, and my friends were kind of ribbing me about my parents doing Scientology. And I was sort of like, yeah, I don't really get, you know, and they'd heard that, you know, this was in the. This is 1981, 82. So my parents had. My friends had sort of heard some things about Scientology. Maybe there was a 60 Minutes episode or something like that. And if you recall at this time, Scientology was in the newspapers and Hubbard's wife was going to jail. I mean, this was a time when Scientology was not experiencing a lot of fun and games. And my parents were still die hard supporters. They ended up becoming collateral damage in a way of that whole mission fiasco that I sort of talked about when we went through the history of all this stuff. They were working at Pasadena Mission and they ended up getting kicked off staff and getting declared suppressive for a little while as collateral damage of this whole mission problem. But that sort of happened at a distance from me. I really wasn't aware of what was going on because I was a teenager. I didn't care about Anybody else but me. So I was not paying a lot of attention to my parents Scientology life. I still had a roof over my head. I still had a bed to sleep in. I was going to school. I was much more interested in trying to find a girlfriend than I was interested in anything having to do with Scientology. I got some shit about it from my friends at school. I went and confronted my mom one day, and I said, you know, hey, what's. You know, you guys pay an awful lot of money into the Scientology stuff, and I don't really get it. Why, you know, couldn't we have nicer things? Couldn't we have a nicer life if you guys didn't spend so much money on this? It seems like a crutch, you know, that you guys are using. And that was the most bold criticism I'd ever offered on Scientology as a child. Right. I was probably 13 or 14 at this point, and my mom sort of put me in my place. She was like, well, look, you know, we're your parents. We're adults. We get to make decisions. You're still growing up in our house, and so you've never wanted for anything. You've always had food, you've always had clothes. You've always had a bed to sleep in. So it's really not up to you to question how we spend our money. It's our money. And that was it. And I was like, okay, I have now been put in my place. You know, pretty rational response, really. My mom didn't like, you know, she was pretty reasonable person in many ways. So that kind of nipped any kind of criticism of Scientology and their spending habits right in the bud, and I never questioned that again. But the following year, I might have questioned it more, and I might have gone in a whole different direction, except this conversation happened one fine day in the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. I was hanging out at home. I had friends, we did role playing games, we hung out, we went to the mall, that kind of stuff. And my dad said that there was. My dad had started his own company with another Scientologist as a partner, and we had. We had moved up to Santa Maria, California, which is outside of Santa Barbara. And. And so we were living up there now, and I was going to high school, and my dad said that another person at the company who was looking into Scientology was going to be going to the Santa Barbara church, the orc. And would I like to go along to check it out for myself? You know, would I like to go see what the Scientology stuff is really all about. And since it came from my dad, I didn't really feel like I had the ability to say no. I was a little, you know, whatever my dad. And again, not because he was ever physically abusive or weird to me. It just. I just kind of had this deference to the things my dad wanted. So I went. I went down to the church I fully expected. I took books with me. I took a backpack with games and stuff. I fully expected it was going to take me 10 minutes. I was going to blow it off, and that was going to be it. Instead, I went in there and I did the personality test, the Oxford capacity analysis, this 200 questions of yes, no, maybe. And I got this graph telling me all about myself. And I had this woman sit down with me and interpret my graph and go over my graph with me. And she. I've told this story so many times, I'll just kind of cut to the chase and say that she convinced me that I was a shy, introverted 15 year old, which I was. And so she kind of nailed me on that. And I thought I had been keeping that a pretty closely held guarded secret. And nobody really knew how shy and introverted I was when obviously everybody knew. And so I signed. She said, we have a class that you can take. It's a communications class, and if you take this class, you will not be shy and introverted anymore, and you will be able to get dates with girls. And I said, sign me up. Take my money. Shut up and take my money. I couldn't sign up fast enough. And of course, let's remember that I went in there with this sort of surface attitude of I'm going to brush this stuff off. But at the same time, I want to acknowledge that I had been primed for this my whole life. So I didn't really go in there with a neutral attitude about Scientology. I'd had my friends ribbing me and giving me some shit about it. But I also had been raised with this stuff. So I had this idea that Scientology actually did work and actually was true. I just wasn't sure if I wanted to spend my time doing it while I was in high school, when I was more interested in girls and stuff. So it was really a matter more of priorities with me than it was a matter if I was critical of Scientology or I didn't want to have anything to do with it. So I go in and I get convinced very quickly that I should be doing Scientology. And I then wanted to sign up for classes right away. And I ended up borrowing money from my parents. They would not pay for it themselves. They said, okay, well, if you're going to do it, we'll lend you the money, but you have to pay for it yourself. And I borrowed $900 from them so I could do three classes and 900 bucks to a kid in high school who's working at Burger King. You know, that's a lot of money. But I went. I was really convinced. I mean, it should kind of tell you how convinced I was, right? That this was like, the shit. And I wanted it now because I wanted dates with girls, damn it, you know, And I wanted to get. I wanted to get along in life better because I didn't like being introverted. I didn't like being the guy who got picked on at school. I didn't like any of that. And this was a possible solution to all of it in one go with a class. I was like, goddamn, absolutely, I want to do that. So I started doing classes at the Santa Barbara Org. And I went with this guy who would drive me. His name was Doug. And he and I would go down and we worked together on the classes. And I did the communications. I did this very advanced communications class. I didn't do the entry level one. I ended up doing the big one. And then I did a study class where I learned, sort of in a codified form, all of that study stuff that I'd grown up with, you know, learning to look up words and all the other aspects of Hubbard's ideas about how to study stuff. And I took a class on that basically surveyed the basics of Scientology, because I didn't know all those basics. I hadn't read any of the books and stuff yet. I just knew what I had grow grown up with and what my parents had passed on to me. So I started taking these classes, started going back to school, started looking a little better, but communications wise, I learned how to look people in the eye, and I learned how to talk to them, and I learned how to listen to what they were saying. But it didn't really help me get any more dates. It didn't really help me overcome all the other cultural and social problems I was having. But I kind of convinced myself that it did because at least I was able to ask girls out. Now they weren't saying yes, but at least I could ask. So I consider that a big, momentous kind of gain, right? And this is the way that we sell ourselves on these groups, is we're promised the sun, moon and stars. We don't actually get the sun, moon, and the stars, but we might get something. We might get a little glimmer of sunlight. We might get a little tinkling of a starlight or something. Right? You get my analogy? And we buy into that as an acceptable product of our work and our money and our time. And we continue going with it on the promise or the hope that the sun, moon, and stars will eventually manifest themselves. And that's how all these cults work is. They drag you in with these amazing promises, and they do give you something that you think is substantive and is very, very helpful to your life and changed your whole world. Well, the ability to go from not being able to look at girls to being able to ask them out, yeah, that was a good thing. But that was it. That was all I got for 900 bucks.

John Dehlin [00:43:00] Right.

Chris Shelton [00:43:01] But I carried on because, you know, again, I was primed for this. I thought this was, like, the thing that was going to get me going. And, of course, the other thing they tell you in Scientology, and they told me this many times, is that if the current service you did or that you're doing right now isn't handling the problem you're trying to handle, well, the solution is obvious. You just need to do the next service and the next one and the next one. And eventually, when you've done all the services, which are going to take you

John Dehlin [00:43:31] years to do, and a lot of money.

Chris Shelton [00:43:33] And a lot of money. A million bucks. And science, when we're talking about Scientology, we're talking about a lot of money, then you're going to have the sun, moon, and stars, you see? So it's all the carrots always dangling out there for you. Always. And I, you know, naively bought into it. And I kept doing classes, and I kept going down to the church on a fairly regular basis through the rest of my high school career. And when I was 17 years old, as a senior in high school, I finally graduated. And that summer I was gonna go to college. I was gonna be a writer. I wanted to kind of follow in the footsteps of Stephen King, who was kind of one of my literary heroes. I loved his work, and I thought that I could do the same. I was a writer. I'd gotten myself into honors English classes in school. I'd gotten myself promoted into that program by writing stories and showing the teacher I was, you know, literate and creative. I couldn't. I didn't pass the tests, the placement test, to get me there. But I, you know, I earned my way in there anyway, and I loved Writing. I love storytelling. And I thought that's what I was going to do with my life. And instead, I was going down to the church during the summer, and I was doing this purification sauna detox program that they do. And that's a whole nother kettle of pseudo sign nonsense, pseudoscience. But I was doing it. I was sweating out. You know, I was spending five hours a day down at the church in Santa Barbara, driving down there every single day to do this detox program. And after I was done each day, they started wrangling me into an office and talking to me about working at the church, because now that I wasn't going to high school anymore, I could potentially, you know, leave home and start working at the church. And they had a personnel problem they had to solve, and they wanted me to help be the solution for that. And I thought, yeah, I don't know that I want to do that. And then they started showing me all these L. Ron Hubbard quotes about saving the world and how Scientology, like, they started introducing me to things that they told me were not broad. Publicly known by all Scientologists. Right? This was hidden information. This was confidential information. They were going to show me things that only staff members could see. The public don't get to see this, but you're special, and we're going to show you this. And they showed me writings from L. Ron Hubbard about how the world was going to, you know, wasn't doing so good. And if Scientology didn't make it, the world wasn't going to make it. And we only had a few years. We were living on borrowed time. You know, the oil crisis and this crisis and that crisis, it was all just from people's reactive minds. And we must, must, must clear the planet, which means we have to get rid of the reactive minds. We have to get people freed up of all of their stresses and traumas and engrams.

John Dehlin [00:46:33] And again and again, that parallels Mormonism and Christianity's sort of end times focus. We're called the Church of Jesus Chris of Latter Day Saints because of this teaching that the end is near. What humans don't realize is the predictions about the end of existence have been going on for millennia. But a way that an organization loops you in is by making you feel like the end is coming. There's a pending destruction, and you are the chosen person that can help save the planet. And it makes you feel special. It gives you a sense of purpose and meaning and fulfillment. And that's so often how they loop you in. The other thing I Just wanted to say, Chris, is that, of course, there's part of me that's thinking, man, it sounds like Scientology is just like self help turned into a pseudoscience religion. And then I realized that's what you've just been telling us the whole time that L. Ron Hubbard did dianetics, which was self help. And then he realized this could be much more effective without the purview of science and without government regulation. So let's take this self help pseudoscience stuff, bake it into a religion, and then we'll be super financially and globally successful under those religious protections.

Chris Shelton [00:47:51] Exactly, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:47:52] Without science inconveniently telling us that there's no empirical support for what we're actually saying. But it gets a youth like you hooked in, because who doesn't want to be better communicator? Who doesn't want to get rid of their insecurities, who doesn't want to get rid of anything that's an inadequacy so that they can be able to find love or find a date or make a family or be happy. And once the religion can convince you that you need them to be able to meet your life goals, then you're hooked.

Chris Shelton [00:48:29] Exactly. Exactly. And that was how I got hooked. Right. Because it went from the product of them working me over, and it took me. And it took them days to do it. I was going down there every day. I was kind of a captive audience. I had to go to do this detox program. It was a daily thing. And coming out of the sauna after five hours, you know, I was a little tired. And then they start working me over, and they start, you know, doing this recruitment on me to be. To get me to join staff. And they was clear, you know, it was love bombing all over the place because they kept telling me how great I was, how intelligent I was, how fit I was for working as a staff member. Because not everybody is cut out to be a staff member. But you sure are, you know, and I would suck all this stuff up. I mean, it was such an ego fest. I mean, it was awesome for somebody to sit there and, you know, these. These wonderful people to tell you how wonderful you are, you know, and these are the staff members who have been delivering services to me for the last couple years. I respect these people. These are authority figures to me. And now they're telling me that I can be one of them and. And not only be one of them, but how smart and brilliant I am and how I'm part of the select few people who can be part of them. Right. So I'm buying all of this. I'd never experienced anything like this before, and it was. It felt wonderful. Then they're telling me that I'm going to be part of saving the world, and suddenly Scientology goes from something that I'm doing to improve myself to something that is absolutely necessary for the survival of our species. That was how they recruited me. Right?

John Dehlin [00:50:15] Yeah.

Chris Shelton [00:50:15] And so I had personal status going on, and I suddenly had this grim awareness of the world and how the world was going to hell, and I needed to do something about it. This was really, really key because this put in my head some ideas that I held onto for decades that. That made me make decisions that were very, very poor decisions for my life. Right. Joining staff was the first one after joining Scientology, I guess maybe it was the second one, But I went home and I had to duke it out with my parents a little bit because they had had their own bad experience as a scientist, Scientology staff members from their mission time, and they had had to clear all that up. And I didn't really know a whole lot about it. All I knew is that suddenly they were really mad at me because I wanted to work at the church. They wanted me to do Scientology. They just didn't want me to work at the church. Right. They didn't think I knew what I was doing. And you have to sign a five year contract of commitment, and the contract didn't promise me a whole lot of anything except free services. Right. You get your services in Scientology for free. A staff member, you don't pay for them anymore, but they're gonna pay you next to nothing. Right. They don't have to pay you anything. You sign up as a religious volunteer, I wasn't so keen. I wasn't so canny enough to be able to read a legal document and understand what I was actually getting into. And my parents tried to warn me, but I was 17, and I was done listening to my parents, so I just needed their signature on the dotted lines because I was a minor still. And they eventually relented and I joined staff. This is after about three days of arguing and haggling back and forth.

John Dehlin [00:52:03] And again, your parents didn't want you to join staff? Why?

Chris Shelton [00:52:07] Because they had been staff, and they saw they got screwed over and treated badly and not paid. And, I mean, they saw behind the curtain staff. They still, like I said, they still thought the subject of Scientology.

John Dehlin [00:52:20] Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Shelton [00:52:21] You know, and this is.

John Dehlin [00:52:23] This is powerful. The organization can even mistreat you, but the theology can be so deeply embedded that you remain faithful to the ideology after the organization has mistreated you.

Chris Shelton [00:52:35] That's right. And that way, that had been the cycle that my parents had gone through, and they didn't want to see me make those mistakes. They never, ever wanted me to be on staff. But I got recruited, and I was gonna save the world. And there is nothing more dangerous to the world at large than a young person who thinks he's saving it. And that was me at 17 years old. Right. I was ready to go. So I joined staff. I moved to Santa Barbara. I moved out of home, and I started, you know, on this journey, and, God, there's just a lot of details, and I really don't know. I don't know that we need to get into all the details of eight years of my life as a staff.

Working as a Scientology Staff Member

John Dehlin [00:53:15] Does staff mean you're paid? It's a job.

Chris Shelton [00:53:18] Well, it's supposed to be. And, yes, you do get paid. But my paycheck, which was given in cash, by the way, every week, was, you know, maybe 50 bucks, 20 bucks, 18 bucks. You know, a really great week of pay was 75 or $100.

John Dehlin [00:53:36] And then, how are you paying rent? How are you food?

Chris Shelton [00:53:39] I had to get another. At first, my parents were basically supporting me, and for about the first year, they were helping me out. I got it. I was working full time at the church. I had been sent to LA for training. So I was down there at the big blue buildings. I wasn't Sea Org yet. I was just a staff member. But one of the functions that happens in the Sea Org is they'll get staff from all the churches around and they'll train them on stuff. And I was getting trained to be a classroom supervisor, to teach scientology to other people and, you know, sort of administer the classes. And so I went down to LA to do that. I bombed because I was kind of, you know, full of myself, and I didn't really understand staff and how staff worked and how the Sea Org worked and that I was supposed to be subservient. And there was just a bunch of stuff I didn't really understand yet. And so I got sent back to Santa Barbara after four months, and I thought I had failed. And they were okay with it. They didn't care. They were like, okay, good. Well, you're back. Let's get you to work, and let's get going. And I started working, and after a year, my parents said, look, you got to get a job, man. We can't keep supporting you and supplementing your income and stuff, you really got to take care of yourself. And I agreed. I said, okay, fine. And I was reluctant, but I did it. I tried to leave staff at one point, but they kind of convinced me to stay. And there's a principle in Scientology especially, that is run on staff hardcore, which is that if you want to leave, it's because of your own sins. It's what they call overts or overt acts. Things you do that you wouldn't want somebody to do to you. Right? Or things that you do that you know are destructive or harmful in some fashion. Even if that's just slacking off, it can be overt, or it can be. It can be an overt act, or it can be an act of omission, something you don't do that you should do. Either one of those can be a violation of your moral code. And if you violate your own moral code often enough, then you'll want to leave the group because you're trying to protect the group from you, is the theory. You're such a bad person. So I'm making all these sacrifices and trying to make this. And I ended up getting another job. So I'm working 80 hours a week now. 40 of those hours are pretty much unpaid, and the other 40 are just so I can have a job, to have a roof over my head, get my own place. I'm struggling back and forth with this because I'm conflicted, because I still believe I should be able to make money at the church. And the only reason we're not making enough money is because we're not working hard enough and getting the job done. It's not because there's something wrong with Scientology. It's never because there's something wrong with Scientology. It's us, right? We're the ones who aren't fulfilling the potential. So for eight years, basically, I struggled with this, and I got a job after the first year. I basically maintained outside jobs, but they were always second fiddle, second priority to my Scientology work. That was the stuff that was saving the world. So that's where my focus and attention was on. And then, let's see, lots of ups and downs, lots of. Like I said, I tried to leave at one point, and they wrangled me back in. And actually, a couple times I took off and tried to say, look, this isn't for me anymore. But they would always kind of get you back in and love bomb you and take care of you and treat you well and tell you how needed you were.

John Dehlin [00:57:33] Hey, Chris, let me Ask you. It was seven years you were working in that capacity.

Chris Shelton [00:57:38] Eight.

John Dehlin [00:57:38] Eight years. Just without going into detail, what were the main responsibilities you had during those eight years?

Chris Shelton [00:57:44] Okay, so first I was responsible for calling people in for the services that they had paid for. Sometimes people would come in, pay for classes, you know, disappear, take off, not do them. So I was working on recovering them. Then I went back to LA the second time, and I succeeded in getting through the training to be a classroom supervisor. And I supervised classes for years, and I did some specialist training for that. Then I rose up. I got promoted to overseeing all of the classwork and the counseling work for the whole. For the church. Right. For Santa Barbara. And I was. So it was sort of an executive type position, even though I was down, you know, doing classroom supervising and stuff sometimes too. And I sort of oversaw that delivery until 1995, and then that's when I joined the C organization.

John Dehlin [00:58:42] Okay, so that was your eight years.

Chris Shelton [00:58:45] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:58:45] Okay. So. And this reminds me of the Landmark Forum a little bit. I don't know if you've ever heard

Chris Shelton [00:58:51] of that, but hearing that sound.

John Dehlin [00:58:53] Landmark Forum is an organization that brings people in on weekends and trains you for two and a half days on again, life improvement stuff. My sense is it's basically just warmed over secular Buddhism that then has a really almost culty feel to it in terms of how high pressured sales the event is to try and close other people to. To attend the Landmark Forum. But one of the most stunning things about Landmark Forum is that they use former participants as volunteers to run the events. So the number of people running any given Landmark Forum event who are paid is actually relatively small. But you become such a believer in the method that you use all these volunteers to help you run the actual seminars. And so it just sounds like people who get recruited into Scientology as employees or as workers do so as volunteers to help promote the basic skills training that Scientology offers. Is that right?

Chris Shelton [00:59:59] Yes. Yeah. I mean, the staff are all basically volunteers. And. And we're not, you know, we're not really getting paid a whole lot. The.

John Dehlin [01:00:10] But you're working on helping others go through the coursework, basically.

Chris Shelton [01:00:14] Oh, yeah, but it's more. It's more advanced than just helping them. There's special training for all of these jobs.

John Dehlin [01:00:20] Yeah.

Chris Shelton [01:00:21] And so it's not just wrangling people in and saying, hey, can you help him get through his study? Or can you sit with him and tutor him a little bit? It's much, much, much more formalized than that. My training took months to get through. And I'm not saying the training was great. I'm just saying that it took me months to get through it because there's so much to learn about how to teach other people things, according to L. Ron Hubbard.

John Dehlin [01:00:46] But it's all about the infrastructure for the wealthier members or the members or the engagers who have access to financial resources. All the infrastructure is to help people, move people through the process.

Chris Shelton [01:01:04] Yes, absolutely. And the. The level I was at as a Scientology staff member in Santa Barbara was the lowest or one of the lower levels of this infrastructure. And there is a hierarchical system. And when I moved. When I joined the Sea Organization, I was moving up that hierarchy.

John Dehlin [01:01:24] And again, the hierarchy. Is it called the bridge? What's it called?

Chris Shelton [01:01:27] No, that's. The organization structure is just the organization. The bridge to total freedom is the services that are also, okay, hierarchically, you know, arranged. You go, you. Everybody does this service, and then everybody does this one, and then everybody does this one. It's a set series of services. There might be some individual variations in what you do with a person at one level or another, but they move up these levels of spiritual awareness and ability, and that is the bridge to total freedom. The organizational structure is how that bridge is delivered.

John Dehlin [01:02:03] Are there explicit levels in the organization, like, actual levels?

Chris Shelton [01:02:07] There are, and the levels involve. Basically, there's only really two of them. There's staff, and then there's Sea Org, and the staff deliver a certain block of services up to a certain level. And beyond that level, you need Sea Org members, and Sea Org members deliver the rest of the bridge.

John Dehlin [01:02:27] Got it? Okay.

Chris Shelton [01:02:28] Yeah, That's. That's how it breaks down.

John Dehlin [01:02:30] Okay.

Chris Shelton [01:02:30] And so as a. As a staff member, we were only responsible for people up to the level of clear on the. On the grade chart or the bridge. So we could deliver all of those services. All of that stuff is not confidential. Anybody can go in, look at that stuff, read it, look. You know, it's. There's nothing advanced about it. It's not the Xenu stuff. That stuff is done by the Sea Org. Second guess your own existence.

John Dehlin [01:03:13] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming me a monthly subscriber at mormonstories.org. Rabbit Hole, an album chronicling the heartaches and rewarding discoveries of her Mormon faith crisis. You can purchase her album on itunes or by visiting mindygledhill. Do.

Chris Shelton [01:03:44] We cry? Everything is going to be all right?

John Dehlin [01:03:49] You got to appreciate the morning light.

Part 3 of 4 · Ep. 1197

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Foreign.

John Dehlin [00:00:10] Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

Chris Shelton [00:00:53] Cry, baby, cry. Everything is gonna be all right. You gotta.

Joining the Sea Organization

John Dehlin [00:01:08] So at some point, after eight years, you were recruited in the Sea Org?

Chris Shelton [00:01:13] Yes, I was, in 1995.

John Dehlin [00:01:15] And so what's that like? I imagine that's everyone's dream, right, The Sea Org. Oh, to become a member of it, right?

Chris Shelton [00:01:23] Well, yeah. I mean. Well, no, it's not everybody's dream. It's more like the c. This is an analogy or it's a simile. It's not a straight comparison, but if you look at being clergy in the Catholic Church, you might have your local bishop or deacon, right? Or whatever the terminology is. For the local guys, the guys who are operating at the city level, let's say that's where their sphere of responsibility is. That's the staff members, the guys at the Vatican. That's the Sea Org. They are the hardcore, committed, core element of the religion. Without them, the rest of it falls apart. That's the Sea org. It's about 4 to 5,000 people worldwide, and they deliver all of the advanced materials. They manage Scientology internationally. We were, as a staff member in Santa Barbara, we were receiving weekly orders and phone calls from Sea Org management telling us what to do in Santa Barbara to become a bigger, prosperous organization following L. Ron Hubbard's policies. Because L. Ron Hubbard wrote policy letters guiding the organizations on how to. How to deliver classes, how to deliver auditing, how to do sales, how to do dissemination, or marketing and promotion, how the building should be laid out, what offices should exist in the building, that there should be an office for L. Ron Hubbard. All of these are policies that L. Ron Hubbard wrote. How to do weekly invoicing, how to get somebody started on a course, how to. How to get somebody attested to an auditing service so that they've completed it, and you get them re signed onto their next service. The resign line was a big deal in Scientology. It's not just a matter of signing the person up, but then when they finish the service, getting them re signed onto their next service. This was really crucial Right. You don't just let them walk out the door. You're going to lose 90% of them if you do that. So, like, all of this stuff is codified in policies. The Sea Org tells the orgs what to do following L. Ron Hubbard's policies. They say, hey, take this policy letter, do this. Take this policy letter, do this, apply this, do this, do that. They're always trying to tell people what to do based on their production statistics. And we had to report our statistics every week, and that's a big deal in Scientology. How many? For me, as a course room supervisor, the statistics that I lived or died by mainly was course completions. How many people completed a course this week? And we would work our asses off to get people through their classes, even calling them in to do more extra time on their class. Let's say the guy was scheduled only come in, like, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday nights. But I needed that guy to get done this week. So I would call him and I'd convince him. And you got to come in Saturday, you got to come in Sunday, because you got 16 hours of coursework left, but you're only scheduled for six. So I need you to come in more so you can finish this week instead of next week, because I want you on this week's statistic. And this was how we would run every week. We were trying to get the lines to go up on our graphs, right, of our statistics. How many completions, how much money made, how many hours of counseling services were delivered this week, how many new people walked in the door, how many new people took a personality test, how many new people signed up for services that week? There are tens, probably about every week. I think we had to report about 120 different production statistics to management. And we would graph these every week. And if the line went up, then we were expanding, we were doing better. And if it went down, that means we produced less than we did last week, and that was bad. And we needed to hustle and get industrious and produce more this week. And this is why I would be calling people and saying, hey, man, I need you to come in this weekend. I know it's not scheduled, but this is Scientology, and this is completions, and we're going to make your life better. So you got to get more time in on this course, Right? I was motivated more by trying to get the statistic up than I was by trying to help this person, because the pressure to have the statistics going up every week was intense. And mind you, we weren't getting paid shit for this. We were just doing it because we thought we were saving the world. Right? Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:06:23] Amy. Amy, one of our listeners. Hi, Amy. Amy says it's like being a Mormon missionary, basically, but basically statistics driven to help advance the organization under the purview of being a volunteer. But really what you are is you're a money making source. You're marketing, and you're administrating recruitment and development of paying members.

Chris Shelton [00:06:48] That's exactly right.

John Dehlin [00:06:49] That's exactly what we're really is a business. It's just a business shrouded in a nonprofit.

Chris Shelton [00:06:55] Exactly. It was all about the Benjamins. At the end of the day, it's

John Dehlin [00:06:58] a business shrouded in religion, but ultimately driven by numbers and driven by revenue.

Chris Shelton [00:07:04] Exactly. And income was the most important statistic of all. Of course, other things could be going to hell, but if the income was doing okay, then cool, right? And we were in a building that had a mortgage, and we had balloon payments, and we had problems making that mortgage payment. And sometimes it would go defaulting for three or four months at a time, and we would struggle. And so there were late nights where we were up until, you know, whatever, ungodly hours trying to sell books and sell services and convince somebody to pay us money. And we were always trying to do it in such a way that we weren't making a bad name for the church, like, oh, my God, we're about to lose the building. We're struggling so bad. We need your money. Like, we couldn't say stuff like that, or we weren't supposed to. Eventually we had to, because it was the only way to get money out of people sometimes is plug on their heartstrings, if for no other reason. But. But we were ostensibly trying to sell them more services or more counseling, more hours of auditing. So those were the ways we were supposed to be making the money and to make the mortgage just to keep the doors open. We were struggling every month just to keep the doors open. So this was a difficult eight years for us. Right. And after eight years of it, I was like, God damn, man. I really know further along right now than when I first got here. And instead of looking and being able to take a good, hard, critical look at what was going on, and maybe, just maybe there was something wrong with this organizational system, and maybe, just maybe there was something wrong with Scientology itself. I never thought those things. I just thought, I'm not working hard enough. We are not collectively getting the job done here. I want to do more. I really am. Serious about this. I know that Scientology is the thing that's going to make the difference in the world. We can bring about world peace, we can bring about all these good things. I got to double down on this. And that's what I did, and that's how I joined the Sea Org. And that was 1995.

John Dehlin [00:09:14] And what I was trying to get at with my question was, why wouldn't it be every believing Scientologist goal to want to be in the Sea Org? Because that's the elite. If that's the Vatican, I would just think that that would be every Scientology boy or girl's dream. And I don't mean every, because I'm sure different people have different interests, but isn't that the culminating sort of highest sanctioned or blessed status? It's like when a Catholic kid joins the priesthood, the Catholic mom is super proud of their boy, or the Catholic dad is super proud of their boy. Other than the fact that your parents had been abused by the organization, so they didn't want to see you get abused, why wouldn't that be every Scientologist parents, or boy or girl's dream to achieve what you achieved, for many of

Chris Shelton [00:10:02] them, it is okay, but not. But for many of them, it also isn't right. Like, how many people want to, you know, how many parents have other dreams or aspirations for their parents who are Catholic parents?

John Dehlin [00:10:17] For the kids?

Chris Shelton [00:10:18] Right, Right. Yeah. They want their kids to go. Maybe their kid has an aptitude for science and they wanted to go be a biologist, or the kid wants to go be a biologist, or maybe, you know, whatever. It's. It's. And also, of course, many Scientologists used to be in the Sea Org or used to be on staff at one point, and they know what it's like, and they don't particularly want that for their kid. They separate the organizational abuses from the subject itself. Right. My parents did. And so they'll argue against going to work for the church because they know that's a bit of a losing proposition for as in terms of life goals. But they know that Scientology has all these good methods and procedures, and the counseling is really helpful. And then you feel really good afterwards. And so obviously, it's a good thing. You see, so much said that out loud to me when he was arguing with me about going on staff.

John Dehlin [00:11:11] Right. In Mormonism, they say that the gospel is perfect, but the church isn't Right. Or the.

Chris Shelton [00:11:17] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:11:17] Or the gospel is perfect, but the leaders aren't. So there's separate. The truthfulness of the theology and the doctrine from the actual members and the leaders even.

Chris Shelton [00:11:27] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:11:28] It sounds like you had that as well. But still, for many, it's the crowning achievement. It's like, well, I'm so proud of my boy or my girl. They're actually in the Sea Org. They tell me that's gotta be a thing.

Chris Shelton [00:11:39] Oh, absolutely, it is. Absolutely. Especially amongst the richer, wealthier Scientologists. They're just proud as a peacock that their kid is a Sea Org member and is working, you know, at FLAG or is working in LA or doing whatever they're doing, and they want to support them and help them out and all of that. And they. Yeah, that absolutely is a thing.

Daily Life Inside the Sea Org

John Dehlin [00:11:58] Okay, so what was your life as a Sea Org member?

Chris Shelton [00:12:01] Okay. The Sea Organization is a paramilitary group that operates 24 7. There is no downtime for the Sea Org. I mean, yeah, you sleep at night, but sometimes that sleep is three or four hours a night, and that can go on for extended periods of time.

John Dehlin [00:12:17] What do you mean by paramilitary? What does that.

Chris Shelton [00:12:20] Well, I mean, uniforms, ranks, ratings. Yes, sir. No, sir. How high should I jump? Sir? You go through a boot camp process called the Estates Project Force, where you're running around cleaning and doing grounds work and stuff and spending five hours a day studying L. Ron Hubbard's policies about how to be a Sea Org member. Because there's a whole nother set of policies just for the Sea Org. I mean, Hubbard was just. He wrote a lot.

John Dehlin [00:12:48] And again, this is his military training that he's injecting into the organization that he has created, and it's his training as a. As a Navy guy. Again, we could just always see how a religious movement grows out of the life experiences of the founder.

Chris Shelton [00:13:05] Absolutely. And. And Hubbard had started the sea org in 1967, and it was the management of Scientology, and it was ultimately responsible for delivering the upper level confidential services. That's all. That's all Sea Org. I joined the Sea Org and went into management. I went into Org management. So I was overseeing the delivery. This is what I went straight to this. I went through the epf, which took me five days, because I was already a very educated Scientologist at this point. So I got. I kind of blew through the EPF and arrived on what they call on post. My post was the assistant technical aide for the Western United States. And basically what that means is I was overseeing the delivery of Dianetics and Scientology services for all of the Western United States, which is basically Mississippi river west and including Hawaii, because there's a Scientology Org out in Hawaii. So this was the largest Scientology geographical zone with the most Scientologists in it. And so we had high expectations. And my job now was to be the guy at the Sea Organ who received all those production statistics every week and looked at them and analyzed how the organizations were doing based on their statistics, and then giving direction and orders down to the orgs on what to do to raise their statistics. Right. We would do analyses, and we say, okay, well, you know, six months ago, the statistics were in a much higher range than they are now. What changed? What's different? What were they doing then that they're not doing now? Let's get them back onto doing that. And that's a fairly sensible approach, if that was all there was to it. But there was not. That was actually the least part of my job, because the bulk of my job was spent dealing with these insane personnel demands that we would have come down on us all the time as managers to get people into training. At Flag, which is the place in Clearwater, they call that Flag, the FLAG service organization, or they're in la. You know, like, I had gone to training when I was first a staff member, I had gone down to LA and gotten a specialist training, and then I went back to my org so that I could supervise classes. Well, they have constantly. They're putting out these training programs to upgrade or improve the quality of the delivery of Scientology.

John Dehlin [00:15:41] And.

Chris Shelton [00:15:42] And they demand that staff members come and get this training. And so a big part of my job was wrangling up people from all of these churches to come to LA or go to Florida and do this training. And there was a lot of heat and pressure on that because these were tiny little pipsqueak organizations. Santa Barbara was, I found out, just one of many pipsqueak tiny organizations that had been plodding along for years, not really doing well, going. You know, the statistics would go up and go down and go up and go down, but if you could look at them on a long term, you'd see they were really going pretty much nowhere. And this was consistent across all of the western United States. And it was a little eye opening. I was like, wow, we got a lot of work to do. And I found myself kind of in a parallel position to how I was in Santa Barbara, where I'm working my ass off. I'm working for. As a Sea Org member, the most you're going to make a week is 50 bucks. It's a set pay.

John Dehlin [00:16:42] Do they cover your living expenses and food?

Chris Shelton [00:16:45] The 50 bucks is basically pocket change. For whatever kind of personal things you need, because you're getting fed and you're getting birthed and you're getting uniformed. It's like living on a military base. Same kind of thing, right? You have a mess that you can go and eat at, and they're not charging you for that food. But sometimes the food is rice and beans. You know, sometimes the food is bad cereal. Sometimes it's runny eggs. I mean, you're not getting good food. It's food that can be, you know, that they're barely paying for because all the money that's coming in is basically most of it's getting funneled up, and we're not getting to keep most of it. And I'm now operating in a sea Org base in Los Angeles, the most prosperous sea Org base outside of flag in the world. We're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a week between all the different organizations that exist in those big blue buildings. There's five organizations there, and they were each one producing a few hundred thousand dollars a week. But they had to keep the lights on. They had to buy the toilet paper. They had to pay for their food. And a bunch of that money was being sucked up the line to miscavige land. So we really had drips and drabs left over to pay for our food, pay for new uniform parts. I mean, just as an example, just as a. Just to kind of set the tone here, I had two shirts for about six years. That was it. I mean, I kept trying to put in for new shirts and never got the. Never got the money approved to buy new shirts.

John Dehlin [00:18:27] You know, it's like a monk. It's like a life of poverty, really.

Chris Shelton [00:18:32] Exactly. The difference is, and this is a really important difference, is that you're not told that's how it's going to be before you go in. You know, when you go become a monk in a monastery, they try to convince you not to do it. I mean, I've looked into this. They tell you, dude, do you know what you're giving up? Are you aware of what your vows actually say and the fact that we're going to hold you to them? Do you know what this lifestyle is like? Do you really want this? And they really work you over to make sure that you have what I would call informed consent. None of that exists in the Sea Org. You go into the sea Org thinking that you're going to be making 50 bucks a week, no questions asked. You don't. There were plenty of weeks where we got no money at all. And when you don't have money to get new underwear or socks or any snacks or a pack of cigarettes or something, those are the only little outlets you have anymore for anything personal. You know, you start, you know, kind of life gets a bit robotic and weird. Starts looking really weird after a while. So, okay, so I'm in SeaWorld management eight years. I'm running orgs. I'm running the delivery of Scientology in the western United States. That's my responsibility. And I'm working with other people who are responsible for other parts of the organization and what's going on in the western United States. We were in a basement room, and the way you would communicate with the orgs was through written telexes and phone calls, and it was supposed to only be through telexes. We weren't supposed to be calling the orgs, but we did all the time and yelled and screamed at them and demanded things because we were getting yelled and screamed at. The environment was very much like a boiler room or a call center. You know, how you see things or are constantly like, go, go, go, go, go, all the time, and there's no downtime, and there's never a time to take a rest or catch your breath or think about things. It's always boom, boom, boom, go, go, go, go, go. And we were always being presented with personnel emergencies or financial emergencies, or some organization was about to get kicked on the street because they weren't making their mortgage payments, just like we were in Santa Barbara, you know, and they had to get bailed out, or we had to pressure them to make the money, or sometimes we actually had to go to them and make the money ourselves as the managers, as the Sea Org guys, because the org staff weren't pulling their freight, so to speak. Right? And these orgs are tiny, little struggling places. They're not big, booming, you know, full of people places. Scientology is not infinitely popular. It's infinitely not popular. So we really had our work cut out for us. And the whole time that I was there, we didn't have this is 1995 until about 2003.ish is when I was working in management. We did not have any awareness of what the public thought about Scientology. Right? We didn't know about Xenu. We didn't know about the bad news. We didn't know about, you know, how we were actually thought of. We were in a very insular, isolated world where we were having weekly briefings and being told how amazing Scientology was. And six or seven times a year, David Miscavige would come out on stage at these big grand events that we had to put on and he would tell us all about how great Scientology was all over the world. And we bought it and we thought, well, maybe we're not doing so great, but everybody else is. So clearly we're not working hard enough. You know, it's that whole computation that you're running on yourself again. And eventually I burned out after eight years of that.

John Dehlin [00:22:31] Okay, wait, so. And just to draw the parallels, Mormons have semiannual general conferences where the top leaders come out and speak in this majestic conference center with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Now they've changed their name, but you know, you get the picture. And tens of thousands of people in attendance and it's always a semi annual conference where everybody gets whipped up into excitement and what are the new temples that are going to get built and how many members do we have now? They've taken that away since membership is declining, but it's just this. So again, charismatic leaders coming out a couple times a year told these big conferences to get everyone excited. That's something that's not only in religion, but in corporate America as well. But then also, this is where Steven Hasson's bite model comes into play. Because you're only hanging around people in your organization and because the church does a really good job of tagging anything that isn't in support of the church as apostate or subversive or whatever it is. You can go for years and years and years never hearing any negativity about the church, no truth about the church, totally unaware of the problems with the church, because you're either only hanging around Scientologists and, or any information that isn't favorable has been banned. That limits the information that you get in your brain, which then limits the thoughts you're able to have about. Huh, I wonder whether or not this church is actually true. And then of course, you know, through the emotion of fear or excitement or saving the world or whatever it is that hooks you in so that you have total commitment to the organization, even though there may be problems all around you, organizational problems, legal problems, you know, historical problems, doctrinal or theological problems, because of the way those organizations take control of your mind, the information that your mind gets, the relationships you have around you, you're oblivious to things that honestly the entire rest of the free world has access to and awareness of, but you within the organization are completely blind to it.

Chris Shelton [00:24:53] Exactly. And that's exactly, that's the point I was trying to get across exactly that. And so. So the struggles that I was having as a Sea Org member were not because of what I was hearing from the outside world or because there were doubts and reservations being introduced into my thinking by people outside Scientology. I was having issues because of what was being done to me as a Sea Org member and Scientologist. Right. Because now I'm seeing behind the curtain at a whole new level. And I'm seeing how Scientology organization is managed. I'm seeing how Scientology is actually running as a body and not just at the city level, public facing front, but I'm seeing how the sausage is made, basically. Right? And I'm seeing that it is a very unpleasant environment. It is not worker oriented in any way. Hubbard actually wrote policies that say worker oriented environments, I.e. unions and good pay and benefits and stuff. He's writing that that's bad. You know, worker oriented companies fail uniformly and that you have to run a tight ship and a hardship. And he says he can make Captain Bly look like a kindergarten teacher on a sunny day. This is his attitude in running the Sea Org. And he said that people appreciate and want a rough, tough, ruthless environment of severe discipline. That's what the Sea Org was. You know, if you weren't making. There was a period of time when they introduced these new books and lectures and stuff, and they were trying like crazy to sell them to everybody, where if you weren't making your sales quotas after like 15 minutes, it was dropping. Give me 20. It was, you go get hosed down in the garbage area because you're not making your quotas, you know, so you're going to go get what they call being thrown overboard. You know, back when Hubbard ran his little navy off of actual boats, there was a period of time where they were overboarding people as a punishment. You weren't making your quotas. You got literally thrown off the side of the boat. And that was a disciplinary action. And so the equivalent of that on land when you don't have a boat or a swimming pool, is you hose the person down, you know, and this was just something that goes on in the Sea Org, and people just accept it because they're not getting enough work done. And they think it's on them, it's their fault. And if they start questioning what's going on and go, hey, I don't want to be part of this anymore. This is crazy. I can't do this anymore. Then they get interrogated as to their crimes, their overts. Right? What have you been doing that you don't want us to know about. Because clearly the only reason you want to leave is because of your own overts, not because of the abuse that we're raining down on you or the lack of pay or the fact you can't get a new shirt or a new pair of shoes. Literally, I watched Sea Org members walk around with shoes that were just flopping. The heels were so broken, the sole was coming off their shoes, but they literally couldn't afford new shoes. This was the lifestyle. And this went on for years and years. I was willing to put a lot of it aside because of the, you know, cause and the purpose and all that. But after eight years, I had had enough. I just. I couldn't take it anymore. And there was a. There was a very, very intense period of time where we were working really hard. I mean, way harder than even everything I've already described. And I hope I'm getting this across. Well, it's very, very hard to get this across in a way that's going to make a lot of sense to people because it's. The Sea Org is not like anything else. I've never run into anything that really parallels the sea. Sea Org. A monastic existence is kind of like the Sea Org, but except there's nothing quiet or sedate or calm about being in the Sea Org. That's, you know, the only thing that really parallels with the monastic comparison is the dedication and the isolation, but not the lifestyle. The lifestyle is much faster. And anyway, so during this really intense

L. Ron Hubbard's Death and David Miscavige's Rise

John Dehlin [00:29:11] period, really quick, did. Number one. I never heard your reaction when L. Ron Hubbard died. I know we're going way back in time now.

Chris Shelton [00:29:19] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:29:21] Do you remember when L. Ron Hubbard died and how you felt?

Chris Shelton [00:29:23] Oh, yeah. Yep.

John Dehlin [00:29:25] What was that like?

Chris Shelton [00:29:26] Well, I was still a public person. This was 1987. I was still in or. 86. Sorry, January 1986. I was still in high school.

John Dehlin [00:29:36] You were a junior?

Chris Shelton [00:29:37] Yeah. And my reaction was I was sad because he had written me a letter when I was six years old. I'd written to him and he'd written me back, maybe 8 years old. And I never wrote him back. He asked me to write him back, and I never did. And I always felt kind of guilty about that. I came to find out later the letter I had gotten was definitely not from him, but I had thought it was because it had his signature on it, you know.

John Dehlin [00:30:04] Okay. The other question I had is, while you were in the Sea Org, did you ever bump into David Miscavige?

Chris Shelton [00:30:09] Yeah, three times.

John Dehlin [00:30:10] And what was that like, while you bumped into.

Chris Shelton [00:30:12] He's a very intense man. He's very short, by the way. But that wasn't particularly noteworthy at the time because he was such a big being to us. You know, we were always freaking out whenever there was the possibility that Miscavige was going to be on base. Cleaning became like an all night thing. You stay up all night cleaning and dusting and all that. We always had really clean facilities, but it was like super crazy clean. Everything had to be clean all the time. So cleaning was a real thing in the Sea Org. And every week we had a day where we would spend the whole morning cleaning the office and I would do the shredding and stuff. Miscavige would come around and we would do all this cleaning to prepare for him. And then he would come around and sometimes we would just sort of hear that he was on the other side of the base and we. You know, it's complicated to explain this because in hindsight I can see that I was afraid. But at the time, I didn't interpret my experience that way. I was afraid. I was terrified that he was going to show up because there had been, you know, you hear rumors and stories of him ripping into people or not. The abuses that we hear about, you know, with the hole and locking people up, we didn't know about any of that stuff, but we did not want to get a face ripping from David Miscavige. And if you got caught out, you know, and the leader of the church, you know, comes around to your desk and sees something wrong and says, what the hell? You don't want that. You don't want any part of that. Right. You don't want all the trouble that's going to come from that. How many endless nights you're going to be scrubbing sinks and toilets because you didn't answer a telex or something, Right? So I was terrified of him coming around. But I would interpret that experience at the time as being filled with awe or respect. These were the words that would come to my mind because I couldn't allow myself to think. I'm afraid of him. There's just certain thoughts as a cult member you just can't let yourself have. And I didn't let myself have those thoughts. But everybody was on edge when he was around. Everybody was on pins and needles. And then when he left, everybody, you know, you could feel the intensity come down. Oh, he's off base, okay. You know, now there's no chance he's gonna come around.

John Dehlin [00:32:55] And was there a High level. So, I mean, in Mormonism, it's like when the prophet enters the room, everybody stands and we sing hail to the prophet. And there's just an incredible amount of reverence and kind of hero or leader worship within Mormonism. And I'm imagining, and I've seen the way that in those videos where Tom Cruise references lrh, you know, and the way Miscavige is treated and applauded, there is just a high, intense level of leader worship. True.

Chris Shelton [00:33:32] Absolutely. Yes. Nobody thinks of David Miscavige as a godlike figure. They wouldn't put it that way. It's not a. It's not a divinity. It's a. It's that he's the hardest working scientologist in the world. That he has made sacrifices the rest of us could only dream of making. That he is, you know, the smartest, most genius guy. He got us tax exemption, he runs Scientology. He's the one making all the decisions. You know, he's the head cheese. Right. It's from that point of view, more so than a divine reverence.

John Dehlin [00:34:17] Okay. But I wonder if the level of devotion and worship is still there just for different reasons. It's not.

Chris Shelton [00:34:25] No, I'm trying to say that it is, but I'm trying to just use different terminology to differentiate how it's slightly different. Also, let me give you a story that'll demonstrate what I'm talking about, because there is a supernatural aspect to it. Again, like I said, this kind of stuff is hard to explain sometimes when you get into all the little gritty details. But I found out after I left that Miscavige would come around in the middle of the night when everybody was asleep. He would arrive on base and he would go through the organizations when they're empty and there's nobody around. Right. I mean, the only people who are awake on the base are the security guards or people who are maybe working really, really super late. But that's. You know, sometimes that would come in fits and start. Sometimes everybody would be up all night, and then other times everybody would be asleep. Right. So he would come around and he would look in people's drawers. Like he would go to the captain's desk of one of the service organizations. I said there were five organizations in the big blue base. So he'd go to one of them and he'd open up the captain's drawer and he would see that something was off, and he'd close the drawer and he'd go out. And the next day he'd come around doing an inspection, Right. Nobody knew he'd been there the night before. No one. Maybe somebody in security knew because they have cameras everywhere, but otherwise nobody had a clue. And he'd walk into the captain's office, and it'd be this big office, lots of desks, you know, people around. And he'd go. And he'd go, hmm. And he'd walk over to the captain's desk and he'd look around and he'd go, there's something not right here. And he'd go. And he'd open the drawer and go, what's this? Nobody knew he'd been there the night before and had scoped that out. So everybody in the room literally thinks he just has this perceptive ability to just find things that are wrong in an area and order it to be corrected. He created this reputation by doing this kind of simple bullshit that none of us ever suspected he would do. Right? And this is how you get this sort of supernatural quality to him. And a real fear that he's gonna know something about you that he couldn't possibly know. You see what I mean?

John Dehlin [00:37:03] Yeah. That reminds me. I heard this. This tale that Napoleon Bonaparte used to find out the name of, like, one of his soldiers, you know, wherever he was, like inspecting a line of soldiers. And he would walk up to one of the soldiers and address them by name. And everybody else would go, oh, my gosh. He must have a photographic memory. He must know the name of every soldier here. When in reality, it was just a ploy to fool people, to make them think that he cared and knew them when he really didn't. So this is the type of thing charlatans do. And Joseph Smith did a million things like this. To be able to fool and honestly sometimes con people out of things, unfortunately.

Chris Shelton [00:37:47] Exactly. And, you know, you look at it now from outside and you go, well, that's obvious and silly and stupid, but when you're in it, you don't think about stuff like that. You don't think, oh, he snuck around in here in the middle of the night last night. That doesn't even enter your brain as a possibility of what's going on. You're much more apt to assign supernatural properties to him because, you know, you believe in Satan's and ESP and stuff like that. So that was, you know, it was little things like that that he would sort of build a reputation on. And we were all freaked out by him. And there was one Clearwater.

John Dehlin [00:38:25] Oh, go ahead. Keep going. Keep going.

Chris Shelton [00:38:26] I went to Clearwater one time in My capacity as the assistant technical aide to get this briefing from Miscavige that went on for three straight days. And that was intense, man. That was pretty scary because he sounded kind of pissed, and he was briefing us on this stuff that he had had to figure out and do, and blah, blah, blah. It was all these other people's jobs, and they had fallen down on the job and hadn't done their job. And so he had to step in. And now he was briefing us all about how he had discovered all this new stuff that was going to revolutionize Scientology training. And that was in 1996. So that was pretty early on. And he had started remaking Scientology in his own image at this point, but it wasn't real obvious. It was a very gradual sort of thing, and at least as far as we could tell, it was anyway. So, yeah, I did that for eight years until I finally got up one night after this really intense period of about three or four months where I'd gotten very little sleep. I'd been very overloaded with other people's work dumped on me because they had gone off to the special project that Miscavige was personally sort of running. And I was left to carry the load for everybody. And so I was really worn out, really exhausted. And one night I just. I just couldn't take it anymore. And I just got up and I walked out the back door. And I walked from Hollywood to downtown LA to Pasadena, where I grew up. I knew Pasadena, and I just needed to get away for a while. And I was kind of just. I had lost it. I was not in a good place. And I left my wife. I left everything. I just literally got up at midnight and I just walked out the door. I was still in my uniform, you know. I crashed in a hotel in Pasadena for, like, three days. I just. I just slept, like, for two straight days. I was so exhausted. And then I spent another day or two kind of wandering around, getting my bearings, chilling out to kind of relaxing. I didn't really have a lot of money. I think I'd taken about 180 bucks or something out of the bank. That was about the total amount of money I had, period. And then I. Then I called my parents, and they were still ostensibly Scientologists at this point. They had not left the church yet. I obviously hadn't left the church yet. I was considering what to do, and I actually talked to my mom in a video. I did an interview with her, and we actually talked about this whole time period in a lot of Detail, because this was a chance that they had to get me out or I could have gotten out, but they, you know. And my mom was trying to be very careful in talking to me because she knew that if I. If I decided to go back and she had told me or advised me, oh, thank God, you're out. Come home now. I'll pay for your ticket. Let's go. She was afraid that if she did that and I changed my mind, that I would have to disconnect from her. And she didn't want that. She was thinking really long term. Right. So she just said, look, I'll support you in anything you want to do. She was trying to be very circumspect. And in hindsight, I wished. And I told her this when we had our conversation. I said, I wish you had been a bit stronger about it. But I then understood why she had been concerned.

John Dehlin [00:42:01] She wasn't a believer at that point.

Chris Shelton [00:42:03] At this point, she had basically given up on Scientology, but she never admitted that to me because she was trying to.

John Dehlin [00:42:10] She'd lose you.

Chris Shelton [00:42:11] Yeah, she was trying to preserve the relationship. Wow.

John Dehlin [00:42:15] So that's the sure sign of a cult if parents or children are worried that they're going to lose the relationship with their parent or children if they're honest about their disbelief.

Chris Shelton [00:42:28] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:42:29] That is the sure sign of the cult.

Chris Shelton [00:42:31] Exactly. So,

Marriage, Family, and Relationships in the Sea Org

John Dehlin [00:42:37] by the way, you didn't mention that you got married. Did you have kids?

Chris Shelton [00:42:41] Oh, yeah. No.

John Dehlin [00:42:42] You didn't learn anything about the fact that you got married?

Chris Shelton [00:42:45] No, I did get married, actually, the first couple months I was in the Sea Org, I got married because you can't have sex in the Sea Org until you're married. The Sea Org is where there are rules about sex and stuff. When I answered before, I was talking about overall Scientology, but in the Sea Org, no premarital sex, no heavy petting, no kids at all, period. No kids are allowed. If you get pregnant, you have to have an abortion or you're going to get kicked out of the Sea Org. If it happens more than once at this point, I've learned they make the guy get a vasectomy. So they're. They're hardcore about no kids in the Sea Org. They already had a period of time where they were raising kids and they did a God awful job of it. And they just abused a whole generation of kids, and it was just awful. And they had so much public backlash from that. They said, okay, no more kids.

John Dehlin [00:43:40] Do you mean physical and sexual abuse or what?

Chris Shelton [00:43:42] All of it. Everything you can imagine that you could do. Kids happened to those kids in the Sea Org. They were physically abused, they were emotionally abused, they were miseducated, they were mistreated. They were in roach and ant infested quarters. I mean, it was bad. It was really bad. This was in the 70s and most especially in the 80s and early 90s. So like I said, a whole generation of Sea Org kids grew up in the Sea Org and they were raised by the person who could be spared, you know, in facilities that were not for kids. They had no education set up. They didn't have anything. It was God awful.

John Dehlin [00:44:18] Yeah.

Chris Shelton [00:44:20] So in the late 80s, they said, what's that? Yeah, so in the late 80s they said, okay, no more kids. Yeah, no more kids. And by 1995, when I got in, right away they said to us, they issued this written policy that said, absolutely no more kids at all. If you're in the Sea Org and you have kids, you're out of the Sea Org. And, you know, I'd been planning on having kids with my wife. We had gotten married. She loved kids. We were gonna have kids at some point. But then this came down and we went, well, I guess we're not having kids anymore, right? Later on, during the course of those eight years that I was in management, she was also in management, we did get pregnant. And I. And I've said this, I've talked about this whole thing, but to my shame, I convinced her to get an abortion. We, you know, we really should have left the Sea Org, but we stayed in and thought we were fighting the good fight and saving the world and we didn't have any choice. It was not, you know, we were being yelled and screamed at, you are getting an abortion. It wasn't like you guys figure it out. It was, you motherfuckers better go get an abortion. And if I hear anything else about it, you guys are gonna be in a world of hurt. That was how we were being talked to about it. So anyway, so yeah, we got the abortion.

John Dehlin [00:45:40] Did you feel like you loved her?

Chris Shelton [00:45:42] Oh, yeah, absolutely. She was a great person. My wife was. Her name was Sunny. She was a very nice person, nice disposition. I definitely loved her. I thought that she was the one for me, you know, the relationship. You know, my relationship with my ex wife is kind of separate from my whole Sea Org experience. I mean, the Sea Org is not the place to have a loving, nurturing relationship. It's not about relationships in the Sea Org. Everything is secondary to the Sea Org. So people are ordered to get divorces in The Sea Org, that happens all the time. You know, if you get moved from one echelon to a higher echelon, you're encouraged to divorce your spouse because they. If they can't move up with you, they're an anchor on you, they're holding you back. They're an albatross around your neck. You know, that's the attitude about it. There's a very. Marriage is not very, you know, sacrosanct in the Sea Org.

John Dehlin [00:46:42] Interesting. Fascinating. And in the Leah Remini series, we haven't. Oh, sorry, we haven't mentioned enough about Leah Remini, but her series on Scientology is breathtaking and powerful, I think, and I think you're a part of it in some way. But I remember one of those stories about the girl that was forced to have an abortion. And that's just crazy, right?

Chris Shelton [00:47:08] It's beyond crazy. And it's routine there. It's not an uncommon thing, you know, because birth control is catch as catch can, right? You go down to Planned Parenthood, you pick up free condoms, or, you know, the women get birth control pills. And it's on you to make all that work. You know, it's not like you're being afforded a lot of time off or liberty to deal with that. You're just expected to make it happen. Yeah, the attitude. Here's something else that'll help you understand the Sea Org. There's a policy. It's an actual written policy in Scientology called the Supreme Test of a Thetan. And the Supreme Test of a Thetan, according to L. Ron Hubbard, is his ability to make things go right. So you are judged by how much you can solve problems, how many problems you can solve, how many situations you can deal with. And the more situations you can deal with or the more problems you can solve, the more you're given. There are very few laurels to rest on in the Sea Org. There are very few attaboys. There are very few rewards. There's a whole lot of penalties. And this is not something you're told when you go in. You think it's a different place than it is when you join the Sea Org. I had no idea what I was getting into. I thought I was joining a higher level group that was dedicated to saving the planet and that we were going to be doing L. Ron Hubbard's work even better and in better conditions and with better results. But what I found was it was like Santa Barbara on hypersteroids. And there was this call center environment, this boiler pressure kind of pressure on your head all the time. You know, you could get woken up at 2:30 in the morning randomly, for any reason whatsoever to go have to deal with some emergency on your post. And you know, it's not like you could just slam the door in the guy's face and say, fuck off. Come back tomorrow morning. You're living on a Sea Org base. If you screw around with these people, security will come and drag you out. And then you're going to be sitting and holding cans and asking, you know, being asked sharp and pointed questions about your masturbatory practices or whatever else you've been up to that they think is immoral because you're bucking the system.

John Dehlin [00:49:28] Was there a brig? Could you be imprisoned?

Chris Shelton [00:49:30] If you disagree, I will get to that. Okay, I'm about to tell you all about that.

John Dehlin [00:49:34] All right. I'm excited.

Chris Shelton [00:49:36] Yeah, here we go. Because after those eight years, after I took off for those three days and then came back because I decided after talking to my parents, okay, I guess I should come back. So I did. And within. I got taken off of my post in management by my own choice. I was like, I'm not doing that anymore. I don't care what you guys do to me. I'm done with that. And so I got reposted eventually as a salesperson, and I sold the OT levels to people, you know, for. For about six months. And I got pretty good at it, actually. It was a relief from the work I'd been doing. I was like, oh my God, I got to. I got to get away from all this management stuff. So selling people scientology services seemed very, very easy in comparison. And I. And it kind of was. And I was able to kind of get along with, you know, individual people. It wasn't all this like, you know, crazy pressure to send telexes to orgs that weren't going to even read them, much less follow my orders and report compliance. Right. It was a much easier thing to sit down and talk to somebody and try to convince them to give you money. And anyway, like I said, I got fairly decent at it. There was an incredible amount of pressure to get money in, but because I was new at it, I was kind of being given a little bit of latitude to learn the job and kind of apprentice under other salespeople and stuff. And I only did it for six months. So I didn't really. I wasn't really there long enough on that post to get into a whole lot of trouble. As I got better and better at doing it, my statistics were going up and up and up every week. So I was doing okay at this job, you know, so much so that they promoted me to work in the technical area of the advanced organization. And I'm trying to avoid all the terminology here, but basically I got put into a job that was very similar to my job in Santa Barbara, except I was overseeing the delivery of people getting on to the OT levels, the confidential stuff. I wasn't exposed to any of the confidential information. I was just in the gateway for people to get to that confidential information. And I was the gatekeeper there. So I did that for a while. But I never really did get over this burnout that had happened a year before. And I was just, I just felt, inside, I just felt broken. I felt really, really broken. And I wasn't able to piece myself back together as I had been able to do for all those years. So I ended up getting into this kind of weird phone sex relationship with this woman who had been a Sea Org member but had now had a baby and been sent off to Las Vegas to work out there with her husband. There had been a period of time where when you got pregnant, you weren't kicked out of the Sea Org, you were sent down to one of the city level churches and you ended up working there. And then they cancelled that. That was what they canceled in 96 when I came in the Sea Org and they said, look, we're not sending you a class 5 org to a city level church. We're just kicking you out of the Sea Org entirely. So this woman had been one of those people who had ended up at a church, you know, at a city level church. She had been a friend of mine and we had stored and we started talking on the phone and like I said, I was a pretty broken person. And I'm not trying to excuse my behavior. It was immoral. I was married. I was having a really rocky time with my wife. I did love her, I had extraordinary feelings for her. But I was broken, you know, in a way that it's very hard for me to easily describe. And I mean, there's burnout, there's exhaustion, and then there was where I was at. And I was faking it. I was trying to, I was trying to make it, I was trying to make it work. I was trying to pass that supreme test of a thetan. Make it go right, you know, make your life go right, make your post go right. Just do it. You know, you're not, you're not given a lot of direction in the Sea Org as to how to do things. You're just told to make it happen. So I was trying to manifest a good post and a good life, and I was failing. I wasn't doing good. So I had this outlet with this old friend of mine. We started talking on the phone, and then we were talking more, and then we were talking more. And this was in the middle of the day. I was pretending to work, but I was actually just bullshitting with her on the phone, right? This went on for a few months, and then it started getting kind of kinky and sort of sexual. And then we started having phone sex. And this was basically a high crime in the Sea Org. Okay? I know in the big wide world this isn't a huge deal, but for me at the time, it was adultery. It was the equivalent of adultery, right? I was cheating on my wife, and it was really not good. So I felt really guilty about it. I knew I was piling on more guilt and more trouble. I wasn't solving anything about my brokenness. I was just making it worse. And I tried, and I basically put a stop to it. This was about. I don't know, I think it started in, like, June or July, and I think by August or September, October, I was like, okay, look, we got to stop this. This isn't good for you. It's not good for me. You're married. You got kids. I'm married. I'm in the Sea Org. We really need to stop doing this. And I stopped calling her, and I stopped taking her calls, and it just kind of fizzled out. And I was pretty happy that I had done that because it was the morally right thing to do. And I started repairing things with my wife. But then one day I went into an auditing session, right? And I was gonna get a counseling session. And I confessed to what I had done. I just. I offered it up. I didn't even wait for the E meter to start doing its thing and stuff. I said, okay, well, I got. I got some stuff I gotta tell you. And I had. I'd already ended it. I'd already dealt with it. It was a done deal, but I hadn't confessed it. I hadn't said anything about it. And it was awful and evil what I did. So I say, okay, well, I did this thing, and I feel really bad about it, and here's what happened. And the guy writes it all down like they do with every single auditing session. He takes extensive notes of all the stuff I did, and he ends up writing a report. And I went down to the ethics area right after the auditing session because I knew I was going to get in trouble and I went down and I said I have to tell you guys something I've been up to or that I had been up to. I stopped it. But they didn't care about the stopping it part. They only cared about the fact that I had done that. And of course this blows up. My wife freaks out. I'm dejected and despondent and horrified. I was in the gutter. Now I'm in the sub gutter as far as myself image goes. And so they did a justice action on me, a court, or it's actually called a committee of evidence. And they determined that I needed to go to the RPF and I agreed. You second guess your own existence.

John Dehlin [00:57:08] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org. Rabbit Hole an album chronicling the heartaches and rewarding discussions discoveries of her Mormon faith crisis. You can purchase her album on itunes or by visiting mindygledhill.com.

Chris Shelton [00:57:52] Sam.

The Rehabilitation Project Force Explained

Part 4 of 4 · Ep. 1198

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Foreign.

John Dehlin [00:00:10] Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

Chris Shelton [00:00:53] Cry baby, cry. Everything is gonna be all right. You gotta. The RPF is the rehabilitation project force. It is science. It is the Sea Org's rehabilitation center. In the same way that a Maoist re education camp is a re education camp. In other words, it's meant to re indoctrinate you as a Sea Org member to your Sea Org basics. It's meant to clean you up of all of your overts across your entire life, not all your dynamics. I should say. I explained those earlier. So you are, when you go to the rpf, you are sequestered from the rest of the Sea Org. If the Sea Org is an intense monastic existence, the RPF is the Sea Org on steroids. How does that look? Well, it looks like you're totally separate from. You're grouped with other people who are on the rpf. It's like a prison setup. You wear black and gray clothes. You cannot speak to anybody outside of the RPF unless you're spoken to first. You can only interact with other RPFers. You have a very exact program of actions to do, which I'll go into. But the schedule is that you get up at like 6:30 in the morning and, and you muster up and you have 20 minutes to eat your breakfast and then you get to muster and then you get to work. Sorry. You do five hours of redemption time, which is you working with another person who's on the rpf, doing the sec, checking the confessionals, the interrogatories. You're doing those on each other. Right. You're not good enough at this point to have a Sea Org member dedicatedly to just sec check you. You have to work. You have to earn it. You got to work with somebody else. And you do that for five hours a day, confessing all your crimes across all your dynamics. And there are hundreds of questions that you are asked on the E meter. And so it takes a long time to get through all that stuff, right? Takes months and months, years. Okay, so you do that for five hours a day, then you have 20 minutes for lunch, then you work for about five straight hours, and then you have 20 minutes for dinner, and then you work for another four or five hours. And you go to bed at about 10:45. Just enough time to get enough sleep so you can be physically rested enough to be able to go on the E meter the next day and confess more sins. And the questions are along the dynamics that I explained earlier. So first you're getting, you know, you're getting sec checked on your first dynamic. And so you're, you're confessing to times that you maybe didn't clean your body, didn't take care of yourself, didn't do a good job, didn't whatever on first stuff. Right? And then you have an extensive sec check on the second dynamic, which has to do with sex. I think there were about. I think I was asked about 230 questions or something that I had to clear up on the E meter about sex and family. And these are very sharp, invasive questions. And they all have to be dealt with. Get this. Okay, I'm going to simplify something that's really pretty complicated in terms of procedure. But the bottom line is what you want to do is not just get the sins that the person committed, but you actually take them down a chain where. Okay, let's say I stole an apple last week. Okay, good. So have you ever stolen an apple? Yeah, I stole an apple last week. Great. Okay, when was it? Where was it? What did you do? You know, how much was the apple worth? Blah, blah, blah. You get all this stuff noted down, but then you ask, is there an earlier similar time you stole an apple? Yeah, when I was nine years old, I stole an apple from the store. Okay, good. When was it, where was it? You know, blah, blah, blah. You get all the details of that. Is there an earlier time you stole an apple and you end up going into past lives and you're expected to. And the kinds of overts, the kinds of sins that are coming up as you go back earlier and earlier into past lives become bigger and bigger to where you're. You're admitting, you know, you're saying, yeah, I stole an apple. Actually I stole a whole field of apples with my spaceship and I starved this city because of it.

John Dehlin [00:05:43] Right.

Chris Shelton [00:05:44] Like these get inflated into these great big, huge.

John Dehlin [00:05:47] In your past life, you're committing holocaust, basically.

Chris Shelton [00:05:50] That's right. And eventually what you're looking for is you're trying to get down to the evil intention that is in your head that caused you to steal an apple in the first place. And you have to get a very specific, exact evil purpose or evil intention. Was there some evil purpose or destructive intention that prompted you to commit that? Overt is the question that you're asked. And you go, God damn, let's see. Evil intention. Yeah, I wanted to destroy those people. Right. That's your evil intention that prompted you, over all the eons of time that you've lived, to steal an apple. Right. So it's not just that you stole an apple. It's what was the evil intention behind that? You got to dig down to that. And this is another one of the reasons why it takes so long. It can take you hours to go down this chain of just having stolen an apple. Well, you're not just saying you stole an apple. You're saying you stole an apple here and you killed a village, and. And you did this, and you did this, and here's your evil intention at the bottom of the whole thing. And that's just one answer that could come up to one question. Have you ever stolen an apple? And you're being asked hundreds of these questions across all aspects of your life. So basically, you're Roto Rooterine your entire life, every single thing you've ever done kind of comes up. It took me three years to get through this program. The bulk of the program was this. And you're only. You're doing this auditing the sec, Checking the counseling, five hours a day on each other. Right. I'm twinned up with another RPFer. They're doing this on me, and I'm also doing it on them. I'm also asking them all the sharp and pointed questions and getting all of their evil intentions. So that's why it took so long to get through this bloody thing and finish the program. There's other things on the program that I don't know not going to get into because they're just too technical. But they basically come under the same heading of confessing your sins, taking responsibility for all the evil, horrible stuff you've done. And if that sounds like a good thing, it's not the way it's done in Scientology, and certainly not the way it's done in the Sea Org, because you're made to feel there's a lot of shaming that goes on with this. It is not a healthy atmosphere when you're confessing these sins. They are being written up in reports, and those reports are being taken up with you, and you have to do things to make amends. Remember that liability thing I mentioned earlier? That is applied to every single one of the sins you've committed and confessed to. So you have to make up the damage for all the stuff that you've done. And you are shamed and shamed and shamed about all of this. And when the end result of it is to discover the evil intention at the bottom of all of your acts, then you come to have a view of yourself as, holy shit. I've been this really evil, awful spiritual being for all these millennia. Thank God Scientology is here to save me from all of this. Right? That's what's supposed to happen through this. But after a while, I started realizing that I was having to make up answers to these questions because I had run out of them, and especially the past life stuff. And in order to get through this program, you've got to jump through these hoops. There were a couple people who were on this program for 10 years, 10 years of their life doing this every day.

John Dehlin [00:09:45] Awful.

Chris Shelton [00:09:47] I mean, I just can't think of, you know, I guess I could think of some worse mental and physical tortures. I mean, there's the gulags and there's the Chinese re education camps that exist right now. And those people are certainly having a harder time of it than we did on the rpf. But other than that, I have a hard time finding examples. You know, obviously, you know, Holocaust survivors went through a harder time than people on the rpf. At least we were getting sleep. That's about the only thing I can say that we were getting was a fairly decent night's sleep every night, but that's about it. We were eating slop. We were having to run everywhere you go. And if you aren't producing, like I mentioned before with the call center thing, where if you're not making your quotas, then it's dropping. Give me 20. That was routine in the RPF. I got in amazing shape, actually, because you have to run everywhere. There's no use of elevators. We had, you know, we were making furniture and stuff, and we had to carry it up and down the flights of stairs because you don't get to use elevators. You know, stuff like that. It was a very, very rigorous program, and I did finish it. I did not. You know, about 75% of the people who end up on this thing leave. They see the light and they take off. I was stupid. I stayed, but I stayed because I had done this horrible thing to my wife, and I felt very guilty about it, and I did love her. See, I didn't mention before when I was having this Sort of phone sex affair. There was one point where we came together and we actually could have gone all the way. This woman I was cheating with, you know, we hugged, we almost kissed, and I stopped it, and I said, I can't do this. I can't do this. I love my wife too much. I'm sorry. I can't. And that's about as far as that went physically. So that's as far as we went physically. And I stopped it because. And I'm not trying to, like, humble brag here. I'm just telling you what happened. Right. It was wrong, what I did. It was definitely a violation of my marriage vows, and I'm not proud of any part of it, but I think the punishment didn't quite fit the crime. You know, three years in a. In a. In a. You know, in gulag conditions was not what I think is a fair punishment for what I did.

John Dehlin [00:12:19] You were there for three years.

Chris Shelton [00:12:21] Three years. Three years and three months. That's how long it took me to get through the program. And like I said, there were other people on that program for 10 years. It was crazy.

John Dehlin [00:12:29] Yeah.

Chris Shelton [00:12:30] So I had to confess all my evil intentions across all my dynamics. I mean, I had hundreds of these things come up in the course of the three years that I was doing this auditing.

John Dehlin [00:12:42] Were you still doing your sales stuff?

Chris Shelton [00:12:44] No, no, no, no. The RPF is no, dude, please get me on this, right? You're not doing anything but the rpf. There's no other thing in your life but this.

John Dehlin [00:12:55] So awfully abusive.

Chris Shelton [00:12:57] 6:30 in the morning until 10:45 at night, seven days a week. There are no holidays. There was no seeing my wife. There was no going home at night. You were in separate quarters with all the people who were stuck on the rpf. And your job was to get through it. And that was all your job was. And there was a Sea Org member who. Who was the RPF in charge, and he oversaw the administration of the program and made sure we were all getting through it, making progress on it. And if you weren't, you're getting kicked out. And the mindset of the RPF is not that it's a relief to get kicked out. You're there because you're being given your last chance to be a Sea Org member and make good on your treasonous actions. So you're there under a complete cloud of blame, shame, and regret. And it was three years of blame, shame, and regret because I was a guilty, horrible, awful asshole and I deserved all this punishment, right. For blowing My post for getting up and walking out. After eight years of intense bullshit, I finally had had enough. Nobody else, by the way, in that management unit had lasted for eight years. I actually had persevered beyond what most people could deal with. I took off one night, I come back, they were furious with me about that. There was no compassion. There was no caring. Nobody gave a shit about me. You know, I let the team down. So then I get posted to do sales, and I start doing okay at that. So they move me up to this other thing. But like I said, I was broken and I needed a friendly voice. If that whole phone sex thing was caused by anything, it was me desperately looking for somebody to care about me again. I'm not trying to make it sound like it was a good thing to do. I'm just telling you where my head was at. So when I went to the rpf, I was a ruined, broken, almost suicidal person. I was not contemplating direct suicide, but it was there.

John Dehlin [00:15:21] Yeah.

Chris Shelton [00:15:21] You know, and I was literally washing walls, crying. You know, when we were on decks, that's what. You know, when you're running around doing all the physical work that's being called your on decks. And when I was on decks, for the first month that I was on the rpf, I was a fucking basket case. I mean, it took me a month just to get my head around the fact that I was on the RPF and that this was my one and only chance at redemption so I could be a Sea Org member again and get my life back. As fucked up as my life was, at least I had a wife and I loved her. And at least I was contributing somehow to clearing the planet and saving the world. So, see, beneath all of this, I still thought Scientology actually worked, which was the only reason I was putting up with all this crap. And so. So for three years, that was my existence. Right? There's no holidays that. 20 minutes for lunch, 20 minutes for dinner. That's it. Right? That's all you get every day. You lose track of the days. After a while, I mean, Christmas was just another day. Birthdays just another day. Nothing special about any of it, you know, so that was. That was my existence there. And it wasn't fun. It was rough. It was very rough. And I couldn't wait to get done with that goddamn thing. And I did get through it. I did persevere because I wanted to get back to my wife.

John Dehlin [00:16:53] Yeah.

Chris Shelton [00:16:54] At the end of the day, that's actually what got me through the rpf. It wasn't the saving the world. It was the fact that I had somebody to get back to that I. That I loved and wanted to be with. And that was how I thought I could do it. You know, I contemplated leaving many, many times, and the choices that I thought I had in leaving the Sea Org was no friends. You know, I could talk to my family, but that would be it. I wouldn't have any other Scientologists. I know I'd be a former Sea Org member. So I'd be kind of disgraced as a Scientologist. That didn't really seem like a very viable alternative for my life. You know, at least on the rpf, I had people who were willing to help me through it. If I got thrown to the wolves in the big wide world, then my life was going to be over as I knew it. That was what I had been indoctrinated to believe through all those briefings and all the other nonsense that we got indoctrinated with. So it didn't really feel like it was a choice to get through the program. I had to get through it. And that's why I. And I worked my ass off and I did it. You know, it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my entire life, bar none. Nothing else even comes close, you know,

John Dehlin [00:18:09] I am so sorry. And just, you know, number one, thank you for being vulnerable about kind of the phone sex kind of stuff. I mean, everybody's got their dark moments in life, but few people are willing to talk openly about that because it's, you know, we have a society where you only talk about the good and you. You avoid the bad. So thanks for being willing to be open and honest and vulnerable about that. What a harrowing, terrible thing you've been through. It just reflects this idea of how religion creates these standards around sex and sexuality and other sorts of things that create all sorts of shame and guilt and pressure that then make you feel like you're. It makes you become a prisoner in your own mind because you allow people to do things to you that you would normally never allow them to do to you. But because you feel so broken and bad and dark and hopeless, that opens up the ability for a religion that has its own interests in mind over your own health and healing to do terrible things. Part of what you talk about reminds me of the repressed memory hypnosis kind of stuff that happened with satanic ritual abuse in the 80s and 90s, where they're having you create memories under the duress and pressure of pseudo fake kind of psychology. It seems like there was a big chunk of that going on with you, but then also just. Just the level of abuse that you endured. You know, it's why I said at the beginning of today's interview that maybe Scientology, as bad as Mormonism can be, maybe Scientology is sort of another next level of. Of cultishness or severity. Because I don't think there's anything in Mormonism like what you experienced other than if you're gay and if you come out as gay and your bishop or your parents decide you need to go through reparative therapy. Maybe in some instances, you're not in a gulag, you're not starving, you're not eating mush, but you're definitely going through some of that psychological torture where you're trying to be cured of something that makes no sense. But it's a next level of horrificness, what you. What you experienced. And I'm so sorry, Chris.

Chris Shelton [00:20:37] Yeah, it was. It was not fun, let's put it that way. You know, it was survivable. It was rough. But, you know, and of course, I, you know, I didn't mention. I mean, there's, you know, all the yelling and screaming and all the other bullshit. I mean, it's. The stress is quite high. You know, it's very stressful environment.

Surviving Three Years on the RPF

John Dehlin [00:20:55] What kept you from physically running away? Do they keep you locked in in those instances, or.

Chris Shelton [00:21:02] Well, yeah. Okay. You're on a Sea Org base, and you are. And when you're on the rpf, you are never allowed to be alone, so you're always with other people. Right. I mean, it may be in the bathroom, you're alone. Right. But otherwise you're not. If you have to go off base, like, let's say you have to go get something or you have some situation where you have to go to the hospital, this happened often. People would get hurt. I broke my finger on the rpf. There's a guy who lost an eye. There are people who break bones all the time. You have to go down to county to get that dealt with. Right. The Sea Org doesn't have medical facilities there to deal with broken bones and stuff. Three people have to go, right? So you and two other people escort you, and you don't get off base through security until you have a written okay from the RPF in charge that you're authorized to leave the base and that all three of you are leaving the base at once, and the other two might not have anything to do except hang out with you for that period of time. So in a way, you know, going to the hospital with somebody was kind of a pleasant reprieve for a couple hours. You know, like, you kind of want to go volunteer to be somebody's buddy while they're going to the hospital with their broken bones or something. You look for these little opportunities to have these little moments. And horribly enough, that was one of the times you would have one of those moments, right? You never were allowed to have more than $20 on you at a time. And your IDs, passport, Social Security card, all of that was confiscated when you arrived to the rpf. You don't get to carry that stuff around with you, ever. If you need it for, like, you go to the hospital, you need to present id, then that person is given one of the people on the watch, one of the people who's accompanying the person is given that guy's IDs, you know, that kind of thing. There's all these controls in place to keep people there. If they do manage to get off the base, and it's not impossible to do, if you walk at the right time and the right angle, you won't be in the cameras, but it's hard to find those places. But if you do manage to get off the base, they're going to figure out you're gone pretty quickly, especially on the rpf, which has so many schedule constraints and controls on it. And then they do what's called. Then security gets involved. There's a whole security force on the base. They're not private security. They're Sea Org members who are trained to be security guards. They carry weapons. They have training. They are security. They dress like cops. They have uniforms and stuff. And they go into what's called the blow drill. So you take off. Any Sea Org member takes off, rpfer, other Sea Org member, anybody who leaves. The blow drill goes into effect. This happened when I took off. They check your bank accounts. They check your credit cards. They start calling your relatives. They start trying to figure out, where could he have gone? Where would he go? Or she. What are they most likely to be doing? Who are their contacts, right? Who are their friends? Who are their family? They have all this information on you on file because you fill out. It's not just in your counseling sessions that you're giving them information. In Scientology, they have what's called a life history form, I might have mentioned this before, where you list all your friends, all your family, every school you've ever been to, every person, every job you've ever had, every person you've ever had any sexual experience with. Like, it's all listed out in this very extensive life history. They have that on file. If you're married, your spouse is going to know your bank account, your bank passwords or whatever. They're going to wrangle your spouse. In they go, hey, he blew. We got to get him back. You know, tell us all about him. Right. They get all that data, so they try to track you down, basically. Right. And they have. They have pursued people and found them at train stations, airports, bus stations, wandering the streets, in the park. They just track people down and they find them. They did not find me. And it wasn't for lack of looking. They just didn't know where to look because I was literally hiding out at a completely random hotel in the middle of Pasadena. They didn't think that because my parents didn't live in Pasadena anymore, they had no idea I had gone to Pasadena. So I eluded the blow drill. But that is not necessarily an easy thing to do. And that is something that they practice as a routine action in the Sea Org.

John Dehlin [00:25:49] Okay, so that. But that's later in the story. Right?

Chris Shelton [00:25:53] Well, I'm just sort of combining those two points. You said. What is it that keeps you there? Security keeps you there. There's cameras all over the place. There's musters multiple times a day. There's the fact that you're married. I mean, there's a lot of reasons, a lot of control points to keep you in place.

John Dehlin [00:26:13] Okay. Okay. So you went through. You said three years of that?

Chris Shelton [00:26:19] Yeah, three years, three months. 2008 or 2009, I graduated and I got put on to making books. That was a little random. Scientology has its own in house publishing facility, and I ended up getting posted there, and I worked there for eight, nine months. Hated it. Found out I was a little colorblind. So there were parts of the job I actually couldn't do because I was making book covers for our books that we were publishing, and there were certain colors I couldn't see. That was a little weird. I was getting in all kinds of trouble for not doing my job right. And turns out it was impossible for me to because I couldn't see the colors. Right. Anyway, then I got on to doing. I wanted to get away from all this. You know, after the rpf, you're supposed to come off of the RPF as a fully rehabilitated Sea Org member. Back on purpose, back on, you know, ready to go, fully determined and all that. Right. Well, that wasn't really me. I got through the rpf, but I had Seen enough of how the sausage was made at this point that I was pretty disaffected with the organization in some ways, oddly enough, and motivated reasoning being what it is, I still believed in Scientology. I just thought that somehow something was off about all of this, but I really hadn't been able to figure out yet what that was. I just knew that I didn't like the high pressure. I didn't like the constant yelling and screaming. And it just seemed so unnecessary to me at this point. That's kind of where my head was at, was like, I get why all these people are acting this way, but it doesn't. We don't have to be like this to accomplish our mission. I don't understand why Scientology is being run this way, but I still believed in it, and I still thought that it was the only thing that was going to save the world, you know, So I proceeded to continue working, and I got onto doing recruitment. And the bonus about doing recruitment was I got to get off the base. After being stuck there for years on the rpf, no days off, no nothing, I was finally able to get myself out of Los Angeles, and I went to Seattle and Portland and Vegas and Twin Cities, and I went around to different places, and I was recruiting staff members and Sea Org members, and I got pretty good at it. You know, I was doing all right. And I was very, very laden down, still, not only with Scientology, but also, as a sort of ancillary note here, I was also very. I had a lot of conspiracy theory because Hubbard is a conspiracy theorist as well as being a, you know, religious philosophical nut. He was big on conspiracy theory, and he had this whole idea that the world had conspired against Scientology specifically. Right. That the international bankers weren't just ruling the world, but they knew that Scientology was going to save it, and they were trying to stop Scientology specifically. Not generally, very premeditatedly. They were trying to destroy Scientology. And I had bought into all that. Like I said, my critical thinking was still not my strong suit here. And Alex Jones and all of that conspiracy theory stuff and 911 truthers and stuff, and that was the vein of conspiracy theory that I believed in at this time. And I used that to recruit people and convince them why they needed to join the Sea Org, because we were saving the world from this horrible conspiracy. And it worked on young people. It worked pretty well. And I had no idea that I was peddling a bunch of lies. I believed all this crap. So during the course of the year, though, was the first time I ever started Getting some Internet access, and I was not going to look up anything about Scientology. I was still ruthlessly self policing myself about that. But I did start questioning some of the conspiracy theory, some of the 911 stuff specifically. I saw some stuff and I thought, huh, you know, I'm off base. I'm recruiting people. I'm doing the job I'm supposed to be doing. But I thought something might not be totally right about this whole 911 thing. And I thought, well, maybe I should look at some of the other information about it. And I did. And I came to realize, oh, no, it's not like that. It's not an inside job. That's not what happened. And I started putting two and two together. And this was the first. First time in my life since joining Scientology that I actually did apply a little critical thinking to something. And I sort of debunked for myself some of those conspiracy theories, at least the heavy duty, Alex Jones, David Ike stuff. Right. I still believed Hubbard, basically, but I thought, you know, these details don't really make a lot of sense, and this is not really that great. The reason I'm bringing this up is not because of the conspiracy theory stuff. It's because this was the first time that I had Internet access, and it was the first time that I actually applied a little critical think in my life. That started a chain, because that was really the beginning of the end. The earlier stuff had been a beginning to the end too. Certainly the RPF program was. But this was the first time when I actually sort of started stepping away from the church's messaging and thinking outside of that, you know, because this conspiracy stuff was heavy duty amongst the recruiters. All the recruiters were using this. This wasn't an idea I invented. I picked it up from another recruiter who was one of the most successful Sea Org recruiters on the planet. So I was just trying to follow in his footsteps and do what he was doing. And that was how I learned how to recruit. And it was with all this conspiracy stuff. And the more I learned about it, the more I thought, wow, this is really crazy. And then the. Then debunking it, I went, oh, we can't be using this stuff to recruit people. This is not true. And I talked to another recruiter and he said, oh, yeah, no, I agree with you. And I just kind of stopped using that. And then I started trying to recruit people other ways. And after about a year, I said, hey, look, I'm kind of done with all this recruitment stuff. Can I do something else? And they put me on to another kind of project, opening up these Ideal orgs. They're buying new buildings, they're renovating them at great expense, and they're opening up as though they're new church buildings. And this is a big real estate project that's going on and has been going on in Scientology since 2004. So I got onto that line, and again, the bonus for me was that I was off the base. I was out traveling, and I was doing logistics work. I was moving people around and stuff. Like, let's say we were trying to open Las Vegas. We had bought a new building. It had gotten renovated. We needed to get it up to like 100 staff members. And trust me, there are not even a hundred Scientologists in Las Vegas. So we needed to import some people. So I was the person who was actually doing the physical work of importing them. I would drive to Washington state, Minnesota, or Kansas, and I would pack the person's stuff up and move them to Las Vegas. That was my job. So I was driving around, and the big bonus here was I was by myself. And this was very rare for a Sea Org member to be given this much, you know, this kind of responsibility and to be trusted to do this. And really, it was only because we didn't have somebody to go with me. You know, Sea Org policy is you never send a person out alone. But I was being sent off alone because I was doing this logistics work, and I was in daily phone touch with my, you know, in charge with the person who was running me. So she was keeping tabs on me, or he was keeping tabs on me. It was different people over the time, and I would go off and do these projects, but what it gave me was I had boots on the ground in every state in the West US over about a two year period of time, from Washington state to Minnesota to Texas to California. I was all over the place. And I was loving it because I was seeing the United States for the first time. I was seeing. I was going outside. I mean, I've been born and raised in California. I'd hardly ever been out of the state. So now I was going all over the place. I was actually seeing the world. I was being exposed to the news on a daily basis. I had Internet access with a little plugin thing on a laptop, and I needed that in order to be able to find things and find people. So the Sea Org was okay with me being on the Internet. And at that time, they had not yet created the computer filters that they have now to control what I could have Internet access to. So I started in little tiny bits and pieces, I started seeing Scientology related stuff on the Internet. And I was like, okay, I'm not supposed to be looking at this stuff. I'm going to avoid looking at it. But some things would kind of slip through. And I'm that naturally curious, voracious reader guy. So some of those things slipped through and started making little chinks in my armor. And this was a very gradual process. This was not a night and day. You know, one day I was a Scientologist, the next day I wasn't. It wasn't like that at all. This took years, but slow, gradually.

John Dehlin [00:36:30] What were some of those. What were some of those pieces of

Chris Shelton [00:36:33] information that little things like a headline that said asbestos found on the free winds. And the free winds is a ship that the Sea Org owns right now that they deliver OT8 on. And I thought. And I knew asbestos was bad, right? So I was like, asbestos on the free winds? What? You know, it's just kind of. It's one of those things that takes you by surprise. So much so that you forget to the filters that you have in place and you just go, wait a minute, Asbestos? That's not right. And I read the article and yeah, no, it was right. There was asbestos on the ship, and we had exposed public Scientologists and Sea Org members to blue asbestos. And I was like, goddamn, that wasn't too cool. Somebody screwed up on that, right? I was never going to find out who or how, but somebody screwed up. And that was. Like I said, that was just a little chink in the armor, you know, And I already had felt from the whole RPF experience and that whole time period when I was broken and not put back together yet, you know, that. That this was not the, you know, the be all, end all of existence, the Sea Org in Scientology then. And I started seeing that there was more to the world, you know, and like I said, I was having very unusual experiences as a Sea Org member. Sea Org members are not sent off by themselves to drive around, and they are not given Internet access. So I was in a very privileged position, right? And I want to stress that because I want to make it clear that what happened with me is not the sort of thing that's going to happen with other Sea Org members as a general rule. So I started learning just a little bit, just little critical things. The word Zenu was kind of around, but I was like, nope, no, no. Because I believed that that confidential upper level material would Kill me. I really believed that, so I didn't want to have anything to do with it, and I did not want to endanger my future in Scientology by screwing around on the Internet. So I was really trying to be good Scientologist and a good Sea Org member, and I was. Some of these things were slipping through, but they were, you know, I was doing okay. But as time went on, you know, a couple more things slipped through, and then what finally did it, you know, was.

John Dehlin [00:38:55] Wait, can I just. Can I jump in and ask something?

Chris Shelton [00:38:58] So.

John Dehlin [00:38:59] So, like, I was introduced to the Xenu stuff from that south park episode. Do you remember what year that south park episode came out?

Chris Shelton [00:39:05] 2005, I think.

John Dehlin [00:39:07] And what year are we at with you right now in your 2000?

Chris Shelton [00:39:11] We're up to 2011.

John Dehlin [00:39:13] So this is six years after the Scientology episode on south park comes out. Mormons know about the Zenu thing, but Scientologists either don't know about the Xenu thing, or they know some rumblings about it, but they're scared to think about it or talk about it because of this perception that they're gonna die if they talk or think about it.

Chris Shelton [00:39:36] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:39:37] And again, remind us, you mentioned this before. How do you come to believe you're gonna die if you think or talk about the Xenu thing?

Chris Shelton [00:39:45] L. Ron Hubbard said so. He specifically said it in the Zenu narrative. I mean, it's written in the materials. And that little bit is passed on. You're not told. How do I put this? Different people have different experiences with this. Okay. But basically, you are indoctrinated in Scientology that the upper levels of Scientology exist. You know all about them. You know that they're there to be done, but you don't know a single thing that is on them that's in them. You don't know the contents of those levels at all. And you are told over and over again that it is extremely powerful information that if you're not ready for it, you can get sick or you can die or other horrible things can happen to you spiritually that you just don't want happening to you. So you. So. So it's just kind of understood. I mean, it's very quickly understood in Scientology that that's not for you yet. And if you're not ready for it, it's dangerous. There. You're. You're told that there's this. That there's this area of the grade chart between the level of clear and OT3, specifically, that is called the no interference area zone, where all you're supposed to do as a Scientologist after you go clear is get your ass to OT3 as fast as possible, because you are in spiritual danger if you don't hurry up and get that done. I mean, that's how it's written. So there's all this mystique and sort of cultural lore in the world of Scientology connected to these OT levels. So you just come to an understanding that until you're ready for it, you don't want to look at that stuff. And when you're ready for it, they'll give it to you. But you got to get yourself up to a level where you're going to be ready for it, because if you're not, you're just going to be damaging yourself and potentially worse. So that was my understanding of it as a Sea Org member.

John Dehlin [00:42:11] And again, we covered this in the earlier episodes, but that's very reminiscent of the Mormon Temple ceremony and the endowment ceremony and even the second anointing and the death oaths that we would reenact as Mormons to make us fear ever divulging these top secret things that really weren't that interesting or real or valuable. But the Church needs sacredness. They need things at the pinnacle of their ritual or theology that can be sacred. And the only way to make them sacred is to have these super harsh penalties if anybody divulges or reveals them. And the Masons did it too. And it sounds like that's what you guys did. But the other point, that's just mind blowing. And I get this. In mormonism still, in 2019, we can have Mormon stories existing for 14 years. We can have CES letter existing for seven years or however long it's been out now, maybe six years. We can have Fawn Brody's book going back to 1945, but still, the vast majority of Mormons are oblivious to all of it. And that's how it is in Scientology as well.

Chris Shelton [00:43:21] Exactly, exactly. It's sacred lore, you know, and you just buy into the rules of it, because those are the rules. You don't know what it is. You know, there's endless, endless guessing game within the lower levels of Scientology as to what OT3 and the OT levels are all about, right? Endless numbers of guesses. I spent years conjecturing what it could all be about. And I studied and studied and studied everything I could get my hands on that Hubbard had talked about that wasn't confidential in an effort to try to reverse engineer or figure out what it could be. I mean, I Was glued to this thing. This was something I was introduced to very early on as a size a Scientologist. And I am not big on mysteries. You know what I mean? Like, I want to know. I don't want. I don't savor the anticipation of finding out. I want to know. I want the spoilers, you know? I want to know. So I. So for 27 years, right, I had been, like, glued to this mystery of what is OT3. So, you know, yeah, I was trying to figure stuff out, but I was still believing that I needed to police myself on this stuff, right? So I didn't want to know. I wanted to know, but I wanted to find out the right way.

John Dehlin [00:44:32] And again, yeah, so this. So this south park episode, the blast Scientology, deep secret theology to the whole world, existed six or seven years before your awakening?

Chris Shelton [00:44:48] Correct. And I did not watch it because I knew I'd only just sort of heard that it had happened. Not when I was in the rpf, when it happened because I was obviously not connected to the outside world. I had no clue what was going on. But when I got on the Internet, I heard that south park had done this episode and that Isaac Hayes had quit the show as a result. Well, I was on the Scientology side. So for me, Isaac Hayes was the hero of that story. Trey and Matt were a couple of dicks, Right? That was my view as a Scientologist. So I didn't want to have anything to do with that south park episode. I wasn't gonna watch that thing. Just a bunch of lies, you know, Just a bunch of crap.

John Dehlin [00:45:28] And what do you think about. What did you think about all the stuff? Did the stuff with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, did all that come out while you were still a Scientologist?

Chris Shelton [00:45:43] The couch jumping stuff did. That all happened again while I was on the rpf, actually. And I didn't see any of that when I was on the rpf. I had no idea any of that had happened. So I was a couple years late finding out about Tom Cruise's craziness. Tom Cruise, to me, was a Greek God. Tom Cruise was the most important Scientologist on the planet, next to David Miscavige. Tom Cruise was a massive superstar celebrity who was spreading the word about Scientology. Tom Cruise was not somebody I was having critical thoughts about yet. Got it, you know, because I was in that world.

John Dehlin [00:46:23] Yeah.

Chris Shelton [00:46:24] You know, and Tom Cruise was the Freedom Medal of Valor winner. I mean, he got the biggest feature freedom medal that David Miscavige had ever given out. I had not Appreciated. And no one in the Sea Org appreciated David Miscavige standing on that stage saying that Tom Cruise was the most dedicated Scientologist he knew. That shit pissed us off because we were Sea Org members. And Tom Cruise might be a hard working celebrity and superstar actor, but he ain't no Sea Org member. That line that David Miscavige stood on stage and said disaffected more Sea Org members than I think he ever had a clue was gonna happen. People were in the Sea Org were pissed off about that, but we had to suppress it all. Because you do not ever express a critical remark about David Miscavige as a Sea Org member and expect to get away with it. You will not.

John Dehlin [00:47:18] And in Miscavige's defense, you live by your celebrities and you grow by your celebrities, but you can die by your celebrities, as Mormonism is now experiencing. Tyler Glenn leaves Mormonism. Dan Reynolds leaves Mormonism. Imagine Dragons leaves Mormonism. Like it's, you know, all these movie stars are leaving. Like, you know, the Osmonds were great when the church was on the rise, but if your celebrity starts speaking out against the church and start disaffecting, you can die by that same sword that you've been living by. And so I'm sure Miscavige had to kiss Tom Cruise's butt to keep him in really quickly. There are rumors that the way that Scientology keeps cruising is by having secret information that he's gay, and they'll use that against him if he ever disaffects. Do you have any sense for any of that being true or not?

Chris Shelton [00:48:15] No, that's all bullshit. Tom Cruise is a religious fanatic. He is a true believer. He is absolutely a true believer.

John Dehlin [00:48:23] And John Travolta too.

Chris Shelton [00:48:25] John Travolta, maybe.

John Dehlin [00:48:29] Okay.

Chris Shelton [00:48:30] At this point, I don't have any question that John Travolta is probably bisexual. I was around in Santa Barbara when John Travolta met Kelly, his wife. I was. That all happened in Santa Barbara and Kelly got into Scientology in Santa Barbara because John Travolta was friends with a couple of the staff members there in Santa Barbara. So that's where she went. I'm convinced that he loves his wife and that he has a family and he loves his family. John Travolta is not an insincere person. He loves Scientology, you know, but he also was disaffected with Scientology in the 1980s before he met Kelly. And he got recovered back into the church.

John Dehlin [00:49:17] Okay.

Chris Shelton [00:49:18] And I think he's had a few Other moments like that. So he's been on the fence about Scientology here and there. Right now he seems pretty die hard. And I think the reason is because his wife Kelly is fanatical about Scientology. She didn't just get converted, she got super converted. And so I think if. I think the thing that's keeping John Travolta in Scientology is his wife. Okay, then blackmail about his bisexuality. Tom Cruise is definitely not bisexual or homosexual. That's just not. There's no way that's true. And he is just a fanatic. You know, he's just this. He's this super intense personality, and he's one of these, like, gung ho, if you're gonna do it, do it all the way kind of people. He met Nicole, whose father is a clinical psychologist, by the way. He met Nicole Kidman on the set of, you know, Days of Thunder. He was married to Mimi Rogers, who was a Scient second gen Scientologist who got him into Scientology. He had fallen out of love with Mimi, fell in love with Nicole, wanted to marry her, right? Wanted to be with her. So, you know, the church complied and helped make that happen and told me. Me to shut the fuck up.

John Dehlin [00:50:35] And.

Chris Shelton [00:50:37] And that's what happened. And that's how he got out of his first marriage. But Nicole wasn't really so down with Scientology. She did it, and I think she even got up to the OT levels at one point, but she was never really hardcore. She was kind of doing it because. Because he wanted her to. And she was kind of pulling him away from Scientology. And in the 1990s, he actually stopped really being much of a Scientologist. He wasn't promoting it. He wasn't talking about it, wasn't doing services, wasn't around the orgs. Sure as hell wasn't going to events. Late 1990s, David Miscavige says, I want to get this guy back. And Marty Rathbun goes and recovers him and does. The most successful Scientology recovery ever happened in the history of Scientology. He gets Tom Cruise back on board, and he gets Nicole out of Tom Cruise's life. Actually accomplished that. And he alien. And he managed to alienate the kids that they had adopted as well so that they went on Cruz's side and not with Nicole. And Nicole was like, okay. So she got blindsided and ended up divorcing Tom. And Tom went all in on Scientology. He and David Miscavige became best buds. And Tom started getting more training in Scientology, started doing more classes with Scientology, started doing more auditing with Scientology, got on to the OT level 7, which I think he's still on now. He might have finished that. And he went all in on Scientology again. And then they arranged Katie Holmes to be his, you know, his wife. And then that didn't work out because Katie saw behind the curtain, and she was like, get me the hell out of here. And she actually arranged with her family with secret phones and secret security and stuff, to escape from Tom Cruise's vicinity with her daughter. And she did, and she pulled it off, and she got out of that. And Tom, of course, never forgave her and won't even see his daughter now. And that's why, you know, so he's as hardcore as they get. And people who conjecture endlessly about Tom Cruise leaving Scientology literally just don't have any idea what they're talking about. He's never gonna leave.

John Dehlin [00:52:56] Got it. Okay.

Chris Shelton [00:52:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:52:59] Okay.

Chris Shelton [00:52:59] Yeah. So that's Tom's situation. Okay, so let's wrap this up. So. Okay, So I. In 2011, something really, really important happened. Actually, two things happened eight years ago.

Discovering the Truth and Leaving Scientology

John Dehlin [00:53:13] Eight years ago. Yeah.

Chris Shelton [00:53:15] Yeah. This is at the end of 2011. I had been out and about for a couple years now, off the base, because I hated being on the Sea Org base. It was nothing but pressure and yelling and screaming, and I don't want anything to do with that anymore. So I was kind of keeping myself on these projects, traveling around, doing this work, having a good time, enjoying the work that I was doing. Kind of. I mean, sort of. It. It's not a lot of fun to go knocking on doors and having people yell and scream at you. That's. That's not a lot of fun. And that happened often. But I. But I. But, you know, sometimes I would get people back in the fold, and I was. I was getting pretty good at that job, but I was becoming more and more aware of how money intensive Scientology had become. I was working on a project in Twin Cities, Minnesota, at the newly opened Scientology Church there. They bought this. This 90,000 square foot museum and converted it into a Scientology Church, which is where it's at now in St. Paul. And we were there to get the place going and, you know, and get the staff producing and stuff like that. But the only orders we were receiving were pretty much all aligned with making money, not bringing new people in, not selling books, not getting people in class, not getting auditing delivered. It wasn't about any of the things that Scientology was ostensibly actually about. It was only money, money, money, money. Right. And I didn't like that. I thought, this is way off. You know, Scientology has always had this thing about money, and I knew that, but now it was. Now there was nothing else but money. That's all we were talking about. And I thought, well, this is wrong. And I started examining my life, and I started thinking, okay, I've done the rpf. I'm married. I'm in the Sea Org. I am not enjoying myself a whole lot. And it dawned on me kind of out of the blue as I was sort of thinking and thinking about this stuff, that I had gotten into this patter, the sales patter, the sales speech when I was recovering people or talking to them or dealing with them. And that sales thing that I had sort of developed or been, you know, been using was really a bunch of lies. And I had developed it along the lines of hopes. You know, well, let's get you back in, and we'll make it go right. We'll do this and we'll do that and all work out. It'll be great. But I seen behind the curtain enough now that I knew that it wasn't all great and that people were getting screwed over, and it was really just about the money. And I started being concerned about getting people in because I knew that they were just going to be jumped all over for money, and I was trying to sell them on. No, we're going to get you back in. We're going to fix your life up. We're going to do this, we're going to do that. But that's not what would happen with them. They'd come in and it was all about the Benjamins, right? And I thought, what am I doing? What's going on here? I'm actually lying to these people. That's what's happening. I'm getting them back in the door by lying to them. And I don't want to lie to people, you know? And I still had enough integrity to know that lies were wrong, you know? And that's not what I got into this whole thing for. And then on New Year's. Yeah, New Year's, 2011-2012, a very, very important former Sea Org member who had been very high up, who had run the Clearwater installation for a while, for many, many years, in fact. Her name was Debbie Cook, sent out an email, a very long and very extensive email with all kinds of L. Ron Hubbard quotes in it that showed how off the rails the church had gone and that it was all about the money. And David Miscavige wasn't doing anything to actually run Scientology the way L. Ron Hubbard wanted him to. He was all about money, and it was ripping people off. And this whole thing about buying buildings and renovating them. Hubbard never said to do that. That was totally wrong, contrary to his policies. And there was all this money that they were just holding onto in reserves, and they weren't spending it, and they weren't using it to promote Scientology. They were just amassing money. And there was lots of other things in this email. And it was a nuclear explosion in the world of Scientology because Debbie Cook was somebody who people knew and trusted because she had run the Florida place for so long. The flag. So everybody knew who Debbie Cook was. She'd been in videos. She had talked about Scientology. So here she was sending out this email saying the current leadership of Scientology is off the rails. And here's what L. Ron Hubbard has to say about it, and here's how David Miscavige is violating all of that. And I could not deny a single word that she had written in that email. And I saw it and I went, oh, my God. Right? It validated everything I'd been thinking. Suddenly I had somebody I could. Somebody else was saying what I was seeing. And I had tried to talk to my wife. She didn't want to hear anything about it. She thought I was a disaffected asshole, and how dare I even question Miscavige, Right? So my marriage was not a safe place for me to go anymore. There were nobody there, other Sea Org members. I couldn't talk to them about any of this stuff I was seeing. They didn't want to hear it. So I was feeling pretty alone until this email drops, and I'm like, damn, I'm not the only one seeing this. I'm not the crazy one. And that was really the. That was the real like, okay, right. I had. I'd been thinking about it and pretty much decided I was going to leave the Sea Org again. I still believed in Scientology. I just thought the organization had gone off the rails, and it was all about the money at this point. So I didn't want to be a part of that. But I still wanted to do Scientology because I still thought the secrets of the universe were on those OT levels. So I decide I'm leaving the Sea Org. Basically, I get called. I'm not going to go into a whole bunch of other details right now. I'm just going to go to. Wrapping this up with. I got called back to la. I submitted my resignation. Basically, I wrote up a thing before I even arrived. In la. And I said, I want to leave the Sea Org. I don't want to argue about it. I don't want to be tried. I don't want anybody trying to convince me to stay. I just want to go. And this, of course, was a bit of a bomb. And, you know, they weren't happy with me at all. But it took me about eight months. This was March 2012. January, March, April, May, May. I think it was April. I think it was April or May that I went back to la. And it took me until December to get through the SEC checking and then jump through all the hoops that I needed to jump through so that I could leave the Sea Org and still be a Scientologist in good standing. And that was important because if I just took off, I'd be in trouble. I'd blind. I'd be blown, and they would not let me continue doing Scientology. So I wanted to do it and jump through all their hoops. So I did. And by December 2012, I was out of the Sea Org, and I went back to my mom's place in California, and I landed there. She gave me a place to land. She was very happy. I found out she was totally out of Scientology at this point. Couldn't care less about it. Didn't want to, you know, was happy to have me around, was happy to talk to me about it and stuff, but, you know, she wasn't interested in doing any more Scientology. And I was totally okay with that. I got it, and I wanted to, but I was gonna get a job. I was gonna have a family. I was gonna. You know, I was gonna. I had a whole idea for how my life was gonna go. And I ended up going back to Minnesota because I had friends there, and I'd met this woman, and I thought we were gonna make a life. And I was divorcing my wife at this point. Right. We had been apart for years, and the marriage had really just fallen apart. I mean, the RPF was. She is what. She's the thing that kind of got me through the RPF as a goal. But after I got back with her, it really wasn't that great. And I had done my punishment, had definitely overqualified for the crime I had committed. So I didn't feel guilty anymore about what had happened. I felt like I had dealt with it and taken responsibility for it. So I didn't feel like I was in a bad, propitiative place with my marriage. I wanted to make it work, but it really wasn't working. And no matter how much I tried to make it work over all this time, it wasn't working, and it was just kind of fading and falling apart. So by the time that this, that this email came and I. And my examination of Scientology came, my marriage was basically over. And I was fine with that. And it wasn't a big, huge loss like you would think it, you know, it might be for some people. So, yeah, so I went back to Minnesota to set up a new life, make a life for myself. I got in a car at this point. My mom had helped me, you know, stabilize some things. I got, you know, opened up a bank account, etc. And I was actually kind of normalizing. And I had been used to driving all over the place, right from all those years of driving around in the West US And I was pretty familiar with how to drive across the United States. So I drove from California to Minnesota, my new car and new used car, and threw all my stuff in the back because I had hardly anything in terms of material possessions. The Sea Org, the lifestyle, is very utilitarian, minimalist lifestyle. I did not have. I had given my ex wife the CDs and everything. I kept. I didn't keep anything really, except the laptop. And I went out to Minnesota. And when I landed in Minnesota, in fact, before I got there, Sea Org members who were in Minnesota, who I had been working with back months and months ago, heard I was coming and they were furious. They were so pissed because I was now showing up as a non Sea Org member. And how dare I, how dare I have a life outside the Sea Org and show up again as though I was just a regular person, right? This was the attitude. And so I was refused entry to the Org. I could not do Scientology services. I could not do any Scientology related stuff. I wasn't even supposed to be Facebook friends with people. That's what the church demanded of me as an ex Sea Org member. I was out of the Sea Org. I was done with that. I was now a public Scientologist. I was no longer working for the church. And yet they were still making these incredibly invasive demands on me about who I could talk to, who I could be friends with, who I could go out with, what I could do in relation to the Scientology Church. And I wasn't really very happy about that. But I was trying to play ball because I wanted to make it go with this woman I had met, and she was a Scientologist. She was actually a staff member at the church. That's how I'd met her. And I Thought we could make something happen. I was, you know, I was falling in love with this woman and vice versa. And we were, you know, kind of making it happen, but we had to do it secretly because Scientology demands that. Because if you don't kowtow to Scientology's demands, then they make life horrible for you. So the Sea Org was really, really pissed at me for going back to Minnesota, and they were not. They were not being very nice to me. And I thought, okay, I think I've had about enough of this. And I started going online because I knew there was stuff I didn't know, and it was time for me to find out. I had heard a couple things. I'd seen a couple things over those years when I had Internet access, I'd been a really good chicken. I had really not looked at a lot of stuff. But now the brakes were off, and it was time to actually find out. And I dived into the way in, and it took me three months. I mean, late nights, you know, I was just horrified, fascinated. I just could not believe the stuff I was reading. I found out about L. Ron Hubbard, his actual life. I found out about how he. How he never saw combat, how he flunked out of college, how he was a pathological liar, how he was married to two women at the same time. We didn't even know about the second wife. Like, I didn't know anything about that. As a Scientologist, you're fed this entire biography of Hubbard. That is total bullshit. And I. That was the version we believed because that's all we were told. I come to find out, no, that's not the actual version of his life. That's true. And there's a lot of Scientology that rests on some of Hubbard's life story being true, and it's not true. Like the combat thing in World War II. He didn't have any combat wounds. Well, he claimed that dianetics was what allowed him to cure himself of his wounds. So if that's not true, Dianetics isn't true. That was not an easy pill to swallow. Not after dedicating my life to this stuff for 27 years. And I'll never forget. I'll never forget the moment that it actually clicked. You know, it was about three months in. I'd gone two or three months. I'd gone down all these rabbit holes, learned all this stuff, heard from Sea Org members that had left, who I used to know. I mean, this was not all divorced, you know, third person stuff. These were people I had worked with who were telling their stories online and stuff. And I was like, oh, that's what happened. That's what happened to that guy. That's what happened at that time. And seeing all that, it all kind of fell into place, and I realized that I had been taken advantage of and that I had just been being used all those years to make money, and that it had all been built on a lie. That the thetans weren't true, the reactive mind wasn't true. Dianetics wasn't true. Scientology was mostly stolen from other places and other sources. That L. Ron Hubbard was not a creative genius. He was a plagiarist and a liar. And that was. You know, what words do you use to describe that? You know, how do you describe finding out that your entire life has been a lie? You know, it's not. It's not like I got into Scientology like everybody else did. You know what I mean? I was a second gen. I was raised with this stuff. It was never a question that we were thetans. It was never a question that we were going to live into eternity, you know, and now suddenly, no, all that's a lie. Your entire worldview, everything you think about yourself, is not true. And that was. That was tough, you know, and of

John Dehlin [01:08:56] course, Mormons now are going to be connecting with what you're saying more than probably anything else, because we do have that rabbit hole moment where we go down the rabbit hole. We get to the point where we're willing to question whether or not it's actually true. And then we use the Internet and podcasts and other sources to start learning, and then we learn the hundreds and thousands of things that the Church hid from us. The disturbing truths about the Church that weren't true. And all of a sudden, everything that we've built our entire life upon now falls to the ground, and we're naked and groundless, you know, after decades and decades and decades of service and commitment and devotion to an organization.

Chris Shelton [01:09:43] Exactly. That's what I experienced, too. And having risen in Scientology up to the highest levels in the Sea Org, having gone through the RPF program, having gone through everything I went through, having gone suicidal, having gone through, you know, being in a headspace where I literally thought I was ready for the funny farm. Right. I mean, I had been in some very dark places, and I had gotten through all of that on the hope and promise that Scientology was what it said it was, you know, so, yeah, and this is earth shattering, you know,

John Dehlin [01:10:21] and just those reflections of L. Ron Hubbard being a plagiarist, just grabbing stuff from all around him and deceiving people. That's exactly what we learn about Joseph Smith by the time we're done studying was that he was simply grabbing stuff from Swedenborg, grabbing stuff from the Masons, grabbing stuff from the temperance movement and whatever it is that was in his air, he was munging it all together, repackaging it, selling it as Mormonism and as divinely inspired. And he was a plagiarist. I mean, Book of Mormon, Book of Abraham. Any revelation he came up with was plagiarism. And anyone who studies it with an open mind reaches that conclusion. So I'm seeing lots of comments now. Rochelle says, we feel your pain. Thomas says, wow, Chris, what you just said just gave me the chills because that's exactly how I felt. Everything I knew and that I was the way I understood the world was all a lie. Thomas writes, I'm sorry for the pain you've experienced. I look up to you and I know many others must as well. Rochelle says, sounds like the old fraudulent foundational stories and truth claims. Deb writes, the parallels to Mormonism are fascinating and it's so powerful and heart wrenching to reach this point in the story and see that our journeys has paralleled. Our journeys have paralleled your journey in such profound and heartbreaking, but also validating and let's just say liberating ways. And so here's what I want to do. We're now four hours into today's interview. We've done six and a half hours, and I don't want to be done yet. I need to be done for today. But I still want to cover your life as an ex Scientologist.

Chris Shelton [01:12:07] I think that's a great idea. I think that's great.

John Dehlin [01:12:10] Would you be okay if we did one more interview even though we thought we were going to be on today?

Chris Shelton [01:12:15] Absolutely. It works for me, too. Yeah, that's great.

John Dehlin [01:12:18] Okay. Because I don't want to rush this very important part because so many people discover it's not true. But then what do you do afterwards? And so many other religions are dealing with this of like, okay, yeah, now tens of thousands of us know it's not true. But what do you do afterwards? How do you hold the church accountable? What do you do when the church attacks you for holding it accountable? How do you. What's it like trying to minister? What's it. What's it like to try and be a truth teller to your former organization? What does the church do to you? And then where do we go from here? And all those things I don't want to rush.

Chris Shelton [01:12:54] Agreed. I don't want to either because I actually have a lot more to say about my post Scientology life and it's. And I think there are some important things there that I can help people with. So I would very much like to have a dedicated time to do that. I think that's great.

Reflections and Closing Thoughts

John Dehlin [01:13:09] All right, so everyone, that's four hours today with Chris Shelton followed by six and a half previously, you're gonna break Roger Hendricks record and exceed the 12 hour mark in a 1 Mormon stories sequence of interviews. But I think it's been worth it. You're that awesome, Chris Shelton. No offense, Roger Hendricks. And so you're awesome too, Roger. So, Chris, we're gonna bring you back for a final round. Is that all right?

Chris Shelton [01:13:35] Awesome, man. Look forward to it.

John Dehlin [01:13:36] All right, keep up the great work, Chris. We'll see you soon. All you listeners, thank you for joining us. Thanks for your support. For those of you support Mormon Stories podcast and the Open Stories foundation, thank you. For those of you who don't, please, if you like this programming, please go to MormonStories.org click on the Donate button. Become a monthly donor. It makes all the difference. Chris, if people want to check out your books or your YouTube or your website, where do they go?

Chris Shelton [01:14:04] Mncriticalthinking.com is my blog and YouTube. I'm under Chris Shelton, so look up my channel as Chris Shelton.

John Dehlin [01:14:13] All right. You're awesome, Chris. We appreciate you. Thanks to all listeners and please join us again soon for more on Mormon Stories podcast. We hope to interview Chris in the next few days to finish all this up. Take care, everybody. Talk to you soon.

John Dehlin [01:14:45] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org

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