Beyond Belief My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape
Ratings17
Average rating3.9
Jenna Miscavige Hill was raised to obey. As the niece of the Church of Scientology's leader David Miscavige, she grew up at the center of this highly controversial and powerful organization. But at twenty-one, Jenna made a daring break, risking everything she had ever known and loved to leave Scientology once and for all. Now she speaks out about her life, the Church, and her dramatic escape, going deep inside a religion that, for decades, has been the subject of fierce debate and speculation worldwide.
Piercing the veil of secrecy that has long shrouded the world of Scientology, this insider reveals unprecedented firsthand knowledge of the religion, its obscure rituals, and its mysterious leader—David Miscavige. From her prolonged separation from her parents as a small child to being indoctrinated to serve the greater good of the Church, from her lack of personal freedoms to the organization's emphasis on celebrity recruitment, Jenna goes behind the scenes of Scientology's oppressive and alienating culture, detailing an environment rooted in control in which the most devoted followers often face the harshest punishments when they fall out of line. Addressing some of the Church's most notorious practices in startling detail, she also describes a childhood of isolation and neglect—a childhood that, painful as it was, prepared her for a tough life in the Church's most devoted order, the Sea Org.
Despite this hardship, it is only when her family approaches dissolution and her world begins to unravel that she is finally able to see the patterns of stifling conformity and psychological control that have ruled her life. Faced with a heartbreaking choice, she mounts a courageous escape, but not before being put through the ultimate test of family, faith, and love. At once captivating and disturbing, Beyond Belief is an eye-opening exploration of the limits of religion and the lengths to which one woman went to break free.
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One of the problems in writing about Scientology is that its credos are both highly complex and utterly meaningless. The religion was created by a not-so-bright guy who thought he was a genius (recipe for disaster), and not-so-bright people who think they're geniuses tend to believe that the more complicated and dense something is, the more brilliant. As a result, in learning about this religion, the reader has innumerable stupid jargon words to contend with (“out-ethics”, “enturbulated”), and has to learn about so many pointlessly complicated “training exercises” that make no sense but that last literally weeks. (Example: L Ron Hubbard, pedagogical revolutionary, believes that people learn best by stating every definition of every word they read as they go, and starting all over again from the beginning every time they make a mistake. Imagine reading this review, starting with the word “one”, providing every definition of that word, then moving on to do the same for “of” and “the” and so on. What a rich understanding of the text you'd have!)
The problem is that this author's writing and level of . . . I don't know, analysis? Reflection? are at about an 8th grade level, though it gets better as the book goes on. It frequently makes the tedium of Scientology tedious to read about. Under more capable hands, that tedium could be elevated to absurdity, irony, pathos, I don't know – anything else. I wish a better writer had taken this fascinating story on. Still worth a read.
An eye opening first hand account, and heart wrenching in its childlike simplicity of speech.
While the facts and the life story are pretty incredible, I could not help but get bored out of my mind by the simplistic story telling. The sunk cost fallacy is the only reason why I finished reading it.
