While the shock and grief of his son’s suicide were still fresh, Bob Bashaw read back through their decades-long correspondence, looking in particular for references to Scientology. “I wanted to see what there was here I missed,” he says. His son Greg had been a member of the Church of Scientology for more than 20 years. During that time other relatives, fearing he belonged to a cult, had voiced concerns. But Bob supported his son’s choice, because he believed people should be free to practice their religion without getting hassled about it–and because he couldn’t find a good enough reason not to. That changed in November 2000, when suddenly, he says, Greg broke into “a hundred pieces.” He’d recently lost his job in advertising. And now, Greg told his father, his church had excommunicated him. Seven months later, more than $50,000 in debt, he ended his life on the shoulder of a Michigan road, leaving behind a wife of 20 years and a teenage son, to whom he’d written a brief, unemotional note.
Bob learned of Greg’s interest in Scientology by accident. In December 1979 Greg had written a letter to a friend, then absentmindedly stuck it in an envelope addressed to his father.
Bob had been careful not to force religion on his children. His own upbringing had included what he once described in a letter to Greg as “crammed-down-my-throat Lutheranism.” He’d emerged from his parents’ home with his belief in God intact but with an aversion to doctrine.
Scientology grew out of the theories science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard espoused in the argot-laden 1950 book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Hubbard purported to have identified the single source of unhappiness–and its cure. Unhappiness, he claimed, stems from the “reactive mind,” which contains “engrams,” or mental images of everything a person perceives when unconscious or in intense physical or emotional pain. Later in life, similar perceptions can trigger the engrams and cause unnecessary suffering. The key to happiness is to obliterate the engrams–to herd them like “little sheep…into the pen for slaughter.”
Greg seemed willing to do whatever it took. Early on he borrowed thousands of dollars from his father for Scientology-related endeavors. Bob says Greg used one of the loans to go with Laura to the church’s Los Angeles complex for course work; he paid it back with interest, explaining that he’d felt pressured by the church to cough up the money. “What happened,” he wrote Bob on January 21, 1981, “is that our financial officer for the Church informed us we would need another $1700 to pay for the package we were securing. It was imperative to get it this past week; otherwise the annual price increase, which he had held off for us through administrative fancywork, would go into effect. Simply put, if we didn’t send the money Wednesday, the prices would have gone up on us by $500.”
Greg’s mother said in her letter that when she’d questioned their son about the article, he claimed it had been planted by “psychiatrists engaged in a conspiracy against Scientology.” As Bob would later realize, Greg had already swallowed the party line.
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Such criticism was the “shot that began a war,” according to Scientology literature. Hubbard dismissed criticism from people in the mental health professions, saying they were motivated by self-interest. He claimed his brand of therapy posed a serious threat to their credibility and pocketbooks and would eventually expose them all as frauds. And he went on the offensive. One former church member says, “Scientologists are constantly indoctrinated with psychiatry as an enemy of mankind. Every course, every lecture of Hubbard’s, every book is laced with antipsychiatry stuff.”
