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“My Scientology Movie” Pokes the Hornet’s Nest

By Gordon Haber

…ntology Movie involve the audition process. As the documentary was shot in Los Angeles, they have no problem finding young actors looking for parts. What’s interesting is that the auditions do indeed provide a glimpse into the cynical overlap between show business and Scientology. “The practices of Scientology are like acting class techniques,” Rathbun says. “You’re learning a new role in life.” Another moving presence is Jeff Hawkins, a former ma…

How Herbalife’s Gospel of Health and Wealth Fuels a Billion-Dollar Deception

By Michael Schulson

…ized. Hughes started the company in 1980, when he was 24 years-old. As the Los Angeles Times explained in a 2001 article, Hughes intended “ to start his own operation that would combine the Eastern philosophy of herbal medicine with the vitamin and mineral technology of the West.” By 1985, the company had $423 million in sales. Hughes gave motivational talks to his sellers. These talks took on the aura of sermons. They “were part revival meeting,…

Rage Against the New Age Machine: Three Days at the Osho International Meditation Resort

By Diane Winston

…m with room for Jesus, New Age and Zen. So after flying 20-plus hours from Los Angeles to Mumbai and driving another eight hours to Pune, I’d dropped half of the students at the rural Ananda retreat and alighted at Osho with the rest. The Osho International Meditation Resort is an urban oasis: an integrated mix of dark, sleek geometric buildings and greenery. The eating patio opens onto a huge swimming pool landscaped to resemble a small lake. The…

Black Satanist Candidate Faces LA Sheriff Shakedown

By Joseph Laycock

…ore the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, Hill was confronted by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) for being “suspicious.” Since then, the more Hill has sought justice, the more outrageous the situation has become. Hill’s situation makes it hard to tell where racial profiling ends and religious discrimination begins. It also reveals what kinds of prejudice have to be concealed or denied and what kinds are still acceptable. H…

‘How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World’: An Interview with Author Elle Hardy

By Katherine Stewart

…en. William J. Seymour was born in Louisiana in 1870 and grew up in African-American Catholicism steeped in strong elements of the supernatural. In 1895, he fled the poverty of subsistence farming and racial persecution. In his travels through the Midwest, he was born again into the Methodist faith and introduced to the Holiness movement, a forerunner of Pentecostalism. But it was an outbreak of smallpox, which cost him an eye, that changed his li…

Before Oprah, There Was the “Hour of Power”: Crystal Cathedral Pastor Robert H. Schuller Has Died

By Cathleen Falsani

…ge via Wiki Commons. Schuller’s congregation became the world’s first “walk-in-drive-in” church and soon thereafter, reportedly at the Rev. Billy Graham’s urging, he began broadcasting services from its sanctuary as Hour of Power. By 1975, with the program was airing in all 50 states and the local congregation booming, Schuller and his flock decided to build the Crystal Cathedral — the “first-ever all-glass church,” according to the web site. The…

James Dobson’s Family Values Were Influenced by a Eugenicist [Audio]

By Bradley Onishi

…tps://religiondispatches.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Audrey-Clare-Farley-RD-Clip-.ogg Bradley Onishi: What’s so important about this story is that once again, we have a secular person or a non-evangelical person whose ideas are formative for what will become the bedrock of evangelical theology, politics, and practice. I mean, we see this with the rise of the religious right and someone like Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie; neither of them a…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…of course, if you’re in Dubai, you’re here to shop. Or you, as per typical American geographic know-how, meant to fly to Duluth and arrived somewhere else entirely. Considering how unaffordable Dubai is for folks like me, you’d need a credit card. But, of course, you have to know your audience. This oversize sample inadvertently gives away the credit card number of some eight-five million men, most of whom live in Egypt. ⬆ Earlier on this day, I…

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

By Michael Schulson

…SoulCycle is gambling that people outside of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles (which, together, account for 95% of SoulCycle’s revenue) will be willing to drop $30+ in order to pedal in unison with strangers, listening to messages of empowerment, growth, and self-actualization. But SoulCycle is also part of a larger gamble: namely, that Americans will be willing to meld the forms of spirituality and the forms of capitalism in more and mor…

The Moral Bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Asceticism

By Vlad Chituc

…eatshop laborers and the unregulated sharing economy. Although he lives in Los Angeles, no one exemplifies the new Silicon Valley asceticism better than Rob Rhinehart, the software engineer who developed Soylent, a “nutritionally complete” liquid meal replacement with a taste that media outlets describe as anything between “flavorless custard” to “like someone wrung out a dishtowel into a glass.” The central ideas behind Soylent are efficiency and…