Lawrence Wright: America's Misadventures in Wars, Cults, and Panics

The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Today's guest is the legendary journalist and New Yorker staffer Lawrence Wright. He is the author of Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief; The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; and The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid.

Wright talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about The Human Scale, his new novel set in the war-torn Middle East, and why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict keeps burning even as most of the 20th century's conflicts have cooled. They also go deep on Wright's exposés on the war on terror, satanic panics, and how our craving for belief can lead us to madness. Then they turn to Texas, Wright's home state and the place he says is the future of America. What exactly does it mean that we're all becoming more like Lone Star State?

This discussion took place at a live event in New York City.

0:00— Introduction

1:20— Texas: the future of American politics

3:17— 'The Human Scale'

5:38— Why the Israel-Palestine conflict endures

12:12— 'Thirteen Days In September' and the Camp David Accords

23:37— America as both egocentric bully and colony for the rest of the world

26:17— 'Remembering Satan' and the 'recovered memories' panic

33:29— How abortion anxiety may have fueled a moral panic

37:07— Insurance companies ended the panic by denying quack psychiatric treatments

39:15— The will to believe often overrides logic and evidence

40:55— Wright's teenage religious fervor led to interest in Scientology

42:19— How Scientology seduced Hollywood

47:26— 'Going clear' and Scientology backlash

50:03— Getting Paul Haggis on the record about Scientology

52:55— Texas in American mythology

Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

All right, Lawrence Wright, late of the Texas Monthly, currently with The New Yorker, and I guess you live in Austin. Do people punch you in the face when you walk down the street because you're at The New Yorker?

Lawrence Wright: Austin is not the usual Texas town. You know, it's a very, very blue city with a recent influx of California libertarian billionaires.

Uh oh.

So, you know, it's changing a lot.

I'm two of those things. I've lived in California, and I'm a libertarian. So the third will follow.

Just one more step.

But I was joking about Texans' attitude toward New Yorkers. I remember the old Pace Salsa ads, where they would make fun of salsa that was made in New York City. Austin—and Texas more broadly—is very cosmopolitan these days, isn't it? Or getting there.

You know, it's the second-largest state, and by 2050, it's projected to be the size of New York and California combined.

Wow.

So, whatever you think of American politics, it's going to be Texas politics from now on out. And I can tell you, speaking from the belly of the beast, we Texans are not ready for that.

We haven't educated our kids, we haven't got the infrastructure—there are a lot of problems we have. We don't take care of our citizens' health. But all that aside it's the hot spot on the map, and there doesn't seem to be anything that's likely to change it unless we run out of water. I think if there's one thing, one real vulnerability that Texas has, that's what it is.

We're going to come back later in our conversation to talk about Texas—not only Texas' future but Texas as the future of America. But let's start now. You have a new novel out. It's called The Human Scale. It is a police procedural that's set in the Middle East, in the occupied territories mostly, right? In Hebron. It follows Tony Malik who is half Irish and half Palestinian. And I thought, as a half Irish, half Italian, I had problems.

But he's an American FBI agent who is investigating the murder in Gaza of an Israeli police chief. Tell us, what prompted you to write this novel now—and as a novel, as opposed to nonfiction?

Well, I've written about the Middle East for much of my career. And, you know, I was always puzzled by what made this conflict so durable. I mean, I'm the same age as Israel. It's a young country. But in my lifetime, I have seen apartheid end. I've seen a black man elected president. I've seen the Soviet Union dissolve—all these things that were never going to happen until they did.

I've seen Vietnam, Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan—all these are past history now. But this keeps going and going. One of the reasons I decided to do it as a novel is that, you know, you can talk to people, you can look them in the eye, but only a novel allows you to go through the eyes and see the world through your characters' own perspective. That would allow me, I thought, to try to get closer to what are the elements that make this war go on and on.

And it's not just Israel and Palestine. It's infected our own politics. We're in the streets, we're on the campuses. The whole Western world is absorbed with this argument, which has been going on for as long as I've been alive.

So what do you think? What's the root of it—or what's enough?

Well, there are several obvious ones. One is God. If you look at the Torah and the Old Testament, God promised this grant of land to Moses—twice, as a matter of fact—but they're different parcels. The first one is a little more generous. It goes from the Red Sea to the Euphrates, which would take in Jordan, the West Bank, parts of Lebanon, a little bit of Saudi Arabia.

And then the next time he gives the promise of the Promised Land, it's more like modern Israel, with the West Bank in it. And then, when Moses dies and Joshua takes over, God commands him to go into Judea and Samaria and kill every living thing. And so that's how the Holy Land was birthed, according to the Bible.

So if you're Jewish and you see this as God's promise to you, then, you know, you don't have to hear anything else. The Quran also agrees that God gave Moses this gift but that the Jews lost the birthright because they turned against God and He took it away from them. That's one of the main problems.

Another real dilemma—I was in Gaza in 2009. It was right after Operation Cast Lead, which was one of those periodic, what the Israelis call "mowing the lawn." In this case, Hamas had kidnapped this young Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit, and they were still holding him when I went to visit. He was held for five years. The Israelis never found him. They finally exchanged him for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

And I got to wondering: In what scale do you measure the value of a human being? How does one person get to equal 1,000? This disparate valuation of people's lives is evident right before us—1,200 Israelis have been slaughtered, and yet 50,000 Palestinians have been killed so far that we know of. At what point does the scale get balanced?

There's one other thing that I was really curious about. I thought I had figured out the way to peace—many people have. It's like the illusion of water in the desert or something like that. But I read this book by David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Ben-Gurion was Israel's founding premier, and Ben-Zvi was its second president.

They were living in Manhattan in 1906 after being kicked out of the Ottoman Empire. They wrote this book in which they described, and this is mainly Ben-Zvi, because he was kind of an amateur archaeologist. He would wander in the Arab villages and see candles in the windows on Friday night. He would see Hebrew in the cemeteries. And he formed a theory that the Palestinians are Jews—or were. They were the remnant of the Jewish population that didn't go out in the diaspora. They stayed.

Then, as centuries passed, they converted to Christianity or to Islam to avoid paying taxes. And actually, genetics have proved that theory right. The Jewish population in Gaza is very similar to the Ashkenazi, through DNA. If you extrapolate and go back in time, they were probably identical.

So I thought I would just go to Israel and tell them, "Yeah, you know, these guys are Jewish." And I expected, "Oh my gosh, we didn't know!" No. "We knew that." And that made it more complicated for me.

So I found a book that has been very—it's an arresting book for me. It's called The Need to Have Enemies and Allies by a Cypriot American psychiatrist named Vamik Volkan. He grew up in Cyprus, populated by Greeks and Turks—these historic antagonists. And they're very similar people. They dressed the same. They each had a white robe. The men who were Turkish would have a green belt and the Greeks would have a blue belt. They smoked different cigarettes. By such things, you knew who your enemy was.

In Northern Ireland, the Catholics and the Protestants would paint their doors different colors so you'd know who lived there. The Hutus and the Tutsis were so similar, they had to ask which tribe you're in before they killed each other.

He referenced [Sigmund] Freud's idea of the narcissism of minor differences—that it is people who are more similar who have the bloodiest civil wars, and so on. According to Freud, it's because, due to the similarity, you project onto your twin the parts of your own nature that you despise. So you're actually fighting, in a way, against your own nature.

It's an interesting theory. But it leaves you grasping for: How is it that Arabs and Jews can live together peacefully in Brooklyn and they can't in the Middle East? I think we have more to learn about that.

Yeah, you also wrote a book called Thirteen Days in September, which was kind of a paean to Jimmy Carter for brokering the Camp David Accords. You mentioned Jews and Arabs—or Muslims—in the Middle East. Christians have kind of vacated that space. In talking about that book, you attribute a lot of what happened at Camp David to Carter's Christianity. Could you talk about that? I mean, religion is generally seen as the stumbling block, particularly in the Middle East. Could it also be a way to resolve things?

Well, in that case, it was. They were fervent believers. But aside from their belief—Carter was a one-term Georgia governor, Anwar Sadat was an assassin, Menachem Begin was a terrorist. "Let's get together and have a peace conference. How does that sound?"

Thirteen days in Camp David with the outside world closed up. These three—the most unlikely gathering of peacemakers you can imagine—emerge with a peace treaty. They signed it in 1979. It hasn't been violated a whit in the years since. It's the first and most durable treaty signed there.

And so you can ask yourself: How did they do it? It was arduous and painful. They had political courage. But I think each of them realized they were going to pay a price for it. I'm not sure they understood how great a price.

But Carter lost reelection. He failed, for the first time as a Democratic nominee, to get the Jewish vote. The Jews turned against the man who had given Israel probably the greatest gift it had ever received.

Menachem Begin felt he was now entitled to invade Lebanon for a couple of weeks—and it lasted 18 years. At the end of his days, he was secluded and isolated. There were protesters outside his house. He refused to have them dispersed. But it was like the "Hey, hey, LBJ!" chants—they were haunting. He was a sad figure when he lived out the rest of his life.

And of course, Sadat was assassinated. They had courage—and they paid the price. But I think maybe the lesson that goes to future peacemakers is that it is a perilous enterprise.

Is some of it that they weren't religious? I mean, Carter was an evangelical—mainstream born-again theology as a cultural identity—but he was a secularist. And the other two, compared to the leadership now, it seems like religion is much more front and center in daily life. Extreme religion, in Israel and in the Palestine territories. Is part of the problem that secularism is taking a beating in the Middle East?

I don't know. Sadat called himself the First Man of Islam. He thought he was the most religious person on the planet. And Menachem Begin was the first nonsecular leader of Israel. So, the step was taken at that point.

Frankly, I don't think religion has as much to do with the conflict as commonly thought. A lot of it is politics. First of all, the Palestinians have had bad luck with democracy, to put it politely. It's interesting to look back—the last election in Palestine and Gaza was in 2006. So, it's been, what, 19 years?

And Hamas won. Why did that happen? What was interesting was that after people left the polls, there were exit polls taken. More than 80 percent of the people polled who had voted for Hamas said they wanted peace with Israel. They wanted Hamas to drop its anti-Israel rhetoric—all the things you would have wanted them to think, they were thinking.

But they voted for Hamas because the Palestinian Authority was so corrupt and tyrannical that everybody hated it so much they'd rather have Hamas. But they didn't, I think, think they'd have Hamas forever. You can see stirrings in Gaza right now—under the most dangerous imaginable circumstances—of people trying to shed Hamas from governing that territory.

Yeah. The anti-Hamas protests put to shame the kind of campus protests here. The stakes are incredibly high.

Can we shift from talking about that to an earlier book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, that you wrote, which was published in 2006? That book, I think, along with The Siege of Mecca, which came out around the same time, really explores what happened. Can you give a capsule summary? Where did the Islamism that fueled Osama bin Laden and ultimately the creation of Al Qaeda—where did that start?

My contention is that it started in the prisons in Egypt.

It's interesting—my wife Roberta and I were teaching in Egypt at that time. I was a conscientious objector during Vietnam, and that was my alternative service. We were there when [Gamal Abdel] Nasser died—that was in October of '70 [sic]—and Anwar Sadat became president. Everybody thought it was a joke. He was sort of like a Spiro Agnew figure; nobody could take him seriously.

Until he shook up the whole world by flying to Tel Aviv and speaking at the Knesset.

One of the first things Sadat did was to free the Muslim Brothers who were in prison. And they're the ones who killed him. At the time, I was really naive. There were practically no Americans or even Westerners in Egypt at the time. There were no diplomatic relations. The American University was run by a CIA agent—we found that out while we were there.

I was seen as a political dissident. I was a kid, more or less. Certainly not a sophisticated politician. I wish I could go back and relive some of that with a little more knowledge about how the world works.

During the time of the Afghan revolt against the Soviet Union, a lot of Egyptians and other Arabs went to fight. And they came home and by this time they had formed Brotherhood groups and had been radicalized. When they went into prison—the Egyptian prisons, I can't speak to what they're like now—they were just appalling.

We have film of Ayman al-Zawahiri who was the Egyptian doctor that became the right-hand man of Osama bin Laden, and he was in prison. He was talking in court—there was a big cage full of defendants—and he was talking about how the guards had put the dogs on them. What that meant was they would tie them backward on a chair and let the dogs fuck them.

That kind of humiliation stays with you. In my opinion, it was this Egyptian clique that came out of the Egyptian prisons, went to Afghanistan, and merged with bin Laden—who at the time was thinking of it as kind of an Arab foreign legion. They would go help muslims everywhere, but Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Egyptians had a different idea.

Why would, on a kind of basic level, wouldn't those people, after experiencing that, want to kill Egyptians?

Oh, they did. They killed a lot of them. So how does it get projected outward?

It was bin Laden who made the turn. Basically, Zawahiri wanted to take over Egypt, but he thought it was too hard.

Bin Laden had this idea, that is an Islamic idea, about the near enemy and the far enemy. In order for Islam to triumph, you begin with the enemy that's close to you—the one affecting your society. Then, when you solve that problem, you spread it. Bin Laden had the insight that the far enemy is near. The Red Sea, the Mediterranean—is an American lake. So, the way to get rid of the near enemy is to scare away the far enemy.

That insight caused Al Qaeda to become an international organization.

Part of what the book raises—and it's a question that comes up from time to time in American foreign policy, especially in the wake of 9/11 and the war on terror—you know—Bin Laden said, "the reason we bombed the towers," just a few miles from here, "was because you had bases in Saudi Arabia, at our holiest sites" and things like that.

Do we take him at face value of that? Was it was somebody—speaking of Texans, was Ron Paul right—that the reason they attacked here was because we were bombing and subjugating them over there?

There's no question there was truth to that. But also, it was a great rallying cry.

It seemed easier to fight Americans than Egyptians or Saudis. If you're a Saudi, for instance, you're a member of a tribe—most of the Saudis are. Your whole family—your extended family are at risk if you are antiroyal family. It's a very difficult thing.

So, it's easier to be anti-American.

America's adventures in the world have been disastrous for us and for the rest of the world—because we don't know the rest of the world. I often think of it as being like a one-way mirror. We can't see outside it, but outside of America everybody else sees us.

Moreover, every country has a colony here. In Egypt, everybody would have an uncle in America. So there was always a point of comparison: "My uncle's life is better than my life."

In a way, America's mission in the world is to show how democracy can work and how you can have a better life. That was, it still is, a powerful thing, but it's been so polluted by our adventures that it's become discredited.

Out of the last 25 years, we've spent about 20 of them in major wars, shooting wars. We're kind of out of that for the moment. Do you feel like we've learned any meaningful lessons?

It's like we learn it on Tuesday and forget it on Friday.

Every war has its raison d'être or its reason. The most egregious example was the Second Iraq War. Hideous. I don't know how much of the story about the nuclear bombs and everything was based on fantasy, or convenient fiction, or just bad intelligence.

There was also a different Camp David meeting. The idea was they were just better targets. So we can go bomb a country that has a lot of things that would get hit, rather than opium fields. So, I don't know.

I guess I want to point out that Texas is kind of 0 for 3 in terms of presidents who have had good foreign policies—at least going back to LBJ [Lydon B. Johnson].

But let's talk about something a little more cheerful. Let's talk about your 1994 book, Remembering Satan, which is one of the most devastating explorations of a ritual satanic child abuse panic case. Can you quickly talk about the person at the center of that? What makes it amazing is that the person at the center confessed to the crimes he was accused of.

It started with my therapist telling me that they were treating all these—mainly young—women who were recovering memories of satanic abuse. And then they said that Satanists are responsible for 50 murders a year in Austin. We never even had 50 murders in Austin! And I thought, these are bright, intelligent people. Wow.

So I got intrigued by how could they believe that?

Well, the Satanists eat their victims, right? So they don't leave a trace. You know, this elaborate infrastructure…

There was one meeting I went to. Part of the syndrome was that ladies that were treated would be diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. So I went to a meeting, the therapist and the victims were hosting the meeting. The victims that they were seeing, as patients—there were four of them—one of them claimed to have 400 personalities—which is a real management problem.

You'd need to be Andrew Huberman to really schedule that properly, right?

So I sat at the lunch break, and the woman who had organized it. I said, "I don't get it—if there are 50 murders, who's collecting the bodies?"

She said, "Postmen. The postmen are doing it. They put them in the bags…."

It was nuts. Nuts. Nuts. Nuts.

We had four hospitals in Austin. By the time I started writing this, each of them had a dissociative disorders wing to treat women—mainly—who had multiple personality disorder. And part of their disorder was supposedly brought on by the fact that they had been satanically abused.

I went to a conference of policemen in Austin. It was led by a roving cop who was making his living talking to other cops about satanic abuse. He said there were that 50,000 murders a year in America by Satanists. Again, that was more murders than we actually had.

Tina Brown was the editor of The New Yorker at the time, and I said I was interested in multiple personality disorder. I said that, "when they're in therapy, they would have these memories of being satanically ritually abused."

[Wright as Tina] "Oh. That's hot, hot, hot! I want that right away."

So I had to find an example. There were hundreds of cases in the courts already. But there was one where a guy went to prison—he was a deputy sheriff in Olympia, Washington—and he confessed. So I thought, that's the case. If there's anything to it, this guy's confessed to it so maybe that'd be a more interesting story.

I went out and met with him. He was investigated by his own police department—it was the county sheriff's office. He was an evangelical Christian, and his minister came in and told him that God would not let him have a false memory.

Then a psychiatrist was brought in too, who hypnotized him and persuaded him. He began to develop these memories. His daughters were developing memories—but they never coincided. They were always different memories. There was never a single one that sounded like the other.

I was curious about, "Where did this start?"

I was in L.A., and there's a church—the Foursquare Gospel Church. Aimee Semple McPherson, some of you may have heard that name, famous evangelist in the early part of the 20th Century. It's still going.

For other reasons I was there interviewing, but I said, "I know that there was a summer camp where Erica Ingram, the first to make this charge, has gone. It must of been one of your evangelists…"

"Oh yeah, that was Paula."

"Oh, is she here?"

"Yeah, she's here."

So I asked her to come in and tell me about the moment in summer camp with all these young girls.

She said:

Oh, it was a holy site. I would talk to them, and I'd say, "I feel there's someone in here who's been locked in the closet and she's hearing her father's footsteps."

Then someone would cry, "It was me! It was me!"

Gradually, so many came forward.

They came to me and said, "there is a young woman"—who was one of the counselors—"and she's just in tears, and we can't break through."

So I went to see her. She was by herself, and she was sobbing. I put my hand on her head and anointed her. I said, "You've been abused." Then I said, "And it's by your father. And it's been happening many times."

This very religious 15-year-old girl hears from God that her father had been abusing her. So what she did with that was to go home and start trying to remember what had happened. And she came up with these accusations.

And then—the most shocking thing—is that he agreed…

I mean, he doesn't now.

Even though he's serving 18 years in prison. He did try to change his plea. I mean, you go through it—it's fascinating, the way he was interrogated. His confession came very quickly. And then he kind of started walking away from it, but he wasn't allowed to.

It's a sad story—the willingness of people to believe things that are not true.

For instance, these girls would supposably—they had been raped, they have had babies ripped out of their stomachs, they'd been nailed to the floor—all these things that they said had happened to them. Finally, a physical examination was taken. They were virgins. They had never had children.

But in the minds of the cops, this didn't stop the freight train. Paul had confessed. Something must have happened.

What do you think was driving it? I mean, we all have moments—both on an individual level and on a societal level—where we want to believe things that clearly are not true.

What was going on in America in the '70s and '80s that these kinds of accusations—of satanic ritual child abuse? This was something right-wingers believed it and left-wingers—Tipper Gore wrote a whole book about raising PG kids in an X-rated world that had a lot to do with this.

Is there some underlying sociological fact that helps explain it?

Abortion. I mean, the fantasies are ideal: "The baby was ripped from my body," "There was blood all over the place"—that sort of thing.

Especially with young teen girls and preteens, the sexual longing mixed with the fear and the societal condemnation that would come along with being pregnant—I think that's my Freudian analysis of it. But it was a hot subject.

In some of the cases, like the McMartin preschool case—there were a couple of big ones in the New York area—I always saw that as people were uncomfortable with kids going into daycare as women entered the work force on equal terms with men. There was a deep discomfort with that as well.

We had a case in Austin. Fran and Dan ran a nursery school. The hysteria got to the point that people began asking their own children who were maybe 3 or 4-year-olds, "Does anything happen to you in school?"

It evolved to the point that some of the children began to talk about how when their parents left them at school they would get on a plane and go to Mexico. They would kill a giraffe and bury him.

You think: Nobody can believe this. But the parents said, "Well, that may not have happened exactly like that, but something happened."

I went to see some of the trial, and there was this 3-year-old girl. When I walked into the courtroom I see her sitting on her big sister's lap. The prosecutor said, "Now sweetie, did Dan touch you? Did Dan hurt you?"

"No."

"Your Honor, can we have a recess?"

And then she's got a lollipop and it's, "Yes. Yes."

They got out of prison, eventually. Their conviction was reversed. But they must've been in for 10 years.

What lanced that kind of boil—or that mania? Because we don't hear about it anymore.

It was insurance companies refusing to pay for those kinds of treatments that made the difference. Those four dissociative disorder wings? They're all gone now. Nobody will provide coverage for therapy involving multiple personalities or satanic abuse.

Multiple personalities aren't even in the DSM manual.

I was invited to a group of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in Austin. I'm in a band, and my guitar player is a professor of psychology, so you might enjoy this.

The guy leading it was Colin Ross, who is a Canadian psychiatrist who ran this really high-end sanitarium in Dallas. I'd gotten hold of a galley that he had written about how multiple personality disorder really exists—but it was created by the CIA in order to split personalities so they could carry secrets in one personality the others wouldn't know about.

I was dying to see what he had to say. He didn't address that, at the time.

He talked about the persecution psychiatrists were going through. So, "Any questions?"

I raised my hand, and he said, "Before I call on this man, I want you to know that he's the one whose book is being used in court suits against psychiatrists all over this country."

Boy, was that a great introduction.

And this woman in a table next to me—a German accent—said, "Yeah, people denied the Holocaust, too."

And I said, "There were bodies in the Holocaust. There's no bodies here, you know?"

Anyway, one last anecdote about that. For some reason, they always want me to come and be converted. This same woman, that told me about the mailbags—I had been invited to attend a conference of therapists. They would witness this young man who had grown up in the house of Anton LaVey—the founder of the Church of Satan and the author of The Satanic Bible.

He had a handler. He was about 22, and the handler would show him a chalice and then this sacrificial knife—and then, "Any questions?" That's my favorite time.

"I'm delighted to talk to you because I wrote an article for Rolling Stone about Anton LaVey. And I just wanted to hear some of your memories. Do you remember what color the house was?"

"White."

"No, no—it was black. Don't you remember? It was a famous…it was a black house in San Francisco. And I guess you played with his kids and so remember their names."

He said, "You got me."

And I thought, that's the end of the show. But no—they kept passing the ritual objects through the crowd. It didn't make a dent in their belief that this guy had confessed, in front of them, that he was a fraud.

Well, that kind of is a natural segue into the next book I wanted to talk about, which is 2013's Going Clear, which is about the Church of Scientology. In that, you talk about the "prison of belief."

Why did you get interested in delving into Scientology? How is it another system that people use to keep the world at bay—or to empower themselves? In a way, what are people getting out of believing they've been abused? Why do people put themselves in a place like Scientology? There must be something beneficial.

Well, I guess, personally, part of it came from the fact that I had been a very religious teenager. I wouldn't call it a cult, but there was a Christian youth group where you got promoted by being more pious.

That's a mechanism that works in a lot of these things—even political cults like Nazism. The more fervent you are, the higher you rise. And I was highly risen.

So, I look back at my career and religion has been a big part of it, and I think that was the motor for me.

With Scientology, I looked at people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta—the poster boys. Scientology is like a public relations martyrdom for them. It's not a help to their careers. People laugh at them for it. I thought, there must be something they get out of it.

There are a lot of varying things. For one, they're movie stars and get treated like Adam and Eve or something. But John Travolta—we suspect he's gay, right? In Scientology, that is a low form.

He had his first movie. It was filmed in Mexico, and it happened that one of the women —who was an actress—befriended him and treated him with some auditing, which is Scientology form of therapy. Often, one of the goals is to leave your body during these experiences, to access past lives. But he had an out-of-body experience. After that, he was hooked.

He was in a Scientology class, and the teacher said, "Johnny is up for a role in this show called Welcome Back, Kotter. We just want to make sure he gets it. NBC Studios is in that direction—focus your energy that John Travolta is going to get the role."

And he got the role. And that was evidence for him.

And Tom Cruise—like many young actors—they come to Hollywood. They may or may not have gotten out of high school. They're young. They're looking for a way to get into the business. There really is a central casting, so they go to stand in line at central casting and Scientology people would come down and hand out brochures saying, "Looking for an agent? How to get ahead. Come to the Celebrity Center on Friday night."

They're desperate for help. They see some people like Tom Cruise who claimed to have been advanced because of what they learned in Scientology. And I'm not saying they didn't learn anything. Jerry Seinfeld, for instance, took a personality course and he credits it for helping his career, although he didn't get sucked in.

Rock Hudson went to Scientology and left because they wouldn't let him out of the auditing room because he wanted to fill his parking meter. So he almost got in—

William Burroughs in London got trafficked in it. Then they wanted money, so he was like, "I'm out."

Leonard Cohen too—so many people were drawn to it. But only a few—

Is it that it gives you a kind of scientific patina on personality development and a structure?

There are a lot of different courses. But I think the glue for young people, bear in mind, when they go to Hollywood, their classmates are going to law school, getting jobs—they're advancing. And they're in Hollywood eating dog food and trying to get something going. They feel terribly inadequate about schooled they are, how educated they are.

Scientology says: You vault over that. You can control people. You cause them to like you. You can achieve great things. You don't need college. You don't need these kinds of skills. We'll give you more than the world can offer.

One of my observations about religion is the fact that a religion might be absurd, like what we were talking about, you'd think it'd be destructive. But actually, it creates a wall around the community. All you have to do to get into this community is say you believe it, and you get into a community of likeminded people.

And this occurred to me when I started hearing—when people would tell me, "We believe this" or "We believe that"

Finally, I heard the word we. And realized: that's the most important word in that sentence.

Your book and then the documentary that came out a year later—also called Going Clear—was part of a process of people unmasking Scientology. Scientology is always claiming to be growing, to have millions of adherents, but probably has somewhere around 50,000 at most—

There are more Rastafarians in the U.S. than Scientologists.

I guess the Scientologists have better mixers—or better free punch or something.

But what went into the debunking of Scientology? There was the South Park episode that just discussed theology, and people were like, "Oh, that's odd." Your book, your New Yorker article, started with Paul Haggis—an Oscar-winning film writer, director, and screenwriter who finally left the church. And then a couple of other actors, Leah Remini who was big.

As with the ritual satanic child abuse, what happens? What happens where stuff runs out of steam and it kind of gets unmasked?

With Scientology, its defectors tended to be very quiet. They didn't want to take on the problems that come with leaving the church because it can be very prosecutorial. It's litigious. In prior experiences with reporters, they tried to frame them for murder or get them committed to mental institutions. It's ruthless.

There had been some exposés—like in 1992, Time magazine had a big exposé. Scientology sued Time and lost at every stage, all the way up to the Supreme Court. But it was the most expensive suit Time ever faced.

They're not going to be writing about Scientology again.

And I didn't want to do that to my magazine, but I was very interested in Scientology.

When John Travolta's son died, I thought that might be an interesting way to get into it. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said, "It's too tabloid for you." But it sounded like a good story to me.

Then Paul Haggis dropped out and I thought—he's kind of ideal. Because when people talk about Scientology, they often do so with a sneer: "I would never fall for that." Most people would say that about themselves, but here's Paul Haggis—two-time Academy Award winner, smart, very cautious intellectually.

I thought I wanted someone who would challenge readers' ideas. But he was not saying a word.

I was doing something else. And finally I got the number for his business manager. I said, "Hi, this is Lawrence Wright with The New Yorker. I would like to write an article about your client, Paul Haggis, and his adventures with the Church of Scientology."

"Are you kidding? Get the fuck off my phone." Click.

I thought, "Well, that went well."

The next day, I got Paul's email address and I wrote him: "I had a conversation with your business manager—he said 'This wasn't the right time.' But if there's ever a moment when you'd like to talk about your intellectual and spiritual development, I'd be honored."

Twenty minutes later, he wrote back: "Very honored. Let's have lunch on Tuesday."

So he was up here and I came up. He wanted a cigarette break, so we went out on the sidewalk and I said, "Well, Paul, this is going to deal mainly with your experience in Scientology."

His eyes got a little wide.

It was months later that he said he had never thought it was going to be about Scientology. He was just so flattered that The New Yorker was going to do a on profile him.

But he turned out to be a very courageous source. And underwent a lot of harassment.

And they still keep an interest up on me, but it's mostly inconsequential.

Haggis was charged with sexual assault—in 2017, I think it was. He was in a civil trial and ended up having to pay over $10 million to an accuser. Do you think that charge was engineered by Scientology?

I have no idea. It's in Italy—

The Italy one, actually, just got dismissed.

So I don't know. I don't question what he told me. And if he was misbehaving around women that seems to be going around.

Let's return to Texas. You've written two books—In the New World, that looks at America but also your adventures in Texas. You were born in Oklahoma, but moved there when you were a kid, from 1964 to 1984. And then God Save Texas, which came out about six years ago. Let's talk about Texas. Especially since in God Save Texas, you're trying to capture a state which has a very distinct identity—but then at least four or five regions, at least.

What is so powerful about the kind of psychic territory that is Texas?

You know, when you talk about Texas, you have to think in terms of Greek and Rome in terms of mythology—the cowboy, the oilman. The cowboy thing, those great trail drives, they only lasted like 16 years. Yet you see people dressed like cowboys to this very day. Getting a pearl-snap shirt and an Open Road Stetson, and you look just like somebody who was riding the range in 1890.

It's alluring.

What people outside Texas don't understand is that it's the most urban state in the nation. Six of the top 11 cities in America in terms of population are in Texas. As I said earlier, it's going to be the size of New York and California combined by 2050.

Yet there's a ton of totally open space. Once, when I moved from Los Angeles to Huntsville, Texas—a prison town north of Houston—the midway point when I drove was El Paso, Texas. I mean, it's a big state.

It's ridiculous. People when they want to compare Texas to another country, sometimes say it's the size of Afghanistan.

If they're kind, they can say it a little larger than France.

But it was in its own state. And so was Vermont. You know, I mean, Hawaii was a kingdom. But these kinds of things feed a sense of culture in the state. And it's an outsider culture, which is one of the reasons I worry about it becoming so predominant, because it's not taking the leadership role. It's always taking the outsider antagonist role. And lots of stuff that starts in Texas, as we know, winds up running all across the country and determining our politics now. If you think it's bad now, just wait.

Why do you think people are going to Texas—particularly in the 21st century? It's been growing all of the 20th century, but it is really one of the major destinations. What draws people to Texas?

People like me keep writing about it.

As an answer to that question, I'm writing a musical based on a novel I wrote called Mr. Texas. My son and Marcia Ball—some of you may know her, as a great New Orleans and Austin piano player and songwriter. We're writing this musical.

Here's one of our songs. This is the Speaker of the House, on his deathbed, explaining what Texas means to him:

I've been around the world in my service days,
Been in French cafés, seen Russian plays.
I ticked everyone off my bucket list—
There can't be too much I missed.
You got your temples of Egypt, your fountains of Rome,
You could fit them all in the Astrodome.
But no matter wherever I roam,
There's only one place I'll ever call home:
Texas, you've got to love her.
If you need another chance, she'll always be there.
If it's a friend you need, there'll be someone to care.
That's why I love Texas.
Texas, my home.

As a final question before we talk to the audience a little bit. It was the shorthand of America, it was a place where people came to remake themselves and to make money, to just struggle and grow rich.

Then it became California in the early '60s when it became the most populous state. The California Dream is about becoming a star or remaking yourself or creating stuff that goes out into space.

What is the Texas Dream? Because Texas is the most populous state, it always shapes the nation's political culture and identity of the United States. What's the essence of the Texas Dream?

It's still in formation.

If you had asked me this question 20 years ago, it was money. And money is always an issue.

I always look at Texas through the lens—my theory about culture is there are three levels, and they're so clear in Texas.

There's the primitive, Level 1. Which in Texas is barbecue, and boots, and big belt buckles—all the stuff you can buy at the airport. Chili and beans. All of that stuff is real old time Texas. And there's nothing wrong with it. But outsiders come, they go to Buc-ees—this gigantic filling station. And they can buy a suit up. And as far as anybody knows or cares, they're a Texan. There's no test you have to pass. You are immediately accepted, which is different from a lot of places I've lived.

Level 2 is when money starts to come in then you begin to look back at level one with a little bit of embarrassment. And you go out into the world and see how other people dress, how they eat. You know, you look at the architecture. You think about the big cities. You start sending your kids away to school. You learn a foreign language….This is Level 2. In a way, it's educational, but it's also a little fraudulent. It's not who you are. It's sort of who you want to be. You project yourself into that. This has always been a level of insecurity in Texas about being outside the power centers, the cultural centers.

And then there's Level 3 where—this came to me when I was in Cafe Annie in Houston, and I ordered a rabbit enchilada.

It was great.

And, you know, it was looking back at Level 1, but with a little crème sauce. And, it, you it was a sophisticated take on, and every Texan would recognize it, on where we came from. And, we have passed all the way through level two. And, now we're looking back and drawing strength from level three. I think that's where Texas is right now, is trying to be a player in the cultural world. It has sources of revenue that when you talk about New York being sort of the past, Houston is the future. And it's the most diverse city in America. It's got oil and it has got real estate. Except for the fact that it's on the Gulf of America. And that's where all the hurricanes come.

All the most precious resources, our refineries and everything are right there. And so it's vulnerable, but it's full of energy. And in both literal and metaphorical sense. So, you know Texas is trying to find its way into the world. This recent migration is characterized by the California billionaires deserting their state to come to Texas and pay fewer taxes.

That's making a big change right now, especially in Austin, where Elon Musk is buying up houses for his baby mamas and—

That'll be like a new WPA [Works Progress Administration].

There are, I think, 15 now. Of the children, not the mamas.

Apparently, he's selling his sperm. So if any of you ladies are interested, he's got a deal for you. It comes with a Tesla.

All right, I think we're going to leave it there. Let's say thank you to Lawrence Wright.

Thanks for talking to Reason.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

• Video editor: Ian Keyser

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