This man was a Scientologist for 27 years. Now he spends his time slamming the Church

Chris Shelton spent two and half decades living and working as a Scientologist, climbing the ranks until he became a course leader for Scientology churches all over the Western United States.

Now he dedicates his time to speaking out against the Church. What happened?

Exhausted by the Church’s demands on his time and curious about the protesters he kept encountering outside Scientology properties, Chris started listening to criticism of Scientology by people like Tony Ortega.

It triggered an all-out repudiation of his faith.

His recently published book, Scientology: From A to Xenu, gives an insight into the Church, why people join, what working for them involves and what it took for him to leave it all behind.

Chris comes from a family of Scientologists. At 17, he was recruited straight from high school into the volunteer ranks of his local Santa Barbara Church. His main responsibilities were delivering 'courses' (essentially, Scientology lessons), and working in 'dissemination', or recruitment.

He would man stalls in the street, handing out leaflets and encouraging passers-by to take personality tests.

According to Chris, these efforts weren’t aimed at all and sundry.

“It’s very much for people who have money, not charity cases,” he told me.

“You have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to receive all of the counselling needed to achieve the level of enlightenment you’re supposed to achieve.”

The basic principle of Scientology, as developed by its founder L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s, is that man is “an immortal spiritual being”, whose experience extends “beyond a single lifetime”.

It encompasses a range of beliefs including that, 75 million years ago, a galactic dictator brought his people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes and bombed them.

Anyway, a series of gradient steps, or lessons, are designed to deliver students to a state of 'Operating Thetan', or 'being above clear'. (Still with me?)

One of the tools Scientology uses to recruit is the 'Oxford Capacity Analysis' (formerly the 'American Personality Analysis').

“They get you to answer a huge range of multiple choice questions, from, 'is your facial expression varied rather than set?' to 'do you consider more money should be spent on social security?'

"Then they make a graph of your answers against all these personality types.”

(You can take the test free online.)

Are they looking for particular personality types?

“The whole purpose is to get you to tell them what’s wrong with you, so that they can sell you on the fact that Scientology can handle that.”

Chris says he worked 40 hours a week and was paid nothing for the time he dedicated to the church, supporting himself with a range of sales and clerical jobs.

By 25, he’d graduated into 'Sea Org' - a religious order for the most dedicated Scientologists.

Sea Org was developed by Hubbard as a sort of naval force intended to conduct “advanced research operations”, and supervise Church organisations around the world. Nowadays, it’s basically Scientology’s executive.

It retains a naval ethos - members belong to specific ranks, wear uniforms, salute and live in communal bunks.

Sea Org is also, according to Chris, “the most abusive level of Scientology.” He says he was hit across the face by a senior executive on one occasion.

They were sleeping five to six hours a night, at most. He described one period of five days when no one slept at all while they had to work on an emergency man-up of personnel.

“It’s seven days a week. There’s no time off. We got paid $50 a week.”

Nevertheless, Chris was happy for a while. Or, as he sees it now, he just didn’t have time to think. After almost a decade, he tanked and began questioning his faith, and eventually got enrolled onto the “Rehabilitation Project Force”.

RPF is only available to Sea Org members. It’s described as a voluntary spiritual rehabilitation - a “second chance” for those, “who have failed to fulfil their ecclesiastical responsibilities”.

Chris had a different analogy.

“If you imagine a Maoist re-education camp, that’s kind of what the RPF is like”.

He told me that, once there, you wear a separate uniform and you’re not allowed to speak to anyone outside of RPF.

You spend seven days a week working hard labour, with scheduled periods for “redemption time”, in which the member will confess their sins to an assigned “twin”.

It took him just over three years to complete.

This was in April 2008. In 2009, he began travelling around the US to recruit new members for Sea Org.

Chris was surprised to see protesters outside many Scientology churches.

A few years later, he saw 'Message to Scientology', a video released by the activist group Anonymous, protesting against the Church’s attempt to censor a now infamous video of Tom Cruise informing us on “the authorities of the mind”.

"We were told that Anonymous was being paid to protest and that they were run by people who worked for Big Pharma."

The theory was that Scientology was exposing the risks of Ritalin and other drugs and these protestors didn't like that.

His doubts grew when he was asked to help re-enlist lapsed Scientologists.

"I'd do my damnedest to see that they were given good service and cared for," he says. "But often the church organisations screwed up the recovery by trying to get the guy to start paying lots of money again for Scientology, when the guy wasn't yet happy with Scientology and wasn't ready to start paying again."

It made him question the Church's intentions towards its followers.

The job involved spending a lot of time online. "I had to skip trace and hunt down people to find them, find their new addresses and phone numbers and that sort of thing."

Suddenly a new world was available to him. Chris says that, at first, he resisted looking at this 'entheta' (the term the Church gives to anti-Scientology materials).

But curiosity took over and he eventually found Tony Ortega’s anti-Scientology blog, The Underground Bunker.

Shortly after that, he decided to leave the Church altogether.

Chris believes that online campaigns like 'Message to Scientology' are shrinking Scientology’s power massively. That’s why he’s not so worried about the Church coming after him now.

“In the nineties, they would have destroyed me for what I’m doing now.”

It wasn’t easy adjusting to life outside the Church. Chris told me he suffered from a “form of PTSD”. The most difficult gear-shift, he said, was changing the way he thought.

“Luckily, one of the things that I hit on when I left Scientology was critical thinking.”

The idea that someone could have arrived at middle age without having encountered the concept of critical thinking seems bizarre.

“In Scientology, critical thinking is not something they want people doing,” Chris explained. “The word ‘critical’, in Scientology, is redefined as a bad thing.”

Does he miss anything about the church?

“That’s a hard question to answer. Yes, there are some positives about Scientology. For instance, there’s a principle in Scientology that says, ‘when in doubt, communicate’. We all know that’s a good idea. But,” he adds, “what I realise now is that Hubbard didn’t invent that idea!”

His biggest regret about his time with Sea Org is having recruited 11 new members.

“I think some of them are still there and I'm partly responsible for that. I miss a couple of the friends I had and I really hope that at some point they come to their senses and get out. I'd love to see them again.”