Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [157]
Natalie never saw Chesapeake as "religious" in any way. "They just used study tech," she explained. The kids learned at their own pace; used physical examples—clay models, marbles, or diagrams—to help them work out complex concepts; and focused intensely on vocabulary, never skipping a word they didn't understand; instead, they looked it up in the dictionary. Natalie described this education as "awesome" because she was never allowed to just ignore things she did not fully comprehend. "If I got a ninety-eight on a test, they would go to that two percent I did wrong and help me figure it out." An intelligent and highly motivated girl, she stayed at Chesapeake through fifth grade and then transferred to a public middle school, where she was an accelerated student. At thirteen, she started high school.
The next year, her parents moved to Dunedin, in part to be closer to Flag, but also, Natalie said, because Washington had become too expensive. For Natalie, it would prove to be both a social and spiritual awakening.
The Walets arrived in the Clearwater area just two years after the Lisa McPherson criminal case had been thrown out, an event that had angered many people in the community. For the next several years, the case was kept alive as the McPherson family's civil lawsuit against the church continued,* and the public's resentment of Scientologists, or "Scienos," as many derisively called them, was palpable. Some twelve thousand Scientologists were living in or around Clearwater by the early 2000s, according to church estimates*—the greatest number in any city except Los Angeles. The Church of Scientology was one of the largest owners of property in Clearwater; half of their holdings were located in or around downtown Clearwater, where, in response to years of protests fomented by church critics, an extensive security system was installed. Some 150 surveillance cameras are posted on or around all buildings associated with Scientology, some disguised as streetlights or hidden inside lampposts, but most perched quite openly on rooftops and window ledges. Some cameras face in, toward the buildings themselves; others are aimed at the street.
Natalie thought this was normal—"It's the twenty-first century; who doesn't have a security camera?"—but many other people found the cameras disconcerting. Scientologists, many locals complained, had "taken over" downtown; indeed, just a year before I met Natalie, the St. Petersburg Times had dubbed Clearwater, a city of more than 100,000 people, "Scientology's Town."
Natalie's religion had never caused problems for her in Virginia—it had almost never come up among her friends and teachers in middle school, in fact. But at the public high school she began attending in Dunedin, some of her teachers advised her that certain faculty members might lower her grade if they knew she was a Scientologist. The parents of several of her classmates, upon learning of Natalie's faith, refused to allow her in their homes. Several even sent letters to one of her teachers, saying they didn't want her to have contact with their children at school.
Kids asked Natalie if she was an alien. She didn't know what they were talking about. Like all Scientologists, Natalie had been instructed not to read about Scientology in any source except a Scientology-sponsored website or publication, and she believed that much of what was posted on the Internet or written in the newspapers about her religion was "entheta." Though the church might have insisted that the OT levels remain secret until its members