One Sunday morning in the early Eighties, as he sat among the pews in church, Jamie DeWolf’s life was changed for ever. Then just six years old, DeWolf was handed The Kingdom of the Cults by his pastor, a book examining new religious movements – among them Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists and Mormons. Yet one group stood out for the young Baptist and, more specifically, one name. It was that of Lafayette Ronald (L Ron) Hubbard, a science fiction writer turned prophet who founded the Church of Scientology. He was also DeWolf’s great-grandfather.
“I remember coming home and saying, 'Mom, what’s Scientology?’ and her face went really pale,” says DeWolf, three decades later in his home in Oakland, California. “I remember her explaining that Hubbard was a prolific writer, then at some point kind of lost his marbles and wrote different kinds of books. She was like, 'I don’t think you’d like them, there aren’t many guns and spaceships’, something I later found out was also untrue.”
