From the Archives: Lawrence Wright

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

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🗓️ 14 October 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Most recently, filmmaker Alex Gibney directed an HBO documentary based on Wright's reporting in Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Unbelief.

Much of Wright's work is about how religious belief animates personal action and political conflict. He has documented the Jonestown massacre, explored allegations of Satan worship, profiled brimstone-tinged gospel preachers, and, of course, tracked the histories of al-Qaeda and the Church of Scientology.

Regarding the latter, he isn't necessarily sympathetic to the Church's claims, but he understands its appeal. "People don't go into it because it's a cult, they go into it because they're looking for something," says Wright. "It's like going into therapy; people do benefit from it."

"But it's one thing to get into it, it's another thing to get out of it."

Originally aired April 14, 2015

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:11.0	This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing,
0:15.0	my chance to talk with artists, policymakers, and performers.
0:19.0	To hear their stories, what inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers,
0:24.6	what relationships influenced their work.
0:27.6	My guest today, author Lawrence Wright, thinks a lot about religion.
0:33.6	He wants to know why people choose one faith over another, especially when what they choose seems, quote,
0:40.3	absurd or dangerous to an outsider.
0:43.3	This question has led right to investigate
0:46.3	some of the world's most complicated and secretive organizations,
0:50.3	from the People's Temple in Jonestown to the Church of Scientology.
0:55.0	His book on Al-Qaeda won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
1:00.0	Lawrence Wright has a unique, firsthand experience as to the power of belief.
1:06.0	I grew up in Dallas in the Methodist Church, and it was, despite the fact that Methodism doesn't have
1:11.8	a reputation as being kind of a, you know, hellfire and brimstone, the first of the churches that we
1:17.3	went to in Dallas really was that. And then we graduated to the Methodist Church downtown. My dad
1:24.3	taught Sunday school for many, many years. You know, Dallas back at that time was the most
1:31.1	pious city in America. We had the largest Methodist Baptist, I think the largest Episcopal
1:38.6	church and one of the largest Catholic churches in the entire country. And at the same time, we had the highest murder rate and the
1:46.8	highest divorce rate, you know, all the things that go along with excessive piety.
1:52.2	Yeah, so it was, and I was very pious as a teenager. I was in a group called Young Life.
2:01.0	Genuinely, or you were responding to pressure?
	...

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