Jennifer Lopez talked in Scientology-speak when she was interviewed by Ryan Seacrest after her performance on American Idol Wednesday. She used the very unique term “rightness,” which is a word coined by failed science fiction writer and Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard. It’s an unmistakable sign of Scientology influence:

Ryan Seacrest asked the singer what she thought of the judges’ critiques of the contestants.

Lopez said that, in contrast to the stinging put-downs of Simon Cowell, she believed that “concentrating on the rightness brings more rightness.”

“Rightness” comes up frequently in the lexicon of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Former OT III-level church member Margery Wakefield writes in “The Language of Scientology” that “rightness” was one of his buzzwords. Among Hubbard’s manifestoes: “Rightness and Wrongness” and “Recognition of Rightness of the Being.”

[via Best Week Ever]

Lopez has defended Scientology in the past and said her father has been a member of cult for 20 years. Maybe “rightness” is something she hears often from her dad, but it’s more likely that she’s taken a few courses and has incorporated it into her everyday language.

A few years ago I read an excellent book called Cults in our Midst by Margaret Thaler Singer. One of the main characteristics of cults is that they have their own language to indoctrinate members and to concurrently exclude others who don’t understand the odd terminology unique to the cult. There’s a term for this coined by another cult expert Robert J. Lifton in his “8 Characteristics of Thought Reform“:

Loading the language – Characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most complex of problems are compressed into brief, definitive sounding phrases, easily memorized and expressed.

“Rightness” is certainly oversimplifying. Scientology must seem appealing at first as it condenses everything into this bullshit pop psychology package that conceals the evil soul-sucking thetans that lurk behind the surface. It’s easy to tout positivity with some new word while similarly calling all psychiatry evil for helping people overcome depression through medical science. (Although my faith in pharmacology is almost nil.)

I would like to see Jennifer “don’t call me J.Lo” convert to Scientology, though, there would be some schadenfreude in it for me. There was an article in the National Enquirer a few weeks ago claiming that she was resisting a full conversion to the religion while her husband Marc Anthony was encouraging her to do so for her career. Since her latest album isn’t faring too well on the charts, it seems like she’s seeing his tax-dodging point and is considering it.

Here’s part of Lopez’s appearance on Idol. Her song is kind of crap and it has nothing to do with the fact that it’s in Spanish. Despite the fact that several of the Idols say how “down to earth” she is, she still seems like she’s full of shit to me. Maybe that arrogant veneer makes her more vulnerable to believing that a volcano killed off most of the population of the earth and left us with all our psychological problems that can’t be solved with medication. She’s going to have to give up much more of her fortune to learn that, though, unless she looks online.

Thanks to Us Weekly for the header picture.