Process Church of the Final Judgement
The 'Process Church of the Final Judgement, also known as the Process Church, was a British religious group established in 1966 and disestablished in the 1970s. Its founders were the English couple Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston, who spread the group's practices across parts of the United Kingdom and United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Process Church's beliefs have been described as "a kind of neo-Gnostic theology".
MacLean and de Grimston initially met as members of the Church of Scientology in the early 1960s; the duo were ejected from the Church in 1962 and married the following year. They started a brief Scientology splinter group named Compulsions Analysis, which incorporated new religious elements; this developed into the Process Church, which was established in London in 1966. Its members initially lived in a commune in Mayfair, West London before moving to Xtul in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. They later established a base of operations in the United States in New Orleans. Prosecutors investigating the Los Angeles murders committed by the Manson Family in 1969 suggested that there were links between Charles Manson and the Process Church, and despite the connection being unproven, the allegations subsequently damaged the Church's reputation.
Authors who have written about the group include Ed Sanders, journalist Maury Terry, and in the early 1970s, the sociologist William Sims Bainbridge. In 1974, MacLean and de Grimston separated. The latter tried to continue the group with a small following, but this folded in 1979. MacLean retained the allegiance of the majority of Church members, later reforming the group as the Foundation Church of the Millennium', which focused explicitly on Christian faith. In 1982, the Foundation Faith of God moved its base to Utah, where it established an animal rescue refuge in Kanab.
History
Background
Mary Ann MacLean, born in 1931, grew up in Glasgow. Various accounts have said that she had spent a year in the United States, had a relationship with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, and worked as a high-end prostitute in London, servicing prominent figures in British business and politics.Robert Moor was born in Shanghai in 1935, relocating to Britain in his infancy. Moor joined the Cavalry, serving from 1954 to 1958.
MacLean joined Scientology, and began working as an auditor at the London branch of the Church of Scientology. In 1962, Maclean and Moor met for the first time at the London Branch. They split with the Church of Scientology in 1962, and were married in 1963.
Foundation: 1963–1966
Together they set up Compulsions Analysis, a group which utilised both the methods of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology and the ideas of the psychologist Alfred Adler. In establishing this company, they were financially assisted by a lawyer friend. Moor changed his name to Robert de Grimston.Moor distinguished the methods of Compulsions Analysis from Scientology in that it did not claim that its benefits were "infinite", stating that "we are not offering super powers, but a means that people can live on this side more effectively".
In 1966, the regular clients of Compulsions Analysis formed into a new group, The Process, which took on an increasingly religious character. In March 1966, twenty-five members of the Process moved into a commune at 2 Balfour Place in Mayfair, an affluent area in the West End of London. In May, the group left London and relocated to a remote area. On 23 June, around 30 Church members—accompanied by their six Alsatian dogs—moved to Nassau in the Bahamas. From there, they spent the rest of the summer seeking a more permanent location.
In September 1966, the group members moved to Mexico City. They obtained an old bus and began driving across the Yucatan Peninsula for a place to settle. They found a location known as Xtul; its name meant "the end" in the Mayan language, and the group took this as a portent that they should settle there. They set about establishing a community, although would only remain there for a month. They faced opposition from both locals and from the parents of several Church members, who enlisted anti-cult groups to try and recuperate their children through legal means. It was while there that the group clarified its hierarchical structure, with the De Grimstons at the top, who were referred to as "the Omega", followed by those regarded as masters, then priests, then prophets, and finally "messengers". In late September, a tropical hurricane devastated their settlement, and while some of them elected to stay, the De Grimstons and most of their followers decided to leave. The Yucatan experience remained an important part of the Process Church's own mythology. After that point, there would be a crucial division within the group between those who had gone through the Xtul experience and those who had not.
Establishing a presence in the United States: 1966–1973
By November 1966, most of the Process members were back in London. Between the end of that year and 1967, the Process began to operate as a church. It became increasingly evangelistic and focused on attracting new members. It opened a library and an all-night coffee shop known as Satan's Cavern. It also began issuing a magazine, at first titled The Common Market and later renamed The Process. The Church's activities attracted the interest of a number of celebrities active in the realms of music and cinema, among them Marianne Faithfull.In the early 1970s, the sociologist William Sims Bainbridge studied the group, producing an in-depth account of its activities.
In 1967 and 1968, the De Grimstons made various further international travels, spending time in East Asia, the United States, Germany and Italy; in the latter they visited the ruins of the Abbey of Thelema on Cefalu, the commune established in the 1920s by British occultist Aleister Crowley. From late 1968 onward, they began spending most of their time in the United States. The Church opened chapters in many U.S. cities, the first of which was in New Orleans, where the remaining members of the Xtul colony settled. Several European chapters followed, in Munich, Rome, and London.
In the early 1970s it opened its largest chapter, in Toronto, Canada.
Introvigne thought that at its maximum capacity, the Process Church had "a few hundred active members."
San Francisco and the Charles Manson Murders
During its existence, the Process Church attracted much publicity.In urban myth, the Process Church came to be associated with ritual murders, although no evidence of any such connection was ever forthcoming. Rumours spread that a number of Alsatians had been sacrificed around San Francisco, with these actions sometimes being associated with the Process Church, which kept Alsatians as pets.
Gavin Baddeley later related that the Process Church "has become legendary, both in the annals of hippie history and Satanic lore".
Police investigating the Tate-LaBianca Murders which were carried out by members of the Manson Family suspected a possible connection between the Family's leader Charles Manson and the Process Church. When Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor of the Manson trial, asked Manson if he knew Moor, he responded: "You're looking at him. Moor and I are one and the same". Two members of the Church subsequently visited Bugliosi to stress that the group had nothing to do with Manson or his Family. Manson's visitor's records indicate that the following day he was visited by the same two members. The Church then included a brief article on Manson in the 1971 Death issue of its magazine, in which it included a short essay by Manson himself next to another by the Roman Catholic writer Malcolm Muggeridge.
Bugliosi later suggested in his book Helter Skelter that Manson may have borrowed philosophically from the Process Church. Although no connection between the Process Church and Manson was ever substantiated, the group's reputation was damaged by the association. The number of donations received began to decline and Church members sometimes received abuse in public. To shift the group's image, its leaders played down their image of black garments and Alsatians and presented a softer interpretation of their four divinities doctrine to limit the Satanic elements.
In his 1972 book The Family, Ed Sanders alleged that Manson had been a member of the Process Church, as evidence citing the fact that Manson once lived in the same road as the Church's San Francisco location. That year, the Church took legal action against Sanders and his U.S. publisher E. P. Dutton in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois; the allegation was subsequently retracted from future printings of The Family. It also brought legal action with the book's British publisher, although in a British court, the publisher won the case.
By the late 1970s—when the Church itself had disbanded—it was common for anti-Satanist literature to allege that Manson was a member of the group and that both were linked to blood sacrifices. In his 1974 book America Bewitched, author Daniel Logan cited the Process Church alongside Manson, the Church of Satan, and the British occultist Aleister Crowley. Journalist Maury Terry linked the Process Church to Ordo Templi Orientis and claimed both as part of a grand Satanic conspiracy in his 1987 book The Ultimate Evil. Critics were skeptical of Terry's claims; Baddeley described Terry as "a sensationalist reporter with a nose for good scare stories"
Claims about the Process Church being linked to a vast Satanic conspiracy and wide range of crimes were also endorsed by members of the LaRouche movement.
A detailed account of the history of and life within the Process Church as told by a participant-observer is contained in William S. Bainbridge's book Satan's Power. A sociologist, Bainbridge encountered the Process Church in 1970, while he was studying Scientology. Bainbridge had conducted several months of fieldwork with the group during the early 1970s, particularly in its Boston branch. His observation took place largely in 1970–71, when he was an active group member, but became episodic between 1972 and 1974. In his book, he disguised the names of people to preserve their identities.
Adam Parfrey noted that Bainbridge provided a "more even-handed view" of the Church than that provided by the likes of Sanders and Terry.
Bainbridge's study was later described as "the main source of information" about the group by La Fontaine.