The Process Church: Myth & Reality Behind the Sixties’ Most Controversial Sect
In the countercultural melange of the late 1960s, organizations rumored to be “Satanic” came and went on the spiritual scene. The most notorious — and misunderstood — was The Process Church of the Final Judgment, a group founded in England in 1966 by two excommunicated Scientologists.
Suggesting that truth always beats fiction — and plenty of fiction swirled around the innovative sect — senior members of the Process Church in 1973 sublet the New York City apartment of actress Ruth Gordon, who played the busybody Satanic neighbor in Rosemary’s Baby. [1]
Today, The Process is linked to everything from the Son of Sam serial killings in New York City in the 1970s to worldwide Satanic cult conspiracies — so that the facts, infinitely more benign but possessed of remarkable folds of their own, prove difficult to discern in our era of digital burlesque, especially when lessons from Satanic Panic hysteria appear willfully lost on some commentators.
