Dr. John W. Hopkins: Mentioned in lofty academic publications of sociological and historic natures

Dr. John W. Hopkins: Mentioned in lofty academic publications of sociological and historic natures

"Occult milieu" was a concept used to describe the atmosphere of Williams College by John Lofland, a sociologist who in 1966 published an account of a "cult", in his book titled "The Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith" (Prentice Hall, 1966). In that treatise, Lofland partly traced the early history of the Unification Church in the Bay Area and his path of inquiry led directly to the grounds of Williams College and Dr. John W. Hopkins himself c. 1961.

By way of explanation, the Unification Church was nearly unknown to any but their followers at the time of Lofland's publication, and only beginning in the early '70s with their growing financial success and swelling membership did the organization gain wider public notoriety as Rev. Moon's church, the followers being popularly designated as Moonies. The concept of "Doomsday Cult" was popularized by Lofland, who had familiarity with the East Bay geography as a teaching assistant and pre-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley in the early '60s. (Lofland eventually was recalled to teaching and served as Professor Emeritus at UC Davis).

Lofland chose to veil "Williams College" by the pseudonym "Amhurst College" in his work for reasons of his own. Although any scholar familiar with the history of Amherst College (in Massachusetts) would catch on to the association as Amherst College was founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College (also in Massachusetts), and would also be aware that those colleges though established on similar tenets since that cleavage separated further and developed rivalries one with the other. Additionally, Lofland disguised Cora Williams as "Cora Amhurst". Educated people of the Bay Area of the time familiar with the local lore of the John Hopkins Spring Estate would have easily seen through this slight literary fabrication. Through his use of pseudonym, I assume that Lofland actively chose to separate Williams College, Berkeley, from the Unification Church.

For others who have followed since, Lofland's "Amhurst College" pseudonym has been revealed by Michael L. Mickler in "A History Of The Unification Church In America, 1959–74 - Emergence of a National Movement" (Publisher HSA-UWC). In this work, Mickler utilizes Lofland's early phrase "Occult Milieu"* as an actual sub-heading title. I should also explain as Moon's church has since gone through another name change that HSA-UWC was the original name for what became known as the Unification Church, the acronymn means The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.

This essentially is a side note to the activities of Williams College and Dr. John Hopkins, but as academic histories each of these scholarly works provide additional details now nearly lost to time.


* ("Although considerable research has been conducted on how people are recruited into cults, little or nothing is known about how they enter the occult milieu. However, persons may take up occult interests as a form of membership in a social network where such interests prevail. If so, then the occult can be characterized as a true subculture -- a distinctive set of cultural elements that flourish as the property of a distinctive social group. Or occult interests may reflect a much more superficial phenomenon. Participation in such interests could be more like being a member of a theater audience -- a transitory and relatively private amusement that is not supported by significant social relations. If the former is the case,then entry into the occult milieu is quite plausibly interpreted as a significant symptom of potential recruitment into a deviant religious group. If the latter, then consumption of occult teachings may be little more than a minor exercise in idiosyncratuc taste having little meaning for future religious actions." ("The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation", by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, University of California Press, 1986, p. 322)