From "The World Savers" to "Doomsday Cult"

Friends and Foes

A Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, John Lofland met Doris Walder at a UFO convention and after several preliminary contacts, decided to do his doctoral dissertation on the group. Having obtained permission from Miss Kim to move in, Lofland played a decisive, if puzzling and finally troublesome role in the community's development. As a participant observer from March, 1962, until January, 1963, when he was asked to leave, Lofland represented the movement's first encounter with a 'disinterested' academic investigator. The misunderstandings that accrued in this encounter were heated and difficult. Miss Kim asserted,

I rather naively thought that he would write a neutral history of our movement. But I saw more and more that he was not genuine and that his view was distorted. His sarcasm became more and more open and his derogatory conception of our work became more obvious. I told him finally, to move out and not come to our meetings. 46

(Quoted from A History Of The Unification Church In America,
1959-74 - Emergence of a National Movement, by Michael L Mickler, Chapter Two
To The Bay Area: 1960-63, Friends and Foes)

All I know of Lofland's tone is shown through his writings on Williams College and Dr. John Hopkins in the "Doomsday Cult":

Pg. 69 Late in February the group learned of Amhurst College, which had a "School of Metaphysical Inquiry."

page 70 Amhurst College was a local gathering place of the occult milieu. A few of the titles of lectures there will illustrate the milieu's concerns: Do You Have An Astral Body? ("the art of projection, viz., meditation, adoration and illumination"); Communication with Extraterrestrial Worlds and Intelligences

pg 71 (He [Hopkins] also got half of the one dollar per person "free will offering.") The school's mimeographed monthly flyer of March, 1961, carried the following announcement, embedded among topics such as those given above, but twice as long as any other.

(The 6-person Unification group was hard pressed financially in those early times, having newly migrated to a "sometimes hostile city environment". Additionally, they had to sustain themselves in their 7-room commune on Cole Street by some of the women taking on jobs as waitresses, while yet another member was helped into a better-paying job as a postman. Therefore, I sense some disapproval behind Lofland's detail about Dr. Hopkins retaining half of the "free will offering".

It is indeed interesting to note that Lofland's 588-page dissertation, submitted to and approved by the University of California at Berkeley's department of sociology in June, 1964, was originally entitled "The World Savers: A Field Study of Cult Processes". When an abbreviated version of the thesis was later published in book form in 1966, the title was changed to "Doomsday Cult".)