Process Church of the Final Judgment (historical)

The Process Church of the Final Judgement was founded in London in 1966 by the British couple Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston (born Robert Moor), who met as members of the Church of Scientology (MacLean worked there as an auditor), were expelled from Scientology together in 1962, married in 1963, and ran a Scientology-and-Adlerian-psychology hybrid practice called Compulsions Analysis before their clients coalesced into "The Process." Members lived communally, first in Mayfair, London, then briefly at a settlement called Xtul on Mexico's Yucatan coast in late 1966, where the group's hierarchical structure — the de Grimstons as "the Omega," followed by masters, priests, prophets, and messengers — was formalised before a hurricane destroyed the camp. Back in London by November 1966, the group operated openly as a church, running a coffee shop ("Satan's Cavern") and a magazine, and attracted celebrity followers including Marianne Faithfull; sociologist William Sims Bainbridge conducted extended embedded fieldwork with the group's Boston branch in the early 1970s, producing the most even-handed academic account (Satan's Power, 1978).

The Process Church's most consequential public association is a myth, not a documented fact: no evidence has ever substantiated a connection between the group and Charles Manson. Investigators of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders considered a possible link after Manson, asked by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi whether he knew "Moor," answered "You're looking at him" — an ambiguous remark, not an admission of Process membership. In his 1972 book The Family, Ed Sanders alleged Manson had belonged to the Process Church, citing only that Manson had once lived on the same San Francisco street as a Process location; the Church sued Sanders and his US publisher, E.P. Dutton, in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and the allegation was subsequently retracted from later printings, while a separate UK suit against the book's British publisher was won by that publisher. Later writers, notably Maury Terry (The Ultimate Evil, 1987), extended the unsubstantiated claim into a broader alleged Satanic conspiracy that other researchers have dismissed as resting on circumstantial leaps beyond even Sanders'. The Process disbanded after MacLean and de Grimston separated in 1974; de Grimston's minority faction folded by 1979. MacLean's majority faction rebranded repeatedly through the 1970s, becoming the explicitly Trinitarian Christian "Foundation Faith of God" by 1980, relocated to Kanab, Utah in 1982, and founded an animal-rescue refuge there. In 1993 that refuge was renamed Best Friends Animal Society and stripped of all religious language from its governing statutes; a 2004 Rocky Mountain News investigation was the first to publicly document this lineage. Best Friends Animal Society today is a large, mainstream animal-welfare charity with no connection to the historical Process Church's beliefs or practices beyond this organisational ancestry; MacLean died in 2005.