Society: Life after Doomsday

Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here.

Tracking cult activity from a Montreal storage locker

When mike kropveld was twenty-eight, he helped plan a mission to rescue his friend, a teacher named Benji Carroll, from an international cult. Kropveld remembers hosting a meeting with Carroll’s parents and several distraught friends in his cramped Montreal living room. “His parents bought Danishes, but nobody ate them,” he says. On a trip to Berkeley, California, Carroll was recruited by members of a branch of the Unification Church, a religious order popularly known as the Moonies. It was 1977, and thanks to the Manson Family and the People’s Temple, terms such as mind control and brainwashing had entered the lexicon. At the time, the Bay Area city was a hotbed for unconventional beliefs. “People called it Berzerkeley,” Kropveld says.

Although Carroll had mostly lost contact with his Montreal community, he eventually agreed to meet his mother and sister at the San Francisco airport. They brought him to a nearby hotel, where a group of his closest friends ambushed him and held him captive in a house a few blocks away. Over two days, a professional “deprogrammer,” who also worked as an auto mechanic and antique dealer in the Bay Area, talked Carroll into returning to Montreal.

Kropveld caught pneumonia shortly before the team’s departure and was unable to go along. It was probably for the best: earlier that year, he visited Carroll and wound up living on a Moonie commune for two weeks before extricating himself. “In retrospect, I don’t think they liked me very much,” he says. “I asked too many questions.”

This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.