The approach happened on a street in Berkeley or San Francisco, or outside a bus station. Someone friendly asked whether you had plans for the weekend, and mentioned a farm a couple of hours away where a group of people were staying — good food, music, discussions about how to make the world better.
The bus went to Boonville, in Mendocino County. Once there, you had no car.
The Oakland Family, led by Mose and Onni Durst, ran the Unification Church's most successful American recruitment operation in the 1970s, and it did not begin with theology. Newcomers were not told for some time that this had anything to do with Sun Myung Moon, and the church's name was not used.
The weekend's structure is the thing to study, and every element of it is functional.
You were never alone. Each newcomer was assigned a buddy who accompanied them everywhere, including to the bathroom door. This is not politeness. It removes solitude, in which doubt is formulated, and it removes private conversation with other newcomers, in which doubt is compared.
You were exhausted. Days began early and ran late, with singing, group games, lectures and shared work. Sleep was short. The songs and the games are not filler; synchronous group activity produces the bonding described in chapter 87 and leaves no interval for reflection.
You were flooded with attention. Constant praise, physical warmth, delight at your presence, people telling you they had never met anyone like you. Former members and researchers who studied the group named this love bombing, and the term escaped into general use from here.
And the escalation was gradual. The weekend became an invitation to stay for a week-long workshop. The week became twenty-one days. Each step was small relative to the last, which is the foot-in-the-door gradient of chapter 3, and at each point the newcomer was surrounded by people who were delighted they were staying.
What makes it effective is that leaving does not feel like rejecting a set of claims, which would be easy. It feels like walking out on people who have been extraordinarily kind to you for four days, in front of them, which is a different and much harder act.
The sociologist Eileen Barker studied the Unification Church's British recruitment closely and reached a finding worth keeping alongside all of this: the great majority of people who attended workshops did not join, and of those who did, most left within a couple of years. Coercive recruitment is not irresistible, and treating it as irresistible has its own costs — it was the premise of the deprogramming industry, which involved abduction and forcible confinement and produced its own casualties.