Question: What was it like to be in a cult before the existence of social media?

In a pre-Internet world, if I had met a nice guy who said he was an antiestablishmentarian polytheist and he wanted me to join him in Mexico where he was planning to dig a hole with a coffee can, I’d have been all “count me in!”

What was I going to do, Google him? 

In other words, I may never have known he was a cult leader.

This kind of scenario comes up in my friend Liz Armstong’s excellent Vice article about the Process Church, a 1960s group that believed that “Satan and Jesus were reconciled through focused awareness. ” Uh, okay. The whole thing devolved and now is an animal shelter in Utah. It’s a fun read, and I liked her point about how scary things could be before current technology was available. As she puts it, it was

a time period in which you couldn’t just use your phone to Google the weird guy in the cloak who was making a little bit of sense to see if he was going to lead you down a dark, emotionally confusing path where you’d be forced to beg on the streets, semi-starve, have your romantic life dictated to you, and live in squalor in order to support your teacher’s lavish lifestyle, all in the name of God.

On second thought, maybe not that much has changed. I think I was in that relationship with someone who had a blogspot page.