“Alison Peters, a former member of Children of God, recalled [the Moonie practice of] love bombing in shopping malls. She’d look for people who seemed, as she put it, ‘sheepy, people who looked lost and vulnerable.’. . . While she was talking to them, she would stare fixedly into their eyes, the classic technique of hard sell. As she described it, ‘It was the whole thing of exuding confidence, of maintaining direct communication so forceful that you’re always in complete control. In the pamphlet, they described it in biblical terms: you were supposed to ‘Let the Holy Spirit work through you.’ The eye-to-eye contact was called ‘letting the Light of Jesus come through your eyes into the other person’s eyes.’’”

—Willa Appel, from Cults in America: Programmed for Paradise, 1983.