(Credits: Far Out / The Process Church of The Final Judgment / Sabbath Assembly)
Thu 4 December 2025 22:00, UK
It’s no coincidence that the countercultural explosion sweeping across music, art, and politics in the 1960s found an easy home for the surge in various new religious movements.
It was a perfectly febrile time for life’s ever-wandering ‘truth’ chasers, be it the sincerely spiritually curious or the many bewildered stragglers chewed up and spat out by the day’s hedonistic abundance. The youthful rejection of social mores and traditional consensus ran rife throughout rock and pop, be it the softer Rishikesh retreat by The Beatles to glean the Transcendental Meditation light, toward a much darker collision of fringe cultism that embroiled The Beach Boys into The Manson Family’s bloody lore.
Amid the flurry of answers supposedly offered by a myriad of underground groups was the UK’s Process Church of the Final Judgement. Founded in 1966 by former Scientologist couple Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston, the Process’s essential doctrinal beliefs centred on the idea of the existence of four deities ensconced within every personality, being Jehovah’s strength, Lucifer’s light, Satan’s separation, and Christ’s unity.
Collectively called the “Great Gods of the Universe”, each member was instructed to embrace two of the ‘Gods’ that best served their perceived character, in protest at the conforming masses around them and in good preparation for the impending end times’ anticipated convergence of all four divinities.
Despite officially petering out across the 1970s into various factions and splinter groups, two stalwarts of the US metal world sought to reignite the Process’s esoteric teachings for the 21st century. Forming Sabbath Assembly in 2009, David Nuss and Jessica Toth corralled an ever-evolving line-up of millenarian metal merchants to wield the movement’s “most sacred scripture”, music, to score a hard rock-leaning ensemble setting original Process hymns to a sonically eclectic songbook of heavy coven attack, cosmic psychedelia, and stirring, communal sermon in the church tradition. Before long, Sabbath Assembly would pen original numbers praising the Process’s good word.
“Our intention isn’t to attract any followers to the Church,” Nuss revealed to Echoes and Dust in 2014. “The Church is definitely long past, and we haven’t met any original members who still believe or practice. As with all the new religious movements from the 60’s, there is a super fascination there, but that moment in history was so different from ours now.”
Nuss was quick to stress a lack of dogma in Sabbath Assembly’s efforts, however. “The Process Church was very primitive sociologically, hence the mind control that was happening, and for us, what’s most important now is psychic liberation rather than entrapment. Even though the Process theology is relevant for the band to share, we are definitely not defining our success by the number of new recruits to these beliefs. What does success mean to us? That’s a good question. I suppose it’s more about connecting rather than convincing.”
The Process had found some prior musical representation. George Clinton’s Funkadelic had included snippets of the ‘Process Number Five on Fear’ hymn on Maggot Brain’s liner notes, industrial group Skinny Puppy had explored the Church’s themes on 1996’s The Process, and Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge co-opted some of the Process’ rituals for their similarly cabalistic Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, as well lending their vocals to Sabbath Assembly’s Ye Are Gods in 2012.
Sabbath Assembly finally came to a close in 2020 after a decade of relentless touring, mainly in Europe due to their heretical allegiances, and seven studio albums. Announcing their disbandment on their official Facebook page, Sabbath Assembly stated a resolution to their creative journey with the Process, as well as hinting at something of a leaden burden on the members involved, paraphrasing the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “The spell has been broken, and the albatross falls like lead into the sea…”
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