In 1974, amid the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the final years of the Vietnam War, my parents became swept up by an apocalyptic, fundamentalist religious organization called The Move of God. I was 15.

I initially thought their involvement with The Move would be simply a passing phase, like my mothers sudden and ultimately failed plan a few years earlier to move the family to Australia, or her determination on another occasion to win a jackpot by solving a scavenger hunt sponsored by a local AM radio station. I remember crowding with my siblings into the backseat of our Ford Fairlane while Mom zipped around Topeka chasing down clues. She often entertained big ideas that led to nothing, so I didnt immediately worry about her latest flight of fancy.

Granted, the holy roller prayer meetings I witnessed in our living room that spring, complete with praying in tongues, witnessing and dancing around in praise of Almighty God, were, to this high schooler, outlandish and supremely embarrassing. I couldnt imagine my parents would carry on like this for long.

Thats what I believed would happen until the day I heard the disembodied voice of Sam Fife, the defrocked Baptist minister and founder of The Move of God claiming he would never die. In angry rants emitting from the tinny-sounding speakers of a cassette player Mom kept on the kitchen counter, Fife warned that demons roamed the earth in search of human hosts. These proxy devils, he said, existed everywhere and could inhabit any human being. More than a little shaken, I asked my mother about Fifes strange monologue.

Shhhh. Im listening, Mom said, waving her hand at me as if she were swatting away flies.

When she reached across the Formica countertop to turn up the tapes volume, I knew something ominous had crept into our lives and I had no idea how to make it stop.

Every day, as Mom prepared the evening meal, she would click the on-button of the tape player to hear Sam Fife deliver a sermon about one bizarre thing or another like that God had selected him and his congregation to serve as warriors in the ultimate and final battle against worldly evil. Once they slaughtered the unbelievers as described in the Book of Revelation he said they would establish a theocratic world government and rule with God for a millennium.