The Spiritual Counterfeits Project (SCP) is a Christian evangelical parachurch organization located in Pasadena, California.
[1] The SCP began as a ministry within the Christian World Liberation Front, an outreach to students at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alexander had participated in the psychedelic drug usage of the counterculture, was an initiate of Transcendental Meditation, and lived in the famous Haight-Ashbury community in San Francisco.
[3] In 1973 Brooks Alexander and others distributed Christian leaflets at Millennium '73, a festival held at the Houston Astrodome by Guru Maharaj Ji's Divine Light Mission.
[4] That same year, Alexander, Fetcho and David Haddon launched a grass-roots campaign to oppose the practice of Transcendental Meditation in American public high schools.
The SCP maintained that transcendental meditation was not religiously neutral, and that its SCI was based on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Hindu faith.
[9] Justice Curtis Meanor who presided over the case concluded that Transcendental Meditation and SCI are "religious in nature within the context of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, and the teaching thereof in the New Jersey public schools is therefore unconstitutional.
An expanded edition was published first in 1979 in German as Die Sonderlehre by Schwengeler-Verlag and then in 1981 in English as The God-Men: An Inquiry into Witness Lee and the Local Church by InterVarsity Press.
The dispute between the Local Church and SCP escalated into a lawsuit for defamation that was filed in Oakland, California in December 1980 and known as Lee et al. v. Duddy et al.[13] According to Bill Squires, the four and a half years of pre-trial preparations and depositions involved expenditure that brought SCP into legal debt with their defense lawyers.
Squires said, "The law firm representing us withdrew from the case"[attribution needed] and SCP decided to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.