Trigger warning: the following contains mention of sexual abuse to children.
cult
/kəlt/
noun
1.a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object:
As a human race, I believe each and everyone of us has had the feeling of wanting to belong. Sometimes we may have felt like an outsider and wished to find "like-minded" people. Some have felt like the black sheep of the family and they just don't fit in. Some have found their place with neighbors, co-workers, maybe even their bowling buddies.
What happens when a person or a group of people come up to you and make a bunch of lifelong promises that just seem to speak your language. Are you intrigued? Are you thinking it's a big joke and walk away?
For some people, they were approached by the "right" people at the "right" time and were told what they needed to hear. What were the lifelong promises? Will it be all rainbows and sunshine? For some people, yes. For many others, NO! And that's were the cult life begins and takes over.
I'm going to talk about The Children of God cult, formed by David Brandt Berg in 1968.
Who is David Brandt Berg? David was born on February 18, 1919 in Oakland, California. He was the youngest of three children of Hjalmer Emmanuel Berg and Rev. Virginia Lee Brandt, both parents were Christian evangelists. His father was Swedish. David Berg's mother Virginia Brandt Berg, is the individual whom he credited for influencing him the most. In her younger years, Virginia was raised in a Christian home, but became an atheist and a wild young lady during her college years. Shortly after the birth of her first child, she broke her back in an accident and spent the next five years disabled and bedridden, often hovering near death. Eventually she recovered and spent the rest of her life with her husband, Hjalmer, in active Christian service as a pastor and evangelist.
Over the years, Virginia and Hjalmer were expelled from the Disciples of Christ after making public states of her "divine healing", which is contrary to church doctrine. They joined another denomination, but things didn't work out well there either because of their different views against the conservative nature of the church. They worked mostly as independent pastors and evangelists.
At some time in his life, David wrote that he was physically abused by a German nurse and sexually abused by a Mexican babysitter when he was three years old.
David and his family traveled a lot on their evangelical mission. In 1924, they settled in Miami, Florida. David lived there for the next 14 years. During those years, Virginia and Hjalmer were pastors at a number of churches, and the family depended mostly on the generosity of the parishioners. David kept that type of living going when he was the leader of The Children of God.
Virginia Berg decided to go back to being a traveling evangelist in the late 1930s. David went with her. For the better part of the next 10 years, David was chauffeur, song leader, and general assistant for his mom.
David Berg graduated high school in 1935 and attended Elliott School of Business Administration. David then became a minister in the Christian and Missionary Alliance and was placed at Valley Farms, Arizona. He was later expelled from the organization due to differences in teachings and alleged sexual misconduct with a church employee. David later wrote that his expulsion was due to his support for a greater racial diversity among his congregation. So...he's also a racist asshat!
Berg married his first wife, Jane Miller (known as "Mother Eve" in the Children of God), on July 22, 1944 in Glendale, California. They had four children together: Linda (known as "Deborah" in the Children of God); Paul, d. April 1973 (known as "Aaron" in the Children of God); Jonathan Emanuel (known as "Hosea" in the Children of God); and Faith.
Berg married his second wife Karen Zerby, who also went by the name Maria Berg. So...I guess Jesus preached that polygamy was okay, too???
Berg informally adopted Ricky Rodriguez, the son of his second wife (and present leader of The Family) Karen Zerby. In the 1970s and 1980s, sexually suggestive photographic depictions of Rodriguez (aka "Davidito") with adult caretakers were disseminated throughout the group by Berg and Zerby in a childrearing handbook known as The Story of Davidito. In January 2005, Ricky Rodriguez murdered one of the female caretakers shown in the handbook before taking his own life several hours later.
David Berg, along with his wife and children, founded the organization known as the Teens for Christ in Huntington Beach, California in 1968.
While in California, after receiving strong resistance from local churches due to his followers picketing them, he took the whole group of about 40 people "on the road".
It was while they were camped in Louis and Clark Park that a news reporter first called them "The Children of God".
In January of 1970, Berg went to his former employer, Fred Jordan, to beg for the use of his training camp near Thurber, Texas, about 100 miles west of Dallas.
Fred Jordan, Berg's friend and boss, allowed Berg and his personal family to open and run a branch of his Soul Clinic in Miami, Florida as a missionary training school. After running into trouble with local authorities for his aggressive disapproval with evolution being taught as fact in public schools, Berg moved his family to Fred Jordan's Texas Soul Clinic, in Western Texas.
The group grew and began to spread as news stations reported the activity and many came to the camp to see the spectacle.
In the mid-70's, Berg began preparing his followers for a "revelation" he had about "Flirty Fishing" or winning important, influential men through sex appeal with his female followers propositioning men to engage in sexual activity. According to David's teaching, this was love. To a healthy, normal thinking human being, David has a major problem and is basically a pimp.
In 1975, after letting everyone know via one of his letters that his mistress, Maria, gave birth to a Jesus baby, Berg changed the name to "The Family of Love" or "The Family". Eventually, this was changed to "The Family International".
What's with all the name changes? You're already brainwashing a bunch of people and now your kids have new names and the cult has gone through multiple name changes? Just pick something!
Berg called on his followers to devote their full-time to spreading the message of Jesus' love and salvation as far and wide as possible, unfettered by convention or tradition, and to teach others to do the same.
In the early 1970s, he sent out a letter saying all members should tithe. His reasoning was that all pastors receive tithes from their church and since he was providing them with his "Wonder Working Words", that group members were obligated to read, that they should tithe to his office.
Part of his teachings was believing in the apocalypse was near and he urged believers to survive on basic necessities by giving up their money and personal possessions to the group’s leaders. To me those are two major red flags right there. When will the world end? Who the hell knows? God wants me to hand over all my possessions to one man. Hell to the NO! Ask my husband how well that would go in our household.
Third red flag, and probably the most important, is the fact that David also infamously taught that God is love and love is sex, so sex with anyone at any age is love. WTF dude???
David Berg thought it best to live in seclusion (duh!) and communicated with his followers and the public via about 3,000 "Mo Letters" - which is from David calling himself "Moses David". Again, what's with all the name changing?
The letters contained his "teachings" and introducing. his policy and religious doctrine to his followers. Berg's letters admonished the reader to "love the sinner but hate the sin". His writings were often extreme and uncompromising in their denunciation of what he believed to be evil, such as mainstream churches, pedophilia laws, capitalism, and Jews.
Yes, you read that correctly...Berg believed that pedophilia laws were evil. And people still followed him because why?
A core message to The Family's doctrine of sexual sharing was expressed in a 1980 Mo Letter - "The Devil Hates Sex! - But God Loves It!". Seriously...WTF? This attitude was supported and made easier to digest by the counterculture and sexual liberation of the time, but was defined in The Family by Berg's pedophilia. Mainstream Christians were said to be heretical and he encouraged adultery as being what he called "revolutionary".
Berg had been in hiding since 1971 and died in November 1994 in Portugal. If his teachings were all A-OK...why did he have to go into hiding. Red flag number 742???
He was buried in Costa de Caparica and his remains have since been cremated.
After his death in 1994, his wife Karen Zerby (aka Maria Berg) led The Family, and there were 6,000 adults and 3,000 children as members of The Family worldwide, in 50 countries. How do these people still follow this crap?
There were investigations of The Family for child abuse, and prostitution in Argentina, France, Spain, Australia, Venezuela, and Peru.
David Berg has been accused of leading a cult which promoted assaults on children and sexual abuse of women and children for decades. Former members have told their stories in widely disseminated media reports, though official inquiries at the time found no evidence of child abuse. I'm sorry...what?
Berg was also personally accused of pedophilia. He recalled in his letters how he was taught to masturbate in church by another boy his age. When his mother caught him, he was forced to masturbate in front of his father. Oftentimes Berg would explicitly describe his sexual preferences and recalled that one thing he regretted was that he never slept with his mother. OMG...WTF???
In a child custody case in the United Kingdom Berg's granddaughter, Merry Berg, testified that Berg sexually molested her when she was a young teenager. Another of Berg's granddaughters, Joyanne Treadwell Berg, spoke on American television about being sexually abused by David Berg. Berg's adopted son, Ricky Rodriguez, wrote an article on the web site MovingOn.org in which he describes Berg's sexual activity involving a number of women and children. Davida Kelley, the daughter of Rodriguez's nanny, Sarah Kelley, accused Berg of molesting her in a June 2005 Rolling Stone article. In the same article, a woman identified as Armendria alleged that David Berg sexually abused her when she was 13 years old. Berg's pedophillic actions extended beyond his personal victims, affecting many children in The Family as child sexual abuse became organized with child sexual abuse material (child pornography) created in alignment with Berg's instructions.
Berg's institutionalisation of pedophilia and sexual abuse was also described in Not Without My Sister, an autobiographical recount of the sexual abuse of three sisters who eventually escaped The Family. The book describes videos being taken of very young children engaging in sexually explicit activities for Berg's consumption, even as a method for his choosing of child brides. Serena Kelley was one of Berg's child brides and was presented by her mother at age 3 to be selected. I truly will never understand what these people were thinking!!!
Along with being a rapists, a pedophile, a racist, Berg was also anti-Semitic. I'm sure there's more we can add to the list. This guy was overall insane!!!
Berg lived in seclusion and apart from the main body of his followers. Due to his obsession with secrecy, until his death, any photos of him appearing in the group's publications had his face covered with pencil drawings, often depicting him as an anthropomorphic lion. Why was it so important for you to hide, David?
Do I think sex is wrong? Absolutely not! But according to what Bible stories I had read and learned...David Berg didn't stay on the right Christian path. Once again, another person using religion to twist their sick ways into being the truth.
When one man says that he has this group of people that is going to fix your life and sex is involved in that opening statement, please let them know that you forgot you have something in the stove and really need to get back home. Run fast, child!
In 1974, a New York attorney general’s office report labeled The Children of God a cult, and its members were accused of sexual abuse, assault, incest and other crimes, The Guardian reported.
In one instance, the report stated, “a 14-year-old runaway who spent nine days at a COG commune testified that she was raped and because of her refusal to cooperate with the elders, was held in solitary confinement on no less than three separate occasions.”
Despite the accusations, The Children of God continued to flourish for decades. Berg changed the cult’s name to The Family of Love following the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide, and, in 2004, the group became known as The Family International.
The preacher’s daughter, Deborah Davis, later referred to the practice in her 1984 autobiography The Children of God: The Inside Story as a “worldwide prostitution network.”
Former cult member Michael Young explained to The Guardian that the doctrine was “meant to justify and conceal sexual exploitation.” “It’s made to make other people feel obligated to give up their bodies to others’ so-called sexual needs. That your body is not your own — you’re supposed to give it up to God,” he said. What the actual f**k???
As a child, Young loved working with the sect as a missionary in Monterrey, Mexico, and he would often preach three or four days a week for 10 hours each time — both on the streets and door-to-door. “I was spiritual in a way that was kind of very obsessive and very determined,” he told The Guardian. After the cult began to implode when he was older, Young became disillusioned with the doctrine he was taught when younger. “It definitely wasn’t a safe place to grow up, especially if you were a girl,” he said. “Close friends of mine growing up were abused and raped.”
Actor Rose McGowan, was born in Florence, Italy, where her parents were members of the cult. However, she told The Irish Times in 2019, The Children of God’s leaders “started advocating child-adult sex and that was too far for my father, so we escaped.”
“I was not molested because my dad was strong enough to realize that this hippie love had gone south," she once told People, revealing, “We had to leave on the sly.”
“You had no contact with the outside world,” McGowan said of her childhood experience. “Things that are completely unacceptable became normal. I remember watching how the [cult's] men were with the women, and at a very early age I decided I did not want to be like those women. They were basically there to serve the men sexually — you were allowed to have more than one wife.”
“There's a trail of some very damaged children that were in this group,” she added. “As strong as I like to think I've always been, I'm sure I could have been broken. I know I got out by the skin of my teeth.”
Actor River Phoenix, who died of a drug overdose on October 31, 1993, and his famous siblings were also raised for a time in The Children of God. He later revealed he was four years old when he first had sex. “But I've blocked it out,” he said in an interview with Details. After living in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Venezuela, his family eventually left the cult and moved to Southern California.
In 1993, Berg, who was accused of sexually abusing his own daughters and granddaughters, fled to Portugal after Interpol began an investigation into the cult leader in Argentina. He died in the European country the following year, but that didn’t stop the cult from expanding. Berg’s widow, Karen Zerby, remarried and she and her new husband, Steve Kelly, took over control.
In February 2009, the couple proclaimed in what is known as “the Reboot” that it was uncertain if Jesus Christ would be imminently returning for the group’s 15,000 members and it was time to start thinking about the future.
“It looks like they were just trying to stem the flow of members out of the movement,” Laura Vance, a religious movements expert and sociology professor told The Guardian of the cult leadership’s sudden about-face. “ They went in the direction of stricter enforcement of the rules first, and then when that didn’t work, within a few years, they went in the opposite direction.”
The Children of God Still Exists Today in a New Online Form
In 1974, the New York attorney general’s office estimated followers of The Children of God lived in 120 communes. By 2006, there were reportedly at least 1,400 communes in over 100 countries.
After The Family International disbanded in 2010, the group reformed into a small online network that it claims now has roughly 1,500 members in 80 countries.
A spokeswoman told the BBC in 2019 that “although The Family International has apologized on a number of occasions to former members for any hurt, real or perceived (perceived?) that they may have suffered during their time in our membership, we do not give credence to tales of institutionalized abuse.”
For more on this story, stream Children of the Cult now on discovery+. This five-part series charts the remarkable true story of three British women born into a global sex cult. Hope, Verity, and Celeste speak out about the years of abuse within the sect and their incredible fight for survival, escape, and quest for justice.
I can understand the feeling of not belonging and wanting to belong somewhere, but please, please, please be careful about who you chose to "fit in" with. Lots of people are wolves in sheep's clothing and they have no true intention of treating you well.
-- Audre
David Brandt Berg - wikipedia.com
Sources:
wikipedia.com
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