Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(6)
If I wanted to play armchair psychologist, I’d slap a label of malignant narcissist on him. Maybe he truly saw visions and heard voices. Maybe he truly believed he could talk to God. Doesn’t really matter. What matters is, in 1968, in Huntington Beach, California, while the war was raging in Vietnam and the country seemed ready to tear itself apart, David Berg started preaching to the hippies at the Teens for Christ coffee shop on the strip.
Berg’s kids were in their late teens, and he used them as bait. They’d sing a few songs, offer coffee, stale donuts, and shelter. Berg tested his new brand of Gospel: Jesus was a long-haired hippie like them. Jesus was a socialist. Jesus was the biggest radical ever. The mainstream churches hadn’t caught the youth-ministry fever yet. Those who heard him back then will tell you they’d never heard anything like him before. He was offering more than an answer to the materialism they already loathed. He gave them what they’d never known: unconditional love and purpose. Around fifty of them followed him around the country, half starved and living in buses and rotting canvas tents. They protested the war. They preached the Gospel he’d taught them: follow Jesus, forsake all. “All” meant everything and everyone from your past life.
In ’71, about 150 members moved onto a ranch in Texas, about an hour east of Dallas, called the Texas Soul Clinic. The members lived communally in absolute poverty. There was no sex, no drugs. They were high on Jesus and freezing in shacks. Berg, however, relocated himself to a sweet pad in Dallas, where he replaced his wife with his secretary (because everything’s a cliché) and took on a few concubines.
The Children of God sent out teams to colleges and universities across the country, to bus stations, anywhere they could find converts. They donned sackcloth and smeared ashes on their foreheads and lined up in front of the UN, the White House, the middle of Times Square. Time magazine called them Jesus Freaks. And kids kept joining up. By the time they left the ranch, Berg had amassed over 1,400 followers. My parents were among them.
By 1972, Berg communicated only by edicts called Mo Letters. Imagine the crazy guy who comments on your local news Facebook page, ranting about spaceships, vaccines, George Soros, and Hollywood pedophiles. Now imagine (and this was likely more difficult prior to 2016) someone following him around with a little tape recorder, transcribing all his alcohol-infused nuggets of wisdom, printing them, and sending them out to his disciples. Essentially, some drunk asshole’s completely fucking insane diatribes on every subject from car engines to shitting habits to biblical theory to dream interpretation. That’s a Mo Letter. And every word he said was law. There’s a paragraph in one—and there are entire volumes of these, enough to fill a pickup bed—where the old bastard says he only eats with spoons. Forks aren’t really necessary. Matter of fact, forks can be dangerous. At that moment, every fucking Children of God home around the world threw away their forks. Another Mo Letter declared America as Babylon, the Whore of Satan. God was going to destroy the continent, he said. So naturally everyone went to Europe—England first, then Scandinavia, Germany, France, and the rest—spreading farther as they gained followers.
Anytime the authorities or press got a little too close for Berg’s comfort, he’d get a prophecy. The first prophecy sent him into hiding, and from then on, only a few senior members would know his location. Later on, his prophecies would disband the group, change the name, move countries, continents, regroup, whatever Berg needed.
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By the time I was born in ’77, there were over 130 communes around the world and they’d changed their name to the Family of Love. That’s right about the time Berg instituted his Law of Love.
Which brings us to the main reason—aside from its more famous alumni: Jeremy Spencer from Fleetwood Mac, who vanished the night before what was supposed to be the band’s big break, a show at the Whiskey A Go Go, to join up; Rose McGowan; River and Joaquin Phoenix—the main reason anyone’s heard of this cult, by any name. Berg waited until he had his followers completely dependent. He had them sever all ties. Most everyone had kids, no jobs, and now lived in foreign countries. His crowning message was simple: Anything done in love was good. Which sounds like an Instagram caption. But it had a dark twist. Go out to nightclubs and lure rich men into bed. It’s not prostitution if you tell them about Jesus. Someone wants to fuck you or your husband, we’re all one family now. Incest, that’s just the devil making you feel ashamed. God’s only law is love, man.
A cult is your textbook abusive relationship—love-bomb, isolate, create dependence, and your victim won’t have the power to leave, even if staying in the relationship means buying into the new Gospel of David Berg. In short, in the eyes of the world, the Children of God, now the Family of Love, became a sex cult.
Enough people had a problem with his message that the press got wind of his new ministry. Mo Letters with titles like “God’s Whores” and “The Devil Hates Sex” made their way into the wrong hands. And Berg did what he did best. He got another prophecy. Fired his leadership team, anyone who spoke against him. Told everyone the cult was disbanded. No more massive communes. Europe was a lost cause. Go to the third world, what we now call developing countries. What was the Children of God, then the Family of Love, became simply, the Family.
This is probably why the memories I have of my early years in a cult look a little more idyllic than you’d imagine. We lived in campgrounds in Chile, in Argentina. A bus in Buenos Aires my dad built into an RV. A farm in Mendoza with goats. A house in Santiago with hay on the roof.