Chapter Twenty-One: Rehabilitation
Chapter Twenty-Two: House of the Open Pussy
Chapter Twenty-Three: Anorexia
Chapter Twenty-Four: A Dream Come True
Chapter Twenty-Five: Is Justice a Dream?
Chapter Twenty-Six: Pearl of Africa
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Breaking Free
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Chained Eagle
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Power of Love
The Children of God started in Southern California in the late 1960s, among the hippies and dropouts of Huntington Beach. The founder, David Berg, was born in 1919, in Oakland, California. His mother, Virginia Lee Brandt Berg, was a celebrated evangelist with the Christian Missionary Alliance. In 1944 Berg married Jane Miller, a young Baptist youth worker. After the birth of their second child, Berg became the pastor of a Christian Missionary Alliance Church in Arizona. However, after only three years he was expelled, reputedly for a sex scandal. His expulsion began his life-long bitterness and disillusionment with organized religion.
In December 1967, Berg moved his family – his wife Jane (later known as Mother Eve) and their four children, Deborah, Faithy, Aaron and Hosea – to Huntington Beach, California, where they stayed with his eighty-year-old mother. She had started a small ministry from a coffee shop called the Light Club, distributing sandwiches to the hippies, surfers and dropouts who congregated on the pier. But when the Light Club’s clean-cut image failed to attract the longhaired hippies, Mrs Berg saw the opportunity for her son and grandchildren to minister to the youngsters with the music and fervour of their own generation. In a short time, David Berg and his family began attracting the youth in droves with the free food and anti-system, anti-war message they endorsed.
The group travelled across the United States gathering more young disciples as they went, and soon opened communities across the country. They attracted a substantial amount of media coverage, and in some articles the writers referred to them as the ‘Children of God’, a name that the fledgling group subsequently adopted.
After a string of illicit affairs with some of his young female members, Berg found a devoted companion in his young and ambitious secretary, Karen Zerby, aka ‘Maria’. Publicly branding his estranged wife Jane and late mother the ‘Old Church’, Berg endorsed Maria and the Children of God as the ‘New Church’, and himself the last prophet of the Endtime. He also started using the pseudonym ‘Moses David’, identifying himself with King David of the Bible and the prophet Moses, who had led the Children of Israel out of captivity in Egypt (the ‘System’) to the Promised Land. Berg decided to start a royal dynasty. His series of residences were designated ‘The King’s House’ and he crowned himself and Maria, the King and the Queen.
For many years a council of ministers ran the cult, mostly members of Berg’s extended family, referred to as the Royal Family. He expected Family members to obey him and the other leaders without question. The only contact between Berg and his members came through his many writings, detailing policies, beliefs and instruction on how the communes were to be run, as well as prophecies and revelations he claimed proceeded directly from God.
In the early 1970s, the Children of God fell under the close scrutiny of the media and law-enforcement agencies, as parents of recruited children witnessed complete personality changes in their offspring after they joined the cult. More worrying was the fact that all contact between them was severed, some of their children disappearing in the night not to be seen again for years.
Evading negative publicity and a court summons, Berg fled to Europe, advising his followers to get out of America. The group left the USA in 1972 in a mass exodus to evangelize and recruit in other countries, beginning with Europe. Berg and Maria arrived in England in 1972.
Increasingly paranoid for his personal safety, he gradually withdrew from his followers, keeping his whereabouts secret. While in seclusion, Berg and Maria experimented with a new controversial method of using sex to win converts and supporters, infamously known as ‘Flirty Fishing’. Berg gradually introduced the idea of Flirty Fishing to his members through a series of letters documenting their own encounters. He also promulgated a new revelation called the ‘Law of Love’. Berg told his followers that the Ten Commandments were now obsolete. Everything done in love (including sex) was sanctioned in the eyes of God. Adultery, incest, extramarital and adult – child sex were no longer sins, as long as they were done ‘in love’. He demanded loyalty to his radical message of the Law of Love and Flirty Fishing and every member was required to actively put them into practice or leave. Consequently, two-thirds of the group left, marking the end of the Children of God era and the beginning of the Family of Love.
In 1979 Berg wrote a letter called ‘My Childhood Sex’ in which he revealed that a nanny had performed oral sex on him as a young toddler, which he said he had enjoyed. He said that it was normal, natural and healthy and that there was nothing wrong with it, which gave anyone so inclined carte blanche to follow suit. In the following years other Mo Letters and Family publications reinforced the idea that children should be allowed to enjoy sexual contact among themselves as well as with adults – and many adults in the Family embraced and carried out these suggestions.
Christopher Jones was born in December 1951 in a town near Hamelin, Germany, to Glen, a British military officer and Krystyna, a young Polish woman he had met while stationed in Palestine. He was educated at a public school in Cheltenham, and studied drama at Rose Bruford College. He dropped out after the second year and joined the Children of God in 1973. He has fathered fifteen children, including Celeste, Kristina and Juliana, by seven different women and remains a member of the cult.
Rebecca Jones was born in March 1957 and had a secure middle-class upbringing in the south of England. Her father, Bill, was a civil engineer and her mother, Margaret, a devoted housewife. Her parents were not religious, but they sent her to the local Sunday school at the age of five. She became a Sunday-school teacher when she was twelve and two years later she was baptized. Rebecca was recruited from her school by the Children of God at the young age of sixteen, and met and married our father in 1974. They had three children together, including Celeste and Kristina, before they were separated. Rebecca left the cult in 1987.
Serena Buhring was born near Hanover, Germany in October 1956. Her father was an architect and her mother an accomplished musician, playing the piano, violin and the cello. Serena travelled as a hippie in India where she joined the Children of God. She met our father after he separated from Rebecca and had three children by him, including Juliana. Serena is still an associate member of the cult.