Sex Cult Nun Read online

  Dedication

  To all of us who have fought to free ourselves from oppression, to claim our choices and bodies, and to thrive not just survive

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  A Note from the Author

  A (Not So) Brief History of My Family and the Children of God

  1. The Great Escape!

  2. Watch Out for Snakes

  3. It Takes a Village

  4. Don’t Work for Money, Honey

  5. Train Up a Child

  6. Heavenly Houris

  7. A Change in Attitude

  8. My Sister Is a Jesus Baby

  9. Farm Life

  10. Burn After Reading

  11. It’s a Teen Revolution!

  12. The Silent Coup

  13. The Grand Experiment

  14. Suffering Makes You Bitter or Better

  15. The Land of Much Too Much

  16. The New Kid in the Class

  17. Gentling and Breaking

  18. Education Is Power

  19. Breaking the Rules

  20. All for One Means None for You

  21. Long Live the Prophet

  22. Meeting the Prince

  23. The Breaking

  24. Pretending Is the First Step to Being

  25. The Big Decision

  26. Suffering Is Never Godly

  27. On My Own

  28. Knowledge and Truth

  29. Never Give Up

  30. The Truth Will Set You Free

  Epilogue: I Own Me

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Note from the Author

  Free love and sex, communes, withdrawal from society, living off donations instead of having jobs, staying vigilant for the rise of the Antichrist and the return of Jesus, spiritual revolutionaries against the system: these are some of the beliefs I grew up with.

  I was born into the Family, a religious movement founded in Huntington Beach, California, in 1968 by my grandfather David Brandt Berg, with help from his four children, Deborah, Aaron, Faithy, and my father, Hosea. It was known as the Children of God in its early days and often referred to as a cult by outsiders.

  With its aggressive proselytizing tactics and its demand that all its members serve as full-time missionaries, its live-in disciples quickly grew to over ten thousand, an average it maintained for over four decades and spread worldwide to 170 countries. With people leaving and joining, I’d estimate over sixty thousand people passed through the group as full-time members during its fifty years in existence. But its missionary activities reached millions more, with hundreds of thousands of converts.

  The group’s more radical practices led to police raids and negative press in many countries, with accusations of kidnapping, prostitution, and child abuse; my grandfather was on Interpol’s wanted list for decades.

  In 2010, it disbanded its communes, releasing into mainstream society thousands of people who’d never held a job or finished school. According to its official website at the time of this writing, it continues as “an online Christian community of 1,450 committed to sharing the message of God’s love with people around the globe.” I left the Family in 2000 and do not have firsthand knowledge of its official practices or beliefs since that time.

  This book is based on my recollections, interviews with family members, and written records. I have made my best efforts to ensure accuracy of detail and emotion in this recounting. I changed the names and identifying personal details of certain people who appear in the book to preserve their anonymity. As memory is sometimes fallible, there are places in the text where some dialogue is approximated, combined, or moved in time. I omitted specific people and events, but only when those omissions had no impact on the substance of the story. The Family had thousands of members, and I cannot speak for all of them. Depending on when and where those thousands were born, we had different experiences. I can only tell my story.

  Through all of this I never doubted that my parents loved me. They acted based on their sincerely held beliefs at the time, which have since changed dramatically. We have a good relationship today, and they understand my purpose in writing this.

  There are two ways to read this book: as a story about a cult or a young woman’s personal story. If you are interested in the latter, feel free to skip the history section and jump straight into my story, beginning with Chapter 1. You can always go back to the history later if questions come up about the cult.

  I write about my experiences from my perspective at each age, so you can peek into my mind and see how I saw the world and my family through the lens of the cult’s beliefs. My understanding of my experiences shifts with each realization I gain. Thank you for coming with me on this wild and crazy journey to its final destination—freedom. True liberation is in the mind.

  Faith Jones

  March 2021

  A (Not So) Brief History of My Family and the Children of God

  FOUR GENERATIONS OF EVANGELISTS

  My father is a fourth-generation evangelist. His great-grandfather John Lincoln Brandt of Muskogee, Oklahoma, was a Baptist minister who moved between churches in Denver, Toledo, Valparaiso, and St. Louis. Later, he became a leader in the Campbellite movement (now known as the Disciples of Christ), building and pastoring churches across the United States and around the world. His travels took him to Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. He was also the author of over twenty books and a lecturer.

  His daughter, Virginia, my father’s grandmother, was also a famous preacher. She was the nation’s first female radio evangelist with her program Meditation Moments, which started in Miami, Florida, in the 1930s. She was a prominent evangelist and revivalist who drew crowds of thousands at her evangelistic tabernacle events across America.

  But her dedication to Jesus came later in life. Although she had been raised a Christian, her faith was shaken with the loss of her mother when she was in her early twenties, and for a time, she declared herself agnostic. It took a miracle to bring her back into the fold. After giving birth to her first child, Hjalmar Jr., she fell and broke her back in two places, leaving her in terrible pain and often bedridden. Several surgeries failed to correct the problem, and doctors ultimately diagnosed her condition as untreatable. But her husband, Hjalmar Berg, an evangelical minister, kept praying over her.

  MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER’S MIRACLE HEALING

  One afternoon, in pain and at the end of her strength, Virginia called out to God for help. A scripture came to her—“Whatever you desire, when you pray, believe you will receive them, and you will have them” (Mark 11:24). She said, “I believe.” At that moment, as the story goes, she was miraculously healed and rose from her bed.

  Hjalmar ministered to a small congregation in Northern California, and she shared her testimony there the following morning. Soon, speaking invitations started pouring in, and Virginia’s reputation and following began to grow. Preaching about miraculous healing was against her church’s doctrine, but Virginia and Hjalmar refused to keep quiet and were ultimately expelled from the Disciples of Christ.

  Subsequently, they joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance, an evangelical Protestant denomination with a heavy emphasis on missionary work. By then, Virginia and Hjalmar had added their second and third children to the family: a daughter, also named Virginia, and my grandfather, David, who was born in Oakland, California, on February 18, 1919.

  The family of five spent the next several years on the road, holding revivals at churches across the United States. Virginia’s story of her miraculous healing alw
ays drew crowds, usually between four thousand to ten thousand strong. Turnout was so great, and her words were so moving, that she was invited to stay as a full-time preacher at a church in Miami, Florida.

  After fifteen years in Miami, Virginia missed her time on the road, and by the late 1930s, she returned to her role as a traveling evangelist. David, my grandfather, was the only one of her three children interested in pursuing a life in the ministry, so she took him on the road as her driver and assistant, staging massive events and tent revivals at venues all over the country.

  GRANDPA’S REBELLION AND REDEDICATION

  In 1941, at age twenty-two, David was drafted into the army. He could have gotten out of it; ministers and divinity students were exempt from service. But he was tired of being under his mother’s thumb and wanted some adventure. In boot camp, he contracted double pneumonia, and, the way he told it, the doctors didn’t have much hope he’d live, so he promised God that if he was healed, he’d devote his life to God’s service. And just like his mother, David claims he was immediately and miraculously healed, to the amazement of all the doctors and nurses.

  David was given a medical discharge due to a heart condition and rejoined Virginia. He enjoyed being on the road but was frustrated with his modest role as his mother’s assistant. He, too, wanted to preach. Yet God told him to be patient and that his time would eventually come.

  The two were visiting California when Grandpa met my grandmother Jane Miller, at the Little Church of Sherman Oaks, where she was working as a secretary. A petite brunette and a devout Christian, Jane was born in Kentucky and raised in a Baptist home. The two eloped in July 1944, and two years later they had their first daughter, Deborah, followed by a son, Aaron, in 1948. That same year, David was ordained as a minister of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and was sent to Valley Farms, Arizona, a sandy desert town about sixty miles south of Phoenix.

  The congregants were a mix of southern whites, Native Americans, and Mexicans, all of whom were struggling to get along. He further exacerbated the tension with his preaching by urging integration and advocated that those of means share more of their material wealth with those less fortunate. David’s inclinations would become more apparent later, but he was just beginning to formulate his ideas of Christian communism based on Acts 2:44. His message infuriated the white members more closely associated with the church’s leadership, and he was eventually expelled. The experience permanently soured him on organized religion. Disappointed but undeterred, David took his family of six back on the road—including my father, Jonathan “Hosea” Emmanuel, who was born in 1949, and his younger sister, Faithy, after whom I would later be named. They eventually ended up in Huntington Beach, California, where David’s parents had now settled in retirement. David found odd jobs to support the family, including a stint as a teacher and bus driver at a local Christian school. But he was profoundly unhappy, and in 1951, he turned to the Lord for direction and received a revelation that set him on a completely new and different path. He became convinced that God wanted him to drop out of the “system”—basically, the established church—and take to the road to save souls for Christ. So, he abruptly quit his job and enrolled in a three-month course at the Soul Clinic in Los Angeles, a missionary training school founded by the Reverend Fred Jordan.

  GRANDPA JOINS FRED JORDAN’S MISSIONARY SCHOOL

  Jordan was one of the nation’s first television evangelists, and he opened the Fred Jordan Mission in 1949, where he ministered to the poor and homeless, and ran his missionary training school. Jordan’s message resonated with my grandfather, particularly his belief that God was everywhere, and parishioners did not need to assemble in a church building to communicate with the Lord.

  The Reverend Jordan had a huge impact on David, and the two would work together in various capacities over the next fifteen years, which dictated where and how he and his family lived. Part of David’s missionary training included a period at Jordan’s Texas Soul Clinic, or the Ranch, located in Thurber, Texas, where his converts were subjected to a military-style boot camp to prepare them for the hardships they would face as missionaries.

  My father was three years old when my grandfather moved the family to the Ranch the first time. They stayed there for two years before heading to Florida, where David and Jane opened a branch of Fred Jordan’s missionary training school in Miami.

  In Miami, they lived communally, sharing a big house with other people who were also training to be missionaries, and spent summers traveling around the US, evangelizing with their parents.

  Witnessing on the road was a family affair throughout my father’s childhood. While my grandmother Jane had initially worried that having four small children meant her days assisting in the ministry were over, she soon realized that even as a mom, there was a role for her. She noticed that people were more receptive to her husband’s message when he was accompanied by his cute kids, so she fashioned their children into a singing group to perform along with his sermons. They performed in churches, on the street, and on Fred Jordan’s radio and TV programs.

  Everything was going fine for a while, but David’s fiery sermons, calls for disciples to “forsake all” to become Christian missionaries, and aggressive “marketing” tactics landed him in hot water with the area’s church leaders. Every Sunday, he sent his children and a few of his missionary students to the local churches to distribute religious literature, instructing them to blanket the buildings and all the cars in the parking lots. These antics infuriated church leaders, who sent local law enforcement after him. He needed to get out of town, so just after my father had completed the eighth grade, David announced they were leaving Miami to hit the road again, thereby marking the end of my father’s formal education.

  WARNING MESSAGE OF THE END TIME

  The family loaded into their twenty-eight-foot Dodge motor home, which David lovingly named the Ark, and returned to the Ranch. Virginia visited the Ranch twice to deliver urgent prophecies to her youngest child. First, “The Warning Message” said the Coming of the Antichrist and the End Time were imminent. Second, “The End-Time Prophecy” claimed that David would have “the understanding of Daniel” and ability to forecast the Coming of Christ.

  They stayed at the Ranch until the fall of 1967, when Virginia asked David to bring his children to California to witness to the hippies. Only his eldest daughter, Deborah, stayed behind. She had married her childhood boyfriend, Jethro, with her father’s blessing when she was sixteen, and the two remained in Texas, where they started a family of their own.

  Despite being in her eighties, Virginia had been spending her days passing out peanut butter sandwiches and talking about Jesus to the hippies, surfers, and homeless who gathered at Huntington Beach Pier, the Haight-Ashbury of Southern California at that time. Passionate in her belief that these young people needed to be saved, she urged my father and his two siblings, Aaron and Faithy, just teenagers themselves, to try to reach them.

  HIPPIES AND JESUS FREAKS

  At the Light Club, a coffeehouse near the pier, my father and his siblings began drawing crowds of young hippies with their musical performances and free sandwiches. It was here that David finally found his flock. These idealistic young people had already turned their backs on the system. They didn’t need to be convinced to leave their old lives. They needed a mission, a direction, and a place to belong. David started showing up at the Light Club in the evenings to preach his progressively more radical sentiments. He grew his hair and beard long, wore a beret, and took on the look of a radically hip evangelist; everyone called him “Dad.”

  His words resonated with these young people, and they embraced his unorthodox message of “dropping out of an evil system”—by forsaking everything, including money, education, jobs, and families, and devoting all their time to serving God as missionaries, God’s highest calling. He also emphasized living communally, like disciples of the early church (first-century Christians); Christian communism; and the End Time
and the Warning Prophecies about the coming punishment of America, which was popular during the Vietnam War era. They took him at his word, showing up with their backpacks, ready to dedicate their lives to God as disciples. They emptied their pockets, turned over bank accounts and trust funds, swore off drugs and alcohol, and instead got high on Jesus as their Savior.

  GRANDPA FINDS HIS PEOPLE

  Virginia Berg’s death in the late spring of 1968, just four years after the passing of her husband, Hjalmar, proved a turning point for David. It was as if he became unfettered from any remaining need to abide by traditional norms and doctrines. He began railing against the church system, organized religion, institutionalized education, the federal government, capitalism, and even parental authority, all very popular sentiments for his audience of young people. He was out to start a religious revolution, and his new disciples were ready and willing to follow him anywhere. The End Time was imminent, and he needed to save as many souls as he could before the Tribulation, the Second Coming of Jesus and the Wrath of God.

  With hundreds of hippies showing up at the Light Club, the group began to garner local media attention, which was at first positive. Here was a group of Christians who were motivating hippies to clean up their act and get off drugs! Soon the family began receiving invitations from preachers who wanted to start youth ministries, including one from an old missionary friend in Tucson, Arizona. David happily dispatched my father and Esther, one of the group’s first recruits. She was a nineteen-year-old who had just completed her freshman year at Kansas Wesleyan University and had been searching for a group that would allow her to serve God as a missionary.

  THE OTHER WOMAN

  Among the new recruits at the Tucson church was Karen Zerby, a shy, bucktoothed Nazarene minister’s daughter in her early twenties who had recently graduated from college and was a trained stenographer. Zerby was so enthusiastic that my father recommended she travel to Huntington Beach for training at the Light Club. She did, and almost immediately, she became David’s secretary. In the months to come, the two would begin a secret affair and start living together in the Ark, which he now shared with his wife. Though Jane appeared to accept her husband’s new intimate partner, my aunt Deborah recalls her crying often and doing her best to avoid being in the trailer with Karen.