Part One: David Berg and the Children of God (ft. Ed Helms)

Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards, the podcast about the very worst people in all of history.

And folks, this week, you know, I've said this a couple of times, but I always mean it.

This is one of the worst guys we're ever going to talk about.

And in order to really get behind this bastard in a way that makes him palatable, we've got to bring on one of the best guests we've ever had.

A man who needs no introduction.

perhaps the Eddest of all Helms, Ed Helms.

Welcome back to the show, Ed.

Thank you so much.

I'm so glad to be here.

Yeah.

I agree.

I'm extremely Eddish, Eddie.

I don't know if I'm the Eddist, but

you're definitely the Helmsest of Eds.

I think we can agree with that.

I'm the Helmsiest.

That's for sure.

And you're the host of Snafu.

Right.

Yeah.

Great podcast.

Entering season three.

It's a podcast about some of the most biggest screw-ups or fuck-ups, I guess, just based on the literal translation of the title in the history of the U.S.

government.

Last season, you talked about the massive, sweeping, unprecedented civilian-led infiltration and expose of FBI surveillance files.

And this season, you're talking about how the U.S.

government tried to poison a shitload of people during Prohibition.

Yeah,

it's a dodgy world out there, folks.

And we are living in it.

But no, thank you for that plug.

I'm extremely proud of Snafu.

It's a labor of love.

It's an unbelievable amount of work.

But

we have an incredible team between Gilded Audio and Film Nation and myself.

And yeah, we just do a ton of research.

It's legit.

It's like legit research.

It's history.

It's real history.

And then the book, of course, I have a book that just came out.

I don't even have one to show you.

Oh, my gosh.

I'm so unprepared.

On the YouTube, we'll put the graphic up first.

Okay, good.

We got you.

Yeah.

It's a fantastic book.

New York Times bestseller.

Hell yeah.

Also called Snafu, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups.

Lots of chapters.

Each chapter is a different screw-up.

Unlike the podcast where the entire season is one screw-up,

you get a whole caboodle.

in the book.

Caboodle of snafus.

Well, we're talking about a great screw-up today, although it's not a screw-up of just the U.S.

government.

It's more like every time a cult leader gets way too big for their britches, it's kind of like a collective human screw-up.

Like, oh man, we really let that guy get too far.

We shouldn't have let that happen, right?

You're looking at like Jim Jones and like, oh shit, man, we really screwed up.

How did that happen?

Today, we're talking about a guy.

You may not recognize him by name, but I think a lot of people will recognize the cult.

The dude was named David Berg, and his cult was called the Children of God or the Family International.

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The action starts with the Big Three Monster Energy Celebrity Game.

Then Dwight Howard and his Ellie Riott take on Montrez Harrell and Dr.

J Chicago Triplets.

The finale will see popular Miami 305 with stars MVP Michael Beasley and Len Stevenson take on Nancy Lieberman's Dallas Power, who will make it to the Big Three Championship.

The no-holds bought action starts Sunday at 3 p.m.

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Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband said, your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

I was just completely in shock.

Liz's father murdered and her mother found locked locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound.

I didn't feel real at all.

More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers.

We're still fighting.

Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Zone 7 ain't a place.

It's a way of life.

Now, this ain't just any old podcast, honey.

We're going to be talking to family members of victims, detectives, prosecutors, and some nationally recognized experts that I have called on over the years to help me work these difficult cases.

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We're back.

Have you ever heard of these guys, Ed?

Just the most

the tiniest bit.

Like I have the broadest sense of this group.

I might recall more as you go.

Yeah.

These guys are, if you kind of want to cut cult leaders into like three different groups, you've got kind of on the lightest and the guys who, like, yeah, there's some psychological abuse.

They're taking money from people, but they're not committing any like serious violent crimes, right?

They're just kind of in it for the cash.

And then the middle, you've got the guys where they're like physically and mentally abusing people, but they're not like killing anyone.

David Berg is on kind of the far end of the spectrum, where like he is, he is just some of the worst stuff I've heard of a cult leader do.

He's about as extreme as it gets.

And he's interesting because he's also, he's not just like a weird religious cult leader.

He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical

like Christianity, like Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century.

He's a very weird guy.

But yeah, I'll just get into it.

Like nothing you just said makes sense.

That doesn't sound right.

But that's the beauty of cults.

Like you just kind of make it up.

up yeah yeah they can make it up as they go along and they're very rooted in their time right this guy this cult couldn't have gotten started any other year but like 1968 which is in fact when it gets started um david brand berg was born on february 18th 1919 kind of at the height of the influenza pandemic uh His parents were Virginia Berg and Hjalmer Berg.

They were both evangelical Christian preachers participating in what was called the revival movement, right?

So at this time, you've got a lot of these like traveling itinerant preachers moving around throughout the U.S., mostly but not entirely in like the south and southeast.

And so you've got this network of churches, but also these traveling preachers who make their money getting crowds and hyping them up.

And there's a lot of, sometimes they're doing like fake psychic surgery.

Sometimes they're doing like snake handling where they'll like milk a snake of its venom and then pretend to get bit beforehand to be like, look, God protected.

me, right?

Like it's a show act in addition to being preaching, right?

And, you know, this, that's the big movement at the time.

And that's how David's parents kind of make their living.

David would later write that his father, Hjalmer, who was a Swedish immigrant to the U.S., had been converted by his maternal grandfather.

And before finding Jesus, Hjalmer was a, quote, cigar-smoking, beer-drinking, wild-dancing, party-going, good-looking, and loose-living young man of the world.

I would think anyone named Hjalmer fits that description.

Yeah, seems like a loose-living man.

What origin is that name?

Swedish.

Yeah, It's very Swedish.

Schalmer.

I like it.

And we don't know if that's actually true.

Like, it's kind of a thing in this world of evangelical preachers to pretend that, you know, before you got saved, you were a real bad guy.

And the fact that he can't think of anything but like, well, I drank beer and danced, right?

It's like, I don't know, man.

I've known worse guys.

I don't know.

Depends on what kind, like how much beer and what kind of dancing, I suppose.

That is a good point.

Dancing can get dirty.

Yes, yes.

We know what is it.

Kevin Bacon, let us all know.

Patrick Swayze.

Patrick Swayze.

Jesus Christ.

I know.

That's shameful.

So one of the weird little facts about his parents is that before she met Hjalmer,

Virginia, his mom, was engaged to be married to Bruce Bogart, who I think was Humphrey Bogart's cousin, which is just a weird fact.

Hjalmer was hired entertainment at the wedding, and she just kind of leaves her fiancé to be with him.

So, you know, there's a story there that's interesting, but we don't have it.

Whatever the truth, from the time David knew his father, he was a zealous minister.

Berg would later write that this was almost too much for his mother because this is not the guy that she'd married.

I don't know if this is true either.

David describes his mother as very, very strict and religious, and she's going to be a super famous preacher later.

He just kind of doesn't like his mom, so he takes a lot of pot shots at her in the biography that he wrote about himself.

I think that's probably more what's happening here.

We call that an autobiography.

Yeah.

Sorry, yes.

Hjellmer and Virginia go to religious universities.

His mom goes to Texas Christian University, gets a degree there.

They have their first son, David's older brother, in 1911, his older sister in 19, 15, and David's the youngest of the family in 1919.

Virginia would later claim that after having her daughter, she had been completely disabled for five years and then miraculously healed.

And if this is the case, then she had David before she was healed.

And scholars who've looked into the family are are like, there's no evidence that she was ever really sick.

This is, again, just kind of like part of the myth-making.

And I bring this up because as David grows into the family, he's going to be used to the idea that both his parents are like these traveling freelance preachers and that they just make up stuff about the family, right?

And about their history.

That, like, as their kid, he knows a lot of this isn't true.

And he just comes, you just lie about your backstory because it sells better.

Yeah, you're, it's, it's a show.

Right, right, exactly.

Kind of like Bob Dylan, but like Bob Dylan, right, like Bob Dylan or a pro wrestler.

Like a lot of entertainers.

Truly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No one was ever born named Nicholas Cage.

It's simply too cool of a name, right?

Like his mother, David's going to go on to later have claimed that he suffered from a variety of untreatable

illnesses that were cured via prayer.

His bio on the website, established by the cult he later founds, says that he was born with influenza and also an enlarged heart.

Neither of these is super unlikely,

but this kind of weaves into the bio he makes that he was spared from all this by his prayers, right?

And then he was like healed so that he could do his work.

His biography, the autobiography on his church's website also goes into a whole host of what I think are increasingly unlikely ailments for him to have suffered.

At three years of age, his foot was run over by an automobile, and the doctor said he would never walk again.

But again, his parents believed in God and prayed, and his foot was miraculously healed, although the doctor said that many of the bones were crushed.

When he was seven years old, a water heater exploded in his face, and the doctor said he would be permanently blinded.

But this time, God used an old friend, a real saint, who prayed for his eyes and they were instantly healed.

I don't know.

Maybe I don't think a water heater exploded in his face.

Yeah.

Maybe.

I mean, that would do a lot more than blind you, it seems like.

Right.

And he's like, we have pictures of his face.

Because those are made of iron.

Those things are like

an exploding water heater.

It's like an IED going off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fully.

Like there's a lot of shrapnel for real.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And his face is like fine.

Like there's not really much evidence of this.

Um, what we can confirm is that he grows up, like I said, in this family that it's almost like a wrestling family, right?

Where it's like, yeah, we've got like, we've got like the K-fape that we have to keep about our background, you know?

And so he's going to be very good about this his entire life.

Is he going on these church revivals like from the get-go?

He's just, they're like living on the road.

sometimes.

He is for a part of his early life, I think up until he's like 10 or 11 or so, he mostly stays at home.

And one of his parents will be traveling at any given time, occasionally both.

Like he will describe himself later as very lonesome as a little kid because he both doesn't have a lot of friends and he barely sees his mom, right?

Because they're very busy and traveling constantly.

Right.

I would wager that describes a lot of cult leaders.

Right.

Yeah.

Lonely kids, too much time thinking.

And sorry, sorry, remind me where this is, his childhood?

It's mostly in, I think at this point, they're like in like Mississippi or something like that, but they're like moving around his entire childhood.

They wind up in Florida and then California are kind of the two places he's primarily raised.

A little in his early life, they're moving so much, sometimes like every couple of months, that it's unclear to me.

Because like his dad or his mom will get a job like pinch hitting at a church for four months or something, right?

So that the normal pastor can go out on the road or whatever.

So he's raised a lot of the time by this like combination of maids, governesses, and like uncles and aunts occasionally.

And he doesn't get a lot of attention.

And this is kind of highlighted by the fact that the attention he does get as a young boy and probably the earliest direct adult attention that he strongly remembers is sexual abuse, which is also going to like leave a mark.

This starts when he's three.

And it's, you know, it's the maid of his house who like he claims is kind of molesting him to help him get to sleep.

So he'll talk about this positively as an adult.

And that's kind of relevant because he's going to come to believe that this kind of stuff is positive for members of his cult to do, right?

That's so interesting.

I read that in Victorian England, this was commonplace, that governesses would give little boys

hand jobs, essentially, at bedtime to have.

Yes.

The theory being that they would help them fall asleep.

Yes, and that's exactly what his maid says that she's doing.

And his mom does not like his mom finds out and assaults the maid, like is hitting her and fires her, which I think we could all agree, pretty normal response from a parent.

But he, and as you said, like this is not at the time, like it's a kind of thing that happens a lot more often than you would have thought.

And he, as a kid, thinks it's unjust and fair because he's like, I don't get why my mom was so mean to the maid, right?

Like, oh, interesting.

And yeah, and this is going to like kind of compound over the years.

He's going to keep having experiences like this and convince himself that sort of his reaction to them is the normal and healthy one.

And that's going to lead to him pushing this on a lot of other kids.

Boy, right.

It's so complex.

It's really complicated.

The maternal figure

battling with his caretaker.

Yeah.

Like

where is his loyalty

in all of that?

And the abuse

is

sort of justified in some way or attempt you know he tries to sure yeah or and the and the the maze it's like his maze yeah yeah nanny or whatever wow that's wild it's it's it's wild and like you have to assume this nanny is like more of a mother figure than his mom at age three because she's just not there right like it's yeah um and after this his mother is going to be increasingly like david experiments a lot with himself and his mom will punish him violently whenever she catches him, right?

Which kind of compounds his feelings of anger towards his mom.

This comes to a head when he's six years old, and she catches him yet again, like experimenting.

And quote, she brought out a wash basin, a little bowl, and a knife, and told me she was going to cut it off, right?

She threatens to like circumcise him, basically.

When you say experimenting, he's just like masturbating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like, his mom is basically threatens to like cut him as a result, which is bad parenting, right?

So, this kid is stacking a lot of trauma.

We're at age seven at this point, right?

Um, which is when he has a confused sexual encounter with a cousin of the same age, right?

Who's also seven.

So, these are two kids playing around.

This is not like an abuse scenario, right?

They're both the same age, but his uncle catches them and like watches.

And he's horrified because he realizes that his uncle is like kind of voyeuristically doing this.

And his uncle never tells his mom.

He never tells his mom.

So what we've got by this point is this very confused kid who's had a lot of sexual trauma before age 10 and is learning from an early age that like this is the most positive attention he's gotten in his life.

And it's also the thing that he's most punished and frightened of, right?

Yeah,

he's going to grow up and his main takeaway from the experience will be frustration at the fact that his parents judged him for all of this, right?

That they punished him for this kind of stuff.

And so you have to kind of think of this energy within him around this as this kind of building pressure inside of him that's going to, at a certain point, be released with pretty catastrophic consequences for a lot of people.

He also is really frustrated as a kid that his mom is usually the one punishing him.

He thinks his dad should be doing that.

He sees his dad as like kind of weak and being dominated by his mom.

He would later write that the times he most respected his father were when his dad, quote, picked picked up a board and hit me so hard on the fanny, he lifted me right off the ground.

So he's like, well, at least my dad hit me sometimes, you know, and was like a real father.

Yeah, we are talking about the 20s here.

So not a healthy upbringing.

Yeah.

The irony is, the irony is that he's right that his parents shouldn't have punished him, but it doesn't, but it seems like he thinks they should have like nurtured this toxicity, whereas they should have intervened in a, in like a healthy way.

Should have intervened, been like, this isn't your fault.

Right, exactly.

All of that.

But this isn't okay.

Yeah.

It's both not your fault and not okay.

Yeah.

And

he seems to have walked away with all the wrong

things.

And, you know, it is hard to imagine a couple of parents in the 20s having gotten this kind of situation right.

You know, like, yeah.

Not a lot of tools.

They didn't have a lot of people.

Not a lot of tools.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So once he gets a little older, he's kind of moving into adolescence.

The family starts to move with regularity.

And at this point, they kind of are on the road and he's on the road with his family pretty constantly.

They go around the U.S.

They live in like a dozen states.

They spend some time in Canada.

His mom is becoming increasingly prominent.

She has like a ministry, which means she's a known preacher.

She's getting invitations from dozens of churches to come.

And the way this works is it's...

Honestly, the evangelical preaching business works a lot like stand-up comedy does today, where a venue invites you or you get hooked up through an agent and you take like half of the offering.

So you give a preach, people donate money, you split it with the venue, right?

That's kind of how these people are making a living.

And

she's like a high-level stand-up like person, right?

Like if you want to think of it that way.

They're making pretty good money for a while.

And in fact, they're making good enough money that when he's like, I think 12 or so, the family settles down in Miami because Virginia is able to actually start her own church, right?

Where she is now operating a venue.

And for a time, things are getting better for the Bergs, but then the depression hits, right?

And this is just as David's entering his teen years and Virginia's church goes out of business, right?

Which is not usually a term we use for churches, but that's what these kind of ones are, right?

So interesting.

Yeah.

I wonder if they had tax-exempt status.

Oh, yeah.

No, these people aren't paying taxes.

And I'm just, I'm so curious what her presentation was.

Like, what was her energy?

What was her tone?

What was the message, I assume, was fire and brimstone, or was it more...

Yeah.

It's both this mix of like fire and brimstone.

You always start with a like, here's how bad I was when I was younger.

You know, there's a, there's a really good, there's an Oscar winning documentary from 1973 called Marjo, M-A-R-J-O-E, with this dude who as a kid, when he was like five, his parents were traveling preachers like Davids, and they had him, like they billed him as like the youngest preacher.

They like taught him, wrote how to do stuff like perform weddings.

And as an adult, he like came back undercover with like a film crew to like expose how this business worked.

And if you want to see like how this whole like industry worked, Marjo's a really good depiction of it.

He also wound up as an actor on the A-team as an adult.

It's weird.

But

so after the business goes under, the Hjalmer and Virginia start going on the road.

The marriage is not doing well because money's not good.

So they split up and they split the kids between them.

And David stays with his mom.

And his mom kind of uses him as, in her words, her, quote, chauffeur, secretary, and singer.

I don't know if they had,

he shouldn't have been driving.

He's like 13, but

it was the 30s.

Yeah.

Yeah, fuck it.

Why not?

Not as much traffic.

Yeah, not as much traffic.

No one's got seatbelts, so you're just vibing in there.

They wind up in California, Southern California, where David attends Monterey High School.

And so this is kind of the second time in his life that he's really stable for any period of time.

He would later claim to have been bullied for being a preacher's kid by the other students who, quote, threw his books around, tore his papers, and even broke his left arm.

He's a sickly kid, and he claims to have figured that the only way he could beat them back was, quote, in the classroom with pen and paper, and that he did this by graduating with, quote, the highest scholastic record in the 80-year history of the school.

Now, there's no evidence of this.

Like, we know he graduated in 1935, but I've never heard, like, the school doesn't claim that he did the best of anyone there.

So he's massaging stuff a little bit.

By this point, he's seen what the life of a traveling preacher looks like, and he's also seen how hard it is to live that life.

So he tries to make a living in the secular world and applies to go to the Elliott School of Business Administration.

This, I think, is in Washington, D.C., but it may have been there.

Maybe another business school by the same name that's since got out of business.

But he's only there for like a couple of months before he drops out.

So, and I think this is just part of he hasn't had a normal education.

He doesn't know how to do anything but what his parents do, right?

And so, within a couple of months, he drops out of school and decides to go into full-time evangelical work, like doing the same thing his parents have done, living as a traveling preacher.

And it's kind of a question mark what he does in the first six years after his graduation, but this is probably it.

He's probably traveling around preaching.

And what year are we talking?

35 to 41.

Okay.

Right.

Yeah.

So David doesn't make any additional direct claims about what he's doing until December 7th, 1941, which, as I think most people know, is when Pearl Harbor happens, right?

And he claims to have joined the army.

And he says he failed the army's physical requirements, but they let him in anyway, and that he served as a conscientious objector because he didn't believe it would be ethical to go and kill Japanese soldiers because they hadn't had a chance to hear the gospel, right?

That's his claim.

And the Army did admit conscientious objectors in non-combat roles in World War II, but there's no evidence that Berg was one of them or that he served in any way, shape, or form.

We have some records of his background from like different evangelical organizations he was a part of that were keeping track of what he was doing in the early 40s.

And there's just no evidence that he ever served at all.

If he did, it was maybe for a month or two.

He claims that he caught double pneumonia and got so sick that the army discharged him because they thought he was going to die.

And in his account of events, obviously, he gets miraculously saved by God and promises to spend the rest of his life preaching as a result, right?

And he's instantly healed.

So that's his claim.

I think the likelier claim is that like he's just making it as a preacher from the late 30s to the early 40s, right?

Doing the thing that he understands how to do, traveling with one of his parents at a time and kind of making his way around the circuit.

And he added this sort of military bullet point on his on his resume just for some added credibility or or yes to just kind of spin the story a little more you got to spin the story you can't have said especially you know in the 50s 60s that like you didn't do anything during world war ii so you had you got to have some explanation as to like how you were patriotic but he's also going to be a big anti-vietnam war guy so you want to he wants to be able to be like but i was a conscientious objector right i didn't want to fight also so that's kind of why i think he cooks that up there's not really evidence of it.

Okay.

So is that is that something easily disproven by military records or is it still kind of an open question?

Because the way you're talking about it sounds like you've you sound convinced he made it up.

I found a good study on him

by a like PhD psychotherapist who like goes through his backstory and found his records with these different, a couple of different evangelical, like the British American Ministerial Federation and the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which are two different groups that he works with.

And they have like records of his background up through the early 40s that don't list any time in the military.

It's possible, like, I have not seen, no one's ever like filed and gotten a DD 214, which is like the discharge paperwork you get from the Army for him.

But also,

at this point in time, if he had just been in for a few months, like he claims, they might not have given him one, right?

Because this is kind of a chaotic period.

The Army didn't work then like it does now, right?

Um, so it's I mean, without the DD124, like what are we, we don't know anything, no, like we can't prove one way or the other.

We got to get the DD124, yeah, the paperwork, yeah, we know, and we just don't have it, so we don't really know what he was doing, um, but it's not impossible either way.

But I think this just kind of fits into the other stories he tells about himself, like, it's it's really convenient, yeah.

The other thing that's convenient, Ed, is the products and services that support this podcast.

This Sunday at 3 p.m.

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Can Glenn Rice, Greg Monroe, and Paul Milsap stop Miami's physical assault or will Miami and Beasley put an end to Dallas's winning ways?

Who will make it to the big three championship?

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Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband comes back outside, and he's shaking, and he just looks like he's seen a ghost, and he's just in shock.

And he said,

your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

I was just completely in shock.

Her dad had been stabbed to death.

It didn't feel real at all.

For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.

Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

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And we're back.

All right.

So at this point in Ed's story,

at this point in David's story,

he's been miraculously healed from double pneumonia.

The army has let him go, and he's decided to get back into the business of preaching.

And he spends the rest of World War II, you know, traveling around doing preaching with his parents.

In 1944, he meets a young woman named Jane Miller, and the two get married.

They start touring because he brings her in and is like, now you're a preacher, right?

Which is kind of what his mom had done to his dad.

And the couple starts having kids in quick succession.

They have Deborah in 1945, Aaron a couple of years later, Jonathan a year after that.

And then their fourth kid, who has my favorite name of their children, Faithy in 51.

Just Faith with a Y.

Huh.

Yeah.

I haven't heard that one.

I haven't heard that name.

That's one you got to spell every time.

Yeah, Faithy.

Faithy.

It's like.

Faithy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Berg and his wife settle down in the Los Angeles.

It's usually said as the Los Angeles area.

They're in Huntington Beach, right?

Which is like the kind of center of the evangelical movement in Southern California at this period of time.

And he starts going to California's Southern Bible College in 1948 to continue his education.

In between classes, he's on the move a lot.

He'll sleep in his car or a tent, you know, in order to save money so that he can keep his family going because money is tight.

It's not until 1949 that he gets his first stable job preaching at a church for the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Arizona.

And by this point, he'd started calling his wife Jane Mother Eve.

And in an early show of kind of how his charisma worked, people around them just sort of went along with it, even though I think it's kind of sacrilegious to call your wife Eve.

Like, I don't know.

That's just a little weird.

Maybe it was kind of just like a nickname.

It's like a nickname.

And it's sort of a, he's got that charisma where like if he gives someone a nickname, everyone picks it up, right?

Yeah.

Like people just kind of listen to what he says about stuff like this.

Now, here's what his church bio, which is he probably writes, paints of this period of time in his life.

His congregation was a mixture of southern whites, Indians, and Mexicans who didn't like each other.

And eventually the wealthy family, which controlled the church board, urged the denomination to send him elsewhere.

They didn't like David because of his integration policies and his preaching that they should share more of their wealth with the poor, beginning with him and his little family.

So

I do love that even in that, there's a little bit of griftiness that comes in, right, Ray?

It's so funny.

It's so magnanimous.

It's such an intrinsically wholesome thing to advocate and preach.

Integration.

Sure, great.

But then it has a little bit of

money.

If some of that cheddar falls on me,

what's wrong with that?

What about old David, huh?

Yeah.

Didn't David get a cut?

You're going to cut Mother Eve out of this?

Yeah.

Come on.

Now,

I don't, this does not seem to be the whole, they just didn't like that I wasn't racist doesn't seem to be the true story.

His eldest daughter, Deborah, would later tell journalists, no, he got accused of sexual misconduct.

He started an affair with a married woman in his church while he was married.

And when it got found out, like that, they were like, well, you're fired.

This is the thing that, this is like the one thing you can't do, right?

A lot of them do it.

A lot of them do it.

But yeah, he gets in trouble for this.

His family would also claim that during this period of time when he was on the road, he would regularly pay sex workers while he was preaching.

His children also accused him later of having slept with all of their housekeepers.

So this is a guy who's got a lot of, his personal life is messy.

And I think that's probably why he gets fired, right?

And maybe just the adultery was kind of the last straw.

Is Mother Eve still in the picture?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

She's never happy with him.

They They do not have a great marriage, although a lot of that seems down to be he just cheating like constantly on her.

Yeah.

Now he gets really angry when this missionary alliance lets him go.

Berg declares for the first time that organized religion is corrupt and that the powers that be within the evangelical movement were holding him back.

He starts referring to the leaders of these major churches as the system

and accused them of fostering churchianity rather than Christianity, right?

So they're serving their churches rather than serving the faith, which is, in a large extent, for a lot of these guys, a fair criticism.

It's also like he's not any better, right?

Like,

yeah.

Also, but I do love the word churchianity.

Churchianity.

Churchianity.

It seems like something that the

that someone would advocate at the annual church, like Fourth of July potluck.

Guys, we need more churchianity.

We need more churchianity.

Churchianity.

He's got a gift for like words, right?

It's also very modern almost, like deciding to frame your enemies as the system.

Like that, people do that all the time today, right?

Like whether they're on the left or the right, everyone wants to be like, there's a system that I'm against, right?

And like you can be a rebel too.

What's the great movie?

Is it Pacino or somebody?

It's like, I'm going to put the system on trial.

Oh, yes, Serpico.

Serpico.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And then it's kind of reminiscent of

our last discussion about old Curdie Yarvin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The cathedral, right?

Yes, yes, exactly.

You got to have a cool name for

the enemy.

Yeah.

Or how Andrew Tatil call it, the Matrix, right?

Like, it's all of these, yeah, you got to have this big system that, like, you're the lone Luke Skywalker character trying to blow up this death star of, in this case, churches that you used to work at until you got kicked out for adultery.

So, whatever the truth behind why he was fired, the experience inspired him to attempt another move into secular life.

So, he goes to Arizona State University in 1951.

I think it's not a party school at this point,

but don't quote me on that, where he claims to have studied communism and walked away with the belief that it was a good idea, but it could only work if everyone was also Christian, right?

So, he starts to see the early Christian church.

And when when I say early, I'm talking about like before the Roman Empire was Christian, right?

So when it's still kind of this underground organization, as essentially the ideal communist community, and modern evangelism is corrupt because it's obsessed with money.

So he's starting to pull in, and right, like this is the 50, early 50s when this is happening.

So the hippie movement's not coming together yet.

But you can see how when it does, he's going to be drawn towards some of the things they're talking about.

Sure.

Right.

Yeah.

That said, the same year he goes to ASU.

He's just there for a couple of terms and then he goes back to Southern California to go to Bible school again.

So his mind may not have been quite as made up at this point as he'd later claim.

For much of the early 50s, he's working odd jobs.

He has a gig at the DA's office.

He works in construction.

He's teaching junior high school at a private Christian school, trying to do anything but what his parents did, right?

Because it sucks.

There's something interesting here, which is that

if you are struggling to kind of like

maintain stability in your life and make ends meet in general, communism sounds pretty damn good.

Yes, yes.

Especially if you're like working with all these corrupt guys who are like, oh, it's all about the money for you.

Right.

And like,

yeah,

I get it.

But he's not.

He's not going to stick with these beliefs in like egalitarianism, right?

When he starts getting money in his cult, the money goes to him, right?

Like,

so in 1954, he gets hired to work in Texas for a guy named Fred Jordan, who was one of the first wave of TV ministers.

So he's like one of the first big ministers to have like a live TV like church program.

He's also training missionaries for foreign work.

And Berg starts working in television effectively, right?

And for 13 years, he's Jordan's right-hand man.

He's marketing for the show.

He's helping to produce it on a technical level.

And this is the most stable job he's ever had, right?

He's doing this for more than a decade.

Most of his kids are raised to adulthood during this period of time.

And, you know, Fred is his mentor.

And this is kind of one thing that's sort of noteworthy about this is that Fred had had a church before the one that he starts and gets a TV program on that he basically gotten fired from because he started cheating with one of the members of his congregation on his wife.

And that had caused his church to leave him, right?

So that's sort of like David knows that and kind of sees a kindred spirit in this guy because the same thing sort of happened to him.

He would later refer to Fred as King Saul and credit him as a mentor.

But he was also unhappy with his kind of humble position in this other guy's organization.

He's middle-aged now, and as he later wrote, I felt I was passing my prime, but had not yet found God's perfect will for my life.

He admits he was desperate for greater power, which is an unsettling thing to say, right?

Yeah.

Remarkably self-aware.

Yeah.

It was just about the power.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, this doesn't come out until a long time later, but his daughters would later claim that he was also sexually harassing them during this period.

Harassing or

both.

So he tries first with his daughter, Deborah, when she's a young adult.

And this doesn't go beyond harassment.

Like she refuses and he seems to have stopped.

She's an adult at this period of time.

So like, she's like, he tried and I refused him.

He does start molesting his daughter, his youngest daughter, Faithie, when she's about 10 years old in 1961.

And one of the writers for Rolling Stone, who I, Wilkinson, who wrote a really good bio on this guy, also describes Faithie as the daughter who resembled him the most, which is like, it's, it's, so this is a guy who, at this point, he's kind of fully turned, right?

He's now passing on the same kind of abuse that he had experienced as a kid.

He's also channeling his ambition at Fred's program into trying to kind of take it into the modern era.

He becomes convinced early on that color television is the future.

And so he tries to convince Fred, you got to move on from black and white in like the mid-60s and make this a color program, right?

And this is expensive.

It's not cheap to go color in this period of time.

And Fred really fights him on it and eventually agrees.

And despite David's best efforts, they can't sell the show to any stations.

So Fred fires him in 67.

So it's this kind of, you know, his life seems like it's falling apart at this point.

He's abusing his kids.

He's lost his job.

He would later tell, like, his version of events is that once the show fails, he thinks Fred's going to fire him.

But then he has a dream where everything's fine and God tells him to have faith.

And he says the dream was signed by Fred himself.

So he has a dream that his boss is cool with him, but the real boss doesn't get the memo about the dream boss.

And this is what David writes next.

He wasn't completely sure if they should stay there or not.

So as a test of the will of the Lord, he wrote and asked Fred for total control of their property and to even have it put in his name.

Fred only said no, but fired David again, this time for the last time.

So his like, his move is, well, I had a dream that things were fine.

I'm just going to ask you to sign over all your property to me.

Is that cool?

Can you do that?

No, you're moved.

You're re-fired.

Yeah.

You're double-fired.

I don't even know what that means.

You can't fire someone twice.

It doesn't,

it's like,

I guess you just say he just had to say the words twice because it just wasn't.

You are really fired.

No, no, no.

Seriously, get out of here.

Oh, my gosh.

This is actually, this is starting to sound, I mean, it was sounding up until this point like he was a very troubled and

troubling person, but mostly coherent and exploitive and

kind of dastardly.

But this is starting to sound

untethered to reality.

He's, he's, he's increasingly like losing his connection to reality, right?

Like the fact that you would have this dream after your boss is like, man, I think I'm going to have to let you go.

You fucked up so bad.

And then you're like, actually, I had a dream that it was fine.

You want to sign over all your property to me?

Is that cool?

Like, no, absolutely not.

Um,

so yeah, this is a bold move and it fails.

Uh, so David has to take his family back to Southern California, where his mom, Virginia, has a very big church in Huntington Beach, and she is super successful at this point.

And she's like, you should come here and start preaching.

There's all these hippie kids, right, who had gotten involved in the anti-war movement, started experimenting with drugs.

And this is a major thing happening in the U.S.

at the time, where you've got, it's 687, 68, 69, the hippie movement reaching like kind of critical mass but also people keep falling out of it right they'll have really bad trips they'll run out of money like something bad will happen to them and there's also all these kind of new evangelical offshoot programs they're called the jesus freaks kind of colloquially who start taking in these former hippies and a lot of churches start as a result of this and there's also a couple of different cults that start as a result of this right it's like people gathering up the shrapnel of the hippie movement as a sort of Yeah, Manson, exactly.

A great example of it, right?

And sorry, did you say that

his mom was now running a church in Huntington Beach?

Yes, a big one.

She is successful at this point.

She's like super successful, and he's just sort of dinking around trying to figure it out.

But she invites him back.

Yeah.

And how old are his kids at this point, by the way?

Three of them are adults, I think, and one of them is like late teens.

Like Faithy's like nearly adult.

So his kids are mostly grown at this point, right and has faithy weighed in like as an as an as an adult is she you know obviously like that's you don't have to say anything just because your dad's a famous monster right after he abuses you but like we don't have a lot from her deborah is the one who talks a lot okay about what what he did um so u.s involvement obviously in vietnam's in full swing at this point and david decides he's he finds himself on the anti-war side of things maybe he is legitimately anti-war right like you can be a bad person and have like one or two good opinions.

But maybe he also just sees it as like, oh, I want to, like my mom said, I want to get kids from this hippie movement, right?

And so you kind of have to be on that side of things, right?

It also may just have been natural because like mainstream American society is this, like the pro-war side of things.

And he has always found himself kind of on the outskirts, right?

And he also really finds himself drawn to a lot of the values of the hippie movement, radical acceptance and peace and love, the anti-war stuff.

So he starts a new organization with his children, his oldest kids, called Teens for Christ.

Now, he is 50 at the time, so that's your first problem, right?

Probably shouldn't be running a teens organization when you're 50.

But his goal is to reach all of these newly awoken hippie kids in Huntington Beach, at the apex of the hippie movement in Southern California, and convince them that the real path to radical change is a Christian revolution that can sweep away the corruption of like the warmongering administration and usher in a better future.

He's got no church at first, and in fact, he doesn't have much in the way of resources at all, so he preaches out of a coffee house called the Light Club.

And I'm going to quote from a 2005 Rolling Stone article by Peter Wilkinson here.

Reject society, he implored them.

With his long white beard and prominent Adam's apple, Berg evoked a crazed Santa.

To his followers, he was mesmerizing.

Who are the real rebels of today?

He asked.

We are the true lovers of peace and love and truth and beauty and God and freedom, whereas you, our parents, are on the brink of destroying and polluting all of us and our world if we do not rise up against you in the name of God and try to stop you.

He came to be known to his children as Moses David, or simply Mo.

So it's all coming together.

Yeah.

So

the only thing I'm confused by is that his mom invited him back.

Yeah.

But he doesn't have a platform.

Like he's not.

He's not in the church.

He's doing this, all this on the side, or what's the...

From my understanding, and a little bit of this is unclear, but he he is initially working with her in a couple other churches, but they don't like how radical he is.

Okay.

Because he's like really anti-war.

He's like anti-military.

And that's not super popular among like these otherwise kind of conservative Christian groups.

Right.

And that's kind of why he gets exiled to this coffee house.

So his mom is the one who brings him back.

But you even see in that rhetoric.

Part of what he's drawn to the hippie movement by and why he's appealing to them is he is also very angry at like his parents, at the older generation.

That's a big part of the hippie movement.

So they're kind of natural partners in a way.

Yeah.

The other thing that really kind of weirded me out about that description was he has a long white beard

and a prominent Adams apple.

Now,

those two things are hard to coexist because

the implication is that his Adams apple is so prominent that it protrudes through his beard.

Through his beard.

I love that you pick up up on that.

Because the beard would otherwise obscure anyone's Adam's apple.

Yeah.

So I'm picturing an Adam's apple that is so long and weird and pointy that it is disturbingly protruding from his beard.

It's like a goiter?

He got an Adams goiter.

Yeah, he's got an Adams goiter.

His goiter had another Adam's apple.

Maybe

was this Father Adams apple?

And by the way, where's Mother Eve?

Is Mother Eve still in in the picture?

She is still around.

She's helping to lead Teens for Christ.

They are together.

He says that she's constantly telling him, like, you're not as holy as you pretend to be, which seems likely given that she knows what he's been up to his whole life.

So they don't have a good marriage, which is going to become relevant later because it's not going to last much longer.

She's kind of undermining him or his psychotic

agenda.

Yeah,

you could see he would say undermining mining, and maybe that's some of it.

It also might be that just she was trying to be like, look, man, you need to, like, I know you're not this guy.

I know the real you.

You know, I don't know entire, I can't claim to have the entire, you know, understanding, but it's not going well,

the marriage.

So one of his early members, one of the first people to join Teens for Christ in 1969 is a former beauty queen named Vashti, or at least that's the last name that she gives to Peter Wilkinson.

And she explained kind of of her and a lot of the early people to join the organization.

Most of us were middle and upper middle class kids who found that chasing materialism didn't work and felt that there had to be something bigger and more satisfying.

Because we had it all, we were looking for the vacuum to be filled by God.

We wanted to change the world, right?

And that's kind of her psychoanalysis of herself and a lot of the early members, right?

And, you know, at this point, Teens for Christ, this is not, this is turning into a cult, but it's not fully a cult yet, right?

This is like you're meeting at a coffee house.

You're handing out a statue in the street.

It's a youth group.

He does have you like handing out pamphlets and raising money, but the cult stuff kind of gets in comes in gradually, piece by piece, right?

You're not all living together immediately.

And you're feeling like if you'd come out of the hippie movement, that you haven't really left the counterculture, right?

The hippie movement, you know, by the kind of 69, 70, especially by like 70, it's starting to become clear that it has failed in a lot of its goals and a lot of people who are kind of traumatized are left in the wake.

What separates David Berg from all the other groups, like you mentioned, Manson, but also like Tony Alamo, who we've talked about, who has a ministry that's kind of part of this Jesus freak movement.

What separates Berg from these other groups picking up these people is that he, well, I guess with the exception of Manson,

he and Manson actually have a lot in common because

they are the ones who are like, we're going to pull in a lot of this evangelical rhetoric, but we're also, we're going to bring in a lot of central tenets of the hippie movement.

And with Berg, that's going to eventually include free love, right?

Not immediately, but he's already as early as like 68, 69, he's starting to think maybe the hippies have a point about this.

People shouldn't be getting married and just having sex with one person thing, right?

Like this should be like, maybe that's like part of the system, right?

Right.

Maybe there's a, maybe there's a belief system or a way of thinking, a way of believing that that validates all of my insane behavior and antisocial psychotic

sexual exploitation.

Maybe there's a construct I can subscribe to and get others to subscribe to that makes all that just fine.

Yeah, I've been doing a lot of fucked up sex stuff in my life.

Maybe that's because that's what God wants.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, that's kind of where he goes.

And that's, by the way, which is, which is even, I would say, I would call what he's doing even a different lane than free love.

60s free love.

Yes.

I should be clear that like, and we'll talk more about this.

free love is the branding he's going to use.

It's not that.

Right, right.

All right.

That tracks.

Yes, yes.

He also does preach a lot at this point at the coffee house.

He starts preaching about the system.

He refers to people in mainstream society as systemites, right?

And

he's cloaking himself in the language of rebellion to gain followers, and it works.

Wilkinson's article describes how Berg used his early followers to recruit more.

Ashes smudged on their foreheads, clad in red sackcloth robes and carrying shepherd staffs, members of Teens for Christ hit the streets and cities across America, from New York to Washington, D.C.

to Chicago, what they referred to as the mission field.

Strumming guitars, they handed out stacks of literature to passersby in exchange for donations.

In those early days, money raised on the mission field went primarily to charities.

Our duty is to the lost souls, Intoned Berg, who traveled in a Dodge motorhome with his wife, Jane, and their four children.

So, again,

You're seeing some cultier elements here, but they're giving away most of the money.

And they're getting, when they get media coverage, it's kind of a lot of it's positive.

It's like, oh, these kids are, this is part of the anti-war movement.

They're trying to make the world, they're raising money for charity.

His mom, however, is horrified.

She accuses him of being a carbon copy of Fred Jordan, the guy who'd fired him, and mocks his obsession with the system because she's done really well in the system.

She's like, Churchianity, not so bad.

Churchianity, it's great.

Excited for more Churchianity.

Yeah, that is what she's saying until the spring of 68, when Virginia dies.

And David, you get the feeling, and you get the feeling because he writes about this, that this is, he considers his mom's death the first moment in his life that he's really free.

And there's a good breakdown of this in an article for Cultic Studies Journal by Dr.

Stephen Kent, who writes, Berg's lifelong resentfulness and anger burst forth shortly after his mother's death at a public meeting that he called, to which he invited many of his mother's friends, plus the press.

His daughter Deborah recalls this August gathering in which he came out with his big proclamation against the system.

And so his mom is famous.

After she dies, he gets a lot of her friends, members of the evangelical community together with reporters to like eulogize his mom.

And instead of eulogizing her, he goes on the attack.

And this is how his daughter Deborah describes this meeting.

The press was there and all my grandmother's old friends, and there he just blows them all away.

He just damns the system and damns the church system, damns the war in Vietnam, damns the political system, damns parents for raising their kids wrong.

I mean, oh, everything.

So it was kind of like all this vehemence against everything that he was disgusted with or mad about.

He just came out against it after she died.

He just began to practice what and how he really wanted to be.

And first off, this really, this alienates him from mainstream evangelical society forever.

It gets a lot of press.

And he will write later that he felt like his mom and dad both needed to go away so that he could become the man he was meant to be.

And it becomes clear to him after this the man he's meant to be is the leader of a new religious sect one that merges the values of pentecostal evangelism with radical sexual liberation

yeah

it's gonna go well it's kind of branched a video in it's like it's a whole pattern of just like let's have like a staunch disciplined belief structure but we get to fuck all we want but but we get or at least one of us does right particularly the guy in charge this guy this guy does like i get to do all the fucking yeah yeah exactly exactly god and who believe why do people think like why do people follow that guy well you know i mean i get it he's charismatic yeah he's charismatic and it's it's interesting ed because when it comes to guys like koresh i have that same question where it's like but he's the only one who gets to do this stuff why do people go along with this Berg starts that way, but as we'll talk about, eventually he's like, actually, everyone gets to have sex as long as I get to like direct the sex.

Whoa.

So

it's weirder than that with him, but you do see like, oh, I get why some people would be like into this, right?

We have to go to ads in a sec, but as a spoiler, Fleetwood Mac is about to come into the picture briefly.

So

race for that.

We're back.

So at this point, his mom is dead.

It's like 69 or so, 68, 69.

His mom is dead and he's thrilled.

And he is off the chain.

Dancing on her grave.

Right.

This is, she had been like the last thing tethering him to some kind of reality.

Finally, free.

So he's got, kind of by late 68, maybe a few dozen, maybe a hundred or so followers at this point.

And they've started living together.

They're splitting their lives between they've got a five-story building in Los Angeles and a small ranch in West Texas.

He's been, some of this is because he's been gathering money from his followers.

I'm sure he inherits something from his mom that helps too.

Real Real estate's a lot cheaper back then.

A journalist who'd started following them in the early days when they'd crisscrossed the country raising money

had reported in an article on them.

He had like cited a passage from the Bible, Matthew 5, 9, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

So this journalist, when he sees them doing their anti-war stuff, had cited this passage from the Bible, and that really sticks in Berg's head.

And he likes it a lot.

And he starts to call, they transition from calling themselves Teens for Christ to he starts calling his group, which is now a cult, the Children of God, right?

That's where the name comes from.

So as a note, reporters, don't suggest stuff like that when you're covering groups like this.

It could go badly for everybody.

So it's still, at this point, they're living together.

He's directing a lot of control for his members' lives, but it's maybe not totally clear to people outside that what's happened, that Teens for Christ has become a full-on cult, right?

And how many people are we talking?

We're talking between 68 and 69, between like 100 and a couple of hundred people over the course of that year, right?

It's going to get much larger, but this is just the start, right?

And so it's small enough that he's kind of able to keep everyone together.

They're moving between LA and West Texas, you know, depending on the time of year.

Probably some people are permanently one place, some people are in the other.

But he's able to maintain a lot of direct personal control, right, over the children of God.

And while they're clad in the aesthetics of hippie dom, they're like dressing and and looking like hippies, he hasn't yet had the courage to tell everyone to break free of the conservative sexual mores of the system of churches that he'd been raised in.

Up to the start of the 70s, within the children of God, there was no dating or premarital sex allowed, right?

And when new members joined, because Berg was like, well, you just came out of the hippie.

I can't trust entirely that you're ready for our rules.

He would assign them a buddy.

who was to watch them at all times, even follow them into the bathroom to make sure they're not backsliding into their heathen ways.

So there's already a lot of control, and they are at the start very conservative in terms of like sexual stuff, right?

Can I ask a question

about

the guy?

Like, do we have a sense of what it's like to just be in the same room with this guy?

Is he funny?

Is he like,

does he kind of have a weird warmth to him?

Is he chatty, accessible, or is he kind of like a stern, you know, like patrician type?

Do we have a sense of his energy?

Yes.

I'll read some quotes in a bit, but to briefly answer your question, he is mercurial in a way that a lot of these guys are.

So he can go from being your best friend and very charming to screaming at you and punishing you in the space of a second, right?

Which you get, and that's...

There's a degree to which the kind of psychological whiplash of that kind of person is almost addictive to some people, right?

It's the same kind of, you get these dynamics in like abusive romantic relationships too, right?

Where once they flip to the bad side, you really want to get them back to the good side.

And that's part of what keeps people, you know, coming back.

And Berg is a lot like that.

But when he's good, it is very charismatic.

And he's able to make you feel like not only do you matter, but you're helping to save the world, right?

Yeah.

So as I said, he's still holding his cult to these kind of strict sexual norms, but his heart's not in this after his mom dies, right?

He doesn't really believe this.

It's kind of running on impulse for a little while.

And he's also, he's having trouble like keeping himself to the same standards that he's holding his people to, right?

He's, he's

never been good at this.

One of his early recruits, Sam Ajimian, claims that Berg acted as a dictator in this period, making every choice for the children of God, saying, quote, Berg convinced himself and us that he was the greatest man who ever lived, second to Jesus.

Now, this gives you a lot of leeway.

Like, Berg starts drinking in this period, and he would often address his congregation while hammered.

He is like a full-on alcoholic in this point.

And he also, he's able to exercise a lot of control over daily life, right?

Like he has chore lists for everybody.

Everybody's day is like scripted out to the minute by Berg.

So he is, he's holding them in a lot of control and he starts to covet control over the bodies of his followers, particularly a young woman in her mid-20s who had joined his church in 1969.

Berg breaks, like he's still married to Mother Eve at this point, but this is kind of when the dam breaks and he's no longer able to abide by these things he doesn't believe anymore.

And he starts sleeping with this new member of his cult three months after she joins.

Now, this is an issue both because he's preaching against such things and because his wife is helping him run the church and she's not going to be happy about this.

And he decides the way to get around this is to change the gospel, right?

So he comes out and says, hey guys, I just did some intensive research into the Bible and I found out some stuff.

You're not going to believe it.

God is fine with polygamy, right?

So he sends out the first of what are called his Mo letters, right?

Because his followers have shortened Moses to Mo.

And he announces that he's replacing the old church with the new church and the old wine with the new wine.

And the wine in this is like the old wine is his wife and the new wine is this 19-year-old girl that he has started sleeping with, right?

And he tells them that it's God's orders he does this, right?

He writes, if you'll you'll even take a look at Bible history, you'll make the shocking discovery that most of God's greats had oodles of wives, women, mistresses, harlots, and what have you, which is like not wrong, like not incorrect like that.

There's a lot of like mistresses and stuff from like different, you know, kings and whatnot in the Bible.

Concubines.

Concubines, right?

And, you know, you could even find some like early Catholic figures who are like, actually, you know, maybe there's not a problem.

Maybe the church doesn't have a problem with sex work.

There's some actually interesting stuff from like kind of like the middle of the last century on that.

And Berg is embracing this for a very selfish reason, right?

Because he wants to have a bunch of different wives.

And this is kind of the early 70s is when he starts putting this stuff out when he starts saying like, actually, it's cool for me to marry whoever I want.

And by this point, kind of 71 or so, there's a couple of hundred members of the cult.

And they've got communal houses and farms in a bunch of different states.

And Berg is traveling around these different properties.

He's not just sleeping with this 19-year-old member who joined.

He starts going to different, every time he spends a couple of days at a new church house, he'll pick up a woman or two there and he'll start sleeping with them, right?

One of the things that starts to happen, and he's not yet saying, hey, we can all do free love stuff, but once he leaves after doing this, a different location, the house leader will be like, well, maybe it's fine if I start sleeping with people.

And right?

So, the kind of free love stuff is almost people start mirroring him before he makes that official policy where they're like, Well, he's he's sleeping around with everybody.

Maybe it's fine if we all do it.

Yeah, of course.

Um, yeah, so question about the Mo letters: is he in these letters, is he citing like sort of a divine message that he heard directly from God, or is he citing just sort of like his hot take on biblical passages, or uh, or just sort of like some new philosophy out of whole cloth.

Like, what's the nature of these Mo letters?

It's a little of both.

So

he is citing passages from the Bible to justify things that he's doing, but he's also, he's a prophet, right?

He has a direct line to God.

So there's stuff where he'll cite a passage that, like a lot of things in the Bible, you could interpret that a bunch of different ways.

And he'll say, but God told me, this is what it means, right?

So this is the rule now.

Right, right, right.

Okay, yeah.

So, he is claiming

that he has a divine voice from God.

Yes, how old is he at this point?

He's in his 50s.

He's claiming he's going to help usher in the apocalypse, right?

That, like, when the end of days comes, he's going to be a key part of that, and that this church is going to be a key part of like Jesus coming back and finding the Antichrist, right?

Would this picture I'm sharing be an accurate representation of what he's looking like at the time?

That's what he looks like at the time.

For the audio-only

audience, he's got a scraggly white beard.

Can't see the Adams Apple, though.

Can't see the Adams apple.

Curly hair.

Looks like he's wearing some kind of a robe.

He's almost got like a Mennonite beard, where it's like shaved on the sides.

Yeah.

Well,

it has kind of a monkish

hairline.

It's like his hairline is receded to the top of his head,

but he has sort of like a

silver halo almost almost of hair and

a nice silver beard.

I will say an incredibly warm and gentle smile

in this photo, at least.

Yeah, you could see how people could see him like, well, this must be a good man.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

So this kind of the fact that he is sleeping around and increasingly so are the different sort of like local cult chapters proves to be a valuable recruiting tool, right?

It kind of differentiates them from a lot of these other groups pulling in shrapnel from the hippie movement.

It makes it more accessible to these countercultural people.

And he realizes this, and he starts adopting new counterculture shibboleths to kind of extend this practice and keep pulling in this kind of group of people.

I'm going to quote from Dr.

Stephen Kent's article again.

After the group departed from California and traveled across the continent, ending up at Camp Laurentide in Quebec, Burke increasingly justified forms of nudity among his followers.

In the Texas Seoul Clinic camp from February 1970 to September 1971, Berg required women to go brawless, undoubtedly borrowing the idea from a trend within the women's movement.

His December 27th, 1970 poem, Mountain Maid, Note the Sexual Illusion, gives no indication that Berg's brawless policy was designed as a political statement against the Baldi politic, as was the women's movement action.

And this is really important, because this is the key to understanding Berg.

He's talking about burning your bra.

He's telling his followers they should stop wearing bras.

But the actual, like the secular version of this is really about liberation.

You can't tell us what to do with our bodies or what to wear.

Berg is telling his followers, it is an order, burn your bra, right?

It is an order, don't wear a bra.

And when he's traveling around to different communal homes and he sees a female follower, he will grab her chest.

forcibly to make sure she's not wearing one.

So you see, there's this language of liberation.

Yeah, but it's the opposite, right?

It's all about control.

It's so evil, but it's so interesting that he has figured out, like, I can use this language of freedom in order to take control away from my followers for myself.

No.

Yeah.

And I think we're fully in cult territory here.

Not hard to, not hard to justify at that point.

And this is like,

he's, these are like orders, right?

Like the fact that you're not, you know, you have to dress this way.

you can't do this, like I'm going to touch you at whatever point.

Like these are,

like, these are his orders.

And not only that, but his followers have to read

the erotic poetry he's putting out about stuff like this.

And I just cited the poem Mountain Maid, which I am not going to read entirely for you, but I will quote two, like, or a single stanza to give you an idea of the poem.

How long is it?

How long is the whole thing?

I'm saving that for the end.

Don't worry.

There's a reveal coming.

But here's a single stanza to give you an idea.

And this is like a less explicit stanza.

Let those mountains be more visible and their clothing more divisible.

Right.

And again, this is like

the least explicit portion.

It gets, it's a lot worse.

You know what's it?

What's cool is that visible rhymes with divisible.

Divisible?

Bad poem?

Yeah.

You'd think a prophet would do better than that.

Now, I picked those lines because they're the least explicit portion of the poem.

But I do need to read this note from Dr.

Berg's piece because Berg quotes 10 lines from the poem and then writes, the poem continues in this vein for a total of 301 lines.

Oh my God.

Wow.

All right, bro.

Oh, man.

So, Ed, that's most of what we got for part one.

As I told you, Fleetwood Mac comes into one member of Fleetwood Mac comes into the story, right?

That's got to be kind of like our fun little thing in part two.

There's a couple of like weird celebrity connections here.

One guy drops out of Fleetwood Mac to join this church.

There's also a couple of celebrities who are born into it,

but don't seem to have like Joaquin Phoenix is born into it, but leaves when he's three.

So, you know, there's not a lot to actually say about that, but it's something you'll come across in all the articles on it.

Like I tend to not like try to go into detail or speculate about stuff like that, just because like, you know, people have a right not to, but it's, if you run into articles about this, it's going to be in every single one of them, right?

Because it's just like a lead line for a lot of people, which will show you that like this is going to be for a while, like a very kind of almost hip countercultural movement, right?

Like that's what he's sort of started to build here.

And in the early 70s, even while he's being very abusive, there's almost this degree to which the children of God are cool, right?

Like, and that's, that's kind of a unique thing for a cult like this to be not totally unique, but for it to be, to have so much appeal to people who are like prominent, right?

Like that's kind of an interesting aspect of this that we'll be getting into a lot more in part two.

But Ed, part one is done.

You want to plug your show at the end here before we roll out for the day?

Yeah, let's talk a little more about Snafu,

the fabulous podcast that I do

that I'm insanely proud of.

And

season you should be.

Season three is out now.

I'm in production on season four, and I'm extremely excited about season four because we're breaking the format.

We're doing something new and different and

very exciting, which I'll get into more at another time.

But season three is cranking along.

It's fully out.

You can binge it, eight episodes.

And then, of course, my book.

Get my book.

Also, Snafu.

Yeah, S-N-A-F-U.

All right, Ed.

Well, thank you so much again for being on the show.

We will be back in just a few minutes.

But to you, the listener, we'll be back on Thursday.

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