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

Robert sits down with Ed Helms to discuss one of our worst monsters: David Berg, founder of the Children of God cult.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, 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

(00:22):
bastard in a way that makes them palatable, We've got
to bring on one of the best guests we've ever had,
a man who needs no introduction, perhaps the Eddiest of all, Helms.
Ed Helms, Welcome back to the show. Ed.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
Yeah, I agree, I'm extremely edi ish Eddie.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Ed, I'm I don't know if I'm the eddiest, but.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
You're definitely the Helmsest of Eds. I think we can
agree with that.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
I'm the Helmsiest, yeah for sure.

Speaker 4 (00:51):
And you and you're the host of Snaffo.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Right, Yeah, great podcast entering season three. It's a pod
cast 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 US government.
Last season, you talked about the massive, sweeping, unprecedented civilian
led infiltration and expose of FBI surveillance files. And this

(01:19):
season you're talking about how the US government tried to
poison a shitload of people during Prohibition.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
Yeah, it's a dodgy. It's a dodgy world out there, folks,
and we are living in it. But no, thank you
for that blog. I'm extremely proud of 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

(01:46):
Film Nation and myself and yeah, we just do a
ton of reason.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
It's legit.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
It's like legit, really really good 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.

Speaker 4 (02:02):
And on the on the YouTube, will put the graphic
up first.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Okay, good books, we got.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yeah, it's a fantastic book, New York Times bestseller, also
called snapfo 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 Kaboodle in the.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Book snaff Ooz. Well, we're talking about a great screw
up today, although it's it's not a screw up of
just the US government. It's more like every time a
cult leader gets way too big for their breches. 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 we screw

(02:47):
it up? How did that happen?

Speaker 2 (02:49):
Today?

Speaker 1 (02:50):
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. We're back. Have you ever heard of these guys?

Speaker 4 (03:09):
Ed?

Speaker 3 (03:10):
Just the most, the tiniest bit, Like I have the
broadest sense of this group.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
I might recall more as you go.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
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 in the guys. You're 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 in
the middle you've got the guys where they're like physically
and mentally abusing people, but they're not like killing anyone.

(03:43):
David Berg is on kind of the far end of
the spectrum where like 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 this kind of like evangelical Christianity, like pentecostal

(04:05):
preaching in the mid centuries. A very weird guy. But yeah,
I'll just get into it.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
Like nothing you just said makes sense, that doesn't say,
But that's the beauty of cults, like you just kind
of make it up.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Yeah, Yeah, they can make it up as they go along,
and they're very rooted in their time. Right, This quolte
couldn't have gotten started any other year but like nineteen
sixty eight, which is in fact when it gets started.
David Brandt Berg was born on February eighteenth, nineteen nineteen,
kind of at the height of the influenza pandemic. His
parents were Virginia Burg and Healmerberg. They were both evangelical

(04:39):
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 US, 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

(05:01):
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, Helmer, who was a Swedish immigrant to

(05:24):
the US, had been converted by his maternal grandfather and
before finding Jesus, Helmer was a quote cigar smoking beer
drinking wild dancing party going, good looking and loose living
young man of the world.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
I would think anyone named Hyalmer.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yeah, it's that description.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah, it seems like a loose slipping man.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
You know what origin is that name?

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Swedish? Yeah, he's very sweetish.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah, Jalmer. I like it.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
And it's 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 while I drank
beer and danced, right, It's like, I don't know, man,
I've known worse guys. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
Depends on what kind of like how much beer and
what kind of dancing.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
I suppose that.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
Is a good point.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
Dancing can get dirty.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
Yes, yes, we know. What was it? Kevin Bacon? Let
us all know, Patrick Swayze, pastor Jesus Christ. I know
that's shameful. So one of the weird little facts about
his parents is that before she met Helmer, Virginia, his
mom was engaged to be married to Bruce Bogart, who
I think was Humphrey Bogart's cousin, which is just a

(06:35):
weird fact. Helmer was hired entertainment at the wedding and
she just kind of leaves her fiance 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.

(06:58):
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 potshots at her in the biography that he
wrote about himself. I think that's probably more what's happening here.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
We call that an auto biography.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
Yeah, sorry, Yes, Hylmer and Virginia go to religious universities.
His mom goes to Texas Christian University and gets a
degree there. They have their first son, David's older brother,
in nineteen eleven, his older sister in nineteen fifteen, and
David's the youngest of the family in nineteen nineteen. Virginia
would later claim that after having her daughter, she had

(07:37):
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 looked into the
family 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

(07:59):
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 come, you just lie about your backstory
because it sells better.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
Rights.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
It's a show, right, right, exactly like Bob Dylan, but
like Boby right, like Bob Dylan, or a pro wrestler
like a.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Lot of entertainers.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
True, 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
illness illnesses that were cured via prayer. His bio on
the website established by the cult he later founds, says

(08:39):
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 increased

(09:00):
the 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

(09:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, maybe. I mean that would do a lot more
than blind you.

Speaker 1 (09:36):
It seems like right, And he's like, we have pictures
of his face because.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Those are those are made of iron. Those things are
like an exploding water heater.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
It's like an ied going off.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah yeah, fully like a lot of shrapnel for real.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah yeah, and his face is like fine, Like there's
not really much evidence of this. What we can confirm
is that he grows up, like I said, in this
family that it's almost like a wrestle ling 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.

Speaker 3 (10:10):
Going on these church revivals, Like from the get go,
he's just they're like living on the.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
Road sometimes he is for a part of his early life.
I think up until he's like ten or eleven 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 he doesn't have a lot
of friends and he barely sees his mom, right, because
they're very busy and traveling constantly.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
Uh, 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 californ 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

(11:09):
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 like uncles and
aunts occasionally, and he doesn't get a lot of attention.
And this is kind of highlighted by the fact that

(11:30):
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.

(11:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
Right. That's so interesting.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Do I read that in Victorian England this was commonplace
that governesses would give little boys hand jobs essentially at
bedtime tot Yes, the theory being that they would help
them fall asleep.

Speaker 1 (12:17):
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 responts
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 he
would have thought, and he, as a kid, thinks it's

(12:40):
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 him pushing this on a lot of
other kids.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
It's so complex, it's it's a really complicated and not
the maternal figure battling with his caretaker. Yeah, like the
where is his loyalty right in all of that? And
the abuse, yeah, is is sort of justified in somewhere
attempt you know, he tries to sure yeah, or and

(13:22):
the and the the maid it's like his mate, Yeah,
nanny or whatever.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
Wow, that's wild.

Speaker 1 (13:29):
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, 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.

(13:51):
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 base, a little bowl in
a knife and told me she was going to cut
it off, right, She threatens to like circumcise him.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
Basically when you say experimenting, he's just like mass masturbating.

Speaker 1 (14:09):
Oh 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 this kid is stacking
a lot of trauma. We're at age seven at this point, right,
which is when he has a confused sexual encounter with
a cousin of the same age, right, who's also seven.

(14:31):
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

(14:53):
lot of sexual trauma before age ten 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

(15:15):
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

(15:35):
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 or when his dad quote 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.

Speaker 4 (15:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
We are talking about the twenties here, so not a
healthy upbringing.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
The irony is irony is that he's right that, yeah,
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.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
They should have intervened been like, this isn't your fault, right,
exactly all of that, but this isn't okay.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
Yeah, it's both not your fault and not okay. Yeah,
And and he seems to have walked away with all.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
The wrong all the wrong things. And you know, it
is hard to imagine a couple of parents in the
twenties having gotten this kind of situation, right, you know, like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
Not a lot of tools. They didn't have a lot
a lot of tools.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
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 US. They live
in like a dozen states. They spend some time in Canada.
His mom is becoming increingly prominent. She has like a ministry,
which means she's a known preacher. She's getting invitations from

(17:05):
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.

(17:27):
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 twelve 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

(17:50):
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 terrible use
for churches, but that's what these kind of ones are, right.

Speaker 3 (18:02):
So interesting, Yeah, I wonder if they had tax exempt status.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
Oh yeah, no, these people are paying taxes.

Speaker 3 (18:10):
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, I don't like.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
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 wedding documentary from nineteen seventy
three called Marjo m A. R. Joe with this dude
who was a kid when he was like five. His
parents were traveling preachers like David's, and they had him
like they billed him as like the youngest preacher. They

(18:44):
like taught him, wrote how to do stuff like perform weddings,
and as an adult, he 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. So after the business

(19:07):
goes under, the Helmer 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 thirteen, but it was the thirties. Yeah, yeah,

(19:32):
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

(19:53):
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 eighty year history of the school. Now there's
no evidence of this, Like, we know he graduated in

(20:14):
nineteen thirty five, but I've never heard, like the school
doesn't claim that he did the best of anyone there.
So he's the 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

(20:35):
School of Business Administration. This I think is in Washington,
d C. But it may have been there, maybe been
another business school by the same name that 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

(20:56):
of months he drops out of school and decides to
go into full time evangelical work, like doing the same
thing his parents has 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, thirty five to forty one? Yeah,

(21:19):
So David doesn't make any additional direct claims about what
he's doing until December seventh, nineteen forty one, which I
think most people that 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 led
him in any way, and that he served as a
conscientious subjector because he didn't believe it would be ethical

(21:40):
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 subjectors and non combat
roles in World War Two, 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 and evangelical organizations he was

(22:02):
a part of that were keeping track of what he
was doing in the early forties, 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

(22:22):
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 thirties to the early forties, 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.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
And he added this sort of military bullet point on
his resume just for some added credibility or yes, to
just kind of spin the story a little more.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
You got to spend the story. You can't have said,
especially you know in the fifties sixties that like you
didn't do anything during World War Two, 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 consciences subjector right, I didn't want to fight. Also,
so that's kind of why I think he cooks that up.

(23:15):
There's not really evidence.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
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, it
sounds like you you sound convinced he made it up.

Speaker 1 (23:30):
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

(23:51):
the early forties 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 two one four, which
is like the discharge paperwork you get from the army
for him. But also this in 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

(24:13):
army didn't work then like it does now.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
Right, So I mean without the d D one two four,
we don't know anything.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
No, Like we can't prove one way or the other.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
We got to get the d D one two four. Yeah,
the paperwork.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah, we know, and we just don't have it, so
we don't really know what he was doing. But it's
not 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.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:39):
The other thing that's convenient, Ed is the products and
services that support this podcast. And we're back, all right,
So at this point and Ed's or sorry. At this
point in David's story, he's been miraculously healed from DOUBLENEMONI. Yeah,

(25:00):
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 Two, you know, traveling around
doing preaching with his parents. In nineteen forty four, 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,

(25:22):
and the couple starts having kids in quick succession. They
have Debora in nineteen forty five, Aaron a couple of
years later, Jonathan a year after that, and then their
fourth kid, who has my favorite name of their children,
Faith ye in fifty one, just Faith with a y.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
Huh.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, I haven't heard that one. I haven't heard that name.

Speaker 3 (25:42):
That's one you gotta spell every time. Yeah, Faith, Ye Faithee,
it's like faithee.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:48):
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 nineteen forty eight to continue his education. In
between classes, he's on the move a lot. He'll sleep

(26:11):
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 nineteen forty
nine 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

(26:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
Maybe it was kind of just like a nickname.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
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 and has life.
His congregation was a mixture of Southern Whites, Indians, and

(27:03):
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 right right.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
It's so funny, it's so magnanimous, it's such a such
an intrinsically a wholesome thing to advocate and preach integration.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Share great, But then it has a little bit of Yeah,
a little bit of money. Some of that sheddars falls
on me. What's what's wrong with that?

Speaker 1 (27:40):
What about old David?

Speaker 2 (27:41):
Huh?

Speaker 1 (27:42):
Then David get a cut.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
You gotta cut mother, reeve out of this.

Speaker 1 (27:46):
Come on, now, I know 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. Now 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

(28:08):
is the thing that this is like the one thing
you can't do, right.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
A lot of them do it.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
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

(28:33):
I think that's probably why he gets fired, right, and
maybe just the adultery was kind of the last straw.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
Is mother Eve still in the picture.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
Oh yeah, yeah, she's never happy with him. They do
not have a great marriage, although a lot of that
seems down to be he just cheating like constantly on her.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
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 accuse them of fostering Churchianity rather than Christianity. Right,

(29:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Also, but I do love the word churchianity.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
Churchianity, churchianity.

Speaker 3 (29:35):
Yeah, it seems like something that the that that someone
would advocate at the annual ch like fourth of July. Pot, look, guys,
we need more Churchianity, more Churchianity, Churchianity.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
He's got a gift for like words, right, And it's
also it's very modern, almost cut, 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 of the right. Ear, everyone wants to be like
there's a system that I'm against, right, and like you
can be a rebel too.

Speaker 2 (30:04):
What's the great movie?

Speaker 1 (30:06):
What's is it?

Speaker 2 (30:07):
Paccino or somebody. It's like, I'm gonna put the system
on trial.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
Oh yes, Cerproicoproo, Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:15):
And then it's kind of reminiscent of our our last
discussion about old Kurdi Jarvin.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
Yeah yeah, the cathedral, right, yes, yes, exactly everything.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
You gotta have a cool name for the for the
for the enemy.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
Yeah, or how Andrew Tatl call it the matrix, right,
like it's it's all of these. Yeah, you got to
you gotta have this big system that like you're the
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

(30:52):
experience inspired him to attempt another move into secular life,
so he goes to Arizona State University in nineteen fifty one,
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

(31:13):
see the early Christian Church, and 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 write like, this is the fifty early fifties

(31:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
Right.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
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 fifties, 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,

(32:07):
trying to do anything but what his parents did, right,
because it sucks.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
There's something interesting here, which is that.

Speaker 3 (32:14):
If you are struggling to kind of like maintain stability
in your life and make ends meet, in general, communism
sounds pretty damn good.

Speaker 1 (32:26):
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 gonna stick with these beliefs in like
egalitarianism right when he starts. When he starts getting money
in his cult, the money goes to him, right, Like.

(32:49):
So in nineteen fifty four, 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 love TV like church program. He's also training missionaries
for foreign work, and Berg starts working in television effectively
right and for thirteen years he's Jordan's right hand man.

(33:13):
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 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

(33:35):
program on that he'd 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

(33:57):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yeah, remarkably self aware.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
Yeah, it was just about the power. 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.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Period or.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
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 it, he tried and I refused him. He does
start molesting his daughter, his youngest daughter, Faithy, when she's
about ten years old in nineteen sixty one, and one

(34:59):
of the writer for Rolling Stone, who Wilkinson, who wrote
a really good bio on this guy, also describes Faithy
as the daughter who resembled him the most, which is like,
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

(35:20):
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 and like the mid
sixties and make this a color program, right, And this

(35:40):
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 sixty seven. 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

(36:03):
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.

(36:23):
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.

(36:45):
Is that cool? Can you do that?

Speaker 2 (36:48):
No?

Speaker 4 (36:48):
Your move?

Speaker 3 (36:49):
You're refired. Yeah, you're double fired. I don't even know
what that means. You can't fire someone twice.

Speaker 2 (36:55):
It doesn't.

Speaker 3 (36:57):
It's like I guess, I guess you just say he
just had to like say the words twice, Yeah, because
it's just.

Speaker 1 (37:02):
War really fired, seriously, get out of here.

Speaker 3 (37:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
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 gonna 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?

Speaker 4 (37:43):
Like?

Speaker 1 (37:43):
No, absolutely not. So yeah, this is a bold move
and it fails. 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 like, you should come
here and start preaching. There's all these hippie kids, right

(38:05):
who had gotten involved in the anti war movement, started
experimenting with drugs. And this is a major thing happening
in the US at the time, where you've got at
sixty seven, sixty eight, sixty nine, 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 battle happened to them.

(38:26):
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, man'son

(38:46):
exactly a great example of it.

Speaker 3 (38:48):
So right, and sorry did you say that that his
mom was now running a church in Hunting Beach.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yes, a big one. She is successful at this point.

Speaker 3 (38:59):
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?

Speaker 1 (39:07):
By the way, three of them are adults, I think,
and one of them is like late teens, like Faith
is like nearly adult, and so his kids are mostly
grown at this point, right.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
And as Faith he weighed in, like as as an
adult as she.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
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 he did. So US involvement obviously in
Vietnam's in full swing at this point, and David decided
he's he finds himself on the anti war side of things.
Maybe he is legitimately anti war, right, like you can

(39:43):
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 Americans,
society is this like the pro war side of things,

(40:04):
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 fifty at the time,

(40:25):
so that's your first problem, right, Probably shouldn't be running
a teen's organization when you're fifty. 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

(40:46):
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 two thousand and five Rolling Stone article by
Peter Wilkinson. Here rejects society. He implored them. With his
long white beard and prominent Adam zapple Berg evoked a
crazed Santa to his followers. He was mesmerizing, who are

(41:08):
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 are parents, are on
the brink of destroying and polluting all of us in
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 Moe. So it's all coming together.

Speaker 3 (41:30):
Yeah, So the only thing I'm confused by is that
his mom invited him back.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah, but he doesn't.

Speaker 3 (41:37):
He doesn't have a platform, Like he's not in the church,
she's not here. He's doing this all this on the
side or what's the.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
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 concerns of it of Christian groups, Right, and that's
kind of why he gets exiled to this coffee house.
So his mom is one who brings him back. But

(42:07):
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 hip hippie movement. So they're kind of natural
partners in a way.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
The other thing that really kind of weirded me out
about that description was he as a long white beard.
Oh yeah, and a prominent Adam's apple. Now those are
those two things are hard to coexist because the implication
is that his Adam's apple is so prominent that it
protrudes through his beard.

Speaker 1 (42:44):
Through his I love that you pick up on that.

Speaker 3 (42:46):
Because 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.

Speaker 1 (42:57):
It's like a greater.

Speaker 2 (43:01):
Adams goiter.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, he's got an Adams goiter at.

Speaker 3 (43:04):
His goiter had another Adam's apple. Maybe this was this
father Adams apple was. And by the way, where's mother Eve?
Adam is Mother Eve still in the picture?

Speaker 1 (43:16):
She is still around, she's helping to lead Teens for Christ.
But 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.

Speaker 2 (43:35):
She's kind of undermining him or his psychotic agenda.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
Yeah, you could, you could see, he would say, undermine 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

(44:01):
his early members, one of the first people to join
Teens for Christ in nineteen sixty nine, 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

(44:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Right.

Speaker 1 (44:30):
And that's kind of her psychoanalysis of herself and a
lot of the early members.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Right.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
And you know this point teens, for christ this is
turning into a cult. But it's not fully a cult yet. Right.
This is like your meeting at a coffeehouse, you're handing
out he's got you 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,

(44:56):
and you're feeling like if you'd come out of the
hippie movement, that you haven't really left the counter culture, right.
The hippie movement, you know, by the kind of sixty
nine to seventy, especially by like seventy, it's started to
become clear that it has failed in a lot of
its goals and a lot of people who are kind
of traumatized or left in the wake. What separates David

(45:17):
Berg from all the other groups, like you mentioned Manson,
but also like Tony Alamo Alamo who we've talked about,
he 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 they are the ones
who are like, we're going to pull in a lot

(45:38):
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 sixty
eight sixty nine, 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

(45:59):
this be like, maybe that's like part of the system, right, right.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
Right, Maybe 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 anti social
psychotic sexual exploitation. Maybe there's a construct I can subscribe
to and get others to subscribe to that that makes

(46:25):
all that just just fine.

Speaker 1 (46:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
And that, 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 sixties free love.

Speaker 1 (46:42):
Yeah, I should be clear that, like, and we'll talk
more about this. Free love is the branding he's going
to eat. Yes, it's not that right right right? That
tracks yes, Yes. He also does preach a lot. At
this point at the coffeehouse, he starts preaching about the system.
He refers to people in mainstream society as systemites right
and seeks. He's cloaking himself in the language of rebellion

(47:03):
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's 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 passers

(47:25):
by 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 in honed Burg who
traveled in a Dodge motor home with his wife, Jane
and their four children. So again you're seeing some cultier
elements here, but they're given away most of the money,
and they're getting when they get media coverage, it's kind

(47:46):
of a lot of it's positive, as 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 fire him,
and mocks his obsession with the system. Because she's done
really well in the system.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
She's like Churchianity, not so Badianity.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
It's great.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Yeah, for more Churchianity.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
Yeah, that is what she's saying. Until the spring of
sixty eight 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 doctor Stephen Kent, who writes Berg's lifelong

(48:31):
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

(48:53):
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.

(49:15):
I mean o 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 alienates
him from mainstream evangelical society forever. It gets a lot
of press, and he will write later that he felt

(49:38):
like his mom and dad both needed to go away
so that he could become the man he would 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.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
Well, it's kind of a branch Davidian.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:09):
But we get or at least one of us does
particularly guy, this guy, this guy, does I get to
do all the fucking Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, And.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
Why do people think, like, why do people follow that guy? Well,
you know, I mean I get it. He's charismatic.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
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 it eventually, he's like, actually, everyone gets to have
sex as long as I get to like direct the sex.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
Whoa.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
So it's it's weirder than that with him, but you
do see, like I get why some people would be
like into this, right, Uh, we have to go to
ads in a sect. But as a spoiler, Fleetwood Mac
is about to come into the picture briefly race for
that we're back. So at this point, his mom is dead.

(51:07):
It's like sixty nine or so sixty eight sixty nine
is dead, and he's thrilled, he is and he is
he is off the chain, Dad saying on her grave, right,
this is she had been like the last thing tethering
him to some kind.

Speaker 4 (51:21):
Of reality finally free.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
So he's got kind of by late sixty eight, maybe
a few dozen, maybe one 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 to real estates a lot cheaper. Back then,

(51:49):
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 five nine, 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

(52:09):
sticks in Berg's head, and he likes it a lot,
and he starts to call the 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

(52:32):
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. The teens for
Christ has become a full on cult, right, And.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
How many people are we talking.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
We're talking between sixty and sixty nine, between like one
hundred and a couple one hundred people over the course
of that year, right, It's gonna 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 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

(53:07):
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 hippietom, they're like dressing and looking
like hippies. He hasn't yet had the courage to tell
everyone to break free of the conservative sexual moras of
the system of churches that he'd been raised in. Up
to the start of the seventies, within the Children of God,

(53:28):
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 movement, 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

(53:50):
conservative in terms of like sexual stuff.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Right.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
Can I ask you 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?

Speaker 2 (54:01):
Is he funny?

Speaker 3 (54:02):
Is he like is Does he kind of have a
weird a warmth to him?

Speaker 2 (54:08):
Is he chatty accessible?

Speaker 3 (54:11):
Or is he kind of like a stern you know,
like patrician type. Do we have a sense of of
his energy?

Speaker 1 (54:19):
And yes, I'll read some quotes in a bit, but
to briefly answer your question, he is mercurial in a
way that the 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.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Right.

Speaker 1 (54:41):
It's the same kind of you get these dynamics and
like abusive romantic relationships too, right, where once they flip
to the bad side, you really want to get him
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 your matter, but you're helping to save the world.

Speaker 2 (55:01):
Right.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
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. Rights, He's never been good at this. One

(55:27):
of his early recruits, Sam Ajemian, 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

(55:47):
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 choor lists for everybody. Everybody's day
is like scripted out to the minute by Berg. So
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 twenties who had

(56:10):
joined his church in nineteen sixty nine. Berg breaks like
he's still married to Mother Eve at this point. But
this is kind of when the damn 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

(56:30):
and because his wife is helping him run the church
and she's not gonna 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 gonna believe it.
God is fine with polygamy. Right. So he sends out

(56:52):
the first of what are called his mo letters, right
because his followers have shortened Moses to Moe, 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 nineteen year old
girl that he has started sleeping with. Right, And he
tells them that it's God's orders he does this, right,

(57:14):
He writes, if 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's 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 combines concubines, right,

(57:37):
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.

(57:59):
And this is kind of the early seventies, is when
he starts putting the stuff out, when he starts saying like, actually,
it's cool for me to marry whoever I want. And
by this point kind of seventy one or so, there's
a couple one hundred members of the cult, and they've
got communal houses and farms and a bunch of different states.
And Berg is traveling around these different properties. He's not

(58:20):
just sleeping with this nineteen 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.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
Right.

Speaker 1 (58:33):
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

(58:55):
we all do it.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
Yeah, of course. Yeah. So question about the letters.

Speaker 3 (59:01):
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 just sort of like some
new philosophy out of whole cloth, Like what's the nature

(59:21):
of these Moe letters.

Speaker 1 (59:23):
It's a little of both. So he's he's 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 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?

Speaker 3 (59:44):
Right?

Speaker 1 (59:44):
Right?

Speaker 2 (59:45):
Right?

Speaker 3 (59:45):
Okay, Yeah, so he is claiming that he has a
divine voice from God.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
Yes, how old is he at this point, He's in
his fifties. 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 find anti Christ. Right.

Speaker 4 (01:00:06):
Did this picture I'm sharing be an accurate representation of
what he's looking like at the time.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
That's what he looks like at the tide well, right, for.

Speaker 4 (01:00:13):
The audio only audience, he's got a scraggly white beard.

Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
Can't see the Adams Apple though.

Speaker 4 (01:00:21):
Fancy the Adams Apple curly hair. Looks like he's wearing
some kind of a robe.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
He's almost got like a Mennonite beard right where it's
like shaved on the sides.

Speaker 2 (01:00:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
Well, and it was kind of a Monkish like hairline
that it's like his hairline has receded to the top
of his head. But he has sort of like a
silver silver halo almost of hair and a nice, a
nice silver beard, I will say, an incredibly warm and

(01:00:54):
gentle smile in this photo at least.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
Yeah, you could see how people it'd seemed like, well,
this must be a good man, 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

(01:01:18):
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 counter culture shibbaleths to kind
of extend this practice and keep pulling in this kind
of this group of people. I'm going to quote from
doctor Stephen Ken's article again. After the group departed from
California and traveled across the continent, ending up at Camp

(01:01:40):
Laurentide and Quebec, Burke increasingly justified forms of nudity among
his followers in the Texas Soul Clinic camp from February
nineteen seventy to September nineteen seventy one, Berg required women
to go brawlless, undoubtedly borrowing the idea from a trend
within the women's movement. His December twenty seventh, nineteen seventy
poem Mountain made note the sexualllusion gives no indication that

(01:02:02):
Berg's brawless policy was designed as a political statement against
the baldy politic, as was the Woman'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
us followers they should stop wearing bras. But the actual,
like the secular version of this is really about liberation.

(01:02:22):
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 forcably to make sure she's
not wearing one. So you see there's this language. Yeah,

(01:02:45):
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, uh,
And I think we're fully in cult territory here. Uh,

(01:03:06):
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 this like the erotic poetry
he's putting out about stuff like this. And I just

(01:03:28):
cited the poem Mountain made, 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 of.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
The moment and how long is the whole thing?

Speaker 1 (01:03:41):
I'm saving that for the end. Don't worry, there's a
reveal coming, okay, But here's a single stands it to
give you an idea. And this is like a less
explicit stanza. Let those mountains be more visible and they're
clothing more divisible, right, And again this is like it
gets it's a lot worse.

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
What's cool is that visible rhinds with divisible visible bad poem?

Speaker 1 (01:04:06):
Yeah, you'd think a prophet would do better than that. Now,
I picked those lines because they're in the least explicit
portion of the poem, but I do need to read
this note from doctor Berg's piece, because Berg quotes ten
lines from the poem and then writes the poem continues
in this vein for a total of three hundred and
one lines. My god.

Speaker 3 (01:04:27):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
All right, well oh man, so ed, that's most of
what we got for part one. As I as I
told you, Fleetwood Mac comes into One member of Fleetwood
Mac comes into the story. Right, Uh, that's gonna be
kind of like our fun, 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.

(01:04:50):
There's also a couple of celebrities who are born into
it but don't 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

(01:05:12):
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 seventies, even
while he's being very abusive, there's almost this degree to

(01:05:35):
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

(01:05:56):
before we roll out for the day.

Speaker 3 (01:05:59):
Yeah, let's talk a little more about Snaffo, the fabulous
podcast that I do that I'm insanely proud of, and
Season you Should Be Season three.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Is out now.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):
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 snafo.

Speaker 1 (01:06:34):
Yeah s n afu. 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.

Speaker 4 (01:06:48):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:07:09):
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