On this Episode of The Sofa King Podcast, we take a run at one of the bigger cults operating in the world today, the Children of God, aka The Family International. It has had many names, from The Family of Love to Teens for Christ, and at the heart of it is a truly bizarre religious sect that is part Christian and part pimp. That’s right, they whore out women for Jesus, and he apparently likes it.

Their founder, David Berg was a preacher who had mixed results getting a congregation together in the 1960s. Eventually, he settled down in Huntington Beach and opened a Christian coffee shop. Calling himself “David Moses,” he eventually learned that in order to attract followers, he had to adapt to the counter culture memes of the era, and he started wearing baggy pants, sandals, a beret, and other hippie attire. Oh, and he also started to get people to have sex. So much sex.

Tapping in to the sexual revolution, he built up a religious following whose main goal was to attract new members. How did it attract members? Through a process he called Flirty Fishing. Flirty Fishing was his name for getting women from his church to have sex with men in order to get them to join. In fact, he rented the women out as an escort service, and once the religion really took off, he even had the children in the cult sleep with adult members. This was to indoctrinate the kids into a love of Jesus Sex and to get the adults to be complicit in the crime, so they wouldn’t defect and tell anyone.

David Berg communicated to his followers through a series of letters (called the Mo Letters) and comic books. That’s right, comic book full of sex. He was so into sex that he even told people to think of Jesus as the had orgasms and even as they masturbated. It wasn’t gay (which he had a problem with) as long as the men pretended they were women having sex with Jesus while they were masturbating. I wish I was making this up.

So what did the Children of God believe as part of their spiritual path? What was the nature of their god and their cosmos? What predictions did David Berg make, and did any of them come true? What happened to the group after he died? Which (pretty big!) celebrities were raised in this cult? Listen, laugh, learn.

Sad Story of Ex Cult Member: http://narrative.ly/my-childhood-in-an-apocalyptic-cult/