Epilogue: Beware of the Kool-Aid

Music featured in this post:

What It Sounds Like – KPop Demon Hunters

Things Have Changed – Bob Dylan

Masters of War – Bob Dylan

Teach Your Children Well – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Old Before My Time – The Allman Brothers Band

The epilogue in my memoir has two parts. In the first half I discuss the downfall of the Children of God/The Family cult. That discussion includes exposing numerous academic apologists who defended the cult over the years, thus enabling the widespread, systemic child abuse to continue for many years. That first half ends by detailing how second-generation survivors of that cult are responsible for rising up against their abusers and taking the cult down through their public activism and advocacy. They are the heroes of this story.

In the second half of the epilogue, I bring my story full circle by comparing current world events to similar events I experienced as a teen in the 1960s and early 70s that caused me great existential angst, which contributed to me running away to “join” a cult. In the 1960s a new wave of cults presented a danger to young people like me. Today, there are more cults than ever, not just religious or spiritual, but groups of all kinds that have similar cult characteristics and use the same cult techniques identified by academics working in this field. I end the book with this warning:

It’s too late for me, but let my story be a cautionary tale. Beware of blindly believing and being misled by persuasive proselytizers of all kinds. Don’t allow yourself and your children to be MISGUIDED.

In 2009, Karen Zerby and Steve Kelly, the leaders of the Children of God/The Family cult after David Berg’s death in 1994, presented a paper at the 2009 Conference of the Center for Studies on New Religious Movements, hosted in Salt Lake City, Utah from June 11th to June 13th, 2009. The paper, entitled: “The Future of the Family International: Establishing a Culture of Innovation and Progress,” outlined organizational changes and evangelistic goals. It was Zerby’s first ever public appearance, however, it was a secret appearance that no one but the academic cult apologists behind that conference were aware of. That was yet another example of how those unethical academics protected the cult and its leaders.

As The Salt Lake Tribune newspaper reported, Karen Zerby’s appearance at the conference was “her first-ever public address”.i After four decades living with Berg in hiding from enemies and followers alike, it isn’t surprising that Zerby wanted to keep her participation in the conference a secret until after it was over. It also isn’t surprising that they chose to present their paper at the Center for Studies on New Religious Movements conference rather than at a similar annual conference held by the International Cultic Studies Association. Professor Steven Kent described CESNUR as

... the highest profile lobbying and information group for controversial religions ... under the directorship of patent/trademark lawyer and independent scholar, Massimo Introvigne. A persistent critic of any national attempts to identify or curtail so-called ‘cults,’ Introvigne has spoken out against what he considers to be intolerance toward “minority religions,” especially in Belgium, France, and Germany. ... Many German and French officials working on issues related to religious ‘sects’ and human rights do not see CESNUR and Introvigne as neutral parties in the ongoing debates (a judgement that certainly flows both ways). Consequently, other people and organizations have damaged their reputations (rightly or wrongly) among these officials by associating too closely with CESNUR.”ii

Some members of CESNUR, including Introvigne and another cofounder, J. Gordon Melton,iii have faced criticism for defending dangerous cults and downplaying their harms, or for maintaining financial or personal connections to organizations they are studying.

...

Zerby and Kelly referred to the radical reversal of many of the Family’s doctrines, policies and practices as the Reboot.iv

...

Gary Shepherd and Gordon Shepherd reported on those fundamental changes in their journal article, “Reboot of The Family International”.v The Shepherds are both professors of sociology who had studied and written about the Family for several years. Gary Shepherd was involved with his colleague Lawrence Lilliston in the Family-funded studyvi of 32 children that the group attempted to use as proof “that their child-rearing practices and the sexualized environment in which a generation was raised had no deleterious effects”.vii When Lilliston presented the study as evidence in the British custody case, Justice Ward said he couldn’t rely on its conclusions because it was too “superficial and [lacked] academic credibility”.viii That study, and another one by Shepherd and Lilliston were included in the Family-funded book edited by Melton and Lewis.

...

... [the Shepherds] provided details of the radical reorganization in their article, “Reboot of The Family International”, summarized in the opening paragraph:

The changes [Zerby and Kelly] outlined presaged a transformation that shifted TFI from being a closely regulated, exclusive communal society requiring uniformity, high commitment levels, and collective decision making to becoming a loose, inclusive, and amorphous cyber community that emphasizes personal choice of individuals pursuing their own spiritual paths as ordinary citizens within the secular societies in which they reside. Virtually all the organizational and cultural structures of TFI were subsequently dissolved, and many previously accepted beliefs and practices modified, downgraded, or simply jettisoned, thus validating ‘‘The Reboot’’ label that TFI’s ‘‘Change Journey’’ had generated. ... all continuing apocalyptic or millennial movements eventually have to make adjustments in both their Endtime calculations and in their relationships to host societies and to the ways of the world. In the case of TFI, however, the latest adjustments or ‘‘revolution’’ we report here seem to push it almost to the threshold of dissolution. ...TFI could simply fade away altogether as a distinct organizational entity.ix

In 2018, long-time Family spokesperson, Claire Borowik,x wrote an article published in Nova Religio that discusses the dramatic impact the Reboot had on the Family. Borowik reports that the Family’s core membership was less than 7000 members around the time the Reboot was announced in 2009. The Shepherds reported in their article that membership had dropped to 3,473 by the end of 2012. Borowik says that by 2018 there were only about 1,900 members, however, she also writes that most current members no longer consider the Family to be a group or a movement, so don’t think of themselves as members. She uses the term “affiliate” instead to describe them. Like the Shepherds, Borowik doesn’t have much hope for the Family’s continued existence.

...

Borowik and some of her interviewees paint a pessimistic picture of the group in its death throes, essentially concluding that the Family has no future as an amorphous community connected only online. Zerby and Kelly intended the Reboot to be the Family’s road to the future, but it turned out to be a dead end. The ex-member community, especially those of the second generation, deserves a lot of credit for that ending. Like the academic cult apologists who discredit and denounce accounts by critical former members, Borowik blames them for making it impossible for the Family to whitewash its past, rewrite history and create a new public image for itself.

Efforts to modernize and reinvent its public image were met with heightened public opposition in the early 2000s due to the development of three adversarial former member websites (exfamily.org, xfamily.org, and movingon.org), which rapidly gained prominence in search engine rankings of information featured about TFI. A murder/suicide in 2005 perpetrated by Karen Zerby’s estranged son, Ricky Rodriguez (1975–2005), further increased tensions and placed the movement once again at the center of controversy and stigmatizing media. The consequent media attention served to revive old controversies and create a platform for new former member narratives, intensifying the struggle to dominate the defining narrative about the movement. In its quest to achieve representation and a voice in cyberspace, TFI has struggled to navigate these often contested spaces of the Web, a forum that has proved more amenable to countermovement propagation of information. The permanence and visibility of counter-narratives on the internet introduced a game changing platform of negotiation for TFI, hindering its efforts to distance the movement from past controversies and reinvent itself as a legitimate contemporary movement.

The Family is now an unrecognizable shadow of its former self thanks to the heroes of this story, Merry Berg and her second generation peers who spoke out and defiantly pushed back against Family leaders who denounced them as lying apostates and denied their claims of abuse. Those who gave evidence of child abuse in the British custody case delivered some of the first deadly blows. Merry’s willingness to testify against her grandfather exposed the extreme immoralities that lay at the heart of the Family, undermining its very foundation, which is why Berg, Zerby and Kelly so viciously vilified and demonized her. Merry bravely bared the naked truth about Berg for all to see, revealing the fiction of the ‘emperor’s new clothes’. Her personal experiences and revelations showed that Berg was not the Love Prophet, as he was referred to in a Canadian documentary,xi he was the Lustful Prophet, as professor Kent referred to him in his study.xii

...

Another influential activist who helped bring down the Family and also died far too young is Julia McNeil,xiii founder of the Moving On website and Safe Passage Foundation. After a decade of advocacy work compassionately supporting her fellow cult survivors, Julia died of cancer on June 5, 2012 at the age of 37.

Many others too numerous to name also deserve credit for helping to kill the cult by exposing its abuses and inner workings, making it impossible for the Family to ever reform its image. The list includes everyone who contributed to the exmember websites; everyone who published memoirs, appeared in documentaries or gave interviews to journalists and academics; and everyone who endured systemic and personal abuses until they were able to defiantly resist their maltreatment and rebel against their abusers by escaping to the real world. Most of the second generation have managed to survive and make new lives despite deficiencies in their upbringing that may have hindered or delayed their progress in some ways. Some have even thrived, but many still bear psychological scars and suffer various heath problems from the stress and trauma of adverse childhood experiences. I continue to hear tragic stories of broken families, poverty, homelessness and addiction. Tragically, overwhelming psychological injuries have led some to commit suicide.xiv

The Family expected their children to be the vanguard of Christian soldiers in Berg’s endtime army, and leaders of the world during the millennium, Christ’s thousand year reign on earth. They raised them to be shining examples to the world of the group’s godliness, the fruit that proved the tree was good. Instead, turning on its head a Bible passage members often cited as proof of their moral goodness, the experiences suffered by the second generation show that the tree was rotten.

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. Matthew 7:15-20

Family members also frequently cited Proverbs 22:6 in support of their Bible-based, fundamentalist education: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” But almost all their children did depart from the Family’s way of life and beliefs by revolting against Berg’s Jesus Revolution. Many are no longer even Christians. Through their mass defections, legal testimonies, and personal accounts in memoirs, documentaries, media reports, academic studies and website forums, the children of the Children of God have shown the world that the Family tree was rotten to the core.

What It Sounds Like – KPop Demon Hunters

Nothing but the truth now

I bring my story full circle in the second half of the epilogue to end the book, discussing how the various existential threats facing humanity in the 1960s have become even worse today, contributing to the creation of thousands of new cults of all kinds.

Most children of the Children of God refused to stay children, and rejected the fraudulent Family, thereby practically killing the cult. But while that one is effectively dead, cults are everywhere, as the title of Margaret Singer and Janja Lalich’s book Cults In our Midst suggests. By some estimates, there could be thousands around the world,xv and new cults of all kinds continue to be created by charlatans or zealots.xvi Cults are so common that they are now part of popular culture, regularly featured in newspaper and magazine reports, documentaries, memoirs, and both non-fiction and fictional TV series, movies and books. Although there is now more information than ever before about the characteristics of cultsxvii and how to identify their harmful aspects, people still get sucked into them.

Some of the same social, political, and environmental factors that led to the counterculture movement and a new wave of cults in the 1960s have worsened since then. Young people today face an even greater existential crisis.xviii Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has maintained a metaphorical Doomsday Clock. Midnight represents a global catastrophe. The time on the clock, which was initially set to seven minutes to midnight, is determined primarily by the risks presented by nuclear war and climate change.

In January 2018, scientists set the clock to two minutes to midnight. The only other time it got that close was in 1953 after the U.S. tested its first thermonuclear device. Then in January 2020, the revised time on the clock was announced in seconds for the first time. They set it at one hundred seconds to midnight, the closest its ever been, because of the increasing possibility of a deliberate or accidental nuclear war, and the world’s failure to effectively combat climate change. Those double threats to humanity, the scientists said, “... are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond.”xix

Just a couple months later, the Covid19 global pandemic started to upend almost every aspect of life as we know it. In May 2020, Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, addressed that growing crisis in relation to their Doomsday Clock setting in January, stating:

While concerns about climate change and nuclear war were the major drivers in moving the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the 2020 statement issued by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists returns over and over again to the same underlying problem: The deliberate erosion by politicians of science and our core institutions. As the Doomsday Clock Statement notes: “Over the last two years, we have seen influential leaders denigrate and discard the most effective methods for addressing complex threats … in favor of their own narrow interests and domestic political gain. By undermining cooperative, science- and law-based approaches to managing the most urgent threats to humanity, leaders have helped to create a situation that will, if unaddressed, lead to catastrophe, sooner rather than later.”xx

Catastrophic changes associated with the Covid pandemic throughout 2020 included the collapse of international tradexxi and travel,xxii and widespread national lockdowns, causing a financial crisis for individuals, nations and the global economy, leading to fears of a recession occurring as bad as the Great Depression.xxiii In the background, drums of war were beating, heating up the New Cold War between the U.S. and China.xxiv Amidst all this upheaval and uncertainty, fearmongering fundamentalists, extremists, conmen and cultistsxxv were peddling all kinds of quack cures,xxvi conspiracy theories,xxvii and Bible-based apocalyptic predictions.xxviii

Things Have Changed – Bob Dylan

People are crazy and times are strange

In January 2021, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists kept their Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight despite the ongoing pandemic.

Though lethal on a massive scale, this particular pandemic is not an existential threat. Its consequences are grave and will be lasting. But COVID-19 will not obliterate civilization, and we expect the disease to recede eventually. Still, the pandemic serves as a historic wake-up call, a vivid illustration that national governments and international organizations are unprepared to manage nuclear weapons and climate change, which currently pose existential threats to humanity, or the other dangers—including more virulent pandemics and next-generation warfare—that could threaten civilization in the near future. ...

As we noted in our last Doomsday Clock statement, the existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change have intensified in recent years because of a threat multiplier: the continuing corruption of the information ecosphere on which democracy and public decision-making depend. Here, again, the COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call. False and misleading information disseminated over the internet ... created social chaos in many countries and led to unnecessary death. This wanton disregard for science and the large-scale embrace of conspiratorial nonsense—often driven by political figures and partisan media—undermined the ability of responsible national and global leaders to protect the security of their citizens. ...

The members of the Science and Security Board therefore set the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse and the same time we set in 2020. It is deeply unfortunate that the global response to the pandemic over the past year has explicitly validated many of the concerns we have voiced for decades.xxix

UPDATE: On January 27, 2026, the Doomsday Clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board (SASB), which sets the Clock, called for urgent action to limit nuclear arsenals, create international guidelines on the use of AI, and form multilateral agreements to address global biological threats.

Masters of War – Bob Dylan

Come, you masters of war, you that build the big guns

The continuing danger of global catastrophe is real,xxx and in unstable, troubled times people can be even more susceptible to cultic manipulations. Conmen, spiritual charlatans, religious proselytizers, and political extremists peddling propaganda, disinformation, and harmful beliefs take advantage of people’s insecurities and anxieties during times of great social upheaval.

Many people wrongly assume that only stupid people fall prey to cultists,xxxi and that they themselves would recognize a cult, so could never be enticed or tricked to join one. Those are uninformed misconceptions.xxxii No one joins a cult. Potential followers of charismatic cult leaders are recruited and indoctrinated in ways that prevent the unwary from recognizing the true nature of a harmful group, and how they are being deceived and manipulated, until it’s too late. It’s too late for me, but let my story be a cautionary tale. Beware of blindly believing and being misled by persuasive proselytizers of all kinds. Don’t allow yourself and your children to be MISGUIDED.

Teach Your Children Well – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

You, who are on the road

I think Old Before My Time is perfect for the last song in this imagined soundtrack to play over the end credits of the movie or TV show. The lyrics almost completely mirror my life.

Old Before My Time – The Allman Brothers Band

There is a long hard road that follows far behind me

Apocalyptic beliefs are no longer fringe—and they’re shaping how people respond to global threats

New UBC research shows apocalyptic thinking is widespread and shapes how people respond to global threats.

by Erik Rolfsen

March 5, 2026 University of British Columbia

In an era of climate anxiety, geopolitical tensions and rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, apocalyptic thinking is no longer confined to the fringes of society, according to new research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Belief in the end of the world is surprisingly common across North America, and it’s significantly influencing how people interpret and respond to the most pressing threats facing humanity,” said Dr. Matthew I. Billet, the study’s lead author who conducted the research as a PhD candidate in UBC’s psychology department. He is now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Irvine.

The research draws on surveys of more than 3,400 people in the U.S. and Canada. In the U.S. national sample of 1,409 respondents, nearly one‑third said they believe the world will end within their lifetime. … https://news.ubc.ca/2026/03/apocalyptic-beliefs-shaping-response-global-threats/

i “Once dismissed as ‘sex cult,’ tiny church launches image makeover”, by Peggy Fletcher Stack, The Salt Lake Tribune - June 25, 2009https://religiouschildabuse.blogspot.com/2010/11/family-international-aka-children-of.html

ii Stephen A. Kent, “The French and German versus American debate over ‘new religions’, Scientology and human rights”. Marburg Journal of Religion. University of Marburg. (January 2001) 6 (1): 15, pp.15,16 https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ep/0004/article/view/3742/3559

iii J. Gordon Melton https://www.xfamily.org/index.php/J._Gordon_Melton

iv The Reboot Documents https://www.xfamily.org/index.php/Reboot_Documents

v Gary Shepherd, Gordon Shepherd, “Reboot of The Family International”, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 17 No. 2, February 2013; (pp. 74-98) https://nr.ucpress.edu/content/17/2/74.full.pdf+html

vi Lawrence Lilliston and Gary Shepherd, “Psychological Assessment of Children in The Family” https://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/family.htm

vii Carol C. Buening, Ph.D., LISW, Critical Commentary on ‘Psychological Assessment of Children in The Family’ http://www.exfamily.org/art/ext/critical_commentary.shtml

viii Lawrence Lilliston https://www.xfamily.org/index.php/Lawrence_Lilliston

The Judgement of Lord Justice Ward, in part 9.8.1, The Psychological and Psychiatric Evidence - Dr Lawrence Lilliston https://www.xfamily.org/index.php/Complete_Judgment_of_Lord_Justice_Ward#Dr_Lawrence_Lilliston

ix Supra

x Claire Borowik https://www.xfamily.org/index.php/Susan_Claire_Borowik Former members have accused Borowik of various child abuse crimes when she was a leader in Argentina before she became the Family spokesperson.

xi “The Love Prophet and the Children of God” documentary transcript https://www.xfamily.org/index.php/The_Love_Prophet_and_the_Children_of_God

xii supra

xiii Julia McNeil Biography https://safepassagefoundation.org/is/juliamcneil

xiv Here is an incomplete list of deaths and suicides of people from both the first and second generations of the Children of God/The Family International: https://www.xfamily.org/index.php/Category:Deaths Ongoing research indicates that the number of suicides among the second generation is many times higher than those listed, and is a much higher rate for that age cohort than in the general population.

xv Michael D. Langone and Herbert L. Rosedale, “On Using the Term ‘Cult’”, ICSA Today, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2015, pp.4-6, https://www.icsahome.com/articles/onusingtermcult

xvi Janja Lalich, “Cults Today: A New Social-Psychological Perspective”, January 29, 2017 http://cultresearch.org/cults-today-new-social-psychological-perspective/ “We see people of all ages—even multigenerational families—being drawn into a variety of groups and movements focused on everything from therapy to business ventures, from New Age philosophies to Bible-based beliefs, and from martial arts to political change. Noted cult expert and clinical psychologist Margaret Thaler Singer estimated that approximately 10 to 20 million people have at some point in recent years been in one or more cult groups.”

xvii Janja Lalich and Michael D. Langone, “Characteristics Associated With Cults” http://cultresearch.org/help/characteristics-associated-with-cults/ That article is an excerpt from the book by Janja Lalich and Madeleine Tobias, Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships, 2nd edition; Bay Tree Publishing: Richmond, CA (August 17, 2006) http://cultresearch.org/take-back-your-life/

xviii “The climate crisis is taking a growing toll on the mental health of children and young people, experts have warned. Increasing levels of ‘eco-anxiety’ – the chronic fear of environmental doom – were likely to be underestimated and damaging to many in the long term, public health experts said.” “‘Eco-anxiety’: fear of environmental doom weighs on young people”, Andrew Gregory, The Guardian, October 6, 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/oct/06/eco-anxiety-fear-of-environmental-doom-weighs-on-young-people

xix Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – January 23, 2020 Doomsday Clock Statement, “Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight” https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/

xx Rachel Bronson, president & CEO of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “The Doomsday Clock meets the coronavirus”, The Hill, May 14, 2020 https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/497565-the-doomsday-clock-meets-the-coronavirus

xxi “COVID-19 drives large international trade declines in 2020”, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, December 9, 2020 https://unctad.org/news/covid-19-drives-large-international-trade-declines-2020

xxii “COVID-19, international mobility and trade in services: The road to recovery”, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, January 22, 2021 https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/covid-19-international-mobility-and-trade-in-services-the-road-to-recovery-ec716823/ “COVID-19 has dramatically disrupted international mobility. Border closures, visa restrictions, quarantine requirements and flight suspensions have played havoc with the cross-border movement of people. Reduced mobility drove a collapse in services trade. The drop has been unprecedented in magnitude and has had economy-wide impacts.”

xxiii Eric Martin, “IMF Sees Great Lockdown Recession as Worst Since Depression”, Bloomberg, April 14, 2020 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-14/imf-says-great-lockdown-recession-likely-worst-since-depression “The International Monetary Fund predicted the “Great Lockdown” recession would be the steepest in almost a century and warned the world economy’s contraction and recovery would be worse than anticipated if the coronavirus lingers or returns.”

xxiv Yen Nee Lee, “‘This is the start of a new Cold War,’ former Trump trade official says of rising US-China tensions”, CNBC, May 5, 2020 https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/05/coronavirus-ex-trump-trade-official-clete-willems-on-us-china-tensions.html “Rising tensions between the U.S. and China — made worse by the coronavirus pandemic — is the start of a new Cold War, former top White House trade negotiator Clete Willems said on Tuesday.”

Richard Javad Heydarian, “Fireworks and fury set New Cold War tone in Alaska”, Asia Times, March 19, 2021 https://asiatimes.com/2021/03/fireworks-and-fury-set-new-cold-war-tone-in-alaska/ “Far from paving the way for a smooth “reset” in US-China relations, the much-anticipated high-level meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, seemed instead to confirm the fact that the two superpowers are locked in a de facto “New Cold War.””

xxv Sam Bradpiece, “How the pandemic in France has led to an explosion in number of sects”, The Local, December 1, 2021 https://www.thelocal.fr/20211201/france-gives-e1m-to-anti-cults-watchdog-after-huge-increase-in-sects-during-pandemic/ “The French government has increased its budget to monitor cults by tenfold after at least 500 religious sects considered potentially dangerous sprung up during the pandemic.”

xxvi Ben Smee, “Australian ‘healing church’ defends bleach sales after US coronavirus cure claims”, The Guardian, May 6, 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/06/australian-healing-church-defends-bleach-sales-after-us-coronavirus-cure-claims “Representatives of an international group that calls itself a “healing church” and promotes industrial bleach as a cure for coronavirus say they should be allowed to continue selling the potentially toxic “miracle” solution in Australia on religious freedom grounds. The ABC reported on Tuesday the Australian chapter of the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing is selling chlorine dioxide – marketed as Miracle Mineral Solution – online. ... It has been revealed that Genesis II church US leader, Mark Grenon, wrote to Donald Trump just days before the US president claimed disinfectant could be a coronavirus cure.”

xxvii Adam M. Enders and Joseph E. Uscinski, “Conspiracy theories run rampant when people feel helpless. Like now.”, Washington Post, May 5, 2020 https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/05/05/coronavirus-conspiracy-theories-pandemic/ “As the coronavirus pandemic has unfolded, conspiracy theories about the origins, threat and basic nature of the virus have become an increasingly visible and consequential element of the timeline. Conspiracy theories have tangible consequences for individuals and society, especially when they are sanctioned by trusted members of society, such as political, business and religious leaders. They can decrease people’s willingness to get vaccinated or comply with social distancing directives; they can also negatively impact people’s view of scientific findings and political out-groups. That means a pandemic is an especially dangerous time for conspiracy theories.”

xxviii “Coronavirus: Far-right spreads Covid-19 ‘infodemic’ on Facebook”, BBC, May 4, 2020 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52490430 “Now, a co-investigation by BBC Click and the UK counter-extremism think-tank Institute of Strategic Dialogue, indicates how both extremist political and fringe medical communities have tried to exploit the pandemic online. ... As they dug deeper into the posts, the researchers took note of many thousands of links directing users to fringe political and health websites.”

“End times experts see ‘growing interest’ in Bible prophecy amid coronavirus pandemic”, The Christian Post, April 22, 2020 https://www.christianpost.com/news/end-times-experts-see-growing-interest-in-bible-prophecy-amid-coronavirus-pandemic.html “LifeWay found that nearly nine out of 10 surveyed pastors viewed the end times prophecies of the Bible as being showcased in current events. ... Darrell Bock, a professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas, also touched on the increased interest in end times prophecy during the webcast. “We did this poll before the pandemic really reared its head,” Bock said. “These questions were asked as the reports of the plague were coming out of China and hadn’t even really hit Europe yet. So these numbers do not reflect the reality we find ourselves in and I agree with Joel. If we were to re-ask these questions, we would see them be even higher in light of what’s going on.”

xxix 2021 Doomsday Clock Statement, “This is your COVID wake-up call: It is 100 seconds to midnight.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/

xxx United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told 193 nations at the 76th General Assembly session: “I am here to sound the alarm: The world must wake up. We are on the edge of an abyss — and moving in the wrong direction. Our world has never been more threatened. Or more divided. We face the greatest cascade of crises in our lifetimes.” Secretary-General’s address to the 76th Session of the UN General Assembly, September 21,2021 https://www.un.org/sg/en/node/259283

xxxi “Janja Lalich: how normal people end up in cults like NXIVM”, Radio New Zealand, February 27, 2021 https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018785404/janja-lalich-how-normal-people-end-up-in-cults-like-nxivm “It’s a myth that only “stupid weird crazy people” get tied up with cults, says cult expert Dr Janja Lalich.”

xxxii International Cultic Studies Association, “Common Myths and Misconceptions About Cults and Cultic Groups” https://www.icsahome.com/articles/common-myths-and-misconceptions-about-cults-and-cultic-groups

Chapter 22 – Everything Is Broken

Music featured in this chapter:

Insomnia – Faithless

Everyone’ll Let You Down – The Philosopher Kings

Save Me – Remy Zero

Everything Is Broken – Bob Dylan (alternate version)

In this chapter of my memoir I start by describing the psychotherapy I was eventually able to get after my complex PTSD diagnosis. I also discuss my descent into depression, poverty and homelessness as a result of my cult-related psychological breakdown.

Reports of Ricky’s shocking tragedy spread quickly in the global survivor community before it hit the headlines. As I tried to make sense of the stunning news, my mind flashed back to Ricky’s last online message pleading for help to find justice and bring an end to the Family. When I first read it I didn’t think he was actually making a public appeal for people to join him in a murder plot. However, in his video he says that is exactly what he was referring to in that message.

Ricky’s video was posted on one of the survivor sites soon after his suicide, but l hadn’t watched it yet when I went to my next session with the psychiatrist. She cautioned that watching it might have a negative effect on me. I knew it would increase my emotional turmoil, but I felt I had to face it full on if I ever hoped to heal. Now that I had finally started to examine my past, I couldn’t turn away from any part of it, no matter how dark, and Ricky’s video is very dark indeed. It was gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, mind-messing to realize that the 13 year old cloistered cult kid I chauffeured several times in Japan was deeply disturbed and suicidal at the time, and was now surrounded by weapons, expressing his mental torment and raging need for revenge.

When that tragedy happened, I was still in the process of reading all the articles, documents, and survivor stories on the three websites. As I learned new information, and followed every conversation in the online forums, often discussing issues late into the night, it was emotionally shattering to see the full picture of the Family’s child abuse legacy emerge while putting the pieces together. Seeing things from the perspective of children raised in the cult helped me recognize the systemic abuses that affected all of them in one way or another.

What started as background research for this memoir turned into a psychological crisis. After immersing myself every day in cult-related information from various sources — websites, books, academic journals, documentary films — I couldn’t turn my mind off at night, so was getting only about four or five hours of broken sleep. I began to dread going to bed, kept awake with incessant thoughts in my head. As my sleep decreased, my pain increased, eventually spreading throughout my body. I slowly became more anti-social and withdrawn, certain that no one in my family or social circles could understand what I was going through.

Insomnia – Faithless

Deep in the bosom of the gentle night

While I waited for my turn in group therapy, I started weekly sessions with a psychologist, a recent graduate with limited clinical experience. Although she read all the psychiatrist’s detailed notes in my file, after a couple conversations it was clear she knew very little about the kinds of cult-related issues I was dealing with. So, I lent her Cults In Our Midst and a VHS video of the 1994 documentary, Children of God.i I was teaching her more than she was helping me.

I had a more helpful experience with group therapy, which I started in the summer of 2005. The doctor leading it was one of Canada’s top PTSD specialists, Dr. Greg Passey, a former military psychiatrist recognized internationally for his trauma research and therapy work with UN peacekeeping forces who witnessed genocidal war crimes in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. Now in private practice, he worked primarily with military veterans, police and other emergency first responders.

In weekly sessions, Dr. Passey taught us the basic psychological mechanisms of PTSD, and strategies for dealing with the symptoms. None of the other nine people were survivors of an abusive cult, although two of them were sexually abused by Catholic priests. But while we had different traumatic experiences, we all suffered many of the same symptoms. There was a strange comfort in talking to strangers. We helped each other see behaviours and attitudes we didn’t recognize in ourselves until we saw and heard them in each other.

Although it wasn’t specifically cult recovery therapy, I began to recognize how much of my mental state and behaviour, both in the cult and after leaving, was caused by undiagnosed complex PTSD. That helped me understand my uncharacteristic reactions in certain situations, how they were connected to past experiences, how those experiences led to ill health, and why I was developing new symptoms after all these years.

I found it helpful to understand my experiences in the Family as a spiritual variation of long-term domestic abuse causing battered wife syndrome, a subcategory of PTSD. After all, I had been a bride of Christ according to the Family’s version of bridal theology.

I wrote an academic article on the cult’s bridal theology, which was published in the International Cultic Studies Association’s journal International Journal of Coercion, Abuse and Manipulation, Vol 8, 2025.

A few months after Ricky’s murder-suicide, before I started group therapy, I travelled to Texas for a weekend conference with about twenty second generation survivors from around the U.S., Canada and Europe. I was one of two former first generation members who were invited. The conference was organized by Julia McNeil,ii who created the Moving On website in 2001 as a safe space for second generation survivors of the Family to find resources, tell their stories, and offer mutual moral support. Over 5000 of Julia’s peers participated on the site.

Knowing personally how difficult it was for anyone raised in a socially isolated cult to create a new life after leaving with few resources, little education and no support, Julia helped establish Safe Passage Foundation (SPF),iii in 2003 to assist to those in need. The conference was a brainstorming session on ways to raise awareness of SPF’s work.

I couldn’t provide financial assistance to SPF, but I could be an advocate by corroborating the stories of abuse survivors and helping to amplify their voices that some scholars attempted to silence. By now I was aware that there was a division among academics who study groups like the Family.iv One crucial difference is that some accept cult survivor stories as relevant evidence of harms caused by high demand groups, while others doubt, dispute or downplay their claims of abuse. The differences between those two camps are reflected in two academic journals, Cultic Studies Reviewv and Nova Religio.vi The latter refers to “new religious movements”, a term some scholars prefer as it avoids negative connotations associated with the word ‘cult’.

I first learned of those academic disputesvii by reading the book Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field.viii That anthology of articles by scholars who study the subject attempts to bridge the divide through direct discourse between the two sides. The assertions of some of those scholars insinuate that what I personally experienced and witnessed didn’t happen, and that thousands of abuse survivors discussing their experiences on the Moving On website must be exaggerating or lying. That outraged me.

I found it extremely frustrating and infuriating that some scholars attacked the credibility of former cult members,ix x stereotyping and smearing them as self-serving liars, while at the same time accepting the truthfulness of accounts by current cult members as if they had no self-interest in lying to protect themselves and their group. That made no sense to me, and seemed to be academic bias. The author of the next book I read displayed that bias in his study of the Family, so I wrote a detailed response hoping it would be published in one of those academic journals.

I wrote the article “A Response to James D Chancellors Life In The Family”, which was published in Cultic Studies Review Vol.6, No.2, 2007 to fill in some of the gaps and provide a perspective, that of a former member, not found in James D. Chancellor’s one-sided book Life In The Family: an oral history of the Children of God. Chancellor’s response to my article, and my reply to Chancellor’s response were both published in that same journal. I’ve put the entire article and the two responses on my blog, and included the links where you can find those articles on International Cultic Studies Association website.

https://perry-bulwer.blogspot.com/p/response-to-james-d-chancellors-life-in.html

https://articles1.icsahome.com/articles/a-response-to-james-d--chancellor-s-life-in-the-family-an-oral-history-of-the-children-of-god

https://articles1.icsahome.com/articles/a-response-to-perry-bulwer-s-evaluation-of-life-in-the-family

https://articles1.icsahome.com/articles/a-rejoinder-to-james-chancellor-s-response-to-my-article

In the next part of this chapter in my memoir I describe my descent into depression, poverty and homelessness as a result of my cult-related psychological breakdown.

After my PTSD group therapy finished at the end of 2005 I had no further mental health support, and no intimate relationships I could discuss my experiences with. I did tell a few people that I had been in a cult, but no one could easily relate to that, so those uneasy conversations didn’t last long. Since my breakdown I had slowly withdrawn from all the friends I made during my nine years in Vancouver. Depression and widespread chronic pain reduced my desire to socialize, so I stopped most activities I once enjoyed, and isolated myself.

...

I was subsisting on poverty level disability in what was fast becoming one of North America’s most expensive cities. I could no longer afford to live in Vancouver. The rent for my apartment had almost doubled in ten years, and was now 80 percent of my income. The number of homeless in Vancouver more than quadrupled in those years. With no affordable options left, I feared becoming a statistic in that homelessness crisis, so in mid-2007 I moved back to Port Alberni, where my story started, hoping to avoid that ending.

Unfortunately, homelessness was increasing everywhere, even in my small home town. I couldn’t find a place that was both affordable on my disability pension and had the kind of quiet environment I needed for my mental health to improve. For the next ten years I languished in unsuitable, substandard housing conditions that triggered my PTSD and worsened my health. I moved six times, fleeing unbearably noisy environments, bad neighbours, and unethical landlords.

Lack of medical care added to my struggles after returning to Port Alberni. ...

Everyone’ll Let You Down – The Philosopher Kings

Everyone'll let you down

I felt abandoned by the medical system, and endangered by government policies that worsened my health and housing crises. I knew that there is a causal connection between mental illness and homelessness, and that many vulnerable citizens who face the same systemic barriers I did end up living on the street. Angered by that ongoing injustice, I decided to fight back by speaking out. Over the next few years, I filed formal complaints with four government agencies, the medical doctors oversight body, and a non-government mental health agency that unethically harmed me and other housing clients.

Filing those complaints gave me some hope that I could help improve things, for myself and for everyone else in similar circumstances. However, I received unsatisfactory, bureaucratic responses to all of my complaints. In each case some policy or regulation prevented a remedy for me personally, or resolution of the systemic problems I raised.

I remained mired in a deep pit of despair for years, and eventually did become homeless.

In 2012, at the height of my health and housing crisis I began watching a digitized copy of the TV series Smallville about Superman’s early years. The theme song for the series is Save Me. Almost every day for several months I would hear those words “somebody save me” and wonder who would save me from my distress. I had been abandoned by the medical system, ignored by the political system, and abused by a prominent mental health advocacy organization that instead of being my advocate in a dispute with an unethical landlord, turned against me with actions that pushed me into homelessness, living on my mum’s couch for 3 months. In the end, it was my mum who saved me from homelessness when she provided the assistance I needed to move into a semi-isolated cabin that was ideal for my mental health and for finishing my memoir. Note the cover photo for the following song, a mother holding her infant.

Save Me – Remy Zero

All my dreams are falling down

Then right at that lowest point in my life I got lucky. I found a very old cottage on a lake 15 kilometres outside of town. ... I had tried to make a difference for others by fighting the systemic issues I faced when seeking suitable housing and healthcare, but I couldn’t save myself, let alone anyone else. So, I gave up trying to make the world a better place, and concentrated on writing this memoir. From the moment I moved into the semi-isolated log cabin I began to relax and recover from over a decade of overwhelming distress. The idyllic environment is the quietest place I have ever lived, ideal for healing and writing.

This is the ending of my story in the final chapter of my memoir. I tell the ending of the cult’s story in the Epilogue. There is no happy ending to my story. Everything in my life is broken. Broken body, broken brain, broken sleep, broken health, broken family, broken relationships, broken friendships, broken finances, broken love, broken hope, broken life. The first chapter of the book started with Dylan lyrics, it’s only fitting the final chapter ends the same way.

Everything Is Broken – Bob Dylan (alternate version)

Broken nights, broken days

I started this story with a Dylan song I heard on the radio. Now, at the end, I’m reminded of another song by him, “Everything Is Broken”. My life is broken. There is no happy ending.

Broken family, broken relationships. Gone for years, I was lost to my real family even after I returned. Broken by the fraudulent Family, unable to talk about my experiences, I remained in many ways a stranger to them. My relationship with my dad never recovered. He remained always sarcastic with me, as he was throughout my childhood, which pushed me away, so we never had a meaningful, heartfelt conversation. The emotional attachment between us was broken long ago, so when he lay dying in a hospital a couple hundred miles away in 2015, I didn’t visit him on his deathbed. I might have, if he had asked to see me, but he didn’t. I never shed a tear, and still haven’t. I don’t know if my heart was too hard or too broken for tears.

Broken social scene, broken love. Damaged by lies, betrayals and the Family’s tainted love, I’ve had difficulty even expressing the word ‘love’ to those who care for me. My inability to trust people and be open about my past prevented me from forming intimate relationships. Although I’ve had many acquaintances since leaving the cult, in those thirty years I’ve never found deep friendship or true love. I’ve been almost entirely and intentionally celibate, and have always lived alone.

Broken finances, broken future. Religious manipulators preying on my ignorant teen naïveté convinced me to waste two of the most potentially productive decades of my life. Trying to warn the world of doomsday and save souls for Jesus before he returned was a fool’s mission doomed from the start. Following a false prophet left me with nothing but the clothes on my back. To make up for lost time, I invested in eight years of schooling, spending tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, but my life broke down before I could take financial advantage of that education. Unable to pay off those loans, I will likely die in debt.

Broken health, broken hope. Some wounds never heal. Racked with remorse, and emotional and physical pain from a broken brain that broke my body, I’ve become old before my time. In the beginning, I thought I could save the world with religion. Later, I tried to change the world with protests, politics and law. In the end, I gave up. World-weary, I retreated from it to a life of solitude.

One day, when I was about five or six years old, we discovered our dog hiding under the house. She was injured, probably hit by a car. I remember hearing an adult explain that some dogs do that when they are sick or injured. Sometimes, when the pain caused by my dogmatic past is at it’s worst, I remember that dog as I’m curled up alone in a semi-secluded log cabin, licking my wounds.

That’s how I ended my story. However, in hindsight, perhaps I should’ve created a footnote to explain that being broken does not mean being useless. If I had, I would’ve added this quotation:

We call ourselves broken when, in truth, those cracks may be shaping beauty we can’t yet see. Being broken doesn’t mean being useless. Sometimes, it means we’re quietly giving life to others. Our struggles, scars, or quirks may be the very things that offer comfort, hope, or inspiration to the people around us. https://lifeditsjournal.medium.com/being-broken-doesnt-mean-being-useless-fdb0624d41a2

If my memoir and this podcast series has helped just one person, then it’s all worth it.

i “Children of God” (1994)

ii Julia McNeil

iii Safe Passage Foundation

iv Michael D. Langone, “The Two “Camps” of Cultic Studies: Time for a Dialogue”, Cultic Studies Journal, 2000, 17, 79-100

v Cultic Studies Review was the journal of the International Cultic Studies Association at the time.

vi Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions

vii Academic Disputes and Dialogue regarding cults and brainwashing

viii Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins, editors. Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field. University of Toronto Press, 2001.

ix Stephen A. Kent and Kayla Swanson, “The History of Credibility Attacks Against Former Cult Members”, International Journal of Cultic Studies Vol 8, No 2, 2017. This article contains an analyses of two important court cases, one the British child custody case involving the Family, that pitted the testimonies of former members against those of current group members. The researchers “... found that most of the apostates’ information was credible, while current members often lied.”

x Carmen Almendros, et al, “Reasons for Leaving: Psychological Abuse and Distress Reported by Former Members of Cultic Groups”, Cultic Studies Review, Volume 8, Number 2, 2009, pages 111-138 This study found that negative experiences reported by former cult members were accurate and credible. It concludes that it may constitute a secondary victimization to presume inaccuracy in former members’ reports of their experiences.

Chapter 21 – Tragedy of the Chosen One

Sensitivity Warning: this article contains graphic discussions of child abuse, murder and suicide.

Music featured in this chapter:

21st Century Breakdown – Green Day

I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun – Cat Stevens

Janie’s Got a Gun – Aerosmith

In this chapter of my memoir the first half describes in detail my psychological breakdown after I began investigating my cult past, my search for mental health help, and the psychiatric assessment and treatment I received. In the midst of that assessment, I heard horrific news that Ricky Rodriguez, the son of Children of God/The Family cult leader, Karen Zerby, had murdered her assistant who had been one of his childhood abusers, in a failed plan to kill his mother. He then killed himself. The second half of this chapter tells Ricky’s story.

Thirteen years after leaving the Family in 1991, I finally began to dig up my buried past and examine the skeleton in my closet. Discovering the whole awful truth behind the lie I had lived so many years was self-shattering. Unlike losing my religion, which relieved me of dogma induced existential anxiety and set my mind free, this examination left me feeling shackled with shame as I read shocking, heart-breaking accounts of child abuse on three survivor websites.i ii iii

Those personal testimonies from around the world confirmed the abuses I had seen, and revealed many others I was unaware of or blind to while I was in the Family. I also learned about new policies and doctrines developed by Karen Zerby and Steven Kelly after Berg’s death that continued to subject children and teens to various forms of abuse.

Having discarded my religious blinders, it disturbed me to now see things from the perspective of people raised in the group. Re-evaluating Family life from a child’s point of viewiv made me realize that what they had experienced was not a righteous life, but was in fact systemic, institutionalized child abuse. Most children in the Family suffered more than one of the following forms of abuse:

* religious indoctrination that denied them freedom of thought and freedom of religion, which includes the right to be free from religion;

* isolation from society;

* separation from parents, siblings and other relatives;

* educational neglect and intellectual abuse;

* medical neglect;

* child labour and financial exploitation;

* sexual coercion, exploitation, assault and rape;

* cruel corporal punishment and extreme physical abuse;

* emotional and psychological abuse, and

* spiritual abuse and threats.

In some cases the abuse was tantamount to torture.

...

As I awakened to the fact that the Family had harmed a generation of children, and continued to do so, I was determined to understand how I ended up in a harmful cult led by a narcissistic, alcoholic,v racist,vi anti-semitic,vii abusive, incestuous pedophile.viii Why did it take me so long to recognize the abuse I saw and experienced? Why was it so difficult to leave? What specific effects did that life have on me? I had many more questions, so started reading academic books and articles on the subject. The first, Cults In Our Midst,ix a comprehensive study of a variety of harmful high demand groups, provided many helpful insights.

Although that book has only two brief references to the Children of God, I recognized elements of my own story on almost every page. After comparing my personal experiences in the Family to the various characteristics associated with joining, living in, and leaving cults, I could see very clearly exactly how I was indoctrinated, manipulated and exploited. I was beginning to understand some of the psychological processes that kept me ignorant and blind to much of the abuse, and why I didn’t recognize it for what it was until I saw in person Merry’s torture, which shocked me out of my stupor and prompted me to leave the Family.

The final chapter in that book, “Recovery: Coming Out of the Pseudopersonality”, was especially helpful for understanding the difficulties I had recovering from my life in the Family. My thoughts, behaviours and experiences after I left finally began to make sense to me.

...

In November [2004, after being diagnosed with PTSD], while waiting for my turn in the group therapy program, which had a long waiting list, I started weekly one-hour sessions with a psychiatrist in VGH’s psychiatric outpatient clinic. It took two months to tell her my entire story, which I had never fully told anyone before. She took copious notes in each session, barely keeping up as the words poured out of me. Occasionally, she would stop my free-flowing, detailed narrative to clarify some point, but otherwise allowed me to talk uninterrupted.

During those two months, I was continuing to learn shocking things about the Family. I was particularly distressed hearing about numerous suicides of people I had lived with, or knew of through Family publications. Sadly, similar tragedies were still occurring. In one of my sessions with the psychiatrist in December, I told her about another suicide of a young man that happened just a few days earlier.

I knew Abex as a child. I lived briefly with his mother when I was in Japan in 1974. Like me, she had joined as a young teen and was among the first Japanese members. When I returned to Japan in the 1980s, she had three children and they were all living at the Heavenly City School during one of my stints there. Abe had been out of the cult four years when he ended his life.

Just a few weeks later, in January 2005, a murder-suicide made headlines around the world. The horrific tragedy made a mockery of the Family’s claims that they had the ideal environment for raising children. Karen Zerby’s son, Ricky, knifed to death her assistant, his former nanny, then shot himself in the head. The shocking news had a similar emotional effect on me as the homicide-suicide involving my two uncles thirty-nine years earlier. Fortunately, I was still seeing the psychiatrist so had someone to talk to about it.

21st Century Breakdown – Green Day

21st century breakdown

Ricky Rodriguez,xi known in the Family as Davidito, was Karen Zerby’s son. His father was a hotel employee in Tenerife who wasn’t in the Family. Ricky was the first Jesus Baby,xii a child born of the sexual proselytizing practice, Flirty Fishing. He was chosen and groomed by Berg to be the princely heir to his spiritual kingdom who would lead the Family with his mother during the final years before Jesus returned. Just as [David] Berg claimed to be the fulfillment of biblical prophecies that refer to a prophet David in the endtime, he claimed that Zerby and Ricky were the two witnesses described in Revelation chapter 11, prophets with supernatural powers who would fight the Antichrist in the last days.xiii

Zerby and her childcare assistant, Sara,xiv documented every aspect of Ricky’s childhood, along with his half sister, Techi,xv and Sara’s daughter, Davida,xvi who he regarded as his sister. Explicit descriptions of their indoctrinated, highly controlled, sexualized lives in Berg’s securely secluded household were published as “The Story of Davidito”,xvii which became the authoritative child training manual for Family parents.

As a teenager, Ricky had a normal reaction to his abnormal childhood in the Family. He rebelled. He grew increasingly resentful of how he and his sisters were raised: not allowed to be children; isolated from other children; unable to plan their own free futures; subjected to spiritual threats and cruel corporal punishment; and encouraged or coerced to engage in sexual activity.

Ricky came to understand how abusive that upbringing was, and hated how his mother and Berg had used him as the poster child for practices presented as childhood sex education, but which led to widespread sexual child abuse. As a young adult he conflicted with his mother when she implemented other sexually abusive policies and practices after Berg’s death.

In January 2001, in his mid-20s, Ricky formally left the Family, rejecting both Berg’s teachings and Christianity. Like most of his peers who left the cult without a proper education and worldly experiences, he struggled at first to adjust to society. He eventually learned to adapt and live his own life, but found it difficult to put his past behind him. The abuse he suffered and witnessed, coupled with his mother’s continual refusal to acknowledge and accept responsibility for systemic abuses of children and teens, weighed heavily on him.

In 2002, Ricky was intent on exposing the truth about Berg and his mother, hoping that would help bring an end to the Family, so he wrote an articlexviii for Moving On, the website for second-generation survivors of the Family. He described in detail what life was like growing up in Berg and Zerby’s abusive household, including the horrific sexual, physical and psychological abuse Merry Berg suffered there, confirming her testimony in the British custody case.

...

In August 2004, Ricky posted his last article on Moving On. Titled “Still Around”, he explained his two year absence from the survivor community and updated his situation. He had tried to start a new life, but struggled to move on, writing: “I know now that will never happen. I can’t run away from my past, and no matter how much longer I live, the first 25 years of my life will always haunt me.”xix

In that article he included a desperate final plea for help to find justice by bringing an end to the Family. His message was short on detail, but implied he wanted to take some sort of vigilante action.

Something has to be done to stop these child molesters, and it would be nice to find some people who think the same way. Every day these people are alive and free is a slap in the face to the thousands of us who have been methodically molested, tortured, raped, and the many who they have as good as murdered by driving them to suicide. It would probably involve a great deal of sacrifice, and would best be accomplished, I think, by people who have nothing to lose, such as myself. ... I think someone needs to put an end to it because only then can we feel some semblance of justice, and maybe be able to start putting it behind us. I think there are others who feel this way, and I would really like to get in touch with them and exchange ideas.

I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun – Cat Stevens

I've been demoralized too many times

... Five months later, on January 8, 2005, Ricky went through with his plan alone, viciously murdering Angela Smith.xx She was Berg’s long-time lover, and Zerby’s secretary, one of the first three Flirty Fishers in Tenerife with Zerby and Sara. She was a familiar part of Berg’s household, and occasionally one of Ricky’s childhood minders, so he knew her well.

Ricky’s original plan was to murder his mother and her co-leader Steven Kelly, hoping he could kill the snake by chopping off its head. ...

...

Ricky recorded a disturbing, hour-long videoxxi on January 7, 2005, the night before the murder. He referred to Angela, without naming her, as his “source” for information about his mother, and explained what he was about to do, and why. He had arranged to meet her for dinner the next night, before she returned to California. He intended to torture her to get information on his mother’s location.

The video shows Ricky in his apartment, the scene of the crime, describing the collection of weapons and tools covering the kitchen table. They included a Glock 23 pistol with several bullet magazines, a stun-gun, soldering iron, electric drill, duct tape, several small knives, and a Ka-Bar combat knife with a seven inch blade. He explained why that was his weapon of choice for “taking out the scum, taking out the f****n’ trash”.

Throughout the video Ricky calmly loads bullets into the magazines as he talks about how the child abuse he and his sisters experienced and witnessed affected his mental state. Describing the physical beatings Merry Berg suffered during her numerous exorcisms, he says: “Nobody, nobody deserved that. Especially not a kid that age. So I watched every day new bruises on her, big f****n’ fat f****n’ bruises on her.”

Ricky also discusses suicidal thoughts he had in his teen years, his ongoing mental health struggles since leaving the Family, and how he had many times considered just disappearing and quietly ending his life. ...

...

Ricky laments that he tried to move on, create a new life and forget the old one, but, “I got stuck because there’s this need that I have, this need. It’s not a want, it’s a f*****g need. And I wish it wasn’t, but it is. It’s a need for revenge. It’s a need for justice, because I can’t go on like this.” At the end of the video he states, “...they sure fucked with our brains … used us as slaves … just there for those sick f****r’s pleasure. That’s the way it was at Grandfather’s and Mamma’s house.”

The next evening, Ricky lured Angela to his apartment where he attacked her with the combat knife, stabbing her five times before cutting her throat. Crime scene investigators said she had been stabbed in her breast and stomach, and had defensive wounds in both arms, but they found no evidence Ricky had tortured her. After the murder he drove several hours to California, found a deserted parking lot outside of Blythe, and shot himself in the head.xxii

Janie’s Got a Gun – Aerosmith

Janie got a gun

i exFamily: a source of truthful information about The Family International/Children of God cult

ii xfamily: a collaboratively edited encyclopedia about The Family International/Children of God cult

iii MovingOn: the website for second-generation survivors no longer exists but some of it is archived at

iv Perry Bulwer, “Respecting A Child’s Point Of View”, December 14, 2011

v Ed Priebe, “The Alcoholic Prophet”,

vi Perry Bulwer, “What do Pat Robertson and The Family International cult have in common?”

vii Berg and Anti-Semitism. “Yes, I’m an anti-Semite, because God is! Yes, I’m a racist, because God is!”

viii “At least seven women, including both his daughters, his daughter-in-law and two of his granddaughters, have publicly alleged that Berg sexually abused them when they were children.”

ix Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich, Cults in Our Midst (1995; revised and updated 2003) San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass

x Abe Braaten

xi Ricky Rodriguez

xii Jesus Baby

xiii David Berg, “The End-Time Witnesses”, May 1978, pars.15,16

xiv Sara Kelley

xv Christina Teresa Zerby, aka Techi

xvi Davida Kelley

xvii “The Story of Davidito”

xviii Ricky Rodriguez, “Life with Grandpa—the Mene Story”, June 04, 2002

xix Ricky Rodriguez, “Still Around”, August 14, 2004

xx Angela Smith

xxi Ricky Rodriguez Video Transcript

xxii Those details are described in the book about Ricky’s life by religion journalist Don Lattin, Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge, San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007

Chapter 20 – Law and Disorder

Music featured in this chapter:

Who Are You – The Who

Finding Myself – Haley Klinkhammer

You Don’t Know How It Feels – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Breakdown – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Pandora’s Box – MARINA

Where In The World? – Gavin Friday

In this chapter of my memoir I discuss my awkward transition from my cult life to my ordinary life. I kept my complicated past a secret, but there were odd things about me. When I eventually made friends at university, I knew they gossiped about some of my oddities. For example, I had almost no furniture in my bachelor apartment, and my only source of music was my TV. That I wasn’t familiar with certain musicians or musical references, and I had no sound system, was particularly odd to my new friends because they knew how much I liked music, which was something we bonded over.

Losing my religion freed me from the Family’s groupthink mindset. Having repudiated my religious identity, I needed to create a new secular one, but to do that I had to know myself first. University was an ideal place for that. Exposure to different ideas, opinions and perspectives helped me discover my own mind and how I viewed the world now that I no longer believed it was doomed to end soon. Campus life also offered many opportunities to resocialize after years of separation from society.

While I was getting to know my true self for the first time and creating a new persona, I was hesitant to reveal my past to people. Although I felt unwhole with half of my life hidden from others, I feared they would judge the new me if they knew my old self. I did attempt to tell two people in separate conversations, by awkwardly blurting out that I had been in a cult, but neither responded and asked me to explain. I never mentioned it again to them, or to anyone else.

I found it difficult to unravel the complicated story of my strange Jesus freak life and understand it myself, let alone briefly explain it to someone else. It was easier to simply tell people I had been an English teacher working and travelling in Asia for a decade. My cover story was at least partly true, and helped me account for my ignorance when someone referred to some aspect of popular culture that I was unaware of.

Who Are You – The Who

I know there's a place you walked

Finding Myself – Haley Klinkhammer

Who am I today

In this chapter I also discuss how I began to self-medicate with cannabis to deal with symptoms related to my undiagnosed complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which at first was primarily regular migraines. Cannabis not only greatly reduced the frequency and severity of migraines, but even after I started to use it daily after my first year at university, I maintained straight As in every course over four years. Cannabis was also a social lubricant that helped me make some friends while at university.

Soon after returning to Canada I began smoking cannabis again, but once my studies started I only used it on weekends to help me relax. During the first year, I noticed that migraines often occurred on a Friday, so seemed to be caused by cumulative stress from studying and working. Knowing that cannabis reduced my stress, I wondered if daily use might prevent them.

I had straight As in every course that first year, and wanted to maintain that success. At the time there was a fear-based drug prohibition campaign, “Just Say No”, that depicted a brain on drugs as a fried egg. That propaganda scare tactic seemed absurd to me, but the disinformation effectively created enough doubt that I worried using cannabis daily might dumb me down by diminishing my cognitive skills. I was desperate for relief, though, so I experimented with two small joints each evening after all my homework was done.

Over time, I noticed that the frequency of my migraines reduced to less than once a month. Cannabis also seemed to improve my intellectual creativity by opening doors of perception when reflecting on my studies afterwards. I often gained insights and made connections I hadn’t considered in class. Far from dumbing me down, disciplined daily use of cannabis had no negative effect on my cognition. For the next three years I continued to get straight As in every course, and had the highest grade point average in the program. Awarded the Liberal Studies medal for high academic achievement, I graduated with distinction.i

Cannabis was also a social lubricant that made it easier to meet like-minded people. A co-worker at one of my campus jobs welcomed me into her social circle of mostly married couples around my age. They all smoked cannabis too, so I was soon hanging out at their homes, going to house parties and pubs, and even to three out-of-town concerts to see Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Steve Winwood.

It had taken over two years after leaving the Family before I finally met people I could relate to on some level and be comfortable socializing with. While I was glad to be a little less lonely now, I didn’t let them in on my secret past, so they stayed superficial acquaintances rather than intimate friends. I desired deeper relationships, but my inability to be trusting and truthful hindered my search for authentic intimacy.

You Don’t Know How It Feels – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

People come, people go

In the next part of this chapter I discuss my move to Vancouver to attend Simon Fraser University’s teacher training program. I intended to become a high school teacher, but I dropped out in the second semester. I then became politically active as an anti-prohibition activist living in a constant state of civil disobedience, consuming cannabis I illegally grew myself. I also became an advocate for street drug users and sex workers in my neighbourhood being preyed on by a serial killer.

That activism led me to law school at the University of British Columbia. For a couple of my law courses I wrote legal essays arguing that in the face of a public health emergency the provincial government had a legal duty to open supervised drug consumption clinics to prevent overdoses and the spread of disease. Those essays were used in the fight to establish Insiteii in Vancouver’s downtown East Side, which opened and began saving lives in 2003. It was North America’s first official supervised drug consumption clinic, and it has saved thousands of lives. It is one of my proudest contributions to public health and human rights in my short-lived legal career.

After describing that legal career, I tell the story of my first and only intimate relationship I’ve had since escaping the cult. My 10-month relationship with Janet should have remained just an end of summer fling, but because it was a torrid affair we both tried to keep it going.

Our summer fling probably should’ve ended with the season, when my last year of law school started. But for the first time in my life I was enjoying typical teen and young adult dating experiences I missed out on when I joined the Children of God. I was just living in the moment, not thinking about where this was headed, but Janet was. A couple months later, she told me she loved me, but immediately said I didn’t have to say it back, so I didn’t. I needed to tell her about my past first. On our next date I blurted out that I had been in a cult. Like me, she didn’t respond. We simply continued on as if neither of us had said what we said.

In many ways we were incompatible, and our inability to communicate at a deeper level led to bitter arguments. I had no problem debating different points of view academically, but in my personal life I wasn’t used to arguing. I had lived for so many years in a groupthink environment where disagreements were disallowed, that my automatic reaction was to walk away each time we quarrelled rather than try to resolve our differences.

I hadn’t dealt with my past, so I couldn’t recognize all the ways that my former life affected my present one. Without that self awareness, it was difficult to honestly communicate and develop a deeper relationship with Janet. But I had to sort out my immediate, uncertain future first before I could deal with my past. As my graduation neared, with no job prospects and money running low, I was under tremendous stress and anxiety. After another heated argument over something trivial, our ten-month affair finally ended. Janet was my first, and to this day, only romantic relationship outside the Family. I’ve been celibate since then. My time with her was the closest I ever got to a normal life.

Breakdown – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

It's alright if you love me

After telling that anecdote about Janet, I return to describing my legal education and short-lived career.

My time at law school had been extremely stressful, manifesting as anxiety and chronic insomnia, worsened by industrial noise from nearby port facilities. On top of everything else I was doing, I got involved with neighbours fighting the Canadian Pacific Railway for causing excessive, unnecessary noise pollution that was harming our health.iii Although I was able to use that experience dealing with regulatory bodies for a law course assignment, I continued to suffer serious side-effects of extreme sleep deprivation from the nightly noise.

I began to have sporadic, abnormal public outbursts of anger in normal situations. Each incident embarrassed and confused me as it was uncharacteristic behaviour that belied my soft-spoken personality. I suspected my insomnia, anxiety and angry outbursts were related to my past, but I didn’t understand the connections and why certain situations triggered my memories and outbursts. So, I continued to suppress my past until I had time to write it down, which was the only way I knew how to deal with it.

...

In the spring of 2002, I celebrated the last day of law school with three close classmates in one of their homes. Maybe the intimacy of sharing that difficult experience and triumphant outcome made me suddenly decide to reveal to them that I had been in a religious cult. I tried to tell the whole story from the beginning, but soon got side-tracked by questions I couldn’t answer, and bogged down in details trying to explain the inexplicable. Not only was it difficult for them to comprehend, there were many things about that life I still didn’t understand myself.

...

Since leaving the Family I never heard any news about it from media reports or other sources, and didn’t look for information on the Internet. I was putting that off until I had time to write my story. But my friends’ many questions aroused my curiosity, so the next day I did a quick search online and easily found the Family’s website and a few ex-member websites. I glanced at the Family’s site just long enough to see that they were still going strong despite all of Berg’s failed prophecies.

The Family site didn’t interest me, but the websites created by former members contained disturbing developments. Skimming through the various sections, articles, and discussions, I quickly understood that they were exposing all kinds of past and current abuses in the group. Clearly, there was much more to my story than I was aware of. I quit reading, unable to deal with those terrible truths while my immediate future was still undetermined. But it was too late. I had opened Pandora’s box, which ironically is the name of the street I was living on. Suppressing my past became more difficult.

Pandora’s Box – MARINA

You almost turned me psycho

I continued having occasional outbursts of aggressive verbal abuse while apprenticing at the law firm. The worst was during a Bar exam mock trial. When my opponent unfairly violated one of the rules, I broke out of character, and dramatically stopped the performance by angrily calling him out. Everyone was stunned, including my instructor and the lawyer who was acting as judge. That was a wake-up call. Although it didn’t prevent me from passing the Bar, an emotional fit like that while in a real court of law, or other legal setting, wouldn’t be as easily overlooked. It could negatively affect not only the case, but my reputation and ability to continue practising law.

If those spontaneous outbursts were being triggered by my subconsciously suppressed past, as I suspected, then they would continue until I exorcised the memories haunting me. I thought the best way to do that was to simply put those secrets into words on a page, exposed for all to see. However, working on legal cases for nearly two years, in the Indigenous law clinic and at Mandell Pinder, it was obvious to me that I wouldn’t have the emotional or mental stamina and cognitive concentration to write a memoir in my spare time. So, when the law firm only offered me a short-term contract I faced another major life decision.

...

It felt like a now-or-never moment. I had put off writing my story twice before, both times to focus on education. Now, the compulsion to write it was overwhelming, and that irresistible need pushed me into a decision that I might not have made had I known how things would turn out.

...

I had opened the lid on Pandora’s box all the way, delving deep into the articles and archives on the ex-member websites. I was entirely engrossed in the disturbing testimonies and evidence of child abuse I found there, which had a profound affect on me. The more I learned, the more my life fell apart. I knew nothing about mental illness, but it seemed to me that I was having a slow motion nervous breakdown.

Where In The World? – Gavin Friday

The soul is up for hire, we sold out the heart.

i Liberal Studies medal https://news.viu.ca/alum-month-perry-bulwer

ii Insite - Supervised Consumption Site

iii “Racket on the Rails” by Perry Bulwer

>

Chapter 19 – Losing My Religion

Music featured in this chapter:

Life Is a Highway – Tom Cochrane

The River, Mother Nature & Me – Jenny Lester

Ordinary World – Duran Duran

On the Road to Find Out – Cat Stevens

Redemption Song – Bob Marley

Losing My Religion – R.E.M.

It took me many years to write my memoir. The manuscript underwent many major changes until I finally had a draft I was satisfied enough with to send to publishers. And the contract I eventually signed with an independent publisher required me to cut 50,000 words from my manuscript. So, quite a few anecdotes didn’t make the cut. One of those anecdotes happened a few days after I returned to Port Alberni for good. In hindsight, I think it would’ve been better if I had kept that particular story, as yet again another song had a profound effect on me.

This chapter in my memoir opens with me dazed and confused after my plan to rescue Wings in Japan failed, and I made my escape back to Port Alberni. I had a secret past and an unknown future.

My family was as surprised as I was that I had returned to Canada just two weeks after leaving. They knew almost nothing about my life in the Family, so I didn’t explain the real reason I had flown across the Pacific three times in less than a month. Still dazed by this development, I just told them that Japanese border agents denied me entry for trying to smuggle Bibles into the country. I ignored or deflected any questions about my past or why I left the group. They soon stopped asking.

I was staying with my mum, and my sister Crystal was living there too with her two young boys. A few days after arriving there to stay I borrowed Crystal’s car and went to visit my uncle, who I refer to as uncle G. in my memoir. It had been over 11 years since I had last smoked cannabis, so I got very high that evening. On the short drive home a song came on the radio that stopped me in my tracks, literally.

Just as I had done the first time I heard Dylan’s Gotta Serve Somebody while driving, I pulled over and stopped to listen to Tom Cochrane’s Life Is A Highway. But that song had the opposite effect of Dylan’s song, which had led me back to the cult, a story told in chapters 1

and Chapter 11 in this series:

My indoctrinated cult world view had been all about the destination: the end of the world, then heaven. Everything was aimed at that, nothing else mattered. Now having left the cult I was aimless, unsure of what came next, but Cochrane’s song enlightened me with the concept that life is a journey, not a destination. I still get chills every time I hear this song.

Life Is a Highway – Tom Cochrane

Life's like a road that you travel on

Another anecdote I had to cut described how during that year in Port Alberni before starting university, I spent countless hours sitting on the bank of a river contemplating my past and trying to imagine my future. It was very soothing to sit by a stream and allow a stream of consciousness to flow through my mind.

The River, Mother Nature & Me – Jenny Lester

Sitting on rocks down by the river

My old life and persona was gone. I was no longer one of God’s elite endtime soldiers who would rule heaven on earth (or in the moon? see chapter 17)

with Jesus for a thousand years. I had to create an entirely new life for myself from scratch, and it was a scary prospect. I would have to learn how to survive in the ordinary world as an ordinary man.

Finding a job in Port Alberni was very difficult in the midst of a recession and high unemployment rate. To account for the past twelve years since my last job in Canada, I padded my thin resume by claiming I spent those years in Asia as an English teacher and staff member at an international boarding school for children of missionaries. But without higher education and credentials it was difficult to find a job where those experiences were useful.

...

... I thought I could simply start my life over from scratch with a clean slate, so had tried to move on by focusing on my education and ignoring issues related to my life in the Family. I learned the hard way it doesn’t work like that. The past doesn’t stay buried. Certain memories haunted me, so I knew I had to eventually acknowledge and deal with my old life. I was too busy trying to overcome 20 lost years and create a new life to do that, though. Putting it off inevitably led to my breakdown.

Ordinary World – Duran Duran

What has happened to it all?

Most of this chapter in my memoir is about my university education that I began exactly a year after I escaped the cult, which helped me deconstruct the dogma I was indoctrinated with, and eventually led to losing my religion completely. Through a series of fortunate incidents I realized a university education would be the best thing I could do at that point.

On the Road to Find Out – Cat Stevens

Well I left my happy home

A note about that Cat Stevens song, where he says “pick up a good book now”. Many of his songs have references to God and spirituality, even before his conversion to Islam. The lyrics I found for this song refer to “a good book”, but in that music video he appears to sing “the good book”, which would be an obvious reference to the Bible and perhaps the Koran. Since my rejection of David Berg and his cult, I no longer read “the good book”, the Bible, but I was reading many good books that helped me deconstruct my indoctrination and eventually lose my religion completely.

For the first six months before I finally got a job, I spent many hours in the library scanning the shelves and selecting any title, on any subject, that grabbed my attention. After years of reading only the Bible and Berg’s letters, the library was a banquet of books feeding my intellectually malnourished mind. I wrote in a diary entry: “reading Plato for the first time in my life and it is immensely enlightening.”

I discovered Plato in the 54 volume Great Books of the Western World. The first volume, The Great Conversation, included a ten-year reading list, which I photocopied and began reading. Exposure to knowledge and ideas in different disciplines was exactly what I needed to overcome the religious dogma I was indoctrinated with since childhood. I didn’t realize it yet, but the recommendations were also excellent preparation for university.

Although I had stopped praying and reading the Bible, I didn’t immediately reject the fundamentalist Christian worldview. It would take awhile to change my perspective and fully open my closed mind, but it was ajar enough to realize that Berg’s dogma against education, rooted in Adam and Eve’s original sin of disobeying God by eating fruit from the tree of knowledge, helped him control his unquestioning followers. I was questioning now, though, and the very knowledge I needed to overcome my indoctrination was the forbidden fruit I was inculcated to reject.

A couple of coincidences a few months after returning to Canada led me to apply to university, which I started exactly a year after escaping the cult. While reading Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species I had another profound “aha moment” reading his elegant explanation of evolution, which made far more sense to me than the young earth creationist dogma David Berg infected me with.

Believing in biblical literalism requires faith that is blind to reality. Squelching doubts becomes essential to maintaining that faith. I quickly learned to ignore, reinterpret or rationalize any facts that didn’t fit my faith. Throughout my life in the Family, pushing doctrines I doubted or disagreed with to the back of my mind became an habitual way of dealing with the psychological stress of cognitive dissonance I experienced when trying to reconcile religious dogma with reality.

Berg was wrong when he wrote: “it takes more faith to believe this incredible, fictitious, fairy tale of man’s origins than it does to accept God’s simple, beautiful, inspired explanation in His Word!”i To believe the Bible is literally true requires the kind of irrational faith expressed in the oxymoronic scripture that preposterously claims faith is evidence (Hebrews 11:1). On the other hand, accepting evolution doesn’t require blind faith, just a basic understanding of the self-correcting scientific method, which counters criticism and dispels doubt with real, reliable evidence that confirms it as fact.

1 Corinthians 13:11 states: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Now that I was no longer a Child of God, and understood as a man, evolution seemed far more reasonable and wonderful than creationism. As Darwin wrote in the final sentence of On the Origin of Species: “There is grandeur in this view of life ... that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.ii

It was a tremendous psychological relief to realize while in university that it isn’t evolution, but creationism that is an “incredible, fictitious fairy tale”. Having reached that conclusion, I didn’t go on to consider the question of God’s existence. By that time, I had shed all other aspects of my former Christian life, so I consciously decided to put aside that ultimate question. For the next several years I suspended my belief, neither believing nor disbelieving God existed.

Religion was irrelevant in my new life, interesting intellectually, but not spiritually. In my former worldview I always filtered everything through my indoctrinated understanding of the Bible. Now clear-eyed, I was able to confront and critique my beliefs from a new perspective. It helped that I could examine biblical and religious themes I encountered in some of my classes, and include my new views in various essays. I had successfully deprogrammed myself from Biblical bondage. Although words attributed to Jesus promised his truth would set me free,iii that dogma bound me in chains. It was the truth I discovered through education that gave me genuine freedom.

Redemption Song – Bob Marley

Won't you help to sing

See: Henrietta Davis. “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery: The origin and meaning behind Bob Marley’s Redemption song.” https://henriettavintondavis.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/redemption-song/

This chapter of my memoir describes in detail my educational experiences and subsequent academic readings that ultimately led me to completely reject all religious beliefs. So, R.E.M.’s song makes its third appearance in this soundtrack series, because of its special relevance to my story.

Losing My Religion – R.E.M.

That's me in the corner

Chapter 18 – Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

Music featured in this chapter:

Losing My Religion – R.E.M.

Should I Stay or Should I Go – The Clash

Birthday – The Beatles

Leaving on a Jet Plane – John Denver

This chapter of my memoir continues where chapter 17 left off, when I secretly listened to the R.E.M. song Losing My Religion while at the Heavenly City School cult compound in Japan. It was an “aha moment”, when in a state of spiritual turmoil I realized I no longer believed David Berg was a prophet.

Although that R.E.M. song was a turning point for me, I remained a believer in God and did not lose all my religious beliefs until I was in university and used that education to deconstruct those beliefs. So, this chapter is not titled after that song, but another that describes the dilemma I was in. Instead, Losing My Religion is the title of the next chapter, where I describe that educational process. The following excerpt is from the end of chapter 17 and the beginning of chapter 18.

... All my doubts came to a head when I returned to Japan in 1991.

Although members had to write regular reports revealing not just their activities, but their state of mind, I now knew better than to expose my true thoughts and feelings. I kept my inner turmoil to myself, choosing my confessions carefully, like I had done as a child in the Catholic confession booth. However, some of my angst spilled out occasionally in angry outbursts and quarrels over petty things with co-workers. That forbidden behaviour was very uncharacteristic of me, so I was as surprised as they were when I did that. I wasn’t happy, and it was getting harder to hide behind a smile.

One day, I suddenly realized what was happening to me. Like most members, I had a portable cassette player for listening to Family music. Mine, which I purchased in Hong Kong, also had a radio. Most worldly music was forbidden, so at first I self-censored and only listened to the radio for news reports. But now I began to covertly listen to pop music on an American Forces Network radio station while I walked around the HCS compound for exercise. I placed a Family music cassette in the player to conceal what I was really listening to in case anyone asked.

It wasn’t unusual for me to interpret a song’s lyrics as a divine message directly applicable to my own life. That’s what happened in 1979 after I first heard Dylan’s song, “Gotta Serve Somebody”, which prompted me to return to serving God in the Family. Now, another rock song stopped me in my tracks like that one did, only it led me in the opposite direction. When I heard “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M., I finally realized that’s what was happening to me.

...

When I heard R.E.M.’s song “Losing My Religion” on the radio in the spring of 1991 it was a current hit so got regular airplay. Each time I heard it, I was mesmerized by the introspective lyrics that reflected my inner turmoil and spiritual confusion. I understood now that I was starting to lose my religion. Months of soul searching, questioning, and doubting Berg’s biblical interpretations and bizarre spiritual fantasies finally led to the realization that, like the song described, I was a blinded fool and the life I was living was just a fanciful dream.

Awakening from a dream can be disorienting. I was confused, unsure of what I believed anymore. I had lost faith in Berg’s prophetic power and could no longer disregard my doubts and concerns. I wasn’t renouncing all Christian dogma, but my faith in the Family’s fundamentalist belief system had collapsed, undermined by facts I could no longer ignore. Totally losing my religion would be a longer process over a few years.

Losing My Religion – R.E.M.

That's me in the corner

After hearing that R.E.M. song I began plotting my escape from the cult. However, after my plan was in progress and I had deceived the leaders into paying for a round-trip flight back to Canada on false pretences, I fell in love with a Japanese member, Wings, who had a 5 year-old daughter. I now had a difficult dilemma: I wanted to leave the cult, but I also wanted to rescue Wings and her daughter from that abusive environment.

Should I Stay or Should I Go – The Clash

Should I stay, or should I go now?If I go, there will be troubleAnd if I stay, it will be doubleSo come on and let me know

This indecision’s bugging me (Esta indecisión me molesta)If you don’t want me, set me free (Si no me quieres, librarme)Exactly whom I’m supposed to be (Dígame que tengo ser)Don’t you know which clothes even fit me? (Sabes que ropa me “quedrá”?)Come on and let me know (Me tienes que decir)Should I cool it, or should I blow? (Me debo ir o quedarme?)

My flight to Canada had already been booked before I could work out a way to rescue Wings and her daughter. I arrived at my parents home in late August 1991, close to my birthday. With my return flight to Japan pre-booked, my dilemma came to ahead and I was forced to make a decision: either remain in Canada or return to Japan to rescue Wings from the cult.

I knew I couldn’t stay in an indecisive state of limbo for long. I had to choose one life or another, each with certain obstacles and uncertain futures. This time there was no song, movie, scripture or other sign directing my path. Instead, in my unstable state of mind, I made a rash decision based on my emotional overreaction to an innocent comment at an extended family gathering.

My birthday is in September, so initially I thought it was an all-in-one welcome home/birthday/farewell celebration on my behalf. I was surprised when almost all of my mum’s relatives came, as I wasn’t close to many of them. But there was another purpose for the party. My mum and aunt told me later in the evening that they used the occasion to plan a family reunion that their brother would come to.

My uncle had recently been diagnosed with advanced cancer, and they thought this would be the last chance to get all nine siblings together. They knew he would be reluctant to attend a reunion focused on him, so a party for me was the perfect reason to convince him to come. I realized that some had probably only come for his sake, and in my highly sensitive, emotional mood I couldn’t help feeling slightly used. In that moment I felt as alienated from my real family as I was from my spiritual family. The only thing I was certain of was my love for Wings. I couldn’t get her out of my mind.

My birthday party in mum’s backyard

Birthday – The Beatles

They say it's your birthday

Love is a powerful motivator. I had long acted out of a misguided, fearful love for God. Now the fear of missing a rare opportunity to share genuine mutual love was moving me. Re-establishing my life in Canada would always remain an option, but I had only one chance to return to Japan and be with Wings. I knew I wouldn’t get another one if I didn’t use my prepaid return ticket. I didn’t know her real name and had no independent way to contact her without going through the Family. If I didn’t return to Japan now I would never know if I could’ve successfully rescued her and Joy, and created a new family with them. So, I decided to return, not to remain in the Family, but to persuade Wings to leave it with me.

My plan was to return to the HCS and push the leaders for permission to legally marry Wings. I knew other foreign members lived in Japan on spousal visas, so I thought they might approve that. It was an all or nothing gamble that could back-fire and strand me overseas again, but I thought it was a fairly safe bet.

The next step in my plan would be to confide my doubts to Wings and convince her that the Family was not a safe place to raise her daughter. I was confident I could persuade her to leave for Joy’s sake once I described the abusive treatment of teens I witnessed in Macau. I also thought my English teaching experiences gave me a good chance of finding a job in Japan. So after three weeks in Canada, I flew back to Japan with that uncertain, though hopeful plan.

Leaving on a Jet Plane – John Denver

Every place I go, I'll think of you

However, my dreams and plans failed, dramatically. I returned to Japan to enact my rescue plan, only to be denied entry into the country. Immigration officers ordered me to use my ongoing ticket on the next flight to Hong Kong. I returned to the cult commune where I had previously lived, and secretly plotted my escape back to Canada. My final escape would make a very dramatic scene in any filmed version of my memoir, as this soundtrack series imagines. I had no way to communicate with Wings without the cooperation of cult leaders, which they refused. Not knowing her real name or anything about her outside of the cult made it impossible to ever find her, which broke my heart.

After jetting across the Pacific three times in less than a month, I arrived back in Canada for the final time on September 25, 1991. I was a misguided, uneducated 36-year-old with less than $100 in my pocket and everything I owned in a half empty suitcase. I would have to start my life over from scratch. The process of losing my religion was just beginning.

Chapter 17 – Heavenly Lunacy

Music featured in this chapter:

Strange Brew – Cream

Everybody gets to go to the Moon – The Three Degrees

Bark at the Moon – Ozzy Osbourne

Man On The Moon – R.E.M.

This chapter in my memoir starts with my return to the Heavenly City School (HCS) in Japan in early 1991, after the horrific child abuse I witnessed in Macau. Top leaders at the HCS were developing new abusive programs to reinforce the indoctrination of children and teens. Those programs were then spread to communes around the world. After my experiences in Macau, I was beginning to examine my doubts about David Berg rather than repress them.

My own doubts were growing while I too kept smiling. I couldn’t forget what I had seen in Macau, or another memory that had resurfaced since then. A few years earlier, I heard that a 13-year-old boy, Martin, had committed suicide. He and his mother lived in the same Tokyo home as Rachelle and I before we moved to Beijing. Hezekiah, who supervised that home at the time, told me that Martin had hung himself, and his mother had taken his body back to Europe. Martin’s suicide had been hushed up, so Hezekiah cautioned me not to talk about it.

When I heard that news, I was shocked and confused. Much like I had with my uncle’s apparent suicide when I was 10, I struggled to comprehend what could’ve pushed the child to take his own life. I couldn’t, so I boxed that tragedy in the back of my mind with other troubling thoughts about problematic practices and disagreeable doctrines. But now, unable to put out of mind the abusive treatment of teens I witnessed in Macau, I reconsidered Martin’s suicide in the context of the extreme indoctrination and discipline used to control Family children. I suspected that’s what pushed him to end his life.

I was finally waking up to the fact that inflicting severe spiritual threats and corporal punishments on vulnerable minors who knew no other life caused them greater psychological harm than the manipulations and chastisements I and other adults experienced. The hypocritically harsh, authoritarian leadership of the Family of Love, under Berg and Zerby’s direct dictatorial control, was more mean-spirited and malevolent now than when I had left the Children of God in 1976. I was also questioning some of Berg’s bizarre spiritual doctrines, as well as doubt that specific end-time events would soon happen the way he predicted.

Berg was a Pentecostalist and Spiritualist. He believed in a spirit world afterlife where the dead interact and communicate with the living. Many of Berg’s letters describe supposed spirit trips where he leaves his body, travels in the spirit to some other location or dimension, including heaven, and interacts with the spirits of biblical, historical, mythical and even fictional characters. He claimed many of them were his spirit helpers who delivered direct messages to him from God through.

Many of Berg’s letters also describe and analyze his dreams. Citing Acts 2:17, which describes the day of Pentecost when Jesus’ first followers were filled with the Holy Spirit, he claimed his dreams were messages from God.

A typical dream was one he called “Strange Truths”i in which he and some followers were drinking crystal clear water springing from a rock. When the water suddenly became filled with tiny, strange creatures, Berg told them it was still safe and nourishing to drink. He analyzed the dream as a metaphor. The rock was God, the water was God’s word, and the strange creatures were Berg’s unique biblical interpretations and and extra-biblical doctrines. Since Berg’s strange truths came from the same source as the Bible, he interpreted, they were equivalent to the word of God.

In fact, Berg’s truths were fictions. Although I swallowed several, I regarded some of his spiritually bizarre beliefs and extreme sexual doctrines as extra-biblical theological theories, so not necessarily meant to be taken literally the way I understood the Bible. Applying that approach to the more troubling Mo Letters made it easier to rationalize, or ignore and store in my compartmentalized mind some of Berg’s strangest truths.

Strange Brew – Cream

Strange brew

I believed Berg was the end-time prophet, so I did take his prophecies predicting the imminent second coming literally because they were tied directly to many eschatological scriptures scattered throughout the Bible foretelling specific end-time events. Some seemed already fulfilled, which made it easier to accept and believe Berg’s divinations of the end of the world.

I was blinded by the belief that we were in the biblical end-time and doomsday was near. Believing that Jesus was coming back in 1993, I had put aside doubts about uncomfortable, questionable aspects of his dogma, hoping all would be revealed after the Resurrection. But one belief I wasn’t blind to was the prophet’s preposterous claim that heaven is inside the moon. I was certain that couldn’t be true, and not just because there is no biblical basis for it. ...

... Berg’s heavenly lunacy required an even greater leap of faith to believe after he published “The Moon and the Hidden City” in 1985. He said it was “the most shocking revelation that I have ever received”.ii He declared that the Biblical heavenly city is actually inside the moon. It was perhaps Berg’s strangest ‘truth’ yet, so strange that he acknowledged it would be hard for his followers to believe and some would think he had “finally lost his mind”.iii In light of his moon theory, he was more of a lunatic than all the people he claimed were insane.

In various Mo Letters previous to that revelation, Berg expounded on his original Space City spirit trip.iv He interpreted the measurements of the holy city provided in Revelation 21 as describing a multi-level pyramid shaped city. Berg gave very specific descriptions to the artists creating posters of his heavenly vision,v which went far beyond the Bible’s description. He claimed, for example, that the entire city is enclosed within a crystal sphere, although the Bible makes no mention of that.

While thinking about that crystal sphere, Berg wondered how its size compared to the moon. He did some ad hoc calculations and concluded that the sphere was slightly smaller than the moon. Suddenly, it occurred to him that the sphere, with the city inside it, could fit within the moon. Seeking scriptural confirmation, he found every biblical reference to the moon and unconvincingly twisted his interpretation of them to fit his theory. But Berg was convinced, confidently declaring, without a doubt, that heaven is inside the moon.

Everybody gets to go to the Moon – The Three Degrees

Everybody gets to go to the moon

Berg not only believed that the moon is hollow and holding a hidden, heavenly city of gold, but that the earth “is also merely a hollow empty shell surrounding the Bottomless Pit & the Lake of Fire”, in other words, hell. He explained that the moon and the earth are different sizes because: “There are so many more people going to Hell than to Heaven! There has to be a lot more room for them in the heart of the Earth!”vi

Bark at the Moon – Ozzy Osbourne

Bark at the Moon

In two related letters,vii viii Berg addresses discrepancies brought to his attention between his mathematics and that of real scientists. He had wrongly measured the size of the moon, but instead of admitting his error and retracting his revelation, he claimed that scientific calculations regarding the moon couldn’t be trusted because scientists don’t really know its dimensions and distance from the earth, they are only guessing.ix

As a young earth creationist, believing the earth is only about 6000 years old, Berg had always denounced the sciences of evolutionary biology, geology, palaeontology, physics and astronomy. Now he was telling his followers that not even the mathematics used by scientists could be trusted, that his uneducated calculations were more accurate than theirs.x

So, in order to make his “heaven in the moon” theory fit, Berg confidently claimed the moon is actually larger than what the science shows. Berg also speculated that the Apollo moon landings never happened, citing the 1978 film Capricorn One,xi which depicts a U.S. government conspiracy faking a manned Mars landing in a film studio. But that too was a leap of faith too far for me. When I was 13, I watched on TV every moment of Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind”. I also saw the next three Apollo missions that landed men on the moon, before I joined the Children Of God. Berg’s loony theories seemed far more improbable than those moon missions.

Man On The Moon – R.E.M.

I'll see you in heaven if you make the list

Coincidentally, the reference to Charles Darwin in that R.E.M. song is also relevant to an upcoming chapter in this series, Chapter 19 Losing My Religion, where I discuss an “aha moment” I had reading Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species in university, which was a crucial part of my religious deconstruction.

I end this chapter in my memoir discussing Berg’s failed endtime prophecies and predictions, which ended my belief in him as a prophet, and the first major “aha moment” I had when I first heard an R.E.M. song, which made me realize I was losing my religion. That song will appear in the next two chapters of this series, it’s that important to my personal story.

i David Berg, “Strange Truths!”, July 1975

ii David Berg, “The Moon--And the Hidden City!”, November 1985, par. 7

iii Ibid par. 42

iv Space City

v Gallery of Posters depicting Berg’s visions of heaven.

vi Supra, note 14, “The Moon”, par.33

vii David Berg, “More on the Moon”, November 1985

viii David Berg, “The City of the Future”, November 1985

ix Years later, a former member wrote a rebuttal explaining the errors in Berg’s calculations and the science disproving the prophet’s impossible claims. Commentary by WC

x Supra note 20, “The City of the Future”, pars. 6,7,10

xi David Berg, “Science Falsely So-Called”, February 1992, par. 24

Chapter 16 – The Exorcism of Merry

Trigger Warning – this chapter describes in detail extremely disturbing religious child abuse, including a violent exorcism.

Music featured in this chapter:

Tainted Love – Soft Cell

This chapter of my memoir concerns Merry Berg, the granddaughter of cult leader David Berg. Her horrific treatment by her grandfather and the other adults in his inner circle was published in great detail as a warning and spiritual threat, especially to teens. Merry’s abuse was used as the model for dealing with other so-called delinquent, disobedient teens. I have left out of this excerpt some of the most disturbing details of Merry’s abuse, which a British judge would later come to describe as torture.

Soon after my divorce from Rachelle was finalized in May 1989, James and Sweetie relayed an order for me to move to a secret World Services unit in Hong Kong.

...No one spoke to me about the work they were doing. I wasn’t trusted enough to be involved directly, ...

Everything I did could easily have been done by one of the others, which made me wonder why I was really there. Manipulative secrecy, information provided only on a need to know basis, and the ask no questions mindset made it impossible for me to know the real reason. In hindsight, I suspect it may have been to maintain complete control over me, at least temporarily, after Berg’s team had recruited Rachelle. I had less freedom there than when I lived in communist China. As Berg bluntly put it, WS members were virtual prisoners under house arrest...

... After nearly a year in Hong Kong, I moved to Macau in 1990. It had been five years since I lived in the translation home there. Ho’s compound on the outer island of Coloane now had around 70 people. About half were children and teens, many without their parents. ...

... I soon realized that some of the teens were segregated from the others. They were under a separate, restricted regime and didn’t participate in activities with others in the commune. …

… Seeing up-close how closely controlled they were under Michael’s harsh command, I realized they were being punished with hard labour. Eventually, after chatting with my teen helpers, and overhearing conversations, I learned disturbing details of other ways those teens were being mistreated. Their physical and psychological punishments included being confined in closets or attics, forced fasting, speech restriction, spiritual threats, and brutal beatings with a wooden paddle.

Although I knew that Family children and teens were subjected to harsh spankings, usually with an instrument of some sort, I had never witnessed such beatings, and wasn’t aware of those other forms of cruel corporal and emotional punishments. I didn’t doubt they were happening though, especially after I saw two teen girls subjected to forced silence and public shaming by wearing signs around their necks instructing people not speak to them because they were forbidden to talk.

One of those girls was Amber, an exuberant red-head I knew from a couple years earlier when I lived with her and her parents, Ezra and Ginny, in the Tokyo office. The other teen was Berg’s granddaughter, Merry Jolene Berg,i known in the Family as Mene. She was the daughter of Berg’s oldest son, Paul, who everyone knew as Aaron.ii

… In 1973, when Merry was one year old, her father Aaron committed suicide by jumping off a cliff in the French Alps. At the time of his death Family members were told it was ruled an accident, but many years later Merry’s mother, Aaron’s second wife, revealed on an internet forum for exmembers that after Aaron died she read his suicide note and sent it to Berg.iii In her early years, Merry was shuffled between her mother and her grandmother, Jane Berg,iv before becoming a child performer with the Music With Meaning radio troupe. She moved to her grandfather’s home when she was 11.

A few years after that, in a fit of rage directed at 14-year-old Merry, Berg told her: “Your father Aaron was insane! If it hadn’t been for the Lord, he would have jumped off the cliff a long time before that...”. His acknowledgement of his son’s suicide appeared in a Mo Letter entitled “The Last State – The Dangers of Demonism”,v which describes a violent exorcism Merry endured at the hands of her grandfather. The title refers to a passage in Luke chapter 11 where Jesus is depicted casting out devils from people, and warns them not to allow the evil spirit to return, or they will end up in a worse state than before.

The letter’s cover illustration shows a young girl using a broom to chase off a flying demon, and several shadowy demons surrounding her as she sleeps. The introduction explains that Merry’s minders had previously subjected her to five exorcisms in the span of two months, attempting to expel the evil spirits they said she had sinfully succumbed to. When that didn’t have the desired effect on her behaviour, Berg stepped in to conduct another exorcism himself. His co-leaders Zerby and Kelly participated, as did Sara and Alfred,vi longtime members of Berg’s staff who supervised Merry and the other children.

Most of the letter is a transcript of the exorcism. It started the moment Merry came into the room where the adults were gathered. Berg hugged and kissed her, asked her how she was, then suddenly started speaking in tongues, grabbed her head with both hands and violently shook her. As Berg described it, he “yanked it around and back and forth and side ways to side ways by my hands until I was afraid I was going to yank her head off or break her neck! God was so angry.... And then I hauled off and slapped her I don’t know how many times tonight, hard, right?”vii

After violently shaking her for a full minute, he told her to look at him, slapped her face and began rebuking the Devil. Merry repeated each line of his prayer commanding Satan to leave her. He then slapped her again, pushed her into a chair and began a fierce rant interspersed with repeated prayers and threats. Berg berated and spiritually condemned Merry for a couple hours, and threatened to physically beat the demons out of her. He showed her a wooden rod, told her to feel how heavy it was, then made her bend over and whacked her with it, warning that next time it would be much harder, but on her bare buttocks.

The vicious verbal violence and spiritual threats Berg spat at Merry was fairly typical of his rants when he was speaking about his perceived enemies, but it was shocking to read such vitriolic language directed at his 14-year-old granddaughter, on top of the physical violence he inflicted on her. That’s why Berg published the letter with those details. He intended it as a dreadful warning, especially to teens, not to doubt, disobey, disrespect, question, or criticize their parents or leaders, which apparently were Merry’s sins. …

… Throughout his tyrannical tirade, Berg demonized Merry by claiming she was involved with witchcraft and satanism, and possessed by devils that she deviously let back in after each exorcism. He repeatedly equated demon possession to mental illness, warning her that she would go insane and end up in a mental hospital if she didn’t repent and change. Berg not only told Merry that her father was insane, but that other close relatives were too, including her mother, her grandmother Jane, and her aunt Deborah, Berg’s first child.viii

It’s not surprising that Berg claimed those people were mentally ill. Each of them had intimate knowledge of his immoral personal life, and had criticized or disobeyed him. Labelling them and othersix as insane and possessed was a tactic to discredit them, which was why Merry was facing the same accusations. She had honestly disclosed her true feelings and thoughts, including criticisms of her grandfather, in daily reportsx the children were required to write. The adults who read her diary probably considered her honest criticisms of Berg’s behaviour her worst sin of all. ...

… In August 1987, several months after the events in that letter, Berg banished his granddaughter to her uncle Ho’s commune in Macau. A year or so after Merry’s arrival, Berg instructed his son and the top leaders of the region to set up a separate juvenile detention program in his compound. Known as the Teen Detention Home,xi it was the model for what became Victor Programsxii in other parts of the world. Teens deemed delinquent or rebellious, often over trivial matters, were subjected to punishments, confinement, hard labour and re-indoctrination through constant study of scriptures and Mo Letters, all intended to break their will and force them to submit. …

...After reading that account of Merry’s horrific exorcism, the fact that Berg had subjected his granddaughter to such cruel physical and psychological torture was so disturbing that I repressed it. Merry had been at the Macau compound for almost three years when I moved there. I hadn’t thought of her in that time, but when I saw her on the workgang the first time and realized who she was, my memory of that atrocity she suffered swiftly surfaced. The helpless girl I saw that morning, and later with the humiliating silence sign around her neck, was a disheartened, depressed, abused teen, not the devilishly dangerous one Berg maliciously claimed she was.

A few months later, I got an even closer look at how Merry was still being abused, which shook me to the core. …

… A few days after that shocking evening, I heard they had finally taken Merry to the local hospital. Knowing she was getting medically competent care helped to relieve some of my inner turmoil. I later learned that when Merry was released from the hospital her uncle Ho took her to the United States to live with her grandmother, Jane Berg, who was no longer in the Family, but still friendly. That was the last I heard of Merry until 15 years later when I was under psychiatric care myself and spoke about that horrific experience for the first time.

After those events in Macau, I was ordered back to the Heavenly City School in Japan in early 1990. While there all my doubts about Berg and the cult reached a turning point (see the chapter Losing My Religion in this series), and I began plotting my escape. Less than a year after witnessing Merry Berg’s torture in Macau I left the cult and returned to Canada in September 1991.

Tainted Love – Soft Cell

Sometimes I feel I've got to

While watching that video as the song played for this podcast episode I noticed for the first time the scene where the male subject of the song is looking at his horoscope, with Virgo highlighted, which coincidentally is also my sun sign. Another example of a pop song mirroring my cult experiences.

i Merry Jolene Berg

ii Paul Brandt Berg

iii Judy Helmstetler (aka Shulamite), Merry Berg’s mother

iv Jane Miller Berg

v David Berg, “The Last State – The Dangers of Demonism”, March 1987 par. 55

vi Alfred Strickland Kelley

vii Supra, note 16 “The Last State”, par. 114

viii Supra, note 16 “The Last State”, pars. 46,47,54,55

ix David Berg, “A Father Applies The Rod! -- Dad’s Phone Call with Ho”, December 1980, pars. 17,18,20

x Open Heart Report

xi Teen Detention Home

xii Victor Programs

Chapter 15 – Mr. Big in Japan

Music featured in this chapter:

Mr. Brightside – The Killers

I Don’t Want to Know – Fleetwood Mac

Big in Japan – Tom Waits

Divorce Separation Blues – The Avett Brothers

This chapter of my memoir starts with my return to Japan in 1996 after fleeing Beijing, China one step ahead of the authorities. Shortly after, Rachelle and I were recruited to serve the top regional leaders in their office home in Kamakura, just south of Yokohama. The first part of this chapter describes our time serving those leaders until they forced Rachelle and I to separate because of my jealousy, which was a major sin in the cult.

.... a Family VIP visited the office. Mordecai Printer, or Inky as Berg called him in various letters, helped establish the Family’s publishing operations around the world. As an important Family dignitary, members owed him the same deference we gave leaders. So when Maggie told Rachelle that Mordecai wanted to ‘share’ with her, even though there were two single women in the home, we had to unquestioningly accept it as God’s will.

Whether or not Rachelle was willing, she had to submit or risk being labelled a disobedient “girl who wouldn’t”, like Maggie’s reluctant former assistant. We were under extreme peer pressure to conform and spiritually coerced to obey leaders in that totalitarian environment. Considering the power imbalance, Rachelle couldn’t have freely given her consent, and I certainly felt forced to accept their liaison even though I thought it was unnecessary.

Living closely with those top leaders, I was beginning to more clearly recognize their double-standards. They had more luxuries and freedoms, lived by their own rules, and did things regular members would be reprimanded for. I had to accept that and keep my mouth shut, but it wasn’t easy suppressing my doubts and jealousy when I had to sleep under the dining room table like an obedient dog, while Mordecai was having sex with my wife in our bed.

I was tormented further when Mordecai and Ezra later came into the kitchen and began a long, loud conversation, thoughtlessly uncaring that they were disturbing my sleep. Ezra had helped Faithy kick me out of the Expo home for exactly the same reason. I was furious at his cruel hypocrisy. My blood boiled as I barely contained my anger, but I didn’t dare criticism him.

At least I was aware of that situation. I became even more agitated when I learned that Rachelle was having an affair with Pete without my knowledge or consent. Sweetie shocked me one day when she asked me if I was aware that her husband had been having sex with Rachelle. Apparently, I was the only one who didn’t know about their affair. I was deeply disturbed by their deception, especially when I realized how manipulative their most recent tryst had been.

The evening before, Pete told me he wasn’t feeling well and asked me to take his place on the courier trip to the translation home. When I returned a couple hours later I had sex with Rachelle, completely oblivious that she had just had sex with Pete behind my back. When Sweetie revealed the affair to me, I realized Pete had manipulated me. He wasn’t ill, he was lustfully lovesick for Rachelle. Learning he lied to me and she betrayed me made me sick at heart.

Later that day, I pulled Rachelle aside to the nook under the staircase and confronted her over their deliberate deceptions. Though I didn’t shout or strike her, I could barely contain my anger. I was deeply hurt and heartbroken, so I pushed her away in a reflexive gesture of rejection when she tried to tearfully hug me. I don’t know if others heard me angrily vent my jealousy, or if Rachelle told Sweetie about my reaction.

All four leaders were away at the time, but they sent me a message accusing me of being “out of the spirit” and distracting them from their important work. They said Rachelle and I needed to be separated. They considered her more yielded and useful to them, so deemed me the guilty party and ordered me to move to a regular home. Afterwards, in a small storage room, I broke down and sobbed. It’s the only time I’ve cried aloud as an adult.

Although I had sinfully yielded to jealousy and anger, I thought the leaders unjustly singled me out for condemnation and punishment when Rachelle and Pete were also guilty. I believed they had violated Berg’s initial rules governing sexual relationships, and the leaders’ response to the situation was contrary to the guidelines first set down in the letter, “The Law of Love”. Distressed by their cruel double-standard, I decided to write a complaint letter to Karen Zerby (Maria), Berg’s co-leader.

Berg’s initial explanation of that foundational doctrine included conditions attached to the new sexual freedoms. Their affair wasn’t unselfish or sacrificial love, so in my opinion the leaders also broke that law by excusing the lustful couple while condemning my reaction. I said so in my letter to Zerby, which included the following quotations from “The Law of Love” to support my complaint:

Any variation from the norm of personal relationships, any substantial change in marital relationships, any projected sexual associations should have the willing consent of all parties concerned or affected, including the approval of leadership and permission of the Body. If this is lacking in any quarter and anyone is going to be harmed or unduly offended, then your action is not in love nor according to God’s law of love! ... Are you doing it because you want to unselfishly and sacrificially help someone else who really needs it, and by which you can show them God’s Love, or are you doing it selfishly and unlawfully, not in love for others and God, but merely “to consume it upon your own lusts”?i

Criticizing leaders was taboo, and I had been punished for far less, so writing the letter was risky, but Zerby never responded directly to my letter.

Mr. Brightside – The Killers

It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this?

The second half of this chapter describes the time David Berg, Karen Zerby and their staff showed up at the cult’s Heavenly City School compound in Japan where Rachelle and I had been reunited several months after our forced separation. That compound served several purposes. It was a ‘school’ to continue the indoctrination of children and teens. Conferences and meetings were held there, and it was also a temporary refuge for members who fled persecution in the Philippines. It also had audio and video recording studios, with the cult’s best musicians from around the world there to produce audio and video cassettes for sale. Among them was Jeremy Spencer, who had dropped out of Fleetwood Mac in 1971 when on tour in Los Angeles to join the Children of God.

I Don’t Want to Know – Fleetwood Mac

I don't want to know the reasons why love keeps

David Berg’s arrival at the Heavenly City School compound was quite a shocking development for us regular members. Berg had lived in hiding for decades, even from his own followers.

..... Then one day in February 1988, I saw the end-time prophet in person.

Mid-morning that day everyone in the compound was called to gather in the dining hall, which was unusual. Curiously, all the curtains were closed, so clearly something important was up. A stranger with an air of authority came into the hall and started speaking about the importance of staying security conscious. He told us we would start to see numerous unfamiliar faces around the compound and warned us not to speculate or gossip among ourselves, or talk to anyone we didn’t know unless they talked to us first.

I was sitting beside one of the windows and noticed the silhouettes of two people in the parking lot. Curious, I peeked through a crack in the curtains and saw the profile of a bearded man wearing a cloak walking arm in arm with a woman. They were headed up the hill behind the compound to a small pyramid shaped building Mrs. Narita built as a prayer room after reading Berg’s letter about the supposed supernatural powers of pyramids.ii I suddenly realized that the mysterious couple was Berg and Zerby, and the stranger speaking was their right-hand man, Steven Kelly,iii known to us as Peter Amsterdam.

This was both a thrilling and terrifying turn of events. Although it was exciting to be at the centre of the action, I was spiritually intimidated by the prophet’s presence. Berg’s end-time predictions motivated me, but his dictatorial, capricious nature frightened me. His letters contain many examples of how, in a fit of self-righteous indignation, he lashed out at those around him with wrathful verbal abuse and punishments for minor matters.iv He published those accounts as warnings to toe the line, or else, so I was treading carefully after Peter’s lecture.

A few days later, as I was about to enter the front door of the main building, I heard someone call out “good morning son” from the window on the upper floor of the white house directly across the street. Immediately recognizing Berg’s voice from audio recordings, I froze, afraid to turn and face him. Was he talking to me, or to Silas who was doing some landscaping nearby? Relieved when I heard Silas answer him, I entered the building without turning around and replying to Berg.

Considering how things turned out, Berg may have seen my failure to face him and respond as a disrespectful insult, and formed a low opinion of me from that first impression. If Berg did feel slighted by that I’m sure he would’ve held a grudge against me, even more so if he learned I was the one who had challenged authority by criticizing Maggie and her co-leaders in my complaint letter to Zerby about the Law Of Love.

The Children of God/The Family cult was very big in Japan for several decades, with dozens of communes around the country, and hundreds of Japanese members and their children. Disappointingly, through research I’ve done and communications with academics in this field, I’ve discovered that there are no academic studies of this cult in Japanese. One Canadian professor I communicated with told me he searched for information on that cult in Japanese and all he could find was a couple paragraphs about the Children of God in a general study of religious groups in Japan. It’s almost as if the cult and hundreds of Japanese members and their children never existed. There is no cultural or academic memory of that cult and its infamous leader, David Berg, being in Japan. The Miriam-Webster dictionary defines the informal noun Mr. Big as “a very powerful or important man, especially the leader of a group of criminals”.

Big in Japan – Tom Waits

I got the style, but not the grace

By the way, regarding those lyrics about the moon and cheese, stayed tuned for chapter 17 in this series titled Heavenly Lunacy, all about Berg’s insane beliefs about the moon.

My reunion with Rachelle was short lived. She was recruited to join Berg’s staff as a childcare helper, but for her to do so, we were required to get a divorce. We had legally married in Hong Kong, obeying Berg’s suggestion for couples in our situation. Now Berg was forcing us to divorce. We got a legal divorce through the Tokyo Family Court, after which I was exiled to prevent me stirring up trouble before Rachelle disappeared with Berg’s inner circle.

Returning from town one evening, I saw Rachelle with a top leader I knew as Garyv strolling on the street between the main building and the white house. I had never spoken to him, but knew he was in Berg and Zerby’s trusted inner circle, so I immediately suspected something significant was up. They both looked at me as I drove past to the parking lot. The timing and location could’ve been coincidental, or perhaps Gary intentionally planned it so I would see them.

After awhile Rachelle came to our bedroom and told me she was asked to serve on Berg’s support staff. Her voice quivered as she explained we would have to get a legal divorce first before they allowed her to join them. That was an emotional gut punch, and felt like another betrayal approved by leaders. I didn’t dare express my resentment like I did when I learned of her secret affair. I suppressed my feelings and accepted the inevitable.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that they only recruited Rachelle. She was more obedient and submissively servile, while my disposition made me a less desirable servant. I was more likely to occasionally question, criticize, and express minor disagreements instead of keeping my thoughts to myself. After Berg arrived at the HCS, top leaders reprimanded me more than once for trivial things, including expressing my opinion, which they considered talking back and challenging authority.

I shouldn’t have been surprised about a forced divorce, either. Most top leaders, and staff members in Berg’s inner circle, were purposely separated from their spouses, ensuring they had no divided loyalties. We didn’t really have a free choice about it. We risked the wrath of God if we refused a request from his prophet. There was no point objecting, so I made it easy for her and bluntly said I agreed to the divorce. Broken-hearted, my emotional connection to her finally broke in that moment.

The leaders wasted no time getting me out of the picture. It would take a few months to get the divorce, so to avoid any awkward tension or disharmony between Rachelle and I while we waited, they sent me away a couple days later. I moved to an office home in the residential neighbourhood of Shin-Urayasu near Tokyo Disneyland. James, formerly Mark, and Sweetie were in charge. Both were also separated from their spouses and children. He was the leader in Hong Kong who recruited Rachelle and I, and she was formerly Maggie’s secretary who informed me of her husband’s affair with Rachelle.

In our divorce application, we claimed irreconcilable differences. We told the Family Court mediator that Rachelle wanted to return to Canada. I had no idea how close to the truth that was. Many years later I learned that Berg and his staff had moved from the HCS to Canada where they lived until 1993 in a rural area near Vancouver, British Columbia. I realized then that one reason Berg’s team recruited Rachelle was her Canadian citizenship.

I didn’t see Rachelle again until 1993, the year Jesus failed to come back.

Divorce Separation Blues – The Avett Brothers

I'm gonna keep on livin'

i David Berg, “The Law of Love”, March 1974, pars. 14,16

ii David Berg, “Pyramid Power”, January 1975

iii Steven Douglas Kelly

iv David Berg, “Obedience in Little Things”, 1984

v Grant Cameron Montgomery

Jeremy Spencer https://www.xfamily.org/index.php/Jeremy_Spencer

Chapter 14 – I Shook Hands With The Butcher Of Beijing

Music featured in this chapter:

Speaking English – Isle of Man

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Communicating with music

China – Joan Baez

This chapter of my memoir first describes my return to Japan ten years after the first time I lived there, and the several months I spent evangelizing at the World Expo 1985 in Tsukuba. The rest of the chapter describes the year I spent in Beijing, China in 1985/86 as an undercover missionary disguised as a school teacher.

Back in Tokyo, reunited with Rachelle, I heard about a meeting on evangelizing China that occurred while I was away. It was led by Maggie (formerly Keda) who was now a co-leader of the Asia-Pacific region with Chris,i Ezra and his wife Ginny. The meeting provided practical information for anyone interested in teaching English there.

Inspired by my two courier trips, I was intrigued by the idea of living in China as an undercover missionary. Though I was a high school drop out, I thought being a native English speaker would be sufficient qualification, like it was for my teaching job in Macau. I didn’t want to miss this opportunity, so after discussing it with Rachelle, I wrote to Maggie expressing our desire to go to China.

My letter arrived at an opportune time. Maggie had just ordered a couple, Sam and Angel, to remain in Japan where they were visiting during the summer break from his teaching job in Beijing. Thinking I might be able to step into Sam’s job at the start of the fall semester, which was just a couple months away, she approved our request. She told me to meet with Tommy, who would help me forge a university degree, a required credential for getting a work visa in China.

Like many members, I had committed immigration fraud by illegally working as a missionary, but I had never used fake documents before.ii Tommy had all the necessary materials, and I copied the design layout from his fake degree. I then made photocopies to conceal the crude counterfeit. If anyone asked to see the original I would tell them I left it with my parents in Canada.

In September 1985, Rachelle, Peter and I were on the move again, flying to China on a wing and a prayer.

... the only school that replied [to my resume], the Central Institute of Finance and Banking. Renamed the Central University of Finance and Economics,i it is now China’s top economics university. It was shut down during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and early 70s along with all other educational institutions, and some of its buildings were taken over by a tobacco factory. It had reclaimed most of them since then, but when I went for an interview I could tell from the aroma wafting through the campus that the factory was still operating in at least one building.

My interviewer told me that a teacher they were expecting to come from the U.S. had backed out, so he was relieved to receive my letter. After a brief interview, he was doubly pleased to hire me on the spot.

The university in Beijing where I taught English in the 1985/86 school year. I did not take this photo, but it was probably taken around the time I worked there.

Speaking English – Isle of Man, 1986, the same year I’m teaching English in China. It’s the 3rd song in this full album.

We are standing face to face

I taught twelve hours of classes a week to first year students. One introduced himself as the spokesperson for the others and said he was a member of the Communist Youth League, a branch of the Communist Party. I assumed he was assigned to monitor the content of my classes in case I strayed into forbidden topics. His English was better than the other students, and a few times he pointed out a grammar mistake I made, a subject he might’ve had more formal training in than I did as a high school drop out.

Although I had no professional training on how to prepare appropriate lesson plans, I had various teaching materials left by Sam that were useful for reading and writing exercises. I also taught one class a week in a new language lab, giving my students aural exercises such as transcribing the lyrics of an English song. But both my students and I preferred conversational lessons. For those, I had everyone sit in a circle so everyone could more easily participate in discussions.

My democratic approach was probably unusual in that authoritarian education system where teachers feed facts to passive students for the purpose of passing exams. Some students were uncomfortable with my teaching style at first, but I invited them to ask me personal questions about life in Canada, or talk about any topic they wanted, which helped draw in those who didn’t see the value of unstructured learning.

There were few opportunities outside of class for students to hear native English speakers, so showing them a movie was another tool I used to help them improve their aural comprehension. I had a videocassette recorder that Sam and Angel left behind, and about 50 films to choose from. Movies were the only form of outside entertainment Family members were permitted. We couldn’t watch any movie, though, only ones that were approved by leaders based on Berg’s spiritual criteria. They couldn’t contradict his teachings in any way and had to have positive, inspiring messages with happy endings.”ii

The Family’s spiritual censorship was similar to China’s censorship of “spiritual pollution” from western culture that was proliferating after the “open door” economic reforms. At the beginning of 1986 the government issued strict censorship guidelines for foreign films: no sex, violence, decadence, superstition, distorted history or science, or anything that could harm diplomatic relationships.

I wasn’t aware of those new guidelines yet, but knew I had to carefully consider the government’s political sensitivities when choosing a movie to show my students. The first one I chose was the 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I thought its happy ending, with its positive message of learning to communicate with aliens was a good metaphor for students studying a foreign language with one. It was a rare chance for them to see a foreign film that wouldn’t be released in China until 1990.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Communicating with music

Me in the white coat outside the Beijing Friendship Store with a fellow cult member visiting from Harbin.

My school also gave me a ticket to the opening ceremony of a special Communist Party National Conference of Party Delegates held in the Great Hall of the People on the west side of Tiananmen Square, where I joined other foreign experts, dignitaries and diplomats invited to witness that public part of China’s political process.

Among the politicians seated on stage were the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, the General Secretary of the Party, Hu Yaobang, and Premier Zhao Ziyang. Hu was a reformist whose death in 1989 prompted pro-democracy protests. Zhao was the principal architect of the open door policy established by Deng. He was later denounced and purged for supporting the protesters in Tiananmen Square.

I had a kind of Forrest Gump moment at another official event I attended, a banquet for foreign experts to thank us for contributing to China’s modernization. Among the uniformed officials at the banquet’s head table was the Vice Premier at the time, Li Peng. After speeches and dinner, Li strolled the room speaking with some of the guests. When he got to my table, he addressed me through his interpreter. After a brief conversation he shook my hand and moved on.

I didn’t know it then, but I shook hands with the Butcher of Beijing.iii That’s the epithet given to Li by those holding him responsible for the Tiananmen massacre three years later. By that time he was the Premier, the person who declared martial law and sent troops and tanks to violently end the student-led democracy protests. Thousands were injured or killed. I was living in Hong Kong then and watched news reports of the protest and slaughter, wondering if any of my former students were in the crowd.

A photo of Tiananmen I took looking across to the Great Hall of the People.

China – Joan Baez

In the month of May, in the glory of the day

i Central University of Finance and Economics

ii David Berg “Happy Endings”, June 1979, pars. 5,9,12

iii “’Butcher of Beijing’ tries to clear his name”, The Guardian, August 19, 2004

Also see: “‘Every year I get new pictures’: the fight to preserve the memory of Tiananmen” The Guardian, June 4, 2026 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/04/tiananmen-square-massacre-preserving-memory