The Family & Children of God— Understanding the Mind of David “Moses” Berg

Believing in a God and being religiously inclined to pray or give prayer has been around for decades. Trusting in a God to keep you safe from harm is something all people, even those who are atheists, do once in their lives. During a horrible event, a death, or a near death experience, we all have had one moment were we looked to God for help.

This is what David “Moses” Berg did for his ‘family.’ To find faith in Christ to bring everyone together. But in terms of going to church, bringing everyone together means unifying as one in prayer against any stigma, regardless of any ones sins. Berg does the complete opposite. Instead, he unifies people through the action of enforcing sins.

We can learn more about what he does in his Christian cult through Stephanie Buck, in her article;

The hippie Christian cult that encouraged sex with children is still around today

She states that, the founder of the ‘family,’ David Berg, “perverted teens for Christ into his own international religious cult, exploiting young people to accomplish it.”

In a February 1971, Berg writes a letter entitled “A Shepherd-Time Story,” where he goes on to describe his “happy folds”.

Buck quotes that these “happy folds” are when, “COG members protected little lambs who “laugh and sing and dance and play and fuck and bear lots of little lambs! And the shepherds like it!”

In public, COG was a Christian group praising the name of God. In private, its purpose was to run a child sex ring.

Buck also writes about Berg’s own daughter, Deborah, who describes her father’s actions in a 1984 exposé, claiming that he, “Attempted to have sex with her several times, and engaged in a continuous sexual relationship with his other daughter, Faith.”

This was not the beginning of what Berg called “sexual sharing.” Starting in the late 1970s, Berg preached to all of his followers and their children, “God created boys and girls able to have children by about 12 years of age.”

Within another letter, there were disgusting photos pictured. One of a mother orally copulating a little boy. Another of an adult woman and a toddler laying naked in bed with her hand suggestively near his penis. The caption underneath the photos read, “Well, they told us to go to bed!”

“The free expression of sexuality, including fornication, adultery, lesbianism (though not male homosexuality), and incest were not just permitted but encouraged,” writes Richard Kyle in The Religious Fringe: A History of Alternate Religions in America (1993).

Also In 1993, TV host Larry King asked former member Ricky Dupuy how he knew such policies existed in the COG. Dupuy replied, “Because I was ordered in the group to have sex with a 10-year-old by the leadership of the group.”“Did you?” King asked.“Yes. It was to get me in so deep that I would be afraid to ever come out and speak against the group.”

In 1977, Berg issued another edict, “Female members should have sex with men in order to convert them.” In a maneuver he dubbed “flirty fishing.”

Even if women were married, Berg called on them to sacrifice their bodies in the name of God.

In Berg’s own 1979 annual report, he stated that his FFers (flirty fishers) had “witnessed to over a quarter of a million souls, loved over 25,000 of them, and won about 19,000 to the Lord.”

By 1981, hundreds of “Jesus Babies” had been born as a result of flirty fishing. Eventually, the cult had to be stopped due to AIDS-related concerns.

Buck states that, “By 1977, COG had established more than 130 communities around the world. In 1983, the group reported more than 10,000 full-time members living in 1,642 homes. The Children of God was officially renamed “The Family.””

Years later, the cult attempted to distance itself from Berg’s pedophilic dogma, especially after his death in 1994. It wanted to be seen as a legitimate international religious sect, and issued charters that allowed for personal careers and independence from the residential family unit. The Family engaged in goodwill marketing campaigns. A group of children even sang for Barbara Bush at the White House during the 1992 Christmas season.

But controversy resurfaced in the 1990s and 2000s as more and more Family members defected. Specifically, original members had given birth to a second generation, children who were raised in communal, religious environments — and in some cases, households of sexual criminality. Such isolation meant these children knew nothing outside that existence. Even celebrities like Joaquin Phoenix and Rose McGowan were part of the cult.

“At the time, I didn’t think of it as abuse,” said Peter Frouman, who left in 1987. “I had no concept that normal people didn’t do this sort of thing. I thought it was perfectly normal for parents to have sex with their children, and children to have sex with each other and with adults.”

“Sex wasn’t the only thing stolen from them. It wasn’t even the biggest thing,” James La Matterly, a member in the early 1970s, told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. “Their spirituality was stolen. God was stolen from them.”

According to Blake Butler, in his article;

The Bizarre and Terrifying Propaganda Art of the Children of God

“The Children of God still exists today under the moniker Family International, but the Children of God movement was originally founded in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California, by the former pastor David Brandt Berg, known to his followers as Moses David, Mo, King David, Dad, and Grandpa.”

Butler goes on to say that this communist cult was, “Founded around banding together to proselytize the word of Jesus in the streets.”

The group maintained an “old world” idea of Christianity, which, at least in Berg’s view, centered largely around sex. By the time the organization changed its name to the Family of Love in 1978, Berg had introduced a process called “flirty fishing,” which involved the women of the group recruiting new members by fucking them.

In 1993, more than 70 percent of the group’s 10,000 members were under the age of 18, operating under a strict and insane set of guidelines laid out by Berg and his wife, Karen Zerby.

20 of the Family’s foundational ideas (paraphrased):

1. God loves sex, because sex is love
2. Satan hates sex, because sex is beautiful
3. Incest is OK, because there’s no better place for a young man to learn about doing it than from his own mother.
4. Eleven-year-olds are capable of becoming pregnant, so why shouldn’t they be having sex?
5. Fucking your grandpa is awesome.
6. Everybody is married to everybody else.
7. Children should have at least an eighth-grade education, provided by their parents, and if the children want more education, it is “up to the parents to see if the Home can comply.”
8. Pictures of naked congregation members, referred to as “nudie-cuties,” make good bookmarks for the Bible.
9. It is OK to lie to nonbelievers in order to protect God’s work.
10. Men should not be gay, but it is hot when women are gay.
11. Masturbation is having sex with Jesus. When a man is having sex with Jesus, he is no longer a man, but Jesus’s wife, so it’s not actually male-on-male anymore, and therefore OK because not gay.
12. When you are having sex with Jesus, he likes you to talk dirty. Pamphlets were created containing suggested “Love Words” to whisper to get Jesus hot
13. It’s not very Christian-like to say words like “dong” or “cunt,” but if you do, it’s cool, because through the instruction of the Lord they are clean. Just, like, don’t go around saying it all the time or anything.
14. The prophecies of Jesus are called “golden seeds,” and one good way to receive them is to suck on Jesus’s “golden rod” (or another man’s rod if you are a chick and can’t find Jesus’s).
15. Jesus was supposed to return in 1993. When he did not return in 1993, it was because he wanted to give the Family more time to grow.
16. Rape provides a female the opportunity to witness to their rapist, and anyway she should have offered it freely, because providing free sex is a good way to convert people to the Family.
17. “Keys of the Kingdom” are powerful words you can use for extra effect while praying. These keys also power UFOs and can turn into swords to fight demons.
18. God allowed 9/11 to happen to “America the Whore” because the towers represent the ignorance of the fat, lazy, and rich.
19. Hitler was on the right track, but didn’t actually do enough, because Jews are subhuman demons. Also, the Holocaust didn’t actually happen.
20. Heaven is actually a “space city” that exists within a pyramid measuring 1,500 miles long, wide, and tall, and this pyramid either is traveling through space to reach Earth or is hidden inside the moon.

It has become clear that Berg and his wife enacted a horrible Christ loving group. Misusing the trust of their own followers and brainwashing them to believe that what they were doing was okay. Despite going against all of what God believes in. In their minds, they were doing what God had wanted them to do. But in the mind of David “Moses” Berg, he was using his sick battered brain to dismiss the truth, and psychologically destroy all of his followers with lies.