by Don Lattin
Jesus Freaks
A True Story of Murder and Madness
on the Evangelical Edge
Don Lattin
For the children
Davidito and Maria are going to be the Endtime witnesses.
They are going to have such power they can call down fire
from Heaven and devour their enemies.
—DAVID BRANDT BERG may 2, 1978
Contents
Epigraph
Cast of Characters
Introduction
1: REVENGE OF THE SAVIOR
Westbound on Interstate 10 near the Arizona/California border, January 8, 2005
2: MAMA BERG
Casa Grande Valley Farms, Pima County, Arizona, December 1948
3: JESUS FREAKS
Corner of Haight and Ashbury streets, San Francisco, California, May 1967
4: GOSPEL OF REBELLION
Light Club, Huntington Beach, California, March 1968
5: FAMILY CIRCUS
Texas Soul Clinic Ranch, Erath County, Texas, March 1970
6: MY LITTLE FISH
Emergencia Maternidad, Tenerife, Canary Islands, January 1975
7: TEEN TERROR
Sunflower Street, Antipolo, Philippines, February 1987
8: JOY
King County District Court, Seattle, Washington, May 1993
9: EXPERT WITNESS
Church in the Marketplace, Sydney, Australia, January 1994
10: ELIXCIA
Family International Offices, Budapest, Hungary, August 1994
11: LOVING JESUS
World Services Publication Unit, Vancouver, Canada, October 1996
12: MOVING ON
Family Care Foundation, Dulzura, California, March 2000
13: INTO THE DESERT
Elderhaven Care Home, Tucson, Arizona, December 25, 2004
14: LAST DATE
Apartment of Alisia Arvizu, Scottsdale, Arizona, January 2, 2005
15: LOST
Tiago’s house, Santa Fe, New Mexico, January 8, 2005
16: “COME DIE WITH ME”
Ricky’s apartment, Tucson, Arizona, January 8, 2005
17: END OF THE ROAD
Palo Verde Irrigation District, Blythe, California, January 9, 2005
18: RICKY.COM
Cyberspace, March 2007 and beyond
CONCLUSION
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note on the “Mo Letters”
Notes
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
Photo Credits
About the Author
Other Books by Don Lattin
Copyright
About the Publisher
Cast of Characters
(Note: Members of The Family International, which has called itself Teens for Christ, the Children of God, and the Family of Love over the past four decades, used numerous aliases. For purposes of clarity, this book uses one name for most characters, even though they may not have been using that name during that chapter of their lives.)
David Brandt Berg was the founder of The Family. He was known to his followers as “Uncle Dave,” “Moses David,” “Mo,” “the Endtime Prophet,” or simply “Dad.”
Karen Elva Zerby took over The Family when Berg died in 1994. Originally one of David Berg’s polygamous wives, she was later known as “Mama” or “Maria.”
Richard Peter Rodriguez was the only son of Karen Zerby. He was raised as David Berg’s spiritual son and proclaimed to be “Davidito.” He was known in The Family during his teenage years as “Pete,” but he called himself “Ricky” after he left the fold.
Susan Joy Kauten was Karen Zerby’s longtime personal assistant and one of several young women who helped raise Ricky Rodriguez. During much of her time in The Family, she was known as “Sue” or “Joy.” She legally changed her name in 1993 to Angela Marilyn Smith.
Merry Berg was the daughter of David Berg’s eldest son, Aaron, and Aaron’s second wife, Shula. Merry was known in The Family as “Mene.”
Sara Kelley was the primary nanny of Ricky Rodriguez and author of The Story of Davidito. In The Family, she was called “Sara Davidito.”
Davida Kelley was the daughter of Sara Kelley and Alfred Stickland. She was raised in David Berg’s household and considered by Ricky to be a sister.
Elixcia Munumel was the widow of Ricky Rodriguez. She was known in The Family as “Nicole.”
Peter Amsterdam was born Steven Douglas Kelly. He became Karen Zerby’s second husband and the second highest-ranking member of The Family.
Jane Miller Berg was the first wife of David Berg. She mothered his four children: “Deborah” (born as Linda), “Aaron” (born as Paul), “Hosea” (born as Jonathan), and Faithy. Jane Berg was known in The Family as “Mother Eve.”
Introduction
David Berg learned the tricks of the evangelical trade from his parents, shown here in a 1926 Miami handbill.
SOME CHRISTIANS MAY take issue with the title of this book, Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge. They may argue that the crazy cult chronicled in these pages has nothing to do with Jesus or the evangelical movement. They may say its founder was not a Christian—that he was a spiritualist or controlled by demonic forces. His sexual immorality, they may argue, is the very antithesis of moral values in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
That’s an understandable reaction, but the odyssey of David Brandt Berg is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. Berg, the founder of The Family, came straight out of American evangelicalism. His grandfather was a famous minister with the Methodist Church, and his father was ordained into another mainline Protestant church. His training as an itinerant evangelist was at his mother’s side in the Christianity and Missionary Alliance. And it was in the Alliance that Berg began his own late-blooming ministry.
During the spiritual counterculture of the late sixties, this previously unremarkable evangelist embraced a strange brew of Christian witness, radical politics, apocalyptic doom, and free love. His followers—known over the years as Teens for Christ, the Children of God, The Family of Love, and The Family International—survived Berg’s 1994 death and continued to operate in 2007 as an international Christian ministry with thousands of devoted members living in cells and missionary communes around the world.
Berg’s army of dedicated disciples emerged in the sixties as one of the earliest and most organized groups of “Jesus freaks” or “Jesus people,” an evangelical movement fueled by two mighty spirits—Christian witness and counterculture zeal. During the sixties, calling someone with long hair a “freak” was not necessarily a putdown. Few “hippies” called themselves “hippies.” Many used the word “freak” to describe themselves as a mark of separation from others who were not so enlightened. American pop culture glorified the Jesus people with stage productions and major motion pictures like Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. Billy Graham, the icon of American evangelicalism, gave the Jesus freaks his blessing. Maybe they had long hair and wore weird clothes, but at least they were following Jesus. At least they hadn’t joined forces with the devil, or the Moonies, or the Hare Krishnas.
It wasn’t long, however, before evangelical insiders heard rumors of strange and unorthodox happenings among Berg’s flock. At first, the concerns revolved around the movement’s overzealous recruitment of troubled teenagers and the extreme regimentation demanded in its ranks. But the greatest controversy would come when Berg started mixing free love and Christian prophecy. In the search for new converts Berg encouraged his female followers to expand the “law of love,” a doctrine that promoted sexual “sharing” among members. Young women were sent forth into the world as sacred prostitutes to bring men to Christ and into Berg’s
fold. They called this witnessing tool “flirty fishing,” after Jesus of Nazareth’s call for his followers to become “fishers of men.”
Berg was a prophet obsessed with sex. “We have a sexy God and a sexy religion with a very sexy leader with an extremely sexy young following,” he wrote in one of his letters. “So if you don’t like sex, you better get out while you can.”1
At the height of the sexual revolution, the lustful prophet mocked traditional Judeo-Christian teachings on sexual morality, preaching that God blessed adults and children who fully expressed their sexuality. “Don’t know what the hell age has got to do with it,” Berg preached. “God made ’em able to enjoy it practically from the time they’re born! But though God didn’t count them as under age to have sexual feelings and sexual responses and sexual nerves and sexual orgasms from the time they’re born, the System prohibits them from having them until they’re eighteen to twenty-one years of age!”2
When it came to sex, Berg practiced what he preached. During the late seventies and well into the eighties, children in The Family grew up in a highly sexualized environment. Sexual play was encouraged among prepubescent children and practiced between adults and children and between adults and teenagers. In a 1973 letter originally intended for only his most trusted disciples, Berg wrote that “there’s nothing in the world at all wrong with sex as long as it’s practiced in love, whatever it is or whoever it’s with, no matter who or what age or what relative or what manner! And you don’t hardly dare even say these words in private! If the law ever got hold of this [letter], they’d try to string me up!”3
Berg even challenged one of society’s greatest sexual taboos—the practice of incest. “There are also many Biblical exceptions to so-called incest, or the marriage of certain near relatives,” he told his followers. “In fact, there would be no human race if Adam and Eve’s two sons, Cain and Seth, had not married their sisters, because there was no one else to marry…. Marriages of brothers and sisters, mothers and sons and even fathers and daughters were very common in ancient times and were not even forbidden for the 2, 600 years from the creation of Adam until the law of Moses!”4
Among those adult women who would later accuse Berg of child molestation were one of his daughters and two of his grandchildren.
My interest in this story began with children born into The Family. As a journalist, I’d been writing about new religious movements since the seventies. Back then, the story was one of worried parents trying to free their teenage or adult children from authoritarian religious cults. Those worries turned to hysteria following the horrific events of November 18, 1978, when more than 900 followers of the Reverend Jim Jones and his San Francisco–based People’s Temple perished in a mass murder/suicide at Jonestown, a remote encampment deep in the South American jungle.
My fascination with new religious movements broadened into an interest in religious movements young and old. For the next twenty-five years, I covered the “God beat” for two San Francisco newspapers. Much of my time was spent writing about the Roman Catholic Church, the rise of the Christian Right, the battle over gay rights in American society, and the emergence of Islam as a force to be reckoned with at home and abroad. As anyone who reads a newspaper knows, rigid fundamentalism and righteous fanaticism are on the rise today among religious traditions young and old.
Fringe religion can be a harbinger of spiritual trends. Cults show us how religions are born. At first glance, the bizarre prophecies and sexual promiscuity among David Berg and his followers seem little more than circus sideshows. But the sexual abuse of children by religious leaders is hardly unique to this Christian sect. Over the past ten years, the American Catholic Church has been shaken by the scandal of priestly pedophilia and paid out over a billion dollars to adult victims of child sexual abuse. And in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, who can argue against the need to better understand psychologically unbalanced zealots who twist scripture, exploit social unrest, and inspire an army of fanatics.
Sometimes it’s hard to see the violent mythology in our own religious traditions. Berg and The Family came out of a modern Christian school of thought that puts great emphasis on the apocalyptic aspects of the faith—the Second Coming of Christ, the Rapture, and the Great Tribulation. This is the same Christian tradition on the rise in America today. It is the same Christian tradition that inspires millions of Americans to buy Reverend Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of apocalyptic fiction and films. It is the same Christian tradition that uses fear to inspire and control—fear of eternal damnation, fear of not being one of the elect. It is the “the same revenge-seeking rhetoric that burns so hotly in the book of Revelation,” observes Bible commentator and book critic Jonathan Kirsch.
“All the complexities of the modern world are swept away and replaced by the simple conflict between God and Satan,” Kirsch writes. “Not coincidentally, the Left Behind series peaked at the very moment when the Western world awakened to the new peril that had replaced the ‘evil empire’ of the Reagan era—the challenge of militant Islam and, especially, the spectacle of religious terrorism on an unprecedented scale.”5
Long before the first Left Behind book hit the best-seller list, David Berg saw himself as the Endtime Prophet—the anointed messenger of the coming apocalypse. It was no great leap for his followers to go from a belief in Jesus as the only way to salvation to a conviction that The Family was the only road to heaven. But for some, especially those closest to Berg, it was a deadly leap.
For more than thirty years, Berg controlled thousands of disciples by co-opting their most intimate relationships. He and his leaders would divide and conquer the emotional lives of their flock. On the surface, it looked like free love in The Family, but there was nothing free about it. Sex was used to control and divide. These Jesus freaks were not encouraged to maintain an exclusive emotional bond with one person. Spouses and children were shuffled around the world like playing cards, and Berg was the dealer.
Berg was the dealer, but he did not invent the game. A full century before he proclaimed the law of love, Christian Perfectionist John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886) ruled over the flourishing Oneida Community in upstate New York, one of the nineteenth century’s more successful experiments in sexual promiscuity and utopian living. Like Berg, Noyes was initially inspired to develop a divine justification for his own extramarital communion. Noyes’s biographer Spencer Klaw cites “persuasive evidence that he was inspired less by theological considerations than by his own experience of the awesome power of sexual desire.
“Noyes was a man with powerful sexual drives, and for many years he was perhaps the most active participant in the sexual life of the community,” Klaw writes. “He was a connoisseur of female sexuality, likening [one female] follower to ‘a beautiful plant…having no outward activity, yet throwing around a fragrance, pleasing our eyes and giving us delight for what she is, and not for what she does.’”
Like Berg, who offered detailed instructions in the art of seduction and insisted that his female followers “burn the bra,” Noyes condemned the prudish fashions of his Victorian era. “Woman’s dress is a standing lie,” Noyes declared. “It proclaims that she is not a two-legged animal, but something like a churn standing on casters.”6
David Berg also found a role model in Joseph Smith (1804–1844), the founder of the Mormon Church and the most famous polygamous prophet in American history. “The life of Joseph Smith and the Mormons was a great influence,” Berg once confessed. “He was a very remarkable and admirable character in many ways.”7
Joseph Smith, like David Berg, put great emphasis on the violence of the approaching Christian apocalypse. Both men bred generations of fanatics among their followers and among their enemies. Jon Krakauer said it well in his 2003 book on extremist Mormon sects in southern Utah: “The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end—wealth, fame, eternal salvation—but the real recompense is probably t
he obsession itself,” he writes. “Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.”8
Like Berg, the Mormon prophet had a fondness for very young women. One exhaustive study of the thirty-three women who were Smith’s well-documented wives reveals that a third of those partners were between fourteen and twenty years of age.9 Like Berg, Smith married the already-married wives of his top male lieutenants, a practice anthropologists say can actually breed loyalty among the tribe. Men who gave up their wives to Smith and Berg were offered spiritual rewards for their sacrifice.
Relatively little has been written about the children born to Joseph Smith’s latter wives—a silence inspired by the secrecy and subterfuge surrounding the practice of polygamy in the early Mormon church. Smith and other Mormon leaders were publicly denying polygamy yet privately practicing it in 1844—the year the Mormon prophet was murdered during a shootout at a jail in Carthage, Illinois. Smith was imprisoned for ordering the destruction of the presses and all remaining copies of the June 7, 1844, edition of the Expositor, a newspaper published by a Mormon faction. Dissident Mormons at the newspaper were opposed to plural marriage and on that day printed a well-documented exposé of Smith’s previously secret revelation on the taking of multiple wives.10
