God's Pimp -- David "Moses" Berg

It was the height of the sexual revolution and the Jesus Movement when David “Moses” Berg dreamed up the idea of “flirty fishing.” Our Lord and Savior directs us to be “fishers of men,” so why not send out crews of hippie chicks to evangelize the young and the horny?

Female converts to the Children of God/Family International sect first employed this unusual “witnessing” technique in the nightclubs and discotheques of London. It was prime mission territory for Berg, a prophet who definitely liked his drink. Berg soon found that potential converts were more interested in dancing with his young wife than listening to what he had to say about the coming apocalypse. It was here, amid the mirror balls of London’s swinging social scene, that the Lord gave Berg his most infamous revelation.

Berg was to become God’s pimp. His mistress/wife, Karen Zerby, and the rest of his female disciples would be heaven’s harlots. They would bring men to Jesus—and into his cult—by selfless acts of sexual sacrifice. Berg gave his erotic evangelists detailed instructions, right down to what they should whisper into the ears of potential converts on the dance floor of discipleship:

Even when you’re dancing, you meet them at the club and you put your arms around them and you snuggle up to them and you love them up and kiss them, you feel their bodies against you and you feel them getting hard and all you have to say is, “You mean to tell me you don’t believe in God?”

“Listen, feel me, I am the love of God, I am God’s love for you! I am God’s love because He created me for you. He created me a woman and a woman’s love and a woman’s breasts, my pussy and everything for your pleasure. Doesn’t that prove that God loves you? Why can’t you understand that that proves that God loves you.”

In 1976, Berg sent out a flood of letters to trusted members with explicit illustrations and provocative titles like “God’s Love Slave” and “The FF Explosion.” By then, Berg and his inner circle — always on the run — had relocated to the party town of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. Young American women were hitting the clubs in low-cut dresses, flirting with men, and talking about Jesus.

Here’s how one member of the flirty fishing crew — who asked to remain anonymous — recalled her thinking at the time in an interview with me in 2005, some thirty years later.

“We were all young, in our early twenties. It was an idyllic place. You were living on this tropical island with this big volcano. It was a relatively simple existence, but it was exciting. None of the bad stuff had really kicked in yet. You have a sense that you are chosen to be there.”

Mostly, it was just a lot of fun. “It’s not like you were in some conservative backwater. Most of the tourists were northern Europeans who were pretty tolerant of our weirdness. We just came across as other people on holiday. That was our front. There were all these gorgeous girls, and there was David Berg test-driving FFing (pronounced ‘eff-eff-ing’) before unleashing it on the entire Family. It was all pretty amazing.”

To some, flirty fishing didn’t seem all that strange. Miriam Williams was still a teenager when she met some of Berg’s disciples in Greenwich Village in 1971. She soon went off with them to a commune in upstate New York. “It was a campground with about 300 people,” she said. “People were living together, sharing everything. It was a mixture of Christianity and communism. It appealed to me.”

Later, as a Children of God missionary in Europe, Miriam found herself sharing more than her material possessions. “At first, it was just flirting, but if necessary, you’d have sex with men to get them to join,” said Williams. “Most of us weren’t that shocked by it. It wasn’t that much different than the whole hippie, free love thing. We were already having sex with people in the group.”

It had only been a decade since this free-wheeling, fast-moving evangelical sect first surfaced in the Southern California seaside community of Huntington Beach during the height of the hippie movement. Its founder, David Brandt Berg, was born in Oakland in 1919, the son of a semi-famous evangelical preacher, Virginia Brandt Berg. David began his own ministry in 1966 as “Teens for Christ,” pushing his two teenage sons, Aaaron, 19, and Hosea, 17, into the limelight.

Many of those joining Berg’s cult, part of the larger “Jesus Freaks” movement, were hippies, runaways, and other counterculture renegades, including some recovering drug addicts who appeared to find salvation once they were “born again” under the guidance of this self-proclaimed prophet. Over the next three decades, Berg and his inner circle would oversee a network of communal missionary homes around the world. Converts would come and go, but it’s estimated that the core membership may have peaked at around 10,000 in the late nineties. Berg died in 1994, when his second wife, Zerby, became the sect’s leader and prophetess.

In the 1970s, Berg stopped hiding his own licentiousness. Instead, he justified it under the “law of love” and presented it as a new theology — a tempting alternative to the uptight sex negativity in the evangelical “Holiness” movement. He encouraged child-to-child sex play, along with sex between adults and minors. He did not hide the fact he himself had been molested by a nanny and then publicly shamed by his mother for touching his own genitals. In his writings, he even admitted having sexual feelings for his mother as a young man when they shared a bed on her evangelical tours.

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.”

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!”

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. 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!”

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.

So, back in the sexually liberated 1970s, Berg had no moral qualms about his flirty fishing crusade. What was immoral was the use of birth control. So, not surprisingly, that decade saw a baby boom in the Children of God/Family of Love. In 1978 alone, the sect reported that 611 babies were born to mothers in its ranks, many of whom had multiple offspring with multiple partners. Many of the fathers were flirty fishing converts who didn’t stick around for long.

They called the fatherless kids “Jesus babies.”

One of those babies, born on January 25, 1975 to Karen Zerby, would go on to play a key role in the twisted history of what is now called The Family International. His biological father, Carlos, was a Spanish waiter seduced by Zerby on one of her flirty fishing outings.

“Moses” Berg claimed spiritual parentage and named the boy “Davidito,” or Little David. He and “Maria” were destined to be the Two Witnesses credited with ushering in the apocalypse in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Revelation.

Thirty years later, Davidito (a.k.a. Ricky Rodriguez) would violently play out a very different destiny, focusing worldwide attention on the children brought up in the Children of God.

To be continued next week…

Much of this post is drawn from my book, Jesus Freaks — A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge (HarperCollins 2007).