Cthe ults are terrible, but few have been as monstrous as the Sons of God, whose founder, David Berg, not only defended the usual conduct about an impending apocalypse and his own condition as a prophet of God, but also preach a doctrine of pedophile sexual abuse. In the audio recordings and literature decorated with cartoons (known as “Mo Letters”) that he sent to his communes around the world, Berg promoted the belief that sex was love, that love was God and therefore that children should have carnal relationships with each other and with adults. The result was an environment of horrific exploitation and rape whose details are nothing short of resounding.
Discovery + five-part docuseries Children of worship (August 21) removes the curtain on this nefarious organization (now known as The Family International), which was founded in 1968 in California by Berg, a former Christian missionary whose mother was an evangelical pastor and who instilled the shame of sex. He later rebelled against his love-with-children free creed. In the few photos and videos out there, Berg — with his big white beard and lunatic eyes — appears as a true caricature of a bewildered cult leader. To his acolytes, however, he was “father” and “grandfather,” and his regular Mo letters and audio tapes were diligently and greedily consumed by the faithful, as they dispensed instructions on the last and best guidelines in which devotees they should be based. every waking moment.
Children of worship offers a platform for the stories of many victims of Children of God, with three – Hope, Truth and Heaven – taking center stage. Their narratives are nightmares because, unlike their parents, who voluntarily bought Berg’s New Age-y shit, they were born into the cult and were therefore from the outset cut off from most of the knowledge or interactions with world. His was an isolated existence in which strangers were seen as enemies with the intention of opposing God, and condemned to die during the inevitable abduction. According to them, her education involved being bombarded with warnings about getting out of the way by contact with secular society, which were captured by cult music videos such as “Kathy Don’t Go to the Supermarket” (which should and was highlighted by the 1993 drug overdose death, who was a member of the River Phoenix, a member of Children of God, whose fate was treated as a precautionary tale for those thinking of leaving.
Through the memories of Hope, Verity and Celeste (as well as other survivors, though not Rose McGowan or Joaquin Phoenix, who were also born to the Sons of God), Children of worship details the control and propaganda systems employed by Berg. The main one of its methods was a practice known like “Flirty Fishing”, in which the young women members of the cult received the order to invite the men to be united to a commune having sexual relations with them, turning them into de facto cult prostitutes. All women were expected to participate in this business and accept “family-sharing” schedules that established who was to sleep with whom on a given night. Naturally, this created quite a bit of tension in certain communes; as former member Sandy recalls, she had the worst year of her life, when she was just 19 and her husband was forced to see her have sex with others. However, it was an integral part of Berg’s ethos that condemned individuality and demanded conformity (to the group and to himself) at every step.
Hope, Verity, and Celeste’s comment is brutally frank, revealing the many horrors they suffered at the hands of their older tormentors, whether Hope’s stepfather, David Lincoln (who raped her as a child), or Hope’s father. Celeste, Simon (who made her one of the stars of her propaganda multimedia device Music with Meaning). These stories are incredibly hard to come by, as are the cult videos and literature presented by Children of worship. From baffling children’s films singing and entering “The Lord’s Army” in a detention camp, where rebellious teenagers were taught to follow the line of worship or endure corporal punishment, to fragments of a comic known as “The Story of the Girl from Heaven” “, which included a chapter entitled” She Can Gang-Bang’m “(which celebrated the sexual ability of his heroine to win the hearts of new fans), the material exhibited it is shocking enough to cause frequent breathing.
“The comment of Hope, Verity and Celeste is brutally frank, revealing the many horrors they suffered at the hands of their greatest tormentors …”
Nothing inside Children of worshipThe first three episodes (which were provided to the press) are more disgusting than passages from a book released by Berg about the lifelong sexual training of his adopted son Ricky “Davidito” Rodriguez, which served as a handbook for carrying pedophile sexual abuse from childhood. Enhanced by extensive audio, video, and archival printed evidence, the series paints an incredibly complete portrait of a cult in love with sharing child pornography and committing child rape. Authorities knew of the despicable conduct of the Children of God as early as 1971, when Berg was forced to flee the FBI and Interpol, who sought him out on charges of child abuse and abduction. However, in light of his most heinous behavior he proved difficult, in the following decades, difficult to achieve, as evidenced by Sandy’s early 1990s ordeal in trying to expose the secret deviation from the cult, which reached the headlines but came at a legal hurdle when members of the cult refused to deviate from Berg’s Misleading Discussion Points.
In discussions of the terminology invented by Berg to foster an island culture; in videos of a young Celeste dancing provocatively and explicitly to the camera (part of a disgusting VHS series that Berg commissioned for her own private use, though she also passed it on to several communes); and in anecdotes about the orgiastic environment in which the young members were raised, Children of worship censors this ugly equipment from multiple angles, equally outraged. While its form is a standard issue, it is a lucid and heartbreaking view of cult structures and procedures, evidence of personal fear, and courageous struggles for justice; , at a police station in Scotland.