Ray Connolly details his recruitment into the Children of God cult in 1970, describing the evolution from evangelical fervor to a system of abuse involving "flirty fishing," polygamy, and child exploitation under David Berg. He recounts managing global communities where children performed for fundraising, eventually fleeing after exposing the group's manipulation tactics and acknowledging his own complicity. The discussion extends to the potential role of psychedelics in religious origins, critiques modern cultic dynamics within mainstream institutions, and emphasizes the need for clergy to help believers integrate spiritual experiences without relying on substances or labels. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Following Jesus in a Stadium00:14:35
Right when I joined the group in 1970, televangelism wasn't even a thing, but there was one guy out in LA who had a church in the home, he called it.
So we were kind of his project, and every week he had to do church in the home.
So he had all these converted hippies come, but it was like this.
It was all just.
Just real cellophane stained glass.
Hey, how dare you disrespect my cathedral like that?
Those are real stained glass windows.
And this is, we imported this basalt granite from Egypt.
You're kidding.
Swear.
Really?
True story.
Go touch it.
Where in Egypt?
Aswan.
Oh, nice.
I'm a sucker.
I lived in Egypt for a year.
One year only?
Yeah, a little less than a year actually.
We had an abbreviation due to the authorities.
So, you made a quick move.
So, okay, for people who don't know who you are, essentially like high level, you were in the Children of God cult for more than 20 years, roughly around 20 years.
May 1970 till early 1991.
You lived in 20 different countries and you had 17 kids when you were in the cult.
Correct.
Good Lord.
I like how you kept up the whole, you know, the beard and the hair.
It's very fitting.
Yeah.
Once I didn't have to appear before customers.
Right.
So the Children of God cult is one of the most sinister cults I've ever heard of.
And, you know, not to discredit how bad some of the other ones are, but like this one in particular seemed very dark, especially when it came to the abuse of children.
And stuff like that, and how widespread it was all around the world.
But first, can you explain what the cult was?
What was the main idea of the cult?
Sure.
Well, obviously, there was a tremendous amount of evolution going on or devolution during the years of any high control group like that is going to have a downward spiral.
But with us, it was.
I was a hippie, dropped out of college, just hitchhiking around looking for the truth and ended up going to California, hitchhiking out to California to meet a guy who had witnessed the gospel to my brother, my younger brother.
And we didn't know, it was 1970.
We had no idea of any of the evangelical language.
We were raised Catholic and didn't know anything about it.
So I hitchhiked to California to find out.
Who could tell me how to accept Christ?
So that's what I was doing.
And the first day I landed in California, there was a rally.
Remember Jerry Rubin from the Chicago Seven?
No.
One of the radicals that was involved in a big court case in Chicago.
Okay.
But he was speaking at the stadium at University of Santa Barbara.
And I was staying with a guy that night.
He was an old friend of mine.
And he said, I'll meet you at the stadium, which sounded like a plan until I realized there's about 40,000 people there.
Anyway, long story short, the group was doing a demonstration that day at the stadium, which I can get into or not get into.
I don't know what you prefer.
Yeah, let's get into it.
The group you're talking about, the Children of God cult.
The Children of God, yeah.
Which I didn't know at the time.
I'd never heard of them.
Didn't know anything about the whole Jesus movement or anything about it.
So they came into the stadium, Jerry Rubin speaking.
They came into the stadium, probably 20 or 30 young people, wearing red robes, ashes on their forehead, carrying big staves.
And scrolls with scripture references, mostly Old Testament.
Very similar, like Pentecostal style.
Yeah, it was Christian.
It came out of a Pentecostal type movement originally.
Serpents and shit.
No, not raising serpents.
No, we were not doing that.
You know, it would have been better if we had.
But the.
More satanic, maybe.
The idea was they were conveying that.
America's in trouble.
Their judgment is coming and Jesus is coming back.
You know, get ready.
So at first, the thing was very strange for me.
I hadn't seen anything like it, nor had many other people.
But, and I wasn't immediately, I knew something big was happening.
I didn't know what it was.
And I wasn't sure it was connected to my search.
So after the demonstration ended and Jerry Rubin left, I met some of them after they'd taken off their robes and were just sharing sandwiches with hippies.
How old were you, by the way?
19.
19.
Okay.
So, um.
So, were they offering like free food or?
Yeah.
And, you know, peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, uh, and playing guitars and, you know, just invitation to have a conversation about God.
So, I was up for it, you know, and I went over and listened in.
And it was so interesting to me because there were a few, um, what would you.
kind of churchy Christians there, college students, that were debating with this group over the way to interpret scripture and what's the right way to live, to follow Jesus.
And these guys would, you know, the college kids would give very reasonable arguments with very little scripture.
And these guys would just flip their Bible and just open it to a verse and said, just read that one.
And everything they did and said came straight out of the Bible.
So I was the children of God people.
They were opening passages.
They knew the Bible way better than these other guys.
Wow.
So, and they memorized, you know, how many.
And we're talking about an English translation.
They weren't reading Greek, right?
No.
Right, right.
King James.
Okay.
But, and their zeal was obvious and they were clearly committed.
They, you know, in the conversation, they lived communally.
They lived by faith.
They didn't have jobs or anything.
They just went out every day to tell people about God.
and challenge them to follow Jesus.
So I was really drawn.
And in the course of the conversation, I talked to them about how do you accept Christ, you know.
So they led me in the sinner's prayer.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with that term, but it's widely used in the evangelical community to ask Jesus in your heart and begin a new life, which I did.
And I had a pretty profound experience of conversion.
I really genuinely sensed that God had come into my life.
So as time went on, I was happy about that, obviously, but I still was a little nervous about what the commitment was being asked of me, you know, to forsake all and follow Jesus.
And I thought, well, maybe if I come down to see you guys, they were from L.A.
They came in on a bus from L.A. to Santa Barbara.
What year are we talking again?
1970.
70.
Right after Kent State, that era.
So, what year were the Manson murders?
69?
I think 69.
Yeah.
Yeah, no.
So that whole thing was in the news, you know, just like California and cults and all that.
Not a lot, but, you know, the Charles Manson thing brought it to attention.
So I was a little like, I'm not sure.
I never came into anything quite this strong in terms of its emotional and spiritual force.
But you sort of had a void in your soul you were looking to fill.
Right.
You were looking for something.
This wasn't just happenstance.
You can't take it across.
I was very deliberately, and, you know, I set out to find God.
And my brother had this experience with a kid in Berkeley.
So I was on my way to Berkeley, but ended up in Santa Barbara for the night where I had a friend.
So that's how I ended up at this event.
Right.
So, but I had really asked God to show me the truth.
And I promised him that if he showed me the truth, I would do it.
Which is a dangerous prayer.
But that afternoon, I bump into these guys.
I ask Jesus, my heart, and my life has changed.
But still, I'm nervous.
Like, can I just get a little distance?
I'd like to, you know, call my girlfriend and check, just see what's happening before I commit to my life.
But the fella that was sharing the gospel with me was.
Pretty determined not to let me do that.
Wait, wait, wait.
So, what was the conversation like to commit your life?
What do you mean by that?
Like, what do they say to you?
Do you want to follow Jesus?
So, likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaken not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.
You know, so, and there's dozens more like that.
So, he was saying, We're doing it.
We're doing what Jesus said.
Yeah.
If you want to follow Jesus, if you told him you want to follow Jesus, and then you get an invitation to follow Jesus exactly the way he said, and you don't do it, He said, You'll never be able to look yourself in the eye again.
You're not going to be able to say you're looking for the truth anymore.
And frankly, I think you'll just go crazy.
And when he said that, I got a jolt.
Like, yeah, I could see that.
I could go crazy if I don't do what I told God I would.
And was there any talk about you just like joining their clan and staying and living with them?
Yeah, I mean, that was the vision.
We all live together.
We're going to travel the world and spread the gospel.
So, Anyway, I did.
I ran back, grabbed my knapsack at my friend's place, and jumped on the bus and rode to L.A.
And then I found out what it was, the Children of God.
How did you find out?
I think they told us somewhere along the way.
They didn't have business cards or anything.
But people call us the Children of God, is what they would say.
Because that's what happened.
They didn't make up the name.
A journalist gave them the name.
So anyway, it was a big five-story mission building in downtown L.A., fifth in town.
And it was pretty much occupied fully by about a hundred converted hippies who were all pursuing this dream.
Very enthusiastic, very loud, a lot of praise the Lord, hallelujah, thank you, Jesus, all day, every day.
A lot of singing, a lot of hugging, a lot of smiling, laughing.
Any drugs?
No.
No.
Well, not once you're in.
I mean, prior to conversion.
I mean, like a part of the prayer and the ritual and the dance and all that?
No, no, no.
Totally Pentecostal, Holy Spirit kind of energy.
Okay.
With a dose of radicalism, you know, that was challenging to all the values of mainstream America and frankly the world.
I mean, it was, this is the right way to do it, and this is what Jesus said we should do, and this is what we're doing.
And if you don't do it, that's your problem, you know.
It's come along and we'll help you get into it.
So anyway, I went to this building, and there was kind of a A lot.
We had a big snack of big bowls of ice cream, donated ice cream and stuff like that.
And then a lot of singing.
And then all the new ones, myself included, about 10 of us who had just jumped on the bus that day, were invited up to the second floor where we had a meeting.
It was called a second floor purge room where new recruits would, after being congratulated on choosing your new life, would then give you a good cop, bad cop experience of, on one hand, praising you for doing it and making you feel good about what you're doing.
And then on the other hand, a warning that if you don't, if you walk away from this, this is what you're doing.
You know, you're failing God and you're crucifying the Son of God afresh.
And it was a real difficult moment.
And you just took out your wallet, threw it on the floor.
Everything, you turned everything over.
You know, traveler's checks, sign them over.
I'm realizing no one will know what a traveler's check is.
No.
But that was the kind of rude awakening into oh, God, this is a lot heavier than I thought.
You know, this is not just sitting around the living room in a commune.
This is like an army here, signing up for something serious.
I went to bed that night kind of nervous about the whole thing.
And a guy gave me a couple scriptures.
To, no, that was later.
Anyway, went to bed, woke up, loud, reveille style, praises to God and all that, and then kind of shuffled off to breakfast and begin your first day in class.
Nervous First Day of Class00:14:25
So the class was being taught, it was all just the new guys.
I think five had made it through the purge room and five had left.
And then The subject was the word.
And in the middle of it, people's minds were wandering, you know, just thinking about what am I doing here?
How did I get here?
That kind of thing.
What's going on?
And it was a kid, really.
He was younger than me, he was teaching the class, but he was kind of a Marine drill sergeant type.
So he was really aggressive in the way he presented scripture.
And he said, Anything you're thinking about right now that is not the word of God is the devil.
I thought, I happened to be thinking about my girlfriend at the time.
So I thought, well, that's not right.
You know, she's not the devil.
And I got up and left, grabbed my knapsack.
Where was your girlfriend during all this?
She's out in, she was on the East Coast in Massachusetts.
We had, I sort of sensed that this journey was going to change my life.
I felt like I was going to meet God and I really couldn't, all bets were off of what would happen after that.
So our vision for life was on hold until I could figure out what God wanted.
Right.
So, but, you know, this was dramatic.
I really wanted to share it with her and also bounce it off somebody to see if I could even.
Comprehensively explain it, you know?
Sure.
So you left the class?
Yeah.
And I grabbed her high school graduation picture out of my knapsack and started out the hallway.
And one of the older guys stopped me and said, Hey, man, where are you going?
And I said, Does this look like the devil to you?
And I held up her picture.
And definitely not the devil.
And he said, Wait, wait.
I think you got a few things off here.
And so he sat me down, walked me through, and kind of encouraged me that, look, You really misunderstood what was said.
And God loves your girlfriend more than you do.
So you need to get strong in the Lord so that you can share the gospel with her.
And we'll probably be sending a team out to the East Coast soon.
You're a likely candidate, kind of thing.
So I said, okay, give it another try.
Went back and got on board.
And it was two weeks in LA was pretty intense, you know, going out into the sidewalks of downtown LA, stopping complete strangers on the street and talking to them about Jesus and the end of the world and all that kind of thing.
And getting three or four hours of Bible studies every day, a lot of singing and dancing and hugging and all that stuff.
So it's a pretty high, it's a very emotionally high atmosphere.
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As time went on, then they said, hey, we've got another community down in Texas that it's way out in the middle of nowhere in the sticks.
And it's an old ranch that was used for a missionary training base.
And we've taken it over as a training place for our movement.
So we're sending a bunch of people down and you're on the bus.
So I went down to Texas and that was four months of pretty much, I guess you would call it a boot camp type situation.
A lot of very hard, hard life.
It wasn't, nobody was there for the perks.
But a lot of joy and a lot of.
dwelling in scripture all the time, memorizing five, sometimes ten Bible verses a day, mostly along the lines of pretty standard evangelical kind of teachings, plus this radical idea that Jesus is not working through the church.
He's working through committed individuals who band together to live like he's said to live in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.
So that was our whole energy.
God's going to use us in a special way because we're willing to do anything.
So, what was like the number one, like, what was your number one objective every day?
Just to go out and preach to people on the street, to recruit new people?
Yeah.
In LA, it was that.
Okay.
In Texas, it was more, we were, it was, you know, like, I don't know, probably 10 miles to the nearest truck stop.
There was nowhere to evangelize.
And that was pretty much training.
So, four months of pretty intense training, miserable living conditions.
And when you say training, you mean, Learning the Bible, memorizing the Bible, memorizing the Bible, and learning like how to answer questions, you know, just standard evangelism stuff.
What, you know, if someone doesn't believe in God, here's some verses you can use and blah, blah, blah.
That kind of how to evangelize.
And all the time, you're learning how to get along with everybody from bikers to prostitutes to junkies to, I mean, it was just a wild bunch of jazz musicians.
I mean, just a wild group of people that are all on the same journey and really committed to it.
So there was a lot of high energy and a lot of stuff that was really hard to take.
You know, you're a hippie.
You don't want to have a bunch of rules and, you know, so much regimentation, which was part of the deal.
You had to submit like a guy going in the army.
You know, you have to let go of your old personality and become the new person that you are.
In your new calling.
And you first discovered these rules and you encountered these rules.
Every time it was like.
Well, even in LA, you always had a buddy.
You always went two by two, which was a biblical term, but we carried it to a lot bigger extreme than the folks in the Bible did.
So you were really kind of.
There was a lot of.
It wasn't surveillance exactly, but it was.
Everybody was looking out for each other.
So if somebody started to have.
Doubts, it would usually show up on their face and you would get pulled aside and given a little personal attention and counseling.
You know, try and help you through your battles.
So, and then every night you'd have a, a worship service.
That was very joyful and and uh, you know transformative, just that kind of a life after the life I had been living is.
It was just very, very different, and I was.
I could tell I was changing, my personality was changing, which I thought was good.
Um so anyway, as time goes on, the group uh changes its emphasis, but that the main structure was in place, that the, the person who started it was uh, he had been a defrocked Christian and missionary alliance, uh pastor lost his church over.
That's a controversy over how he lost his church, but I think it was probably having to do with sex.
Um, talking about Berg Berg yeah yeah, David Berg so, and he had this, you know uh, vision of just molding young lives into something that was uh Yeah, that's him.
It would be unstoppable.
If you had a bunch of committed people that were willing to go anywhere and do anything and share the gospel, we'd take over the world.
In the meantime, if you happen to be a narcissist, what a setup.
David Bird, very interesting backstory, to say the least.
His upbringing with his parents, how he was raised.
I think his mother was the first Christian.
Evangelist in the United States.
I was doing all kinds of insane things, proclaimed to have divine healing powers.
All kinds of work.
He was part of the healing movement, yeah.
Yeah.
And he didn't really succeed at anything until he was like in his 50s.
And that's when he started the Children of God in like Huntington Beach, I think, right?
Yeah.
You know, he would, I think he was part of his mom's evangelistic team, played piano, that kind of thing.
But he wasn't really a well known preacher.
And when he was a, from what I've, From what I understand, when he was a young child, uh, he had a very traumatic childhood where his parents would shame him for like weird, like normal, what most people would consider normal, uh, sexual proclivities of kids going through puberty or things like this.
And they would, they would like threaten him with like, uh, chopping off his and like doing weird things with him and his sisters and his watching him like.
When he was a kid, like lots of weird early programming that happened to him from his parents in his early childhood.
Folks who have done psychological studies on Berg, you know, always comment on the bizarre nature of, I mean, it's not even all that bizarre when it comes to the evangelical world.
A lot of very strict fundamentalists approach child rearing and sexuality that way.
But I think it probably was more extreme in his case.
And given the nature of his, he thought about sex a lot.
So it probably was a big problem for him growing up.
Yeah.
But what just typically, I mean, that's the story of the Catholic school girl.
Yeah.
I'm a Catholic school kid.
You tell a kid they're forbidden from something, it's just going to make them want more of it.
Yeah.
Typically.
Yeah.
No, I mean, His story is not that different from many other people who grew up in that tradition, but his reaction to it was extreme.
So he internalized a lot of stuff.
And over time, I think, as a traveling evangelist, people have opportunities to sleep with people that they're not married to.
It just happens.
It's not unique to cults, it's all over.
And I'm sure he engaged in that.
And Along the way, he also got really involved with one of his daughters.
And so that was a, you know, we didn't know any of this.
It wasn't advertised.
Many, many years later, it came out.
But so he had already begun crossing the line into sex with minors.
This was before he started the cult.
Right.
Right.
She was, I don't know.
I think he was probably a preteen.
Age.
So, what happened after Texas when you first went to Texas to train?
They sent a team to Cincinnati, which was closer to where I wanted to go.
I still wanted to get back to the East Coast and talk to my friends and girlfriend.
But, and that was a total outreach.
We were on the streets every day at the University of Cincinnati sharing the gospel.
Sometimes, you know, have new recruits come in every week one, two, three some of whom were like well known musicians and that kind of thing.
That were, it gave us a sense of wow, this is really happening.
The NBC did a program on us called The Ultimate Trip.
I don't know if you have that one, but that was the first.
The Ultimate Trip?
The Ultimate Trip.
And it was filmed in Sensei.
I don't think I'm in that.
I don't know where I was.
And that made us even more like, yeah, God's giving us promotion.
He wants the word out.
And a lot of people started coming.
We had a lot of things happening.
A few months there, I had sort of gotten into, they got me into teaching the Bible.
I became like a leadership trainee.
So I had responsibility with some of the new disciples and so on.
Then the movement was growing so fast, they wanted to open more branches, but didn't have enough leaders.
Who was bankrolling all this?
Well, the original LA and Texas were supported by Fred Jordan, who was this TV evangelist guy who was making way more money off us than he was giving to us because he was using us to raise money from his supporters.
This is what we're doing.
Becoming a Leadership Trainee00:04:00
We're converting all these terrible hippies.
I see.
So then from that point on, it was really seriously a faith work.
It's hard for people to get their head around it, but miracles would happen.
We had some strategy.
I mean, we would.
Contact local business owners to donate food or whatever we, you know, think lumber, whatever we needed for our projects.
And then when you joined, I had a couple hundred bucks.
I threw that in the common pot and everything just goes in the common pot.
I mean, I think I probably went four or five months and I never touched money, never actually touched money.
So it was, you know, a kind of rush, you know, because you kind of expect your life to happen.
In a really miraculous way.
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So, and that continued on that way, you know, of mostly good stuff.
You bump into some strange people in a communal group, but mostly it was pretty positive.
Anyway, at the point where they wanted me to become a leader, they wanted me to get a wife.
Yes, that was Cincy.
They wanted you to become a leader.
Yeah, to be able to open a community.
Okay.
So, but you had to have, you had to be married.
So, what is this, a baptism?
Yeah.
This is the ultimate trip.
Yeah.
This is Cincinnati.
I think I'm there somewhere, but I don't see me.
But so, you know, at this stage, we're kind of part of what becomes known as the Jesus movement, but we are the most radical part of the Jesus movement just because of our commitment to following the teachings on forsaking all and having all things in common and so on.
Yeah, when you say radical, what do you mean specifically?
What was so radical about it?
Just because you guys were devoting everything and living together, getting rid of all your personal belongings and just sleep and breathe.
Forget about businesses, forget about any of that.
Just preach the gospel and God will take care of you.
You guys were like living in your own separate reality.
Correct.
And we would challenge others to do the same.
So it was a very aggressive, whenever you're arguing a case, you're also convincing yourself more and more as you present the case.
Interesting.
This is what.
Jesus challenges his disciples and you turn the page, you read it right out of the book and people go, would you guys often get in debates with folks in public, like heated actual debates or where people mostly either checked out and just like ignoring you guys or like interested?
Government Interest and Subversion00:03:52
Debates were very common.
And, you know, it was kind of in other religious traditions, I also experienced this where people, it's a bit of a sport to try and win someone over to your point of view.
And if you're doing it for God, all the better.
You know, you get a little juice there.
But so, and we would always try to bring it back to the Bible so that, and there is some pretty, if you read through the Gospels, there's a very little connection between the way Jesus challenges his followers and the way most people live out their Christian faith.
So it was, and at that time, 1970, it's, you know, people are ready to do wild and radical steps.
Just give away all your stuff and join the movement and go anywhere.
Such a crazy time, the 60s and 70s.
There's so many wacky stories of shit that was going on in the United States during the 60s and the 70s.
It's unbelievable.
I think that's a big part of how this movement coalesced because it was.
I mean, think about it.
You had MKUltra going on, a government mind control program, legit, that was declassified.
You had the Charles Manson murders, which was.
Which was evidently tied into all of that.
You have the whole Cold War, Kennedy getting killed, the Vietnam War.
I mean, there's just an endless amount of fucking bullshit that was going on back then.
Yeah.
And deception, you know, and government lies and just.
Wow.
I think that was like the pinnacle epoch of just like Twilight Zone of America.
Yeah.
Also, you know.
Flower power.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it wasn't all dark.
There was a lot of.
Right, but that stuff got subverted by the government.
But, yeah, I don't think, you know, some people have proposed that perhaps some of that, the government got interested in us because we had a pretty impressive technique for mind control.
We were really good at it.
The government got interested in children of God.
Well, some people speculate that.
I don't think so.
I never saw any evidence of that.
But I have heard that people checked it out and then kind of realized.
I don't even think we could control these guys.
Well, yeah, if you wanted to, if you were the government, which, and they were interested in mind control, that's a fact, you, and they were interested in you guys, how would they figure out what was going on?
Well, they would have somebody, you know, try to join and see what it's all about.
And you, if they would do their job, I suspect that probably did happen, you know, that people would come in for, you know, a couple of weeks or a month or two months, and they didn't quite fit the bill of, you know, the typical disciple.
So I think there was probably some research going on, but I, I think they just thought, I don't think we'd have a way of steering this unless they did it through Berg, but I don't think Berg was interested in sharing.
Well, they might not want to steer it.
They might just want to understand it.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah.
So you were on the streets.
You were preaching to people on the streets, converting, trying to convert people, trying to engage people and recruit people, doing debates.
Was there anything sinister you were noticing at all or anything that was no.
I mean, in terms of, you know, what we later became most well known for was the sexual stuff.
We were so prudish.
Arranged Marriage Tests00:02:40
I mean, I was getting to the point where I proposed to my wife.
Okay.
They're trying to, you know, encourage me to take a wife so that I can open a community.
And we were going out to LA to get ordained.
We had a problem with the draft.
So they thought, well, if we get all these guys ordained and get them as licensed ministers, then they'll be able to.
better qualify for an exemption.
For the Vietnam War.
For the Vietnam War.
So the bus was going from Cincinnati to Texas, which was our other big commune at the ranch, and then to L.A. There were only four single women in Cincinnati and probably 30 single guys.
So they said, look, why don't you come back with a wife?
Because there's not much to choose from here, but you've got lots of women in Texas and in L.A. Surely the Lord can give you a wife out of them.
the fact that I didn't know them was really not an issue.
You know, they had a, you know, kind of arranged marriage kind of concept.
I took that in, but after a few days, I went and said, I don't think I should do that because I think I'm supposed to marry one of the girls that's here.
And they said, oh, well, that's interesting.
Two other guys have asked for her hand.
So, but okay.
Come back, no wife.
We'll see what works out with Stephanie, my wife.
And I got back from LA.
She was gone.
She had gone up to Detroit to pioneer a new work up there.
And I thought, well, that's a good test.
If we end up getting back together, then I'll know that God was engineering things in a certain way.
It was a little bit of a test.
And she came back, kind of an unusual romance.
But we got betrothed, which was kind of a commitment to each other before the Lord.
But even after we were betrothed, we couldn't make out.
We couldn't, you know, we were allowed to hold hands, kiss each other goodnight, but, you know, no sex, no anything that would be construed as a date.
Nope.
Until you're married.
So we had to get our birth certificates from our parents, which was really awkward, to put it mildly.
And then when that all happened, we hitchhiked to Kentucky because we were too young to get married in Ohio without some document and got married.
Strict Rules on Sexuality00:05:18
That's the nature of the group that I joined.
It was extremely, you know, strict on all sexual matters.
But as time went on, that all changed.
But there was a, what I try to explain about the difficult thing, obviously you led with it.
You know, these guys are the worst.
They're just so nefarious and, you know, dark and, you know, all this.
Stuff that happened in the group, and I don't deny it at all.
It just didn't happen early on.
It was a very slow place, probably six or seven years in the group before that stuff started happening.
This is the way cults typically operate, right?
They draw people in with the glamour and all the good stuff and the future promises.
And once you get so far down the road, the point of no return is when they introduce the evil shit or the.
The trafficking, the child abuse, or Xenu, the galactic overlord, whatever your cult god is, that's when the crazy stuff comes in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, I think Berg was making it up as he went.
He may have had some sort of a role in it.
He may have.
At what point did you meet him?
I met him in Texas.
Oh, in Texas?
Early on.
Okay.
He was charismatic, a bit spooky.
I mean, I wasn't used to anybody of his demeanor.
You know, he wore dark.
Sunglasses all the time, even at night, and the the?
Um rumor was that the reason he did it is because he could see all your sins and it freaked out new believers.
So I don't know what the excuse was.
Maybe maybe it was bloodshot, I don't really know.
But um, that's the air he.
He would just kind of pop up when you weren't expecting him and, you know, say something profound and you know, kind of throw you off guard.
Uh, it was.
It was um, I wasn't particularly attracted to him or repulsed by him.
I was just fascinated because I never saw anyone like him.
Mysterious.
Yeah.
So as time went on, his.
To me, it seems like if you give a guy with narcissistic personality disorder the attention that he was getting from these wildly enthusiastic, young, virile kind of.
Young people, that kind of a crowd, he's going to do something with it eventually.
Whether he was thinking about it in the original case or not, it morphed that way.
So he started getting, you know, concubines or whatever you want to, you know, he had other girls with him from time to time, most of which we knew about one, but we didn't know about the others.
So, and that was kind of kept hush hush because it would freak us out.
You know, we were not allowed to make out with our betrothed, and he was.
Messing around with other people's wives, you know, so that was it was that leaked out later, okay.
But he would slowly introduce ideas of more sexual freedom.
We were pretty repressed, you know.
I mean, we were, you know, like church Christians, but on steroids.
I mean, we were really intense about everything.
So he had to kind of steer us into a path where we'd be a little more liberated, skinny dipping or, you know, that kind of stuff.
Right.
But once he got into a place where he had several thousand followers all over the world and was living separate from any of the communities, he lived on his own, just he and his wife and a few helpers kind of thing.
Then he had the liberty to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and just got.
Stronger and stronger.
And he got the bright idea that, you know, maybe we should use our sexual energy and attractiveness to the public as a way of gaining recruits.
Show them the love of God in a physical way, like you would feed them or take care of them if they're wounded or that kind of thing.
And that's the way he built on it slowly.
First, it was just a matter of don't be afraid to flirt, you know, just to.
Engage in a flirtatious type of conversation if it will help you draw that person into a deeper conversation and a longer conversation.
And then it went from that where he started, he and his second wife were going to dance lessons in London and meeting all these lonely guys.
And eventually she started hooking up with them as a way to give them the gospel.
And they got a few recruits from that.
And they thought, well, let's take this show on the road.
So they launched a worldwide rollout of this new plan.
Called flirty fishing, which I hope you don't have.
Flirty fishing.
Yeah.
Don't Google it.
Don't Google it?
Why?
No, I mean, it's.
Flirty Fishing for Converts00:08:10
They drew manuals for this, right?
Exactly.
And that's, you know.
They did like comic book style illustrations and manuals describing and teaching folks how to engage in the flirty fishing.
And it was mainly the women who were doing this, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, occasionally you might end up in a kind of a relationship with a person of the opposite sex if you're a male, but.
That wasn't the ticket, you know?
So that's when things started getting really crazy because.
Yeah, how long were you in it before he introduced this flirty fishing stuff?
Yeah, I was just trying to think about that.
And I haven't visited the literature in a long time, but I'm thinking it was probably six or seven years at least.
Okay.
Yeah, that stuff.
God's whores.
Look at that.
So, yeah, it's a.
It's not something I really brag about.
And when did he change his name to Moses?
What happened was it was an early article when they were on the road camping in state parks and buses and stuff.
One of the guys came out and said, This is like Moses and the children of Israel.
So we got the name Moses and the children of God there.
And then he later took David, his original name, but he also takes on the character.
He feels that he combines the anointing of the prophet Moses and the anointing of King David.
In one person as this great end time prophet, which we have a whole kind of theology about where in the Bible this speaks about this guy, but it's all patched together in a very weird way.
Eventually, interpretation.
Yeah.
Most Bible scholars identify it as messianic, as Christ, but he had a way of twisting it into this is me, and this is a new, the change will be as great as from the Old Testament to the New Testament, from the New Testament to the end time church.
So the idea was this is going to be really a dramatic departure.
And the central piece of what he was going for in it was this thing he called the law of love.
And in it, he sort of said, it doesn't really matter.
There's no right or wrong outside of love.
You know, love is the whole key to doing.
If you're doing it in love, it's good.
So there were a few parameters, what would be loving and what wouldn't, but not many.
And he took it.
Further and further and further as time went on, and eventually started with his own.
He wasn't having sex with his son, but his helpers were when he was just two years old, three years old.
Just, I don't think it was the intercourse, but it was, you know, oral sex and that kind of thing.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, it was really hard to take.
I mean, frankly.
And how did you guys know about this?
They published it, they sent out photos.
They would touch up the photos so the adult could not be recognizable.
And they would distribute it to all the members.
To the members only.
It wasn't something you'd hand out on the street.
Or you guarded it.
It was a very secretive thing.
But it's so hard to say because to put myself back into my 26 or 27 year old head, I now was married.
I had another partner who was soon to become my wife.
I had seven kids.
It was a real.
I had five kids and then I got two more real quick after that.
But with how many?
You're pretty committed.
I had five with my first wife.
And then when we added another member, which a long story, but eventually it was not commonly practiced in the group, but it wasn't uncommon either.
It was to have two wives was considered biblical simultaneously.
Yeah.
And it started out as a.
The idea was they wanted to involve.
There were too many Americans in the group.
They wanted more international people.
So if you were a leader, an American leader with an American wife, you had to take on another trainee or a partner.
It didn't have to be a woman, it could be a man, whatever.
But as a team that would be leadership in a three way kind of community.
Well, if you start having sex and sharing, your bonds grow quite intense.
It's not.
It's not turn it on, turn it off.
So we're pretty entangled.
Yeah.
I don't know, you know, my wife has her convictions about what we're doing.
I was starting to have some doubts.
My best friend, who had been in the group as well, that I'd brought into the group, but he had become Mo's right hand man.
And part of my willingness to follow was the fact, well, if it's okay with Mike, things have got to be okay.
I know he's not going to do something like that.
You know that's that's wrong.
So if he's convinced, I feel safe.
But he ended up getting kicked out because he challenged.
So that was a crisis for me and I.
So here I am.
I was at the time a pretty big leader I had.
I was over about, I don't know, probably a dozen countries works all over and and all this kind of you were in charge of a dozen uh, country groups in different countries, you're right.
So me, I don't know probably 30 or 40 different communities, But spread all the way from Bangladesh to Greece and parts of North Africa.
So it was a massive area.
And, you know, what did I know?
All I knew was 19 year olds' education and the Bible and a very particular interpretation of the Bible.
Right.
So, but everyone around me, my wife, my kids, we're all involved in this thing that's kind of all consuming.
You don't have like outside friends and stuff, you know, it's just your whole life is tied up in the community and committed to it.
You're still experiencing miracles.
I got to admit, they started getting less and less as time went on.
The miraculous aspect of our life became more strategic.
We'd figure out, well, this works good.
Let's try busking.
Let's do this.
Let's, you know, different ways to raise money.
FFing was one of them because people would be quite generous with people.
Yeah.
Okay.
And I, you know, I felt the real change going on.
And I got in trouble for having, I don't know, a bad attitude or something.
They just didn't think I was.
Committed enough, I wasn't, I didn't have enough of the spirit of David, of our leader's spirit, um, to properly lead.
So we got canned, and it was a big, you know, a public denunciation and letters going to everyone you know in the world is reading about you and all these things.
Some of them are making statements about what a jerk you are.
Uh, it's a hard thing to go through.
I was quite tempted at that point to say, Fuck this, you know, I can't do this anymore.
But it was my whole life, my wife, my kids, by this time, two wives.
It was, I couldn't emotionally allow myself to get strong enough on my conviction that this is wrong.
I should leave.
Because I knew it would probably cost me my family.
I just didn't think my wife would come with me.
We were living overseas.
We had no money of our own, you know.
My free time is short.
And the way I see it, why waste it watching actors on a TV when I can use my time to learn stuff from people I actually admire?
Struggling with Family Craziness00:15:55
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Now back to the show.
How often were you bouncing from country to country?
Oh, boy.
Well, it depended on visas, for one thing.
You know, like India, you get a visa for six months, a year.
You might stretch it for two years if you had a connection, but then you got to leave.
So, you know, we'd be bouncing around from India to Athens to, oops. Tehran to Cairo, you know, just we were always, you know, on some kind of a mission.
Where were your children during all of this?
Eventually, well, there was one period when we ended up back in the States for about maybe a year, if that.
And our idea was we were going to go back to India, but this time on a business visa.
So we were trying to start a business here that we could sponsor ourselves as buyers and go to India and buy handicrafts and whatnot, which didn't work out.
But at the same time, I got an invitation to go to Mexico.
And so what we did was the kids, my oldest son is a very talented musician, and my wife could also play guitar and sing.
And we had another team member who was also quite good and fluent in several languages.
So the kids formed a music group, and they became quite popular.
First in Mexico, we performed all over the Yucatan, in every prison in the Yucatan, five-star hotels.
We were on television.
We did shows for the mayor, you know, that kind of stuff.
Quite popular, all the while camping on the beach.
But we started sending our newsletter that we've sent to folks that were contributors that weren't in the group but would send donations to us to help us with our work to other folks around the world.
And one of our friends was in Egypt and he said, You know, I think you could do this in Cairo.
You could be a children's musical act here.
Why don't you pray about it?
So we did.
And I don't know, six months later, we were performing in Cairo.
You know, it was just kind of a The kids enjoyed it to a certain extent, but it was also child labor.
I mean, we were just, you know, kind of the Jackson family or Bruno Mars in Hawaii as a kid, you know, that kind of a thing in our head.
But, I mean, in retrospect, obviously, there's a better way to do a children's music group than the way we did with street busting.
And these were all your kids in this group.
Except for the very little ones.
Right.
Once they were old enough, they would perform matching outfits.
Choreographs and all that, quite cute.
And what about like, like, was there any sort of like internal education program for the kids?
Like, were they learning basic stuff, like about the world and about life?
And we had a very basic homeschool program, but it was pretty basic, uh, really reading, writing, and arithmetic.
That's about it.
Um, and but they were all very verbal because we didn't have TVs, we didn't do any of that.
It was just all reading.
So, my kids have you know amazing vocabularies and love to read, but um.
We sadly, you know, once you got those down, there's so much more you have to learn in order to get ready for life.
And we didn't do that by that time.
They were pretty much, you know, when they're 12 or 13, they're pretty much part of the workforce.
You know, they're on the dishes.
They're helping cook.
They're going out on the streets to distribute literature and raise money and go perform, which at the time, you know, I justified it in my own head as, you know, this is how all children's music groups.
You know, if you trace a lot of rock musicians' history, they started in a children's music group, but uh, it was different, and I know it was uh, uh, not a good thing to do with the kids that way, you know.
Um, and I, yeah, I feel bad about it, feel that it was injurious to their, you know, they shouldn't have had to bear that kind of burden.
So, I don't know where we're, yeah, we were just talking about how you were in charge of the.
12 different countries, factions in 12 different countries, and managing them and jumping all around.
And then your best friend was killed by a demon.
So we got the axe.
Then we ended up going, we went out to Sri Lanka and we're trying to start a business out there with another friend in the group, which you could do in certain countries.
You were allowed to have secular activities if you were in a country that didn't have a Christian background or donor base.
And real hard.
I mean, I honestly could have easily left the group.
back then if I was convinced that my family would stay intact.
But every time I got right up to the edge of it, I would back off.
I would just get scared thinking, I don't want to do this.
I'm going to lose my family.
What did your kids think about it all?
Well, they're kids.
So they were.
Do you ever have conversations with them about that?
No, no, back then about potentially leaving or like.
No, I would never ask you.
If I even brought it up to my wife directly, she would report me.
I would be sent off to Timbuktu to wash dishes and, you know, get retrained.
So I didn't, I couldn't openly discuss that.
But I just put it off and thought, well, maybe we'll find a way, a niche that we can kind of be far enough away from leadership and all the craziness that's going on and just be missionaries.
We'll just do our own thing and be missionaries.
Worked for a while, but it's a very difficult tightrope to walk.
We ended up back in.
The States, then in Mexico, kids got involved, then back to Cairo, then I don't know.
It was jumping around a lot.
But during the last 10 years or so that we were in the group, I was pretty much independent.
I didn't really, I tried not to get into leadership again because it was a bummer.
It just, there was nothing good about it.
But every once in a while I would, and then the crisis of conscience would come up.
You can't do this.
This is wrong.
And the the stuff with kids was getting much more serious, much more widespread.
Thankfully, I can just and known by people.
Yeah.
Known by all the members.
You had to know.
It was part of the publications.
It was part of the it might not be happening in your home.
It might not be happening in your location, but you knew it was happening.
It was published everywhere, and you're always going to brush up against it somewhere.
So that was a crisis for me.
The group started having to change because you can't get away with that stuff indefinitely.
Somebody's going to blow the whistle on you.
So then we became much more of this freaked out, draw the curtains.
Paranoid?
Yeah, paranoid.
And we rent a house and have 20 people in it, but you'd think there were just three people living there, going in and out in tinted vans, all this kind of just a crazy way to live.
Freaked out that they were going to take our kids away.
So that was the once it got so bizarre that I realized I am doing nothing for God here.
I'm all I'm doing is playing a role in this abusive organization.
I have to get out.
I hope they'll come, but I don't know.
I don't know what they'll do.
And that was a pretty big moment for me.
They finally came out with some list of rules.
It was just so insane.
I just said, wait, why don't you just tell us?
A list of the things we're allowed to do because it would be a lot shorter than the list of the things we're not allowed to do.
And that blew up.
And I was in the doghouse.
And next thing I knew, I was being invited to serve the Lord in some other capacity to leave the group.
How did you protect your kids from the abuse?
Well, you know, I don't like to discuss my own children's personal experiences, and it really depends on where you were, how old you were at the time that this particular activity got widespread within the group.
Just some, there was, in my mind, clearly a handful of people who were just flat out pedophiles, just were having a field day.
A lot of people who got into that.
Activity did it with the believing this is the way the logic went.
If we already were sold on the fact that God created sex, it's good, it's beautiful, it's a gift.
We also had crossed over, it's not only if you're married, you can share sexual love with other people in a beneficial and loving way.
So once you're over that hump, then you think, well, the idea was in the Bible, people.
Get betrothed at the age of 12.
Mary was probably 12 years old.
And allegedly the apostles were children as well, or teenagers.
Yeah, some of them were.
Some of them had kids.
But it was the idea I forgot where I was going with that.
I was asking about how you protected your kids from some of the stuff.
So then, once it opened up to the point where.
Yeah, you know, kids can have sex when they're teenagers, and maybe an adult could have sex with a teenager in certain circumstances.
Very uncomfortable, very uncomfortable.
I had teenage girls, you know, it wasn't at all.
And this was writing?
This was stuff that was written and given to you, or this was explained to you in person in like a meeting or something?
Both.
Both.
Yeah, it was not a secret.
So, I mean, you really can't say, you know, I know some people who still kind of like, I never saw it, I didn't know what was going on.
I don't believe that.
I just it was everywhere.
Unless you're willingly blind, you would know that this was going on.
You might try to describe it in the idealized love, and there's really no difference between a child exploring sexuality and an adult, and maybe they can do it together, you know, that kind of thing.
And I think people got drawn into this idea that I have to educate my child sexually.
in a loving manner and introduce them to this.
Well, I didn't like it at all.
I was not a part of I never had sex with a child or anyone underage at all.
But it's a miracle.
Honestly, it's very hard to imagine how I escaped from any situation because of the places that I lived.
There was an awful lot of it going on around.
And some of my kids were affected by it.
I won't discuss the details of their situations.
It's up to them to – and they do.
They, in their own world, will express their challenges and difficulties overcoming the trauma of those kind of early exposures.
Once we got out, in terms of the rest of the group, I think it really went – Berg himself, I do believe, was a pedophile.
He had, I mean, he was just in everything.
He was just, you know, I'm just a dangerous, dangerous man.
But, and I do think there were other people in the group who had, who just had a field day with it.
And they're very, very un, just selfish, just going after people that it was going to be hurtful and they didn't care.
But not everybody.
And I know some people who got caught up in it, who deeply regretted it and have recovered their bonds with their kids in a beautiful way, you know, just by admitting they were just.
Crazy, you know, just went nuts in this whole thing.
So, I got to say, my kids are remarkable in the way they've struggled through the issues of their upbringing and found a way that they have certain strengths of character and of resilience that not too many people do.
And so I got a lot of respect for them.
And I've had to apologize.
I couldn't tell you how many times just for the stuff that we did, the stuff that went wrong, stuff that happened to them on my watch.
You know, just shouldn't have happened at all.
And it's not just my kids.
It's, you know, I don't know how many kids, but in the thousands of kids who in that window where this was part of the group's identity and practices and whatever age they were, you know, depending on if they were preteens or teens or whatever.
Their experience and where they were.
If they were in a central headquarters situation, bad news.
If they were out in the field somewhere, maybe not.
Maybe they didn't even have, it might not have come up.
Where was Berg during all this?
Where was he based?
Texas?
He moved around.
He left the States pretty early.
I think he thought the FBI was after him.
He lived in England for a while.
He lived in Switzerland for a long time, Tenerife.
He lived in, you know, the.
What are those islands off the coast of Spain?
He jumped around.
I think his last place was Portugal.
I think that's where he died.
It's all very secretive, but that's my understanding anyway.
I was out by that time.
Berg's Global Hiding Spots00:09:56
What was the straw that broke the camel's back for you?
For me?
I think it was just, there was no, this is good, this is bad, this is good, this is bad.
It was all wump.
There's nothing good about this anymore.
I can't even preach the gospel.
If I should lead someone to Christ, I can't give them my phone number because it's a security law rule.
And it was just, I'm doing all this and I'm not treating my kids.
By this time, the sex with kids had been outlawed within the group, although I think it was still practiced.
It wasn't practiced where we were the last couple of years that we were in.
It had been verboten, too much bad publicity.
So they stopped all that.
But my kids were still messed up and I could see they're not ready for life.
I can't, unless they're going to be part of this community all of their lives, we have to make a change.
We have to be able to give them a better opportunity.
And it's personally agonizing for me just to watch what had been my dream turn into an absolute nightmare and didn't know how to get out, didn't really know.
So by the time we did make the break, we had spent two years in England, visas ran out, came back to the States.
By this time, I was already thinking if I'm going to make a break, I'd rather be in the States.
At least I'm in my own country.
I don't have to worry about.
Visas and all that, and figure out some, some way of, of changing our lifestyle.
Um, so and it, within six months, the hit and you know, you know it was persona non grata would wendle out on the property.
Um, really is.
They're not, you don't?
You don't go out with a friendly handshake and a gold watch.
You get pummeled, you know so.
And my, the kids, all their best, Not physically.
Oh, okay.
You know, you're just, you're a real stinker.
You know, people just dump on you.
And my kids were confused because all their lives I had been preaching, this is the way we serve God.
And now I'm saying, nope, we can't do this.
It's not right.
We're not doing it.
And all that's very hard.
And they're losing their friends.
What's the age group again?
What's the age gap between how many kids?
At that point, how many kids?
At 16, one more was born after we left.
16 kids.
And you're around all of them every day?
No.
My second wife was still in England getting ready to have our sixth baby together when we came back to the States.
And she's from New Zealand.
So it was complicated.
So we just figured, have your baby here.
And then we'll figure out visas later or whether we go to Mexico or we'll do something.
We'll figure out a way to do it because she wasn't American.
In the meantime, I got kicked out of the group.
She stayed and she faced a complicated challenge in her own right.
That meant she's a single woman with six kids and, you know, totally at the mercy of the group.
But that's what she felt she was supposed to do.
And it was a, you know, she was kind enough, which was unusual in the group.
She was kind enough to allow me to maintain a friendly, ongoing relationship with all of our kids.
So, you know.
What was the oldest kid?
At the time we left, probably 13, 14, maybe.
Okay.
Down to a baby.
But so I'd, you know, every couple of years I'd get over to England to see them or New Zealand or Mexico or wherever they were.
Every few years I'd go over and try to, you know, remember everybody's birthday every year, Christmas, all that kind of stuff.
So.
We had a friendly relationship, but I was always, it was suspicious.
If I came to visit, like in England, they wouldn't let me spend the night in the house.
So, you know, I had to stay in a trailer park up the street, that kind of thing.
So it was, she would still make sure I could see him.
I wasn't allowed to talk to him about the group or anything or why we left.
It was a very confusing thing for them, trying to figure out why his dad, who, you know, this guy is, he was so part of this group.
That, how can he be against it now?
I don't understand.
You know, it was really hard for them.
Amazingly, we still, they're all out now, thank God.
Yeah.
And we're pretty good friends.
What about your wife?
Second wife?
You mean?
Either of them.
Are either of them still in?
No, no.
None of them are in anymore.
It took Melissa, our New Zealand partner, a long time to come around.
She was mentally convinced.
And I'm not 100% sure whether that's just because she couldn't imagine life that wasn't.
part of the group.
So, and, you know, it was going to be complicated if she decided to come with us and figure out all the things we had to do to figure out where to live and get visas and all that.
So she held on for a long time in the group.
But eventually she finally says, I get what you're saying.
Yeah, this is wrong.
And the kids are all pretty well adjusted.
I have a son in Mexico City who's a high-paid consultant.
Today.
Yeah.
You know, they're all successful in their fields musicians and artists and medical field, all kinds of things.
They're, you know, quite good, happy, well rounded.
Everybody likes them.
They're very lovable people.
It's a miracle, man.
I won't say that about all my own kids who grew up with me.
Several of them had serious psychiatric problems along the way.
Like what?
Well, in 1997, we were living in the States.
I had three of my oldest kids stayed in the group after we left because they were all.
How old?
Two of them were married.
Oh my God.
And had babies.
How old were they?
Maybe between the ages of 16.
He was the youngest, he wasn't married.
16 up to probably 21.
And, you know, We just had to wait patiently because you can't just run in and try to talk somebody out of what they're doing, especially if they have kids.
You know, I know the trial that they're going to have.
So it's just giving it time.
And slowly life would start to, yeah, maybe what dad's saying is true.
And they'd pack up and leave.
Yeah.
So thankfully, it all came back together.
But in 1997, one of our daughters was in college.
Two of them were in college, roommates together.
And, uh, One of them, just shy of her 19th birthday, was killed in a car accident.
And it was, you know, utterly devastating to everyone in our family.
Just, we couldn't imagine it.
And a super, super lovely young woman.
If you took a vote of my kids, who's your favorite brother or sister, she would have won all the votes.
So we were smashed.
And, you know, it took a while for us to, Get our feet again.
At that time, we also had a 13 year old who was already, she was off the charts, brilliant, beautiful, perfect pitch, musically gifted, just an amazing kid, and a very unusual personality, and just obviously had some personality disorders.
So it was really hard to, for her, when her big sister died, she got more and more wild.
And, ran away from home when she was 15, got into a lot of trouble.
But she was doing better.
She was now 23.
This is some years later, 10 years, 2005.
And she had gotten married.
Her husband was a nice guy.
And I don't think he knew how to help her.
During one of her breaks with reality, she ended up overdosing on alcohol and her psychiatric prescriptions accidentally.
And, phew, you know, again, rough on the whole family, you know.
So that has left its echoes.
Some of the, I admire every one of the kids, but, you know, some of them handled it better than others and some of them struggled, you know, still struggle with different issues, which I'm sure are related to the family, but they were so young.
that they didn't have any of those kind of experiences.
It was definitely not part of their, but the echoes, they hear their big brothers and sisters talk.
Carrying the Hard Cross00:03:16
So all of that carries down and it makes it a hard cross for them to carry too.
You know, it's a tough thing.
You're me, I was 19 when I joined the group.
I had a reasonably good education.
I was aware of many things in the world.
I have to take full responsibility for everything I did.
You know, there's just, you know, I can explain it in terms of what psychological conditioning is and how it works.
I mean, I loved your interview with Rebecca Lemoff there.
That was good.
I love her book.
But yeah, it's just the struggle is as a parent, I can't live constantly in.
full view of everything I ever did wrong.
So you slowly have to forgive yourself if you've kind of learned what you did, why you did it, what went wrong, how your brain got to that place, and you're willing to say, I was wrong.
And you're not, it's not, it's not like somebody hypnotizes you, you know, it's their little agreements you have to take.
I had to agree to do stuff, you know, it wasn't just, they couldn't just make me, but they would convince me in a way.
But it also sort of appealed to me the thought, yeah, I could have another wife.
Yeah.
So I can't say I'm just a totally innocent bystander.
You know, it was a.
There's an appeal that holds you in something.
And there's the hard part, you know, there's the part you don't like.
And it's constantly back and forth.
But I won't say that I never.
You get led away, the way the Bible puts it, you're led away of your own lusts.
You know, so there's a certain part of us that is.
If you get suckered into something, chances are you probably were lusting after it, you know?
Yes.
So that's the, you have to unpack all that, repent, and forgive yourself.
You have to be willing to change, admit what happened, see it as wrong, do the best you can to make up for it, apologize to those you've hurt, and work hard to try to build the trust again, you know?
Do you think your kids forgive you?
Yeah, I do.
Although, if they didn't, I'm not sure they'd tell me, you know?
And it does.
In moments of high pressure, sometimes something will come out, you know, that look, Dad, you know, what can you say?
Really, seriously, you know, this is what happened to us, you know.
So it was, it's, but nonetheless, they love me.
They seek advice sometimes.
You know, we were good friends.
Everybody lives in, of our nine surviving children, eight live within a probably 10 mile radius.
They still love each other.
Raise their kids together, and you know, they're we're a big, loving, happy bunch.
Nine of them are alive, yeah.
We have one son who moved to Atlanta.
The Upsetting 2005 Tape00:11:03
I think he just couldn't handle the drama of a big family.
But we're still very close.
But he's not at the Pats game every weekend or something.
He's got his own life, busy life.
But yeah, I respect them.
I give them kudos for being able to come up with a forgiving attitude.
But I think if you really love somebody, they feel it.
They know that you'll do anything for them.
However, you screwed up.
Yeah.
Well, it's obviously a lot of people could not live with themselves after that.
A lot of people committed suicide after leaving that.
And even when they were in the cult, right?
I remember I heard stories about, you know.
There were a few adult suicides, but the tragic piece is that so many of the second generation, I don't even know the statistics, but it's a lot, you know, that end up, I don't know, just getting into a place that they can't find a way out of.
They don't have the internal structure, you know, from having been raised in a chaotic fashion.
And, you know, they have some tough stuff to chew through.
So, I mean, as an adult, every time it happens, it's crushing.
There was, I don't know if you're familiar with the whole Ricky Rodriguez thing.
I am, yeah.
But you should explain it for people.
So, 2005, just shortly after.
Shortly before my daughter passed away, Ricky.
Were you in 2005?
Were you out?
Oh, yeah.
We'd been out for 15 years almost.
Okay.
But I was involved with a ministry called Meadowhaven, which was a transitional home for people coming out of high control groups, cults.
And you could stay there for up to six months.
And they had a counseling program and a lot of different ways to help people get back on track after.
Being, you know, 20 years in a cult or whatever, right?
But, um, so we were involved, we're serving on the board of this ministry and trying to work, you know, going to International Cultic Studies Association events where, uh, we would explain our past and try to get, uh, um, a deeper understanding of the dynamics in ICSA, the International Cultic Studies Association.
People get it, it doesn't, you know, they're.
hundreds of different groups represented, but they get the same dynamic.
You know, it's like McDonald's or Taco Bell, different menu, but same standard operating procedure.
And so cults are that way.
They just inevitably end up doing certain things the same.
So they get the dynamic and they get how warped your sense of right and wrong can become in that atmosphere.
So I'm trying to think of why I was going there.
2005.
Oh, yeah.
So one, the kid, the child of Ricky, right?
Ricky.
He was a love child.
She was born to a guy from the Canary Islands and Maria, who was the second wife of Berg.
Oh, Ricky was not Berg's wife?
I mean, I'm sorry.
Ricky wasn't Berg's son?
Not biologically, no.
Okay.
He was, you know, a Spanish father.
Okay.
And.
He had left the group.
It was very, very, you can imagine what he went through.
Holy smokes.
He's been publicly lauded all over the world by our group.
He was the prince.
He was the up and coming heir to the throne kind of thing.
A lot of pressure.
And it was obviously all that he was the experimental test case for all the sex stuff with kids.
The moment he was born, basically, he was abused sexually.
I think maybe two or three, something like that.
He was getting his diaper changed.
Jesus Christ.
So, and the idea, I mean, they published it.
It wasn't something like the Catholic Church or something.
This is not done in a corner.
It was not.
Like, secret, hide it, don't tell anybody.
It was, no, this is great.
This is the way God's love is meant to function.
We're supposed to be all, you know, utterly liberated in all ways.
So, not only are they doing to this child, they're publicly bragging about it to everybody in the group.
As a kind of a how to manual.
Kind of, this is the way we suggest Eurasia gets, you know.
So, that's why it caught on so widespread.
So, anyway, he had.
No kid raised in the family had it easy, but he had it more difficult than almost anyone I can imagine.
Just the amount of scrutiny and the amount of abuse and control.
He got married.
They left the group.
He had become an electrician.
But he was severely troubled, just eaten alive and constantly feeling like, I got to do something to save my generation from the family.
And he got it fixed in his brain that he was going to kill his mother and track her down.
But he was living incognito.
He didn't know where she was.
And on the path of trying to find her, he ended up.
He made a video, right?
Yeah, he made a video.
He made a video talking about, and you can find this on YouTube, I think.
Yeah.
He's basically like, he has the knife and the gun, he's showing it off and telling about it.
And you can see his demeanor is just flat.
He's not raging, angry, or anything.
He's just cold.
He's come to a place of a decision in his life and he's ready to commit violence.
And he's, you know, like.
That weird piece when you make a decision, even if it's a really bad one, that's what he the vibe that he carried on his tape.
Um, so after he don't play the audio on this, Steve.
Sorry, continue.
After he, um, he ended up well, he ended up finding one of Maria's assistants who was living, I forget why, but she was living on her own.
Um, and tracked her down and was trying to extract the information where is my mother, right?
Was torturing her to do it, ended up killing her, and then drove off into the desert and killed himself.
So, this was, you know, I didn't know him well, but I knew him.
You met him?
Yeah, as a kid, you know, and I had just come back from India and I was visiting, you know, David Berg and his headquarters situation in southern France.
He came over to hang out.
I was just showing him pictures of him.
He was so interested.
Oh, how did they do that?
Oh, what's that?
I really liked him.
He was a good kid and happy.
He didn't seem to be, he was very comfortable with an adult company and stuff.
So it was real, it hit me really hard, not because I was so emotionally connected to Ricky, but because he was part of the cohort of my kids.
So, you know, it's just a total shock.
So the entire ex-member, second-generation ex-member community went ballistic over the whole thing.
It was a website formed with a whole lot of very, very traumatic testimonies.
When it first broke, ABC News wanted to do a story, a little background piece on cults and the group.
And so they contacted Bob Pardon, a friend of ours who runs the Meadowhaven project.
And so, do you know anything from the children of God?
And he says, yeah, let me, I'm not sure you'll want to, but, you know, maybe.
So it was a, they wanted me to get interviewed, but the tape hadn't come out yet.
We all knew that it had happened.
It was newspaper stories, but there was no footage released or anything.
ABC had the tape.
This one?
Yeah.
Okay.
So he, the, the, I said, look, I'll do it, but, you know, if you could like, put the screen over me and change my voice or something like that.
I got kids in school, grandkids in school.
That gets out.
I know how kids can be with other kids, you know?
Yeah.
It's going to be rough for them.
So, and I was just scared, you know, like, wow, this is really, really upsetting, you know, in every way.
So I said, I'll do this, but I'm not going to talk about my own kids' experience because that's their story to tell, not mine.
I will answer questions about the group and so on and so forth and give you the Background piece to you know, in any way that I can help, sure.
And um, so I went into they had a hotel room set up in Boston, you know, with lights and all that kind of stuff.
And but before doing the interview, he said, I have a tape to show you, you know, and he hit play.
And you know, God, I'm just utter, utter, completely shocked.
I was a mess of just tears and snot.
Couldn't catch my breath, I couldn't talk.
I was just so upset thinking about Ricky and all the kids that that face the same type of uh emotional challenges that he did.
Maybe not to the same extent, maybe they are, who knows?
I'm not sure, I don't know everybody's experience, but it's uh personally upsetting, but more so because I know that I played a role in this group getting as far as it had, you know, for so many years, And I'm, you know, responsible to some extent for all the shit that's happening, you know, with all the second generation kids.
So that became, you know, a real difficult reality to deal with in my everyday life.
Thankfully, they never aired the clip, you know, of me in the interview because I was completely, I think I was just too snot covered to use on TV.
Kids Separated Permanently00:03:50
So they went a different way.
Which I was grateful for.
But, um, yes, that's the biggest thing for the last, uh, from probably 1995, once we had kind of got educated about what had happened to us and we began to see clearly and get some cult insights, uh, until the present day.
I mean, I got grandkids, you know, they weren't even a twinkle in my son's eyes yet, you know, that.
Are affected in the bang on repercussions.
Really?
Well, they hear the stories.
And that, you know, makes it a little hard to feel the same about grandma and grandpa, you know, because, you know, my kids actually understand it better than some of my grandkids just simply because, of course, kids understood, you know, how this happened, that it wasn't, dad didn't dream this thing up.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's my story.
Wow, man.
And this, so this Ricky guy, he was, that we were just talking about, he was proclaimed by Berg to be like the next Messiah or something like that.
He would be the prince once Berg died, which he was prophesying that he was going to die soon, that I think the doctrine that they came up with that Ricky and his mother would be the two end time prophets in the Bible, in the book of Revelation.
So that was a lot of pressure put on a kid.
How was this group never taken down by law enforcement or the FBI?
Well, in other countries, it did get in trouble, a lot of trouble in Australia, in Argentina, France.
Kids were taken away and held in facilities for months, trying to deconstruct what's going on here.
But the kids were actually trained to how to answer the authorities.
No, we don't have sexual contact.
No, they were just trained to do that.
Because we have to do this, we're deceivers yet true, the Bible says, because otherwise they're going to stop our work for the Lord.
So the kids, you know, they're just brainwashed.
Yeah, there was nothing to wash.
Exactly.
They were just sponges.
Exactly.
They were just sponges at some point.
And so sometimes kids did end up being permanently separated from their parents if there was a particularly egregious situation.
But most of the time, they'd end up getting them back.
Everybody'd leave the country.
Go to somewhere new, start a new group under a new name, a new outreach.
And they did it, you know, that's the way it worked.
In the States, that's one of the reasons we got out of the States.
Moe made a big point early on of getting out of the States.
And I think it wasn't just because we're supposed to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, it was also because the FBI won't get you if you're overseas.
And if we're here, we're much more vulnerable.
So, okay, so you said you left in, what was it, 95, 96?
We left in 91, early on.
Oh, in 91.
And it took us about four or five years before we felt like we'd even come to a place where we could begin to understand our own experience.
You know, we didn't come out.
I already knew that Berg was wrong about a whole lot of stuff, but I hadn't unpacked.
Did you ever confront him?
Not personal, not face to face, but that's what got me to the boot.
You know, when I basically said, look, can anyone show me from the Bible how this stuff can be justified?
Psychedelics and Religious Sacrifice00:15:34
And they said, well, maybe you'll.
Be better off some, some other organization, which was rough, you know, my wife didn't have a clue until it happened.
She didn't even know I was thinking about this, you know, because you can't talk to anybody.
Yeah, you got to keep it internal.
And I give her kudos for saying, yeah she, I think she thought well, if I go with him, i'll be able to help him come back to his senses and come back to the group.
But um thankfully, Given enough time, she began to realize that I was right about an awful lot of that.
Are you still with her?
Oh, yeah.
Wow.
54 and a half years.
Wow.
The strange thing is, we met the group the same exact day at that same Jerry Rubin rally.
She was hitchhiking from LA up to Big Sur, and her ride stopped to get some weed in Santa Barbara.
And she got out and went to the demonstration.
And I was on my way to Berkeley and got dropped in Santa Barbara.
Whoa.
So, you know, wasn't love at first sight, but we were on the same journey.
And when, you know, it's really an amazing thing because I don't know your married situation or anything.
Are you married?
Yes, I am.
Well, it's how long?
Six years.
Six years.
I feel like I've been married for 54 years to the same woman, but that woman has changed 54 times.
Oh, really?
Because we just have so much change in our life.
So it's constantly fresh, but we constantly, I think, just having been through what we've been through in the group and then losing girls and just the tremendous effort it takes.
First, you're poor.
You know, you got 11 kids.
You know, you can cut grass and clean supermarket floors.
You're going to have a tough time meeting the bills.
So, all those kind of struggles of working our way slowly, slowly to a more stable financial situation.
And dealing with all the different trouble that my kids were having adjusting to the society.
Seven teen kids.
Well, it was 11 with us.
11 were still in the kitchen.
Six were with our other partner.
But yeah.
Still.
Well, that's more than a few kids.
They're all over the place.
I mean, when you got out, though.
Oh, yeah, no.
It was a lot of kids.
And, you know, it just.
We were used to it.
You know, we didn't get them all at once.
They were one at a time.
So, you slowly develop a plan.
They become more independent slowly.
How to pack your bedding and all that kind of stuff to move over.
I think all of our kids have.
None of them want to have a big family.
Let's put it that way.
They all are grateful that they grew up in a big family, but they know it's hard.
There's a lot of sacrifices involved in being a child.
Where's the other wife?
She's in.
Texas at the moment.
She's actually from New Zealand and she's at this place, you know, retirement age and where she wants to be.
She'd lived in Mexico for most of the time.
Oh, geez, at least 20 years, I guess.
I love going to see her in Mexico because that's always fun.
But yeah, then she ended up in Texas for some reason.
Two of our daughters are American citizens because one was born in the States as we were traveling through, and the other one.
Was smart enough to come ask dad to help her get a passport before she turned 18.
After 18, it's just a nightmare trying to get someone.
How much longer did she stay in after you left?
She's probably 20 years.
No, even more than that.
Probably 25 years.
So she's recently out?
The last maybe seven or eight years, I think.
And it was a slow, you know, because the group crumbled.
It became more or less an online, you know, QAnon type thing, I guess.
People still send in tithe money and all that, but not too many.
And there's not a lot of activity going on.
I really don't know what the status is right now because there's a.
I also have a brother who joined the group for quite a long time.
And he still lives in Brazil.
He's out of the group, but he stayed in quite a while.
So he filled me in on, you know, more or less the trajectory.
And when it just split apart, everybody just gets into, okay, how can I pay the bills?
How can we get something going here that'll find us a way forward if we're not in a communal society?
Are you still a believer in Jesus Christ?
Very much.
This is one of the interesting things that I think.
Wow, you just see my bookshelf.
Taking a lot of reading and talking and got to know Christians from every imaginable denomination through our business operations and so on.
But it was, both my wife and I still feel as though the way we met Jesus was so dramatic and so give it your all, just lay it all on the altar.
This is not my own life, it's yours, God.
Do with me what you will.
It did something to expand our idea about what faith in God is.
It's not just throwing out fourth quarter Hail Marys to the end zone and saying, Lord, just please.
It's a relationship that is difficult for me to explain.
How did God stay with me, answer prayer, help me have whatever success we had as a family, and at least a successful marriage, all the while?
Involved in some really nasty crap all around us, and you know, whatever level of participation, non participation, absolutely within our knowledge.
And to me, that's none of us can excuse the fact that we didn't, at the first sign of this, say, Holy shit, this is not right.
This is not, you know, uh, going to a dance hall and picking up a lonely guy.
This is much different.
It's a real.
It's a difficult thing to chew through.
And I think a lot of people don't make it.
Some people just turn it off.
I don't ever want to think about the group again.
I'm just getting, you know, some people bury it.
Yeah, bury it.
Get married, don't even tell their new partner they were ever part of a group.
I can't imagine that.
But the thing is, once out, I've started sensing, I don't know if you have any kind of, what's your.
Do you have a faith of any kind or?
Not particularly.
I'm not a devout Christian or anything like that, but I'm not an atheist or anything like that either.
Every once in a while, whatever your belief system is, you get these ascents that there's something.
It doesn't happen all day, every day, but every once in a while you go, wow, it's real.
This inner feeling that I have is real.
And I think everybody has that.
So I. When I talk about what God thinks, it's hard because I'm using language that's, you know, it's very difficult.
You're talking about everything, you know, the whole shebang, reality at its base.
You could be really wrong about a whole bunch of stuff and still be right about that inner voice, even though that inner voice may have tried, tried, tried to get through to you.
No, get out now, you know.
But if I didn't pick up the signal or I was too scared or I didn't want to lose my family, God would allow me to still have a sense of his presence in my life, even though he's going to constantly try to show me, get the hell out of here.
So once you're out, then it's kind of okay, I'm going to help you go through all this, pick up the pieces, take it out, look at it, what happened here, deconstruct the whole thing, and find out.
Yeah, there's some stuff that was horrendous and abusive and dark, you know, nefarious, whatever, you know, term you want to use, very dark, darkest you can imagine.
And other stuff was, you know, I've got friends and loved ones around the world that we've shared experiences in God that we'll never forget, even though it was in the middle of chaos.
It's an unusual story.
And I do think it's probably true in everyone's life to some extent.
In our life, to an exceptional extent, it's pretty extreme.
Now, there was also, I should have brought this up earlier, but there was use of psychedelic drugs with kids as well, where they were allegedly given LSD and things like this by Berg's wife.
I don't think so.
You never saw anything like that?
It was a verbal, you know, I smoked weed one time in Kathmandu and caught hell for it.
You know, it was really drugs was, you know, totally off the table.
Interesting.
But, you know, it's interesting.
I was just at Harvard, did a seminar, a webinar, I guess a seminar on the topic, the psychedelic Jesus.
And the speaker was an expert on the late 60s, early 70s, the whole hippie scene, you know.
And he's got a whole collection of the free press, you know, the hippie papers and all that and artwork.
And he had an interesting theory that, There's so many stories of people who got involved in the Jesus movement.
I'm not sure you're familiar with the term the Jesus movement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Very widespread.
A lot of pastors in the country came out of the Jesus movement.
They quickly, you know, went from hippie to fairly mainstream quickly, but not us.
We stayed out in the wilderness.
But what he, his theory was that there was so much LSD.
And all kinds of drugs that were preparing the way.
Myself personally, my wife, most of my friends had had experiences that made us question the nature of reality while on psychedelics as kids, 18, 19 years old.
That definitely prepared us for not only a spiritual experience, but a profound spiritual experience.
So the average person who says the sinner's prayer doesn't.
Turned their entire life upside down that day.
You know, it was a dramatic conversion experience, I think, partly prepared by LSD, by psychedelics.
Do you think it was purely the psychedelics, or do you think it was a combination of that and the vulnerability, the vulnerable state that you were in at the time that you discovered those people?
I was particularly vulnerable, but it was also, you know, something in the air.
You know, the hippie thing was very powerful and, you know, just made you question everything.
So, And lay it all on the line for your belief system.
So, you know, whether I was going to become a political radical or whatever it was, I was not going to live, you know, the same life my parents lived.
I was going to live in a radical way.
And when I found out that Jesus was a radical, I took off.
That was it.
Yeah, it's interesting.
There's a lot of texts that allude to the use of drugs during Jesus' time, too.
Yeah.
Like there's the Eleusinian mysteries and the Greeks were doing.
And there's lots of interpretations that involve psychedelic drugs in antiquity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a lot of people that are advocating for it now, too.
There's people that are advocating for the idea of introducing psychedelic drugs into the church.
Yeah, I'm actually part of an organization called Agare.
Have you ever heard of them?
It's been around for a couple of years, started by an Episcopal priest who was part of the Johns Hopkins experiments.
Yeah.
Which Johns Hopkins experiment specifically?
It was 2016.
The report just came out because it was mired in the religious leaders.
The religious leaders, yeah.
So he was a.
Episcopal priests.
There was like, I don't know, 16 people.
There were priests.
I don't think there were any nuns, but there was, you know, a lot of different, not all one denomination.
They had them from every religion, heads of every religion.
They gave them psychedelic drugs and they religious professionals.
Yeah, that was the quote.
That was the title of it, religious professionals.
But they had like a Christian guy, a Catholic guy, a Jewish dude, a Hindu, every religion, Islam.
Yeah.
And they would describe their experience on, I think it was LSD.
It was psilocybin.
Psilocybin, that's what it was, yeah.
And seeing how their experience would differ, if their religious belief would influence that at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they all had, I think 15 of the 16 ended up saying, yeah, we had a profound spiritual experience here that's dramatically impacted my walk, my faith walk.
And Hunt Priest, the fellow who started it, eventually was so taken with the idea that more and more studies were coming out, How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan's book came out, and there was a lot of conversation about the interplay between spirituality and psychedelics.
And he felt like it was something that people needed to discuss because whether you're advocating it or not, you're going to have – if you're a church, anywhere in the United States, sooner or later, someone's going to come up to you and say, you know, I've got this ketamine treatment going for my depression.
And when you know it, I had an experience with God, you know, and like, what do they do with it?
What does a priest do with that?
You know?
So they're trying to get the discussion on the table, like, how can the insights that spiritual insights that people gain, not all the time, but quite often from the use of psychedelics with a spiritual, an understanding From your own spiritual tradition, what it is that's happening here.
Ancient Myths in Modern Stories00:14:56
I mean, it's not just chemistry.
Well, I mean, a lot of the stories in the Bible are, I mean, some of them you can only imagine they came up with them with psychedelic drugs.
Like they seem very similar to a lot of the stories in the Bible and some of these ancient religious stories you hear.
And that's why I believe some people speculate that.
The birth of Christianity came out of psychedelic experiences.
And that is how people started writing these stories and developing ancient myths, and those evolved into the Old Testament, the New Testament.
Eventually, through time, the 2,000-year game of telephone that has been played with the Bible and revising stuff and translating stuff, it's obviously evolved quite a bit.
Yeah, there's a bunch of theories.
I've been to probably four or five seminars at Harvard, and a lot of really smart people from all over the world are exploring how this connects.
Historically, you know, the burning bush, was that a cassia wood?
Was it, you know, all those kind of things.
I don't think there's a consensus on this.
And Harvard, the scholars at Harvard, although they're very, I don't know if they're pro, I think they are pro-psychedelic, but they don't generally accept the mushroom Jesus concept.
But I think what they do understand is that what you experience on psilocybin, May be very much like what Ezekiel experienced in the middle of the desert from fasting for day after day.
You know, that the same sort of out of body, dramatic encounters with another realm, another level, I guess, of reality.
Yeah.
It's very similar.
And I think that's something I take seriously.
I think, yeah, I can see why psychedelics could cause a person to really encounter.
A different level.
Have you heard the theory that Jesus was tripping on psychedelics when he was in the Garden of Gethsemane at 4 a.m. with the naked boy?
Remember that part of the Bible?
Well, let's see.
But what was going on there?
Okay.
I mean, do you mind if I correct you?
Just the way the story goes is that Jesus is in the garden praying and sweating drops of blood.
His vessels were actually giving out from the anguish that he was in.
Peter, James, and John were often, he invited them to come along and said, watch and pray, you know, and he went by himself to pray.
They fell asleep.
Finally, he gets up and said, let's go.
And as they leave the garden, that's when he's arrested.
The boy, all the disciples fled.
And they think it was John, who was the youngest.
Someone grabbed his coat to try and stop him from fleeing.
And he fled naked.
So I don't think there was any sexual stuff going on.
It was a.
The Greek word was a sindone, which means a linen cloth.
And if you actually.
The Greek translation of it was that it was a Greek cloth.
I'm sorry, a linen cloth sindone wrapped around his private parts.
And then when he ran away, no one grabbed it.
It just fell off.
And he ran away naked.
And.
That's the problem with this stuff is that everyone has their own interpretation of what the stuff meant.
And the only way to really drill down into it is to understand the Greek, to translate the Greek.
And people, depending on what denomination of Christianity or Catholicism or even what was the religion was the other guy, Dan McClellan?
He was a Mormon.
They all have their own.
Dictionaries where they change the meaning of words so that can change the meaning of what was happening in the Bible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know Hebrew or Greek.
I do use an interlinear every once in a while just to see what it says.
But for me, I've gotten away from trying to figure out what everything means in the Bible.
I have a general sense of what's happening.
The Gospels are, for me, the richest source of spiritual inspiration because Jesus' interactions are quite remarkable.
I mean, I think meeting.
Jesus, you know, you're a woman pulling out water from a well and you encounter this guy who reads your soul to you and just tells you all your secret stuff.
The conversation, it wasn't just a parlor trick.
He was trying to get something across to her and she got it.
She actually got it.
She ran into town and said, I met him.
He's the Messiah.
So the actual encounter, I would say that's very close to A psychedelic type experience where you encounter so much reality in one setting that it changes you forever.
That, that, how to change your mind.
I think Jesus was the expert at it.
He would, he would, uh, he would usually use questions, he used way more questions than answers.
And he drew people out and got them to change their mind.
In fact, repent means change your mind.
So I think that's the key to the whole thing is can I get in contact with that voice that will lead me into the way that I need to change?
And, and, Give me the inspiration and source of power that I need.
That's, you know, we're not trying to get the perfect doctrine or the absolute right interpretation of everything.
I've grown to appreciate the understanding of the spiritual realm from other traditions.
The Jewish tradition is super rich.
I've gotten a lot out of that.
Rumi and the Muslim mystics.
Gandhi, many of the Hindus have very strong spiritual understandings.
So I don't have to narrow it down whether anyone encountered the monkey god or I don't know.
I know what they're trying to teach.
That's what I think I know, what they're trying to teach.
And that is what helps me go forward with a sense that I'm not doing this all on my own.
There's an energy and an intelligence that I can interact with that will gently, he's not going to.
take over my life and just I'm on autopilot from now on.
Yeah.
So, so what you're saying is like understanding what the, the people who like the first people who wrote down the Greek that was translated into the Bible.
That's not as important to you as the value that the stories give to your life.
And yeah, like the, like the stories, your belief in the, in the stories, it makes you, you believe a better person.
Right.
And that's, you know, Also, there's a lot of stories, particularly from the Old Testament, even some in the New Testament, that are really hard to take.
I mean, they're just very violent stories.
And you just wonder, what is this all about?
Yeah, and a lot of stories that were taken out of the Bible, too, that are atrocious.
The Bible doesn't even self define.
I mean, that was just a committee meeting.
They came up with what's going to be in the book and what ain't.
So I think that when you read about, say, the first.
10 or 11 chapters of the Bible before Abraham.
You know, the garden, Adam and Eve, Noah, the flood, all that is really in the language of myth.
When you read it, if you were just, you'd never heard of the Bible or God or anything, and you checked into a hotel, picked up the Gideon's Bible and started reading it in Genesis, you'd go, oh, this is an ancient myth.
You know, it's just, it's what it is.
You can just tell, you know, not a science book.
It's not a history book.
They're trying to make sense.
How do we explain the fact that we're so, you know, everything is good and beautiful, and yet we also, Shy away from truth.
We, you know, do things that we shouldn't.
We want to hide ourselves from God because, you know, we're now conscious of our nakedness.
All of that is an attempt from ancient civilizations to understand why things are the way they are.
Then from chapter 12 on, you have this accounts of Abraham and this people.
Scoop this way a little bit.
Oh, sorry.
I'm a leaner.
You keep drawing to that side.
Yeah.
That, uh, Somehow, they are willing to engage with this voice, with this God, this presence in a way that's very unlike the other cultures around them.
And it's a one God thing.
It's not.
Yeah, Monica.
But they still have a lot of attitudes, like the sacrificial systems and stuff.
That's all imported from other religious traditions, the Mesopotamians, all that.
A lot of the myth language is right out of the Babylonian texts.
So I don't have a problem with that.
Because I think over time, what happens once this people says, you know what, we're going to try and follow this God, you know, I am that I am, the guy that's the voice that speaks out of the burning bush, we want to follow him.
And once they enter into this relationship, they're still, you know, Bronze Age shepherds and Bedouins and, you know, so on and so forth, great poets, great, you know, a lot of cool stuff going on in their civilization, but they're still working through stuff.
And so they don't get it all right, you know, and if they say, well, God said, go and kill every man, woman, child, and even the donkeys.
Just get rid of them all.
Yeah, but I don't think so.
I mean, I just don't think that you got that right.
Something made you want to do that, but I don't think you'd identify that with the I am that spoke to Moses.
And that goes along.
Then you have the history of the kings and all their corruption and everything in Israel.
Then you have the judgments that come on Israel, carried into Babylon and all that.
The prophets, the prophets bring in a whole new understanding.
They bring God's word in a different way, and they pretty much say, forget the sacrifices.
Well, I don't need this.
You know, I want you to love one another.
I want you to take care of the hungry.
You know, I want you.
So there's a progression in terms of their understanding.
And it's back and forth.
It's not one straight line.
And then eventually Jesus shows up.
And as in the tradition of the prophets, he comes with a new understanding of some new, not everything new.
He's, you know, said, You heard Moses say this.
Well, I'm going to tell you something even heavier.
You know, this is what I say.
And, uh, That to me is in flux.
It's not a rule book.
I'm not going to decide how long my hair is because it says so in 1 Thessalonians.
That's just not either here nor there.
Right.
Did you ever question any of this stuff?
Did you ever question the Bible or Christianity or your religious beliefs during the process of escaping the cult?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, You can't help but wonder what else did I get wrong?
You know, if I'm wrong about all this stuff, how can I be so sure that I'm right about Jesus?
Like, maybe I'll wash my hands of all of this shit.
Maybe I'll become a saint.
That's what a lot of people do.
And I have no problem with anybody who feels like they should do that.
It's right.
I don't think God's wringing his hands.
You know, you don't like me anymore.
You know, he's just sure, he loves us all regardless.
And it's not a he.
I just, you know, I don't, the pronouns for God is a whole nother, but they, them, yeah, they, them.
That's.
My lesbian daughter says I should use that.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
That's amazing.
It takes some getting used to.
That's amazing.
Anyway.
So, no.
So, you didn't question it.
You kept.
I questioned it in kind of like, I should.
If I'm being responsible, I at least want to challenge my own belief systems.
I should question those beliefs.
Why do I believe that?
Does that really make sense?
Is there another explanation?
Could it have been, I don't know, some other explanation?
Thing that I interpret as being the voice of God.
I think you'd be a fool not to.
You have to be willing to question that.
I mean, but in the end, I would always come to a place where I have a piece that I don't understand at all, but this much I know.
I do have a sense that this voice inside me is real and has seen me through some really tough shit, you know, but, and it tells me good stuff.
Tells me to love, you know.
Oh, talking to your mic.
Sorry.
Oh, am I?
What am I doing?
You're going.
Oops.
Sorry.
Yeah, this is weird.
So, at what point did you meet with Rebecca Lamov, the mind control expert?
There was an International Cultic Studies Association was doing a meeting in Santa Fe on the topic of child abuse in cultic groups.
So, I'd been hanging out with those guys for a while.
I wanted to go, but I didn't want to go without a representative from the second generation.
So a girl that had been very active in ex-member circles, I invited her to come along and we gave an address at the workshop or something.
She would tell her story, which was insane, totally insane.
She was very close to Berg.
Brainwashing and Shared Tribes00:06:17
Oh, really?
Lived with him for a while.
Anyway.
Hard to take.
She's amazingly healthy, really mentally.
Wow, I don't know how she did it, but she's in good shape.
But she shared her story and then I shared my story of what it was like.
How could this have possibly happened on our watch?
You know we're not, you know sadists we.
How did this happen?
So that was the kind of uh, look at it.
There was other groups there as well that had.
One of them had extreme physical punishment.
Um, Tony Lamo, did you ever hear his?
That rings a bell.
He died a few years ago, but he had a really bad one in Arkansas, a group, really bad.
And they were physical beatings that I just couldn't even bear to describe them.
So, you know, the.
We found that organization very helpful just simply because a whole bunch of different opinions.
You know, they're not all believers by any stretch.
Most of them are PhDs and who became PhDs to figure out what the hell happened to me.
And they started studying and never stopped.
But anyway, so Rebecca was there, I think, because of her interest in brainwashing and how this topic is of key importance to the ex cult community or to society when it relates to cults to understand it.
And I thought Rebecca did a well, anyway, at the meeting, I was just, hey, where are you from?
Oh, Harvard.
Oh, really?
You know, I live in Massachusetts too.
We had lunch together and I told her my whole story.
And then I gave her my book and she read it, sent me a really nice email.
And then the pandemic hit and, you know, we just lost touch.
We just didn't keep in touch until her book came out.
And then she was doing the Joe Rogan show.
Did you happen to watch her on that at all?
I did, yeah.
So there's a certain point in the story where she tells my story.
Right.
In this one, she gave me three wives.
Which my kids gave me a real hard time.
Where's the other one, Dad?
But what I think appealed to her was a try.
My story tries to understand what it is that could cause you to do this, but not only do it in fear of doing something hurtful and harmful, but thinking you're right, thinking you're actually right.
And it's.
Ouch, you know it's uh, I I like the fact that she puts it in historical context.
There was a time when she mentions in her book that you know, the scholarly community just poo-pooed brainwashing and just thought it was no no, that's just people making an excuse for doing really dumb.
You know uh, she said, I don't think so and I think she really got it.
You know, getting into the Korean War, veterans and all of that yeah uh, in a very excellent way of unpacking it, not extreme in one way or the other.
Just we're all, We're all a confusing mess.
I think we're all brainwashed somewhere on the spectrum.
It's a continuum.
Yeah.
I think a great example of that is American politics.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
What was it like unbrainwashing yourself?
Well, we were living in Florida, which was for us, we were spinning our wheels.
And for me, it was one long heat rash.
But eventually, some good friends of ours got kicked out of the group up in New Hampshire.
Rhode Island.
And we were so close and we were so lonely.
We said, well, let's, we'll come up and visit you guys.
And we went up and four days later, I'd rented a house in Rhode Island.
So, and we still hung out with a lot of folks from the group or who had, you know, some connection to it.
Eventually, shoot, I lost my thought.
I'm brainwashing yourself.
Oh, yeah.
So, One of our friends had called a Christian counseling center to ask for help with their marriage.
They're married in the group, have a bunch of kids, and you know, all that.
And when they just explained their situation to the counselor, they said, You know, we don't really handle anything like that.
That's way out of our portfolio.
But we know a guy, and that was Bob Pardon, who was this minister who had started this organization, which is originally he and some other pastors were confronting the fact that.
They had a number of their congregation dropping out and joining the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Mormons or some small outfit, you know, kind of goofy, crazy outfits.
And, you know, we just got to teach our people the Bible so that they can recognize it when something's not coming from the same voice.
But what happened is once they got educated into the way the groups worked, they started attracting ex-members, you know, so because they understood somebody from the 12 tribes, which is another kind of very still-going organization.
Are 12 tribes of Israel?
Yeah, I think they're called the Messianic communities, but they're known as the 12 tribes.
You know vernacular, and they say Bob, you get this.
So well, we we're, we want to leave.
We don't know what to do.
We don't you know, I can't remember how to open a checking account.
My kids, you know, don't know.
You know what do we do, how do we get started?
And that's how he ended up starting this ministry that was just trying to help people transition.
There was so many things that they began to organize into a bit of a, a course you can kind of work your way through.
So we got there.
We couldn't move in because we had all these kids, But we would take the classes and, you know, the stuff like the experiment, the, oh, what's the name of that famous?
Psychological Combat Triggers00:11:29
the prison experiment and brainwashing?
MKUltra?
No, it was, I don't know, it was Harvard.
I'm not sure where it was, but it was completely unethical and they can't do it anymore.
When were they doing it?
50s.
And it was the idea how quickly a person.
Is it the Stanford prison experiment?
Yeah, Stanford prison experiment.
Okay.
And they, Very quickly, turned into sadistic jailers.
They're students one day, and 48 hours later, they're doing all this stuff.
They can't even believe it how quickly it happened.
They had to call the experiment off because people were going off the deep end.
It was a controversial and famous psychology experiment conducted in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo.
The goal of the experiment was aimed to determine whether the brutal behavior often seen in prisons was due to the inherent personalities of the guards and the prisoners or bad apples.
Healthy, psychologically stable male college students were randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners.
Oh, yes, this is ringing a bell.
In a simulated prison in a basement of the university psychology building, the outcome of the experiment, planned for two weeks, was stopped after only six days because the participants quickly adopted their roles to an extreme degree.
Guards became sadistic and abusive using psychological warfare and humiliation, while prisoners became passive, distressed, and some experienced emotional breakdowns.
Wow.
Yeah.
And then I remember the other one with the electric shocks.
I can't remember that one, but where they'd have a guy in a white coat tell you, you have to turn the shock up, turn the shock up.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
I forget the name of that one.
I remember that.
We talked about this a lot.
They showed us all these things and kind of helped us unpack.
Okay, this is how it works.
This is how our brain's structure is designed to work.
The shocking one was where they were shocking somebody, it was interesting because there was nobody there.
They were just playing screams as if they were shocking somebody.
Right.
So, they were seeing how they could get or how far they could push the person that was turning the dial to follow the orders before their conscious kicked in and said, No, I'm not going to do this anymore.
And a lot of them just kept doing it until the scream stopped and they were like, Oh my God, did I kill him?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The human mind is very vulnerable, very, very manipulatable.
There's a book.
Fragile.
Are you familiar with Robert Cialdini?
He wrote a book called Influence.
Really interesting guy.
But the reason I bring them up, and it's all about how you can influence someone's thinking through these different techniques.
And Bob, the cult educator, gave me the book to read in order to understand the subtle manipulation that happens along the way, cult or no cult.
Then I got into sales, and the sales organization gave me.
Giordini's book to read as how to manipulate the sale.
So it just depends on where you're coming from, the way you take that information.
And I do, it's all the fundamentals are still there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's amazing how similar so many cults are, you know, from Children of God to Jonestown to Scientology, Heaven's Gate.
There's so many like fundamental cults.
Similarities between all of them.
It's interesting because it has become, you know, in the last five years or so, it just seems like they should have a special channel with nothing but cult shows on.
Because there's so many of them.
People are fascinated by it.
Yeah, fascinating.
The part that worries me a little bit is that if people only focus on the sensational, and they are sensational, so, you know, the guy with the branding iron and all that.
I mean, it just.
Oh, yeah.
What was that one called again?
I don't know.
Yeah, that was a more recent one.
Yeah.
That guy's in prison, I think so too.
But if you just get freaked out by how bizarre the behaviors can be, then you just think people who get involved with cults are just somehow their brain does not work right.
It just, they can't think.
I think people tend to look at it that way.
Like, how do you.
That's the perception.
Yeah.
Right.
Perception.
Yes.
Right, right, right.
Okay.
So, but in fact, nobody ever joins a cult.
You know, I was joining an organization to evangelize the world, you know, later on.
Yeah, I was in a cult, but how that happened was a long transitional period.
It's sometimes hard to watch those things if people haven't processed their experience.
They can be so full of shame.
I almost want to cry as they tell their story about what they did while they're in a group.
And I can see that they're still carrying a tremendous amount of pain from it.
I don't think you'll ever be pain free, but you don't have to walk around in complete shame all the time if you can work through.
This is what happened.
This is where I screwed up.
This is where I got suckered.
You know, I bit the apple or whatever, you know, and, and, but I, it wasn't purely evil intentions.
I didn't set out to do wrong, but I did do wrong.
I can't get away from that, but I can forgive myself because I can understand why it happened.
The underlying motives that I actually had was good.
I wanted to serve God.
I hope that people who have those experiences can get to a place where they get some help working through what happened, how the brain works, and come to a place where you go, yeah, given the right set of circumstances, pretty much anybody could end up in a situation that is cultic or manipulative or, you know, in, I mean, the military, you know, think of all the things that people do in the military.
Oh, yeah.
They didn't, you know, join the army to burn villagers in Vietnam, but they did, you know, so what happened?
They got psychologically programmed to a place where they were willing to do that.
You know, but you can't, you know, and guys do have a hard time.
They can't come back from that.
They have a hard time being able to forgive themselves for what happened.
If they can unpack it and understand it.
And it's also so similar, too.
If you think about, especially if you want to go back to the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan, the type of people that signed up to do that, they were young kids that were not like growing up saying, I want to grow up and I want to go into combat and I want to fight for America and I want to go to war.
Like, This was not something that was like in their DNA.
It wasn't a calling that they had, right?
These people were these, and I've talked to a lot of them, these combat veterans.
They were really young.
They didn't know what direction they wanted to go in life.
They maybe had a few options on the table.
Maybe I'll go to college.
Maybe I'll try to get a job doing this, learn a trade or whatever.
Or maybe I could go sign up for the military and I can go off to war.
And for one reason or another, they picked war.
And Their brains were not built for that.
They were not psychologically ready to witness that kind of stuff and be in combat, pulling the trigger, killing people, killing kids.
And they come back and there's nothing left for them.
And they're broken when they get back here.
I actually think that it's interesting because Bob, the fellow at Meadowhaven, he had suggested early on, I hadn't knew very little about trauma.
It was like maybe 1994, 95.
And I was kind of, once I got a little cult education in me, then I realized what kind of challenges my kids were up against, you know, and I was getting a little freaked out.
Like trauma changes your brain.
I mean, these kids grew up, I mean, even if you left the sex stuff out, it was still a traumatic situation.
People had way too much power over their lives.
And it was, you know, abusive.
There's no question about it.
What could be more abusive than sexual abuse?
I mean, I don't know.
No, it's probably not.
Sex gets right into the core of our being.
Right, exactly.
And especially for a kid who has no mental equipment to deal with that.
Right.
But my point is just that if soldiers coming back from, I'm not sure if it was in Rebecca's book where they talk about moral injury, where it's not that you just experienced horrible stuff, your friends getting blown up and this and that.
It's that you pulled the trigger, that you did something that you knew deep down on some level.
You know, you killed a young boy.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's, I think, a piece of the.
He gave me a book to read, Trauma and Healing by Judith Herman.
It was one of the earliest books written on trauma.
And I was surprised to find out it was only 1980.
They came up with.
The term trauma related to Vietnam vets.
It was their rap sessions where they started to unpack what had happened to them and they began to realize this is, they came up with the term trauma for it.
At the same time, the Women's Liberation Movement was coming up with all the stories of women who had been subject to all kinds of abuse and they were traumatized.
And then they started to put two and two together and realize this is a kind of a constant in human history and human experience that what you get.
traumatized, you have to somehow go back and revisit how this happened.
Confess to whatever weakness you might have had in the situation, but also absolve yourself that, look, something happened to you, man.
You didn't dream this up.
This is not your fault.
You can't not take any responsibility for it.
It's good that you take responsibility for it.
Nobody should walk away after war without some issues.
But you have to get to a place where you can let go.
You can get that trauma to a healed place.
I hope that that message gets out more and more, the psychological research on trauma is just flooding the world today.
What is the best way to do it?
What is the best way to face it?
Well, and to work through it.
Well, from a cultic point of view, it was this educational piece of how did these small decisions along the way, which in their own, this choice wasn't all that bad.
This choice wasn't all that bad.
But all of a sudden, holy shit, you know, where are we?
You know, and that's like, I think, pretty much what happens to soldiers too.
Silicon Valley Political Movements00:16:12
They get caught up in this.
Weird world.
I just visited an old friend.
He went to Vietnam when he was 16, lied about his age.
Wow.
Because he wanted to go?
He wanted to go.
He came home in rough shape, full disability.
He still struggles with it.
It still will come to him, even though he's done a lot of work to try and process it all.
He still.
Carries it.
You know, when he talks about it you can see it in his face.
It's real and it's it's still a burden for him.
Thank god he's learned how to how to live.
Uh, beyond that, but yeah, I mean I, I hope you know that's.
That's why I got involved with Meadowhaven for so long was because uh, I thought it did a good job of trying to give people a chance to unpack it rather than just shove it down and forget about it.
And you know it's going to pop up somewhere at an unfortunate moment.
Can you, can you spot this kind of stuff, Like in other parts of society, like where cultish behaviors bubbling up, and you in the religious world, it's, you know, becoming more and more widely well known how much abuse goes on in churches, not just sexual abuse historically.
Yeah, the manipulation to get people to do all kinds of crazy stuff, right?
I mean, there's nothing, it's crazy that there's nothing else that's more synonymous with child abuse than the Catholic Church, yeah, and cults that use that stuff.
And now it's coming out, it's not just the Catholics, it's Pretty much every doggone denomination has a closet full.
But it is something that, especially now because people, are you familiar with the term deconstruction in the evangelical world?
No.
Well, you know, there's, I don't know the statistics, but a pretty large percentage of our society over the last 20, 30 years was evangelical.
You know, witness our political situation.
But the.
A large, poor.
Say that again?
You know, American society.
I think maybe 20 or 30% are Catholic, 20 or 30% are mainstream Protestants, 20 or 30% are charismatic and evangelical and fundamentalist.
I wonder what percent of the United States is Christian or Catholic.
Let's look that up.
Yeah.
Christian is a tricky word.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's supposed to mean a follower of Jesus, but I don't think it does anymore.
Why?
Because it's become something else.
It's become a political movement.
62 to 69% of US adults identify as Christian.
Wow.
You think it's becoming political?
Yeah.
I mean, you can't read the Sermon on the Mount and say this goes along with, I don't know if I should get political on a podcast, but you know.
Podcasts are made to be political.
There's no boundaries.
It's unrecognizable.
You know, you read the words of Jesus and then you see what's happening in Chicago or in, you know, North Carolina.
And it's just crazy.
It's just, this is absolutely not what Jesus said.
Yeah.
You're supposed to love the stranger.
You're supposed to help the stranger.
You're not supposed to beat them up, throw them in the back of a van.
But, you know, all of that.
What do you make of the push to make the government more Christian?
I think Trump appointed a Christian.
What was the title of that woman?
She was like the head of Christianity.
All white.
Yeah, Tampa Girl.
Some of the videos of that lady are wild.
Yeah.
It's a little strange.
So, like, what do you make of the push to merge that televangelism with politics?
Well, that would be a really good and interesting podcast.
What happened, you know, interestingly, was the Jesus movement gave a real jolt of energy to the flagging evangelical church.
So, a whole lot of young people came into the church with a lot of enthusiasm and zeal, eventually, Got into Bible college, became pastors and whatnot.
And it was just kind of religious.
It wasn't a political movement.
And then Jerry Falwell realized that the political potential that it would wield.
So they started with the abortion issue.
There's a guy named Frankie Schaefer.
I don't know if you've ever heard of him.
His father, Francis Schaefer, was a well known scholar.
He lived in Switzerland, he's American scholar.
of religion and wrote some really important books in theology.
His son kind of grew up kind of like my kids, you know, somewhat neglected because daddy was off serving the Lord.
And he ended up getting polio.
He didn't learn to read until he was about 13.
But his dad gave him the mission to go and teach the American church the importance of the pro-life movement.
And so he Came over here and networked with all these denominational leaders and so on and got them really sold.
I mean, Billy Graham never talked about abortion.
It wasn't even an issue.
I mean, it was just not a thing.
All of a sudden in 1980, 1985, it's the only thing the Bible is supposed to be about.
Jesus never even used the word, you know?
So it just became, and then the gay thing.
And they just will take these issues and politicize them.
I suppose they have some moral principle to them.
I don't agree with it, but it's in their mind a moral principle.
But it's a tremendous fundraising tool and they organize.
Because you have the microphone every Sunday morning, you've got pretty strong control over the thought lives of your and it's all just like with us.
It's in the name of God.
Who's going to say no if they think God wants them to?
You know, hate gays or whatever.
It's the same dynamic.
It's just a matter.
If you're a communal group, it gets real bizarre real fast.
If you're not a communal group, it takes a while, but over a decade, decade and a half, America was changed by this whole evangelical movement, given life by the Jesus movement, no political message there at all.
And then from 1980 on or so, the moral majority, and then into – and Frankie Shaver details exactly how they did it and managed to win over the evangelical world to this political worldview.
Interesting.
So it is interesting.
You know, it's affecting our lives right now.
I don't know if you're familiar with the Seven Mountains, that whole thing.
What's that?
It's a movement, the National Apostolic Reformation or something, the New Apostolic Reformation, NAR.
They have this teaching that there are seven mountains that are places of influence in society, politics, entertainment.
I don't know.
I can't even think of all of them they are.
But they're all.
Parts of society, business.
And their idea is that God wants us to be on the top of all these seven mountains so we can change society in all its dimensions.
So that's why they work so hard to capture positions in other parts of the society that have nothing to do with religion.
Who is trying to capture that?
Well, what's the name of that church?
There's a big church, Bethel Church, out in California.
Kind of the launch pad for this whole seven mountains movement, and they are committed to it.
They don't make any bone, they don't hide it.
It'll be published in Charisma magazine, you know.
They teach it as this is what we should do.
Whereas Jesus said, No, my kingdom is not of this world.
I'm not trying to take over Rome, I don't want any part of Rome.
You know, we've got our own kingdom, yeah.
So let's do our kingdom stuff, which is love, which is care for the poor.
Which is well, also, there's been I don't know if you've read about this, but.
There's been this huge push over the last few years to transform Silicon Valley into like a religious Christian hub.
I've heard that.
And Peter Thiel is one of the big people behind that.
He's doing these big conferences in Silicon Valley.
There's even a big church that got started there, where Silicon Valley historically has been like an atheist part, an atheist hub.
All the tech people, they're not religious, they're not godly.
And that's been completely transformed.
You think psychedelics might have something to do with that too?
I don't know.
No, no, I don't think so.
I don't think so.
It's funny though that that's also like the psychedelic hub of the world.
I wonder if there was some America.
But no, Peter Thiel is like on to this jihad to paint Christianity onto everything Silicon Valley is doing.
And he's holding these seminars all about the Antichrist.
And he thinks that AI is going to, or technology.
And he's a guy who's invested in lots of AI and tech companies and companies like Palantir, which is a.
A surveillance company that sells surveillance software to the CIA and creates autonomous weapons systems for the sell out of other countries to essentially just kill people.
Yeah.
It's a pretty weird combination.
And yeah, right.
And oh, this is a Vanity Fair article.
Yeah, yeah.
Christianity was borderline illegal in Silicon Valley and now it's the new religion.
And there is this whole.
It's odd.
It's very odd.
And I've been racking my brain trying to think like, What is this?
Is this something that this guy really believes is the right thing?
Is something, does he really believe this?
I don't know.
Or does he have a motive behind this?
You know, is there some sort of motive that does he think that America would be stronger if our American society would be stronger if everyone subscribed to Christianity, if we had a one binding thing where we were all Christians and we were all people of the Lord?
You know, similar to how other countries, if you look at other like Muslim countries, They're so devout to their religion that they're willing to strap a bomb to their chest.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And we're not like that.
We're a little bit more segregated, a little bit more diverse.
Yeah, but I think there is a push.
It's weird because it is two completely different Jesuses that are starting to talk about deconstruction.
Because what happened with the evangelical movement is the kids who were raised in the 80s and 90s in these strict evangelical environments, homeschooled, stuff like that, they.
Um and purity culture.
All of you know, no dating, all that kind of thing they're.
Now, you know, they get into their 20s and go.
I don't think I really agree with this anymore.
And they start, but they still have a spiritual life, they still have a prayer life and they so they start to take it apart, they deconstruct it, what is and what isn't connected to this Jesus, and that is having a big movement on the other end.
You got these guys going total in one direction, you know, the God Of War.
And the other ones are kind of like, wait, we have to be able to understand Jesus' ethic in terms of our own social experience.
So what Jesus didn't talk about homosexuality.
He didn't talk about it.
It wasn't an issue.
You can't go to the verses.
And a few people do, but they're incorrect.
But nonetheless, people are beginning to go, it's just not, I can't picture Jesus saying, you know, mocking people for having a different sexual preference.
You know, it just doesn't make sense.
Yet, this other Jesus, yeah, let's just, you know, segregate them off from society.
Yeah.
So there's two, it's a war, you know?
It's just people, it's groups, it's groupthink, and it's people in society with lots of power who want to use things like this, like religion or Christianity to achieve whatever their goals are.
It seems like there's people that just want to use it to their advantage, however, they can.
And that's not just with religion.
That's even with psychedelics and psychedelic drugs.
Absolutely.
Yeah, there's a lot of profit motive there.
And that religious professional study with Johns Hopkins we were talking about earlier.
I forget who it was, but there was somebody in that study who spoke about how they thought that if they could.
Depending on the outcome of that study, determine that maybe introducing psychedelics to people who are believers in this stuff already, maybe that could strengthen their belief, or maybe that could strengthen Christian values in the country and create some sort of a renaissance in America, right?
Like if you were able to give the church fathers legal access to psychedelic drugs to where they could administer that to the people that go to the church, imagine how much more devout they would be to their religion.
Yeah.
I have a hard time picturing psychedelics ever getting integrated to that level in the church, but I think it will be something that is practiced among members of the church who connect on a certain wavelength and go, you know, I don't know, you ever heard of Houston Smith?
He wrote The Religions of Man.
It was the largest selling, I think it still is, the largest selling textbook on comparative religion.
And he himself was a child of a missionary out in China.
But in his study of the world religions, he also practices the five daily prayers of Islam.
He fasts during Ramadan.
He's passed away now.
This was a while back.
And he got involved with psychedelics with Timothy Leary in Harvard.
Oh, wow.
Tripped his first trip on January 1st, 1960.
What a way to kick off the 60s, huh?
Wow.
So here's a very devout man.
Dedicated his life since six months in a zen monastery um, and he said it was the first time that he really felt that he had experienced god uh, and it he, it became a very uh well uh, covered it's.
I think it's the most reprinted article.
Wow, in all the literature, what was his name?
Again Houston, it's.
It's not like Houston in the city, it's H-u-s-t-o-n.
Smith and great guy, great writes, fantastic stuff and A lovely man, Too.
He was interviewed by Bill Moyer a lot on PBS.
But his takeaway was like, once you get the message, hang up the phone.
Writing to Share the Puzzle00:10:06
You don't have to keep tripping.
If you experience that breakthrough into a spiritual reality, try to find ways to support that through spiritual disciplines, maybe a certain prayer or meditation practice, or studying scripture, or talking to other religions for insights or.
Poetry.
I mean, all kinds of ways you can nurture it aside from psychedelics because after a while, it's already done its job, you know.
Unless you're treating, you know, your depression.
Yeah, it's not, people like to broad brush psychedelics and other drugs all together.
They say it's drugs, right?
But it's not, it's not like something that you're chasing.
It's like often people that you talk to that have experienced psychedelics, they are recounting.
an experience they had years ago.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
And it's still very palpable and it's still like very vivid in their mind.
It's something they experienced a long time ago.
It's not like you have to keep going back and chasing the dragon like you have to do with other drugs.
I would, because, you know, I felt like psychedelics had played a role in getting me to the point where I opened my heart to God.
After, oh, been out since 91.
That's 45 years, 44 years, something like that.
I began to, you know, The stuff that happened to us in our family, I struggled with it.
I'm not diagnosable depression, but I was flat.
Let's put it that way.
My spiritual life just wasn't joyful.
And I just was lacking some sense of aliveness.
And when I started reading all the How to Change Your Mind and a lot of the stuff that Ligari publishes online, then I started going to Harvard conferences.
I thought maybe I should try this.
Maybe it would just jolt me out of this kind of not very exciting spiritual place I'm at.
And I tried.
I was also interested because I got hooked on cigars and it was getting pretty annoying, expensive and bad for my health.
So I thought it's also very good at that.
Maybe I can kill two birds with one stone.
I did a retreat in Mexico.
What did you do?
DMT?
No, no, just ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca scares the hell out of me just because, I don't know, vomiting and diarrhea is just not my cup of tea.
Right, right.
I don't blame you.
I, you know, had the visuals and all that kind of thing, but I didn't experience the kind of experience I hoped for.
I did quit smoking cigars.
But the, and I realized afterwards that I did a few things wrong.
You got to be more careful in how you prepare for a journey, you know, if you want to take it seriously and, you know, not just go to a Grateful Dead concert.
It was, I think I was, I was leaning on the arm of the flesh.
I was looking to something.
I already know God.
I should be able to communicate with God without needing a substance.
Not that it's a sin or anything.
It's just like, yeah, if you want to go ahead, but you don't really need it.
But I think that was the message that I got was, you already know how to talk to me.
You know how to listen to me.
And it's really not necessary.
I'm not going to blame you, but I'm not going to give you the trip of your lifetime either.
Right.
But I still respect it.
I still, you know, I do think it's an important change that's going to come over the next few years.
That as psychedelics for therapy get out into society, people are going to have these experiences.
And the clergy has got to have some language to help people understand it and unpack these encounters and integrate them into your regular life.
So you wrote your book in 2011.
Right.
And you never promoted it or anything?
Not much.
I mean, you know, I did at ICSA conferences and things like that.
But, It was, it's, um, I get a lot of good feedback from people who do read it, it's they find it very helpful.
And how do people find it?
Uh, usually just some discussion or another, you know.
Is this the first audio interview you've ever done?
Uh, I think recorded.
I used to do a number of talks with Ixa about you know cults and spirituality, but um, yeah, I kind of backed off from everything in terms of the cult, you know, it's just like old.
Old news.
Yeah.
And then it seemed to be coming back up in my life.
I was starting to tell you about the Joe Rogan thing.
So I guess it was May or June.
I got a WhatsApp from my son in New Zealand.
I said, Dad, I'm listening to Joe Rogan and they're talking about you.
And I thought, they're probably just somebody's talking about the group or something like that.
I mean, how would Joe Rogan know anything about, you know?
And then he sent me a link and sure enough, he was.
And And then I got in touch with Rebecca and, you know, it started to open a door that I thought was kind of like passed, you know, to discuss this topic that we were discussing today.
Maybe the fact that I'm in a different place, you know, I'm in a different place in life.
My, you know, I'm 75, so I'm starting to think more about what's next, what comes after this, what do I need to get done before I say goodnight.
And it seems like it popped back up.
So I feel like there's something I have to do to at least share what little piece of the puzzle that I've experienced.
Yeah.
And maybe it'll help somebody else.
I want to write, I've actually got way too many notes on an update because my thinking's changed since the book was printed on some things.
Basically, it's still the same, but I would word things differently now.
I think I'd have a lot more.
Uh, insight into because it's a pretty Christian approach that I take, you know, in the book, and I now think that's not always helpful because you know, you say Christian, you could be talking about Peter Thiel, you know, people just don't know what you're talking about anymore, sure.
Yeah, so I think I would try to unpack things in a more everyday language, uh, and that everyone can relate to because you know, maybe you work for a boss who was just Simon Legree, you know, I mean, you have experiences like this in life, and if you can.
Kind of begin to relate your own personal experiences with manipulation or getting drafted or whatever your personal experience was or a bad marriage, you know, that kind of thing.
It's the same basic dynamic, just not quite as dramatic and sensational as a cult might be.
But, you know, I hope that we can get past.
People.
I do this, other people do it to me and I know it.
You know they're sizing me up and saying oh, you're a, you're this kind of Christian, you're that kind of Christian, you're this kind of uh ex-hippie, or you know.
They always kind of try to peg you in a box yeah, instead of get to know me, and then you'll know what.
You know, not just what image leaps into your mind and you can categorize it and write it off.
Oh, I don't believe in Christianity well yeah, but you know you believe in humans, because a lot of humans caught up in this thing, You know, at least we can talk as humans.
You know, I used to get very nervous at the thought of somebody not believing in God.
How could you go through life and not believe in God?
I personally think everyone believes in something.
I call it the voice.
You know, it's a presence that you encounter not all day, every day, but sometimes, some sunset, some date with your wife, some special birth, you know, or death where, you know, that presence is felt and known.
My mother-in-law just passed away.
She was 100 years old.
We had a wingding of a party in June.
All the kids, she's out in California, and everybody flew out there to wish her a happy birthday.
And she had dementia.
It was, you know, her mind was slipping.
She couldn't, her short-term memory was very brief.
But she was such a godly woman her whole life and just has exudes it.
She doesn't use a lot of religious language.
She doesn't, you know, just.
It's just love, you know, that just comes through her.
So that one of my sons, after she passed, he said, This is the Christ we need, you know.
And I think that's what we need stuff that's real, you know.
It's not all theoretical and abstract, it's lived, you know.
I think that's what incarnation means.
It's supposed to be in the flesh, you know, supposed to be real, not airy, you know, fairy type thing.
Well, that's very powerful, man.
Thank you for doing this.
This has been.
We're done?
This has been incredible.
Yeah, we just did three hours.
Holy smokes.
What time is it?
It's 4 45.
Okay, I got time.
Yeah.
Does your flight leave tonight?
It leaves tonight, yeah.
Okay.
I think I need to be there by seven.
Tell people where they can find your book and all that stuff.
Oh, yeah.
Get a hold of you.
Can I get my book?
Real Experiences for Families00:01:12
I'll just show this.
Yeah, yeah.
Go grab it.
Only available in paperback.
Is that right?
Do you have Kindle?
Okay, fantastic.
Oh, there it is right there.
Something somebody stole.
Yeah, that's it.
So.
Beautiful, man.
But yeah, I think it's a good read.
You might not.
People that are not that involved with Bible study like the first half better than the second half because of my story.
And the second half, I'm trying to make sense of my story.
So it's a little more spiritual and scriptural exploration, although it gets back into our life too.
So, yeah, I mean, I think if anybody's been through an experience like this or has a family member who has, it's helpful.
I tried to digest a lot of other material from other writers and scholars and make it simple for a layman.
So, it can help you cover the issues involved as you're trying to work through your own personal apocalypse.
It's amazing, man.
Super powerful.
We'll link all that stuff below so people can find it and get a hold of you if they need to.