Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 1: the podcast about the very worst people in all of
Speaker 1: history and folks this week. You know, I've said this
Speaker 1: a couple of times, but I always mean it. This
Speaker 1: is one of the worst guys we're ever going to
Speaker 1: talk about, and in order to really get behind this
Speaker 1: bastard in a way that makes them palatable, We've got
Speaker 1: to bring on one of the best guests we've ever had,
Speaker 1: a man who needs no introduction, perhaps the Eddiest of all, Helms.
Speaker 1: Ed Helms, Welcome back to the show. Ed.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree, I'm extremely edi ish Eddie.
Speaker 2: Ed, I'm I don't know if I'm the eddiest, but.
Speaker 1: You're definitely the Helmsest of Eds. I think we can
Speaker 1: agree with that.
Speaker 2: I'm the Helmsiest, yeah for sure.
Speaker 4: And you and you're the host of Snaffo.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, great podcast entering season three. It's a pod
Speaker 1: cast about some of the most biggest screw ups or
Speaker 1: fuck ups I guess, just based on the literal translation
Speaker 1: of the title, in the history of the US government.
Speaker 1: Last season, you talked about the massive, sweeping, unprecedented civilian
Speaker 1: led infiltration and expose of FBI surveillance files. And this
Speaker 1: season you're talking about how the US government tried to
Speaker 1: poison a shitload of people during Prohibition.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a dodgy. It's a dodgy world out there, folks,
Speaker 3: and we are living in it. But no, thank you
Speaker 3: for that blog. I'm extremely proud of of SNAFU. It's
Speaker 3: a labor of love. It's an unbelievable amount of work.
Speaker 3: But we have an incredible team between Gilded Audio and
Speaker 3: Film Nation and myself and yeah, we just do a
Speaker 3: ton of reason.
Speaker 2: It's legit.
Speaker 3: It's like legit, really really good history. It's real history.
Speaker 3: And then the book, of course, I have a book
Speaker 3: that just came out. I don't even have one to
Speaker 3: show you. Oh my gosh, I'm so unprepared.
Speaker 4: And on the on the YouTube, will put the graphic
Speaker 4: up first.
Speaker 2: Okay, good books, we got.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a fantastic book, New York Times bestseller, also
Speaker 3: called snapfo The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest screw Ups,
Speaker 3: lots of chapters. Each chapter is a different screw up.
Speaker 3: Unlike the podcast, where the entire season is one screw up,
Speaker 3: you get a whole Kaboodle in the.
Speaker 1: Book snaff Ooz. Well, we're talking about a great screw
Speaker 1: up today, although it's it's not a screw up of
Speaker 1: just the US government. It's more like every time a
Speaker 1: cult leader gets way too big for their breches. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like a collective human screw up. Like, oh man,
Speaker 1: we really let that guy get too far. We shouldn't
Speaker 1: have let that happen. Right, You're looking at like Jim
Speaker 1: Jones and like, oh shit, man, we really we screw
Speaker 1: it up? How did that happen?
Speaker 2: Today?
Speaker 1: We're talking about a guy. You may not recognize him
Speaker 1: by name, but I think a lot of people will
Speaker 1: recognize the cult. The dude was named David Berg and
Speaker 1: his cult was called the Children of God or the
Speaker 1: Family International. We're back. Have you ever heard of these guys?
Speaker 4: Ed?
Speaker 3: Just the most, the tiniest bit, Like I have the
Speaker 3: broadest sense of this group.
Speaker 2: I might recall more as you go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, these guys are If you kind of want to
Speaker 1: cut cult leaders into like three different groups, you've got
Speaker 1: kind of on the lightest in the guys. You're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some psychological abuse. They're taking money from people, but
Speaker 1: they're not committing any like serious violent crimes, right, they're
Speaker 1: just kind of in it for the cash. And in
Speaker 1: the middle you've got the guys where they're like physically
Speaker 1: and mentally abusing people, but they're not like killing anyone.
Speaker 1: David Berg is on kind of the far end of
Speaker 1: the spectrum where like is he is just some of
Speaker 1: the worst stuff I've heard of a cult leader do.
Speaker 1: He's about as extreme as it gets. And he's interesting
Speaker 1: because he's also he's not just like a weird religious
Speaker 1: cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie
Speaker 1: ideology in this kind of like evangelical Christianity, like pentecostal
Speaker 1: preaching in the mid centuries. A very weird guy. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll just get into it.
Speaker 3: Like nothing you just said makes sense, that doesn't say,
Speaker 3: But that's the beauty of cults, like you just kind
Speaker 3: of make it up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, they can make it up as they go along,
Speaker 1: and they're very rooted in their time. Right, This quolte
Speaker 1: couldn't have gotten started any other year but like nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, which is in fact when it gets started.
Speaker 1: David Brandt Berg was born on February eighteenth, nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: kind of at the height of the influenza pandemic. His
Speaker 1: parents were Virginia Burg and Healmerberg. They were both evangelical
Speaker 1: Christian preachers participating in what was called the Revival movement. Right,
Speaker 1: So at this time, you've got a lot of these
Speaker 1: like traveling itinerant preachers moving around throughout the US, mostly
Speaker 1: but not entirely, in like the South and southeast. And
Speaker 1: so you've got this network of churches, but also these
Speaker 1: traveling preachers who make their money getting crowds and hyping
Speaker 1: them up, and there's a lot of Sometimes they're doing
Speaker 1: like fake psychic surgery. Sometimes they're doing like snake handling,
Speaker 1: where they'll like milk a snake of its venom and
Speaker 1: then pretend to get bit beforehand to be like, look,
Speaker 1: God protected me, right, Like it's a show act in
Speaker 1: addition to being preaching, right, and you know this, that's
Speaker 1: the big movement at the time, and that's how David's
Speaker 1: parents kind of make their living. David would later write
Speaker 1: that his father, Helmer, who was a Swedish immigrant to
Speaker 1: the US, had been converted by his maternal grandfather and
Speaker 1: before finding Jesus, Helmer was a quote cigar smoking beer
Speaker 1: drinking wild dancing party going, good looking and loose living
Speaker 1: young man of the world.
Speaker 3: I would think anyone named Hyalmer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's that description.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems like a loose slipping man.
Speaker 2: You know what origin is that name?
Speaker 1: Swedish? Yeah, he's very sweetish.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jalmer. I like it.
Speaker 1: And it's we don't know if that's actually true. Like
Speaker 1: it's kind of a thing in this world of evangelical
Speaker 1: preachers to pretend that, you know, before you got saved,
Speaker 1: you were a real bad guy. And the fact that
Speaker 1: he can't think of anything but like while I drank
Speaker 1: beer and danced, right, It's like, I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: I've known worse guys. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Depends on what kind of like how much beer and
Speaker 3: what kind of dancing.
Speaker 2: I suppose that.
Speaker 1: Is a good point.
Speaker 2: Dancing can get dirty.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, we know. What was it? Kevin Bacon? Let
Speaker 1: us all know, Patrick Swayze, pastor Jesus Christ. I know
Speaker 1: that's shameful. So one of the weird little facts about
Speaker 1: his parents is that before she met Helmer, Virginia, his
Speaker 1: mom was engaged to be married to Bruce Bogart, who
Speaker 1: I think was Humphrey Bogart's cousin, which is just a
Speaker 1: weird fact. Helmer was hired entertainment at the wedding and
Speaker 1: she just kind of leaves her fiance to be with him. So,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a story there that's interesting, but we
Speaker 1: don't have it. Whatever the truth, from the time David
Speaker 1: knew his father, he was a zealous minister. Berg would
Speaker 1: later write that this was almost too much for his
Speaker 1: mother because this is not the guy that she'd married.
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is true either. David describes
Speaker 1: his mother as very, very strict and religious and she's
Speaker 1: going to be a super famous preacher. Later, he just
Speaker 1: kind of doesn't like his mom, so he takes a
Speaker 1: lot of potshots at her in the biography that he
Speaker 1: wrote about himself. I think that's probably more what's happening here.
Speaker 2: We call that an auto biography.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sorry, Yes, Hylmer and Virginia go to religious universities.
Speaker 1: His mom goes to Texas Christian University and gets a
Speaker 1: degree there. They have their first son, David's older brother,
Speaker 1: in nineteen eleven, his older sister in nineteen fifteen, and
Speaker 1: David's the youngest of the family in nineteen nineteen. Virginia
Speaker 1: would later claim that after having her daughter, she had
Speaker 1: been completely disabled for five years and then miraculously healed.
Speaker 1: And if this is the case, then she had David
Speaker 1: before she was healed, and scholars who looked into the
Speaker 1: family are like, there's no evidence that she was ever
Speaker 1: really sick. This is again just kind of like part
Speaker 1: of the myth making. And I bring this up because
Speaker 1: as David grows into the family, he's going to be
Speaker 1: used to the idea that both his parents are like
Speaker 1: these traveling freelance preachers, and that they just make up
Speaker 1: stuff about the family, right and about their history that like,
Speaker 1: as their kid, he knows a lot of this isn't true,
Speaker 1: and he just come, you just lie about your backstory
Speaker 1: because it sells better.
Speaker 2: Rights.
Speaker 1: It's a show, right, right, exactly like Bob Dylan, but
Speaker 1: like Boby right, like Bob Dylan, or a pro wrestler
Speaker 1: like a.
Speaker 2: Lot of entertainers.
Speaker 1: True, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No one was ever born
Speaker 1: named Nicholas Cage. It's simply too cool of a name, right,
Speaker 1: Like his mother, David's going to go on to later
Speaker 1: have claimed that he suffered from a variety of untreatable
Speaker 1: illness illnesses that were cured via prayer. His bio on
Speaker 1: the website established by the cult he later founds, says
Speaker 1: that he was born with influenza and also an enlarged heart.
Speaker 1: Neither of these is super unlikely, but this kind of
Speaker 1: weaves into the bio he makes that he was spared
Speaker 1: from all this by his prayers right, and then he
Speaker 1: was like healed so that he could do his work.
Speaker 1: His biography, the autobiography on his church's website, also goes
Speaker 1: into a whole host of what I think are increased
Speaker 1: the unlikely ailments for him to have suffered. At three
Speaker 1: years of age, his foot was run over by an
Speaker 1: automobile and the doctor said he would never walk again.
Speaker 1: But again his parents believed in God and prayed, and
Speaker 1: his foot was miraculously healed, although the doctor said that
Speaker 1: many of the bones were crushed. When he was seven
Speaker 1: years old, a water heater exploded in his face and
Speaker 1: the doctor said he would be permanently blinded. But this
Speaker 1: time God used an old friend, a real saint, who
Speaker 1: prayed for his eyes and they were instantly healed. I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe I don't think a water heater exploded
Speaker 1: in his face.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe. I mean that would do a lot more
Speaker 2: than blind you.
Speaker 1: It seems like right, And he's like, we have pictures
Speaker 1: of his face because.
Speaker 3: Those are those are made of iron. Those things are
Speaker 3: like an exploding water heater.
Speaker 1: It's like an ied going off.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, fully like a lot of shrapnel for real.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and his face is like fine, Like there's
Speaker 1: not really much evidence of this. What we can confirm
Speaker 1: is that he grows up, like I said, in this
Speaker 1: family that it's almost like a wrestle ling family right
Speaker 1: where it's like, yeah, we've got like we've got like
Speaker 1: the k fape that we have to keep about our background,
Speaker 1: you know. And so he's going to be very good
Speaker 1: about this. His entire life is he.
Speaker 3: Going on these church revivals, Like from the get go,
Speaker 3: he's just they're like living on the.
Speaker 1: Road sometimes he is for a part of his early life.
Speaker 1: I think up until he's like ten or eleven or so,
Speaker 1: he mostly stays at home and one of his parents
Speaker 1: will be traveling at any given time occasionally. Both like
Speaker 1: he will describe himself later as very lonesome as a
Speaker 1: little kid, because he both he doesn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of friends and he barely sees his mom, right, because
Speaker 1: they're very busy and traveling constantly.
Speaker 3: Right, I would wager that describes a lot of cult leaders, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: lonely kids, too much time thinking and sorry, sorry, remind
Speaker 3: me where this is his childhood.
Speaker 1: Uh, it's mostly in I think at this point they're
Speaker 1: like in like Mississippi or something like that, but they're
Speaker 1: like moving around his entire childhood. They wind up in
Speaker 1: Florida and then californ are kind of the two places
Speaker 1: he's primarily raised a little in his early life. They're
Speaker 1: moving so much sometimes like every couple of months that
Speaker 1: it's unclear to me, because like his dad or his
Speaker 1: mom will get a job like pinch hitting at a
Speaker 1: church for four months or something, right, so that the
Speaker 1: normal pastor can go out on the road or whatever.
Speaker 1: So he's raised a lot of the time by this
Speaker 1: like combination of maids, governesses and like like uncles and
Speaker 1: aunts occasionally, and he doesn't get a lot of attention.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of highlighted by the fact that
Speaker 1: the attention he does get as a young boy, and
Speaker 1: probably the earliest direct adult attention that he strongly remembers
Speaker 1: is sexual abuse, which is also going to like leave
Speaker 1: a mark. This starts when he's three, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's the maid of his house, who, like he claims,
Speaker 1: is kind of molesting him to help him get to sleep.
Speaker 1: So he'll talk about this positively as an adult, and
Speaker 1: that's kind of relevant because he's going to come to
Speaker 1: believe that this kind of stuff is positive for members
Speaker 1: of his cult to do.
Speaker 2: Right. That's so interesting.
Speaker 3: Do I read that in Victorian England this was commonplace
Speaker 3: that governesses would give little boys hand jobs essentially at
Speaker 3: bedtime tot Yes, the theory being that they would help
Speaker 3: them fall asleep.
Speaker 1: Yes, And that's exactly what his maid says that she's doing,
Speaker 1: and his mom does not like. His mom finds out
Speaker 1: and assaults the maid, like is hitting her and fires her,
Speaker 1: which I think we could all agree pretty normal responts
Speaker 1: from a parent. But he and as you said, like,
Speaker 1: this is not at the time, like it's a kind
Speaker 1: of thing that happens a lot more often than he
Speaker 1: would have thought, and he, as a kid, thinks it's
Speaker 1: unjust and fair because he's like, I don't get why
Speaker 1: my mom was so mean to the maid, right, like, oh, interesting,
Speaker 1: and yeah, and this is going to like kind of
Speaker 1: compound over the years, he's going to keep having experiences
Speaker 1: like this and convince himself that sort of his reaction
Speaker 1: to them is the normal and healthy one, and that's
Speaker 1: going to lead him pushing this on a lot of
Speaker 1: other kids.
Speaker 3: It's so complex, it's it's a really complicated and not
Speaker 3: the maternal figure battling with his caretaker. Yeah, like the
Speaker 3: where is his loyalty right in all of that? And
Speaker 3: the abuse, yeah, is is sort of justified in somewhere
Speaker 3: attempt you know, he tries to sure yeah, or and
Speaker 3: the and the the maid it's like his mate, Yeah,
Speaker 3: nanny or whatever.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's wild.
Speaker 1: It's it's wild, and like you have to assume this
Speaker 1: nanny is like more of a mother figure than his
Speaker 1: mom at age three, because she's just not there, right
Speaker 1: Like it's yeah, and after this, his mother is going
Speaker 1: to be increasingly like David experiments a lot with himself,
Speaker 1: and his mom will punish him violently whenever she catches him, right,
Speaker 1: which kind of compounds his feelings of anger towards his mom.
Speaker 1: This comes to a head when he's six years old
Speaker 1: and she catches him yet again like experimenting and quote
Speaker 1: she brought out a wash base, a little bowl in
Speaker 1: a knife and told me she was going to cut
Speaker 1: it off, right, She threatens to like circumcise him.
Speaker 3: Basically when you say experimenting, he's just like mass masturbating.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, And like his mom is
Speaker 1: basically threatens to like cut him as a result, which
Speaker 1: is bad parenting. Right. So this this kid is stacking
Speaker 1: a lot of trauma. We're at age seven at this point, right,
Speaker 1: which is when he has a confused sexual encounter with
Speaker 1: a cousin of the same age, right, who's also seven.
Speaker 1: So these are two kids playing around. This is not
Speaker 1: like an abuse scenario, right, They're both the same age.
Speaker 1: But his uncle catches them and like watches and he's
Speaker 1: horrified because he realizes that his uncle is like kind
Speaker 1: of voyeuristically doing this, and his uncle never tells his mom.
Speaker 1: He never tells his mom. So what we've got by
Speaker 1: this point is this very confused kid who's had a
Speaker 1: lot of sexual trauma before age ten and is learning
Speaker 1: from an early age that like this is the most
Speaker 1: positive attention he's gotten in his life, and it's also
Speaker 1: the thing that he's most punished and frightened of. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: He's going to grow up, and his main takeaway from
Speaker 1: the experience will be frustration at the fact that his
Speaker 1: parents judged him for all of this, right, that they
Speaker 1: punished him for this kind of stuff, And so you
Speaker 1: have to kind of think of this energy within him
Speaker 1: around this as this kind of building pressure inside of
Speaker 1: him that's going to at a certain point be released
Speaker 1: with pretty catastrophic consequences for a lot of people. He
Speaker 1: also is really frustrated as a kid that his mom
Speaker 1: is usually the one punishing him. He thinks his dad
Speaker 1: should be doing that. He sees his dad as like
Speaker 1: kind of weak and being dominated by his mom. He
Speaker 1: would later write that the times he most respected his
Speaker 1: father or when his dad quote picked up a board
Speaker 1: and hit me so hard on the fanny he lifted
Speaker 1: me right off the ground. So he's like, well, at
Speaker 1: least my dad hit me sometimes, you know, and was
Speaker 1: like a real father.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: We are talking about the twenties here, so not a
Speaker 1: healthy upbringing.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The irony is irony is that he's right that, yeah,
Speaker 3: his parents shouldn't have punished him, but it doesn't. But
Speaker 3: it seems like he thinks they should have like nurtured
Speaker 3: this toxicity whereas they should have intervened in a in
Speaker 3: like a healthy way.
Speaker 1: They should have intervened been like, this isn't your fault, right,
Speaker 1: exactly all of that, but this isn't okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's both not your fault and not okay. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And and he seems to have walked away with all.
Speaker 1: The wrong all the wrong things. And you know, it
Speaker 1: is hard to imagine a couple of parents in the
Speaker 1: twenties having gotten this kind of situation, right, you know, like, yeah.
Speaker 2: Not a lot of tools. They didn't have a lot
Speaker 2: a lot of tools.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. So once he gets a little older, he's
Speaker 1: kind of moving into adolescence. The family starts to move
Speaker 1: with regularity. And at this point they kind of are
Speaker 1: on the road. And he's on the road with his
Speaker 1: family pretty constantly. They go around the US. They live
Speaker 1: in like a dozen states. They spend some time in Canada.
Speaker 1: His mom is becoming increingly prominent. She has like a ministry,
Speaker 1: which means she's a known preacher. She's getting invitations from
Speaker 1: dozens of churches to come. And the way this works
Speaker 1: is it's honestly, the evangelical preaching business works a lot
Speaker 1: like stand up comedy does. Today where a venue invites
Speaker 1: you or you get hooked up through an agent and
Speaker 1: you take like half of the offering. So you give
Speaker 1: a preach, people donate money, you split it with the venue. Right,
Speaker 1: That's kind of how these people are making a living.
Speaker 1: And she's like a high level stand up like person, right, Like,
Speaker 1: if you want to think of it that way, they're
Speaker 1: making pretty good money for a while, and in fact,
Speaker 1: they're making good enough money that when he's like I
Speaker 1: think twelve or so, the family settles down in Miami
Speaker 1: because Virginia is able to actually start her own church
Speaker 1: right where she is now operating a venue, And for
Speaker 1: a time things are getting better for the Bergs, but
Speaker 1: then the depression hits, right, and this is just as
Speaker 1: David's entering his teen years, and Virginia's church goes out
Speaker 1: of business, right, which is not usually a terrible use
Speaker 1: for churches, but that's what these kind of ones are, right.
Speaker 3: So interesting, Yeah, I wonder if they had tax exempt status.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, these people are paying taxes.
Speaker 3: And I'm just I'm so curious what her presentation was, like,
Speaker 3: what was her energy, what was her tone? What was
Speaker 3: the message? I assume was fire and brimstone or was
Speaker 3: it more Yeah, I don't like.
Speaker 1: It's both this mix of like fire and brimstone. You
Speaker 1: always start with a like, here's how bad I was
Speaker 1: when I was younger. You know, there's a there's a
Speaker 1: really good There's an Oscar wedding documentary from nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: three called Marjo m A. R. Joe with this dude
Speaker 1: who was a kid when he was like five. His
Speaker 1: parents were traveling preachers like David's, and they had him
Speaker 1: like they billed him as like the youngest preacher. They
Speaker 1: like taught him, wrote how to do stuff like perform weddings,
Speaker 1: and as an adult, he came back undercover with like
Speaker 1: a film crew to like expose how this business worked.
Speaker 1: And if you want to see like how this whole
Speaker 1: like industry worked, Marjo's a really good depiction of it.
Speaker 1: He also wound up as an actor on the A
Speaker 1: team as an adult. It's weird. So after the business
Speaker 1: goes under, the Helmer and Virginia start going on the road.
Speaker 1: The marriage is not doing well because money's not good,
Speaker 1: so they split up and they split the kids between them,
Speaker 1: and David stays with his mom, and his mom kind
Speaker 1: of uses him as in her words her quote chauffeur, secretary,
Speaker 1: and singer. I don't know if they had he shouldn't
Speaker 1: have been driving. He's like thirteen, but it was the thirties. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: fuck it. Why not not as much traffic. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: as much traffic. No one's got seatbelts, So you're just
Speaker 1: vibing in there. They wind up in California, southern California,
Speaker 1: where David attends Monterey High School, and so this is
Speaker 1: kind of the second time in his life that he's
Speaker 1: really stable for any period of time. He would later
Speaker 1: claim to have been bullied for being a preacher's kid
Speaker 1: by the other students who quote threw his books around,
Speaker 1: tore his papers, and even broke his left arm. He's
Speaker 1: a sickly kid, and he claims to have figured that
Speaker 1: the only way he could beat them back was quote
Speaker 1: in the classroom with pen and paper, and that he
Speaker 1: did this by graduating with quote the highest scholastic record
Speaker 1: in the eighty year history of the school. Now there's
Speaker 1: no evidence of this, Like, we know he graduated in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five, but I've never heard, like the school
Speaker 1: doesn't claim that he did the best of anyone there.
Speaker 1: So he's the massaging stuff a little bit. By this point,
Speaker 1: he's seen what the life of a traveling preacher looks like,
Speaker 1: and he's also seen how hard it is to live
Speaker 1: that life. So he tries to make a living in
Speaker 1: the secular world and applies to go to the Elliott
Speaker 1: School of Business Administration. This I think is in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. But it may have been there, maybe been
Speaker 1: another business school by the same name that since got
Speaker 1: out of business. But he's only there for like a
Speaker 1: couple of months before he drops out. So and I
Speaker 1: think this is just part of he hasn't had a
Speaker 1: normal education. He doesn't know how to do anything but
Speaker 1: what his parents do, right, And so within a couple
Speaker 1: of months he drops out of school and decides to
Speaker 1: go into full time evangelical work, like doing the same
Speaker 1: thing his parents has done, living as a traveling preacher.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of a question mark what he does
Speaker 1: in the first six years after his graduation, but this
Speaker 1: is probably it. He's probably traveling around preaching and what
Speaker 1: year are we talking, thirty five to forty one? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So David doesn't make any additional direct claims about what
Speaker 1: he's doing until December seventh, nineteen forty one, which I
Speaker 1: think most people that is when Pearl Harbor happens, right,
Speaker 1: And he claims to have joined the army, and he
Speaker 1: says he failed the army's physical requirements, but they led
Speaker 1: him in any way, and that he served as a
Speaker 1: conscientious subjector because he didn't believe it would be ethical
Speaker 1: to go and kill Japanese soldiers because they hadn't had
Speaker 1: a chance to hear the gospel. Right, that's his claim,
Speaker 1: And the Army did admit conscientious subjectors and non combat
Speaker 1: roles in World War Two, but there's no evidence that
Speaker 1: Berg was one of them, or that he served in
Speaker 1: any way, shape or form. We have some records of
Speaker 1: his background from like different and evangelical organizations he was
Speaker 1: a part of that were keeping track of what he
Speaker 1: was doing in the early forties, and there's just no
Speaker 1: evidence that he ever served at all. If he did,
Speaker 1: it was maybe for a month or two. He claims
Speaker 1: that he caught double pneumonia and got so sick that
Speaker 1: the army discharged him because they thought he was going
Speaker 1: to die. And in his account of events, obviously he
Speaker 1: gets miraculously saved by God and promises to spend the
Speaker 1: rest of his life preaching as a result, right, and
Speaker 1: he's instantly healed. So that's his claim. I think the
Speaker 1: likelier claim is that, like he's just making it as
Speaker 1: a preacher from the late thirties to the early forties, right,
Speaker 1: doing the thing that he understands how to do, traveling
Speaker 1: with one of his parents at a time and kind
Speaker 1: of making his way around the circuit.
Speaker 3: And he added this sort of military bullet point on
Speaker 3: his resume just for some added credibility or yes, to
Speaker 3: just kind of spin the story a little more.
Speaker 1: You got to spend the story. You can't have said,
Speaker 1: especially you know in the fifties sixties that like you
Speaker 1: didn't do anything during World War Two, so you had
Speaker 1: you got to have some explanation as to like how
Speaker 1: you were patriotic. But he's also going to be a
Speaker 1: big anti Vietnam War guy, so you want to he
Speaker 1: wants to be able to be like, but I was
Speaker 1: a consciences subjector right, I didn't want to fight. Also,
Speaker 1: so that's kind of why I think he cooks that up.
Speaker 1: There's not really evidence.
Speaker 3: Of it, okay, So is that is that something easily
Speaker 3: disproven by military records or is it still kind of
Speaker 3: an open question because the way you're talking about it, it
Speaker 3: sounds like you you sound convinced he made it up.
Speaker 1: I found a good study on him by a like
Speaker 1: PhD psychotherapist who like goes through his backstory and found
Speaker 1: his records with these different a couple of different evangelical
Speaker 1: like the British American Ministerial Federation and the Christian and
Speaker 1: Missionary Alliance, which are two different groups that he works with,
Speaker 1: and they have like records of his background up through
Speaker 1: the early forties that don't list any time in the military.
Speaker 1: It's possible, like I have not seen no one's ever
Speaker 1: like filed and gotten a DD two one four, which
Speaker 1: is like the discharge paperwork you get from the army
Speaker 1: for him. But also this in this point in time,
Speaker 1: if he had just been in for a few months
Speaker 1: like he claims, they might not have given him one,
Speaker 1: right because this is kind of a chaotic period. The
Speaker 1: army didn't work then like it does now.
Speaker 2: Right, So I mean without the d D one two four,
Speaker 2: we don't know anything.
Speaker 1: No, Like we can't prove one way or the other.
Speaker 2: We got to get the d D one two four. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the paperwork.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we know, and we just don't have it, so
Speaker 1: we don't really know what he was doing. But it's
Speaker 1: not it's not impossible either way. But I think this
Speaker 1: just kind of fits into the other stories he tells
Speaker 1: about himself, like it's it's really convenient.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The other thing that's convenient, Ed is the products and
Speaker 1: services that support this podcast. And we're back, all right,
Speaker 1: So at this point and Ed's or sorry. At this
Speaker 1: point in David's story, he's been miraculously healed from DOUBLENEMONI. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the army has let him go, and he's decided to
Speaker 1: get back into the business of preaching, and he spends
Speaker 1: the rest of World War Two, you know, traveling around
Speaker 1: doing preaching with his parents. In nineteen forty four, he
Speaker 1: meets a young woman named Jane Miller and the two
Speaker 1: get married. They start touring because he brings her in
Speaker 1: and is like, now you're a preacher, right, which is
Speaker 1: kind of what his mom had done to his dad,
Speaker 1: and the couple starts having kids in quick succession. They
Speaker 1: have Debora in nineteen forty five, Aaron a couple of
Speaker 1: years later, Jonathan a year after that, and then their
Speaker 1: fourth kid, who has my favorite name of their children,
Speaker 1: Faith ye in fifty one, just Faith with a y.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I haven't heard that one. I haven't heard that name.
Speaker 3: That's one you gotta spell every time. Yeah, Faith, Ye Faithee,
Speaker 3: it's like faithee.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Berg and his wife settle down in the Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: It's usually said as the Los Angeles area. They're in
Speaker 1: Huntington Beach, right, which is like the kind of center
Speaker 1: of the evangelical movement in southern California at this period
Speaker 1: of time. And he starts going to California's Southern Bible
Speaker 1: College in nineteen forty eight to continue his education. In
Speaker 1: between classes, he's on the move a lot. He'll sleep
Speaker 1: in his car or a tent, you know, in order
Speaker 1: to save money so that he can keep his family
Speaker 1: going because money is tight. It's not until nineteen forty
Speaker 1: nine that he gets his first stable job, preaching at
Speaker 1: a church for the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Arizona.
Speaker 1: And by this point he'd started calling his wife Jane
Speaker 1: mother Eve, and in an early show of kind of
Speaker 1: how his charisma worked, people around them just sort of
Speaker 1: went along with it, even though I think it's kind
Speaker 1: of sacrilegious to call your wife Eve, Like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: that's just a little weird.
Speaker 2: Maybe it was kind of just like a nickname.
Speaker 1: It's like a nickname, and it's sort of a he's
Speaker 1: got that charisma where like if he gives someone a nickname,
Speaker 1: everyone picks it up, right. Yeah, Like people just kind
Speaker 1: of listen to what he says about stuff like this.
Speaker 1: Now here's what his church bio, which is he probably
Speaker 1: writes paints of this period of time and has life.
Speaker 1: His congregation was a mixture of Southern Whites, Indians, and
Speaker 1: Mexicans who didn't like each other, and eventually the wealthy
Speaker 1: family which controlled the church board urged the denomination to
Speaker 1: send him elsewhere. They didn't like David because of his
Speaker 1: integration policies and his preaching that they should share more
Speaker 1: of their wealth with the poor, beginning with him and
Speaker 1: his little family. So I do love that even in
Speaker 1: that there's a little bit of griftiness right right.
Speaker 3: It's so funny, it's so magnanimous, it's such a such
Speaker 3: an intrinsically a wholesome thing to advocate and preach integration.
Speaker 2: Share great, But then it has a little bit of Yeah,
Speaker 2: a little bit of money. Some of that sheddars falls
Speaker 2: on me. What's what's wrong with that?
Speaker 1: What about old David?
Speaker 2: Huh?
Speaker 1: Then David get a cut.
Speaker 2: You gotta cut mother, reeve out of this.
Speaker 1: Come on, now, I know this does not seem to
Speaker 1: be the whole. They just didn't like that. I wasn't racist.
Speaker 1: Doesn't seem to be the true story, his eldest daughter, Deborah,
Speaker 1: would later tell journalists. Now he got accused of sexual misconduct.
Speaker 1: He started an affair with a married woman in his
Speaker 1: church while he was married, and when it got found
Speaker 1: out like that, they were like, well, you're fired. This
Speaker 1: is the thing that this is like the one thing
Speaker 1: you can't do, right.
Speaker 2: A lot of them do it.
Speaker 1: A lot of them do it. But yeah, he gets
Speaker 1: in trouble for this. His family would also claim that
Speaker 1: during this period of time when he was on the road,
Speaker 1: he would regularly pay sex workers while he was preaching.
Speaker 1: His children also accused him later of having slept with
Speaker 1: all of their housekeepers. So this is a guy who's
Speaker 1: got a lot of his personal life is messy, and
Speaker 1: I think that's probably why he gets fired, right, and
Speaker 1: maybe just the adultery was kind of the last straw.
Speaker 2: Is mother Eve still in the picture.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, she's never happy with him. They do
Speaker 1: not have a great marriage, although a lot of that
Speaker 1: seems down to be he just cheating like constantly on her.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now he gets really angry when this missionary alliance lets
Speaker 1: him go. Berg declares for the first time that organized
Speaker 1: religion is corrupt and that the powers that be within
Speaker 1: the evangelical movement were holding him back. He starts referring
Speaker 1: to the leaders of these major churches as the system
Speaker 1: and accuse them of fostering Churchianity rather than Christianity. Right,
Speaker 1: so they're serving their churches rather than serving the faith,
Speaker 1: which is in a large extent for a lot of
Speaker 1: these guys a fair criticism. It's also like he's not
Speaker 1: any better, right, Like yeah.
Speaker 2: Also, but I do love the word churchianity.
Speaker 1: Churchianity, churchianity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems like something that the that that someone
Speaker 3: would advocate at the annual ch like fourth of July. Pot, look, guys,
Speaker 3: we need more Churchianity, more Churchianity, Churchianity.
Speaker 1: He's got a gift for like words, right, And it's
Speaker 1: also it's very modern, almost cut, like deciding to frame
Speaker 1: your enemies as the system like that. People do that
Speaker 1: all the time today, right, like whether they're on the
Speaker 1: left of the right. Ear, everyone wants to be like
Speaker 1: there's a system that I'm against, right, and like you
Speaker 1: can be a rebel too.
Speaker 2: What's the great movie?
Speaker 1: What's is it?
Speaker 2: Paccino or somebody. It's like, I'm gonna put the system
Speaker 2: on trial.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, Cerproicoproo, Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly yeah.
Speaker 3: And then it's kind of reminiscent of our our last
Speaker 3: discussion about old Kurdi Jarvin.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, the cathedral, right, yes, yes, exactly everything.
Speaker 2: You gotta have a cool name for the for the
Speaker 2: for the enemy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or how Andrew Tatl call it the matrix, right,
Speaker 1: like it's it's all of these. Yeah, you got to
Speaker 1: you gotta have this big system that like you're the
Speaker 1: you're the lone Luke Skywalker character trying to blow up
Speaker 1: this death star of in this case churches that you
Speaker 1: used to work at until you got kicked out for adultery.
Speaker 1: So whatever the truth behind why he was fired, the
Speaker 1: experience inspired him to attempt another move into secular life,
Speaker 1: so he goes to Arizona State University in nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: I think it's not a party school at this point,
Speaker 1: but don't quote me on that, where he claims to
Speaker 1: have studied communism and walked away with the belief that
Speaker 1: it was a good idea, but it could only work
Speaker 1: if everyone was also Christian. Right, So he starts to
Speaker 1: see the early Christian Church, and when I say early,
Speaker 1: i'm talking about like before the Roman Empire was Christian. Right,
Speaker 1: So when it's still kind of this underground organization as
Speaker 1: essentially the ideal communist community, and modern evangelism is corrupt
Speaker 1: because it's obsessed with money. So he's starting to pull
Speaker 1: in and write like, this is the fifty early fifties
Speaker 1: when this is happening. So the hippie movement's not coming
Speaker 1: together yet, but you can see how when it does,
Speaker 1: he's going to be drawn towards some of the things
Speaker 1: they're talking about.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That said, the same year he goes to ASU, he's
Speaker 1: just there for a couple of terms, and then he
Speaker 1: goes back to southern California to go to Bible School again.
Speaker 1: So his mind may not have been quite as made
Speaker 1: up at this point as he'd later claim. For much
Speaker 1: of the early fifties, he's working odd jobs. He has
Speaker 1: a gig at the DA's office. He works in construction.
Speaker 1: He's teaching junior high school at a private Christian school,
Speaker 1: trying to do anything but what his parents did, right,
Speaker 1: because it sucks.
Speaker 2: There's something interesting here, which is that.
Speaker 3: If you are struggling to kind of like maintain stability
Speaker 3: in your life and make ends meet, in general, communism
Speaker 3: sounds pretty damn good.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, especially if you're like working with all these
Speaker 1: corrupt guys who are like, oh, it's all about the
Speaker 1: money for you, right, and like, yeah, I get it,
Speaker 1: But he's not gonna stick with these beliefs in like
Speaker 1: egalitarianism right when he starts. When he starts getting money
Speaker 1: in his cult, the money goes to him, right, Like.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen fifty four, he gets hired to work
Speaker 1: in Texas for a guy named Fred Jordan, who was
Speaker 1: one of the first wave of TV ministers. So he's
Speaker 1: like one of the first big ministers to have like
Speaker 1: a love TV like church program. He's also training missionaries
Speaker 1: for foreign work, and Berg starts working in television effectively
Speaker 1: right and for thirteen years he's Jordan's right hand man.
Speaker 1: He's marketing for the show. He's helping to produce it
Speaker 1: on a technical level, and this is the most stable
Speaker 1: job he's ever had, right, He's doing this for more
Speaker 1: than a decade. Most of his kids are raised to
Speaker 1: adulthood during this period of time, and Fred is his mentor.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of one thing that's sort of
Speaker 1: noteworthy about this is that Fred had had a church
Speaker 1: before the one that he starts and gets a TV
Speaker 1: program on that he'd basically gotten fired from because he
Speaker 1: started cheating with one of the members of his congregation
Speaker 1: on his wife, and that had caused his church to
Speaker 1: leave him. Right, So that's sort of like David knows
Speaker 1: that and kind of sees a kindred spirit in this
Speaker 1: guy because the same thing sort of happened to him.
Speaker 1: He would later refer to Fred as King Saul and
Speaker 1: credit him as a mentor. But he was also unhappy
Speaker 1: with his kind of humble position in this other guy's organization.
Speaker 1: He's middle aged now, and as he later wrote, I
Speaker 1: felt I was passing my prime but had not yet
Speaker 1: found God's perfect will for my life. He admits he
Speaker 1: was desperate for greater power, which is an unsettling thing
Speaker 1: to say, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, remarkably self aware.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was just about the power. Yeah. Now this
Speaker 1: doesn't come out until a long time later, but his
Speaker 1: daughters would later claim that he was also sexually harassing
Speaker 1: them during this.
Speaker 2: Period or.
Speaker 1: Both. So he tries first with his daughter Deborah when
Speaker 1: she's a young adult, and this doesn't go beyond harassment.
Speaker 1: Like she refuses and he seems to have stopped. She's
Speaker 1: an adult at this period of time, so like she's
Speaker 1: like it, he tried and I refused him. He does
Speaker 1: start molesting his daughter, his youngest daughter, Faithy, when she's
Speaker 1: about ten years old in nineteen sixty one, and one
Speaker 1: of the writer for Rolling Stone, who Wilkinson, who wrote
Speaker 1: a really good bio on this guy, also describes Faithy
Speaker 1: as the daughter who resembled him the most, which is like,
Speaker 1: it's so this is a guy who at this point
Speaker 1: he's kind of fully turned, right, He's now passing on
Speaker 1: the same kind of abuse that he had experienced as
Speaker 1: a kid. He's also channeling his ambition at Fred's program
Speaker 1: into trying to kind of take it into the modern era.
Speaker 1: He becomes convinced early on that color television is the future,
Speaker 1: and so he tries to convince Fred, you got to
Speaker 1: move on from black and white and like the mid
Speaker 1: sixties and make this a color program, right, And this
Speaker 1: is expensive, It's not cheap to go color in this
Speaker 1: period of time. And Fred really fights him on it
Speaker 1: and eventually agrees, and despite David's best efforts, they can't
Speaker 1: sell the show to any stations. So Fred fires him
Speaker 1: in sixty seven. So it's this kind of you know,
Speaker 1: his life seems like it's falling apart at this point,
Speaker 1: he's abusing his kids, he's lost his job. He would
Speaker 1: later tell like his version of events is that once
Speaker 1: the show fails, he thinks Fred's going to fire him,
Speaker 1: but then he has a dream where everything's fine and
Speaker 1: God tells him to have faith, and he says the
Speaker 1: dream was signed by Fred himself. So he has a
Speaker 1: dream that his boss is cool with him, but the
Speaker 1: real boss doesn't get the memo about the dream boss.
Speaker 1: And this is what David writes next. He wasn't completely
Speaker 1: sure if they should stay there or not, so as
Speaker 1: a test of the will of the Lord, he wrote
Speaker 1: and asked Fred for total control of their property and
Speaker 1: to even have it put in his name. Fred only
Speaker 1: said no, but fired David again, this time for the
Speaker 1: last time. So his like his move is, well, I
Speaker 1: had a dream that things were fine. I'm just going
Speaker 1: to ask you to sign over all your property to me.
Speaker 1: Is that cool? Can you do that?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 4: Your move?
Speaker 3: You're refired. Yeah, you're double fired. I don't even know
Speaker 3: what that means. You can't fire someone twice.
Speaker 2: It doesn't.
Speaker 3: It's like I guess, I guess you just say he
Speaker 3: just had to like say the words twice, Yeah, because
Speaker 3: it's just.
Speaker 1: War really fired, seriously, get out of here.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, this is actually this is starting to
Speaker 3: sound I mean it was sounding up until this point
Speaker 3: like he was a very troubled and troubling person, but
Speaker 3: mostly coherent and exploitive and kind of dastardly. But this
Speaker 3: is starting to sound untethered to reality.
Speaker 1: He's increasingly like losing his connection to reality, right, Like
Speaker 1: the fact that you would have this dream after your
Speaker 1: boss is like, man, I think I'm gonna have to
Speaker 1: let you go. You fucked up so bad. And then
Speaker 1: you're like, actually, I had a dream that it was fine.
Speaker 1: You want to sign over all your property to me?
Speaker 1: Is that cool?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: No, absolutely not. So yeah, this is a bold move
Speaker 1: and it fails. So David has to take his family
Speaker 1: back to southern California where his mom, Virginia, has a
Speaker 1: very big church in Huntington Beach, and she is super
Speaker 1: successful at this point, and she like, you should come
Speaker 1: here and start preaching. There's all these hippie kids, right
Speaker 1: who had gotten involved in the anti war movement, started
Speaker 1: experimenting with drugs. And this is a major thing happening
Speaker 1: in the US at the time, where you've got at
Speaker 1: sixty seven, sixty eight, sixty nine, the hippie movement reaching
Speaker 1: like kind of critical mass. But also people keep falling
Speaker 1: out of it, right, They'll have really bad trips, they'll
Speaker 1: run out of money, like something battle happened to them.
Speaker 1: And there's also all these kind of new evangelical offshoot
Speaker 1: programs they're called the Jesus Freaks kind of colloquially, who
Speaker 1: start taking in these former hippies. And a lot of
Speaker 1: churches start as a result of this, and there's also
Speaker 1: a couple of different cults that start as a result
Speaker 1: of this. Right, it's like people gathering up the shrapnel
Speaker 1: of the hippie movement as a sort of yeah, man'son
Speaker 1: exactly a great example of it.
Speaker 3: So right, and sorry did you say that that his
Speaker 3: mom was now running a church in Hunting Beach.
Speaker 1: Yes, a big one. She is successful at this point.
Speaker 3: She's like super successful, and he's just sort of dinking
Speaker 3: around trying to figure it out. But she invites him back. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and how old are his kids at this point?
Speaker 1: By the way, three of them are adults, I think,
Speaker 1: and one of them is like late teens, like Faith
Speaker 1: is like nearly adult, and so his kids are mostly
Speaker 1: grown at this point, right.
Speaker 2: And as Faith he weighed in, like as as an
Speaker 2: adult as she.
Speaker 1: You know, obviously, like that's you don't have to say
Speaker 1: anything just because your dad's a famous monster right after
Speaker 1: he abuses you. But like, we don't have a lot
Speaker 1: from her. Deborah is the one who talks a lot,
Speaker 1: okay about what he did. So US involvement obviously in
Speaker 1: Vietnam's in full swing at this point, and David decided
Speaker 1: he's he finds himself on the anti war side of things.
Speaker 1: Maybe he is legitimately anti war, right, like you can
Speaker 1: be a bad person and have like one or two
Speaker 1: good opinions, But maybe he also just sees it as like, oh,
Speaker 1: I want to like my mom said, I want to
Speaker 1: get kids from this hippie movement, right, and so you
Speaker 1: kind of have to be on that side of things, right.
Speaker 1: It also may just have been natural because like mainstream Americans,
Speaker 1: society is this like the pro war side of things,
Speaker 1: and he has always found himself kind of on the outskirts, right,
Speaker 1: And he also really finds himself drawn to a lot
Speaker 1: of the values of the hippie movement, radical acceptance and
Speaker 1: peace and love, the anti war stuff. So he starts
Speaker 1: a new organization with his children, his oldest kids, called
Speaker 1: Teens for Christ. Now, he is fifty at the time,
Speaker 1: so that's your first problem, right, Probably shouldn't be running
Speaker 1: a teen's organization when you're fifty. But his goal is
Speaker 1: to reach all of these newly awoken hippie kids in
Speaker 1: Huntington Beach, at the apex of the hippie movement in
Speaker 1: southern California, and convince them that the real path to
Speaker 1: radical change is a Christian revolution that can sweep away
Speaker 1: the corruption of like the warmongering administration and usher in
Speaker 1: a better future. He's got no church at first, and
Speaker 1: in fact he doesn't have much in the way of
Speaker 1: resources at all, so he preaches out of a coffee
Speaker 1: house called the Light Club. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from a two thousand and five Rolling Stone article by
Speaker 1: Peter Wilkinson. Here rejects society. He implored them. With his
Speaker 1: long white beard and prominent Adam zapple Berg evoked a
Speaker 1: crazed Santa to his followers. He was mesmerizing, who are
Speaker 1: the real rebels of today? He asked, We are the
Speaker 1: true lovers of peace and love and truth and beauty
Speaker 1: and God and freedom, whereas you are parents, are on
Speaker 1: the brink of destroying and polluting all of us in
Speaker 1: our world if we do not rise up against you
Speaker 1: in the name of God and try to stop you.
Speaker 1: He came to be known to his children as Moses,
Speaker 1: David or simply Moe. So it's all coming together.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the only thing I'm confused by is that
Speaker 3: his mom invited him back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he doesn't.
Speaker 3: He doesn't have a platform, Like he's not in the church,
Speaker 3: she's not here. He's doing this all this on the
Speaker 3: side or what's the.
Speaker 1: From my understanding, and a little bit of this is unclear,
Speaker 1: but he he is initially working with her in a
Speaker 1: couple other churches, but they don't like how radical he is. Okay,
Speaker 1: because he's like really anti war. He's like anti military,
Speaker 1: and that's not super popular among like these otherwise kind
Speaker 1: of concerns of it of Christian groups, Right, and that's
Speaker 1: kind of why he gets exiled to this coffee house.
Speaker 1: So his mom is one who brings him back. But
Speaker 1: you even see in that rhetoric part of what he's
Speaker 1: drawn to the hippie movement by and why he's appealing
Speaker 1: to them is he is also very angry at like
Speaker 1: his parents at the older generation. That's a big part
Speaker 1: of the hip hippie movement. So they're kind of natural
Speaker 1: partners in a way.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The other thing that really kind of weirded me out
Speaker 3: about that description was he as a long white beard.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and a prominent Adam's apple. Now those are
Speaker 3: those two things are hard to coexist because the implication
Speaker 3: is that his Adam's apple is so prominent that it
Speaker 3: protrudes through his beard.
Speaker 1: Through his I love that you pick up on that.
Speaker 3: Because would otherwise obscure anyone's Adam's apple. Yeah, so I'm
Speaker 3: picturing an Adam's apple that is so long and weird
Speaker 3: and pointy that it is disturbingly protruding.
Speaker 1: It's like a greater.
Speaker 2: Adams goiter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's got an Adams goiter at.
Speaker 3: His goiter had another Adam's apple. Maybe this was this
Speaker 3: father Adams apple was. And by the way, where's mother Eve?
Speaker 3: Adam is Mother Eve still in the picture?
Speaker 1: She is still around, she's helping to lead Teens for Christ.
Speaker 1: But they are together. He says that she's constantly telling him, like,
Speaker 1: you're not as holy as you pretend to be, which
Speaker 1: seems likely given that she knows what he's been up
Speaker 1: to his whole life. So they don't have a good marriage,
Speaker 1: which is going to become relevant later because it's not
Speaker 1: going to last much longer.
Speaker 2: She's kind of undermining him or his psychotic agenda.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you could, you could see, he would say, undermine mining,
Speaker 1: And maybe that's some of it. It also might be
Speaker 1: that just she was trying to be like, look, man,
Speaker 1: you need to like, I know you're not this guy,
Speaker 1: I know the real you. You know, I don't know
Speaker 1: entire I can't claim to have the entire you know understanding.
Speaker 1: But it's not going well the marriage. So one of
Speaker 1: his early members, one of the first people to join
Speaker 1: Teens for Christ in nineteen sixty nine, is a former
Speaker 1: beauty queen named Vashti, or at least that's the last
Speaker 1: name that she gives to Peter Wilkinson. And she explained
Speaker 1: kind of of her and a lot of the early
Speaker 1: people to join the organization. Most of us were middle
Speaker 1: and upper middle class kids who found that chasing materialism
Speaker 1: didn't work and felt that there had to be something
Speaker 1: bigger and more satisfying because we had it all. We
Speaker 1: were looking for the vacuum to be filled by God.
Speaker 1: We wanted to change the world.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of her psychoanalysis of herself and a
Speaker 1: lot of the early members.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And you know this point teens, for christ this is
Speaker 1: turning into a cult. But it's not fully a cult yet. Right.
Speaker 1: This is like your meeting at a coffeehouse, you're handing
Speaker 1: out he's got you in the street. It's a youth group.
Speaker 1: He does have you like handing out pamphlets and raising money.
Speaker 1: But the cult stuff kind of gets in comes in gradually,
Speaker 1: piece by piece. Right. You're not all living together immediately,
Speaker 1: and you're feeling like if you'd come out of the
Speaker 1: hippie movement, that you haven't really left the counter culture, right.
Speaker 1: The hippie movement, you know, by the kind of sixty
Speaker 1: nine to seventy, especially by like seventy, it's started to
Speaker 1: become clear that it has failed in a lot of
Speaker 1: its goals and a lot of people who are kind
Speaker 1: of traumatized or left in the wake. What separates David
Speaker 1: Berg from all the other groups, like you mentioned Manson,
Speaker 1: but also like Tony Alamo Alamo who we've talked about,
Speaker 1: he has a ministry that's kind of part of this
Speaker 1: Jesus Freak movement. What separates Berg from these other groups
Speaker 1: picking up these people is that he well, I guess
Speaker 1: with the exception of Manson, he and Manson actually have
Speaker 1: a lot in common because they they are the ones
Speaker 1: who are like, we're going to pull in a lot
Speaker 1: of this evangelical rhetoric, but we're also we're going to
Speaker 1: bring in a lot of central tenets of the hippie movement,
Speaker 1: and with Berg, that's going to eventually include free love. Right,
Speaker 1: not immediately, but he's already as early as like sixty
Speaker 1: eight sixty nine, he's starting to think maybe the hippies
Speaker 1: have a point about this. People shouldn't be getting married
Speaker 1: and just having sex with one person. Thing, right like
Speaker 1: this be like, maybe that's like part of the system, right, right.
Speaker 3: Right, Maybe maybe there's a maybe there's a belief system
Speaker 3: or a way of thinking, a way of believing that
Speaker 3: that validates all of my insane behavior and anti social
Speaker 3: psychotic sexual exploitation. Maybe there's a construct I can subscribe
Speaker 3: to and get others to subscribe to that that makes
Speaker 3: all that just just fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been doing a lot of fucked up sex
Speaker 1: stuff in my life. Maybe that's because that's what God wants. Yeah, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's kind of where he goes.
Speaker 3: And that, by the way, which is which is even
Speaker 3: I would say I would call what he's doing even
Speaker 3: a different lane than free love sixties free love.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I should be clear that, like, and we'll talk
Speaker 1: more about this. Free love is the branding he's going
Speaker 1: to eat. Yes, it's not that right right right? That
Speaker 1: tracks yes, Yes. He also does preach a lot. At
Speaker 1: this point at the coffeehouse, he starts preaching about the system.
Speaker 1: He refers to people in mainstream society as systemites right
Speaker 1: and seeks. He's cloaking himself in the language of rebellion
Speaker 1: to gain followers, and it works. Wilkinson's article describes how
Speaker 1: Berg used his early followers to recruit more ashes smudged
Speaker 1: on their foreheads, clad in red sackcloth robes and carrying
Speaker 1: shepherd's staffs, members of Teens for Christ hit the streets
Speaker 1: and cities across America, from New York to Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: To Chicago what they referred to as the mission Field.
Speaker 1: Strumming guitars, they handed out stacks of literature to passers
Speaker 1: by in exchange for donations. In those early days, money
Speaker 1: raised on the mission Field went primarily to charities. Our
Speaker 1: duty is to the lost souls in honed Burg who
Speaker 1: traveled in a Dodge motor home with his wife, Jane
Speaker 1: and their four children. So again you're seeing some cultier
Speaker 1: elements here, but they're given away most of the money,
Speaker 1: and they're getting when they get media coverage, it's kind
Speaker 1: of a lot of it's positive, as like, oh, these
Speaker 1: kids are this is part of the anti war movement.
Speaker 1: They're trying to make the world. They're raising money for charity.
Speaker 1: His mom, however, is horrified. She accuses him of being
Speaker 1: a carbon copy of Fred Jordan, the guy who'd fire him,
Speaker 1: and mocks his obsession with the system. Because she's done
Speaker 1: really well in the system.
Speaker 2: She's like Churchianity, not so Badianity.
Speaker 1: It's great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for more Churchianity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is what she's saying. Until the spring of
Speaker 1: sixty eight when Virginia dies and David, you get the feeling,
Speaker 1: and you get the feeling because he writes about this
Speaker 1: that this is he considers his mom's death the first
Speaker 1: moment in his life that he's really free. And there's
Speaker 1: a good breakdown of this in an article for Cultic
Speaker 1: Studies Journal by doctor Stephen Kent, who writes Berg's lifelong
Speaker 1: resentfulness and anger burst forth shortly after his mother's death
Speaker 1: at a public meeting that he called, to which he
Speaker 1: invited many of his mother's friends plus the press. His
Speaker 1: daughter Deborah recalls this August gathering in which he came
Speaker 1: out with his big proclamation against the system, and so
Speaker 1: his mom is famous. After she dies, he gets a
Speaker 1: lot of her friends, members of the evangelical community, together
Speaker 1: with reporters to like eulogize his mom, and instead of
Speaker 1: eulogizing her, he goes on the attack. And this is
Speaker 1: how his daughter Deborah describes this meeting. The press was
Speaker 1: there and all my grandmother's old friends, and there he
Speaker 1: just blows them all away. He just damns the system
Speaker 1: and damns the church system, damns the war in Vietnam,
Speaker 1: damns the political system, damns parents for raising their kids wrong.
Speaker 1: I mean o everything. So it was kind of like
Speaker 1: all this vehemence against everything that he was disgusted with
Speaker 1: or mad about, he just came out against it. After
Speaker 1: she died, he just began to practice what and how
Speaker 1: he really wanted to be. And first off, this alienates
Speaker 1: him from mainstream evangelical society forever. It gets a lot
Speaker 1: of press, and he will write later that he felt
Speaker 1: like his mom and dad both needed to go away
Speaker 1: so that he could become the man he would he
Speaker 1: was meant to be. And it becomes clear to him
Speaker 1: after this the man he's meant to be is the
Speaker 1: leader of a new religious sect, one that merges the
Speaker 1: values of Pentecostal evangelism with radical sexual liberation. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: gonna go.
Speaker 2: Well, it's kind of a branch Davidian.
Speaker 3: It's like it's a whole pattern of just like, let's
Speaker 3: have like a staunch, disciplined belief structure, but we get
Speaker 3: to fuck all we want.
Speaker 1: But we get or at least one of us does
Speaker 1: particularly guy, this guy, this guy, does I get to
Speaker 1: do all the fucking Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, And.
Speaker 2: Why do people think, like, why do people follow that guy? Well,
Speaker 2: you know, I mean I get it. He's charismatic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's charismatic. And it's it's interesting, ed because when
Speaker 1: it comes to guys like Koresh, I have that same
Speaker 1: question where it's like, but he's the only one who
Speaker 1: gets to do this stuff? Why do people go along
Speaker 1: with this? Berg starts that way, but as we'll talk
Speaker 1: about it eventually, he's like, actually, everyone gets to have
Speaker 1: sex as long as I get to like direct the sex.
Speaker 2: Whoa.
Speaker 1: So it's it's weirder than that with him, but you
Speaker 1: do see, like I get why some people would be
Speaker 1: like into this, right, Uh, we have to go to
Speaker 1: ads in a sect. But as a spoiler, Fleetwood Mac
Speaker 1: is about to come into the picture briefly race for
Speaker 1: that we're back. So at this point, his mom is dead.
Speaker 1: It's like sixty nine or so sixty eight sixty nine
Speaker 1: is dead, and he's thrilled, he is and he is
Speaker 1: he is off the chain, Dad saying on her grave, right,
Speaker 1: this is she had been like the last thing tethering
Speaker 1: him to some kind.
Speaker 4: Of reality finally free.
Speaker 1: So he's got kind of by late sixty eight, maybe
Speaker 1: a few dozen, maybe one hundred or so followers at
Speaker 1: this point, and they've started living together. They're splitting their
Speaker 1: lives between. They've got a five story building in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles and a small ranch in West Texas. He's been
Speaker 1: some of this is because he's been gathering money from
Speaker 1: his followers. I'm sure he inherits something from his mom
Speaker 1: that helps to real estates a lot cheaper. Back then,
Speaker 1: a journalist who'd started following them in the early days,
Speaker 1: when they'd crisscrossed the country raising money, had reported in
Speaker 1: an article on them he had like cited a passage
Speaker 1: from the Bible, Matthew five nine, Blessed are the peacemakers,
Speaker 1: for they shall be called the children of God. So
Speaker 1: this journalist, when he sees them doing their anti war stuff,
Speaker 1: had cited this passage from the Bible, and that really
Speaker 1: sticks in Berg's head, and he likes it a lot,
Speaker 1: and he starts to call the transition from calling themselves
Speaker 1: teens for Christ to he starts calling his group, which
Speaker 1: is now a cult, the children of God. Right, that's
Speaker 1: where the name comes from. So as a note, reporters
Speaker 1: don't suggest stuff like that when you're covering groups like this,
Speaker 1: it could go badly for everybody. So it's still at
Speaker 1: this point they're living together. He's directing a lot of
Speaker 1: control for his members' lives, but it's maybe not totally
Speaker 1: clear to people outside that what's happened. The teens for
Speaker 1: Christ has become a full on cult, right, And.
Speaker 2: How many people are we talking.
Speaker 1: We're talking between sixty and sixty nine, between like one
Speaker 1: hundred and a couple one hundred people over the course
Speaker 1: of that year, right, It's gonna get much larger, But
Speaker 1: this is just the start, right, And so it's small
Speaker 1: enough that he's kind of able to keep everyone together.
Speaker 1: They're moving between between La and West Texas, you know,
Speaker 1: depending on the time of year. Probably some people are
Speaker 1: permanently one place, some people are in the other. But
Speaker 1: he's able to maintain a lot of direct personal control
Speaker 1: right over the children of God. And while they're clad
Speaker 1: in the aesthetics of hippietom, they're like dressing and looking
Speaker 1: like hippies. He hasn't yet had the courage to tell
Speaker 1: everyone to break free of the conservative sexual moras of
Speaker 1: the system of churches that he'd been raised in. Up
Speaker 1: to the start of the seventies, within the Children of God,
Speaker 1: there was no dating or premarital sex allowed, right, And
Speaker 1: when new members joined, because Berg was like, well, you
Speaker 1: just came out of the hippie movement, I can't trust
Speaker 1: entirely that you're ready for our rules. He would assign
Speaker 1: them a buddy who was to watch them at all times,
Speaker 1: even follow them into the bathroom to make sure they're
Speaker 1: not backsliding into their heathen ways. So there's already a
Speaker 1: lot of control and they are at the start very
Speaker 1: conservative in terms of like sexual stuff.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Can I ask you a question about the guy, like,
Speaker 3: do we have a sense of what it's like to
Speaker 3: just be in the same room with this guy?
Speaker 2: Is he funny?
Speaker 3: Is he like is Does he kind of have a
Speaker 3: weird a warmth to him?
Speaker 2: Is he chatty accessible?
Speaker 3: Or is he kind of like a stern you know,
Speaker 3: like patrician type. Do we have a sense of of
Speaker 3: his energy?
Speaker 1: And yes, I'll read some quotes in a bit, but
Speaker 1: to briefly answer your question, he is mercurial in a
Speaker 1: way that the lot of these guys are. So he
Speaker 1: can go from being your best friend and very charming
Speaker 1: to screaming at you and punishing you in the space
Speaker 1: of a second, right, which you get. And that's there's
Speaker 1: a degree to which the kind of psychological whiplash of
Speaker 1: that kind of person is almost addictive to some people.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It's the same kind of you get these dynamics and
Speaker 1: like abusive romantic relationships too, right, where once they flip
Speaker 1: to the bad side, you really want to get him
Speaker 1: back to the good side, and that's part of what
Speaker 1: keeps people, you know, coming back, and Berg is a
Speaker 1: lot like that. But when he's good, it is very charismatic,
Speaker 1: and he's able to make you feel like not only
Speaker 1: do your matter, but you're helping to save the world.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, as I said, he's still holding his cult
Speaker 1: to these kind of strict sexual norms, but his heart's
Speaker 1: not in this. After his mom dies, right, he doesn't
Speaker 1: really believe this. It's kind of running on impulse for
Speaker 1: a little while. And he's also he's having trouble like
Speaker 1: keeping himself to the same standards that he's holding his
Speaker 1: people to. Rights, He's never been good at this. One
Speaker 1: of his early recruits, Sam Ajemian, claims that Berg acted
Speaker 1: as a dictator in this period, making every choice for
Speaker 1: the children of God, saying quote, Berg convinced himself and
Speaker 1: us that he was the greatest man who ever lived,
Speaker 1: second to Jesus. Now this gives you a lot of leeway.
Speaker 1: Like Berg starts drinking in this period, and he would
Speaker 1: often address his congregation while hammered. He is like a
Speaker 1: full on alcoholic in this point. And he also he's
Speaker 1: able to exercise a lot of control over daily life
Speaker 1: right like he has choor lists for everybody. Everybody's day
Speaker 1: is like scripted out to the minute by Berg. So
Speaker 1: is he's holding them in a lot of control. And
Speaker 1: he starts to covet control over the bodies of his followers,
Speaker 1: particularly a young woman in her mid twenties who had
Speaker 1: joined his church in nineteen sixty nine. Berg breaks like
Speaker 1: he's still married to Mother Eve at this point. But
Speaker 1: this is kind of when the damn breaks and he's
Speaker 1: no longer able to abide by these things. He doesn't
Speaker 1: believe anymore, and he starts sleeping with this new member
Speaker 1: of his cult three months after she joins. Now this
Speaker 1: is an issue both because he's preaching against such things
Speaker 1: and because his wife is helping him run the church
Speaker 1: and she's not gonna be happy about this, and he
Speaker 1: decides the way to get around this is to change
Speaker 1: the gospel. Right. So he comes out and says, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I just did some intensive research into the Bible, and
Speaker 1: I found out some stuff. You're not gonna believe it.
Speaker 1: God is fine with polygamy. Right. So he sends out
Speaker 1: the first of what are called his mo letters, right
Speaker 1: because his followers have shortened Moses to Moe, and he
Speaker 1: announces that he's replacing the old church with the new church,
Speaker 1: and the old wine with the new wine. And the
Speaker 1: wine in this is like the old wine is his
Speaker 1: wife and the new wine is this nineteen year old
Speaker 1: girl that he has started sleeping with. Right, And he
Speaker 1: tells them that it's God's orders he does this, right,
Speaker 1: He writes, if you'll even take a look at Bible history,
Speaker 1: you'll make the shocking discovery that most of God's greats
Speaker 1: had oodles of wives, women's mistresses, harlots and what have you,
Speaker 1: which is like not wrong, like not incorrect, like that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of like mistresses and stuff from like
Speaker 1: different you know, kings and whatnot. In the Bible combines concubines, right,
Speaker 1: and you know, you could even find some like early
Speaker 1: Catholic figures who are like, actually, you know, maybe there's
Speaker 1: not a problem. Maybe the church doesn't have a problem
Speaker 1: with sex work. There's some actually interesting stuff from like
Speaker 1: kind of like the middle of the last century on that.
Speaker 1: And Berg is embracing this for a very selfish reason, right,
Speaker 1: because he wants to have a bunch of different wives.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of the early seventies, is when
Speaker 1: he starts putting the stuff out, when he starts saying like, actually,
Speaker 1: it's cool for me to marry whoever I want. And
Speaker 1: by this point kind of seventy one or so, there's
Speaker 1: a couple one hundred members of the cult, and they've
Speaker 1: got communal houses and farms and a bunch of different states.
Speaker 1: And Berg is traveling around these different properties. He's not
Speaker 1: just sleeping with this nineteen year old member who joined.
Speaker 1: He starts going to different every time he spends a
Speaker 1: couple of days at a new church house, he'll pick
Speaker 1: up a woman or two there and he'll start sleeping
Speaker 1: with them.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: One of the things that starts to happen, and he's
Speaker 1: not yet saying, hey, we can all do free love stuff.
Speaker 1: But once he leaves after doing this a different location,
Speaker 1: the house leader will be like, well, maybe it's fine
Speaker 1: if I start sleeping with people, and right, so the
Speaker 1: kind of free love stuff is almost people start mirroring
Speaker 1: him before he makes that official policy where they're like, well,
Speaker 1: he's he's sleeping around with everybody. Maybe it's fine if
Speaker 1: we all do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course. Yeah. So question about the letters.
Speaker 3: Is he in these letters is he citing like sort
Speaker 3: of a divine message that he heard directly from God,
Speaker 3: or is he citing just sort of like his hot
Speaker 3: take on biblical passages or just sort of like some
Speaker 3: new philosophy out of whole cloth, Like what's the nature
Speaker 3: of these Moe letters.
Speaker 1: It's a little of both. So he's he's he is
Speaker 1: citing passages from the Bible to justify things that he's doing.
Speaker 1: But he's also he's a prophet, right, he has a
Speaker 1: direct line to God. So there's stuff he'll cite a
Speaker 1: passage that, like a lot of things in the Bible,
Speaker 1: you could interpret that a bunch of different ways, and
Speaker 1: he'll say, but God told me this is what it means, right,
Speaker 1: So this is the rule now?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Okay, Yeah, so he is claiming that he has a
Speaker 3: divine voice from God.
Speaker 1: Yes, how old is he at this point, He's in
Speaker 1: his fifties. He's claiming he's going to help usher in
Speaker 1: the apocalypse, right, that like when the end of Days comes,
Speaker 1: he's going to be a key part of that, and
Speaker 1: that this church is going to be a key part
Speaker 1: of like Jesus coming back and find anti Christ. Right.
Speaker 4: Did this picture I'm sharing be an accurate representation of
Speaker 4: what he's looking like at the time.
Speaker 1: That's what he looks like at the tide well, right, for.
Speaker 4: The audio only audience, he's got a scraggly white beard.
Speaker 1: Can't see the Adams Apple though.
Speaker 4: Fancy the Adams Apple curly hair. Looks like he's wearing
Speaker 4: some kind of a robe.
Speaker 1: He's almost got like a Mennonite beard right where it's
Speaker 1: like shaved on the sides.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, and it was kind of a Monkish like hairline
Speaker 3: that it's like his hairline has receded to the top
Speaker 3: of his head. But he has sort of like a
Speaker 3: silver silver halo almost of hair and a nice, a
Speaker 3: nice silver beard, I will say, an incredibly warm and
Speaker 3: gentle smile in this photo at least.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you could see how people it'd seemed like, well,
Speaker 1: this must be a good man, right. Yeah. So this
Speaker 1: kind of the fact that he is sleeping around and
Speaker 1: increasingly so are the different sort of like local cult chapters,
Speaker 1: proves to be a valuable recruiting tool, right. It kind
Speaker 1: of differentiates them from a lot of these other groups
Speaker 1: pulling in shrapnel from the hippie movement. It makes it
Speaker 1: more accessible to these countercultural people. And he realizes this
Speaker 1: and he starts adopting new counter culture shibbaleths to kind
Speaker 1: of extend this practice and keep pulling in this kind
Speaker 1: of this group of people. I'm going to quote from
Speaker 1: doctor Stephen Ken's article again. After the group departed from
Speaker 1: California and traveled across the continent, ending up at Camp
Speaker 1: Laurentide and Quebec, Burke increasingly justified forms of nudity among
Speaker 1: his followers in the Texas Soul Clinic camp from February
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy to September nineteen seventy one, Berg required women
Speaker 1: to go brawlless, undoubtedly borrowing the idea from a trend
Speaker 1: within the women's movement. His December twenty seventh, nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: poem Mountain made note the sexualllusion gives no indication that
Speaker 1: Berg's brawless policy was designed as a political statement against
Speaker 1: the baldy politic, as was the Woman's movement action. And
Speaker 1: this is really important because this is the key to
Speaker 1: understanding Berg. He's talking about burning your bra. He's telling
Speaker 1: us followers they should stop wearing bras. But the actual,
Speaker 1: like the secular version of this is really about liberation.
Speaker 1: You can't tell us what to do with our bodies
Speaker 1: or what to wear. Berg is telling his followers. It
Speaker 1: is an order burn your bra, right, it is an
Speaker 1: order don't wear a bra. And when he's traveling around
Speaker 1: to different communal homes and he sees a female follower,
Speaker 1: he will grab her chest forcably to make sure she's
Speaker 1: not wearing one. So you see there's this language. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's the opposite, right, It's all about control. It's
Speaker 1: so evil, but it's so interesting that he has figured out, like,
Speaker 1: I can use this language of freedom in order to
Speaker 1: take control away from my followers for myself. No, yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: And I think we're fully in cult territory here. Uh,
Speaker 1: not hard to not hard to justify at that point.
Speaker 1: And this is like he's these are like orders, right,
Speaker 1: like the fact that you're not you know, you have
Speaker 1: to dress this way, you can't do this, like I'm
Speaker 1: going to touch you at whatever point, like these are
Speaker 1: like these are his orders. And not only that, but
Speaker 1: his followers have to read this like the erotic poetry
Speaker 1: he's putting out about stuff like this. And I just
Speaker 1: cited the poem Mountain made, which I am not going
Speaker 1: to read entirely for you, but I will quote two
Speaker 1: like or a single stanza to give you an idea
Speaker 1: of the of.
Speaker 2: The moment and how long is the whole thing?
Speaker 1: I'm saving that for the end. Don't worry, there's a
Speaker 1: reveal coming, okay, But here's a single stands it to
Speaker 1: give you an idea. And this is like a less
Speaker 1: explicit stanza. Let those mountains be more visible and they're
Speaker 1: clothing more divisible, right, And again this is like it
Speaker 1: gets it's a lot worse.
Speaker 3: What's cool is that visible rhinds with divisible visible bad poem?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you'd think a prophet would do better than that. Now,
Speaker 1: I picked those lines because they're in the least explicit
Speaker 1: portion of the poem, but I do need to read
Speaker 1: this note from doctor Berg's piece, because Berg quotes ten
Speaker 1: lines from the poem and then writes the poem continues
Speaker 1: in this vein for a total of three hundred and
Speaker 1: one lines. My god.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: All right, well oh man, so ed, that's most of
Speaker 1: what we got for part one. As I as I
Speaker 1: told you, Fleetwood Mac comes into One member of Fleetwood
Speaker 1: Mac comes into the story. Right, Uh, that's gonna be
Speaker 1: kind of like our fun, our fun little thing. In
Speaker 1: part two, there's a couple of like weird celebrity connections here.
Speaker 1: One guy drops out of Fleetwood Mac to join this church.
Speaker 1: There's also a couple of celebrities who are born into
Speaker 1: it but don't don't seem to have Like Joaquin Phoenix
Speaker 1: is born into it but leaves when he's three. So
Speaker 1: you know, there's not a lot to actually say about that,
Speaker 1: but it's something you'll come across in all the articles
Speaker 1: on it. Like I tend to not like try to
Speaker 1: go into detail or speculate about stuff like that, just because,
Speaker 1: like you know, people have a right not to. But
Speaker 1: it's if you run into articles about this, it's going
Speaker 1: to be in every single one of them, right because
Speaker 1: it's just like a lead line for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: which will show you that, like, this is going to
Speaker 1: be for a while, like a very kind of almost
Speaker 1: hip countercultural movement, right Like. That's what he's sort of
Speaker 1: started to build here and in the early seventies, even
Speaker 1: while he's being very abusive, there's almost this degree to
Speaker 1: which the Children of God are cool, right like, And
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of a unique thing for a cult
Speaker 1: like this to be, not totally unique, but for it
Speaker 1: to be to have so much appeal to people who
Speaker 1: are like prominent, right Like. That's kind of an interesting
Speaker 1: aspect of this that we'll be getting into a lot
Speaker 1: more in Part two. But ed Part one is done.
Speaker 1: You want to plug your show at the end here
Speaker 1: before we roll out for the day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's talk a little more about Snaffo, the fabulous
Speaker 3: podcast that I do that I'm insanely proud of, and
Speaker 3: Season you Should Be Season three.
Speaker 2: Is out now.
Speaker 3: I'm in production on season four, and I'm extremely excited
Speaker 3: about season four because we're breaking the format. We're doing
Speaker 3: something new and different and very exciting, which I'll get
Speaker 3: into more at another time. But Season three is cranking along.
Speaker 3: It's fully out you can binge it. Eight episodes and
Speaker 3: then of course my book, get my book also snafo.
Speaker 1: Yeah s n afu. All right, ed, well, thank you
Speaker 1: so much again for being on the show. We will
Speaker 1: be back in just a few minutes, but to you
Speaker 1: the listener, we'll be back on Thursday.
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