The Children of God: The Cult That Weaponized Sex

In 1968, a former Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor named David Berg began ministering to hippies, runaways, and dropouts in Huntington Beach, California, building a commune that would grow into one of the most widespread and most sexually abusive cult movements in American history. The Children of God — later rebranded as The Family International — operated at its peak in over a hundred countries, claimed tens of thousands of members, and implemented a theology of sexual liberation so extreme that it sanctioned the prostitution of its adult members for recruitment purposes and the sexual abuse of its children as a matter of doctrinal practice.^1^

The group’s history is difficult to reckon with because of its scope. This wasn’t a compound with thirty people. It was a global operation with communities on six continents, and the number of people who passed through its membership over five decades — as children born into the group, as young adults recruited during periods of vulnerability, as seekers who joined and later left — numbers in the tens of thousands. The scale of the sexual abuse that occurred within the organization, particularly the abuse of children, is proportionally vast and still being reckoned with by survivors who are now middle-aged adults processing childhoods that were, by any clinical or legal standard, catastrophic.^2^

How David Berg Turned Evangelism Into Sexual Exploitation

David Brandt Berg was born in 1919 in Oakland, California, into a family of itinerant evangelists. His mother was a radio preacher. His childhood was shaped by the tent-revival circuit and by what he later described — and what former members have corroborated through secondary accounts — as sexual abuse within his own family. He was ordained in the Christian and Missionary Alliance but left the denomination under unclear circumstances and spent years drifting through various evangelical roles before landing in Huntington Beach at precisely the moment when the counterculture was producing a population of young people who were spiritually hungry, chemically altered, and structurally disconnected from the families and institutions that might have protected them.^1^

Berg’s early theology was conventionally apocalyptic — he preached the imminent return of Christ, the necessity of communal living, and the rejection of mainstream society. The sexual component emerged gradually, first as a loosening of conventional sexual morality within the communes (Berg taught that love, including sexual love, should be shared freely among members) and then as a systematic theological framework in which sex became the primary mechanism of recruitment, retention, and control.^3^

He issued his teachings through letters — called “Mo Letters” — that were distributed to all communities worldwide and that constituted the group’s de facto scripture. The letters covered everything from daily operations to eschatology, but the ones that defined the movement’s character were the ones that addressed sex. Berg taught that God’s love was expressed through sexual love, that conventional sexual morality was a tool of the oppressive system they had rejected, and that the sharing of bodies was the highest expression of spiritual commitment.^1^

The doctrine he called “Flirty Fishing” — introduced in the mid-1970s — directed female members to use sexual contact as a recruitment tool. Women were sent to bars, hotels, and public spaces to attract potential converts through sex, a practice that Berg framed as evangelism and that constituted, in practical terms, religiously mandated prostitution. The practice was widespread, documented in internal publications, and continued for approximately a decade before being officially discontinued in 1987, ostensibly due to concerns about HIV/AIDS.^2^

The Children Were the Defining Atrocity

The abuse of children within the Children of God is the organization’s defining atrocity and the dimension of its history that survivors have been most vocal about in the decades since many left or escaped.

Berg’s theology made no clear distinction between adult and childhood sexuality. His Mo Letters included illustrations depicting sexual contact between adults and children, and his writings explicitly endorsed what he called “loving” physical contact between adults and minors — a framework that functioned as institutional authorization for child sexual abuse on a global scale. Children born into the group — and there were thousands of them, in communities across Europe, South America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere — grew up in an environment where sexual contact with adults was normalized, where boundaries were defined by Berg’s theology rather than by law or developmental psychology, and where the concept of consent as it applies to children was doctrinally nonexistent.^1^

The abuse was not incidental or the work of individual bad actors exploiting an otherwise functional system. It was structural — built into the organization’s theology, disseminated through its leadership publications, and practiced across its global network with a consistency that reflects institutional policy rather than individual deviation. Survivors who came forward in the 1990s and after described childhoods defined by sexual abuse beginning in early childhood, physical punishment, educational neglect, and the total isolation from mainstream society that made reporting impossible and escape unimaginable.^3^

Ricky Rodriguez — the son of Berg’s partner Karen Zerby, who was groomed from infancy as Berg’s successor and who was sexually abused from childhood — killed a former member of the group’s inner circle in 2005 and then killed himself, leaving behind a video in which he described his upbringing and his desire for accountability. His death brought renewed media attention to the organization’s history and to the ongoing trauma experienced by second-generation survivors who had spent their childhoods inside the group and their adulthoods trying to recover from it.^2^

Why the Global Structure Made Prosecution Nearly Impossible

The Children of God’s international scope made it exceptionally difficult to investigate and prosecute. By the 1980s, the organization had communities in dozens of countries, many of them nations with weak child protection laws and limited institutional capacity to investigate organizations operating under the cover of religious mission work. When law enforcement in one country conducted raids — as happened in Argentina, France, and Australia during the 1990s and 2000s — the organization would move members and children to other jurisdictions, exploiting the same geographic fragmentation that enabled serial killers operating across state lines.^1^

Berg died in 1994, and leadership passed to Karen Zerby (known within the group as “Mama Maria”) and her partner Steve Kelly. Under their leadership, the organization rebranded as The Family International and underwent a series of public reforms — officially repudiating Flirty Fishing, acknowledging that some members had engaged in “inappropriate behavior” with children, and restructuring its governance. Survivors and watchdog organizations have described these reforms as cosmetic — sufficient to deflect legal and media scrutiny without addressing the fundamental dynamics of control that characterized the organization.^3^

The Family International officially dissolved its formal communal structure in 2010, though elements of the organization continue to operate in various forms. The survivors’ community — organized through online networks and support groups — continues to advocate for accountability and for recognition of the scope of the abuse that occurred within the organization over five decades.^2^

Why the Scale of the Children of God Matters

The Children of God is not the most famous American cult. It doesn’t occupy the cultural space that Jonestown, Manson, or Waco occupy, in part because there was no single catastrophic event — no mass death, no siege, no murder spree — that crystallized the organization’s abuses into a media-friendly narrative. The harm was distributed across decades, continents, and thousands of individual lives, and that distribution made it both more devastating in aggregate and less visible in any single instance.^1^

The case’s significance lies in what it demonstrates about the scalability of cult abuse. The mechanisms David Berg employed — theological justification for sexual exploitation, information isolation, redefinition of language, shame-based compliance, geographic dispersion to avoid accountability — are the same mechanisms employed by every cult leader discussed in this series. But Berg applied them at a scale that no American cult before or since has matched, and the result was a global operation that produced thousands of survivors whose childhoods were defined by institutionalized sexual abuse.^2^

The survivors are still here. Many of them are in their forties and fifties now, raising their own children and navigating the long aftermath of a childhood that no institution prevented and no legal system has adequately addressed. Their names don’t appear in this article because their stories are their own to tell, and many of them are still telling them — in memoirs, in documentaries, in the quiet work of therapy and recovery that doesn’t generate headlines but constitutes the real aftermath of what David Berg built and what the world failed to stop.

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Sources:

1. Williams, Miriam. Heaven’s Harlots: My Fifteen Years as a Sacred Prostitute in the Children of God Cult. Eagle Brook, 1998.
2. Jones, Celeste and Jones, Kristina and Buhring, Juliana. Not Without My Sister: The True Story of Three Girls Violated and Betrayed. HarperElement, 2007.
3. Kent, Stephen A. “Lustful Prophet: A Psychosexual Historical Study of the Children of God’s Leader, David Berg.” Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2014.
4. Rolling Stone. “Children of God” investigation, 2005.
5. Siskind, Amy. The Family International: A Comprehensive Guide. ICSA, 2003.