Behind the Bastards - Part One: David Berg and the Children of God (ft. Ed Helms)

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

Robert sits down with Ed Helms to discuss one of our worst monsters: David Berg, founder of the Children of God cult.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Call zone media. Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards, the podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And folks, this week, you know, I've said this a couple of times, but I always mean it. This is one of the worst guys we're ever gonna talk about. And in order to really get behind this bastard in a way that makes him palatable,

we've got to bring on one of the best guests we've ever had. A man who needs no introduction, perhaps the Ed-est of all Helms, Ed Helms. Welcome back to the show, Ed. Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here. Yeah. I agree.

I'm extremely Ed-ish, Eddie. I'm Ed, I'm the, I don't know if I'm the Ed-ist, but. You're definitely the Helms-ist of Eds, I think we can agree with that. I'm the Helms-iest, that's for sure. And you're the host of Snafu. Right, yeah, great podcast. Entering season three, it's a podcast

about some of the most biggest screw-ups, or fuck-ups, I guess, just based on the literal translation of the title in the history of the US government. Last season, you talked about the massive sweeping unprecedented civilian led infiltration and expose of FBI surveillance files. And this season you're talking about how the US government tried to poison a shit load of people during prohibition.

Yeah, it's a dodgy, it's a dodgy world out there, folks, and we are living in it. But no, thank you for that plug. I'm extremely proud of Snafu. It's a labor of love. It's an unbelievable amount of work. But we have an incredible team between Gilded Audio and Film Nation and myself. And yeah, we just do a ton of research. It's legit. It's like legit research. It's really, really good. It's history.

It's real history. And then the book, of course, I have a book that just came out. I don't even have one to show you. Oh my gosh. I'm so unprepared. On the YouTube, we'll put the graphic up for folks. We got you. It's a fantastic book.

New York Times bestseller. Hell yeah. Also called Snafu, the definitive guide to history's greatest screw ups. Lots of chapters. Each chapter is a different screw up. Unlike the podcast where the entire season is one screw up. You get a whole caboodle in the book. Caboodle with snafus.

Well, we're talking about a great screw up today, although it's not a screw up of just the US government. It's more, like every time a cult leader gets way too big for their britches, it's kind of like a collective human screw up, like, oh man, we really let that guy get too far. We shouldn't have let that happen, right? You're looking at like Jim Jones and like, oh shit, man, we really, we screwed up.

How did that happen? Today we're talking about a guy, you may not recognize him by name, but I think a lot of people recognize the cult. The dude was named David Berg and his cult was called the Children of God or the Family International. This is an iHeart Podcast. In 2012, 16 year old Brian Herrera was gunned down in broad daylight on his way to do homework.

No suspects, no witnesses, no justice. I would ask my husband, do you want me to stop? He was like, no, keep fighting. After nearly a decade, a breakthrough changed everything. This is Cold Case Files Miami, stories of families who never stopped fighting. Listen to Cold Case Files Miami on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Just like great shoes, great books take you places through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay, and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club,

the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcast, where we dive into the stories that shape us, on the page and off. Each week, I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile. Listen to Bookmarked by Rhys's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way?

Yes, it did, but he was a charming man. It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all. Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Marsha P. Johnson is the trans icon of the queer movement, and it's time to listen to her. I want to be one of the world's biggest drag queens.

Today you can buy t-shirts with her face on them. But her death in 1992 was never solved. I'm dying, dying, dying. Hear how Marsha's life and legacy reshaped our world. Just get your heart ready. Listen to Afterlives on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back.

Have you ever heard of these guys, Ed? Just the most, the tiniest bit. Like I have the broadest sense of this group. I might recall more as you go. Yeah. These guys are, if you kind of want to cut cult leaders into like three different groups, you've got kind of on the lightest and the guys who like yeah there's some psychological abuse they're taking money from people.

But they're not committing any like serious violent crimes right there just kind of in it for the cash and in the middle you've got the guys where they're like physically and mentally abusing people but they're not like killing anyone. like killing anyone. David Berg is on kind of the far end of the spectrum where like he is, he is just some of the worst stuff I've heard of a cult leader do. He's about as extreme as it gets. And he's interesting because he's also, he's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical, like Christianity, like Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century is a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it here. Like, nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't... Right.

But that's the beauty of cults. Like, they just kind of make it up. Yeah, yeah, they can make it up as they go along, and they're very rooted in their time, right? This cult couldn't have gotten started any other year, but like 1968, which is in fact when it gets started. David Brandt Berg was born on February 18th, 1919, kind of at the height of the influenza pandemic. His parents were Virginia Berg and Helmer Berg. They were both evangelical Christian preachers participating in what was called the revival movement, right? So at this time, you've got a lot of these like

traveling itinerant preachers moving around throughout the US movement, right? So at this time, you've got a lot of these like traveling itinerant preachers moving around throughout the US mostly, but not entirely in like the South and Southeast. And so you've got this network of churches, but also these traveling preachers who make their money getting crowds and hyping them up. And there's a lot of, sometimes they're doing like fake psychic surgery.

Sometimes they're doing like snake handling where they'll like milk a snake of its venom and then pretending to get bit beforehand to be like, look, God protected me, right? Like it's a show act in addition to being preaching, right? And you know, that's the big movement at the time. And that's how David's parents kind of make their living. David would later write that his father, Hjalmar,

who was a Swedish immigrant to the US, had been converted by his maternal grandfather. And before finding Jesus, Hjalmar, who was a Swedish immigrant to the U.S., had been converted by his maternal grandfather. And before finding Jesus, Hjalmar was a, quote, cigar smoking, beer drinking, wild dancing, party going, good looking and loose living young man of the world. I would think anyone named Hjalmar fits that description. Yeah, seems like a loose living man. Hjalmar?

Well, no, what origin is that name? Swedish, yeah, he's very Swedish. Yeah. Hjölmur, I like it. And it's, we don't know if that's actually true. Like it's kind of a thing in this world of evangelical preachers to pretend that, you know, before you got saved, you were a real bad guy.

And the fact that he can't think of anything but like, well, I drank beer and danced, right? It's like, I don't know, man, I've known worse guys. I don't know. It depends on how much beer and what kind of dancing, I suppose. That is a good point. Dancing can get dirty. Yes, yes.

We know that. Kevin Bacon, let us all know. Patrick Swayze. Patrick Swayze, Jesus Christ. Come on. I know, that's shameful. So one of the weird little facts about his parents is that before she met Helmer,

Virginia, his mom, was engaged to be married to Bruce Bogart, who I think was Humphrey Bogart's cousin, which is just a weird fact. Helmer was hired entertainment at the wedding and she just kind of leaves her fiance to be with him. So, you know, there's a story there that's interesting, but we don't have it. Whatever the truth, from the time David knew his father,

he was a zealous minister. Berg would later write that this was almost too much for his mother because this is not the guy that she'd married. I don't know if this is true either. David describes his mother as very, very strict and religious, and she's going to be a super famous preacher later. He just kind of doesn't like his mom,

so he takes a lot of pot shots at her in the biography that he wrote about himself. I think that's probably more what's happening here. We call that an autobiography. Yeah. Sorry, yes. Helmer and Virginia go to religious universities. His mom goes to Texas Christian University,

gets a degree there. They have their first son, David's older brother in 1911, his older sister in 1915, and David's the youngest of the family in 1919. Virginia would later claim that after having her daughter, she had been completely disabled for five years and then miraculously healed. And if this is the case,

then she had David before she was healed. And scholars who've looked into the family are like, there's no evidence that she was ever really sick. This is again, just kind of like part of the myth-making. And I bring this up because as David grows into the family, he's going to be used to the idea that both his parents are like these traveling freelance preachers and that they just make up stuff about the family, right?

And about their history that like as their kid, he knows a lot of this isn't true. And he just come, you just lie about your backstory because it sells better. Yeah, it's a show. Right, right, exactly. Kind of like Bob Dylan. But like Bob, right, like Bob Dylan or a pro wrestler.

Like a lot of entertainers, truly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no one was ever born named Nicholas Cage. It's simply too cool of a name, right? Like his mother, David's gonna go on to later have claimed that he suffered from a variety of untreatable illnesses that were cured via prayer. His bio on the website established by the cult he later founds says that he was born with influenza

and also an enlarged heart. Neither of these is super unlikely, but this kind of weaves into the bio-hemex that he was spared from all this by his prayers, right? And then he was like healed so that he could do his work. His autobiography on his church's website also goes into a whole host of what I think are increasingly unlikely ailments for him to have suffered. At three years of age, his foot was run over by an automobile, and the doctor said he would never walk again.

But again, his parents believed in God and prayed, and his foot was miraculously healed, although the doctor said that many of the bones were crushed. When he was seven years old, a water heater exploded in his face, and the doctor said he would be permanently blinded. But this time, God used an old friend, a real saint, who prayed for his eyes, and they were instantly healed. I don't know. Maybe I don't think a water heater exploded in his face. Yeah. Maybe. I mean, that would do a lot more than blind you, it seems like. Right. And he's like, we have pictures of his face.

Because those are made of iron. Those things are like an exploding water heater. It's like an IED going off, yeah. Yeah, fully, like there's a lot of shrapnel for real. Yeah, yeah, and his face is like fine. There's not really much evidence of this. What we can confirm is that he grows up, like I said, in this family that, it's almost like a wrestling family, right?

Where it's like, yeah, we've got like the kayfabe that we have to keep about our background, you know? And so he's going to be very good about this his entire life. Is he going on these church revivals, like from the get-go? He's just, they're like living on the road? Sometimes. He is, for a part of his early life,

I think up until he's like 10 or 11 or so, he mostly stays at home and one of his parents will be traveling at any given time, occasionally both. Like he will describe himself later as very lonesome as a little kid Because he both he doesn't have a lot of friends and he barely sees his mom right because they're very busy and traveling constantly Right. I would wager that describes a lot of cult leaders, right? Yeah lonely kids too much time thinking Sorry. Sorry remind me where this is his childhood It's mostly in I think at this point. They're like in like Mississippi or something like that But they're like moving around his entire childhood. They wind up in Florida and then California are kind of the two places

He's primarily raised a little in his early life They're moving so much Sometimes like every couple of months that it's unclear to me because like his early life, they're moving so much, sometimes like every couple of months that it's unclear to me, because like his dad or his mom will get a job like pinch hitting at a church for four months or something, right, so that the normal pastor can go out on the road or whatever.

So he's raised a lot of the time by this like combination of maids, governesses and like uncles and aunts occasionally and he doesn't get a lot of attention. And this is kind of maids, governesses, and like uncles and aunts occasionally, and he doesn't get a lot of attention. And this is kind of highlighted by the fact that the attention he does get as a young boy and probably the earliest direct adult attention that he strongly remembers is sexual abuse, which is also going to like leave a mark.

This starts when he's three and it's, you know, it's the maid of his house who like he claims is, is kind of molesting him to help him get to sleep. So he'll talk about this positively as an adult. And that's kind of relevant because he's going to come to believe that this kind of stuff is positive for members of his cult to do, right?

That's so interesting. I read that in Victorian England, this was commonplace that governesses would give little boys, uh, hand jobs essentially at bedtime. Yes. The theory being that they would help them fall asleep. Yes. And that's exactly what his maid says that she's doing. Um, and his mom does not like, his mom finds out and assaults the maid, like is hitting her and fires her,

which I think we could all agree, pretty normal response from a parent. But he, and as you said, like this is not at the time, like it's a kind of thing that happens a lot more often than you would have thought. And he as a kid thinks it's unjust and fair. Cause he's like, I don't get why my mom was so mean to the maid, right?

Like, and yeah. And this is going to like kind of compound over the years. He's going to keep having experiences like this and convince himself that sort of his reaction to them is the normal and healthy one. And that's going to lead to him pushing this on a lot of other kids. Right? So complex. It's so complex. It's really complicated. The maternal figure battling with his caretaker, where's his loyalty in all of that and the abuse is justified in some way or attempt.

He tries to, sure. And the maid. It's like his maid. His nanny or whatever. Wow, that's wild. It's wild. And you have to assume this nanny is more of a mother figure than his mom at age three

because she's just not there, right? Like it's, yeah. And after this, his mother is going to be increasingly, David experiments a lot with himself and his mom will punish him violently whenever she catches him, right? Which kind of compounds his feelings of anger towards his mom.

This comes to a head when he's six years old and she catches him yet again, like experimenting. And quote, she brought out a wash basin, a little bowl and a knife and told me she was going to cut it off, right? She threatens to like circumcise him basically. When you say experimenting, he's just like masturbating? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like his mom is basically threatens to like cut him as a result, which is bad parenting, right? So this kid is stacking a lot of trauma. We're at age seven at this point, right? Which is when he has a confused sexual encounter with a cousin of the same age, right? Who's also seven.

So these are two kids playing around. This is not like an abuse scenario, right? They're both the same age, but his uncle catches them and like watches and he's horrified because he realizes that his uncle is like kind of voyeuristically doing this and his uncle never tells his mom, he never tells his mom. So what we've got by this point is this very confused kid

who's had a lot of sexual trauma before age 10 and is learning from an early age that like, this is the most positive attention he's gotten in his life and it's also the thing that he's most punished and frightened of, right? Yeah, he's going to grow life. And it's also the thing that he's most punished and frightened of, right? Yeah, he's going to grow up and his main takeaway from the experience will be frustration at the fact that his parents judged him for all of this, right?

That they punished him for this kind of stuff. And so you have to kind of think of this energy within him around this as this kind of building pressure inside of him that's going to at a certain point be released with pretty catastrophic consequences for a lot of people. He also is really frustrated as a kid that his mom is usually the one punishing him. He thinks his dad should be doing that. He sees his dad as like kind of weak and being dominated by his mom.

He would later write that the times he most respected his father, when his dad, quote, picked up a board and hit me so hard on the fanny, he lifted me right off the ground. So he's like, well, at least my dad hit me sometimes, you know, and was like a real father. Um, you know, we're talking about the twenties here. So not a healthy upbringing. Yeah. The irony is, the irony is that he's right that his parents shouldn't have punished him, but it seems like he thinks they should have nurtured this toxicity, whereas they should have intervened in a healthy way.

Should have intervened, been like, this isn't your fault. Right, exactly. All of that. But this isn't okay. It's both not your fault and not okay. Yeah. And he seems to have walked away with all the wrong. All the wrong things and you know, it is hard to imagine a couple of parents in the 20s

having gotten this kind of situation right, you know? Like, yeah. Like. Not a lot of tools. They didn't have a lot of tools. Not a lot of tools. Yeah. Yeah.

So once he gets a little older, he's kind of moving into adolescence. The family starts to move with regularity. And at this point, they kind of are on the road, and he's on the road with his family pretty constantly. They go around the US. They live in like a dozen states. They spend some time in Canada.

His mom is becoming increasingly prominent. She has like a ministry, which means she's a known preacher. She's getting invitations from dozens of churches to come. And the way this works is it's honestly the evangelical preaching business works a lot like standup comedy does today, where a venue invites you or you get hooked up through an agent and you take like half of the offering.

So you give a preach, people donate money, you split it with the venue, right? That's kind of how these people are making a living. And she's like a high level standup person, right? Like if you wanna think of it that way, they're making pretty good money for a while. And in fact, they're making good enough money that when he's like, I think 12 or so,

the family settles down in Miami because Virginia is able to actually start her own church, right, where she is now operating a venue. And for a time, things are getting better for the Bergs, but then the depression hits, right? And this is just as David's entering his teen years, and Virginia's church goes out of business, right? Which is not usually a term we use for churches,

but that's what these kind of ones are, right? So interesting. Yeah. I wonder if they had tax exempt status. Oh yeah. No, these people are paying taxes. And I'm just, I'm so curious what her presentation was. What was her energy? What was her tone?

What was the message I assume was fire and brimstone or was it more- Yeah. It's both this mix of fire and brimstone. You always start with a, here's how bad I was when more? Yeah. I don't like. It's both this mix of like fire and brimstone. You always start with a like, here's how bad I was when I was younger. You know, there's a really good, there's an Oscar winning documentary from 1973 called Marjo, M-A-R-J-O-E with this dude who was a kid

when he was like five, his parents were traveling preachers like David's and they had him, like they billed him as like the youngest preacher. They like taught him rote how to do stuff, like perform weddings. And as an adult, he like came back undercover with like a film crew to like expose how this business worked. And if you want to see like how this whole like industry worked, Marjo is a really good depiction of it. He

also wound up as an actor on the A team as an adult. It's weird. So after the business goes under, the Helmer and Virginia start going on the road. The marriage is not doing well, cause money's not good. So they split up and they split the kids between them. And David stays with his mom. And his mom kind of uses him as in her words, her quote, chauffeur, secretary and singer.

I don't know if they had, he shouldn't have been driving. He's like 13, but it was the thirties. Yeah, fuck it. Why not? Not as much traffic. Yeah, not as much traffic. No one's got seat belts. So you're just vibing in there.

They wind up in California, Southern California, where David attends Monterey High School. And so this is kind of the second time in his life that he's really stable for any period of time. He would later claim to have been bullied for being a preacher's kid by the other students who quote, through his books around, tore his papers and even broke his left arm. He's a sickly kid and he claims to have figured that the only way he could

beat them back was quote, in the classroom with pen and paper and that he did this by graduating with, quote, the highest scholastic record in the 80-year history of the school. Now, there's no evidence of this. Like, we know we graduated in 1935, but I've never heard, like, the school doesn't claim that he did the best of anyone there,

so he's massaging stuff a little bit. By this point, he's seen what the life of a traveling preacher looks like. And he's also seen how hard it is to live that life. So he tries to make a living in the secular world and applies to go to the Elliott School of Business Administration. This I think is in Washington, DC, but it may have been

there may be another business school by the same name that since got out of business, but he's only there for like a couple of months before he drops out. So, and I think this is just part of, he hasn't had a normal education. He doesn't know how to do anything, but what his parents do, right? And so within a couple of months,

he drops out of school and decides to go into full-time evangelical work, like doing the same thing his parents has done, living as a traveling preacher. And it's kind of a question mark what he does in the first six years after his graduation, but this is probably it. He's probably traveling around preaching.

And what year are we talking? 35 to 41, right? Yeah. So David doesn't make any additional direct claims about what he's doing until December 7th, 1941, which I think most people know is when Pearl Harbor happens, right? And he claims to have joined the army. And he says he failed the army's physical requirements,

but they let him in anyway, and that he served as a conscientious objector because he didn't believe it would be ethical to go and kill Japanese soldiers because they hadn't had a chance to hear the gospel, right? That's his claim. And the army did admit conscientious objectors in non-combat roles in World War II, but there's no evidence that Berg was one of them or that he served in any way, shape, or form. We have some records of his background from like different evangelical organizations he was a part of that were keeping track of what he was doing in the early 40s. And there's just no evidence that he ever served at all. If he did, it was maybe for a month or two. He claims that he caught double pneumonia and got so sick that the army discharged him because they thought he was going to die. And in his account of events, obviously, he gets miraculously

saved by God and promises to spend the rest of his life preaching as a result, right? And he's instantly healed. So that's his claim. I think the a result. Right. And he's instantly healed. Um, so that's his claim. Uh, I think the likelier claim is that like, he's just making it as a preacher from the late thirties to the early forties, right? Um, doing the thing that he understands how to do traveling with one of his parents at a time and kind of making his way around the circuit. And, and he added this sort of. Military bullet point on his, on on his resume just for some added credibility

or to just kind of spin the story a little more. You got to spin the story. You can't have said, especially in the 50s, 60s, that you didn't do anything during World War II. So you got to have some explanation as to how you were patriotic. But he's also going to be a big anti-Vietnam you were patriotic, but he's also gonna be a big Anti-vietnam war guy so you wanna he wants to be able to be like but I was a conscientious objector, right?

I didn't want to fight also. So that's kind of why I think he cooks that up. There's not really evidence of it Okay, so is that is that something easily disproven by military records or or is it still kind of an open question? Because you the way you're talking about it sounds like, you sound convinced he made it up. I found a good study on him by a PhD psychotherapist who goes through his backstory and found his records with a couple of different evangelical, like the British American Ministerial Federation

and the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which are two different groups that he works with. And they have like records of his background up through the early forties that don't list any time in the military. It's possible, like I have not seen, no one's ever like filed and gotten a DD214, which is like the discharge paperwork

you get from the army for him. But also this, at this point in time, if he had just been in for a few months, like he claims, they might not have given him one, right? Cause this is kind of a chaotic period. The army didn't work then like it does now, right? So it's- I mean, without the DD124, like what do we,

we don't know anything. No, like we can't prove one way or the other. We gotta get the DD124, the paperwork. Yeah, and we just don't have it, so we don't really know what he was doing. But it's not impossible either way, but I think this just kind of fits into the other stories he tells about himself. It's really convenient. The other thing that's convenient, Ed, is the products and services that support this

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The call was horrible. I replayed over my head all the time. For years, Brian's family kept asking questions, while a culture of silence kept the case cold. Snitches get stitches. Everybody knows it. Still, they refused to give up. I would ask my husband, do you want me to just let this go? He said, no, keep fighting.

I told her I would never give up on this case. And then after a decade of waiting, a breakthrough. We received a phone call that was bittersweet, because it's a call that we've been waiting for for a very long time. I'm Enrique Santos. This is Cold Case Files Miami, a podcast about justice, persistence, and the families who never stopped fighting. Listen to Cold Case Files Miami as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just like great shoes, great books take you places through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay, and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts. Every week I sit down with your favorite book lovers, authors, celebrities, book talkers, and more to explore the stories that shape us, on the page and off.

I've been reading every Reese's Book Club pick, deep diving book talk theories, and obsessing over book to screen casts for years. And now I get to talk to the people making the magic. So if you've ever fallen in love with a fictional character or cried at the last chapter or passed a book to a friend saying, you have to read this, this podcast is for you. Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to be one of the world's biggest drag queens. You've heard the name Marsha P. Johnson, T. Johnson, trans icon, revolutionary, saint.

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And we're back. All right. So at this point in Ed's, or sorry, at this point in David's story, he's been miraculously healed from double pneumonia. The army has let him go and he's decided to get back into the business of preaching. And he spends the rest of World War II, you know, traveling around doing preaching with his parents. In 1944, he meets a young woman named Jane Miller and the two get married. They start touring,

because he brings her in and is like, now you're a preacher, right? Which is kind of what his mom had done to his dad. And the couple starts having kids in quick succession. They have Deborah in 1945, Erin a couple of years later, Jonathan a year after that, and then their fourth kid who has my favorite name of their children, Faithy in 51. Just Faith with a Y. Huh. Yeah. I haven't heard that one.

I haven't heard that name. That's one you gotta spell every time. Yeah, Faithy. Faithy, it's like, yeah. Yeah. Berg and his wife settle down in the Los Angeles, it's usually said as the Los Angeles area. They're in Huntington Beach, right?

Which is like the kind of center of the evangelical movement in Southern California at this period of time. And he starts going to California's Southern Bible College in 1948 to continue his education. In between classes, he's on the move a lot. He'll sleep in his car or a tent, you know, in order to save money so that he can keep his family going. Cause money is tight.

Uh, it's not until 1949 that he gets his first stable job preaching at a church for the Christian and missionary Alliance in Arizona. And by this point, he'd started calling his wife, Jane mother Eve. And in an early show of kind of how his charisma worked, people around them just sort of went along with it, even though I think it's kind of sacrilegious to call your wife Eve. Like, I don't know. That's just a little weird. Maybe it was kind of just like a nickname.

It's like a nickname. And it's sort of a, he's got that charisma where like, if he gives someone a nickname, everyone picks it up, right? Yeah. Like, people just kind of listen to what he says about stuff like this. Now here's what his church bio, which is, he probably writes, paints of this period of time in his life.

His congregation was a mixture of Southern whites, Indians and Mexicans who didn't like each other. And eventually the wealthy family, which controlled the church board, urged the denomination to send him elsewhere. They didn't like David because of his integration policies and his preaching that they should share more of their wealth with the poor, beginning with him and his little family." So I do love that even in that there's a little bit of griftiness that comes out, right?

It's so funny. It's so magnanimous. It's such an intrinsically wholesome thing to advocate and preach. Integration. Sure, great. Yeah. But then it has a little bit of- Give me a little bit of money. Yeah. Some of that cheddar falls on me.

What's wrong with that? What about old David, huh? Yeah. Didn't David get a cut? You're going to cut Mother Reve out of this? Come on. Now, this does not seem to be the whole, they just didn't like that I wasn't racist,

doesn't seem to be the true story. His eldest daughter, Deborah, would later tell journalists, no, he got accused of sexual misconduct. He started an affair with a married woman in his church while he was married. And when it got found out, they were like, well, you're fired. This is the thing that,

this is like the one thing you can't do, right? A lot of them do it. A lot of them do it. But yeah, he gets in trouble for this. His family would also claim that during this period of time when he was on the road, he would regularly pay sex workers while he was preaching. His children also accused him later of having slept

with all of their housekeepers. So this is a guy who's got a lot of his personal life is messy. And I think that's probably why he gets fired. Right. And maybe just the adultery was kind of the last straw. His mother, Eve, still in the picture. Oh, yeah. Yeah. OK. She's never happy with him. They do not have a great marriage, although a lot of that seems down to be. He just cheating like constantly on her.

Now he gets really angry when this missionary alliance lets him go. Berg declares for the first time that organized religion is corrupt and that the powers that be within the evangelical movement were holding him back. He starts referring to the leaders of these major churches as the system and accused them of fostering churchianity rather than Christianity, right? So they're serving their churches rather than serving the faith,

which is in a large extent for a lot of these guys, a fair criticism. It's also like, he's not any better, right? Like, yeah. Also, I do love the word churchianity. Churchianity. Churchianity. It seems like something that the,

that someone would advocate at the annual, like, Fourth of July potluck. Guys, we need more churchianity around here. We need more churchianity. Churchianity. He's got a gift for like words, right? It's also, it's very modern almost, Churchianity. Churchianity. He's got a gift for words, right? It's also, it's very modern almost, deciding to frame your enemies as the system.

People do that all the time today, right? Whether they're on the left or the right, everyone wants to be like, there's a system that I'm against, right? And you can be a rebel too. What's the great movie, is it Pacino or somebody that's like, I'm gonna the system on trial. Oh, yes, Serpico Serpico Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly Yeah, and then it's kind of reminiscent of our our last discussion about old Kurti Yarvin. Yeah. Yeah the cathedral, right? Yes. Yes, exactly

Everything you gotta have a cool name for the yeah for the for the enemy Yeah, or how Andrew Tate will call it the Matrix, right? Like it's all of these, yeah, you gotta have this big system that like, you're the lone Luke Skywalker character trying to blow up this Death Star of, in this case, churches that you used to work at until you got kicked out for adultery.

That's the... Um, so whatever the truth behind why he was fired, the experience inspired him to attempt another move into secular life. So he goes to Arizona State University in 1951. I think it's not a party school at this point, but don't quote me on that, where he claims to have studied communism

and walked away with the belief that it was a good idea, but it could only work if everyone was also Christian, right? So he starts to see the early Christian church. And when I say early, I'm talking about like before the Roman Empire was Christian, right? So when it's still kind of this underground organization as essentially the ideal communist community and modern evangelism is corrupt because it's obsessed with money. So he's starting to pull in and write, like this is the early 50s when this is happening, so the hippie movement's not coming together yet, but you can see how when it does, he's going to be drawn towards some of the things they're talking about. Sure.

Right? Yeah. That said, the same year he goes to ASU, he's just there for a couple of terms, and then he goes back to Southern California to go to Bible school again. So his mind may not have been quite as made up at this point as he'd later claim. For much of the early 50s, he's working odd jobs. He has a gig at the DA's office. He works in construction.

He's teaching junior high school at a private Christian school, trying to do anything but what his parents did, right? Because it sucks. your high school at a private Christian school, trying to do anything but what his parents did, right? Because it sucks. There's something interesting here, which is that if you are struggling to kind of like maintain stability in your life and make ends meet in general, communism sounds pretty damn good. Yes, yes.

Especially if you're like working with all these corrupt guys who are like, oh, it's all about the money for you, right? And like, yeah, I get it. But he's not gonna stick with these beliefs in like egalitarianism, right? When he starts getting money in his cult, the money goes to him, right? So in 1954, he gets hired to work in Texas

for a guy named Fred Jordan, who was one of the first wave of TV ministers. So he's like one of the first big ministers to have like a live TV like church program. He's also training missionaries for foreign work and Berg starts working in television effectively, right? And for 13 years, he's Jordan's right-hand man. Uh, he's marketing for the show.

He's helping to produce it on a technical level. And this is the most stable job he's ever had, right? He's doing this for more than a decade. Most of his kids are raised to adulthood during this period of time. And you know, Fred is his mentor. And this is kind of one thing that's sort of noteworthy about this is that Fred had had a church before the one that he starts and gets a TV program on, that he'd basically gotten fired from because he started cheating with one of the members of his

congregation on his wife, and that had caused his church to leave him, right? So that's sort of like, David knows that and kind of sees a kindred spirit in this guy, because the same thing sort of happened to him. He would later refer to Fred as King Saul and credit him as a mentor. But he was also unhappy with his kind of humble position in this other guy's organization. He's middle-aged now, and as he later wrote, I felt I was passing my prime, but had not yet found God's perfect will for my life. He admits he was desperate for greater power, which is an unsettling thing to say, right? Yeah.

Remarkably self-aware. Yeah. Oh, it was just about the power, yeah? Yeah. Now, this doesn't come out until a long time later, but his daughters would later claim that he was also sexually harassing them during this period. Arrassing or?

Both. So he tries first with his daughter, Debra, when she's a young adult, and this doesn't go beyond harassment. Like she refuses and he seems to have stopped. She's an adult at this period of time. So like she's like, he tried and I refused him. He does start molesting his daughter, his youngest daughter, Faithy, when she's about 10 years old in 1961.

And one of the, a writer for Rolling Stone, who I, Wilkinson, who wrote a really good bio on this guy, also describes Faithy as the daughter who resembled him the most, which is like, it's, it's, so this is a guy who, at this point, he's kind of fully turned, right? He's now passing on the same kind of abuse that he had experienced as a kid. He's also channeling his ambition at Fred's program

into trying to kind of take it into the modern era. He becomes convinced early on that color television is the future. And so he tries to convince Fred, you got to move on from black and white in like the mid sixties and make this a color program, right? And this is expensive. It's not cheap to go color in this period of time.

And Fred really fights him on it and eventually agrees. And despite David's best efforts, they can't sell the show to any stations So Fred fires him in 67. So it's it's this kind of you know, his life seems like it's falling apart at this point He's abusing his kids. He's lost his job He would later tell like his version of events is that once the show fails He thinks Fred's going to fire him. but then he has a dream where everything's fine and God tells him to have faith.

And he says the dream was signed by Fred himself. So he has a dream that his boss is cool with him, but the real boss doesn't get the memo about the dream boss. And this is what David writes next. He wasn't completely sure if they should stay there or not. So as a test of the will of the Lord, he wrote and asked Fred for total control of their property and to even have it put in his name.

Fred only said no, but fired David again, this time for the last time. So his move is, well, I had a dream that things were fine. I'm just gonna ask you to sign over all your property to me. Is that cool? Can you do that? No, you're re-fired. Yeah. You're double fired.

I don't even know what that means. You can't fire someone twice. It doesn't, it's like, I guess you just say he just had to like say the words twice. Yeah. Because it just wasn't. You are really fired. No, no, no. Seriously, get out of here.

Oh my gosh. This is actually, this is starting to sound I mean it was sounding up until this point like he was a very troubled and and troubling person, but mostly coherent and exploitive and and yeah kind of dastardly But this is starting to sound Untethered to reality He's he's he's's increasingly losing his connection to reality, right? Like the fact that you would have this dream

after your boss is like, man, I think I'm gonna have to let you go, you fucked up so bad. And then you're like, actually I had a dream that it was fine. You wanna sign over all your property to me? Is that cool? Like no, absolutely not.

So yeah, this is a bold move and it fails. So David has to take his family back to Southern California where his mom, Virginia has a very big church in Huntington Beach and she is super successful at this point. And she's like, you should come here and start preaching. There's all these hippie kids, right, who had gotten involved in the anti-war movement, started experimenting with drugs. And this is a major thing happening in the US at the time

where you've got, it's 67, 68, 69, the hippie movement reaching kind of critical mass, but also people keep falling out of it, right? They'll have really bad trips, they'll run out of money, like something bad will happen to them. And there's also all these kind of new evangelical offshoot programs. They're called the Jesus Freaks, kind of colloquially,

who start taking in these former hippies. And a lot of churches start as a result of this, and there's also a couple of different cults that start as a result of this, right? It's like people gathering up the shrapnel of the hippie movement as a sort of- Manson. Yeah, Manson, exactly.

A great example of that, right? And sorry sorry did you say that that his mom was was now now running a church in Huntington Beach yes a big one she is successful at this point she's like super successful and he's just sort of dinking around trying to figure it out but she invites him back yeah and how old are his kids at this point by the way three of them are adults I think and one of them is like late teens. Like Faithy's like nearly adult.

So his kids are mostly grown at this point, right? And as Faithy weighed in, like as an adult, is she? You know, obviously like that's, you don't have to say anything just because your dad's a famous monster, right? After he abuses you. But like we don't have a lot from her. Deborah is the one who talks a lot about what he did. So US involvement, obviously in Vietnam's in full swing

at this point, and David, he finds himself on the anti-war side of things. Maybe he is legitimately anti-war, right? Like you can be a bad person and have like one or two good opinions. But maybe he also just sees it as like, oh, I want to, like my mom said, I want to get kids from this hippie movement, right? And so you kind of have to be on that side of things, right?

It also may just have been natural because like mainstream American society is this, like the pro war side of things. And he has always found himself kind of on the outskirts, right? And he also really finds himself drawn to a lot of the values of the hippskirts, right? And he also really finds himself drawn to a lot of the values of the hippie movement, radical acceptance and peace and love, the anti-war stuff. So he starts a new organization with his children, his oldest kids called Teens for Christ. Now, he is 50 at the time, so that's your first problem,

right, probably shouldn't be running a teens organization when you're 50. But his goal is to reach all of these newly awoken So that's your first problem, right? Probably shouldn't be running a teens organization when you're 50. But his goal is to reach all of these newly awoken hippie kids in Huntington Beach at the apex of the hippie movement in Southern California and convince them that the real path to radical change is a Christian revolution that can sweep away the corruption of like the warmongering administration

and usher in a better future. He's got no church at first. In fact, he doesn't have much in the way of resources at all. So he preaches out of a coffee house called the Light Club. And I want to quote from a 2005 Rolling Stone article by Peter Wilkinson here. Reject society, he implored them, with his long white beard and prominent Adam's apple,

Berg evoked a crazed Santa. To his followers, he was mesmerizing. Who are the real rebels of today, he asked. We are the true lovers of today, he asked. We are the true lovers of peace and love and truth and beauty and God and freedom. Whereas you, our parents, are on the brink of destroying and polluting all of us and our world

if we do not rise up against you in the name of God and try to stop you. He came to be known to his children as Moses David, or simply Moe. So it's all coming together. Yeah. So, so I'm, the only thing I'm confused by is, is that his mom invited him back, but, but he doesn't, he doesn't have a platform.

Like he's not, he's not in the church. She's not, he's doing this, all this on the side or what's the, from my understanding and a little bit of this is unclear, but he is, he is initially working with her in a couple other churches, but they don't like how radical he is. Cause he's like really anti-war, he's like anti-military, and that's not super popular among like these otherwise kind of conservative

Christian groups, right? And that's kind of why he gets exiled to this coffee house. So his mom is one who brings him back, but you even see in that rhetoric, part of what he's drawn to the hippie movement by and why he's appealing to them is he is also very angry at like his parents and the older generation. That's a big part of the hippie movement.

So they're kind of natural partners in a way. Yeah, the other thing that really kind of weirded me out about that description was he has a long white beard. Oh yeah. And a prominent Adam's apple. Now those two things are hard to coexist because the implication is that his Adam's apple is so prominent that it protrudes through his beard. Through his beard. I love that you pick up on that.

Because the beard would otherwise obscure anyone's Adam's apple Yeah, so I'm picturing an Adam's apple that is so long and weird and pointy that it is disturbingly protruding It's like a goiter He had an Adam's goiter. Yeah, he's got an Adam's goiter. His at his goiter had another Adam's apple Maybe this was this father Adam's apple. Maybe this was this Father Adam's apple was. And by the way, where's that Adam is Mother Eve still in the picture? She is still around. She's helping to lead teens for Christ. They are together.

He says that she's constantly telling him like, you're not as holy as you pretend to be, which seems likely given that she knows what he's been up to his whole life. So they don't have a good marriage, which seems likely given that she knows what he's been up to his whole life. So they don't have a good marriage, which is going to become relevant later because it's not going to last much longer. She's kind of undermining him or his psychotic agenda. Yeah, you could see, he would say undermining and maybe that's some of it. It also might be that just she was trying to be like, look, man, you need to, like, I know you're not this guy.

I know the real you, you know? I don't know entire, I can't claim to have the entire, you know, understanding, but it's not going well, the marriage. So one of his early members, one of the first people to join Teens for Christ in 1969 is a former beauty queen named Vashti, or at least that's the last name that she gives

to Peter Wilkinson. And she explained kind of of her and a lot of the early people to join the organization, most of us were middle and upper middle-class kids who found that chasing materialism didn't work and felt that there had to be something bigger and more satisfying. Because we had it all,

we were looking for the vacuum to be filled by God. We wanted to change the world, right? And that's kind of her psychoanalysis of herself and a lot of the early members, right? And you know, this point, Teens for Christ, this is not, this is turning into a cult, but it's not fully a cult yet, right? This is like you're meeting at a coffee house,

you're handing out- It's a youth group. He's got you in the street. It's a youth group. He does have you like handing out pamphlets and raising money, but the cult stuff kind of gets in, comes in gradually piece by piece, right? You're not all living together immediately.

And you're feeling like if you'd come out of the hippie movement, that you haven't really left the counterculture, right? The hippie movement, you know, by the kind of 69, 70, especially by like 70, it's starting to become clear that it has failed in a lot of its goals and a lot of people who are kind of traumatized or left in the wake. What separates David Berg from all the other groups,

like you mentioned Manson, but also like Tony Alamo, who we've talked about, he has a ministry that's kind of part of this Jesus Freak movement. What separates Berg from these other groups picking up these people is that he, well, I guess with the exception of Manson, it's that he and Manson actually have a lot in common because they are the ones who are like,

we're going to pull in a lot of this evangelical rhetoric, but we're also, we're going to bring in a lot of central tenants of the hippie movement. And with Berg, that's going to eventually include free love, right? Not immediately, but he's already as early as like 68, 69. He's starting to think, maybe the hippies have a point about this.

People shouldn't be getting married and just having sex with one person thing, right? Like this should be like, maybe that's like part of the system, right? Right, right. Maybe there's a belief system or a way of thinking, a way of believing that validates all of my insane behavior and antisocial psychotic sexual exploitation.

Maybe there's a construct I can subscribe to and get others to subscribe to that makes all that just fine. Yeah. I've been doing a lot of fucked up sex stuff in my life. Maybe that's because that's what God wants. Yeah. Right? Yeah, that's kind of where he goes. And that's by the way, which is even,

I would say I would call what he's doing even a different lane than free love, 60s free love. Yeah, I should be clear that like, and we'll talk more about this, free love is the branding he's going to use. It's not that, right? All right, that tracks. Yes, yes.

He also does preach a lot at this point at the coffee house. He starts preaching about the system. He refers to people in mainstream society as systemites, right? And he's cloaking himself in the language of rebellion to gain followers and it works. Wilkinson's article describes how Berg used his early followers to recruit more. Ashes smudged on their foreheads, clad in red sackcloth robes and carrying shepherd staffs, members of Teens for Christ hit the streets and cities across America,

from New York to Washington, D.C. to Chicago, what they referred to as the mission field. Strumming guitars, they handed out stacks of literature to passersby in exchange for donations. In those early days, money raised on the mission field went primarily to charities. Our duty is to the lost souls in Hohenberg, who traveled in a Dodge motor home with his wife, Jane, and their four children. So again, you're seeing some cultier elements here, but they're giving away most of the money.

And when they get media coverage, it's kind of a lot of it's positive. It's like, oh, these kids are, this is part of the anti-war movement. They're trying to make the world, they're raising money for charity. His mom, however, is horrified. She accuses him of being a carbon copy of Fred Jordan,

the guy who'd fired him, and mocks his obsession with the system because she's done really well in the system. She's like, churchianity, not so bad. Churchianity, it's great, yeah. Sign up for more churchianity. Yeah, that is what she's saying until the spring of 68, when Virginia dies.

And David, you get the feeling, and you get the feeling because he writes about this, that this is, he considers his mom's death the first moment in his life that he's really free. And there's a good breakdown of this in an article for Coltic Studies Journal by Dr. Stephen Kent, who writes, "...Berg's lifelong resentfulness and anger burst forth shortly after his mother's death

at a public meeting that he called, to which he invited many of his mother's friends, plus the press. His daughter Deborah recalls this August gathering in which he came out with his big proclamation against the system." And so, his mom is famous. After she dies, he gets a lot of her friends, members of the evangelical community together with reporters to like eulogize his mom. And instead of eulogizing her, he goes on the attack. And this is how his daughter Deborah describes this meeting. The press was there and all my grandmother's old friends and there he just blows them all away. He just damns the system and damns the church system, damns the war in Vietnam, damns the political system, damns parents for raising their kids wrong.

I mean, oh, everything. So it was kind of like all this vehemence against everything that he was disgusted with or mad about. He just came out against it after she died. He just began to practice what and how he really wanted to be. And first off, this really, this alienates him from mainstream evangelical society forever. It gets a lot of press and he will write later

that he felt like his mom and dad both needed to go away so that he could become the man he was meant to be. And it becomes clear to him after this, the man he's meant to be is the leader of a new religious sect, one that merges the values of Pentecostal evangelism with radical sexual liberation. Yeah.

It's gonna go well. It's kind of branched of Indian. It's like a whole pattern of just like, let's have like a staunch disciplined belief structure, but we get to fuck all we want. Or at least one of us does, right? Particularly the guy in charge. This guy, this guy does.

Like I get to do all the fucking. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. God. Who believed, why do people think, like, why do people follow that guy? Well, you know- I mean, I get it, he's charismatic. Yeah, he's charismatic, and it's interesting, Ed, because when it comes to guys like Koresh,

I have that same question where it's like, but he's the only one who gets to do this stuff. Why do people go along with this? Berg starts that way, but as we'll talk about, eventually he's like, actually, everyone gets to have sex as long as I get to like direct the sex. Whoa. So it's weirder than that with him,

but you do see like, oh, I get why some people would be like into this, right? We have to go to ads in a sec, but as a spoiler, Fleetwood Mac is about to come into the picture briefly. So race for that. In 2012, 16 year old Brian Herrera was gunned down in broad daylight on his way to do homework. No suspects, no witnesses, no justice.

The call was horrible. I replayed it over in my head all the time. For years, Brian's family kept asking questions, while a culture of silence kept the case cold. Snitches get stitches. Everybody knows it. Still, they refused to give up. I would ask my husband, do you want me to just let this go? He said, no, keep fighting. I told her I would never give up on this case. And then, after a decade of waiting, a breakthrough. We received a phone call that was bittersweet because it's a call that we've been waiting

for for a very long time. I'm Enrique Santos. This is Cold Case Files Miami, a podcast about justice, persistence, and the families who never stopped fighting. Listen to Cold Case Files Miami as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just like great shoes, great books take you places.

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You've heard the name Marsha P. Johnson, trans icon, revolutionary, saint. They call me a legend in my own time. But who was she, really? She's strutting up there, waving to the policemen in the cars, pay it no mind. I'm a woman, a real woman. Marsha also survived homelessness, sex work, and police violence.

And in 1992, her body was found in the Hudson River. Her death remains unsolved. Marcia was pulled out of the water right over the edge here. Afterlives is a podcast about how trans lives we've lost have reshaped our world. Marcia will tell us who she was in her own words. You're going to be gagging. Just get your heart ready for heart failure. At a time when trans rights are under attack, her story is more urgent than ever. Listen to Afterlives on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. From iHearts, before social media, before the internet, before cable news, there was Alan Berg. You dig what I do, you have a need, unfortunately you have no sense of humor, that's why you can't ever enjoy this show, and that's why you're a loser. He was the first and the original shock shock. That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people. You're as dumb as the rest.

I can't take anyone. I don't agree with you all the time. I don't want you to. I hope that you pick me apart. His voice changed media. His death shocked the nation. And it makes me so angry that he got himself killed because he had a big mouth.

KOA morning talk show host Alan Berg reportedly was shot and killed tonight in downtown Denver. He pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably two million suspects. This guy aggravated everybody. From iHeart Podcasts, this is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So at this point, his mom is dead. It's like 69 or so, 68, 69.

His mom is dead and he's thrilled. He is off the chain now. Dancing on her grave. Right. She had been like the last thing tethering him to some kind of reality. He's finally free. So he's got kind of by late 68, maybe a few dozen, maybe a hundred or so followers at this point.

And they've started living together. They're splitting their lives between, they've got a five story building in Los Angeles and a small ranch in West Texas. He's been, some of this is cause he's been gathering money from his followers. I'm sure he inher gathering money from his followers. I'm sure he inherits something from his mom that helps too.

Real estate's a lot cheaper back then. A journalist who'd started following them in the early days when they'd crisscrossed the country raising money had reported in an article on them. He had like cited a passage from the Bible, Matthew 5.9, blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God. So this journalist,

when he sees them doing their anti-war stuff, had cited this passage from the Bible, and that really sticks in Berg's head. And he likes it a lot. And he starts to call, they transition from calling themselves teens for Christ, till he starts calling his group,

which is now a cult, the children of God, right? That's where the name comes from. So as a note, reporters, don't suggest stuff like that when you're covering groups like this. It could go badly for everybody. So it's still, at this point, they're living together. He's directing a lot of control for his members' lives, but it's maybe not totally clear to people outside that what's happened, the Teens for Christ has become a full-on cult, right? And how many people are we talking? We're talking between 60 and 69, between like a hundred and a couple of hundred people over

the course of that year, right? It's going to get much larger, but this is just the start, right? And so it's small enough that he's kind of able to keep everyone together. They're moving between LA and West Texas, you know, depending on the time of year. Probably some people are permanently one place, some people are in the other, but he's able to maintain a lot of direct personal control, right, over the children of God.

And while they're clad in the aesthetics of hippie-dom, they're like dressing and looking like hippies, he hasn't yet had the courage to tell everyone to break free of the conservative sexual mores of the system of churches that he'd been raised in. Up to the start of the 70s, within the children of God, there was no dating or premarital sex allowed, right? And when new members joined, because Berg was like,

well, you just came out of the hippie movement, I can't trust entirely that you're ready for our rules, he would assign them a buddy who was to watch them at all times, even follow them into the bathroom to make sure they're not backsliding into their heathen ways. So there's already a lot of control and they are at the start very conservative in terms of like sexual stuff, right? Can I ask a question about the guy?

Like do we have a sense of what it's like to just be in the same room with this guy? Is he funny? Is he like, does he kind of have a weird warmth to him? Is he chatty, accessible, or is he kind of like a stern, you know, like patrician type? Do we have a sense of his energy? And- Yes. I'll read some quotes in a bit, but to briefly answer your question,

he is mercurial in a way that a lot of these guys are. So he can go from being your best friend and very charming to screaming at you and punishing you in the space of a second, right? Which you get, and that's, there's a degree to which the kind of psychological whiplash of that kind of person is almost addictive to some people, right?

It's the same kind of, you get these dynamics in like abusive romantic relationships too, right? Where once they flip to the bad side, you really want to get them back to the good side. And that's part of what keeps people, you know, coming back. And Berg is a lot like that. But when he's good, it is very charismatic. And he's able to make you feel like not only do you matter, but you're helping to save the world, right? Yeah. So as I said, he's still holding his cult to these kind of strict sexual norms,

but his heart's not in this after his mom dies, right? He doesn't really believe this. It's kind of running on impulse for a little while. And he's also, he's having trouble like keeping himself to the same standards that he's holding his people to, right? He's never been good at this. One of his early recruits, Sam Ajamian, claims that Berg acted as a dictator in this period,

making every choice for the children of God, saying, Berg convinced himself and us that he was the greatest man who ever lived, second to Jesus. Now, this gives you a lot of leeway. Like Berg starts drinking in this period, and he would often address his congregation while hammered. He is like a full-on alcoholic in this point. And he also, he's able to exercise a lot of control over daily life, right? Like, he has chore lists for everybody. Everybody's day is like scripted out to the minute by Berg. So, he's holding them in a lot of control

and he starts to covet control over the bodies of his followers, particularly a young woman in her mid twenties who had joined his church in 1969. Berg breaks, like he's still married to mother Eve at this point, but this is kind of when the dam breaks and he's no longer able to abide by these things. He doesn't believe anymore.

And he starts sleeping with this new member of his the dam breaks and he's no longer able to abide by these things. He doesn't believe anymore. And he starts sleeping with this new member of his cult three months after she joins. Now, this is an issue, both because he's preaching against such things and because his wife is helping him run the church and she's not gonna be happy about this. And he decides the way to get around this

is to change the gospel, right? So he comes out and says, hey guys, I just did some intensive research into the Bible and I found out some stuff, you're not gonna believe it. God is fine with polygamy, right? So he sends out the first of what are called his Mo letters, right? Because it's his followers have shortened Moses to Mo.

And he announces that he's replacing the old church with the new church and the old wine with the new wine. And the wine in this is like the old wine is his wife and the new wine is this 19 year old girl that he has started sleeping with, right? And he tells them that it's God's orders he does this, right? He writes, if you'll even take a look at Bible history, you'll make the shocking discovery

that most of God's greats had oodles of wives, women's, mistresses, harlots, and what have you." Which is like not wrong, like not incorrect like that. There's a lot of like mistresses and stuff from like different, you know, kings and whatnot in the Bible. Concubines. Concubines, right? And, you know, you could even find some like early Catholic figures who are like, actually,

you know, maybe there's not a problem. Maybe the church doesn't have a problem with sex work. There's some actually interesting stuff from kind of the middle of the last century on that. And Berg is embracing this for a very selfish reason, right? Because he wants to have a bunch of different wives. And this is kind of the early 70s is when he starts putting the stuff out

when he starts saying like, actually it's cool for me to marry whoever I want. And by this point, kind of 71 or so there's a couple of hundred members of the cult and they've got communal houses and farms in a bunch of different states. And Berg is traveling around these different properties. He's not just sleeping with this 19 year old member who joined. He starts going to different, every time he spends a couple of days at a new church house, he'll pick up a woman or two there and he'll start sleeping with them. Right.

One of the things that starts to happen, and he's not yet saying, Hey, we can all do free love stuff, but once he leaves after doing this, a different location, the house leader will be like, well, maybe it's fine if I start sleeping with people. And right, so the kind of free love stuff is almost, people start mirroring him before he makes that official policy, where they're like,

well, he's sleeping around with everybody. Maybe it's fine if we all do it. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So question about the Moe letters. Is he, In these letters, is he citing like sort of a divine message that he heard directly from God or is he citing just sort of like his hot take on biblical passages or just sort of like some new philosophy out of whole cloth?

Like what's the nature of these Mo letters? It's a little of both. So he's, he's, he is citing passages from the Bible to justify things that he's doing, but he's also, he's a prophet, right? He has a direct line to God. So there's stuff where he'll, he'll cite a passage that like a lot of things in the Bible, you could interpret that a bunch of different ways and he'll say, but God told me this is what it means, right?

So this is the rule now. Right, right, right. Okay, yeah, so he is claiming that he has a divine voice from God. Yes. How old is he at this point? He's in his 50s. He's claiming he's gonna help usher in the apocalypse, right?

That like when the end of days comes, he's gonna be a key part of that. And that this church is gonna be a key part of like Jesus coming back and fighting the antichrist, right? That like when the end of days comes, he's going to be a key part of that. And that this church is going to be a key part of like Jesus coming back and fight the antichrist, right? This picture I'm sharing be an accurate representation of what he's looking like at the time. That's what he looks like at the time. Whoa.

Right. For the audio only audience, he's got a scraggly white beard. Can't see the Adam's apple though. Can't see the Adam's apple though can see the Adam's apple Curly hair Looks like he's wearing some kind of a robe He's almost got like a Mennonite beard yeah, where it's like shaved on the sides. Yeah, well he and all day It's kind of a monk ish

Yeah, like hairline that yeah, it's like his hairline is receded to the top of his head But he has sort of like a silver halo almost of hair and a nice silver beard. I will say an incredibly warm and gentle smile in this photo at least. Yeah. You could see how people could seem like, well, this must be a good man, right? Yeah. So this kind of the fact that he is sleeping around

and increasingly so are the different sort of like local cult chapters proves to be a valuable recruiting tool. Right? It kind of differentiates them from a lot of these other groups pulling in shrapnel from the hippie movement. It makes it more accessible to these countercultural people. And he realizes this and he starts adopting new counterculture shibboleths to kind of

extend this practice and keep pulling in this kind of this group of people. I'm going to quote from Dr. Stephen Kent's article again. After the group departed from California and traveled across the continent, ending up at Camp Laurentide in Quebec, Burke increasingly justified forms of nudity among his followers. In the Texas Soul Clinic Camp from February 1970 to September 1971, Burke required women to go brawless, undoubtedly borrowing the idea from a trend within the women's movement. His December 27th, 1970 poem, Mountain Maid, Note the Sexual Illusion, gives no indication that Berg's bra-less policy was designed as a political statement

against the baldy politic, as was the woman's movement action. And this is really important because this is the key to understanding Berg. He's talking about burning your bra. He's telling his followers they should stop wearing bras. But the actual, like the secular version of this is really about liberation. You can't tell us what to do with our bodies

or what to wear. Berg is telling his followers, it is an order, burn your bra, right? It is an order, don't wear a bra. And when he's traveling around to different communal homes and he sees a female follower, he will grab her chest forcibly to make sure she's not wearing one.

So you see, there's this language of liberation. Yeah, but it's the opposite, right? It's all about control. It's so evil, but it's so interesting that he has figured out like, I can use this language of freedom in order to take control away from my followers, from myself.

No. Yeah. And I think we're fully in cult territory here. Not hard to justify at that point. And this is like, these are like orders, right? Like the fact that you have to dress this way, you can't do this, like I'm going to touch you at whatever point.

Like these are his orders. And not only that, but his followers have to read the erotic poetry he's putting out about stuff like this. And I just cited the poem Mountain Maid, which I am not going to read entirely for you, but I will quote two, or a single stanza to give you an idea of the poem. How long is it?

How long is the whole thing? I'm saving that for the end, man. Don't worry. There's a reveal coming. But here's a single stanza to give you an idea. And this is like a less explicit stanza. Let those mountains be more visible and their clothing more divisible, right?

And again, this is like the least explicit portion. It gets, it's a lot worse. What's cool is that visible rhymes with divisible. Divisible, bad poem. Yeah. You'd think a prophet would do better than that. Now I picked those lines because they're in the least explicit portion of the poem.

But I do need to read this note from Dr. Berg's piece because Berg quotes 10 lines from the poem and then writes, the poem continues in this vein for a total of 301 lines. My God. Wow. All right, bro. Oh, man. So Ed, that's most of what we got for part one.

As I told you, Fleetwood Mac comes into, one member of Fleetwood Mac comes into the story, right? That's got to be kind of like our fun little thing in part two. There's a couple of like weird celebrity connections here. One guy drops out of Fleetwood Mac to join this church. There's also a couple of celebrities who are born into it. But don't seem to have like, Joaquin Phoenix is born into it, but leaves when he's three.

So, you know, there's not a lot to actually say about that, but it's something you'll come across in all the articles on it. Like I tend to not like try to go into detail or speculate about stuff like that, just cause like, you know, people have a right not to, but it's, if you run into articles about this, it's going to be in every single one of them, right?

Cause it's just like a lead line for a lot of people, which will show you that like, this is going to be for a while, like a very kind of almost hip countercultural movement, right? Like that's what he sort of started to build here. And in the early 70s, even while he's being very abusive, there's almost this degree to which the children of God are cool, right? And that's kind of a unique thing for a cult like this to be not totally unique,

but for it to be, to have so much appeal to people who are like prominent, right? Like that's kind of an interesting aspect of this that we'll be getting into a lot more in part two. But Ed, part one is done. You wanna plug your show at the end here before we roll out for the day? Yeah, let's talk a little more about Snafu,

the fabulous podcast that I do that I'm insanely proud of. And season- You should be. Season three is out now. I'm in production on season four and I'm extremely excited about season four because we're breaking the format.

We're doing something new and different and very exciting, which I'll get into more at another time. But season three is cranking along. It's fully out. You can binge it, eight episodes. And then of course, my book, get my book, also Snafu. Yeah, S-N-A-F-U.

All right, Ed, well, thank you so much again for being on the show. We will be back in just a few minutes. But to you, the listener, we'll be back on Thursday. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

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