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

Ed Helms, Welcome back to the show. Ed.

David Berg is on kind of the far end of the spectrum where like 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 this kind of like evangelical Christianity, like pentecostal preaching in the mid centuries. A very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it.

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, 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 pretend 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 this, 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, Helmer, who was a Swedish immigrant to the US, had been converted by his maternal grandfather and before finding Jesus, Helmer was a quote cigar smoking beer drinking wild dancing party going, good looking and loose living young man of the world.

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 potshots at her in the biography that he

wrote about himself. I think that's probably more what's happening here.

And if this is the case, then she had David before she was healed, and scholars who 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.

Neither of these is super unlikely, but this kind of weaves into the bio he makes 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 biography, the autobiography on his church's website, also goes into a whole host of what I think are increased the 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.

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 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 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 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.

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 he would have thought, and he, as a kid, thinks it's unjust and fair because he's like, I don't get why my mom was so mean to the maid, right, like, oh, interesting, 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 him pushing this on a lot of other kids.

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 base, a little bowl in a knife and told me she was going to cut it off, right, She threatens to like circumcise him.

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 ten 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 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 or 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.

dozens of churches to come. And the way this works is it's honestly, the evangelical preaching business works a lot like stand up 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 stand up like person, right, Like, if you want to 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 twelve 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 terrible use for churches, but that's what these kind of ones are, right.

like they billed him as like the youngest preacher. They like taught him, wrote how to do stuff like perform weddings, and as an adult, he 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's 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 because 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 thirteen, but it was the thirties. Yeah, yeah, fuck it. Why not not as much traffic. Yeah, not as much traffic. No one's got seatbelts, 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 threw 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 eighty year history of the school. Now there's no evidence of this, Like, we know he graduated in nineteen thirty five, but I've never heard, like the school doesn't claim that he did the best of anyone there.

So he's the 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, d C. But it may have been there, maybe been 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, thirty five to forty one? Yeah, So David doesn't make any additional direct claims about what he's doing until December seventh, nineteen forty one, which I think most people that 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 led him in any way, and that he served as a conscientious subjector 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 subjectors and non combat roles in World War Two, 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 and evangelical organizations he was a part of that were keeping track of what he was doing in the early forties, 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 likelier claim is that, like he's just making it as a preacher from the late thirties to the early forties, right, 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.

It's possible, like I have not seen no one's ever like filed and gotten a DD two one four, which is like the discharge paperwork you get from the army for him. But also this in 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 because this is kind of a chaotic period. The army didn't work then like it does now.

doing preaching with his parents. In nineteen forty four, 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 Debora in nineteen forty five, Aaron a couple of years later, Jonathan a year after that, and then their fourth kid, who has my favorite name of their children, Faith ye in fifty one, just Faith with a y.

going because money is tight. It's not until nineteen forty nine 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.

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 right right.

these guys a fair criticism. It's also like he's not any better, right, Like yeah.

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 nineteen fifty one, 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 fifty early fifties 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.

one of the first wave of TV ministers. So he's like one of the first big ministers to have like a love TV like church program. He's also training missionaries for foreign work, and Berg starts working in television effectively right and for thirteen years he's Jordan's right hand man. 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 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.

like it, he tried and I refused him. He does start molesting his daughter, his youngest daughter, Faithy, when she's about ten years old in nineteen sixty one, and one of the writer for Rolling Stone, who 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 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 and 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 sixty seven. So 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 like his move is, well, I

had a dream that things were fine. I'm just going to ask you to sign over all your property to me. Is that cool? Can you do that?

experimenting with drugs. And this is a major thing happening in the US at the time, where you've got at sixty seven, sixty eight, sixty nine, the hippie movement reaching like 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 battle happened 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 yeah, man'son exactly a great example of it.

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 Americans, 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 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 fifty at the time, so that's your first problem, right, Probably shouldn't be running a teen's organization when you're fifty. 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, and 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'm going to quote from a two thousand and five Rolling Stone article by Peter Wilkinson. Here rejects society. He implored them. With his long white beard and prominent Adam zapple 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 peace and love and truth and beauty and God and freedom, whereas you are parents, are on the brink of destroying and polluting all of us in 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.

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 at the older generation. That's a big part of the hip hippie movement. So they're kind of natural partners in a way.

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 nineteen sixty nine, 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.

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 counter culture, right. The hippie movement, you know, by the kind of sixty nine to seventy, especially by like seventy, it's started 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 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, he and Manson actually have a lot in common because they 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 tenets 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 sixty eight sixty nine, 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 be like, maybe that's like part of the system, right, right.

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's 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 passers by 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 honed Burg 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 given away most of the money, and they're getting when they get media coverage, it's kind of a lot of it's positive, as 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 fire him, and mocks his obsession with the system. Because she's done really well in the system.

moment in his life that he's really free. And there's a good breakdown of this in an article for Cultic Studies Journal by doctor 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 o 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 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 would 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.

It's like sixty nine or so sixty eight sixty nine is dead, and he's thrilled, he is and he is he is off the chain, Dad saying on her grave, right, this is she had been like the last thing tethering him to some kind.

that helps to real estates 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 five nine, 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 the transition from calling themselves teens for Christ to 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.

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 hippietom, 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 moras of

the system of churches that he'd been raised in. Up to the start of the seventies, 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.

people to. Rights, He's never been good at this. One of his early recruits, Sam Ajemian, claims that Berg acted as a dictator in this period, making every choice for the children of God, saying quote, 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 choor lists for everybody. Everybody's day is like scripted out to the minute by Berg. So is 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 nineteen sixty nine. Berg breaks like

he's still married to Mother Eve at this point. But this is kind of when the damn 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 his followers have shortened Moses to Moe, 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 nineteen 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 combines 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 like kind of like 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 seventies, 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 seventy one or so, there's a couple one hundred members of the cult, and they've got communal houses and farms and a bunch of different states. And Berg is traveling around these different properties. He's not just sleeping with this nineteen 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.

more accessible to these countercultural people. And he realizes this and he starts adopting new counter culture shibbaleths to kind of extend this practice and keep pulling in this kind of this group of people. I'm going to quote from

doctor Stephen Ken's article again. After the group departed from California and traveled across the continent, ending up at Camp Laurentide and Quebec, Burke increasingly justified forms of nudity among his followers in the Texas Soul Clinic camp from February nineteen seventy to September nineteen seventy one, Berg required women to go brawlless, undoubtedly borrowing the idea from a trend

within the women's movement. His December twenty seventh, nineteen seventy poem Mountain made note the sexualllusion gives no indication that Berg's brawless 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

us 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 forcably to make sure she's not wearing one. So you see there's this language. 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 for myself. No, yeah, uh, And I think we're fully in cult territory here. Uh, not hard to not hard to justify at that point.

And this is like he's these are like orders, right, like the fact that you're not you know, you have to dress this way, you can't do this, like I'm going to touch you at whatever point, like these are like these are his orders. And not only that, but his followers have to read this like the erotic poetry

he's putting out about stuff like this. And I just cited the poem Mountain made, which I am not going to read entirely for you, but I will quote two like or a single stanza to give you an idea of the of.

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 because,

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 because 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's sort of started to build here and in the early seventies, even while he's being very abusive, there's almost this degree to which the Children of God are cool, right like, And that's 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 want to plug your show at the end here before we roll out for the day.