Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  David Berg’s children brought many early devotees into the fold—especially Aaron, who wrote many of the songs that would inspire the first wave of converts. He would also foreshadow the madness that would soon envelop The Family. “Aaron was the big show in Huntington Beach. Here was this guy, writing songs, playing guitar. He’d start singing and his hair, blond and curly, would stand on end. He looked like Einstein,” Shula recalled. “Aaron was like an encounter with God. Revivals are started by spiritual anointing, a power encounter with the presence of god. Aaron had that spirit.”

  In his own account of the early days, David Berg credits his younger son, Hosea, for gaining control of the Huntington Beach club. “He was begging me to come down and teach the hippies the Bible—‘Like you taught us, Dad!’ But I said, ‘Well, I’ll have to come down and see first.’

  So I was trying to get to know the hippies and see what they were like, hanging around all their haunts. I grew a little beard and I put on some old ragged sneakers, a ragged pair of pants, an old ragged black jacket, my beret and dark glasses and I probably looked like a pusher or something! The police used to really give me the eye when I passed by. But that seemed to be the style, to dress as ragged and as bummy as possible. Only they wore a lot of freaky clothes too, and I got to where I was finally wearing a Japanese kimono, a little more fitting to my style.

  So I came into the club one night, sort of staggering in like some old bum. I wanted to see what it was like, because I’d never been there and [Hosea] wanted me to come down and teach. I thought, “Well, I ought to scout out the land a little bit first.” So I staggered in the door and saw a spot over in the corner that was vacant—you had to step over bodies and everything to get to it—I threw myself down in the corner. And this nice little blond boy beside me, I remember him yet, he said, “Hi Dad, what’s your bag?” I didn’t even know what a bag was then.8

  After a few undercover visits, Berg decided to reveal himself. He waited one night until the Light Club was packed with seventy-five singing, clapping converts.

  [Hosea’s wife] was singing so I waited till she came to the end of her song and she was just leaving the stage. I knew [Hosea] was probably waiting to introduce me. So I flung the door open and I leaped in and I thundered at the top of my voice—and I can yell pretty loud—“Revolution for Jesus!” And then they roared: “For Jesus!” I said, “Come on, you can do better than that! When I say, “Revolution!” you answer me back, “For Jesus!” So that got to be our battle cry and the way I introduced myself every night from then on…. I really had the age barrier to break, because they didn’t trust anybody over thirty. I had to really prove I was one of them.

  David Berg took off his tie, let his hair and beard grow, and began to preach “the gospel of rebellion.” Some of his early sermons sound like they were written by a teenage rebel, not a man in his early fifties. They were as much a rebellion against all those stupid parents out there than they were a prophetic witness against social injustice.

  People never cut their hair until the past hundred years. Men had beards…. Sandals and bare feet were popular throughout the ages. What are the parents complaining about? They’re complaining that their children are returning to the customs of their forefathers. It’s the parents who are the rebels. The kids want to return to the pattern of the cooperative, socialistic, communal living of the tribalism of their forefathers. That’s the most ancient and longest lasting of any economic system—the economic system of tribalism—ancient socialism.9

  Berg’s tribe was growing, and he was about to find another way to break the age barrier. In January 1969, he met and began seducing Karen Elva Zerby, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a conservative Tucson preacher. Karen was a few years older than many of the teenage converts, but she didn’t look like it. “When she lets her hair fall down, she looks like she’s about fourteen,” Berg recalled years later. “When I used to take her out places with her hair down they looked at me like I was really robbing the cradle!”10

  Like David Berg, and his mother, Virginia, Karen Zerby was a preacher’s kid. She was born in Camden, New Jersey, on July 31, 1946. Her dad was a Methodist minister who served in the Wesleyan and Pilgrim Holiness churches. Her parents moved to Tucson in 1964 when Karen was eighteen.

  Her younger sister, Rosemary, said their father was stern, but loving. “We did get paddled and it did hurt. But it was always fair. We knew we deserved it. He talked to us about it. But it was never anywhere but on the bottom. He didn’t whip us. He wasn’t beating us. He was a great father. My father is one of the best men I have ever met.”11

  Karen enrolled at the University of Arizona after her family moved to Tucson, but she dropped out after a year to work as a legal secretary and help her struggling parents pay their bills. “Karen was their first child. She had always been good to them,” Rosemary recalled. “They loved her. They loved all of us, but she was the first. She had always been there for them. My younger sister and I were the goofballs. Karen wasn’t. She had always been the best of the three of us.”

  Karen agreed. “I was taught by my parents and church that it was displeasing to the Lord to smoke, drink, dance, wear make-up, jewelry or have short hair, attend movies or even watch TV. We didn’t have a TV until I was sixteen, and we listened to radio seldom,” she said. “To me, obeying my parents was obeying the Lord…unlike my sister, two years younger, who was very rebellious.”12

  Karen was very idealistic and very religious. Rosemary remembers her walking back and forth under the trees in their large backyard every morning, reading her Bible. She took her Bible to her job at the law firm. This was the late sixties, a time when few young people did that kind of thing. “Karen had never held hands with a man until she met The Family,” Rosemary said. “She would maybe bring someone from the church and we’d sit and eat. She went out with other couples, but she hadn’t even held hands with a guy. She felt it was not the right thing to do.”

  According to Rosemary, Karen’s dream was to minister to all the teenagers she saw hanging out on the street in Tucson. She had gone from church to church to find someone willing to sponsor her in that ministry, but no one seemed interested. Then, one day in January 1969, she met the Teens for Christ at an evangelical convention in Phoenix. Two of Berg’s children, Faithy and Hosea, were singing at the assembly and telling local preachers how to reach counterculture converts. After the meeting, Karen ran into Faithy Berg in the ladies room.

  “Hi,” Karen said. “I’m really interested, I really appreciated your talk!”

  “Thanks,” Faithy replied. “”Where are you from?”

  “Tucson.”

  “Oh, we’re going to be in Tucson in a week, why don’t you come?”13

  They talked for a few minutes. Faithy handed Karen a card with the address for the upcoming Tucson meeting. They were only going to be there one night, but here was Karen’s big chance for her dream vocation. She went to the meeting and ran off to southern California with her new friends the next day.

  On the day she left, Karen showed up at her family’s Tucson home with—of all people—Jane Berg, the woman she would soon replace as David Berg’s primary wife. “I vividly remember watching my mom and dad cry,” Rosemary said. “Karen came in along with Jane, who was talking to my mom and dad to distract them when Karen went in and got her things. She just walked out and said she was going off with them.”14

  Karen Zerby and Jane Berg jumped into a van and sped off—driving straight to Huntington Beach. They were just a couple miles away from the Zerby’s home in Tucson when Jane turned to Karen and asked, “Honey, what job have you been doing?”

  “Well, I’ve been a secretary,” Karen replied, “but I’m glad I’m done with that now.”

  “Oh, we need secretaries,” Jane said. “Maybe you could help out!”

  Karen began having second thoughts about running away with the Jesus people.

  “I was already so sad I was leaving home,” she recalled years
later. “I’d never been away for very long from my parents, and I thought, ‘How can I bear this? It’s bad enough leaving home and my parents, then having to go back to that boring job again.’”

  They arrived at the Light Club after midnight. “The kids were still in the club,” Karen recalled. “I walked in and there was a group of people there singing. The thing that really impressed me was Aaron standing there with his guitar. The light was shining on him and his beautiful blonde hair and it looked like he had a halo around his head.”15

  Karen started typing letters and other secretarial work in the Huntington Beach garage Berg had inherited from his mother. Virginia Berg had been dead now for almost a year, and her fifty-year-old son was finally coming into his own. One day, David wandered out into the garage to see Karen.

  “It was winter,” Berg recalled. “I was afraid she was cold, so I went out there to make sure she had heat. She said she was cold, so I think I put her sweater around her or something.”

  “I wish you’d pray for my back,” Karen said. “I’m having backaches lately.”

  “Well, where is it? Is it here? Higher? Lower? Is that it? I’ll give you a little massage.”

  After a few minutes of back rubbing, Berg had made his diagnosis. “Your backache sounds to me like maybe it’s your kidneys. Of course, a lot of women get backaches from congestion back here because of sexual tension, they don’t have any sexual release, and you’re not married.”

  At that point, Berg says, Karen confessed that she had an attraction toward Jethro, the husband of Deborah Berg, the prophet’s eldest daughter. “He’s married and has got five children,” Karen wept. “I couldn’t steal another woman’s husband!”

  “Well, that’s true,” Berg replied. “You certainly couldn’t have him.”

  Berg and Zerby related this account of that winter day in Huntington Beach nearly a decade after the event in a 1978 letter entitled “Our Love Story!”16

  “Of course,” Berg recalled in the letter, “I hadn’t boned up enough on our doctrine of having an additional wife in those days, but I got around to it real fast after I got hooked on [Karen]. So I didn’t know enough then to tell her, ‘Well, you wouldn’t have to steal him, maybe you could just be added!’”

  By the time Karen Zerby walked into the Light Club, Berg was plotting his next move. Concerned parents, police, and school administrators were worried about the beatnik prophet and his diehard followers. Then, suddenly, in the spring of 1969, he and his flock disappeared from the streets of southern California.

  They resurfaced when a convoy of cars and campers were spotted in the parking lot of the Sears Roebuck department store in Tucson. Berg consummated the affair with Zerby in April. They made love in “The Ark,” the twenty-six-foot-long 1962 Dodge camper that slept twelve and served as Berg’s mobile headquarters in the early years.

  “Mostly we were just doing what we used to call ‘necking,’ just kissing, cuddling, fondling and petting. She was a virgin, so it took me a little while to get her opened up. But, finally, one night we got it together!”

  Jane Berg was suspicious of her husband’s young secretary. “Once or twice dear little mother came home early and came bursting in the door,” David Berg said. “All we had was a little curtain across the aisle to hide the beds. Suddenly we heard mother coming and Maria [Karen Zerby] would scramble out of my bed as fast as she could and go back up in the top bunk and pretend to be asleep.

  “We used to park a whole convoy there [in the Sears parking lot] on the weekend when there was nobody there,” Berg explained. “It was a good place to park, vacant and lots of room. I think Mother began to suspect something was going on for sure. I hadn’t quite sold her yet on the doctrine of polygamy. I was even having a hard time selling [Karen] on the doctrine of polygamy. I don’t think I got her sold on that until we got to Texas. But she was at least enjoying participating [having sex with Berg] even if she didn’t understand the doctrine.”

  Berg had been caught, but he was unrepentant. No one, especially his aging wife, could question the Endtime Prophet. His time had come. Young people were finally following him.

  Berg saw something in Karen Zerby. She certainly wasn’t one of the prettiest females in the flock. She was skinny, bucktoothed, and extraordinarily plain. She was the same generation as Berg’s own children, but more of a blank slate. She hadn’t seen the shadow side of the Endtime Prophet during all those tough years on the road—his alcoholism, his tirades, his infidelity to his wife, his incestuous impulses. Karen was searching for the truth, and Berg convinced her that he had the truth and could pass it onto her

  In recalling her childhood, Zerby said, “Obeying my parents was obeying the Lord.” Karen’s sister thinks she transferred that loyalty from her preacher father to the Endtime Prophet. “He could definitely mold her,” Rosemary said. “If she had faith in him she would give him everything. I heard that later a lot of it was guilt. She felt guilty for things she had done with him and he used that against her.”

  Tucson was just a stop along the way. Berg put out the word for his flock to meet up with him in Canada. What would later be seen as the founding convention of The Family was held in the summer of 1969 at a campground in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec. David Berg was the new Moses, and the hippies were his Chosen People. God’s prophecy was pouring through him, and his people were finally listening.

  I saw unto thee this night, my children of the hippie army, bow low before Me, for I will give unto thee that which I have long desired to bestow upon My Children. I have said that in the Last Days, I would pour out My Spirit, yet the world has seen but a little sprinkling of the mighty showers. During this year to come right before you I shall pour out My Spirit in mighty waves upon you as you witness to the lost children whom the churches have created by their own whoredom.

  Thou shalt see it flow as rivers in the streets, parks and highways. Lo, servants, My hippie children…I have seen thy tears in the night hours during all thy childhood. I have seen the burdens of thy heart. I have seen thee in all thy struggles against the Evil One, and in thy heartaches, and when the Evil One hath sought to take thy life, and did seek to destroy many of thee through drugs. I waited for the congregations of the churches to minister unto thee. But they hardened their hearts and forsook thee!17

  Berg then called the leaders of the fledgling movement to a meeting in Vienna, Virginia, where his prophecies included a spiritual justification for his sexual affair with Zerby, whom the Endtime Prophet christened “Maria.” That prophecy, later published as “Old Love, New Love,” declared Jane Berg, his wife of more than twenty years, to be the “Old Church.” Zerby was the “New Church.”

  At that moment, the course of The Family was set. Berg was the Endtime Prophet and Karen Zerby was his queen. They would lead the hippie army through the Great Tribulation and into the new millennium. There was no time to waste. The end of the old order was near. Jesus was coming again. It was time to spread the news.

  “Be prepared! Join us now! Tomorrow may be too late!” one early tract screamed. “Come see us TODAY or write NOW for the location of our nearest colony and more information on how to survive in the days ahead!”18

  Nothing motivates the troops like the end of the world, and Berg would often use his apocalyptic prophecies to inspire his followers to new fields of battle and higher levels of commitment. California was going to be destroyed by earthquakes, so they all fled to Europe. Then Europe and North America were to burn in a nuclear holocaust, so the troops headed down to Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.

  Dates were set. The Great Tribulation would begin in the eighties and last for seven years. Ricky and his mother—Davidito and Maria—would lead the Endtime army. Jesus would return and The Family would be raptured to heaven in 1993. “We were always having to get ready spiritually for the Endtime,” recalled one longtime member of Berg’s inner circle. “It keeps you in this hyper state of mind—kind of like the war on terror. The
bad guys are everywhere, but you can’t really see them. It changes the way you think. Why worry about consequences when the whole world is about to end? Why take the time to work out your relationship with your wife? Why take on long-term projects? People were not thinking about things like growing old or sending the kids to college.”19

  It may have all been very exciting, but there was little new in Berg’s doomsday scenario. Religious prophets have been warning about the end of world since the world began. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, apocalyptic prophecies begin with the Hebrew Bible and the Book of Daniel, which was written several centuries before the first coming of Jesus and meant to comfort Jewish Zealots living under the oppressive rule of a Syrian monarch. Sometime around ad 70, the Book of Revelation, the last chapter of the New Testament, was written to inspire the persecuted followers of Jesus.

  In the modern era, an Englishman named John Nelson Darby pioneered the still popular theory of “dispensationalism” or “pretribulation premillennialism.” Darby, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, envisioned a “Secret Rapture” to snatch true believers up to heaven and concluded that the Book of Revelation was written to describe the last seven years of Earth’s history. The basic idea is that the Antichrist is at work in the world, making things worse and worse. Even the churches are corrupt. But before the Antichrist is revealed in the flesh, Jesus will appear and rapture true believers up to heaven with him. They escape the seven years of intense earthly tribulation and disaster. Then there is the final battle of Armageddon, with Christ fighting the Antichrist. Christ wins and Satan is bound and kept away for one thousand perfect years when the lions lie with the lambs. Finally, there comes the Last Judgment. People go to heaven or hell. Human history ends.