Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  This scenario of the end of the world—one favored by many of today’s televangelists—has only become the mainstream evangelical scenario over the last fifty years. This vision really caught on in the seventies when author Hal Lindsey published the Late Great Planet Earth, the best-selling book of that decade. Lindsey used Bible prophecy to explain how Israel recaptured Jerusalem in 1967. Russia was the home of the Antichrist of that era, so Lindsey predicted a Soviet invasion and Middle Eastern war in the eighties as his Battle of Armageddon.

  Lindsey’s work foreshadowed the more recent success of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, the evangelical authors whose series of Left Behind books have sold more than sixty million copies, plus millions more in home video. In their Endtime scenario, the Antichrist uses the United Nations to establish a one-world government, currency, and religion. Baghdad—the old Babylon—is the new world capital.

  That’s not much different than the gospel according to Berg, where the emissaries of Satan “crept into our institutions in the form of university professors and high school teachers, and into our churches as moralistic pastors.

  “The Antichrist agents had thoroughly infiltrated our government agencies and our militaristic establishments so that every move was known by their central intelligence agency in the headquarters of the Antichrist government.”

  It was not a new message, but it rang true to many in the political left and hippie counterculture of the late sixties and early seventies. Berg disciples spread the ancient warning with renewed fervor. They donned red sackcloth and wore large wooden yokes around their necks. They smeared ashes on their foreheads, carrying Bibles in one hand and large staves in the other, pounding them on the ground in a mournful rhythm. They appeared at churches and government buildings around the nation, generating media interest wherever they went. They warned of impending doom raining down upon a decadent nation. It was quite a sight. John the Baptist had come back to Earth and taken over the dirty bodies of a bunch of crazed hippies.

  Meanwhile, Berg was mending fences with his old boss, Fred Jordan, who allowed the hippie army to occupy the televangelist’s abandoned ranch at Thurber, an old coal-mining settlement and one of the finest ghost towns in west Texas. Another garrison of Berg’s troops went to Jordan’s skid row mission in downtown Los Angeles, while others settled in Florida with Jane Berg, who had accepted her demotion and along with her children continued to bring new disciples into the fold.

  Faithy Berg was put in charge of the Los Angeles mission, while Aaron and Deborah Berg joined their father at the Texas Soul Clinic. The Berg family had lived on the 400-acre ranch back in the fifties, following Berg’s ouster from Valley Farms, but the place had fallen into serious disrepair. Berg arrived with a small army of disciples eager to rebuild the ranch into a basic training camp for his revolutionary recruits. Buses full of dropouts, runaways, and other counterculture flotsam poured into the camp.

  Jordan gave The Family positive media exposure on his TV program “Church in the Home.” Former hippies and druggies testified before the cameras about how Jesus had saved them from a life of sin. Some even had their long hair shorn on television. By 1971, the mainstream media had discovered the Jesus freaks. Newsweek found them on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. “They roam about in shaggy pairs, praising the Lord and pressing for converts at the drop of a psychedelic Bible tract.” NBC’s First Tuesday newsmagazine gave positive coverage in a nationally televised broadcast that profiled three Jesus people groups, including The Family.

  Another group featured in that broadcast was based in Atlanta and run by David Hoyt, the former Hare Krishna devotee who’d found Jesus in San Francisco on the eve of the Summer of Love. After founding a network of Jesus communes in California, Hoyt moved to Atlanta to establish a beachhead in the South. It had been three years since he, Kent Philpott, and Lonnie Frisbee stumbled across the beginnings of The Family in Huntington Beach. It seemed like a century ago.

  Berg’s following grew rapidly in the early seventies, from a few hundred to several thousand. Accurate membership figures in new religious movements are hard to establish, but The Family would claim to have more than eight thousand members by 1978. By the time NBC found the Jesus movement, David Hoyt had become overwhelmed by his own success.

  “We were housing about eighty people in Atlanta, many of them just recovering from being street people,” Hoyt explained in an interview decades later. “We were strapped financially. I was only twenty-five at the time and very young to be in charge of this whole thing.”20

  Hoyt saw salvation in The Family. Perhaps they had the organizational skills he lacked. He went off on a secret mission to check out the Texas Soul Clinic. “It was a very dumb mission,” he said. “I went incognito, posing as a seeker who’d just heard about their movement.” In a few days, Hoyt revealed who he really was, and the courtship began. “They were very excited about working with us. They said, ‘We have an excellent band. Let us come and visit you guys.’”

  Jeremy Spencer, a guitarist with the rock band Fleetwood Mac, had recently joined the sect after disappearing one night in 1971 while on tour at the Hollywood Bowl. Hoyt agreed to let the band come to Atlanta, but when The Family arrived, they came with more than just the band. “They bused people in and flew in people from all over the county,” Hoyt recalled. “From that moment onward it was just major confusion. They had a plan to take over our ministry. That was the hidden agenda. It was a nightmare. I felt terrible for years afterward. I just went along thinking they had the best of motives. They emptied out most of our ministry.”

  Hoyt and Philpott recalled these events three decades later. Kent Philpott had wound up pastor of Miller Avenue Baptist Church in Mill Valley, a small congregation in a prosperous Marin County suburb not far from the Baptist seminary where he and Hoyt lived during the Summer of Love. “I don’t think David Hoyt has ever recovered from the trauma he went through in Atlanta,” Philpott said. “Berg and his children had a spiritual power that was beyond what we could deal with. I believe it was a demonic spirit.”21

  Philpott pulled out an old file stuffed with Family tracts, or “Mo Letters,” that he had collected during the seventies and spread them over the desk in his cluttered office. Some of them were yellowed and frayed around the edges. Many of the leaflets are illustrated with covers that make them seem more like underground comics than Bible tracts. There’s one with a warning about the chaos coming in the wake of the comet Kohoutek in March of 1973. Another asks, “Are You a Dropout?” with an illustration copying the Zap Comics style of cartoonist R. Crumb. By the mid-seventies, Berg stopped hiding his sexual obsessions, and the cover art started looking more like cartoons from Playboy magazine than Christianity Today. “Come on Ma! Burn Your Bra!” one tract extorts, while another entitled “Mountin’ Maid,” reprints Berg’s poetic homage to the female breast. One particularly revealing tract, “Revolutionary Sex,” has a cover drawing of a hippie couple masturbating in a field of flowers. Two young children, a boy and girl, stand nearby, tenderly touching each other in an act of imitation.

  It was quite a leap from the earliest of Berg’s letters, written in 1970 and published two years later. They would hardly raise an eyebrow. One early compilation is illustrated with a pastoral scene of sheep in a mountain valley. In the neck of the shepherd’s crook is the title, “Letters from a Shepherd.” This collection, unlike the later letters to his followers, has Berg’s real name on the cover and begins with a poem written by his mother. Looking back at this early tract more than three decades later, there are two lines of Virginia Berg’s poem that jump out like an early warning signal:

  The lectures you deliver may be very wide and true;

  But I’d rather get my lessons by observing what you do.22

  That’s advice David Hoyt wishes he had followed. In those early years, when he joined forces with The Family, Berg had yet to reveal his sexual obsessions. In fact, Hoyt never even saw Berg during his indoctrination into the sect. Hose
a, the prophet’s younger son, was his main contact. Nevertheless, Hoyt clearly saw the abuse of power and the blind obedience inspired by the Endtime Prophet.

  “The lesson for me is to be very, very careful not to give your loyalty to any new teaching, new prophet, special revelation. My loyalty is to God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and to no pastor, teacher, or evangelist. I don’t care how big a following they have. No pastor or leader or man is infallible. You have to keep your eyes focused on what is pure and eternal. Don’t listen to the voices of prophets and prophecies. I’ve got that warning burned on my soul.”

  Hoyt brought four communes and scores of disciples into The Family. He also helped convince another Jesus movement leader in Seattle to bring members of her flock under Berg’s control. But at the same time, The Family’s zealous recruitment tactics were making as many enemies as they were converts. Berg had warned his followers that they would face persecution, and like many of his predictions, this one proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  On the Fourth of July in 1971, Ted Patrick took his family to watch the fireworks at Belmont Park in San Diego. At the time, Patrick was California Governor Ronald Reagan’s Special Representative for Community Relations in San Diego and Imperial Counties. During the evening Patrick lost track of his fourteen-year-old son and one of his nephews. They had not returned to the beachfront hotel room Patrick had rented. Just after midnight, as the worried father was about to call police, the two boys appeared back at the hotel looking “vacant, glazed and drifting.” They met some people with Bibles and guitars, they said, and there was just something about them that made it hard to leave. They wanted the boys to go with them, and promised that they’d never have to work, be sick, or go to school again. They wouldn’t even have to go to church because all of those things, along with their parents, were “of the Devil.” The encounter prompted Patrick to investigate. He let himself be recruited into The Family, and after several days determined that this dangerous cult was programming innocent recruits into its deceptive fold.23

  If young people could be programmed, he reasoned, they could also be de programmed. Patrick found other southern California parents whose children had disappeared or gone through sudden personality changes after meeting these intense Christian missionaries. They joined forces to help launch the anticult movement of the seventies. Parents began kidnapping their “brainwashed” children for intense “exit counseling.” The media-fueled cult wars began and The Family was right there in the opening battle. Berg’s prophecies were being realized. The persecution had begun.

  Patrick and the other parents didn’t know it, but they were playing right into David Berg’s hands. “Which of the prophets,” the Endtime Prophet asked, “have not your fathers persecuted?”

  Persecution is not bad, but good for you! It purges, purifies…. It tests your devotion and loyalty to Him and His, and keeps you closely dependent on Him, crying out for help! It purifies you and makes you mean business! It sees whether you’ve got what it takes, if you really love Him and His all the way! It purges the ranks of those that don’t mean business and who are not devoted, loyal and true, and who will not be faithful unto the end, but who, like Judas, will cop out under pressure and turn on you and betray you rather than suffer and die for you! It really shows you who’s who in your own ranks, and who is going to be dependable when even greater pressure comes!24

  5

  Family Circus

  ERATH COUNTY, TEXAS

  March 1970 – Texas Soul Clinic Ranch

  LIKE MOST OF THE BABES on the Jesus bus, Shula didn’t have many other options. Surrounding her on the ride from Los Angeles to west Texas were street people strung out on dope and kids running away from home. Others were just lonely or looking for something with meaning.

  In the parlance of The Family, they were all “babes,” meaning babies in Christ.

  Honk if you love Jesus!

  Shula was a babe. She was also pregnant and looking for a husband.

  She had been raised in the Baptist church in Anaheim, back when it advertised itself as the fastest-growing city in America. Then her family moved up to Beaumont, a small town on the eastern edge of the southern California sprawl. After high school she moved into Los Angeles, where she was in a bad car accident. “I was lost,” she said. “I had sex with this guy I hardly knew and ended up pregnant.”1

  Shula went to see her older brother. He’d just gotten out of the Navy and had run into a bunch of Jesus freaks on the streets of Palm Springs. “They’ve got all kinds of wonderful guys in there,” he told her. “If you join up with them, God will give you a husband.”

  The next thing Shula knew she was on a bus full of Jesus people heading for Texas. She needed love, and The Family had plenty of it. They were singing, laughing, praising Jesus. They were headed for the Texas Soul Clinic, the ranch where Fred Jordan had taught David Berg how to win souls for Jesus back in the fifties. Shula rolled into the Texas ranch in March 1970 but was not prepared for what hit her. “I got off the bus, and there was David Berg right there,” she recalled. “I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘This guy is crazier than a fruitcake. I’m getting back on the bus.’ He was speaking in tongues and laying on hands, and people would burst into tears. It’s a powerful thing to watch, especially as an outsider. Here he was praying for all these people, and I’m thinking, ‘He might as well pray for me. I need it.’

  “It was the most intense spiritual experience I’d felt since I was saved as a seven-year-old at a Baptist church camp. Who knows? Maybe I was imparted with his evil spirit. All I know was I fell in love with Berg right on the spot.”2

  By now, The Family was on a roll. Berg had left Huntington Beach for Arizona in 1969 with about fifty followers. “We began sending teams eastward by different routes to cover the major cities of the United States with our witness,” recalled Berg’s son, Hosea. “We were seeking to reach young people who were the same as ourselves, looking for something to do with their lives and to give their lives to.”3

  After the big gathering in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec, the hippie army had fanned back down into the United States. At one encampment in New Jersey, a local newspaper reporter came to check out the motley collection of tents, VW buses, trailers, and other vehicles.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

  “We told them we weren’t part of any group or church, we were just children of God,” Hosea said. “So they ran headlines in the newspapers about the ‘Children of God.’”

  Berg decided that name was as good as any, and it stuck for a while. There were more than 100 members of the tribe traveling in about three dozen vehicles when they regrouped in February 1970 at the Texas Soul Clinic.

  Those who joined The Family were encouraged to renounce all worldly possessions—to turn over all they owned for the collective good. Cars, stereos, television sets—not to mention bank accounts—were turned over to the group. In the early years, many Family colonies looked more like pawn shops or used car lots, as all the loot piled up for resale. While the proceeds were used to support colonies popping up around the states and overseas, they also provided Family leaders the resources they needed to scout out future encampments and find a network of safe houses for Berg and his growing staff.

  Meanwhile, back at the Texas ranch, Shula was still reeling from her encounter with David Berg when she got her first glimpse of the prophet’s oldest son. “Aaron pulled out a guitar and started singing: I’d rather hear from heaven than a thousand times from earth. For heaven knows what’s happening, and the men on earth do not. I got a supernatural feeling that told me, ‘You’re going to marry him.’”

  There were a couple of problems. Shula was pregnant with another man’s child, and Aaron was already married to a girl named Sara.

  In 1967, Sara Glasswell had been given her mother’s permission to travel the country with the Teens for Christ. She would later tell investigators working with the N
ew York Attorney General that she was forced to have sexual intercourse with Aaron in the presence of David Berg. She told them she was then compelled to obtain her mother’s permission to marry Aaron. After the birth of her first child, Sara Berg said her new father-in-law told her it was his turn to father her child, asking the teenage girl, “Why can’t you have my son?”4

  Sara said David Berg tried to seduce her several times before he married her to his son. “Of course, I jumped up and ran and things like this,” she said. “He never pushed it very far because I guess he was afraid I’d squeal. But once or twice he did make the attempt.”5

  David Berg seems to confirm his early sexual interest in Sara in his own diary. In an entry dated August 10, 1967, when the Teens for Christ were camped at the Texas ranch, Berg writes “kissed Sara in washhouse. She’s so sweet and good to me.”

  Berg officiated at the wedding of Aaron and Sara in November, just weeks before they arrived in Huntington Beach. “After I had married [Aaron] there were several times when [David Berg] tried to get me. He’d ask me to go to bed with him,” Sara said. “He said if I’d have his son’s children, why couldn’t I have his. He told me that nobody would know the difference if it was his or [Aaron’s].”6

  Over the next three years, Sara Berg gave birth to a son and a daughter. She later told New York state investigators that she “continued living with the group almost as a virtual prisoner.”

  It wasn’t until 1970, just a few weeks after Shula arrived at the Texas ranch, that Sara said she was able to escape with her baby daughter. At the time, Shula says, she had no idea that David Berg’s advances had forced Sara to flee the Texas Soul Clinic. All she knew, she says, was that Aaron was despondent over the departure of his first wife and baby daughter.