博客來50 Years in a Sect: My Life with a Sex Cult! (284 pages) tells the story of life within one of recent history’s most controversial religious sects: The Children of God! Later changing its name to the Family of Love, or simply ’The Family’ -- the fast-growing and highly unorthodox Christian movement gained notoriety as a ’sex cult’ due to its practice of using sex to win new converts! It also believed in sexual ’sharing’ with other adults within one’s communal group.
Following a firebrand maverick preacher, members left their old lives behind and dropped out of society to begin new lives in idealistic communes, made up mostly of ex-hippies and society rejects who now lived together and shared everything. Members quickly learned that the end of the world was not far away, with Jesus expected to come back in 1993!
David Berg, nicknamed Moses David, the founder and self-styled prophet of this ’spiritual revolution’, had warning dreams of God’s impending judgments falling on the wicked nations of the western world. In his messages, known as Mo letters, Berg strongly encouraged his followers to leave the West and go to poorer, undeveloped countries to be missionaries.
With no financial support whatsoever, members dutifully obeyed, travelling to far-flung parts of the globe. Thus it was that this author spent the next 50 years in India, Nepal, southern Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific islands! All through this incredible life journey, the Family’s numerous ’revolutions’ brought tremendous social upheaval and 180 degree changes in direction, making life exciting and eventful, but also bringing some personal heartbreak as families sometimes found themselves separated due to being on different status levels. In the case of the author’s second family, the children were ’kidnapped’ and taken away by the Social Services.
Although this book has some sexual content, it is not intended to be a scandal-filled, lurid account of sexual excesses. It is meant to be a real account of what life was really like within the groups’ closed communities -- both good and bad. And how, 50 years later, after changing its form and reinventing itself several times, the movement is still going strong...
