As with many of the books that interest me the most, this one raises rather more questions than it answers. That's OK; I have two more about the same basic topic (the Children of God aka The Family International), and lots of material culled from the Internet. I'm preparing a Power Point tentatively titled "But What About the Children?" to be presented at the Ethical Society on August 31.
Author Don Lattin has studied cults , and especially destructive cults, for some 30 years, covering the People's Temple, Branch Davidian, Heaven's Gate and the Family. He's also studied fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. In fact, he's had the writing career I ought to have had!
This line from the front inside dust cover sums it up neatly: "Jesus Freaks is a cautionary tale for those who fail to question the prophesies and proclamations of anyone who claims to speak for God." Or as I put it myself in trying to explain my 20+ years with Steve Holzman: I came to trust his judgment more than my own. Very, very dangerous, and I'm beginning to think I was lucky that Steve's magick failed.
Ricky Rodriguez was not so lucky. Having been raised as cult leader David "Moses" Berg's hand-crafted successor, he was told from the beginning that he was destined to be a martyr for the cause of bringing on the Rapture. He was also the guinea pig for Berg's pedophilia ideas of child-rearing, being pampered and petted -- oh, very much petted! -- from infancy. His mother and three or four other women of the cult were in the habit of performing oral sex on him as a way to relax him to get to sleep, as well as masturbating him, offering their bodies to him to play with, and offering his infant female cousin to "hump."
Due to these and other unconventional ideas about "sacred sex," including what they called "flirty fishing," but which was nothing short of using sex to lure in male members [sorry; the puns are part of the story, unfortunately], the group moved from home to home constantly, in all different countries, involved in child custody battles with the enraged spouses of Family members, issues of fraudulent financial practices, and so on.
One of the most amazing things about the story of Ricky Rodriguez, called "Davidito" (Little David) by the Family, was that while he was about three years old, the Family published a book entitled The Story of Davidito which was distributed throughout the organization as a manual for how to raise children. It was lavishly illustrated with pictures of the toddler Davidito and his "nurses," explicitly engaged in sexual conduct! Obviously, the censors considered it kiddie porn.
I said one of the problems was that the book raises at least as many questions as it answers. For one thing, the organization still exists, under the name The Family International. For another, if Davidito was so pampered and indulged, and the pictures show he did a lot of smiling, why did he rebel?
The answer goes to the heart of the question "But What About the Children?" that I mentioned earlier. The people who joined the cult as adults were mostly OK with the sexual part. Indeed, I almost joined myself when I heard about it in the early 1970s. The religion is otherwise very much fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity, with much "praise the Lord" and all of that. Indeed, I sympathize with the idea that sex can be a pathway to spiritual enlightenment, and calling on God at peak experiences is not necessarily inappropriate.
But the children did not choose; they were born there, or joined as little ones when their parents did. They didn't find out until they were nearly adult that the way they lived was not only not the norm, but was the reason they had to hide from everyone and be constantly on the run. Also, discipline was sometimes quite severe, and could be due to unwillingness to engage in specific acts with specific adults. For girls especially, being unwilling to do their share of "flirty fishing" could get them beaten black and blue, or sent to "victory camp," which is to say victory over the demons that cause them to disobey. They were exposed to "exorcism" which involved being sufficiently brutal to them that the demon possessing them would consider it no longer worthwhile and would depart.
And they developed the view that sex was all about using and controlling and being so open that they were criticized for wanting to close the bedroom door and not let anyone watch! One girl was told that if she left the group, she would be good for nothing but prostitution and drug addiction and disease and an early death.
So what about the children? Just when is it appropriate for the Child Protective Services or the courts to interfere between parent or guardian and child? Where do we draw the line?
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Emmanuele Massimi
This book is worth reading if you are interested in ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 5, 2014
