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The Children of God
The Inside Story By The Daughter Of The Founder, Moses David Berg by Deborah (Linda Berg) Davis with Bill Davis, 1984
On coming out of the Children of God, I, like all ex-cult members, was face to face with the question of survival. Since coming into a new Reality, I have thought about survival, and specifically, what is the sustaining factor that keeps people from breaking under duress? What enables people to withstand torture or imprisonment or even the daily pressures of life? We don't ordinarily regard alcoholism, depression, or drug dependency as a form of breaking under torture, but in reality, they are much the same. The man or woman who can't "cope" with the pressures of life, marital, social, financial, or job-related—and turns to an artificial release such as drinking, is running from the problem, breaking, and escaping into an illusion. I found many insights and parallels to my own situation in Every Secret Thing, Patty Hearst's story of her kidnapping and ordeal with the small revolutionary group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.133 To some degree, all of us have been in Patty's position. There is a lot to learn from her story. Through no choice of her own, Patty was kidnapped, abused, and forced to follow the SLA in 1974. She lived under an ever-present threat of death. Patty decided that in order to survive, to stay alive, she would say and do whatever her captors demanded. Patty recalls a turning point in her captivity that occurred during a thirty-day confinement in a small closet. She came to the point of having to decide whether to live or die. A silent battle was waged there in the closet, and my mind won. Deliberately and clearly, I decided I would not die of my own accord. I would fight with everything in my power to survive; to see this through. I would concentrate on staying alive one day at a time.134 As she yielded her will to theirs, consciously agreeing and accepting, she opened herself to the effects of brainwashing and mind control. What happened to her parallels exactly the pattern of the voluntary suspension of disbelief. To stay alive, Patty came to accept as reality what she knew to be false. I experienced the same thing in my life, even though my circumstances were different in detail. The fear of death triggered in Patty Hearst's mind a well-defined course of action, to which she responded. She would do anything to stay alive. However, throughout her captivity and involvement with the SLA, the underlying fears, resentment, and ambiguities gnawed at her conscience and never gave her peace. She was a woman convinced against her will. She was forced to live with a violated conscience. I experienced this same condition in the COG. Beneath all the thoughts lies a tormenting confusion that does not allow for peace or happiness. Patty did what was necessary to accomplish her goal of staying alive. In regard to the famous bank robbery in which she was forced to take part, she says, As Patty's ordeal of physical captivity continued, she eventually became a prisoner to her fears. I can understand exactly this mental polarity, this conflict of conscience, the melting of right and wrong into an amorphous mess. It is like mixing sugar and salt. To look at it, no one can tell the difference, yet to taste it causes the palate to explode in contradiction. The physical response to the taste is nausea and vomiting. A similar response takes place morally and psychologically in a situation like Patty's. When I returned to my father and his movement after running away in London, I felt as if my mind had been split with an ax. On the one hand, I knew how diseased Dad was morally; on the other, I wanted to serve God. There was no peace—only confusion and a spiritual and psychological nausea. To try to live in perversion and for the glory of God at the same time was insanity. Fear is a powerful, though vile, motivation. Where conscience is involved, fear creates a moral polarity that tears the soul apart. One lives continually with the question, "What is more acceptable, to bypass one's conscience because of fear, and knowingly do what is wrong, or to yield to the demands of conscience and do what it tells you is right regardless of the consequences?" I will not judge Patty Hearst; that is not my place, but God's; yet I was faced with the very same kind of choice that she was when I was face to face with my father. So many times I was faced with the choice of living for the Cause of David Berg, or resisting him at risk of suffering. I failed. Repeatedly I buckled under to fear. I repressed my guilt, violated my conscience, and did things I knew were immoral and wrong, justifying them through religious reasoning, through the "good works" we were doing. I judge myself now on the basis of truths I learned the hard way—through failure, agony, and seeing the consequences of my sin in the lives of my children and others whom I love. I think about Patty Hearst and wonder, "What if she had resisted her captors?" According to the conditions of her captivity and the fanatical zeal of the SLA, she would have been shot. What would have happened had I withstood my father? Only God knows. My brother fought the same spiritual battle I did. He could not follow Dad with a clear conscience, yet he would not face him and call him wrong. The confusion overwhelmed him, so he ended it all. I too lived with a haunting desire for suicide. Until I left the Children of God, I never withstood my father, and no one else in my family has. Why? Because of fear. It is not for fear of physical harm, for as I have said, my dad has never exhibited a violent nature. He was a loving and gentle father as I was growing up. Rather, his power comes from intimidating people through a subtle blend of sin and pride, using their own guilty conscience as a lever against them. One can become free of my father only through conquering the fear of accepting mistakes and facing one's sin. Conquer this fear, and David Berg loses the power to intimidate. But it is perhaps the greatest of all fears. To expose my dad was to expose myself; so for a long time I decided instead to follow him and sin after him. I see that people in a situation like Patty Hearst's, or like mine, have a great need. That need is for strength of character founded on godly principles. The sixties were an era of great rebellion; but rebellion does not build character. Rebellion is the result of a soul suffering the burden of sin and guilt. And immorality does not build character. Greed and the love of money do not build character. The power that will destroy cults and destructive groups such as the SLA is the strength of character grounded in the power and authority of scriptural principles. Great men of God in history have not been ruled by fear. Neither fear of death, nor of torture, nor failure, nor social rejection. Rather, they have been governed by divine standards. These standards keep us strong, free from mental polarity, and free from the torment of soul wrought by a fear of conscience. In contrast to Patty Hearst's decision, consider the ordeal of Richard Wurmbrand. He was face to face with unmitigated evil and abuse for fourteen years, yet he did not break. He did not bend to the will of his captors. He is a living example of his own statement that persecution and suffering reveal strength of personal character or the lack of it. Many Christians have asked Wurmbrand, "Which Scriptures helped you endure your torture?" His response is intriguing. "Christians," Wurmbrand wrote, "were tied to crosses for three days and three nights. The crosses were laid on the floor at different times of the day, and the other prisoners were tortured in such a way as to force them to relieve their bodily necessities on the faces of these men. Then the crosses were erected again. "One does not hang upon a cross," he said."Your body cries out in agony at the torment of the pain, so you twist and turn to find a more comfortable position, only to find that the new one is more painful than the last. You do not hang upon a cross, you writhe in endless agony. "In such conditions we knew the verse. 'My grace is sufficient for thee', but the verse 'My grace is sufficient' was not sufficient. We also knew the Twenty-third Psalm, 'The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want', but the psalm about the Shepherd did not help us. A verse about grace was not sufficient; we needed grace. A psalm about the Shepherd was not sufficient; we needed the Shepherd Himself. No verse on earth could enable us to endure such torture." The Communists also put Wurmbrand's wife in prison, and his only son was left to himself, without mother or father to care for him, at the age of ten. When the interrogators were not torturing Richard Wurmbrand, then his mind and heart were torturing him as to what had become of his family. Only the person of Jesus Christ, he explains, can sustain a person in such circumstances. "In the West," Wurmbrand writes, "I see a danger of Christians worshipping the Bible." He makes a statement that puzzled me at first; but when I considered it in light of the confusion and suffering I had experienced because of the Children of God, its meaning became clear. "The Bible is not 'the Truth,'" Wurmbrand writes."God is 'the Truth.' The Bible is 'the truth about the Truth.' Theology, if it is the right theology, is 'the truth about the truth about the Truth'; and a good sermon is 'the truth about the truth about the truth about the Truth'; and Christian people live in these many truths about the Truth, and, because of them, have not 'the Truth.'"139 Wurmbrand further explains that people must strip away the scaffolding of words that surrounds "the Truth." We must penetrate through everything that is "words" and be bound up with the reality of God Himself. This is the secret that enabled him to endure fourteen years of suffering under the Communists. Under constant threat of death, innumerable tortures, near- starvation, and bitter cold, Wurmbrand would not recant his faith in Christ, betray his fellow Christians, (even though he was sent to prison as a result of another's betrayal), or swear allegiance to his captors' regime. Miraculously, he survived. His wife also survived six years in prison; and their son lived to see them both freed. There are countless thousands of Christians who have not escaped death—the martyrs of the Underground Church. But more miraculous than the fact of Richard Wurmbrand's survival, is the power that enabled him to resist the fear of death. Because his life was founded on divine principles, because he was bound up with the Reality of God, he was motivated by love and not by hate. The power of his resistance was love. He professed as much love for his tormentors as for his brothers in Christ. The power of the love of God enabled him with strength and clarity of mind to live in forgiveness instead of becoming a twisted, embittered, foul, and hateful man. Unlike me, Wurmbrand did not choose to stay alive "at any cost." He conquered his fear. He was not intimidated by it or ruled by evil as a consequence. He was in prison, but not a prisoner. Fear is the real prison. Ironically, Wurmbrand found eternal freedom in the cold, dark prison cells of Rumania. Great men are ruled by divine principles. This is what we must teach our children. This is the one true power against cults or any outside forces that would dominate us. And more than that, through Christ it is the power over evil itself. We see a tree, yet we cannot touch its beauty with our hearts because our hearts are bound with fear and sin. We see our children, yet our emotions are not at liberty to open the floodgates of love with which we would engulf them. We see, but we cannot touch. We feel, yet our hearts are bound. How many live in prison? In varying degrees, we are all in the prisons of our sinful selves, of wrong and limited ideas; but Jesus can free us of these. We must teach our children by our own example to understand, believe in, and live by divine standards revealed to us in Scripture; otherwise, they will not have sufficient strength of character to recognize and resist evil. Ultimately, fear will rule their hearts, and consequently rule the world. As I scan the panorama of my past, it is hard to see anything but the mountains of failures and mistakes; but God has set before me a new pathway. God has put to me the question, "Despite your past failures, can you purpose in your heart never again to be ruled by fear?" I have accepted that challenge.
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