Faith Jones grew up believing that her paternal grandfather was the voice of God. As far as she knew, he was a divinely anointed End-Time prophet with a generous white beard who was leading thousands of disciples to salvation. This wasn’t just the story her parents had told her. It was the message in all of the comics she read where her grandfather was portrayed as a cartoonish Moses, a bespectacled lion or a bare-chested love god snuggling up with multiple naked women. He — David Berg, the American founder of the Children of God sect — was “Grandpa” to every disciple, and sometimes “Papa Lion”, “King David” or “Mo”, short for Moses.
The fact that Jones had never met the leader of the infamous sex cult — or Family, as it was known — added to his mystique. Berg had been in hiding since before she was born. He communicated via illustrated newsletters in which he preached the Law of Love, a doctrine that sanctioned spouse sharing and made female disciples, including young girls, the sexual property of the men in the cult. Grandpa’s location was a secret, with all photographs of him burnt to protect his identity. Or that’s what Jones thought until she was ten, and her mother opened a safe and shared a few illicit pictures.
In her memoir Jones describes the moment she stared at the images in the office of the Macau commune where she grew up. “Grandpa doesn’t look nearly as magnificent as all the drawings I’ve seen of him,” she writes. “Instead of the full, imposing beard, his is thin and wiry as weeds. He has deep-set eyes like my father, but not the all-knowing power portrayed by the cartoons.”
Although the seeds of doubt were planted early, Jones didn’t begin to question the Family’s doctrines until she was 23, when she escaped the group. Sex Cult Nun is the story of how she survived a childhood that would have broken many — and indeed did, because her experiences of subjugation, punishment and sexual abuse were shared by thousands of children who grew up in the cult. Not all of these sexualised “nuns and monks” emerged so resilient.
If the book’s title sounds sensationalist, well, so are the events within it. Now 44 and a successful lawyer, Jones describes in vivid present-tense narration how aged four she watched her mother demonstrate masturbation on her father. He had two wives and kept many of his children in line with a wooden paddle that he called the “Rod of God”. When she was six he filmed her dancing naked for a Family video, attracting the attention of an “uncle”, who forced her to perform a sex act on him. “From this point forward I don’t like to be around adult men,” she says.
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Other escapees have shared similarly chilling stories, but none has offered Jones’s unique perspective as cult “royalty”. Although she spent her childhood living beneath the poverty line, she was famous within the sect for her star turns in the Family’s international bulletins, Kidz True Komics. “Little Faithy” was depicted feeding the animals on their Macau farm or busking with her siblings in their winsome singing troupe. As well as gratifying the sexual urges of the men, the children and women were the main breadwinners.
The Children of God was founded in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California, by Berg, who hailed from a line of evangelists and missionaries. He targeted disillusioned young hippies, preaching against traditional Christianity and calling capitalist America “evil Babylon, the Whore”. He declared that his disciples needed to take their spiritual revolution against “the System” overseas, but once they were estranged from their actual families his teachings about sex became strict and militaristic.
In one of the first “Mo Letters”, as his newsletters were known, Berg introduced the idea of sharing mates, essentially enforcing polygamy. He later established prostitution (“Flirty Fishing”) as a way for women to make money for the cult. Jones recalls accompanying her mother on these dates, even sleeping in the same bed. Children were often born from “FFing” (and named “Jesus Babies”), as well as Family “sex sprees”. Jones’s mother gave birth to her father’s sixth child two days before his mistress gave birth to his seventh. Burdened with caring for her siblings, Jones was terrified of becoming pregnant herself.
It was ultimately a love of learning that inspired her slow withdrawal from the cult. Brought up on apocalyptic Bible stories and kinky cartoons, Jones longed to read “secular” fiction, pouncing on an errant copy of The Secret Garden and begging her maternal grandparents to send her regular books. After living in Family compounds in Thailand, Japan, Kazakhstan and China, she finally broke away to pursue her formal schooling in the US. She obtained a scholarship from Georgetown University and then Berkeley School of Law, where she began to see the cult’s violations in legal terms. It’s fascinating to watch the scales falling from her eyes.
Jones is determined not to let Sex Cult Nun become a misery memoir, but her message of education and empowerment can’t help being overshadowed by the most lurid details of her childhood. What haunted me most were the Family’s punishments for children deemed “unyielding”. At 12, Jones was put on “silence restriction”, which required her to wear a sign around her neck instructing people not to talk to her: “I am learning to be yielded and submissive.” At one point she lets slip that an elder brother spent the equivalent of one year out of three in solitary confinement.
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Why are we so interested in cults? A fear of mind control? “Even people who consider themselves forward-thinking, modern and cynical about their political system and history can still have indoctrination so deep they just can’t see past it,” Jones says. The techniques that the Children of God used to indoctrinate aren’t unique to extreme sects. They can be found in families, workplaces and political movements: preying on the vulnerable and offering them reward; love-bombing the loyal and humiliating the disobedient; demanding ever more public acts of devotion to the in-group while isolating individuals from outside help.
In the closing pages Jones writes that the statistics for abuse against children and women show “it’s a world culture”. Love is often used to mask all kinds of perversion of power, she reminds us. The line between cultish devotion and what the rest of us believe is fuzzier than we think.
Sex Cult Nun by Faith Jones
HarperCollins £16.99 pp400
