I first tried college at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Things went mostly unsuccessfully—I was on academic probation after my freshman year and then I dropped out in February of 1969, at the end of my third semester. I wandered back to Houston, my hometown, and got a job as a carpenter’s apprentice. I met a carpenter who talked to me about Jesus and I listened to him. He took me to his church and I listened some more. A month or so later I decided to become a Christian. It was August of 1969. But that December I met some one hundred radical-looking young people camping in a county park. They’d been traveling from place to place—they’d been at it for a year and a half. They said that Jesus was a revolutionary and that they were revolutionary Christians who’d given their lives to following Him the way the first Christians had done almost 2,000 years before. I was intrigued, charmed, enchanted—I liked what I saw and heard so much that I joined them the next day, leaving my job and the church I had been going to. I was twenty years old. My life with the Children of God had begun.
The illustration above, taken from an Esquire Magazine feature dating from 1970, portrays one of the Children of God involved in a sackcloth vigil, done in imitation of the ancient prophet Jeremiah, one whom the Bible says was sent by God around 600 B.C. to warn the ancient land of Judah of the danger of turning away from God. This was something–the sackcloth vigil–the group did back when I joined–it was a way, it was said, of sounding a message of warning about God’s impending judgment of America for forgetting God. Our leader taught that we had been given the “message of Jeremiah”; we were to warn the nation that it better “get right with God.”
The occasion for the vigil in the portrait was the trial of the Chicago Seven in September of 1969–it was in Chicago, naturally enough. Some thirty members of the group participated, standing in somber silence in the midst of a shouting multitude of demonstrators; this particular vigil was a few months before I joined. The portrait shows the kind of grave seriousness with which we took ourselves, but I now know–after many years of brooding about these things–that it was not a seriousness steeped in a deep understanding of Christianity.
Nine years later I was still with them–now in one of the group’s communes, or “colonies,” as we called them, in Santiago, Chile. The one hundred people in the group had grown to more than 8,000. The enchanting charm and intriguing appeal of nine years earlier was still there to some degree, but these things had grown somewhat worn. The notion that we were following Jesus-the-revolutionary had evolved; it now seemed that more than anything else we were following the leader of the group, one David Berg, otherwise known as Moses David. That was okay for a time, too–I thought we could follow both Jesus and “Mo,” as we called our leader. But one day, suddenly, I saw him–Mo–sort of in a flash–in a new light and for the first time I realized something fundamental had changed; I couldn’t trust him the way I had before. No need now to go into what I saw in that flash of insight; that’s a story for later. But shortly after that, I left Chile and returned to Houston and never returned to the Children of God. I hadn’t realized that I’d joined a cult for some time after I’d left the group—but I had. I don’t think anyone knowingly really joins a cult.
That first year or two out of the group was strange—I had been so much affected by my life in the Children of God; getting my bearings anew apart from it all took time. Meanwhile, I worked at different jobs for two and a half years around Houston and then I decided to go back to college–to give “higher education” a second try. I spent a year in the Honors Program at the University of Houston and things went well with my studies this time. Then, thanks to the generosity of Brown University, I was able to return there to finish what I’d so inauspiciously started a dozen years before. Settling in back in Providence, Rhode Island, academic pursuits were now very agreeable. I should say that my reentry into university studies was made especially pleasant this time thanks in large part to the vision for learning imparted by John Danford, a professor with whom I had studied at the University of Houston Honors Program the year before. It was through him that I discovered that college, if it’s to be successful in truly educating a person, must be about good teachers; they’re the ones who make the whole enterprise worthwhile.
After two years I graduated from Brown magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English and American Literature; I can say I was doing much better now academically than when I’d left the place in the middle of my sophomore year some fifteen years before.
I spent a significant part of my second and final year back at Brown working on a lengthy memoir of my nine years of cult life. In the summer after my graduation I sent the completed manuscript to a number of agents and publishers and received several kind replies, though no takers. Some of the thoughtful responses I received indicated my effort was interesting, but that something was missing; above all, they felt, there was a lack of resolution. Where did I really stand with my cult experience? It didn’t seem entirely clear to those to whom I’d sent my work. This was only five years or so after I’d left the cult, and there was still in my mind a significant degree of uncertainty and confusion about it all—something apparent to my readers, if not to me.
The late Professor William McLoughlin, with whom I had the privilege of studying when I returned to Brown, also read my manuscript. I had taken his course, History 177, “The History of Religion in America,” with much interest and had gone to see him in his office several times. After he’d read my work he generously wrote me a combination “Reader’s Review” and personal letter. Professor McLoughlin, the late Annie McClelland and Willard Prescott Smith Professor of History and Religion at Brown, is still regarded as one of the most distinguished modern historians of American religion and what he wrote me reflected his background.
Professor McLoughlin took a kindly interest in my story, initially because he saw it in the context of the whole of American religious history, which was, after all, his field of expertise. Yet his interest was more than academic. Professor McLoughlin’s disposition was genuinely personal and warm-hearted; his attitude toward me was one of friendship. He was not only a scholar, but a deeply humane man and I was fortunate to have known him.
Through our discussions he learned even more of my story than what I had written in my memoir. His closely reasoned and detailed review and letter about my narrative fully covered two single-spaced pages and was filled with insights such as only a scholar of his caliber could have had. He praised some aspects of my manuscript, but his concluding lines hit me quite hard, so that I almost forgot everything else he’d said, for his last words were not praise but an acute insight. He wrote, “Maybe it will be thirty years before you can really assess your experience….I closed the book thinking, `He still doesn’t know what hit him.’ The scars are still too sore. Somehow time will have to mellow the emotional experience into a broader worldview.”
Professor McLoughlin was wonderfully prescient, but he overestimated my capacities; it has taken me not thirty years, but over forty, to come to conclusions that do the subject greater justice. That early memoir attempt was the heart cry of an injured lover, not the accounting of one who understands and can thoroughly explain what happened, and how and why.
I hope Professor McLoughlin would agree that now I have a fuller knowledge of “what hit me,” though I am still sure I have not plumbed the deepest depths of the long affair. Nonetheless, here is an effort better grounded in an understanding of the truths of Christianity and of the untruths that were so much a part of the life of the cult which I embraced for so long.
As I write this, I am conscious of a relevant passage from the Psalms: “Thou rulest the raging of the sea: when the waves thereof arise, thou stillest them” (Psalm 89:9). A presence greater than me has kept me and has stilled the waves that were nearly my undoing, and in so doing saved me from drowning, as I so easily might have. It has been that ruler of the raging sea who has rescued me so that I am alive and well and able to tell the story I am here about to relate.
The world even now is full of many wolves in sheep’s clothing, deceivers and wrongdoers who are only too ready to practice their ways on the unwary. May the account this little essay precedes sound a gentle and helpful word of caution about such things to those who read it. Finally, may my memoir also point to the beauty of the rescue from lostness that I have known. Truly the one who quiets the raging of the sea has been merciful to me.
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