Seminole Lovelight, the Children of God & Other Episodes from Cult Life

SEMINOLE LOVELIGHT is the story of the author’s nine years with the group known as the Children of God. While in some part a chronicle of his life in that cult, his memoir is also a meditation on the ease with which a person can be fooled, a primer on how to spy out frauds and a declaration of the conviction that something worthwhile can be gained even from being the dupe of a charming, flattering wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Just to the left here is an illustration–an oil painting published in Esquire Magazine–depicting one of the earliest members of the Children of God dressed in sackcloth, carrying a staff and issuing an enigmatic warning. The sackcloth vigil  was one of the group’s earliest tactics. The setting for its use this time was the troubled trial of the Chicago Seven in September, 1969. These young men were on trial for leading the violent demonstrations at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in August of the previous year. Some thirty members of the Children of God stood vigil at one of the protests supporting the defendants; they were all dressed in sackcloth and warning of the coming judgment of God against America for her sins–the warning couched in the scrolls they each held. A few months afterwards, at the end of ’69, the author of this memoir met and joined the group as they were camped out in the woods of a county park near Houston, Texas. When he joined, there were only about 100 members but by the end of 1978–when the author departed–there were some 8,000 people in the Children of God.

There are over 5,000 cults in America today—this story deals with just one of them, and one, like so many others,  characterized by remarkable persuasiveness on the part of the leader and equally strong delusion among both leader and followers. Something all cults have in common is that it’s a sure thing that no one joins one knowing he or she is about to enter a web of deceptions—there’s never a sign out front saying, “Welcome to our cult!” Thus the story of being in a cult is going to be a story about being fooled—there’s no way around that. The followers are surely being fooled, but the leader, too–with the unwitting support of those who look to him–is also mightily deceived.

Among the lessons this memoirist learned is that it pays to beware of the overly charming. But if one can’t manage that, at least if one can make oneself go slowly, ask questions and be cautious when confronted with what appears to be an exceedingly rosy temptation, then there’s some hope of not being taken in.

But this author may be heard to make a confession: Baaaaaaaaa. Baaaaaaaa. Since people can be like sheep and sheep can be pretty dumb, he wants to say that it’s easier to be taken in than one may suppose. Yet this story, while warning about wolves in sheep’s clothing (and the founder of the cult known as Children of God, one David Berg, was surely one of those) is a plea not to lose hope that there are such things as good shepherds who point honestly to the true gospel found in the Bible.

The author hopes readers will come along and revisit his cult years with him and that they will find something useful in his description and analysis of how he was taken in and how he came out of that strong delusion which he had once so completely taken for truth. Here is a tale with running commentary about things he learned, written down in hope that it might be of real worth to you or someone you love regarding snares and traps which are not always so easily avoided.

Just below, there’s an illustration poignantly portraying how such traps and snares can catch a person; it shows how cults work and how the Children of God’s leader and founder worked, in particular. Read on and see.

The engraving reproduced just to the right is an illustration taken from John Bunyan’s novel, Pilgrim’s Progress. It depicts the heroes of the novel, Christian and Hopeful, after having come to a crossroads and met and followed a man dressed in a white robe. In this robed figure is a picture of the cult leader looking very much like a wise personage, dressed for the role and speaking like a guide. But in time the two wayfarers were led to a place where they were trapped in a net spread for them by this man whose name, we finally learn, is “Flatterer.” He is seen in the picture fleeing the scene just as a “Shining One” appears who comes to the two trapped friends and frees them. If it had not been for this savior, it is not likely at all that they would ever have been set free.

Meeting the group later known as the Children of God was, for the author of this memoir, like coming to a crossroads where one way meets another. There he met one who seemed so wise. The two ways forming the crossroads at the moment he arrived there looked in many respects very much alike, only the new way seemed more attractive than the path of association with a church–the path on which he began his Christian life only four months earlier.

The group—and behind it David Berg, also known as Moses David, the leader all members called “Mo”—very convincingly declared a belief in Jesus and spoke winningly of a hope that was in heaven. This memoir’s author and all his fellows were being told by this seemingly wise one, “Follow me, I am certainly going there—to the Celestial City—and I am following Jesus!” And so, attractive as the path he pointed out to those he addressed was, and as charming as he himself appeared to be , the author and many others followed.

David Berg—Moses David—praised these followers, these “disciples” and told them that in following him they were following Jesus. He told them they were doing it better–being Jesus’ disciples–than anyone else, and they were flattered, though none of them thought of it as flattery and so didn’t recognize it as such. But flattery can be a subtle and very powerful thing—and very dangerous, because it is so disarming even as it spreads a net in which you may be caught.

To quote Pilgrim’s Progress, speaking of the pair of believers depicted above:

“….the road, which by Degrees turned, and turned them so from the City that they desired to go to, that in a little time their faces were turned away from it, yet they followed him. But, by and by, before they were aware, he led them both within the Compass of a Net, in which they were both so entangled, that they knew not what to do; and with that the White robe fell…off the man’s back: Then they saw where they were. Therefore there they lay crying some time, for they could not get themselves out. Then Christian said to his fellow, Now do I see myself in an Error.”

Like these two in Pilgrim’s Progress, the author and his fellows in the Children of God had chosen one path that seemed so much like the true path at first but was finally revealed to be a very wrong one, and so they found themselves trapped in great and quite nearly fatal error.

Christian was only finally freed from the entangling net of his mistake by “a Shining One” who told him and his companion, Hopeful, speaking of the man clothed in white who had misled them, “It is Flatterer, a false Apostle, that hath transformed himself into an Angel of Light.”

This “Shining One,” as Bunyan put it, “rent the Net, and let the men out. Then said he to them, Follow me, that I may set you in your Way again; so he led them aback to the Way which they had left to follow the Flatterer.”

This is a most accurate representation of what befell those in the Children of God.

The author of Seminole Lovelight takes his readers back to the beginning of his story to tell them where he came from, how he joined, and more than that, how he came to be the person he was who did such a thing. He includes chapters describing how his life went after his deliverance and ends with what might be called a song of thanksgiving to the wisest and best of all shepherds.

The quotations above are from John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress with Intro. by David Hawkes (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005) pp. 150-152.