One of the most unshakeable reading experiences I’ve had in the last year is Don Lattin’s Jesus Freak: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge. Taking a cue from Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, Lattin uses the story of a freakish murder-suicide as the occasion to research the nature of cultish religious belief. Lattin’s sect is a little less known than Krakauer’ fundamentalist Mormons–in Jesus Freaks we follow the founding and flourishing of the Children of God/Family International. The group was initially an offshoot of sorts from the Jesus Movement, the evangelical hippie revival of the 1970s. But under the apocalyptic teaching of a self-described messiah and “End-Time Prophet” named David Berg, the Children of God became a corrupted, sexualized regime that drove its decedents to murderous acts. 

You anticipate in
your introduction that a lot of evangelical Christians will have a problem with
the title “Jesus Freaks.” You’ve got that right–this is a book about
cultists, and it sounds like you are conflating them with other Jesus
followers. Why did you choose this title?

When I did the
historical research on Berg’s beginnings, two things were clear. One, that he
definitely came out of the evangelical movement. He was in ministry with his
mother and with his children and ordained with the Christian Missionary
Alliance. And when the Children of God started, they were originally called
Teens for Christ. He initially had support within the evangelical movement
until some people started hearing what was really going on underneath.

What were
Bergen’s evangelical roots?

He started out kind
of Holiness Pentecostal. His mother was a pretty well known evangelist in the
1920s in the mode of Aimee Semple McPherson. That’s where he really learned the
tricks of the evangelical trade.

How does someone
transition from garden variety evangelical preacher to “The End-Time
Prophet”?

This was a guy who
was a miserable failure as a preacher and evangelist. He was 50 years old when
he started this thing, and he had been in his mother’s shadow for so long. I
think a lot of it was he was just mad at the world because of the failures that
he had in his own ministry. Then, when he got this following, I think it
convinced him more and more that he was a prophet. His time had finally
come–you know, the whole Messianic complex.

Berg is often in the background in this book, which
I think is probably how he existed for his followers, too.

That’s the thing.
How can someone have this much power over people that had never even see him?
They didn’t even know what he looked like. They weren’t allowed to see pictures
of him. He was a drawing of a lion–a friendly lion–on all the literature, his
photograph with a drawing of a lion for the head.

Was Berg central
in the minds of the community as the leader of this movement?

No doubt about it.
He wrote thousands of missives. I talked to people who were in his inner
circle, one that was anonymous in the book. He said that [Berg] never went
anywhere without someone carrying a tape recorder. A lot of his writings were
just his rantings. He was basically a religious drunk. He would get drunk
around the dinner table and start talking, and that’s kind of why he said such
outrageous things. But it was later edited and checked, and they still sent it
out.

You write that
cults show us how religions are born, and you draw a connection between David Berg
and Catholic pedophilia and Muslim terrorists.  What
connects those three different groups?

In a way you could
say that all religions start as cults, or sects. Christianity started as a
Jewish sect, right? And take the Mormon church–a lot of people still think
that Mormonism is a cult. People are so interested in studying the development
of Mormonism because there’s a written record. Most religions are from
antiquity, and it’s really hard to see what was going on. With Berg–he wrote
down everything. So you can see how the theology develops.

Do you see Ricky
as kind of a symbol for products of religious upbringings?

As a religion writer
over the years, I have come across a lot of people who were raised in strict,
conservative evangelical–some would say fundamentalist–churches that feel like
it was abusive, that they’re survivors of Christianity.

[David Hoyt] said,
“The lesson for me is to be very, very careful not to give your loyalty to any
new teaching, new prophet, special revelation. My loyalty is to God and Jesus
Christ and the Holy Spirit, and to no pastor, teacher or evangelist. I don’t care how big
a following they have. No pastor or leader or man is infallible. I’ve got that warning burned on my soul.”

That’s why I think this a book that Evangelicals should read.