The Margaret Mead of the North American Weirdo: Christopher Owens and the Children of God
by Robert Lanham
Given the passion expressed for girl music on this site, I suppose it’s not too much an affront to my masculinity to confess my obsession with the admittedly unmanly band Girls. Their debut record “Album” is forty minutes of melancholy bliss, late night break-up songs that will make you feel like a teenager suffering from a his first encounter with heartbreak. My introduction to the band’s back-story came through Pitchfork (shut up!) whose review featured a little biographical information on the band’s leader, Christopher Owens: “Christopher Owens grew up in the Children of God. His older brother died as a baby because the cult didn’t believe in medical attention. His dad left. He and his mother lived around the world, and the cult sometimes forced his mother to prostitute herself.”
Forced his mother to prostitute herself? Christ. After reading this, the darkness of Owens’ music began to make sense. Lyrics like “I’m just crazy, I’m fucked in the head,” after all, don’t come from a happy place.
Calling the Children of God cult “one of the craziest groups that came out of sixties,” Owens acknowledges that his experience growing up among these religious extremists greatly informs his music. It shows. There’s something off-kilter and ominous to his music whose hooks are as sundrenched as they are depressing.
Obsessed with Owens’ record and with all things pertaining to weird cults I decided to read more about the Children of God, if only to find out more about Owens’ experience.
In their original incarnation, the Children of God wackos were essentially a bunch of deranged hippies who re-envisioned Jesus as a silk robe-wearing swinger in order to justify their own disturbing sexual perversions. Under the leadership of a maniacal, anti-Semitic, crazy-man named David Berg-also known to members as Moses-they set up communes all over the world, had orgies (heterosexual and girl-on-girl bisexual only though!) and basically began acting like a bunch of Jesus-loving halfwits who enjoyed freebasing aphrodisiacs.
But their Jesus wasn’t just some lady-lovin’ swinger promoting free love for his disciples. He was a pimp. The group was involved in a practice known as Flirty Fishing, where women in the cult were encouraged to meet men, bring them home, and have sex with them-proselytizing to them in the afterglow. From xfamily.org:
Flirty Fishing… involved the use of sexual attraction and intercourse to win converts and favors. Female members were told to be “God’s whores” and “hookers for Jesus”, and soon after its launch as a method of witnessing, sex was given to complete strangers in combination with a request for a “donation”, or for a required fee in line with Escort Servicing (ESing) or freelance ESing. FFing and prostitution was widely used as a way to raise money for the cult and resulted in many of the second generation births (known as “Jesus Babies”). Internal Family records from 1988 indicate that over 223,000 “fish” were loved sexually between 1978 and 1988.
Of course all this would be fine and good, people are free to make their own choices, but things get more fucked up. Berg also promoted sex-sometimes incestuous sex-with children, sometimes as young as three. Critics say that molestation was commonplace, and accepted as God’s will, within the cult. Infamously, COG published a child-rearing manual called “The Story of Davidito”-Davidito was the nickname for Ricky Rodriguez, one of Berg’s adopted children-which detailed sexual activity between adults and the book’s prepubescent victim. The shit hit the fan in 2005 when Rodriguez, then a disgruntled 29-year-old, murdered his former nanny before killing himself. The nanny had been pictured in “The Story of Davidito” engaged in sexual conduct with the underage Rodriguez. In a video taped just prior to the murder-suicide, Rodriguez claimed the cult had ruined his life.
Look up “The Story of Davido” at your own risk. It’s disturbing and definitely NSFW, or for anywhere. Only slightly more palatable is the artwork produced by the cult promoting childhood sexuality and flirty fishing. Some of it actually makes Jack Chick look like a cool, progressive dude.
Amazingly, Christopher Owens wasn’t the only celebrity who grew up among the Children of God. Rose McGowan was a member.
“Like many things, I’m sure they started out with good intentions,” McGowan told The Face. “Meanwhile they’re all having sex with each other and going out and getting men drunk and luring them into the cult. They call it Flirty Fishing. Gross. A lot of kids disappeared. I could be sweeping Ghadaffi’s doorstep right now.”
Joaquin and River Phoenix were also members. River Phoenix once told Details that he’d lost his virginity to cult members when he was four: “I’ve blocked it out. I was completely celibate from 10 to 14.”
“They’re disgusting; they’re ruining people’s lives,” he said in another interview.
I’m no shrink, but all of the aforementioned celebrities could be classified as “troubled”-which is no surprise.
Thankfully, cult leader Berg died in 1994-I’m not religious but if there’s a God he’s spending eternity being buggered by Pinhead and the rest of those dudes from “HellRaiser II.” Still, I was disturbed to find that Rodriguez’s mom, and Berg’s former wife, Karen Zerby has rebranded COG and attract new followers under the name The Family International. There’s an estimated 15,000 members worldwide today and they recently launched a revamped website where Zerby has been releasing videos with the hopes of attracting new members.
This lunatic-who looks like the mutant offspring of Stevie Nicks and Jim Carrey’s Fire Marshal Bill- is truly a piece of work. As Alternet points out: “[Zerby] likes to think of herself as a Queen, and believes she was one of Jesus’ favourite lovers in heaven before she was sent to earth to be the Endtime Prophetess.”
Zerby also believes, or at least has believed, that disciples can literally have sex with Jesus, who loves to supernaturally visit his devoted followers to bump uglies. Jesus appreciates a little dirty talk; the Family distributed a handy list of phrases to use when doing the J-man:
I’m juicy for You.
Come, Jesus! Oh please, come!
My pussy is excited for You, Jesus!
Fuck me long and hard and deep. I want to feel You in the very heart of me. Longer, harder, deeper!
You’re beautiful, Jesus, and so sexy — sexier than I ever dreamed — so handsome, so naked and so hard!
Fill me with Your seeds. Flood me with Your seeds. Explode in me!
That’s a tad different than what I learned at Baptist Vacation Bible School when I was a kid.
Today, Zerby travels under several different monikers and no one outside her immediate circle, not even other members, often know her whereabouts. Discussing her desire to reinvigorate the movement and attract new members, she came out of hiding to speak at a conference in Salt Lake City (where else?) for the Center for the Study of New Religions conference last year:
“Many desire to see innovation, professionalization and modernization,” Karen “Maria” Zerby, one of the Family’s spiritual and administrative leaders, said last week in her first-ever public address. “We must determine what elements of our theology, culture and context are rooted in the past and no longer hold relevance.”
A spokesperson for the group, Claire Borowik, who was in attendance, gave the closest thing to an apology that was to be offered: “We acknowledge that mistakes were made and that there were excesses,” said Borowik. “We’ve taken stringent measures to right those wrongs and apologized to former members… we find it disheartening for people to focus so much on the past.”
This of course, seems about as sincere as the Pope’s lame attempts at dealing with the Catholic churches’ own child-sex problem.
But back to Girls. At least Christopher Owens was able to rise above the insanity. He’s a rising star of the indie music scene and his band’s debut topped dozens of best of 2009 lists last year. He got out. Best of all, he seems to have come to terms with the lunacy of his upbringing: “They had some ideal that they could raise us and we’d be these perfect little Children of God. But it’s like horrible-it’s also beautiful, like-they meant well, I guess, even though a lot of things that they did were completely crazy.”
As for me, “Hellhole Ratrace” remains in heavy rotation on my iTunes, even if it will never quite sound the same again.
Robert Lanham is the author of the beach-towel classic The Emerald Beach Trilogy, which includes the titles Pre-Coitus, Coitus, and Afterglow. More recent works include The Hipster Handbook and The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right. He is the founder and editor of FREEwilliamsburg.com.