NEWS
In recent weeks, parents, pastors, law-enforcement officials, and Jesus-movement leaders around the country have been concerned, intrigued, baffled, and even dismayed by the sudden and mysterious rise of a sect-like movement called the Children of God. Who are these zealous youth and their charismatic leaders, how did the movement arise, and what are its teachings? What strange fascination does it hold for an increasing number of young people?
To answer these and many other questions, the news department ofCHRISTIANITY TODAYtalked to dozens of persons in and out of the movement and dispatched correspondent Rita Warren and her husband to the San Diego area for interviews. Russell Chandler obtained a long interview with promoter J. Fred Jordan, and Edward Plowman visited parents and communes in Maryland, Georgia, and New York and spoke to Children of God leaders in Seattle, Texas, and California. J. D. Douglas investigated the movement in England. Mr. Plowman wrote this story:
Suspicion, intrigue, charges, and counter-charges are swirling in a maelstrom of controversy that involves a growing band of far-out young Christian vagabonds known as the “Children of God.”
The Children’s opponents include parents, pastors, Jesus-movement leaders, former benefactors, and ex-Children. Backers include parents, pastors and Jesus-movement leaders who have joined up, current benefactors, and ex-Children. Charges against the Children range from hypnotic spellbinding and demon possession to apostasy and hate-mongering. Not guilty, reply the sect’s youthful elders, who blame the imbroglio on non-Christians’ inability to comprehend Christian discipleship and on the failure of establishment Christians to forsake the hated world system.
The Children have experienced spectacular gains and severe setbacks alike in the past two months. Under harassment from a newly formed Parents Committee To Free Our Sons and Daughters From the Children of God, the San Diego area Children say they may have to get out of California. Similar parents committees have sprouted elsewhere in southern California and in Texas, and show signs of spreading as rapidly as the Children’s own “colonies.” (There are dozens of colonies in the United States, and bases have been opened this year in Mexico, England, and the Netherlands. Although the Children numbered fewer than 300 at the beginning of the year, thanks to media exposure and super-aggressive outreach their ranks have swelled to nearly 3,000.)
Last month a pro-Children parents group surfaced, led by wealthy Houston industrialist M. J. DuPuy.
Also last month the Children resettled hundreds of their clan after Los Angeles television preacher Fred Jordan evicted leaders from property he owns in Texas and California. Having recently ripped off large segments of the mainstream Jesus movement in the Pacific Northwest, the Children moved many of their refugees to movement houses in Seattle and Vancouver and to a large farm near Burlington, Washington. Shortly after their arrival in Seattle, the Children incurred the ire of ministerial groups; even a gigantic “open house” they threw for the city failed to overcome the suspicions of the church community.
Jordan, 62, cited “disobedience” of the sect’s elders and errors in doctrine as his reasons for evicting them. He had incorporated the Children as a branch of his ministry in mid-1970. Since then, says he, he has given the Children $98,000 in cash (to provide transportation, repairs, and “operating expenses”) and spent $500,000 promoting the group. Jordan claims the outlay included a $ 1,000-a-month salary to the Children’s founder, David Berg, 52. Berg, formerly a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor and connected with Jordan’s American Soul Clinic mission agency since 1954, reportedly is living in London while writing a book and has not been associated with the Children for a year, elders say.
Linda “Deborah” Treadwell (Children shed their “worldly” names for biblical ones), 26, Berg’s eldest daughter, disputes Jordan’s claim about finances. “Other than $100 a week he gave our Los Angeles colony for food,” she claims, “we have not received a dime.” Her husband, “Jethro,” formerly ran Jordan’s data-processing department.
Jethro helped Berg and other relatives get the Children organized in Huntington Beach, California, in the summer of 1968. The group adopted no official name at first, though they were variously known as Teens for Christ (after an earlier Berg group) and Revolutionaries for Christ. The following year a trained group of thirty struck out for various cities in this country and Canada, calling converts to “100 per cent discipleship.” They patterned themselves after the disciples whom Christ sent out “two by two” without possessions, relying on God to provide all needs.
The group included Berg’s other children and subsequently their spouses. They are: “Faith,” 20, and Arnold “Joshua” Dietrich, 30; “Jonathan,” 22, and “Esther” Berg; and Paul “Aaron” Berg, 24. With Dietrich’s brother, Arthur “Caleb,” 23, and Caleb’s wife “Lydia,” the clan is known to insiders as bishops, to outsiders as “colony advisors” or overseers.
Leaders say that charismatic churches at first gave warm welcomes and invited them to speak, then turned a cold shoulder when the Children openly exhorted church members to repent of system-enmeshed lukewarm Christianity and to sell their goods and take up communal-type discipleship. Then the Children went uninvited to churches, issuing calls to repentance or standing in silent vigils.
“We did freaky things in those days,” recalls “Samson,” red-bearded elder at the Children’s colony near Ellensville, New York. In one Ohio fundamentalist church, he recalls, six men ejected him bodily as he quoted Scriptures and a seventh choked him into silence.
The clan and their converts gathered in a silent vigil at the casket of Senator Everett Dirkson in Washington, D. C., in 1969. Clad in red sackcloth they lamented, as Deborah says, “the closing of an era—the country’s failure to put prayer and Bible reading back into the schools.”
After the Dirkson vigil they traveled intact as a “family” in ancient “prophet buses,” trucks, and assorted jalopies. They crashed a Sunday-morning service at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco after a sermon by Episcopal bishop C. Kilmer Myers and startled worshipers with a call to repentance. The city council of nearby San Rafael took up an offering to pay gasoline, bridge tolls, and towing charges to get them out of town there.
Finally, Jordan let them settle on a large ranch hear Mingus, Texas, and in a building he owns in Los Angeles. Later he purchased a 100-acre spread at Coachella, California, and settled a colony on ten acres in return for work in his orchards. He featured testimonies of Children on his television shows, sometimes pegging his appeal for offerings on them. He also licensed and ordained a number of the young men through his Bible college, thereby earning them draft deferments. (One of the Children, who says the sect believes in law and order, relates how he showed up at his draft board and began reciting Scripture at the top of his voice. He says he was thrown out and has not been invited back for classification.)
It was at Jordan’s desert property in Coachella that the Children’s spat with Jordan erupted, says Deborah. Elder “Belteshazzar” complained to Jordan about work and living conditions, especially lack of air conditioning, she explains, adding that the Children worked many hours without pay. Parents, she says, wondered how Jordan could live “in his $100,000 mansion” on the property in plain view of the Children’s poverty conditions. At first Jordan wanted to oust only several elders, but the Children refused to be divided, and the rupture became complete.
The Children live a tightly structured communal life. Members are placed in various “tribes” according to their communal assignments (Zebulon, farming; Joseph, procurement of goods; Levi, elders; Ephraim, laundry; and so on). Basic indoctrination classes for new converts last from three to five months. For the first five days a new convert learns about eternal salvation (the Children are Calvinists), baptism in the Holy Spirit (the Children are Pentecostal), the first five chapters of Acts, and the Children’s relationship to “the world,” particularly their parents, the churches, and “the system.” Then the convert is asked to sign “the revolutionary sheet” introduced last year (many of the early members have not signed it), which commits him and his possessions to the Children. Unusable possessions are sold and the money used to buy and repair buses, shortwave radio equipment, and other items.
The Children do not even own their clothing; they salvage anything in the laundry room that fits. They are conservation conscious. Signs posted in bathrooms specify a limit of three sheets of toilet tissue. Food is plentiful, usually of the donated leftover and dented-can variety. They say they are appalled by American wastefulness. One elder says he discovered bakeries selling leftover bread to pig farmers for a penny a loaf “while poor people go hungry.” Frequently the Children distribute free food to ghetto dwellers.
Colonies are integrated. Most Children are in their late teens and early twenties. About one-third come from nominally Catholic backgrounds. They operate kindergarten and elementary schools using the Montessori method. Dating is forbidden. Marriage proposals are offered during an instant of courtship “as God leads” and subject to approval of the elders. Many of the colonies keep in touch through short wave sets.
Cigarettes, booze, and drugs are taboo. Prayers, not aspirin, are applied to headaches. Television and all magazines and books except the Bible are shunned.
Each colony looks after its own finances and operates as both a missionary training and sending facility. In many cases, the Children’s property has been lent by parents impressed at the transformation of an offspring.
Natural childbirth is practiced. Babies are usually placed in the full-time custody of nursery attendants. “We want our children to feel like they belong to the entire family,” explains Gary “Elijah” Spence of the Washington, D. C., area colony. Critics of the Children, however, say that the practice unscripturally disrupts the basic family unit.
Parents have complained that their children have been spirited away, held incommunicado for days, and somehow alienated from home ties. Parents of Children at a recent Atlanta meeting said their offspring had undergone dramatic personality changes. Such terms as hypnosis, brainwashing, witchcraft, Satanic influences, and drugs were tossed around freely as possible explanations. Indeed, a number of the Children seen in various colonies last month did have glazed eyes and walked about as if in a trance. The explanation, according to Elijah: “We’re stoned on the Spirit, man.”
Seattle Times religion writer Ray Ruppert observed last month that there is no “overt hypnosis on a one-to-one basis. But there may be a kind of self-hypnosis induced in the susceptible by a schedule that keeps members constantly busy and which includes group singing and lively dancing. Some of the young people seem to be worked into a state of frenzy as the dancing and singing goes on for hours.”
A Christian psychiatrist in Atlanta whose daughter is with the Children is convinced that brainwashing techniques are “definitely” used.
Ex-Children said in interviews that they were always at the point of near-exhaustion, and that with the intensive Scripture-memorization program (even during chores) and endless class sessions they had little or no time for personal Bible study or meditation. Skits, songs, and chants stressed hatred of the system, parents, and churches, they said.
New converts are admonished to submit themselves completely to the elders. Ex-Children say leaders hurled vulgar descriptives at them to test the brokenness of their wills. Deborah says, however, she would rebuke elders for using four-letter Words. And Samson declares he would oppose “any elder who does or says anything not in keeping with the Word of God.”
A “security” system also ires many parents who have been unable on visits to talk with their children alone or to get mail through uncensored. Samson says that the security is necessary to prevent parents or infiltrators from planting dope and thus triggering police raids, and to discourage the bodily removal of clan members. “Besides,” he adds, “we want the kids to stay with us.” Incoming mail is censored because parents have tried to “bribe their kids with dope, plane tickets to Europe—anything to get them to come home,” he explains. Outgoing mail is censored in order to “spot spiritual needs.” (His and the mail of other older elders, he admits, is not censored.) Telephone calls are monitored.
Samson says Children are encouraged to write at least one letter home each week and that Sunday afternoons are usually set aside for this chore. “After all,” he scowls, “we want to keep the parents off our backs.” But, he complains, many Children simply don’t write. Also, the Children move around a lot on witnessing assignments, and mail is often late in catching up, he says.
Ex-Children (the dropout rate is said to be 15 per cent) cite numerous reasons for leaving: the emphasis on hatred, dislike of the regimentation, homesickness. One Detroit youth told a reporter the Children’s style of life was simply too rugged; he held no ill will toward them.
Most converts to date have been youths in the drug, free sex, New Left, and eastern religion scenes. Children usually roll into an area in buses, hand out free food, perhaps dance and play rock music, then identify with their subjects and voice expressions of care. The outpouring of love and concern overwhelms many youths from broken homes now existing in a lonely street world.
The Children deny the unproved charges that they are arming themselves. “Vengeance belongs to God,” says Deborah. Even in the event of a Communist takeover of the government—the Children fear this will happen soon—there will be no violence. “The only way to sabotage the government,” declares Samson, “is to live the Bible. This means ripping out every idol in our hearts with spiritual weapons.”
Eschatologically, the Children believe in a mid-Tribulation rapture viewpoint. A Communist anti-Christ will take over America and persecute Christians. The only Bibles left will be those stored in minds. The “systemite” or establishment Christians will cave in. Only a strongly disciplined remnant will survive to witness for Christ.
Early this year NBC television featured the Children in an hour-long documentary (see January 29 issue, page 35) that was rerun this summer. An NBC official reports that most responses came from young people who wanted to know how to contact the Children. Hundreds joined.
Some of the biggest hauls lately have involved the mainstream of the Jesus movement, including Atlanta street-Christian leader David Hoyt, Russell Griggs of Vancouver, and Linda Meissner Salveson of Seattle (see January 29 issue, page 34). All had large followings.
Hoyt joined in June and led most of his 120 followers with him. The Children closed his coffeehouse, restaurant, and all but one of his home ministries, which they colonized with outsiders. Interestingly enough, Hoyt had been writing a book to warn Jesus people about false cults—including the Children of God.
Hoyt’s move split leaders and members of house ministries he had organized in other Southern cities. His mentor, San Francisco street evangelist Kent Philpott, who led Hoyt to Christ in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, denounced the Children in a letter to the 400,000-circulation Hollywood Free Paper, and severed relations with Hoyt. Philpott refuses to recant despite threats of lawsuits by the Children. (Several newspapers, under such threats, have retracted unfavorable stories and apologized in print to the Children.)
An explanatory letter from Hoyt led Griggs, 26, an ordained Pentecostal minister who directs an extensive street-Christian ministry in Vancouver, along with Everett, Washington, leader Robert Cramer to investigate and join the Children. In turn they influenced their colleague Mrs. Salveson to join last month. However, many of her followers balked, and a deep rift has opened between them and the Children. It extends to Mrs. Salveson’s marriage: her husband has sided with the churches and other dissidents against the Children. He claims the clan is trying to break up his home. (A San Diego wife has sued for divorce saying her husband ran away with the Children.)
Families are in turmoil. The Jesus movement is staggering. Churches are troubled. In London a spokesman says the Billy Graham organization people “are split three ways” on the Children. (Deborah insists the Graham office in England helped her sister Faith and other Children to get established in London.)
As Samson puts it: “We are catalysts. We are so far out that no one can claim neutrality. We make people cold or hot. I want to make it so hard that only real Christians will stand up.”
Amid all the ferment many parents are still wondering where their children have gone. “What did we do wrong?” asks a Maryland architect whose 18-year-old daughter dropped out of college to join the Children.
“Parents just can’t admit that they didn’t give their children what they really needed,” Samson muses.
Rx For Medical Ethics: An Injection Of Compassion
It took fifteen days, but the baby finally died. A fairly simple surgical procedure would have corrected the intestinal block that prevented his assimilation of food; but because of another congenital defect—mongolism—his parents refused permission for the operation. When a judge said that because of the child’s retardation no court would overrule the parents, doctors removed the infant to a dark corner of the hospital nursery with a sign on his bassinet: “Nothing by mouth.”
With that emotional bang—presented in a film of an actual case at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore—a day-long symposium on medical ethics opened last month in Washington, D. C. It was as startling as the cannon boom that tested acoustics in the John F. Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater, being used for the first time. The acoustical experiment’s cloud of smoke disappeared in the theater’s red ceiling; the murky issues raised at the symposium, sponsored by the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation, were not so readily dispelled.
The experts in medicine, law, politics, and ethics who assembled during the morning session for a panel discussion of the film agreed that the life of the infant should have been saved. It was, said Episcopal minister John Fletcher, who directs Washington’s Inter-Met Theological Institute, “a very primitive way of handling the problem.”
But that society should somehow have intervened was the closest the group came to consensus on how the case should have been handled. “To be human,” declared Yale ethics professor James Gustafson, citing Old and New Testament texts, “is to be for others as well as for ourselves.”
Man’s ability to make life-and-death decisions gives him no choice but to “play God,” author Michael Harrington told the overflow audience of Kennedys, doctors, clergy, and students. “Once we have that ability, even the humble refusal to exercise it in the name of higher values is itself a God-like choice.”
The issue had been anticipated by symposium planners, who had arranged seven concurrent panels comprised of about a hundred scientists and ethicists to spend the afternoon discussing the three “Rs” basic to Kennedy Foundation concerns: human rights, retardation, and research. Topics ranged from who has the right to be born to how and why people should care about others.
At the end, moderators were hard pressed to summarize lively and far-ranging discussions. Perhaps the sharpest disagreement occurred when panel members discussing “fabricated” babies challenged the experiments of a Cambridge scientist that are leading the way toward test-tube babies. Moral theologian Paul Ramsey called the work of physiology professor Robert Edwards “unethical medical experimentation on future possible human beings.”
Laboratory fertilized eggs may produce deformed babies, Princeton University professor Ramsey and others cautioned; no amount of testing before birth can guarantee a normal child because the final test might cause the deformity. “You can only go ahead if you accept the necessity of infanticide,” warned Harvard biologist James Watson, who discovered the double-helix structure of DNA.
The panel headlined by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner may have been the afternoon’s major attraction. Addressing a standing-room-only crowd that included Joan Kennedy and a young, blue-jeaned couple carrying their motorcycle helmets, the controversial Harvard professor discussed which comes first: compassionate feelings or charitable acts. A person feels compassion for, say, institutionalized retardates who are being mistreated, Skinner suggested, after he has behaved charitably as a result of being subjected to controls himself. The behavior produces—as a by-product—a feeling usually called compassion.
Meanwhile, the audience at another panel seemed to reverse Skinner’s order of acts and feelings. The group, composed largely of uniformed clergy and nuns, asked several questions about how to translate caring into action. Among panel members questioned was Mother Theresa, a nun whose concern for the poor in Calcutta, India, led her to found an order now ministering around the world.
At day’s end, the issues remained as cloudy as ever, leaving much for Georgetown University’s new Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and Bioethics. A $1.35 million Kennedy Foundation grant will, according to Georgetown president Robert J. Henle, bring “ethicists into laboratories, clinical areas, operating and delivery rooms where the life-and-death decisions involving both science and ethics are daily being made.”
JANET ROHLER GREISCH
Future Theology: Hope Or Suffering?
The role of theology in helping man to realize his future, and whether that future will culminate in the unification of mankind, were among problems discussed at an international conference on “Hope and the Future of Man” held last month in New York City.
The conference was sponsored by the American Teilhard de Chardin Association, Cardinal Bea Institute of Woodstock College, Trinity Institute, and Union Theological Seminary. It brought together leading representatives of the German theology of hope, adherents to the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, and American process theologians. During three days of discussion the thinkers exchanged ideas and views on the future of man, emphasizing suffering more than hope. More than 1,000 theologians, seminarians, teachers, and students attended.
Jürgen Moltmann of Eberhard-Karls University in Tübingen, author of the book Theology of Hope and a founder of that school of thought, injected a point of controversy early in the conference by questioning its very theme:
“The theme ‘Hope and the Future of Man’ had a great appeal ten years ago,” he said. “Now the catch-words are no longer ‘Hope and the Future of Man,’ but perhaps more, ‘Frustration, Betrayal, and the Oppression of Man.’ ”
Moltmann challenged the Teilhardian idea that mankind is moving toward a convergence. He asserted that the hopes in the First World and the Third World are different hopes, and suggested that theology will have to speak to oppressed groups more than it traditionally has. He called for a “liberation theology” that “radically focuses on Christian hope.”
Wolfhart Pannenberg, also associated with the theology of hope, attempted to synthesize the theoretical and practical natures of theology in a way that would be acceptable to both sides. “Certainly theology, as every other intellectual activity, always expresses the concerns of a particular individual as a member of a particular group,” he agreed, adding: “To the degree we get at truth, we overcome other particularities of our diverse interests.”
By the end of the conference, the participants’ attention had been so focused on the political applications of theology that Johannes Metz of West-falische Wilhelms University in Münster, a representative of the theology of hope, affirmed that “every theology attempting to reflect on Christian traditions in the context of the world’s problems becomes political theology.” He concluded that the problem of the future is primarily political and social.
Because of the nature of the conference and the three schools of thought represented, evangelical theology was for the most part excluded. At one point Carl Braaten of the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, an adherent of the theology of hope, observed that “an eschatology without Christology is very difficult for me as a Christian.”
DARRELL J. TURNER
Billy Graham’S Day
North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County paid elaborate tribute last month to its most famous native son, evangelist Billy Graham. The acclaim symbolizes the marked change in public attitude toward evangelistic ministries since the heyday of fundamentalism, when itinerant preachers were widely equated with Elmer Gantry.
Leading the tribute was President Nixon, who flew in from Washington for the occasion. He called Graham “the top preacher, the top evangelist in the world today.”
The highlight of “Billy Graham Day” in Charlotte was a special commemorative program witnessed by a turnaway crowd of more than 12,000. “You have contributed to America and the world one of the great leaders of our time,” Nixon told them. Thousands of other people lined the streets of Charlotte and waved and cheered as the President and evangelist drove from the airport on a clear, warm autumn afternoon.
The climax of the program, held at the enclosed Charlotte Coliseum, was the unveiling by Nixon of a three-by-four-foot bronze marker that has a likeness of the evangelist and an inscription composed and signed by the President: “Billy Graham is one of the giants of our time. Truly a man of God. The force of his spirit has ennobled millions in this and other lands. I salute him with deep affection and profound respect.”
The marker is being put on the site of Graham’s birthplace in Charlotte.
The ceremony honoring Graham was probably the most prestigious commemorative affair ever arranged for a Christian evangelist. Along with President and Mrs. Nixon were Treasury Secretary and Mrs. John B. Connally, the two U. S. senators from North Carolina, congressmen, the governor, the mayor, and many other dignitaries.
Local business and government leaders who arranged the event gave Graham a plaque proclaiming that he was “a preacher of the Gospel of Christ to more people than any other man in history.” Graham responded by praising the people of the area and also putting in a good word for Nixon (the two have been friends for nearly twenty years).
Graham commended Nixon for his moral sensitivity. He recalled a time when he made a suggestion to the President only to have it rejected by Nixon, whom he quoted as saying, “That wouldn’t be morally right.”
The two local newspapers carried lead editorials honoring Graham. The Charlotte Observer expressed concern, however, over whether he is assuming the role of “court chaplain.” The Charlotte News noted in an apparently complimentary context that Graham has become “the symbol of what might be called America’s ‘civil religion.’ ”
Graham’s closest friends point out that there is a vast quantitative gap between people who endorse Graham theologically and those who merely respect him, and that mutual admiration ought not to be construed as religious or political collusion.
Graham, who will be 53 on November 7, was born on a small dairy farm now the site of a commercial development. He was converted in a tent meeting under the ministry of the evangelist Mordecai Ham (the site was just a mile from the coliseum where Graham was honored). He now lives at a mountain-top home about 100 miles west of Charlotte.
Nixon, who came on the program after the evangelist had spoken, declared that “it’s the character of a nation that determines whether it survives,” and expressed confidence that America would retain its moral and spiritual strength. He said Graham had contributed significantly to that end.
But in contrast to the evangelist, who seldom makes a public utterance without exalting Christ, Nixon, perhaps all too aware that he is president both of saints and of skeptics, avoided any mention of deity.
DAVID KUCHARSKY
