#353 - Doomsday Cult Leader Breaks Silence on Most Evil Religion in History | Ray Connolly

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Ray Connolly is a former leading member of "The Children of God", one of the most radical group of Jesus Freaks spawned during the sixties. They later morphed into a headline grabbing cult known as "The Family" known for strange mixture of evangelism, doomsday prophecies and unusual sexual practices taught by their founder, David Berg. SPONSORS https://trueclassic.com/danny - Upgrade your wardrobe and save on True Classic today. https://brooklynbedding.com - Use code DANNY to get 30% off SITEWIDE. https://masterclass.com/dannyjones - Get up to 50% off today! https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS Ray's book - https://a.co/d/j4608ol FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Joining the Children of God cult 11:32 - How 'Children of God' brainwashes new members 22:47 - What David Berg did before founding his cult 35:01 - CIA infiltrating cults 36:47 - Rules married couples had to follow in Children of God 43:44 - Recruiting new members with sex: "flirty fishing" 54:44 - Children's role in the Children of God cult 01:09:06 - Deciding to escape the cult 01:23:39 - The tragedy of Ricky Rodriguez 01:35:06 - How 'Children of God' escaped the FBI 01:42:08 - Embracing Christianity after leaving the cult 01:46:43 - Psychedelics + the Jesus movement 01:55:05 - Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane 02:00:08 - Myths in the Bible 02:11:08 - How do undo cult brainwashing 02:19:57 - How the military uses cult psychological programming 02:28:04 - The merge of Christianity & politics 02:39:00 - Bringing psychedelics into the Church Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:07Speaker 02

  Right when I joined the group in 1970, televangelism wasn't even a thing. But there was one guy out in LA who had a "church in the home," he called it. So we were kind of his project. And he had... Every week, he had to do "church in the home." So he had all these, you know, converted hippies come. But it was like this. It was all just cellophane stained glass.

• 1:36Danny Jones?

  Hey, how dare you disrespect my cathedral like that? Those are real stained glass windows.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Are they?

• 1:41Danny Jones?

  And this is... We imported this basalt granite from Egypt.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  You're kidding.

• 1:47Danny Jones?

  Swear.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:48Danny Jones?

  True story. Go touch it.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Where in Egypt?

• 1:52Danny Jones?

  Aswan.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  I'm a sucker.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  I lived in Egypt for a year.

• 2:04Danny Jones?

  One year only?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little less than a year, actually. We had an abbreviation due to the authorities. So we made a quick move.

• 2:15Danny Jones?

  So, okay, for people who don't know who you are, essentially like high level, you were in the Children of God cult for more than 20 years, roughly around 20 years?

• 2:26Speaker 02

  From May 1970 till early 1991.

• 2:30Danny Jones?

  You lived in 20 different countries and you had 17 kids when you were in the cult?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 2:35Danny Jones?

  Good lord. I like how you kept up the whole, you know, the beard and the hair. It's very fitting.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Once I didn't have to appear before customers.

• 2:47Danny Jones?

  So the Children of God cult is one of the most sinister cults I've ever heard of. And, you know, not to discredit how bad some of the other ones are, but like this one in particular seemed very dark, especially when it came to the abuse of children and stuff like that, and how widespread it was all around the world. But first, can you explain what the cult was? What was the main idea of the cult?

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, obviously, there was a tremendous amount of evolution going on or devolution during the years of any, any high control group like that is going to have a downward spiral.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  But with us, it was, I was, you know, hippie, dropped out of college, just hitchhiking around, looking for the truth and, and.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Ended up going to California, hitchhiking out to California to meet a guy who had witnessed the gospel to my brother, my younger brother. And we didn't know, it was 1970, we had no idea of any of the evangelical language. We were raised Catholic and didn't know anything about it. So I hitchhiked to California to find out who could tell me how to accept Christ. So that's what I was doing. And the first day I landed in California, there was a rally. I remember Jerry Rubin from the Chicago Seven? No? One of the radicals that was involved in big court case in Chicago.

• 4:30Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  But he was speaking at the stadium at University of Santa Barbara. And I was staying with a guy that night, who's an old friend of mine, and he said, I'll meet you at the stadium, which sounded like a plan until I realized there's about 40,000 people there. Anyway, long story short, the group was doing a demonstration that day at the stadium, and which I can get into or not get into, I don't know what you prefer.

• 5:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah, let's get into it. When the group you're talking about, the children of God, God call?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  The children of God, yeah. Which I didn't know at the time, I'd never heard of them, didn't know anything about the whole Jesus movement or anything about it. So they were, they came into the stadium, Jerry Rubin's speaking, they came into the stadium, probably 20 or 30 young people, wearing red robes, ashes on their forehead, carrying big staves and scrolls with scripture references, mostly Old Testament.

• 5:38Danny Jones?

  Very similar to like Pentecostal style.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, it came out of a Pentecostal type movement, originally.

• 5:47Danny Jones?

  Serpents and shit.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  No, not. They're not raising serpents? No, we're not doing that. Well, you know, it would have been better if we had. But, um, the. More satanic, maybe? The idea was, um, they were conveying that America's in trouble. Their judgment is coming and, um, Jesus is coming back. You know, get ready. So at first, the thing was very strange for me. I hadn't seen anything like it, um, nor had many other people. Um, but, and I wasn't immediately, I knew something big was happening. I didn't know what it was. Uh, and I wasn't sure it was connected to my search. So after the demonstration ended and Jerry Rubin left,

• 6:35Speaker 02

  I met some of them after they'd taken off their robes and were just sharing sandwiches with hippies. And how old were you, by the way? Nineteen. Nineteen, okay. So, um. So were they offering like free food or? Yeah, you know. Yeah, yeah. Peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Yeah, yeah. But, uh, and playing guitars and, you know, just invitation to have a conversation about God. So I was up for it, you know, and I went over and listened in and it was, it was so interesting to me because there was a few, um, what would you, kind of churchy Christians there, college students that were debating with this group over the, the way to interpret scripture.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  And who, who, uh, what's the right way to live to follow Jesus? And these guys would, you know, the, the college kids would, uh, give very reasonable arguments with very little scripture. And these guys would just flip their Bible and just open it to a verse and said, just read that one. And everything they did and said came straight out of the Bible. So I was. The children of God people. The children of God people. They were opening passages. They knew the Bible way better than these other guys. So, and they memorized, you know. And we're talking about an English translation. They weren't reading Greek, right? No. Right, right. King James. Okay. Um, but.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  And their zeal was obvious and they were clearly committed. They, you know, in the conversation, they lived communally. They lived by faith. They didn't have jobs or anything. They just went out every day to tell people about God and challenged them to follow Jesus. So I was really drawn. And in the course of the conversation, I talked to him about, um, how do you accept Christ? You know, so they led me in the sinner's prayer. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that term, but it's widely used in the evangelical community to ask Jesus into your heart and begin a new life, which I did.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  And I had a pretty profound experience of conversion. I really genuinely sensed that God had come into my life. So as time went on, I was happy about that, obviously, but I still was a little nervous about what the commitment was being asked of me, you know, to forsake all and follow Jesus. And I thought, well, maybe, maybe if I come down to see you guys, they were from LA. They came in on a bus from LA to Santa Barbara.

• 9:18Danny Jones?

  What year are we talking again?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  1970.

• 9:20Danny Jones?

  Seventy.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Right after Kent State, that, that era. So.

• 9:26Danny Jones?

  What year were the Manson murders? Sixty nine?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  I think sixty nine.

• 9:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, no. So that whole thing was in the news, you know, just like California and cults and all that. Not a lot, but you know, the Charles Manson thing brought it to attention. So I was a little like, hmm, I'm not sure. I never came into anything quite this strong in terms of its emotional and spiritual.

• 9:50Danny Jones?

  But you, you sort of had a void in your soul you were looking to fill, right? You were looking for something. This wasn't just happenstance.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  No, no, I was very deliberately, uh, and, um, you know, I set out to find God and I, my brother had this experience with a kid in Berkeley. So I was on my way to Berkeley, but ended up in Santa Barbara for the night where I had a friend. So that's how I ended up at this event.

• 10:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  So, but I had really asked God to show me the truth. And if, if he, I promised him that if, if he showed me the truth, I would do it.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Which is a dangerous prayer. But uh, that afternoon, I bump into these guys. I ask Jesus, my heart, my life has changed. But still I'm nervous, like, can I just get a little distance? I'd like to, you know, call my girlfriend and check, just see, see what's uh,

• 10:49Speaker 02

  if I can even make sense of what's happening before I commit to, you know, my life. But the fella that was sharing the gospel with me was pretty determined not to let me do that. Wait, wait, wait. So what was the conversation like to commit your life? What do you mean by that? Like, what, what did they say to you? Would you want to follow Jesus? So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaken not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. You know, so, and there's dozens more like that. So he was saying, we're doing it. We're doing what Jesus said. Yeah. If you want to follow Jesus, if you told him you want to follow Jesus, and then you get an invitation to follow Jesus exactly the way he said,

• 11:30Speaker 02

  and you don't do it, he said, I, you'll never be able to look yourself in the eye again. You're just, you, you're not going to be able to say you're looking for the truth anymore. And frankly, I think it'd just go crazy. And when he said that, uh, I got a, a jolt, like, yeah, I, I could see that. I could go crazy if I don't do what I told God I would. And was there any talk about you just like joining their clan and staying and living with them? Yeah, I mean, that was the vision. We all live together. We're going to travel the world and Okay. Spread the gospel. So, um, anyway, I did. I ran back, grabbed my knapsack at my friend's place and jumped on the bus and rode to LA. And then I found out what it was, the children of God.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  And it was, uh, How did you find out? I think they told us somewhere along the, you know, they didn't have business cards or anything. But uh, people call us the children of God is what they would say. Cause that's what happened. They, they didn't make up the name. A journalist gave them the name. So anyway, it was a big five-story mission building in downtown LA, fifth and Town. And uh, it was pretty much occupied fully by about a hundred converted hippies who were all pursuing this dream. Very enthusiastic, very loud, a lot of praise the Lord, hallelujah, thank you, Jesus,

• 12:54Speaker 02

  all day, every day. A lot of singing, a lot of hugging, a lot of smiling, laughing. Any drugs? No. No? Well, not once you're in. I mean, prior to conversion. I mean, like, a part of the prayer and the ritual and the dance? No, no, no. Totally Pentecostal Holy Spirit kind of energy. Okay. With a dose of radicalism, you know, that was challenging to all the values of mainstream America, and frankly, the world. I mean, it was, this is the right way to do it, and this is what Jesus said we should do, and this is what we're doing. And if you don't

• 13:36Speaker 02

  do it, that's your problem, you know? It's, come along and we'll help you get into it. So anyway, I went to this building, and there was kind of a, a lot, we had a big snack of big bowls of ice cream, donated ice cream, and stuff like that. And then, a lot of singing, and then, all the new ones, myself included, about ten of us, who had just jumped on the bus that day, were invited up to the second floor, where we had a, a meeting that was called the Second Floor Purge Room, where new recruits would, after being congratulated

• 14:17Speaker 02

  on choosing your new life, would then give you a good cop, bad cop experience of, on one hand, praising you for doing it, and making you feel good about what you're doing, and then, on the other hand, a warning that if you don't, if you walk away from this, this is what you're doing, you know, that you're failing God, and you're crucifying the Son of God afresh. And it was a real difficult moment, and you just took out your wallet, threw it on the floor, everything, you turned everything over, you know, traveler's checks, signed them over. I'm realizing, no one will know what a traveler's check is. No.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  But, that, that was the kind of rude awakening into, oh, God, this is a lot heavier than I thought. You know, this is not just sitting around the living room in a commune, this is, this is like an army here, signing up for something serious. I went to bed that night, kind of nervous about the whole thing. And a guy gave me a couple scriptures to, no, that was later. Anyway, went to bed, woke up. Loud, revelry style praises to God and all that. And then kind of shuffled off to breakfast and begin your first day in class. So.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  The, the class was being taught, it was just new, just the new guys. I think five had made it through the purge room and five had left. Um, and then, uh, the, the subject was the word. And in the middle of it, people's minds were wandering, you know, just thinking about, what am I doing here? How did I get here? That kind of thing, what's going on? And the, it was a kid, really, he was younger than me, was teaching the class, but he was kind of a, a marine drill sergeant type. So he was really aggressive in the way he presented scripture. And he said, anything you're thinking about right now that is not the word of God is the devil. I thought, I happened to be thinking about my girlfriend at the time.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  So I thought, well, that's not right. You know, she's not the devil. I got up and left, grabbed my knapsack. Where was your girlfriend during all this? Uh, she's out in, she was on the east coast in Massachusetts. Um, we had, I sort of sensed that, uh, this journey was going to change my life. I, I felt like I was going to meet God and I, I really couldn't, all bets were off of what would happen after that. So our, our vision for life was on hold until I could figure out what God wanted. Right. So, um. But, you know, this was dramatic.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  I really wanted to share it with her and also bounce it off somebody, see where, if I could even comprehensively explain it, you know? Sure. So you left the class? Yeah. And I grabbed her high school, uh, graduation picture out of my knapsack and started out the hallway. And some, one of the older guys stopped me and said, hey, man, where, where are you going? And I said, does this look like the devil to you? And I held, held up her picture and definitely not the devil. Um. And he said, wait, wait, I think you got a few things off here. And so he sat me down, walked me through and kind of encouraged me that, look, you really misunderstood what was

• 17:48Speaker 02

  said, and God loves your girlfriend more than you do. So you need to get strong in the Lord so that you can share the gospel with her. And we'll probably be sending a team out to the East Coast soon. You're likely candidate, kind of thing. So I said, okay, give it another try. Went back and got on board. And it was, two weeks in LA was pretty intense, you know, going out into the sidewalks of downtown LA, stopping complete strangers on the street and talking to them about Jesus, and the end of the world, and all that kind of thing. And getting three or four hours of Bible studies every day, a lot of singing, and dancing, and hugging, and all that stuff. So it's a pretty high, it's a very emotionally high atmosphere.

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• 19:48Speaker 02

  As time went on, then they said, hey, we've got another community down in Texas, that it's way out in the middle of nowhere in the sticks. And it's an old ranch that was used for a missionary training base and we've taken it over to as a training place for for our movement. So we're sending a bunch of people down and you're on the bus. So I went down to Texas and that was four months of pretty much, I guess you would call it a boot camp type situation. A lot of very hard, hard life. It wasn't, nobody was there for the perks. But a lot of joy and a lot of dwelling in

• 20:30Speaker 02

  scripture all the time, memorizing five, sometimes 10 Bible verses a day. Mostly along the lines of pretty standard evangelical kind of teachings, plus this radical idea that Jesus is not working through the church, he's working through committed individuals who band together to live like he said to live in the gospels and the acts of the apostles. So that was our whole energy, like God's going to use a special in a special way because we're willing to do anything.

• 21:02Danny Jones?

  So what was like the number one, like what was your number one objective every day? Just to go out and preach to people on the street to recruit new people?

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. In in LA, it was that.

• 21:13Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  In Texas, it was more, we were, it was, you know, like, I don't, probably 10 miles to nearest truck stop. There was nowhere to evangelize. And that was pretty much training. So four months of pretty intense training, miserable condition, living conditions in the district.

• 21:30Danny Jones?

  And when you say training, you mean learning the Bible, memorizing the Bible?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Learning the Bible, memorizing the Bible and learning like how to answer questions, you know, just standard evangelism stuff. What, you know, if someone doesn't believe in God, here's some verses you can use and blah, blah, blah, that kind of how to how to evangelize.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  And all the time, you're learning how to get along with everybody from bikers to prostitutes, to junkies, to, I mean, it was just a wild bunch. Jazz musicians, I mean, just a wild group of people that are all on the same journey and really committed to it. So there was a lot of high energy and a lot of stuff that was really hard to take, you know, you're hippy. You don't want to have a bunch of rules and, you know, so much regimentation, which was part of the deal. You had to submit like a guy going in the army. You know, you have

• 22:29Speaker 02

  to let go of your old personality and become the new person that you are in your new calling.

• 22:36Danny Jones?

  And you really, you first discovered these rules and you encountered these rules in Texas?

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Everything was like, well, even in LA, like you always had a buddy, you know, there's, you always went two by two, which was a biblical term, but we carried it to a lot bigger extreme than the folks in the Bible did. But, so you were really kind of, there was a lot of, it wasn't surveillance exactly, but it was. Everyone was, you know, looking out for each other. So if somebody started to have doubts, it would usually show up on their face and you would get pulled aside and given a little personal attention and counseling and try and help you through your battles. So, and then every night you'd have a worship service that was very joyful and, you know, transformative. Just that kind

• 23:25Speaker 02

  of a life after the life I had been living is, it was just very, very different. And I was, I could tell I was changing. My personality was changing, which I thought was good. So anyway, as time goes on, the group changes its emphasis, but the main structure was in place, that the person who started it was, he had been a defrocked Christian and missionary alliance pastor, lost his church over, there's a controversy over how he lost his church, but I think it was probably having to do with sex.

• 24:01Danny Jones?

  Talking about Berg?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Berg, yeah.

• 24:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah, David Berg.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  So, and he had this, you know, vision of just molding young lives into something that was

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's him.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  It would be unstoppable. If you had a bunch of committed people that were willing to go anywhere and do anything and share the gospel, we'd take over the world. In the meantime, if you happen to be a narcissist, what a setup.

• 24:37Danny Jones?

  David Berg, a very interesting backstory, to say the least. His upbringing with his parents, how he was raised. I think his mother was the first Christian evangelist in the United States and was doing all kinds of insane things, proclaimed to have divine healing powers.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  She was a big part of the healing movement, yeah.

• 24:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And, um, and he didn't really succeed at anything until he was like in his 50s. And that's when he started The Children of God in like Huntington Beach, I think, right?

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, he would, I think he was part of his mom's evangelistic team, played piano, that kind of thing. But he wasn't really a well-known preacher.

• 25:19Danny Jones?

  And, and when he was a, from what I've, from what I understand, when he was a young child, uh, he had a very traumatic childhood where his parents would shame him for like weird, like normal, what, what most people would consider normal, uh, sexual proclivities of kids going through puberty or things like this. And they would, they would like threaten him with like, uh, chopping off his and like doing weird things with him and his sisters and his, watching him like when he was a kid, like lots of weird early programming that happened to him, um, from his parents in his, in his early childhood.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Folks who have done psychological studies on Berg, you know, always comment on the,

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Bizarre nature of, I mean, it's not even all that bizarre when it comes to the evangelical world. A lot of very strict fundamentalists approach child rearing and sexuality that way.

• 26:25Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  But I think it probably was more extreme in his case and given the nature of his, he thought about sex a lot. So it probably was a big problem for him growing up.

• 26:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  But um.

• 26:40Danny Jones?

  Well, just typically, I mean, that's the story of the Catholic school girl.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a Catholic school kid.

• 26:46Danny Jones?

  You tell, you tell, you tell, you tell a kid.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  I didn't get that lucky.

• 26:50Danny Jones?

  You tell a kid they're, they're forbidden from something, it's just gonna make them want, want more of it.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:55Danny Jones?

  Typically.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I'm, it's, his story is not that different from many other people who grew up in that tradition.

• 27:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  But his reaction to it was extreme. So he.

• 27:10Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Internalized a lot of stuff and over time, I think, you know, as a traveling evangelist, people have opportunities to, to, you know, sleep with people that are not, they're not married to. It just happens. It's not unique to cults. It's, you know, all over. And I'm sure he engaged in that. And along the way, he also got really involved with one of his daughters. And so that was a, you know, we didn't know any of this. It wasn't advertised or many, many years later, it came out. But um, so he had already begun crossing the line into sex with minors.

• 27:54Danny Jones?

  This was before he started the cult.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Right. Right. And she was, I don't know, I think she, he was probably a pre-teen age.

• 28:05Danny Jones?

  So what, what happened after Texas? When you first went to Texas to train?

• 28:13Speaker 02

  They sent a team to Cincinnati, which was closer to where I wanted to go. I still wanted to get back and to the east coast and talk to my friends and girlfriend. But, and that was a total outrage. We were on the streets every day at the University of Cincinnati, sharing the gospel. Sometimes, you know, have new recruits come in every week, one, two, three, some of whom were like well-known musicians and that kind of thing that were, it gave us a sense of wow, this is really happening. The NBC did a program on us called The Ultimate Trip. I don't know if you have that one, but that was the first. The Ultimate Trip?

• 28:58Speaker 02

  The Ultimate Trip. And it was filmed in Cincy. I don't think I'm in that. I don't know where I was. But, um, and that made us, you know, even more like, yeah, God's giving us, you know, promotion, you know, this is, he wants the word out. So, and a lot of people started coming. We had a lot of things happening. A few months there, I had sort of gotten into, they got me into teaching the Bible. I became like a leadership trainee. So I had responsibility with some of the new disciples and so on.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Then it was, the movement was growing so fast, they wanted to open more branches, but didn't have enough leaders. Who was bankrolling all this? Well, the original LA and Texas were supported by Fred Jordan, who was this TV evangelist guy, who was making way more money off us than he was giving to us, because he was using us to raise money from his supporters. This is what we're doing. We're converting all these terrible hippies. So then from that point on, it was really a seriously a faith work. It's hard for people to get their head around it, but miracles would happen.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  We had some strategy. I mean, we would contact local business owners to donate food or whatever we, you know, think lumber, whatever we needed for our projects. And then.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  When you joined, I had a couple hundred bucks. I threw that in the common pot and everything just goes in the common pot. I mean, I think that I probably went four or five months and I never touched money, never actually touched money. So it was, you know, a kind of, it's a rush, you know, because you kind of expect your life to, to happen in a really miraculous way, fashion. Every day was a miracle.

• 31:03Danny Jones?

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• 32:14Speaker 02

  So, and that continued on that way, you know, mostly good stuff. You bump into some strange people in a communal group, but mostly it was pretty positive. Anyway, they, they, at the point where they wanted me to become a leader, they wanted me to get a wife. Yes, there's a, that was Cincy.

• 32:36Danny Jones?

  They wanted you to become a leader?

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, to be able to open a community.

• 32:41Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  So, but you had to have, you had to be married, so.

• 32:45Danny Jones?

  Was this a baptism?

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:47Speaker 04

  This is the ultimate trip.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Cincinnati.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  I think I'm there somewhere, but I don't see me.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  But uh, so you know, at this stage, we're kind of part of what becomes known as the Jesus Movement, but we are the most radical part of the Jesus Movement, just because of our commitment to following the teachings on forsaking all and having all things in common and so on.

• 33:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah, when you say radical, what do you mean specifically? What was so radical about it?

• 33:22Danny Jones?

  Just because you guys were devoting everything and living together, getting rid of all your personal belongings and just eat, sleep and breathe?

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Forget about businesses, forget about any of that. Just preach the gospel and God will take care of you.

• 33:35Danny Jones?

  You guys were like living in your own separate reality.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Correct. And you know, we would challenge others to do the same. So it was a very aggressive, you know, whenever you're arguing a case, you're also convincing yourself more and more as you present the...

• 33:49Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  This is what Jesus challenges his disciples. And you turn to the page, you read it right out of the book, and people go, yeah.

• 33:57Danny Jones?

  Would you guys often get in debates with folks in, in public? Like, like heated actual debates? Or where people mostly either checked out and just like ignoring you guys or like interested?

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Debates were very common. And you know, it was, it was kind of, um, in other religious traditions, I also experienced this where people, it's, it's a bit of a sport to try and win someone over to your point of view. And if you're doing it for God, all the better. You know, you, you got a little juice there. But um, so, and we would always try to bring it back to the Bible so that, and there is some pretty, if you read through the Gospels, there's a very little connection between the way Jesus challenges his followers and the way most people live out their Christian faith. So

• 34:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  It was, and at that time, 1970, it's, you know, people are, are ready to do wild and radical steps, like just give away all your stuff and... And join the movement and go anywhere.

• 35:03Danny Jones?

  Such a crazy time, the sixties and seventies.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:06Danny Jones?

  There's so many wacky stories of shit that was going on in the United States during the sixties and the seventies. It's unbelievable.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  I, I think that's a big part of how this movement coalesced because it was, it was.

• 35:19Danny Jones?

  I mean, think about it. You had, you had MKUltra was going on, a government mind control program legit that was declassified. You had the Charles Manson murders, which was, which was evidently tied into all of that. You have the whole cold world, Kennedy getting killed, the Vietnam war.

• 35:40Danny Jones?

  I mean, there's just an endless amount of fucking bullshit that was going on back then.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:46Danny Jones?

  And deception, you know, and government lies and just wow. That was, I think that was like the, the pinnacle epoch of just like Twilight Zone of America.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, you know, flower power.

• 36:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  So it wasn't all dark. There was a lot.

• 36:07Danny Jones?

  Right, but that stuff got, that stuff got subverted by the government.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  But yeah, I don't think, you know, some people have, have

• 36:22Speaker 02

  proposed that perhaps some of that, the, the government got interested in us because we had a pretty impressive technique for mind control. We were really good at it.

• 36:35Danny Jones?

  The government got interested in children of God.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Well, some people speculate that. I, I don't think so. I never saw any evidence of that, but I have heard that people checked it out and then kind of realized, I don't even think we could control these guys.

• 36:48Danny Jones?

  Well, yeah, if you wanted to, if you were the government, which and they were interested in mind control, that's a fact. You, and they, and they were interested in you guys, how would they figure out what was going on? Well, they would have somebody, you know, try to join and see what it's all about and you.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  I suspect that probably did happen, you know, that people would come in for, you know, a couple of weeks or a month or two months, and they didn't quite fit the bill of, you know, the typical disciple. So I think there was probably some research going on, but I, I think they just thought we, you know.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  I don't think we'd have a way of steering this.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Unless they did it through Berg, but I don't think Berg was interested in sharing.

• 37:30Danny Jones?

  Well, they might not want to steer it. They might just want to understand it.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

• 37:36Danny Jones?

  So you were on the streets, you were preaching to people on the streets, converting, trying to convert people, trying to engage people and recruit people, doing debates. Was there anything sinister you were noticing at all or anything that was?

• 37:52Speaker 02

  No, I mean, in terms of, you know, what we later became most well-known for was the sexual stuff. We were so prudish. I mean, I was getting to the point where I'm proposed to my wife. They're trying to, you know, encourage me to take a wife so that I can open a community. And I was, we were going out to LA to get ordained. We had a problem with the draft. So they thought, well, if we get all these guys ordained and get them as licensed ministers, then they'll be able to better qualify for an exemption.

• 38:29Danny Jones?

  For the Vietnam War.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  For the Vietnam War. So

• 38:34Speaker 02

  the bus was going from Cincinnati to Texas, which was our other big commune in the, at the ranch, and then to LA. There were only four single women in Cincinnati and probably 30 single guys. So they said, look, why don't you come back with a wife? Because, you know, there's not much to choose from here, but you, you've got lots of women in Texas and in LA. Surely the Lord can give you a wife out of them. The fact that I didn't know them was really not an issue. You know, they had a, you know, kind of arranged marriage kind of concept.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  I, I took that in, but after a few days I went and said, I don't think I should do that because I think I'm supposed to marry one of the girls that's here. And they said, oh, well, that's interesting. Two other guys have asked for her hand, so, but, okay. Come back, no wife. We'll see what, how, what works out with Stephanie, my wife.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  And I got, you know, back from LA, uh, she was gone. She'd gone up to Detroit to pioneer a new work up there. And I thought, well, that's a good test. If we get, end up getting back together, then I'll know that, you know, God was engineering things in a certain way. It was a little bit of a test. And, uh, she came back, uh, kind of an unusual romance, but, um, we, we got betrothed, which was kind of a commitment to each other before the Lord. But even after we were betrothed, we couldn't, we couldn't make out, we couldn't, you know, we were allowed to hold hands, kiss each other goodnight, but, you know,

• 40:16Speaker 02

  no sex, no anything that would be considered as a date. Nope. Until you're married. So I had to, we had to get our birth certificates from our parents, which was really awkward, to put it mildly. Um, and then when they, that all happened, we hitchhiked to Kentucky because we were too young to get married in Ohio without some document, uh, and got married. Um, that's the nature of the group that I joined. It was extremely, uh, um, you know, strict on all sexual matters. But as time went on, that all changed. But there

• 40:55Speaker 02

  was a, what, what I try to explain about the difficult thing, obviously you led with it, you know, these guys are the worst, the, they're just so nefarious and, you know, dark and, you know, all this stuff that happened in the group, and I don't deny it at all. It just didn't happen early on. It was a very slow, uh, place, probably six or seven years in the group before that stuff started happening.

• 41:22Danny Jones?

  This is the way cults typically operate, right? They draw people in with the glamour and all the good stuff and the future promises. And once you get so far down the road, the point of no return is when they introduce the, the evil shit, the, the, the trafficking, the child abuse or... Xenu, the Galactic Overlord, whatever your cult god is, that's when the crazy stuff comes in.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, yeah, it's, I think Berg was making it up as he went. He may have had some sort of

• 41:57Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 41:58Speaker 02

  He may have.

• 41:59Danny Jones?

  At what point did you meet him?

• 42:01Speaker 02

  I met him in Texas.

• 42:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, in Texas, early on, okay.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  He was charismatic, a bit spooky. I mean, I wasn't used to anybody of his demeanor. You know, he wore dark sunglasses all the time, even at night. And the rumor was that the reason he did it is because he could see all your sins. And it freaked out no believers. So I don't know what the excuse was. Maybe, maybe it was bloodshot. I don't really know. But that's the air. He would just kind of pop up when you weren't expecting him and, you know, say something profound and, you know, kind of throw you off guard. It was, it was, um, I wasn't particularly attracted to him or repulsed by him.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  I was just fascinated because I never saw anyone like him.

• 42:52Danny Jones?

  Mysterious.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So as time went on, his, what happened, to me, it seems like if you give a guy with narcissistic personality disorder, the attention that he was getting from these wildly enthusiastic, young, um, you know, virile kind of young people, that kind of a crowd, he's going to do something with it. Eventually, if, whether he's thinking about it in the original case or not, it morphed that way. So he started getting, you know, concubines or whatever you want to, you know, he had other

• 43:32Speaker 02

  girls with him from time to time, most of which, we knew about one, but we didn't know about the others. So, and that was kind of kept hush hush because it would freak us out, you know, we were not allowed to make out with our betrothed. And he was messing around with other people's wives, you know? So that was, it was, that leaked out later.

• 43:54Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm, okay.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  But he would slowly introduce ideas of more sexual freedom. We were pretty repressed, you know? I mean, we were, you know? Like church Christians, but on steroids. I mean, we were really intense about everything. So he had to kind of steer us into a path where we'd be a little more liberated, skinny dipping, or you know, that kind of stuff.

• 44:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  But um, once he got into into a place where he had several thousand followers all over the world and was living separate from any of the communities, he lived on his own, just he and his wife and a few helpers kind of thing. Uh, then he had the liberty to do whatever he want, whenever he wanted, and it just got stronger and stronger. And he got the bright idea that, you know, maybe we should use um, our sexual energy and attractiveness to the public as a way of gaining recruits. Show them the love of God in a physical way, like you would feed them or take care of them if they're wounded, or that kind of thing. And

• 45:04Speaker 02

  that's the way he built on it slowly. First, it was just a matter of, of um, don't be afraid to flirt, you know, just to engage in a flirtatious type of conversation if it will help you draw that person into a deeper conversation and a longer conversation.

• 45:22Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  And then it went from that, where he started, uh, he and his second wife were were going to um, dance lessons in London and meeting all these lonely guys. And eventually she started uh, hooking up with them as a way to give them the gospel. And they got a few recruits from from that. And they thought, well, let's, let's take this show on the road. So they launched a worldwide rollout of this new plan called Flirty Fishing, which I hope you don't have.

• 45:51Danny Jones?

  Flirty Fishing.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, don't, don't Google it.

• 45:56Danny Jones?

  Don't Google it? Why?

• 45:58Speaker 02

  No, I mean, it's.

• 45:59Danny Jones?

  They got, they, they like drew manuals for this, right?

• 46:01Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And that's, you know.

• 46:03Danny Jones?

  They did like comic book uh, style illustrations and and uh, manuals describing and teaching folks how to do engage in the flirty fishing. And it was, it was mainly the women who were doing this, right?

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, occasionally you, you might end up in a, in a kind of a relationship with a person of the opposite sex if you're a male, but that wasn't the, that wasn't the ticket, you know?

• 46:27Speaker 02

  So that's when things started getting really crazy because Yeah, how long were you in it before he introduced this flirty fishing stuff? Yeah, I was just trying to think about that and I haven't visited the literature in a long time, but I'm thinking it was probably six or seven years at least. Yeah, that stuff. God's whores.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Look at that. So, yeah, it's a

• 46:53Speaker 02

  it's not something like I really brag about. And when did he change his name to Moses?

• 47:00Speaker 02

  What happened was it was an early article when they were on the road camping in state parks and buses and stuff. One of the guys came out and said, this is like Moses and the children of Israel. So that's we got the name Moses and the children of God there. And then he later took David was his original name, but he also takes on the character. He feels that he combines the anointing of the prophet Moses and the anointing of King David. And one person has this great end time prophet, which we have a whole, we had a whole kind of theology about where in the Bible this speaks about this guy, but it's all patched together in a very weird way. Interpretation. Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Most Bible scholars identify it as as messianic as Christ, but he had a way of twisting it into this is me. And this is a new, the change will be as great as from the Old Testament to the New Testament, from the New Testament to the end time church. So the idea was this is going to be really a dramatic departure.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  And the central piece of what he was going for in it was this thing he called the law of love. And in it, he sort of said, it doesn't really matter. There's no right or wrong outside of love, you know, love is the whole key to to doing. If you're doing it in love, it's good. So there were a few parameters would would be loving and what wouldn't, but not many. And he took it further and further and further as time went on and eventually started with with his own. He wasn't having sex with his son, but his helpers were when he was just two years old, three years old, just, I don't, I don't think it was intercourse, but it was, you

• 48:52Speaker 02

  know, um, oral sex and that kind of thing. Jesus Christ. Yeah, it was really, really hard to take. I mean, for anybody. And how did you guys know about this? They published it. They'd send out photos. They would touch up the photos so the adult could not be recognizable, but. And they would distribute it to all the members? To the members only. It wasn't something you'd hand out on the street. Or you guarded it, you know, it was a very secretive thing. Hmm. But it's so hard to say because to put myself back into my 26 or 27 year old head, I now was married. I had another partner who was soon to become my wife. I had seven

• 49:35Speaker 02

  kids. Um, it was a real, um, I had five kids and then I got two more real quick after that. But, um.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  With how many? You're pretty committed. I had five with my first wife and then when we added another member, which, um, a long story, but eventually it was, it was not commonly practiced in the group, but it wasn't uncommon either. It was to have two wives was considered biblical simultaneously. Yeah. Um, and it started out as, oh, the idea was they wanted to involve, there was too many Americans in the group. They wanted more international people. So if you were a leader, an American leader with an American wife, you had to take on another trainee or a partner. Didn't have to be a woman. It could be a man, whatever. But as a team that would be leadership in a, in a, a three-way kind of community.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Well, if you start having sex and sharing, your, your, your, your bonds grow quite intense. It's not, um, it's not turn it on, turn it off. So we're pretty entangled. Yeah. I don't know, you know, my wife has her convictions about what we're doing. I was starting to have some doubts. My best friend, who had been, um, in the group as well,

• 51:02Speaker 02

  that I'd brought into the group, but, um, he had become Mo's right-hand man. And part of my willingness to follow was the fact, well, if it's okay with Mike, things have got to be okay. I know he's not going to do something like that, you know, that's, that's wrong. So if he's convinced, I feel safe. But he ended up getting kicked out because he challenged. Hmm. So that was a crisis for me. And so here I am. I was at the time, a pretty big leader. I had, I was over about, I don't know, probably a dozen countries, works all over and, and all this kind of. You were in charge of a dozen coun- uh, country groups in different countries?

• 51:44Speaker 02

  You're right. So me, I don't know, probably thirty or forty different communities, but spread all the way from Bangladesh to Greece and parts of North Africa. So it was a massive area. And, you know, what did I know? I had, all I knew was nineteen-year-olds' education and the Bible, and, and a very particular interpretation of the Bible. Right. So, but everyone around me, my wife, my ki- we're all involved in this thing that's, that's kind of all-consuming. You don't have like outside friends and stuff, you know, it's just your, your whole life is tied up in the community and committed to it. You're still experiencing miracles, I gotta admit.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  They started getting less and less. As time went on, the, that miraculous aspect of our life became more, um, strategic. We'd figure out, well, this works good. Let's try busking. Let's do this. Let's, you know, different ways to raise money. FFing was one of them because people would be quite generous with people. Flurry fishing. Yeah.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  And I, you know, I felt the real change going on and I got in trouble for having, I don't know, bad attitude or something. They just didn't think I was committed enough. I wasn't, I didn't have enough of the spirit of David, of our leader's spirit to properly lead. So we got canned and it was a big, you know, a public denunciation and letters going to everyone you know in the world is reading about you and all these things. Some of them are making statements about what a jerk you are. It's a hard, it's a hard thing to go through. I was quite tempted at that point to just say, fuck this, you know, I can't

• 53:35Speaker 02

  do this anymore. But it was my whole life, my wife, my kids, by this time, two wives. It was, I couldn't emotionally allow myself to get strong enough on my conviction that this is wrong. I should leave. Cause I knew it probably cost me my family. I just didn't think my wife would come with me. We were living overseas, had no money of our own, you know?

• 54:01Danny Jones?

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• 55:17Speaker 02

  How often were you bouncing from country to country? Oh, boy. Well, it depended on visas, for one thing, you know, like India, you get a visa for six months, a year, you might stretch it for two years if you had a connection, but then you gotta leave. So, you know, we'd be bouncing around from India to Athens to, oops, Tehran to Cairo, you know, just, we were always, you know, on some kind of a mission. And where were your children during all of this? Eventually, well, there was one period when we ended up back in the States for about,

• 55:58Speaker 02

  maybe a year, if that. And our idea was, we were gonna go back to India, but this time on a business visa. So, we were trying to start a business here that we could sponsor ourselves as buyers and go to India and buy handicaps and whatnot, which didn't work out. But at the same time, I got an invitation to go to Mexico. And so, what we did was, the kids, my oldest son is a very talented musician, and my wife could also play guitar and sing, and we had another team member who was also quite good and fluent in several languages. So, the kids formed a music group, and they became quite popular. At first in

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Mexico, we performed all the, all over the Yucatan, in every prison in the Yucatan, five-star hotels, we were on television, we did shows for the mayor, you know, that kind of stuff. We were quite popular, all the while camping on the beach. But we started sending our newsletter that we sent to folks that were contributors, that weren't in the group, but would send donations to us to help us with our work, to other folks around the world. And one of our friends was in Egypt, and he said, you know, I think you could do this in Cairo. You could be a children's musical act here. Why don't you pray about it? So, we did. And, I don't know, six months later, we were performing in Cairo. You know,

• 57:26Speaker 02

  it was just a kind of a...

• 57:31Speaker 02

  That, the kids enjoyed it to a certain extent, but it was also child labor. I mean, we were just, you know, you know, kind of the Jackson family or Bruno Mars and in Hawaii as a kid, you know, that kind of a thing in our, in our head. But I mean, in retrospect, obviously, there's a better way to do a children's music group than the way we did with street bus.

• 57:52Danny Jones?

  And these were all your kids in this group?

• 57:54Speaker 02

  Except for the very little ones.

• 57:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  And once they were old enough, they were, they were, they would perform matching outfits and choreographs and all that. Quite cute.

• 58:04Danny Jones?

  And what about like, like, was there any sort of like internal education program for the kids? Like, were they learning basic stuff like about the world and about life and?

• 58:13Speaker 02

  We had a very basic homeschool program, but it was pretty basic. Really reading, writing and arithmetic. That's about it. And, but they were all very verbal because we didn't have TVs. We didn't do any of that.

• 58:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  It was just all reading. Some, my kids have, you know, amazing vocabularies and love to read. But, um, we sadly, you know, once you got those down, there's so much more you have to learn in order to get ready for life. And we didn't do that. By that time, they were pretty much, you know, when they're 12 or 13, they're pretty much part of the workforce, you know, they're on the dishes, they're helping cook, they're going out to, on the streets to distribute literature and raise money and go perform.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  Which at the time, you know, I justified it in my own head as, you know, this, this is how all children's music groups, you know, if you trace a lot of rock musicians' history, they started in a children's music group. But, uh, it was different. And I, I know it was, uh, not a, not a good thing to do with the kids that way, you know?

• 59:26Speaker 02

  And I, you know, I feel bad about it. Feel feel that it was injurious to their, you know, they shouldn't have had to bear that kind of burden. So, I don't know, where, where we live, I'm not sure where.

• 59:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we were just talking about how you were in charge of the 12 different countries, factions in 12 different countries and managing them and, and jumping all around. And then your best friend was kicked out.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  So we got the, we got the ax. Then we ended up going, we went out to Sri Lanka and we're trying to start a business out there with another friend in the group, which you could do in certain countries. You were allowed to have secular activities if you were in a country that wasn't, didn't have a Christian background or donor base.

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  And real hard. I mean, I honestly could have easily left the group back then if I was convinced that my family would stay intact. But every time I got right up to the edge of it, I would back off. I would just get scared thinking, I don't, I don't want to do this. I'm going to lose my family, you know?

• 1:00:29Danny Jones?

  What did your kids think about it all?

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Well, they're kids, so they were, you know.

• 1:00:34Danny Jones?

  Did you ever have conversations with them about that?

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Now?

• 1:00:36Danny Jones?

  About, but no, no, back then, about like potentially leaving or like?

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  No, I would never have.

• 1:00:40Danny Jones?

  Did they ask you about like?

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  I wouldn't, if I even brought it up to my wife directly, she would report me. I would be sent off to Timbuktu to wash dishes and, you know, get retrained. So I didn't, I couldn't openly discuss that. But I just put it off and thought, well, maybe we'll find a way and niche that we can kind of be far enough away from, from leadership and all the craziness that's going on and just be missionaries. We'll just do our own thing and be missionaries.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  Worked for a while, but it's, it's a very difficult tight rope to walk. We ended up back in the States, then in Mexico, kids got involved, then back to Cairo, then, I don't know, it was jumping around a lot. But during the last 10 years or so that we were in the group, I was pretty much independent. I didn't really, I tried not to get into leadership again because it was a bummer. It just, there was nothing good about it.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  But every once in a while, I would, and then the crisis of conscience would come up. You can't do this. This is wrong. And the stuff with kids is getting much more serious, much more widespread. Thankfully, I can just- And known by people. Yeah. Known by all the members. You had to know. It was part of the publications. It was part of the, it might not be happening in your home. It might not be happening in your location, but you knew it was happening. It was published everywhere, and you're always gonna brush up against it somewhere. So, that was a crisis for me. The group started having to change because, you know,

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  you can't get away with that stuff indefinitely. Somebody's gonna blow the whistle on you. So then we became much more of this, you know, freaked out, you know, draw the curtains. Paranoid? Yeah, paranoid. And we, you know, rent the house and have 20 people in it, but you'd think there were just three people living there, going in and out in tinted vans, you know, all this kinda, just a crazy way to live. Except, we were all freaked out that they were gonna take our kids away. So that was the, once it got so bizarre that I realized I am doing nothing for God here. All I'm doing is just playing a role in this abusive

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  organization. I have to get out. I hope they'll come, but I don't know. I don't know what they'll do. And that was a pretty big moment for me. They finally came out with some list of rules. It was just so insane. I just said, "Wait, why don't you just tell us a list of the things we're allowed to do?" Because it would be a lot shorter than the list of the things we're not allowed to do. So, and that blew up. Then I was in the doghouse, and next thing I knew, I was being invited to serve the Lord in some other capacity to leave the group. How did you protect your kids from the abuse? Well, you know, I don't like to discuss my own children's personal experiences, and

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  it really depends on where you were, how old you were at the time that this particular activity got widespread within the group.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  Just some, there was in my mind, clearly, a handful of people who were just flat out pedophiles, just were having a field day.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  A lot of people who got into that activity did it with the believing, this is the way the logic went. If, if, uh, we already were sold on the fact that God created sex. It's good, it's beautiful, it's a gift. Uh, we, we also had crossed over, it's not only if you're married, you can share sexual love with other people in a beneficial and loving way. So, once you're over that hump, then you think, well, the idea was, in, in the Bible, people were, you know, get betrothed at the age of 12. You know, it was, Mary was probably 12 years old.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:04:55Danny Jones?

  And the, and the, allegedly, the apostles were children as well, or teenagers.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, some of them were. Some of them had kids, but it, it was, um, the idea was, I forgot where I was going with that.

• 1:05:11Danny Jones?

  I was asking about how you protected your kids from this stuff.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  So, then, once it opened up to the point where, yeah, you know, kids can have sex when they're teenagers and maybe an adult could have sex with a teenager in certain circumstances. Very uncomfortable, very uncomfortable. I had teenage girls, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't at all.

• 1:05:39Danny Jones?

  And this was writing? This was, this was stuff that was written and given to you? Or this was explained to you in person, in like a meeting or something?

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Um, both, both, yeah. It was, it was not a secret. So, I mean, you really can't say, you know, I know some people who still kind of like, I never saw it, I didn't know what was going on. I don't believe that. I just It was everywhere. Unless you're willingly blind, you would know that this was going on. You might, you might try to describe it in the, in the idealized love and, and there's really no difference between a, a child exploring sexuality and an adult. And maybe they can do it together, you know, that kind of thing. And I think people got drawn into this idea that I have to educate my child sexually. In, in a, in a loving, um, you know,

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  it matter and introduce them to this. Well, I didn't, I didn't like it at all. I was not a part of, um, I never had sex with a child, uh, or anyone underage at all.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  But it's a miracle. Honestly, it's very hard to imagine how I escaped from any situation because of the places that I lived. There was an awful lot of it going on around. And some of my kids were affected by it. I won't, you know, discuss the details of their, their situations. It's up to them to, and they do, they, they in, in their own world will express their, their challenges and difficulties in overcoming the trauma of those kind of, uh, early exposures.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Once we got out, it was

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  in terms of the rest of the group. I think it really went Berg himself, I do believe was a pedophile. He had, I mean, he was just an everything. He was just, you know, just a dangerous, dangerous man.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  But, um, and I do think there were other people in the group who had, who just had a field day with it and they're very, very, uh, un- just selfish, just going after people that it was going to be hurtful and they didn't care. But not everybody. And I know some people who got caught up in it, who deeply regretted it and have recovered their bonds with their kids in a, in a, in a beautiful way, you know, just by admitting they were just

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Crazy, you know, just went nuts in this whole thing. So, you know, I gotta say, my, my kids are remarkable in the, in the way they've struggled through the issues of, of their upbringing and found a way that they have certain strengths of character and of, of resilience that, that not too many people do. And so I got a lot of respect for them. And I've had to apologize, I couldn't tell you how many times, just for the stuff that we did, the stuff that went wrong, stuff that happened to them on my watch, you know, just shouldn't, shouldn't have, shouldn't have happened at all. And it's not just my

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  kids, it's, you know, I don't know how many kids, but in the thousands of kids who, in that window where this was part of the group's identity and practices and whatever age they were, you know, depending on if they were pre-teens or teens or whatever, their experience and where they were, if they were in a central headquarters situation, bad news. If they were out in the field somewhere, maybe not, maybe they didn't even have, might not have come up. Where was Berg during all this? Where was he based? Texas? He moved around, he left the States pretty early. I think he thought the FBI was after him.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  He lived in England for a while, they lived in Switzerland for a long time, Tenerife, he lived in, you know, the, what are those islands? Off the coast of Spain.

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  He, he jumped around, he, he was, I think his last place was Portugal, I think that's where he died.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  It's all very secretive, but that's, that's my understanding, anyway. So. I was out by that time. What was the straw that broke the camel's back for you? For me? I think it was just, this is, there was no, there was no, this is good, this is bad, this is good, this is bad. It was all wump. There's nothing good about this anymore. I can't even preach the gospel. If I should lead someone to Christ, I can't give them my phone number because it's a security law, you know, rule. And it was just, I'm doing all this and I'm not treating my kids. By this time, the, the sex with kids had been outlawed within the group, although I think it was still practiced. It wasn't practiced

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  where we were. The last couple of years that we were in, it had been verboten. Too much, you know, too much bad publicity. So they, they stopped all that. But my kids were still messed up and I could see they're not ready for life. I can't, unless they're going to be part of this community all of their lives, we're in a, we have to make a change. We have to be able to give them a better opportunity. And it's personally agonizing for me just to watch what had been my dream turn into an absolute nightmare and not figure, didn't know how to get out, you know, didn't really know. So by the time we did make the break,

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  we had spent two years in England, visas ran out, came back to the States. By this time, I was already thinking, if I'm gonna make a break, I'd rather be in the States. At least I'm in my own country. I don't have to worry about visas and all that and figure out some, some way of, of changing our lifestyle.

• 1:12:14Speaker 05

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• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  So, and it, within six months, the shit hit. You know, persona non grata, wouldn't let on the property. Really, they're not, you don't go out with a friendly handshake and a gold watch. You get pummeled, you know, so. And my, the kids, all their best friends. Not physically.

• 1:13:11Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  You know, you're just, you're a real stinker, you know, and just, people just dump on you. And my kids were confused because I, all their lives, I had been preaching, this is the way we serve God. And now I'm saying, nope, we can't do this. It's not right. We're not doing it. And all that's very hard and losing their friends.

• 1:13:34Danny Jones?

  What's the age group again? What's the age gap between all, how many kids? At that point, how many kids?

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  At sixteen, one more was born after we left.

• 1:13:43Danny Jones?

  Sixteen kids? And you're around all of them every day?

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  No, my second wife was still in England, getting ready to have our sixth baby together, when we came back to the States. And she's from New Zealand. So, it was complicated. So, we just figured, you have your baby here, and then we'll figure out visas later, or whether we go to Mexico, or we'll do something, we'll figure out a way to do it. Because she wasn't American. In the meantime, I got kicked out of the group. She stayed. And she faced a complicated challenge in her own right. That meant she's a single woman with six kids. And, you know, totally at the mercy of the group.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  But that's what she felt she was supposed to do. And it was a, you know, she was kind enough, which was unusual in the group. She was kind enough to allow me to maintain a friendly, ongoing relationship with all of our kids. So, you know. What was the oldest kid? At the time, we left probably thirteen, fourteen, maybe. Okay. Um, down to a baby. Mm hmm. Um.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  But so I, you know, every couple of years I'd get over to England to see him or New Zealand or Mexico or wherever they were. Every few years I'd go over and try, try to, you know, remember everybody's birthday every year, Christmas, all that kind of stuff. So we, we had a friendly relationship, but I was always, it was suspicious. If I came to visit, like in England, they wouldn't let me stay, spend the night in the house. So, you know, I had to stay in a trailer park up the, up the street. That kind of thing. So it was, she was still make sure I could see him. I wasn't allowed to talk to him about the group or anything or what, why we left. And it was a very confusing thing for them, trying to figure out why his dad, who, you

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  know, this guy is, he, he was so part of this group that how can he be against it now? I don't understand. You know, it was really hard for them. Amazingly, we still, they're all out now, thank God. Yeah. Um, and we're pretty good friends. What about the, what about your wife? Second wife? You mean? Either of them. Are either of them still in? No, no. None of them are anymore. It took, it took, uh, Melissa, our, our New Zealand partner, a, a long time to come around. She was mentally convinced, and I'm not a hundred percent sure whether that's just because she couldn't imagine life that wasn't, uh, part of the group.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  So, um, and, you know, it was going to be complicated if she decided to come with us and figure out all, all, all the things we had to do to figure out where to live and get visas and all that.

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  So she hang on, held on for a long time in the group. But eventually she finally says, I get what you're saying. Yeah, we, this is wrong. And the kids are all pretty well adjusted. And I have a son in Mexico City is a high paid consultant, you know. Today? Yeah.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  You know, they're all successful in their fields, musicians and artists and medical field, all kinds of things. They're, you know, quite

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  good, happy, well rounded. Everybody likes them. They're very lovable people. It's a miracle, man.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  I won't say that about all my own kids who grew up with me. Several of them had serious psychiatric problems along the way. Like what?

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Well, in 1997, we were living in the States and I had

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  three of my oldest kids stayed in the group after we left because they were all How old? Two of them were married.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  And had babies. How old were they?

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  Maybe between the ages of 16. He was the youngest. He wasn't married. 16 up to probably 21. And, you know, we just had to wait patiently because you can't just run in and try to talk somebody out of what they're doing, especially if they have kids, you know? I, I know the trial that they're going to have. So it's just giving it time and slowly life would start to, yeah, maybe what dad's saying is true and they'd pack up and leave. Yeah. So thankfully it, it all came back together. But in 1997, one of our daughters was in college, two of them were in college, roommates together. And

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  one of them, just shy of her 19th birthday, was killed in a car accident. And it was, you know, utterly.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Devastating to everyone in our family, just we couldn't imagine it. A super, super lovely young woman. If you took a vote of my kids, who's your favorite brother or sister? She would have won all the votes. So we were smashed and it took a while for us to get our feet again. At that time, we also had a 13 year old who was already, she was off the charts. Brilliant, beautiful, perfect pitch, musically gifted, just an amazing kid. And a very unusual personality and just obviously had some personality disorders.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  So it was really hard to, for her, when her big sister died, she got more and more wild and ran away from home when she was 15. Got into a lot of trouble. But she was doing better. She was now 23, this is some years later, 10 years, 2005. And she had gotten married. Her husband was a nice guy and I don't think he knew how to help her.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  But during one of her breaks with reality, she ended up overdosing on alcohol and her psychiatric prescriptions accidentally. And, you know. Again, rough on the whole family, you know. So that has left its echoes. Some of the, I admire every one of the kids, but you know, some of them handled it better than others and some of them struggled, you know, still struggle with different issues.

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  Which I'm sure are related to the family, but they were so young that they didn't have any of those kind of experiences. It was definitely not part of their, but the echoes, they hear their big brothers and sisters talk. So all of that carries down and it makes it a hard cross for them to carry too, you know, just.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  You know, it's a tough thing. You're a... Me, I'm, you know, I was 19 when I joined the group. I had a reasonably good education. I was aware of many things in the world. And I have to take full responsibility for everything I did, you know? There's just, you know, I can explain it in terms of what psychological conditioning is and how it works. I mean, I loved your interview with Rebecca Lemo off there. That was good. I love her book.

• 1:21:45Speaker 02

  But, yeah, it's just, the struggle is, as a parent, I can't live constantly in full view of everything I ever did wrong. So you slowly have to forgive yourself if you've kind of learned what you did, why you did it, what went wrong, how your brain got to that place, and you're willing to say, "I was wrong." And you're not, it's not, it's not like somebody hypnotizes you, you know? It's little agreements you have to take. I had to agree to do stuff, you know? It wasn't just, they couldn't just make me, but they would convince me in a way.

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  And it also sort of appealed to me, the thought, "Yeah, I could have another wife." Yeah, right. So I can't say I'm just a totally innocent bystander, you know? It was a, there's an appeal that holds you in something.

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  And there's the hard part, you know, there's the part you don't like, and it's constantly back and forth. But I won't say that I never, you get led, the way the Bible puts it, you're led away of your own lusts, you know? So there's a certain part of us that is, if you get suckered into something, chances are you probably were lusting after it, you know? Yes. So that's the, you have to unpack all that, repent and forgive yourself. You have to be willing to change, admit what happened, see it as wrong, do the best you can to make up for it, apologize to those you've hurt, and work hard to try to build the trust again, you know? Do you think your kids forgive you?

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do.

• 1:23:33Speaker 02

  Although if they didn't, I'm not sure they'd tell me, you know.

• 1:23:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:23:36Speaker 02

  And it does, in moments of high pressure, sometimes something will come out, you know, that, look, Dad, you know, what can you say, really, seriously? You know, this is what happened to us, you know. So it was, it's, but nonetheless, they love me, they seek advice sometimes. You know, we were good friends. Everybody lives in, of our nine surviving children, eight live within a probably a 10-mile radius. They still love each other and raise their kids together and, you know, we're a big, loving, happy bunch.

• 1:24:14Danny Jones?

  So nine of them are alive?

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had one son who moved to Atlanta. I think he just couldn't handle the drama of a big family. But we're still very close, but he's not

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  at the Pats game every weekend or something, you know. It's, he's got his own life, busy life. But, um, yeah, I respect them. I give them kudos for being able to come up with a forgiving attitude. But I think if you really love somebody, they feel it. You know, they know that you'll do anything for them, whatever you screwed up, you know?

• 1:24:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, it's, obviously, a lot of people could not live with themselves after that. A lot of people committed suicide after leaving that. And even when they were in the cult, right? I remember, I heard stories about, you know.

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  There were a few adult suicides, but the tragic piece is that so many of the second generation, I don't even know the statistics, but it's a lot, you know, that end up, I don't know, just getting into a place that they can't find a way out of. They don't have the internal structure, you know, from having been raised in a chaotic fashion. And, you know, they have some tough stuff to chew through. So, I mean, as an adult, every time it happens, it's crushing.

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  There was, I don't know if you're familiar with the whole Ricky Rodriguez thing?

• 1:25:43Danny Jones?

  I am, yeah, but you should explain it for people.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  So, 2005, just shortly after, shortly before my daughter passed away, Ricky.

• 1:25:57Danny Jones?

  Were you in, well, in 2005, were you out?

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, we were, we'd been out for 15 years, almost.

• 1:26:02Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  But I was involved with a ministry called Meadowhaven, which is, it was a transitional home for people coming out of high-control groups, cults. And you could stay there for up to six months, and they had a counseling program and a lot of different ways to help people get back on track after being, you know, 20 years in a cult or whatever.

• 1:26:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  But, um, so we were involved, we were serving on the board of this ministry and trying to work, you know, going to International Cultic Studies Association events where we would explain our past and try to get a deeper understanding of the dynamics. And Ixia, the International Cultic Studies Association, people get it. It doesn't, you know, there are hundreds of different groups represented, but they get the same dynamic, you know, it's like McDonald's or Taco Bell, different menu, but same standard operating procedure.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  So, and so cults are that way, they just inevitably end up doing certain things the same. So they get the dynamic and they get how warped your sense of right and wrong can become in that atmosphere. So, uh, trying to think of why I was going there.

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  Two thousand and oh yeah, so um one, the kid, the, the, the child of

• 1:27:38Danny Jones?

  Ricky, right?

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

  Ricky, uh, he was a love child, born to a guy from the Canary Islands and Maria, who was the second wife of Berg.

• 1:27:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, Ricky was not Berg's wife? I mean, I'm sorry, Ricky was a Berg's son?

• 1:27:54Speaker 02

  Not biologically, no.

• 1:27:55Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  He was, you know, a Spanish father.

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  And he had left the group, it was very, very, uh, you can imagine what he went through, holy smokes, he's, you know, he's been publicly, um, lauded all over the, the world by our group. He was, he was the prince, he was, you know, the up and coming heir to the throne kind of thing. A lot of pressure and, uh, it, it was obviously all that, he was the, the experimental test case for all the sex stuff with kids.

• 1:28:30Danny Jones?

  The moment he was born, basically, he was abused sexually.

• 1:28:36Speaker 02

  I think maybe two or three, something like that. He was getting his diaper changed, you know, so that's

• 1:28:43Speaker 02

  So, and you know, the idea, I mean, they published it all, it wasn't something like the Catholic Church or something, this is not done in a corner, it was not like secret, hide it, don't tell anybody, it was, no, this is great, this is, this is the way God's love is meant to function, we're supposed to be all, you know, utterly liberated in all, in all ways.

• 1:29:02Danny Jones?

  So not only are they doing to this, to this child, they're, they're publicly brag, they're bragging about it to everybody in the group.

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  As a kind of a how to manual, kind of, this is, this is the way we suggest you raise your kids, you know, so that's why it caught on so, so, um, widespread. So anyway, he had, no kid raised in the family had it easy, but he had it more difficult than almost anyone I can imagine, just the amount of scrutiny and the amount of abuse and control. He, he got married, they left the group, um, he had become an electrician, he was, but he was severely troubled, just eaten alive and constantly feeling like

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  I gotta do something to save my generation from the family. And he got it fixed in his brain that he was gonna kill his mother. And track her down, but he's living incognito. He didn't know where she was. And on in the path of trying to, oops, trying to find her. He ended up.

• 1:30:05Danny Jones?

  He made a video, right?

• 1:30:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, he made a video.

• 1:30:07Danny Jones?

  He made a video talking about, and you can find this on YouTube, I think.

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Danny Jones?

  Basically, like he has the knife and the gun, showing it off and telling him about.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  And you can see his demeanor is just, you know, flat. He's not raging angry or anything. He's just cold. He's come to a place of a decision in his life. And he's ready to commit violence. And he's, you know, like that weird piece when you make a decision, even if it's a really bad one. That's what he, the vibe that he carried on his tape. So after he.

• 1:30:39Danny Jones?

  Don't play the audio on this, Steve. Sorry, continue.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  After he, he ended up. Well, he ended up finding one of Maria's assistants. Who was living, I forget why, but she was living on her own. And tracked her down and was trying to extract the information. Where is my mother?

• 1:31:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  And was torturing her to do it and ended up killing her. And then drove off into the desert and killed himself. So this was, you know. I didn't know him well, but I knew him.

• 1:31:17Danny Jones?

  You met him?

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, as a kid, you know, and I had just come back from India and and I was visiting, you know, David Bergen, his headquarters situation in Southern France. And he came over to hang out. I was just showing him pictures of India. He was so interested, you know. Oh, how did they do that? Oh, what's that? You know, just, I really liked him. He was a good kid. And happy, you know, he wasn't, he didn't seem to be, he was very comfortable with adult company and stuff, you know. So it was real. It hit me really hard. Not because I was so emotionally connected to Ricky,

• 1:32:00Speaker 02

  but because he was a cop, he was a part of the cohort of my kids. Oh, wow. You know, it was just a total shock. So the entire ex-member, second generation ex-member community, you know, went ballistic over the whole thing. It was a website formed with a whole lot of very, very traumatic testimonies.

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  When it first broke, ABC News wanted to do a story, a little background piece on cults and the group. And so they contacted Bob Pardon, a friend of ours who runs the Meadowhaven Project, and said, do you know anyone from the children of God? And he says, yeah, let me, I'm not sure he'll want to, but you know, maybe. So it was a, they wanted me to get interviewed, but the tape hadn't come out yet. And we all knew that it had happened. There was newspaper stories, but there was no footage released or anything. ABC had the tape. This one? Yeah. Okay. So he, the, I said, look, I'll do it.

• 1:33:10Speaker 02

  But you know, if you could like put the screen over me and change my voice or something like that, you know, I got kids in school, grandkids in school. That gets out. I know how kids can be with other kids, you know? Yeah. It's gonna be rough for them. So, and I was just scared, you know, like, wow, this is really, really upsetting, you know, in every way.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  So I said, I'll do this, but I'm not going to talk about my own kids' experience because that's their story to tell, not mine. I will answer questions about the group and so on and so forth and give you the background piece to, you know, in any way that I can help. Sure. And.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  So I went into, they had a hotel room set up in Boston, you know, with lights and all that kind of stuff. But before doing the interview, he said, I have a tape to show you, you know, and he hit play and, you know, God, I'm just utter, utter,

• 1:34:12Speaker 02

  completely shocked. I was a mess of just tears and snot, couldn't catch my breath. I couldn't talk. I was just so upset, thinking about Ricky and all the kids that that faced the same type of emotional challenges that he did. Maybe not to the same extent, maybe they are, who knows? I'm not sure. I don't know everybody's experience, but it's personally upsetting, but more so because I know that I played a role in this group getting as far as it had, you know, for so many years. And I'm, you know, responsible to some extent for all the shit

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  that's happening, you know, with with all the second generation kids. So that became, you know, a real difficult reality to deal with in my everyday life.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  Thankfully, they never aired the clip, you know, of me in the interview because I was completely, I think I was just too snot covered to use on a TV. So they went a different way, which I was grateful for. But, um, yes, that's the biggest thing for the last, from probably

• 1:35:38Speaker 02

  1995, once we had kind of got educated about what had happened to us and we began to see clearly and get some cult insights.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  Until the present day. I mean, I got grandkids, you know, they weren't even a twinkle in my son's eyes yet, you know, that are affected in the bang on repercussions.

• 1:35:59Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:36:00Speaker 02

  Well, they hear the stories and that, you know, it makes it a little hard to feel the same about grandma and grandpa, you know, because, you know, I, my kids actually understand it better than some of my grandkids, just simply because my kids understood, you know, how this happened, that it wasn't, dad didn't dream this thing up. Um, yeah, well, you know, that's, that's my story.

• 1:36:27Danny Jones?

  Wow, man. And this, so this, this Ricky guy, he was, that we were just talking about, he was proclaimed by Berg to be like the next Messiah or something like that?

• 1:36:42Speaker 02

  He would be the prince. Once Berg died, which he was prophesying that he was going to die soon, that I think the, the doctrine that they came up with, Ricky and his mother would be the two end time prophets in the Bible and the book of Revelation. So that was a lot of pressure put on a kid.

• 1:37:05Danny Jones?

  How was this group never taken down by law enforcement or the FBI?

• 1:37:10Speaker 02

  Well, in other countries, it's, it did get in trouble, a lot of trouble in Australia, in Argentina, France, kids were taken away and, you know, held in facilities for months, you know, trying to de, deconstruct what's going on here. Uh, but the kids were, were actually trained to how to answer the authorities. No, we don't have sexual contact. No, you know, they, they were just trained to do that because we have to do this. We're deceivers yet true, the Bible says, because otherwise they're going to stop our work for the Lord. So the kids, you know, they,

• 1:37:50Danny Jones?

  They're just brainwashed.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  There was nothing to wash.

• 1:37:55Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  They were just sponges.

• 1:37:56Danny Jones?

  Exactly. They were just sponges.

• 1:37:58Speaker 02

  So, and so sometimes kids did end up being permanently separated from their parents if there was a particularly egregious situation, but most of the time they'd end up getting them back. Everybody to leave the country, go to somewhere new, start a new group under a new name, you know, a new outreach.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  And they did, you know, that's the way it worked. In the States, that's one of the reasons we got out of the States. Mo made a, Berg made a big point early on of getting out of the States. I think it wasn't just because we're supposed to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. It was also because the FBI won't get you if you're overseas. And if we're here, we're much more vulnerable.

• 1:38:42Danny Jones?

  So, okay. So you said you, you left in, what was it 95, 96?

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  We left in 91, early on.

• 1:38:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, in 91.

• 1:38:48Speaker 02

  It took us about four or five years before we felt like we'd even come to a place where we could begin to understand our own experience, you know? We didn't come out, I already knew that Berg was wrong about a whole lot of stuff, but I hadn't unpacked.

• 1:39:01Danny Jones?

  Did you ever confront him?

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  Not personally, not face to face, but that's what got me the boot, you know?

• 1:39:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:08Speaker 02

  Basically said, look, can anyone show me from the Bible how this stuff can be justified? And they said, well, maybe you'll be better off some, some other organization. Which was rough, you know?

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  My wife didn't have a clue until it happened. She didn't even know I was thinking about this, you know?

• 1:39:26Danny Jones?

  Cause you can't talk to anybody.

• 1:39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:28Danny Jones?

  You gotta keep it internal.

• 1:39:29Speaker 02

  And I give her kudos for saying, yeah. She, I think she thought, well, if I go with him, I'll be able to help him come back to his senses and come back to the group. But thankfully, given enough time, she began to realize that I was right about awful lot of that.

• 1:39:49Danny Jones?

  Are you still with her?

• 1:39:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:51Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:39:51Speaker 02

  Fifty-four and a half years.

• 1:39:54Speaker 02

  The strange thing is, we met the group the same exact day at that same Jerry Rubin rally. She was hitchhiking from LA up to Big Sur and her ride stopped to get some weed in Santa Barbara. And she got out and went to the demonstration. And I was on my way to Berkeley and got dropped in Santa Barbara. Whoa. So, you know, wasn't love at first sight, but we were on the same journey. And when, you know, it's really an amazing thing because I don't know your married situation or anything. Are you married or? Yes, I am. Well, it's, how long? Six years.

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  Six years. I feel like I've been married for 54 years to the same woman. But that woman has changed 54 times. Oh, really? Because we're, we just have so much change in our life. So it's constantly fresh, but we constantly, I think just having been through what we've been through in the group and then losing girls and just the tremendous effort it takes. First, you're poor, you know, you got 11 kids. You know, you can cut grass and clean supermarket floors. You're gonna have a tough time meeting the bills.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  So all those kinds of struggles of working our way slowly, slowly to a more stable financial situation. And dealing with all the different trouble that my kids were having adjusting to society. 17 kids? Well, it was 11 with us. 11 with you. Six with our other partner. But, um, yeah. Still? Well, they're all adults. That's more than a few kids. I mean, when you got out though. Oh, yeah, no, it was a lot of kids and, you know, it just.

• 1:41:55Speaker 02

  We were used to it, you know, we didn't get them all at once. They were one at a time. So you slowly, you know, develop a plan.

• 1:42:01Danny Jones?

  They become more independent slowly.

• 1:42:03Speaker 02

  How to, how to pack your bedding and all that kind of stuff to move all the time. And it was, you know, I think all of our kids have, have, none of them want to have a big family. Let's put it that way. They all are grateful that they grew up in a big family, but they know it's hard. There's a lot of sacrifices involved and, you know, being a child.

• 1:42:27Danny Jones?

  Where, where's the other wife?

• 1:42:30Speaker 02

  She's in Texas at the moment. She's actually from New Zealand and she's at this place, you know, she's retirement age and where to, where she wants to be. She'd lived in Mexico for most of the time. Oh geez, at least 20 years, I guess. I love going to see her in Mexico because that's always fun. But, um, yeah, then she ended up in Texas for some reason. Two of our daughters are American citizens because one was born in the States as we were traveling through and the other one was smart enough to come ask dad to help her get a passport before she turned 18. After 18, it's just a nightmare trying to get.

• 1:43:08Danny Jones?

  How much longer did she stay in after you left?

• 1:43:11Speaker 02

  Um, she's probably 20, no, even more than that, probably 25, 30.

• 1:43:15Danny Jones?

  So she's recently out?

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  The last maybe seven or eight years, I think. And it was a slow, you know, because the group crumbled, you know, it became more or less an online, you know, QAnon type thing, I guess. People still send in tithe money and all that, but not too many. And there's not, not a lot of activity going on. I really don't know what the, what the status is right now because there's a, I also have a brother who joined the group for quite a long time. And he still lives in Brazil. He's out of the group, but he stayed in quite a while. So he filled me in, you know, more or less the trajectory. And when it just split apart, everybody just gets into, okay, how can I pay the bills?

• 1:44:01Speaker 02

  How can we get something going here that'll, that'll find us a way forward if we're not in a communal society?

• 1:44:08Danny Jones?

  Uh, are you still a believer in Jesus Christ?

• 1:44:10Speaker 02

  Very much. This is one of the interesting things that I think.

• 1:44:17Speaker 02

  Wow, you're just in my bookshelf. Taking a lot of reading and talking and got to know Christians from every imaginable denomination through our business operations and so on, but it was, I, both my wife and I still feel as though the way we met Jesus was so dramatic and so, give it your all, just lay it all on the altar. This is not my own life, it's yours, God, do with me what you will. It did something to expand our idea about what faith in God is, you know, it's not just

• 1:44:58Speaker 02

  throwing out, you know, fourth quarter Hail Marys to the end zone and saying, "Lord, just please," you know, it's, it's a relationship that is difficult for me to explain. How did God stay with me, answer prayer, help me have a, whatever success we had as a family and at least a successful marriage, all the while involved in some really nasty crap all around us and, and, you know, whatever level of participation, non-participation, absolutely within our knowledge. And to me, that's, none of us can excuse the fact that we didn't at the first sign of

• 1:45:43Speaker 02

  this say, "Holy shit, this is not right." This is not, you know, going to a dance hall and picking up a lonely guy. This is much different. It's a, it's a real, it's a difficult thing to chew through and I, I think a lot of, there, some people don't make it. Some people just turn it off, just, "I don't ever want to think about the group again." I'm just getting, you know, some people- Bury it. Yeah, bury it. Get married, don't even tell their new partner that they were ever part of a group. I can't imagine that, but the, the thing is-

• 1:46:20Speaker 02

  Once out, I've started sensing, I don't know if you have any kind, what's your, do you have a faith of any kind?

• 1:46:29Danny Jones?

  Uh, not particularly, no. I'm not, I'm not a, like a devout Christian or anything like that, but I'm not like, I'm not an atheist or anything like that either.

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  But that, every once in a while, whatever your belief system is, you get these, a sense that there's something, it doesn't happen all day, every day, but every once in a while you go, wow, it's real, you know, this inner feeling that I have is real. And I think everybody has that. So, I'm, I, when I talk about what God thinks, it's, it's hard, because I'm, I'm using language that's, you know, it's very difficult. You're talking about everything, you know, the, um, the whole shebang, reality at its base.

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  It's, it, you could be really wrong about a whole bunch of stuff and still be right about that inner voice, even though you, that inner voice may have tried, tried, tried to get through to you, no, get out now, you know? But didn't, if I didn't pick up the signal, or I was too scared, or I didn't want to lose my family, God would allow me to still have a sense of his presence in my life, even though he's going to constantly try to show me, get the hell out of here, you know? So, that, once you're out, then it's kind of, okay, I'm going to help you go through all this, pick up the pieces, take it out, look at it, what happened here, deconstruct

• 1:48:01Speaker 02

  the whole thing, and find out, yeah, there's some stuff that was horrendous and abusive and dark, you know, nefarious, whatever, you know, term you want to use, very dark, dark as you can imagine. And, um, other stuff was, you know, I've got friends, uh, and loved ones around the world that we've shared experiences in God that we'll never forget, even though it was in the middle of chaos. Uh, it's an, it's an unusual story, um, and I do think it's, it's probably true in everyone's life to some extent, and, um...

• 1:48:38Speaker 02

  In our life to an exceptional extent, it was pretty extreme.

• 1:48:42Danny Jones?

  Now, there was also, I should have brought this up earlier, but there was use of psychedelic drugs with kids as well, where they were allegedly given LSD and things like this by Berg's wife?

• 1:48:58Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 1:48:59Danny Jones?

  You never saw anything like that?

• 1:49:01Speaker 02

  It was, you know, I smoked weed one time in Kathmandu and caught hell for it, you know, it was

• 1:49:07Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:49:07Speaker 02

  Drugs was, you know, totally off the table.

• 1:49:09Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  But, you know, it's interesting, I was just at Harvard, did a seminar, a webinar, I guess a seminar, on the topic, the psychedelic Jesus, and the speaker was an expert on the late 60s, early 70s,

• 1:49:29Speaker 02

  the whole hippie scene, you know?

• 1:49:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:30Speaker 02

  And he's got a whole collection of this free press, you know, the hippie papers and all that, and artwork, and he had an interesting theory that there's so many stories of people who got involved in the Jesus movement, I'm not sure, are you familiar with the term the Jesus movement?

• 1:49:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. Very widespread, there, a lot of pastors in the country came out of the Jesus movement, they quickly, you know, went from hippie to, to fairly mainstream, quickly, but not us, we stayed out in the wilderness.

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  But, what he, his theory was that there was so much LSD, that, and all kinds of drugs, that were preparing the way our, myself personally, my wife, most of my friends, had had experiences that made us question the nature of reality while on psychedelics as kids, you know, 18, 19 years old.

• 1:50:31Speaker 02

  That definitely prepared us for not only a spiritual experience, but a profound spiritual experience. So, you know, the average person who says the sinner's prayer doesn't turn their entire life upside down that day. You know, it was a dramatic conversion experience, I think, partly prepared by psychedelics.

• 1:50:53Danny Jones?

  Do you think it was purely the psychedelics? Or do you think it was a combination of that and the vulnerability, the vulnerable state that you were in at the time that you discovered those people?

• 1:51:05Speaker 02

  I was particularly vulnerable. But it was also, you know, something in the air. You know, the hippie thing was very powerful and, you know, just made you question everything. And so, and lay it all on the line for your belief system. So, you know, whether I was going to become a political radical or whatever it was, I was not going to live, you know, the same life my parents lived. I was going to live in a radical way. And when I found out that Jesus was a radical, I, you know, took off. That was it.

• 1:51:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's interesting. There's a lot, there's a lot of texts that allude to the use of drugs during Jesus's time, too. You know, like there's the Eleusinian mysteries and like the Greeks were doing. And there's lots of interpretations of, that involve psychedelic drugs in antiquity.

• 1:51:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:01Danny Jones?

  There's a lot of people that are advocating for it now, too. There's people that are advocating for the idea of introducing psychedelic drugs into the church.

• 1:52:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm actually part of an organization called Ligari. Have you heard of them? It's been around for a couple of years, started by an Episcopal priest who was part of the Johns Hopkins experiments.

• 1:52:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Which Johns Hopkins experiment specifically?

• 1:52:26Speaker 02

  It was the 2016. The report just came out because it was mired in guns.

• 1:52:30Danny Jones?

  The religious leaders.

• 1:52:31Speaker 02

  The religious leaders, yeah. So, he was an Episcopal priest. There was like, I don't know, 16 people there. Priests, I don't think there were any nuns, but there was, you know, a lot of different, not all one denomination there.

• 1:52:45Danny Jones?

  They had them from every religion, heads of every religion. They gave them psychedelic drugs and they-

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  Religious professionals.

• 1:52:51Danny Jones?

  Religious, yeah, that was the quote, that was the title of it, religious professionals. But they had like a Christian guy, a Catholic guy, Jewish dude, Hindu, every religion, Islam. And they would describe their experience on, I think it was LSD.

• 1:53:07Speaker 02

  It was psilocybin.

• 1:53:08Danny Jones?

  Psilocybin, that's what it was, yeah.

• 1:53:10Speaker 02

  And-

• 1:53:11Danny Jones?

  Seeing how their experience would differ.

• 1:53:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:53:13Danny Jones?

  If their, if their religious belief would influence that at all.

• 1:53:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And they all had, I think 15 of the 16 ended up saying, yeah, we had a profound spiritual experience here. That's, you know, dramatically impacted my, my walk, my faith walk. And Hunt, Hunt Priest, the fellow who started it, eventually was so taken with the idea that, you know, more and more studies were coming out, How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan's book came out. And there was a lot of conversation about the interplay between spirituality and psychedelics. And he felt like it was something that people

• 1:54:02Speaker 02

  needed to discuss because whether you're advocating it or not, you're gonna have, if you're a church anywhere in the United States, sooner or later, someone's gonna come up to you and say, you know, I've got this ketamine treatment going for my depression and when you know it, I had an experience with God, you know, and like, what do they do with that? What does, what does a priest do with that? You know?

• 1:54:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:27Speaker 02

  So they're trying to get the discussion on the table, like, how can the, the insights that, spiritual insights that people gain, not all the time, but quite often, from the use of psychedelics with a spiritual, an understanding from your own spiritual tradition? What it is that's, that's happening here? I mean, it's not just chemistry.

• 1:54:48Danny Jones?

  Well, I mean, a lot of the stories in the Bible are-

• 1:54:54Danny Jones?

  I mean, some of them, you can only imagine they came up with them with psychedelic drugs. Like, they seem very, like, if you've ever experienced psychedelics, I mean, it is very similar to a lot of the stories in the Bible and some of these ancient religious stories that you hear. And there's, that's why I believe some people speculate that the the birth of Christianity came out of psychedelic experiences.

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:23Danny Jones?

  And that is how people started writing these stories and, and developing ancient myths. And those evolved into, uh, you know, the, the Old Testament, the New Testament. And eventually through the, through time, the 2000 year game of telephone that has been played with the Bible and revising stuff and, and translating stuff that, um, it's obviously evolved quite a bit.

• 1:55:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, there's a bunch of theories. I, I've been to probably four or five seminars at Harvard and, you know, a lot of really smart people from all over the world are, are exploring what, you know, how does this connect historically, you know? The burning bush, was that a cassiopeia wood? Was, you know, you know, all those kinds of things. I don't think there's a consensus on this.

• 1:56:06Danny Jones?

  No, there's not.

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  The, uh, the scholars at Harvard, although they're very, I was, I don't know if they're pro, I think they are pro psychedelic. Um, but they don't, uh, generally accept the, the mushroom Jesus concept.

• 1:56:26Speaker 02

  But I think what they do like, understand is that what you experience on psilocybin may be very much like what Ezekiel experienced in the middle of the desert from fasting for day after day, you know, that the same sort of out of body, um, dramatic encounters with another realm, another, uh, level, I guess, of reality.

• 1:56:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:50Speaker 02

  Is very similar. And I think that's something I take seriously. I think, yeah, I can see why psychedelics could, uh, cause a person to, to really encounter a different level.

• 1:57:05Danny Jones?

  Have you heard the theory that Jesus was, was tripping on psychedelics when he was in the, the Garden of Gethsemane at 4:00 AM with the naked boy? Remember that part of the Bible?

• 1:57:15Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:57:16Danny Jones?

  What was going on there?

• 1:57:17Speaker 02

  Okay, I mean, do you mind if I correct you? Just the way the story goes is that Jesus is in the garden praying and sweating drops of blood. His vessels were actually giving out from the anguish that he was in.

• 1:57:35Speaker 02

  Peter, James and John were often, he invited them to come along and said, watch and pray, you know? And he went to by himself to pray. They fell asleep.

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  Finally, it's the, he gets up and said, let's go. And as they leave the garden, that's when he's arrested. The boy, all the disciples fled. And they said, they think it was John, who was the youngest.

• 1:58:02Speaker 02

  They, someone grabbed his coat to try and stop him from fleeing and he fled naked. So I don't think there was any sexual stuff going on.

• 1:58:09Danny Jones?

  It was a, um, the Greek word was a scendon, which means a, like a linen cloth. And if you actually, the Greek translation of it was that it was a Greek cloth. Uh, I'm sorry, a linen cloth scendon wrapped around his private parts. And then when he ran away, no one grabbed it. It just fell off and he ran away naked. And, uh, that's the problem with this stuff is that everyone has their own interpretation of what the stuff meant. And the only way to really drill down into it is to understand the Greek, to translate the Greek.

• 1:58:52Danny Jones?

  And people, depending on what denomination of Christianity or, um,

• 1:58:59Danny Jones?

  or Catholicism, or even, um, what was the, uh, what religion was the other guy, Dan McClellan? He was a Mormon. They, they all have their own dictionaries where word, they change the meaning of words. So that can change the meaning of what was happening in the Bible.

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I'm, there's.

• 1:59:23Speaker 02

  I don't know Hebrew or Greek. You know, I do use an interlinear every once in a while just to see what it says. But That's what's so fascinating. For me, I've gotten away from trying to figure out what everything means in the Bible. I have a general sense of what's happening. The Gospels are for me the richest source of spiritual inspiration because Jesus's interactions are quite remarkable. I mean, I think meeting Jesus, you know, you're a woman pulling out water from a well and you encounter this guy who reads your soul to you and just tells you all your secret stuff.

• 2:00:08Speaker 02

  The conversation, it wasn't just a parlor trick. He was trying to get something across to her and she got it. She actually got it. She ran into town and said, "I've met him. He's the Messiah." So, the actual encounter, I would say that's very close to a psychedelic type experience where you encounter so much reality in one setting that it changes you forever. That how to change your mind, I think Jesus was the expert at it. He would usually use questions. He used way more questions than answers and he drew people out and got them to change their mind. In fact, repent means change your mind. So, I think that's

• 2:00:47Speaker 02

  the key to the whole thing is can I get in contact with that voice that will lead me into the way that I need to change and give me the inspiration and source of power that I need. That's, you know, we're not trying to get the perfect doctrine or the absolute right interpretation of everything. I've grown to appreciate the understanding of the spiritual realm from other traditions. The Jewish tradition is super rich. I've gotten a lot out of that. Rumi and the Muslim mystics, Gandhi, many of the Hindus have

• 2:01:32Speaker 02

  very strong spiritual understandings. So, I don't have to narrow it down whether, you know...

• 2:01:43Speaker 02

  Anyone encountered the monkey god or I don't know, I just, I know what they're trying to teach. That's what I, that's what I think I know, what they're trying to teach. And that is what helps me go forward with a sense that I'm not doing this all on my own. There's a, there's an energy and an intelligence that I can interact with that will gently, he's not gonna take over my life and just, I'm on autopilot from now on.

• 2:02:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah, so, so what you're saying is like, understanding what the, the people who, like the first people who wrote down the Greek that was translated into the Bible, that's not as important to you as the value that the stories give to your life. And like the, like the stories, your belief in the, in the stories, it makes you, you believe a better person.

• 2:02:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:02:33Danny Jones?

  And that's the most important thing to you.

• 2:02:34Speaker 02

  Also, there's a lot of stories, particularly from the Old Testament, even some in the New Testament, that are really hard to take. I mean, they're just very violent stories and you just wonder, what is this all about? But um.

• 2:02:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and a lot of stories that were taken out of the Bible too, that are.

• 2:02:48Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, sure.

• 2:02:49Danny Jones?

  Atrocious.

• 2:02:50Speaker 02

  The Bible doesn't even self define. I mean, it's, that was just a committee meeting. They came up with what's gonna be in the book and was ain't. But um, so I think that when you read about, say, the first 10 or 11 chapters of the Bible, before Abraham, you know, the garden, Adam and Eve, Noah, the flood, all that, is really in the language of myth. When you read it, if you were just, you've never heard of the Bible or God or anything, and you checked into a hotel, picked up the Gideon's Bible and started reading it in Genesis, you go, oh, this is an ancient myth. You know, it's just, it's what it is. You can just tell, you know?

• 2:03:35Speaker 02

  Not a science book, it's not a history book. They're trying to make sense. How do we explain the fact that we're so, you know? Everything is good and beautiful, and yet we also. Shy away from truth. We, you know, do things that we shouldn't. We want to hide ourselves from God because, you know, we're now conscious or in nakedness. All of that is an attempt from ancient civilizations to understand why are things the way they are. Then from chapter 12 on, you have this accounts of Abraham and this people. Scoop this way a little bit. Oh, sorry. I'm a leaner. You keep drawing to that side. Yeah.

• 2:04:15Speaker 02

  That somehow are willing to engage with this voice, with this God, this, this presence in a way that's very unlike the other cultures around them. And they, and it's a one God thing, you know, it's, it's not. Yeah. You know, and it's, but they still have a lot of attitudes, like, you know, the sacrificial systems and stuff. That's all imported from other religious traditions, the Mesopotamians, all that. A lot of the myth language is, is right out of the Babylonian texts. So I don't have a problem with that because I think over time, what happens, once this people says, you know what, we're going to try and follow this God, you know, I am that I am.

• 2:04:57Speaker 02

  The guy that's, the, the voice that speaks out of the burning bush, we want to follow him. And once they enter into this relationship, they're still, you know, Bronze Age shepherds and Bedouins and, you know, so on and so forth. Great poets, great, you know, a lot of cool stuff going on in their, in their civilization, but they're still working through stuff. And so they don't get it all right, you know, and if they say, well, God said, go and kill every man, woman, child, and even the donkeys, just get rid of them all. Yeah, but I don't think so. I mean, I just don't think that you got that right. You, some, something made you want to do that, but I don't, I don't think you'd identify

• 2:05:40Speaker 02

  that with the I am that spoke to Moses. And that goes along. Then you, you have the history of the kings and all the corruption and everything in Israel. Then you have the judgments that come on Israel, but carried into Babylon and all that. The prophets, the prophets bring in a whole new understanding. They bring God's word in a different way, and they pretty much say. Forget the sacrifices. Well, I don't need this, you know, I want you to love one another. I want you to take care of the hungry, you know, I want you, so there's a progression in terms of their understanding and back and forth, it's not all one straight line. And then eventually, Jesus shows up and as in the tradition of the prophets, he comes with a new understanding of some new, not everything new.

• 2:06:23Speaker 02

  He's, you know, said, you heard Moses say this, well, I'm gonna tell you something even heavier, you know? This is what I say. And that to me is, it's in flux, I don't have, it's not a rule book. I'm not gonna, you know, decide how long my hair is because it says so in First Thessalonians, you know? It's, that's just not either here nor there.

• 2:06:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:06:46Speaker 02

  But um, that it's um.

• 2:06:50Danny Jones?

  Did you ever question any of this stuff? Did you ever question the Bible or question Christianity or your religious beliefs with during the process of escaping the cult?

• 2:06:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, you can't help but wonder, what else did I get wrong? You know, if I'm wrong about all this stuff, how can I be so sure that I'm right about Jesus?

• 2:07:09Danny Jones?

  Like maybe I'll wash my hands of all of this shit, maybe I'll become a Satanist.

• 2:07:12Speaker 02

  A lot of people doing, I have no problem with anybody who feels like they should do that. It's, I don't think God's wringing his hands, you know? You don't like me anymore, you know, he's, he's just, he loves us all regardless. And it's not a he, I just, you know, I don't, the pronouns for God is a whole nother. But um.

• 2:07:35Danny Jones?

  They, them.

• 2:07:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, them, that's, my lesbian daughter says I should use that.

• 2:07:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:07:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:43Danny Jones?

  That's amazing.

• 2:07:43Speaker 02

  Takes some getting used to.

• 2:07:44Danny Jones?

  That's amazing.

• 2:07:47Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 2:07:47Danny Jones?

  So no, so you didn't question it?

• 2:07:49Speaker 02

  I did, you, I questioned it in kind of like, I should, it's, if I'm being responsible, I at least want to challenge my own belief systems. I should question those beliefs. Why do I believe that? Is that, does that really make sense? Is there another explanation? Could it, could it have been, I don't know, some other thing that, that I interpret as being the voice of God? I think you'd be a fool not to, you have to be willing to question that. I mean, uh, but.

• 2:08:23Speaker 02

  In the end, I would always come to a place where I have a piece that I don't understand at all, but this much I know, you know, I do have a sense that this voice inside me is real and has seen me through some really tough shit, you know, but, um, and it tells me good stuff, tells me to love, you know? Oh, talking to your mic, sorry. Nope, am I, what am I doing? You're, you're going like that. Oops, sorry. Yeah, this is weird. Um, so at what point did you meet with Rebecca Lamov, the, the mind control expert? There was an International Cultic Studies Association was doing a meeting in Santa

• 2:09:03Speaker 02

  Fei, uh, on the topic of child abuse in cultic groups. So I'd been hanging out with those guys for a while, so I wanted to go, but I didn't want to go without a representative from the second generation. So a girl that, that, uh, had been very active in ex-member circles, I invited her to come along and we gave an address at the, um, you know, I, uh, workshop or something. She would tell her story, which was insane, totally insane. She was very close to, uh, Berg. Oh, really? Lived with him for a while and, you know, anyway, hard to take. She's amazingly healthy.

• 2:09:48Speaker 02

  Really? Mentally. Wow. I don't know how she did it, but she's in good shape. But she shared her story and then I shared my story of what it was like, how could this have possibly happened on our watch, you know? We're not, you know, sadists, we, we, how did this happen? So that was the kind of look at it. There was other groups there as well that had, one of them had extreme physical punishment. Tony Lamo, did you ever hear his? That rings a bell. He died a few years ago, but he had a really bad one in Arkansas, a group, really bad. And they were physical beatings that I just couldn't even, uh, bear it when they described them. So, you know, the, um,

• 2:10:33Speaker 02

  We found that organization very helpful, just simply because a whole bunch of different opinions, you know, they're not all believers by any stretch. Most of them are PhDs and who became PhDs to figure out what the hell happened to me. And they started studying and never stopped. But anyway, so Rebecca was there, I think because of her interest in brainwashing and how this topic is of key importance to the ex-cult community, or to society when it relates to cults, to understand it. And I thought Rebecca did a, well, anyway, at the meeting, I was just, hey, where are you from? Oh, Harvard. Oh, really? You know,

• 2:11:15Speaker 02

  I'm living in Massachusetts too. We had lunch together. And I told her my whole story. And then I gave her my book. And she read it, sent me a really nice email. And then the pandemic hit. And, you know, we just lost touch. We just didn't keep in touch until her book came out. And then, then she was doing the Joe Rogan Show. Did you happen to watch her on that at all? I did, yeah. So, in the, there's a certain point in the story where she tells my story. Right. In this one, she gave me three wives, which my kids gave me a real hard time. Where's

• 2:11:55Speaker 02

  the other one, Dad? But, um, what I think appealed to her was a try, my story tries to understand what it is that could, could cause you to do this, but not only do it in, in fear of doing something hurtful and harmful, but thinking you're right, thinking you're actually right. And it's, it's, it's,

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• 2:13:23Speaker 02

  Ouch. You know, it's, I like the fact that she puts it in historical context. There was a time when, she mentions in her book that, you know, the scholarly community just poo-pooed brainwashing and just thought it was no, no. That's just people making an excuse for doing really dumb shit, you know? She said, "I don't think so." And I think she really got it, you know, getting into the Korean War veterans and all of that.

• 2:13:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:50Speaker 02

  In a very excellent way of unpacking it, not extreme in one way or the other, just we're all, we're all a confusing mess, you know? I think we're all brainwashed.

• 2:13:59Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:14:00Speaker 02

  Somewhere on the spectrum, you know?

• 2:14:01Danny Jones?

  Totally.

• 2:14:02Speaker 02

  It's a continuum.

• 2:14:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think a great example of that is American politics.

• 2:14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

• 2:14:07Danny Jones?

  What was it like un-brainwashing yourself?

• 2:14:10Speaker 02

  Well, we got, we were living in Florida, which was, for us, we were spinning our wheels. And for me, it was one long heat rash. But eventually, some good friends of ours got kicked out of the group up in Rhode Island. And we were so close and we were so lonely. We said, "Well, let's, we'll come up and visit you guys." And we went up and four days later, I'd rented a house in Rhode Island. So, and we still hung out with a lot of folks from the group or who had, you know, some connection to it. Eventually, shoot, I lost my thought.

• 2:14:57Danny Jones?

  I'm brainwashing yourself.

• 2:14:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:14:59Danny Jones?

  Move to Florida.

• 2:14:59Speaker 02

  So, one of our friends had called a Christian Counseling Center to ask for help with their marriage. They're married in the group, have a bunch of kids and, you know, all that. And when they just explained their situation to the counselor, they said, you know, we don't really handle anything like that. That's way out of our, our portfolio. But we know a guy. And that was Bob Pardon, who was this minister who had started this organization, which was originally, he was, he and some other pastors were confronting the fact that they had a number of their congregation dropping out and joining the Jehovah Witnesses, or

• 2:15:39Speaker 02

  the Mormons, or some small outfit, you know, kind of goofy, crazy outfits. And, you know, we just got to teach our people the Bible so that they can recognize it when something's not coming from the same voice. But what happened is, once they got educated into the way the groups worked, they started attracting ex-members, you know, so, because they understood. Somebody from the 12 Tribes, which is another kind of very still-going organization.

• 2:16:12Danny Jones?

  The 12 Tribes of Israel?

• 2:16:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they're called the Messianic Communities, but they're known as 12 Tribes, you know, vernacular. And they say, Bob, you get this so well, we want to leave. We don't know what to do. We don't, you know, I can't remember how to open a checking account. My kids, you know, don't know, you know, what do we do? How do we get started? And that's how he ended up starting this ministry that was just trying to help people transition. There was so many things that they began to organize into a bit of a course you can kind of work your way through. So, we got there. We couldn't move in because we had all these kids, but we would take the classes.

• 2:16:53Speaker 02

  And, you know, the stuff like the experiment, the, oh, what's the name of that famous, the prison experiment?

• 2:17:04Speaker 02

  And brainwashing.

• 2:17:05Danny Jones?

  MKUltra?

• 2:17:06Speaker 02

  No, it was a, I don't know if it was Harvard, I'm not sure where it was, but it was completely unethical and they can't do it anymore.

• 2:17:12Danny Jones?

  When were they doing it?

• 2:17:13Speaker 02

  Uh, 50s. And it was, the idea was how quickly a person-

• 2:17:19Danny Jones?

  Is that the Stanford prison experiment?

• 2:17:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, Stanford prison experiment, that's-

• 2:17:22Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:17:23Speaker 02

  And they very quickly, um, turned into, you know, sadistic jailers, who just opened, you know, there's students one day and 48 hours later, they're doing all this stuff they can't even believe it. How quickly it happened. They, they had to call the experiment off because people were going off the deep end. So.

• 2:17:43Danny Jones?

  It was a controversial and famous psychology experiment conducted in 71 by Philip Zimbardo. The goal of the experiment was aimed to determine whether the brutal behavior often seen in prisons was due to the inherent personalities of the guards and the prisoners, or bad apples. Uh, healthy, psychologically stable male college students were randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners. Oh yes, this is ringing a bell. An assimilated prison in a basement of the university psychology building. The outcome of the experiment planned for two weeks was stopped after only six days because the participants quickly adopted their roles to an extreme degree. Guards became sadistic and abusive, using psychological warfare and humiliation, while prisoners became passive, distressed, and some experienced emotional breakdowns. Wow.

• 2:18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they had that other one with the, um, electric shocks. I can't remember that one, but where they have a guy in a white coat, tell you, you have to turn the shock up, turn the shock up and-

• 2:18:39Danny Jones?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes. I forget the name of that one, but I, I remember, I remember. We talked about this a lot, yeah.

• 2:18:44Speaker 02

  They, they showed us all these things and kind of helped us unpack. Okay, this is how it works. This is how our brains structure is designed to work and-

• 2:18:52Danny Jones?

  The, the, the shocking one was the, where they were shocking somebody was interesting because there was nobody there. They were just played screams.

• 2:18:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:59Danny Jones?

  As if they were shocking somebody.

• 2:19:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:19:01Danny Jones?

  So they were seeing how, how they could get, or how far they could push the person that was turning the dial to follow the orders before their conscience kicked in and said, no, I'm not gonna do this anymore. And a lot of them just kept doing it until like the scream stopped and they were like, oh my God, did I kill him?

• 2:19:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:19:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:19:17Danny Jones?

  The human mind is a very vulnerable, very, very manipulatable.

• 2:19:23Speaker 02

  There's a book.

• 2:19:24Danny Jones?

  Fragile.

• 2:19:25Speaker 02

  Are you familiar with Robert Cialdini? He wrote a book called Influence.

• 2:19:30Speaker 02

  Really interesting guy, but the, the reason I bring him up, and it's all about how it's, it's about how you can change, influence someone's thinking, you know, through these different techniques. And Bob, the, the cult educator was, gave me the book to read in order to understand the subtle manipulation that happens along the way.

• 2:19:56Speaker 02

  Cult or no cult.

• 2:19:59Speaker 02

  Then I got into sales and the sales organization gave me Cialdini's book to read. How to manipulate the sale. So it was, it's just depends on where you're coming from. What, uh, the way you take that information. And I do, it's.

• 2:20:19Danny Jones?

  All the fundamentals are still there.

• 2:20:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:23Danny Jones?

  It's amazing how, how similar so many cults are, you know, from Children of God to

• 2:20:30Danny Jones?

  Jonestown to Scientology, uh, Heaven's Gate. There's so many like fundamental similarities between all of them.

• 2:20:39Speaker 02

  This, it's interesting because it has become, you know, the last five years or so, it just seems like they should have a special channel with nothing but cult shows. There's so many.

• 2:20:49Danny Jones?

  People are fascinated by it.

• 2:20:50Speaker 02

  Fascinating. The, the part that worries me a little bit is that if people only focus on the sensational and they are sensational, you know, the guy with the, the branding iron and all that. I mean, it's just.

• 2:21:02Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah. What was that one called again?

• 2:21:05Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 2:21:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that was a more recent one.

• 2:21:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:09Danny Jones?

  That guy's in prison.

• 2:21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so too. But if you just get freaked out by how bizarre the behaviors can be, then you just think, people who get involved with cults are just somehow their brain does not work right. It just, they can't.

• 2:21:27Danny Jones?

  You think?

• 2:21:28Speaker 02

  I think people tend to look at it that way.

• 2:21:30Danny Jones?

  Like, that's the perception.

• 2:21:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, perception, yes.

• 2:21:33Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, okay, I see.

• 2:21:34Speaker 02

  So, but in fact, nobody ever joins a cult. You know, I was joining an organization to evangelize the world, you know? Later on, yeah, I was in a cult, but how that happened was a long transitional period. For, I, it's, it's sometimes hard to watch those things if people haven't processed their experience. They're, they're, they can be so full of shame. It's, I almost want to cry as they tell their story about what they did while they're in a group. And it's, it's, I can see that they're still carrying a tremendous amount of pain from it. I don't think you'll be pain free, but you don't have to walk around in complete shame all the time. If you, if you can work through, this is what happened. This is where I screwed up.

• 2:22:19Speaker 02

  This is where I got suckered, you know, I, I bit the apple or whatever, you know? And, and, but I, it wasn't purely evil intentions. I didn't set out to do wrong, but I did do wrong. I can't get away from that. But I can forgive myself because I can understand why it happened. The underlying motives that I actually had was, good, I wanted to serve God. The, I hope that people who have those experiences can get to a place where they get some help, working through what happened, how the brain works, and come to a place where you go, yeah, given the right set of circumstances, pretty much anybody could end up in a situation that is cultic

• 2:23:02Speaker 02

  or manipulative or, you know, in, I mean.

• 2:23:07Speaker 02

  The military, you know, think of all the things that people do in the military.

• 2:23:10Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:23:10Speaker 02

  They didn't, you know, join the army to burn villagers in Vietnam, but they did, you know? So what happened? They got psychologically programmed to a place where they were willing to do that. You know, but you can't, you know, and guys do have a hard time. They can't come back from that. They have a hard time being able to forgive themselves for what happened. If they can unpack it and understand.

• 2:23:33Danny Jones?

  And it's also so similar too. If you think about, especially if you want to go back to the Iraq war and that war in Afghanistan, the type of people that signed up to do that, they were young kids that were not,

• 2:23:49Danny Jones?

  were not like growing up saying, I want to grow up and I want to go into combat and I want to fight for America and I want to go to war. Like this was not something that was like in their DNA. It wasn't a calling that they had, right? These people were these, and I've talked to a lot of them, these combat veterans. They were really young. They didn't know what direction they wanted to go in life. They maybe had a few options on the table. Maybe I'll go to college. Maybe I'll try to get a job doing this, learn a trade or whatever. Or maybe I could go sign up for the military and I can go off to war. And for one reason or another, they picked war. And their brains were not built for that.

• 2:24:33Danny Jones?

  They're, they, they were not psychologically ready to witness that kind of stuff and, and be in combat, pulling the trigger, killing people, killing kids. And they come back and there's nothing left for them and they're, they're broken when they get back here.

• 2:24:46Speaker 02

  I, I actually think that, that it's interesting because Bob, the fellow at Meadowhaven, he had suggested early on, I hadn't knew very little about trauma. It was like maybe 1994, 95.

• 2:25:01Speaker 02

  And I was kind of, once I got a little cult education in me, then I realized what kind of challenges my kids were up against, you know, and, and I was getting a little freaked out, like, trauma changes your brain. I mean, these kids grew up, I mean, even if you left the sex stuff out, it was still a traumatic situation. People had way too much power over their lives. And it was, you know, abusive. There's no question about it. So- What could be more abusive than sexual abuse? I mean, I don't know. No, it's probably not. Sex gets, you know, right into the core of our being. Right, exactly. And that, especially for a kid who has no mental equipment to deal with that.

• 2:25:46Speaker 02

  Right. Um, but I, my, my, my point is just that if, if soldiers coming back from, you know, I'm not sure if it was in Rebecca's book where they talk about moral injury, where you, you're, you're, it's not that you just experienced horrible stuff, your friends getting blown up and this and that, it's that you pulled the trigger, that you did something that you knew, deep down on some level, you know, um, you, you killed a, a- And it's a kid. A young boy. Yeah, exactly. And it's, it's, I think, a piece of the, the, he gave me a book to read, Trauma and Healing by Judith Herman. It was one of the earliest

• 2:26:30Speaker 02

  books written on trauma. And I was surprised to find out, it was only 1980, they came up with the term trauma related to Vietnam vets. Uh, it was their wrap sessions where they started to unpack what had happened to them, and they began to realize this is, they came up with the term trauma for it. At the same time, women's, uh, the women's liberation movement was coming up with all the stories of women who had been subject to all kinds of abuse, and they were traumatized. And then they started to put two and two together and realized this is a kind of a constant in human history, uh, and human experience, that when you get traumatized, there, you have to somehow go back and revisit how this happened.

• 2:27:17Speaker 02

  Confess to whatever weakness you might have had in the situation. But also absolve yourself that, look, something happened to you, man. You didn't dream this up. You know, this is, this is, you know,

• 2:27:32Speaker 02

  not your fault. It's, you, you can't not take any responsibility for it. It's good that you take responsibility for it. Nobody should walk away after war without some issues. But you have, you have to get to a place where you can let go. You can get that trauma to a healed place. That's, I, I hope

• 2:27:55Speaker 02

  that that message gets out more and more. The, the psychological

• 2:28:01Speaker 02

  research on traumas just flooding the, the, the world today.

• 2:28:06Danny Jones?

  What is the best way to do it? What is the best way to face it?

• 2:28:09Speaker 02

  Well,

• 2:28:10Danny Jones?

  and to, and to work through it?

• 2:28:11Speaker 02

  In my, well, from a cultic point of view, it was this educational piece of how did this, these small decisions along the way, which in, in their own, this choice wasn't all that bad. This choice wasn't all that bad. This choice, but all of a sudden, holy shit, you know, where are we? You know, and that's, I think, pretty much what happens to soldiers too. They get caught up in this weird world. I just visited an old friend. He, he went to Vietnam when he was 16, lied about his age.

• 2:28:39Danny Jones?

  Wow. Cause he wanted to go?

• 2:28:40Speaker 02

  He wanted to go. He came home in, you know, rough shape. Full, full disability, you know, it's,

• 2:28:51Speaker 02

  he still struggles with it, you know, it's still, it's still,

• 2:28:55Speaker 02

  will come to him, even though he's done a lot of work to try and process it all. He still carries it, you know, when he talks about it, you can see it in his face. It's real and it's, it's still a burden for him. Thank God he's learned how to, how to live beyond that.

• 2:29:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I, I hope, you know, that's, that's why I got involved with Meadow Haven for so long was because I thought it did a good job of trying to give people a chance to unpack it. Rather than just shove it down and forget about it and, you know, it's going to pop up somewhere at an unfortunate moment.

• 2:29:31Danny Jones?

  Can you, can you spot this kind of stuff? Like, like in other parts of society? Like, like cultish behaviors bubbling up? And you, and you-

• 2:29:41Speaker 02

  In the religious world, it's, you know, becoming more and more widely well-known how much abuse goes on in churches. Not just sexual abuse-

• 2:29:49Danny Jones?

  Historically?

• 2:29:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. The manipulation to get people to do all kinds of crazy stuff.

• 2:29:54Danny Jones?

  Right. I mean, there's nothing, it's crazy that there's nothing else that's more synonymous with child abuse than the Catholic Church.

• 2:30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:04Danny Jones?

  And cults that use that stuff.

• 2:30:06Speaker 02

  And now it's coming out, it's not just the Catholics. It's pretty much every doggone denomination has, has a closet full. But, um, it is something that, especially now because people, are you familiar with the term deconstruction in the, in the evangelical world?

• 2:30:23Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:30:24Speaker 02

  Well, you know, there's, I don't know the statistics, but a pretty large percentage of our society over the last 20, 30 years was evangelical. You know, witness our political situation. But the, um-

• 2:30:38Danny Jones?

  A large por- say that again?

• 2:30:40Speaker 02

  Um, you know, American society, I, I think maybe 20 or 30% are Catholic, 20 or 30% are mainstream Protestants, 20 or 30% are charismatic and evangelical and, you know, fundamentalist.

• 2:30:56Danny Jones?

  I wonder what percent of them of the United States is, is Christian? Or Catholic? Let's look that up.

• 2:31:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Christian is a, is a tricky word.

• 2:31:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's supposed to mean a follower of Jesus, but I don't think it does anymore.

• 2:31:12Danny Jones?

  Why?

• 2:31:14Speaker 02

  Because it's become something else. It's become a, a political movement.

• 2:31:19Danny Jones?

  62 to 69% of US adults identify as Christian. Wow. You think it's become, becoming political?

• 2:31:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you can't read the Sermon on the Mount and say, this goes along with, I don't know if I should get political on a podcast, but you know-

• 2:31:34Danny Jones?

  Podcasts are born to be, made to be political. There's no, there's no, there's no boundaries.

• 2:31:39Speaker 02

  It's, it's-

• 2:31:42Speaker 02

  Unrecognizable, you know, you read the words of Jesus and then you see what's happening in Chicago or in, you know, North Carolina, and it's just crazy. It's just, this is absolutely not what Jesus said.

• 2:31:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:55Speaker 02

  You're supposed to love the stranger. You're supposed to help the stranger. You're not supposed to beat him up, throw him in the back of a van.

• 2:32:01Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:32:02Speaker 02

  But, you know, all these-

• 2:32:03Danny Jones?

  See, what do you make of the, the push to, to make the government more Christian?

• 2:32:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:11Danny Jones?

  I think Trump appointed a Christian, what was the, what was the, um, the title of that woman? She was like, she was like the, the head of Christian-

• 2:32:18Speaker 02

  Hollow White.

• 2:32:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:20Speaker 02

  Tampa Girl.

• 2:32:21Danny Jones?

  Some of the, yeah. Some of the videos of that lady are wild.

• 2:32:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a little strange.

• 2:32:26Danny Jones?

  And so like, what do you make of the, of the push to, to merge that, that televangelism with, with politics?

• 2:32:35Speaker 02

  Well, that would be a really good, uh, and an interesting podcast. What happened, you know, interestingly, um, was the Jesus movement gave a whole, real jolt of energy to the, to the flagging evangelical church. So a whole lot of young people came into the church with a lot of enthusiasm and zeal, eventually got into Bible college, became pastors and whatnot. And it was just kind of religious. It wasn't, it wasn't a political movement. And then Jerry Falwell, um, realized that the political potential that it, that it would wield. So

• 2:33:17Speaker 02

  they started with the abortion issue. Um, there's a guy named Frankie Schaefer. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. His, his father, Francis Schaefer, was a well-known, he lives in Switzerland, he's American, scholar of religion and wrote some really important books in theology. His son kind of grew up, kind of like my kids, you know, somewhat neglected because daddy was off serving the Lord. Um, and he ended up getting polio. He didn't learn to read until he was about 13. Uh, and, but-

• 2:33:50Speaker 02

  His dad gave him the mission to go and teach the American church the importance of the pro-life movement. And so he came over here and networked with all these denominational leaders and so on, and got them really sold. I mean, Billy Graham never talked about abortion. It wasn't even an issue. I mean, it was just not a thing. All of a sudden in 1980, 1985, it's the only thing the Bible's supposed to be about. Jesus never even used the word, you know? So it just became, and then, the gay thing. And they just will take these issues and politicize them. I suppose they have some moral principle to them.

• 2:34:33Speaker 02

  I don't agree with it, but it's, in their mind, a moral principle. But it's a tremendous fundraising tool, and they organize, and because you have the, you have the microphone every Sunday morning, you've got pretty, pretty strong control over the thought lives of your... And it's all, just like with us, it's in the name of God. Who's gonna, who's gonna say no if they think God wants them to, you know, hate gays or whatever? It's, it's, it's, it's the same dynamic. It's just a matter, if you're a communal group, it gets real bizarre real fast. If you're not a communal group, it takes a while, but over a decade, decade and a half,

• 2:35:17Speaker 02

  America was changed by this whole evangelical movement, given life by the Jesus movement, no political message there at all. And then, from 1980 on, or so, the Moral Majority, and then into, and Frankie Schaver details exactly how they did it, and managed to win over the evangelical world to this political worldview. Interesting. So it's, it is interesting, and it's, you know, it's affecting our lives right now. I don't know if you're familiar with the Seven Mountains, that whole thing? What's that? It's a movement, the National Apostolic Reformation or something, the New Apostolic Reformation, NAR. They have this teaching that there's seven mountains that are...

• 2:36:05Speaker 02

  Places of influence in society, politics, entertainment, I don't know. I can't even think of all of them they are, but they're all parts of society, business. And their idea is that we, God wants us to be on the top of all these seven mountains so we can change society in all its dimensions. So that's why they work so hard to capture positions in other parts of the, of the society that have nothing to do with the religion.

• 2:36:38Danny Jones?

  Who, who, who is trying to capture?

• 2:36:39Speaker 02

  The, well, what's the name of that church? There's a big church, Bethel, Bethel Church out in, in California with a, it's kind of the, the launchpad for this whole seven mountains movement. And they are committed to it. They don't make any bones, they don't hide it. It'll be published in Charisma Magazine, you know, they, they teach it as this is what we should do. Whereas Jesus said, no, my kingdom is not of this world. I'm not trying to take over Rome. I don't want any part of Rome, you know? We, we've got our own kingdom.

• 2:37:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:12Speaker 02

  So let's, let's do, do our kingdom stuff, which is love, which is care for the poor, which is.

• 2:37:19Danny Jones?

  Well, also, there's been, I don't know if you've, if you've read about this, but there's been this huge push over the last few years to transform Silicon Valley into like a religious Christian hub.

• 2:37:30Speaker 02

  I've heard that.

• 2:37:31Danny Jones?

  And Peter Thiel is one of the big people behind that. He's doing these, these big conferences in Silicon Valley. There's even a big church that got started there where Silicon Valley historically has been like an atheist part, an atheist hub. All the tech people, they're not religious, they're not godly and, and that's been completely transformed.

• 2:37:50Speaker 02

  You think psychedelics might add something to do with that?

• 2:37:52Danny Jones?

  I don't know. No, no, I don't think so. I, I don't think so. It's, it's funny though, that that's also like the psychedelic hub of, of the world.

• 2:37:59Speaker 02

  I wonder if there was some.

• 2:38:00Danny Jones?

  America. But no, Peter Thiel is like on to this jihad to, to paint Christianity onto everything Silicon Valley is doing. And he's holding these seminars all about the Antichrist.

• 2:38:16Danny Jones?

  And he thinks that AI is gonna or technology and he's a guy who's invested in lots of AI and tech companies and companies like Palantir, which is a surveillance company that sells surveillance software to the CIA and creates autonomous weapon systems for they sell out other countries to, you know, essentially just kill people.

• 2:38:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a pretty weird combination.

• 2:38:40Danny Jones?

  And yeah, right. And oh, this is a Vanity Fair article. Yeah, yeah. Christianity was borderline illegal in Silicon Valley and now it's the new religion.

• 2:38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is this whole.

• 2:38:52Danny Jones?

  It's odd. It's very odd. And I I've been I've been racking my brain trying to think like, what is this? Is this something that this guy really believes is the right thing is is something? Does he really believe this?

• 2:39:06Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 2:39:06Danny Jones?

  Or or does he have a motive behind this? You know, is there some sort of motive that does he think that America would be stronger if our if American society would be stronger? If everyone subscribed to Christianity, if we had a one binding thing where we were, we were all Christians and we were all people of the Lord, you know, similar to how other countries, if you look at other like Muslim countries, they're all they're they're so devout to their religion that they're willing to strap a bomb to their chest.

• 2:39:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 2:39:46Danny Jones?

  And we're not like that. We're more we're we're a little bit more segregated, a little bit more diverse.

• 2:39:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think there is there is a push. It's weird because it is two completely different Jesuses that are that are well, I was starting to talk about deconstruction because what happened with the evangelical movement is the kids who were raised in the 80s and 90s in these strict evangelical environments, homeschool, stuff like that. They and purity culture, all of you know, no dating, all that kind of thing.

• 2:40:19Speaker 02

  They're now, you know, they get into their twenties and go, I don't think I really agree with this anymore. And they start, but they still have a spiritual life. They still have a prayer life. And they, so they start to take it apart. They deconstruct it. What is and what isn't connected to this Jesus? And that is having a big movement on the other end. You got these guys going total in one direction, you know, the God of war. And the other ones are kind of like, wait, we have to be able to understand Jesus's ethic in terms of our own social experience. So what, Jesus didn't talk about homosexuality. He didn't talk about, it wasn't

• 2:41:04Speaker 02

  an issue. You can't go to the verses, and a few people do, but they're incorrect. But nonetheless, people are beginning to go, it's just not, I can't picture Jesus saying, you know, mocking people for having a different sexual preference, you know, it's just not, it doesn't make sense. Yet this other Jesus, yeah, let's just, you know,

• 2:41:27Speaker 02

  segregate them off from, from society.

• 2:41:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:32Speaker 02

  So there's two, it's a war, you know?

• 2:41:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It's a, it's just people, it's, it's groups, it's group think, and it's people in society with lots of power who want to use things like this, like, like religion or Christianity to achieve, achieve whatever their goals are. It seems like there's people that just want to use it to their advantage, however they can. And that's not just with religion, that's what other, that's even with psychedelics, psychedelic drugs.

• 2:41:58Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah, there's a lot of profit motive there.

• 2:42:01Danny Jones?

  And that, and that, that religious professional study with John Johns Hopkins, we were talking about earlier. I forget who it was, but there was somebody in that study who spoke about how they thought that if they could, depending on the outcome of that study, determine that maybe introducing psychedelics to people who are believers in this stuff already, maybe that could strengthen their belief, or maybe that could.

• 2:42:35Danny Jones?

  That could strengthen Christian values in the country and create some sort of a Renaissance in America, right? Like if you were able to give the church fathers legal access to psychedelic drugs to where they could administer that to the people that go to the church, imagine how much more devout they would be to their religion.

• 2:42:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have a hard time picturing psychedelics ever getting integrated to that level in the church, but I think it will be something that is practiced among members of the church who connect on a certain wavelength and go, you know, I don't know, you ever heard of Houston Smith? He's, he wrote The Religions of Man. It was the largest selling, I think it still is, the largest selling textbook on comparative religion. And he himself was a child of a missionary out in China, but in his study of the world religions, he also practices the, the five daily prayers of Islam. He fasts during Ramadan. He's passed

• 2:43:39Speaker 02

  away now. This was a while back. But, and he got involved with psychedelics with Timothy Leary in Harvard.

• 2:43:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:43:48Speaker 02

  Tripped, his first trip on January 1st, 1960. What a way to kick off the 60s.

• 2:43:55Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:43:56Speaker 02

  So here's a very devout man, you know, dedicated his life since six months in a Zen monastery. And he said it was the first time that he really felt that he had experienced God. And he, it became a very, well covered. I think it's the most reprinted article.

• 2:44:17Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:44:18Speaker 02

  In all the literature.

• 2:44:19Danny Jones?

  What was his name again?

• 2:44:20Speaker 02

  Houston. It's, it's not like Houston in the city. It's H U S T O N, Smith. And great guy, great, writes fantastic stuff and a lovely man too. He was interviewed by Bill Moyar a lot on PBS. But.

• 2:44:39Speaker 02

  His takeaway was like, once you get the message, hang up the phone. You don't have to keep tripping. If you experience that breakthrough into a spiritual reality, try to find ways to support that through spiritual disciplines. Maybe, you know, a certain prayer or meditation practice, or, you know, studying scripture, or, you know, talking to other religions for insights or poetry. I mean, all kinds of ways you can nurture it aside from psychedelics, because after a while, it's already done its job, you know?

• 2:45:12Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  Unless you're treating, you know, your depression.

• 2:45:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not, people like to broad brush psychedelics and other drugs altogether. They say it's drugs, right? But it's not, it's not like something that you're chasing. It's like, often people that you talk to that have experienced psychedelics, they are recounting an experience they had years ago.

• 2:45:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 2:45:38Danny Jones?

  Right? And it's still very palpable and it's still like very vivid in their mind. Something they experienced a long time ago. It's not like you have to keep going back and chasing the dragon like you have to do with other drugs.

• 2:45:47Speaker 02

  I would, because, you know, I felt like psychedelics had played a role in getting me to the point where I opened my heart to God.

• 2:45:57Speaker 02

  After, I've been out since 91, that's 45 years, 44 years, something like that. I began to, you know, the stuff that happened to us in our family, I struggled with, with, I'm not diagnosable depression, but I was, you know, I was, I was flat. Let's put it that way. I wasn't, my spiritual life just wasn't joyful. And I just was lacking some sense of aliveness. And when I started reading all the How to Change Your Mind and a lot of the stuff that Legari publishes online.

• 2:46:34Speaker 02

  Then I started going to Harvard conferences. I thought, maybe I should try this. Maybe it would just jolt me out of this kind of not very exciting spiritual place I'm at. And I tried. I was also interested because I got hooked on cigars. And it was getting pretty annoying, expensive and bad for my health. So I thought it's also very good at that. Maybe I could kill two birds with one stone. I did a retreat in Mexico.

• 2:47:07Danny Jones?

  What did you do, DMT?

• 2:47:09Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 2:47:10Danny Jones?

  Ayahuasca?

• 2:47:11Speaker 02

  Ayahuasca scares the hell out of me just because, I don't know, vomiting and diarrhea is just not my cup of tea.

• 2:47:18Danny Jones?

  Right, right. But I blame you.

• 2:47:20Speaker 02

  But I, you know, had the visuals and all that kind of thing. But I didn't, I didn't experience the kind of experience I hoped for. I did quit smoking cigars. But the, and I realized afterwards that I did a few things wrong. You got to be more careful in how you prepare for a journey, you know, if you want to take it seriously. And, you know, not just go to a Grateful Dead concert. It was, I think I was, I was leaning on the arm of the flesh. I was looking to something. I already know God, you know?

• 2:48:02Speaker 02

  I should be able to communicate with God without needing a substance. Not that it's a sin or anything. It's just like, eh, if you want to go ahead, but you know, you don't really need it. But I think that was the message that I got was you already know how to talk to me. You know how to listen to me and it's really not necessary. I'm not going to blame you, but I'm not going to give you the trip of your lifetime either. So, but I still respect it. And I still, you know, I do think it's an important change that's going to come over the next few years. That as psychedelics for therapy get out into society.

• 2:48:40Speaker 02

  People are gonna have these experiences and the clergy has got to have some language to help people understand it and unpack these encounters and integrate them into your regular life.

• 2:48:50Danny Jones?

  So you wrote, you wrote your book in 2011.

• 2:48:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:48:55Danny Jones?

  And you ever promoted it or anything?

• 2:48:57Speaker 02

  Not much. I mean, you know, I did at Exa conferences and things like that, but it was, it's, I get a lot of good feedback from people who do read it. They find it very helpful and.

• 2:49:09Danny Jones?

  How do people find it?

• 2:49:10Speaker 02

  Usually just some discussion or another, you know.

• 2:49:14Danny Jones?

  Is this the first audio interview you've ever done?

• 2:49:17Speaker 02

  I think recorded. I used to do a number of talks with Exa about, you know, cults and spirituality. But, um, yeah, I kind of backed off from, from everything in terms of the cult, you know, it was just like old, old news.

• 2:49:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:34Speaker 02

  And then it seemed to be coming back up in my life. Well, I was starting to tell you about the Joe Rogan thing. So, um, I guess it was May or June, I got a WhatsApp from my son in New Zealand. I said, Dad, I'm listening to Joe Rogan and they're talking about you. And I thought, they're probably just somebody's talking about the group or something like that. I mean, how would Joe Rogan know anything about, you know? And then, um, he sent me a link and sure enough, he was. And, and then I got in touch with Rebecca and, you know, it started to open a door that I thought was kind of like past, you know, to discuss this, the topic that we were discussing today.

• 2:50:19Speaker 02

  Maybe the fact that I'm in a different place, you know, I'm in a different place in life. My, you know, I'm 75, so I'm starting to think more about what's, what's next, what comes after this? What do I need to get done before, before I say goodnight?

• 2:50:36Speaker 02

  And it seems like it popped back up. So I feel like there's something I have to do

• 2:50:43Speaker 02

  to at least share what little piece of the puzzle that I've experienced. Yeah. And maybe it'll help somebody else. I do, I want to write, I actually got way too many notes on update because my thinking's changed since the book was printed on some things. Basically, it's still the same, but I would, I would word things differently now. I think I'd have a lot more

• 2:51:14Speaker 02

  insight into, because it's a pretty Christian approach that I take, you know, in the book. And I now think that's not always helpful because, you know, you say Christian, you could be talking about Peter Thiel. You know, people just don't know what you're talking about anymore. Sure, yeah. So I, I think I would try to unpack things in a more everyday language. And that everyone can relate to because, you know, maybe you work for a boss who was just Simon Legree, you know, I mean, you, you have experiences like this in life. And if you can kind of begin to relate your own personal experiences with manipulation or getting drafted or whatever your personal experience was,

• 2:51:56Speaker 02

  or a bad marriage, you know, that kind of thing. It's, it's the same basic dynamic, just not quite as dramatic and sensational as a cult might be. Right. But, you know, that, I, I, I hope, I hope that we can get past

• 2:52:18Speaker 02

  people, I do this, other people do it to me and I know it, you know, they're sizing me up and saying, oh, you're a, you're this kind of Christian, you're that kind of Christian, you're this kind of ex hippie, or you know, they always kind of try to peg you. In a box. Yeah. Instead of get to know me and then you'll know what, you know, not just what image leaps into your mind and you can categorize it and write it off. Oh, I don't believe in Christianity. Well, yeah, but you know, you believe in humans because a lot of humans caught up in this thing. You know, at least we can talk as humans, you know, I, I used to get very nervous at the thought of somebody not believing in God. How could you go through life and not believe in God?

• 2:53:00Speaker 02

  I personally think everyone believes in something. I call it the voice, you know, it's a presence that you encounter not all day, every day, but sometimes, some sunset, some date with your wife, some special birth, you know?

• 2:53:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:18Speaker 02

  Or death, where, you know, that presence is felt and known.

• 2:53:25Speaker 02

  My mother-in-law just passed away. She was 100 years old. We had a wingding of a party in June. All the kids, she's out in California and everybody flew out there to wish her happy birthday.

• 2:53:39Speaker 02

  And she had dementia. It was, you know, her mind was slipping. She couldn't, her short-term memory was very brief, but she was such a godly woman her whole life and just has, exudes it. She doesn't use a lot of religious language. She doesn't, you know, just, it's just love, you know, that just comes through her. So that one of my sons, after she passes, he said, "This is the Christ we need," you know? And I think that's what we need. Stuff that's real, you know? It's not all theoretical and abstract. It's lived, you know? I think that's what incarnation means. It's supposed to be in the flesh, you know? Supposed to be real, not airy, you know, fairy type thing.

• 2:54:23Danny Jones?

  Well, that's very powerful, man. Thank you for doing this. This has been-

• 2:54:27Speaker 02

  We're done?

• 2:54:28Danny Jones?

  This has been incredible. Yeah, we just did three hours.

• 2:54:34Speaker 02

  Holy smokes.

• 2:54:36Danny Jones?

  It's 4:45.

• 2:54:37Speaker 02

  Okay, I got, I got time, yeah.

• 2:54:41Danny Jones?

  Does your flight leave tonight?

• 2:54:42Speaker 02

  It leaves tonight, yeah.

• 2:54:43Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:54:44Speaker 02

  I think I need to be there by 7.

• 2:54:46Danny Jones?

  Tell people where they can find your book and all that stuff.

• 2:54:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:54:48Danny Jones?

  Get ahold of you.

• 2:54:49Speaker 02

  Can I get my book? I'll just show that.

• 2:54:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, go grab it. Only available in paperback, is that right? Do you have Kindle? Okay, fantastic. Oh, there it is, right there. Something somebody stole.

• 2:55:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. So.

• 2:55:07Danny Jones?

  Beautiful, man.

• 2:55:07Speaker 02

  But, uh, yeah, I think it's a good read. You might not, people that are not that involved with Bible study like the first half better than the second half, because it's my story. In the second half, I'm trying to make sense of my story. So it's a little more spiritual and scriptural exploration, although it gets back into our life, too. So, yeah, I mean, I think if anybody's been through an experience like this, or has a family member who has, it's helpful. I've tried to digest a lot of other material from other writers and scholars and make it simple for a layman. So it can help you cover the issues involved as you're trying to work through your own personal apocalypse.

• 2:55:51Danny Jones?

  Hmm. It's amazing, man. Super powerful. We'll link all that stuff below so people can find it and get ahold of you if they need to.

• 2:56:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:56:01Danny Jones?

  And that's all, folks.

• 2:56:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:56:03Danny Jones?

  All right. Good night, everybody.

• 2:56:05Speaker 04

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