Talking With the Children of God: Prophecy and Transformation in a Radical Religious Group (review)

The media made the Children of God cult famous for its "flirty fishing" technique, whereby attractive young female members seduced clueless civilians, and then used their sexy wiles to keep them around. But readers hoping for scurrilous details will be disappointed by Talking with the Children of God. This book reads more like a drawn-out organizational chart with elaborately detailed job descriptions, spiced up with heavy doses of divination.

Brothers Gordon and Gary Shepherd, both sociologists, have spent seventeen years studying the Family International, which is what the Children of God has called itself since 2004. During that time, they visited many communal homes of Family International members. In 2005, Gary visited twenty-three homes in sixteen countries.

The Shepherds explain the Family's position in the religious spectrum: "The Family International's emphasis on the Bible, and its attempts to reinstate such early Christian practices as sharing all things in common and dedicating their lives to evangelizing the world for Jesus, are sectarian Christian themes. At the same time, the Family's radical sexual teachings and practices, its origins in the prophetic claims of David Berg, and its continuing dependence on direct revelatory guidance from Jesus (as well as Berg's departed spirit and a host of other supernatural entities) clearly mark the Family as a religious cult in the strict sociological sense" (1). The sharing they refer to includes the requirement that the 10,000 core Family members live in communal homes and practice the "law of love," which involves multiple sexual liaisons between members.

After the government attack on the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993, the Family was nervous that they might meet a similar fate. They contacted several scholars who study new religious movements, hoping that favorable reports of their communal lifestyle would boost their PR. The Shepherds first met with Family International members in 1993, when Family leaders invited the brothers to visit.

In 2005, the Shepherds had gained enough trust to be invited to spend four days at World Services, the location of the Family's headquarters. World Services, which is moved every few years and kept secret both from the public and from Family members, is where the Family's many publications and Web sites are produced, under the close supervision of Maria David, who is usually called simply Maria or Mama. First married to David Berg, the late founder of the group, she is now married to Peter Amsterdam.

Most of the book consists of transcripts from interviews the Shepherds conducted with the workers at World Services. The brothers rely heavily on qualitative research. Definitely social scientists rather than oral historians, the authors assign the narrators pseudonyms to protect their anonymity, except for Maria and Peter. The Shepherds say of their method: "We did our best to avoid too many such digressions while simultaneously maintaining the relaxed ambience of a true conversation. While we did not systematically work from a set of preformulated questions, we did have a specific interest in the way that WS staff utilized prophecy in their work, and this helped us to channel the direction our many conversations took" (xiv). Their editing methodology included starting with verbatim transcripts, then amending garbled syntax and grammatical errors, eliminating redundancies, and condensing for space. While they are up front about their handling of the transcripts, like many social scientists, they do not make them public to other scholars.

Channeling prophecies and recording them is a crucial part of daily life for the Family, inside and outside World Services, since it directs most decisions and dictates the content of World Services' publications, about which Maria has the final say. The degree to which World Services uses prophecy in everyday decisions is staggering as well, such as deciding which line drawings are right for a story or writing a note of reprimand to...