The Children of God — A mission of love that weaponized sex against its own children

The Children of God began in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California, as a Christian outreach to disaffected young people, and it ended — as a communal movement — in a 2010 restructuring its own leadership called the “Reboot,” after decades of documented sexual abuse of children had hollowed it out from within. Its founder, David Brandt Berg (1919–1994), a former Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor, built a worldwide network that at its height in the 1970s claimed roughly 10,000 full-time members in dozens of countries, governed almost entirely through thousands of his own newsletters, the “Mo Letters.” The group renamed itself repeatedly — Children of God, then the Family of Love (1978), then The Family, then The Family International (2004) — but the through-line was Berg’s doctrine that an all-superseding “Law of Love” permitted, and even sanctified, sexual conduct that the surrounding world criminalized.

The gravest harm fell on the children born into the movement, the “second generation.” Internal Family publications, the testimony of survivors, and the findings of courts in several countries established that adult–child sexual contact occurred in some communities over a span of years, presented in Berg’s writings not as sin but as an expression of love. The group has acknowledged that minors were subjected to sexually inappropriate conduct in the years before it issued internal prohibitions in the mid-1980s. This dossier describes the existence and findings of that abuse without graphic detail, as the record requires.

The defining emblem of the cost came in 2005. Ricky Rodriguez — born David Moses Zerby in 1975, the son of Berg’s longtime partner and successor Karen Zerby, raised inside the movement as a groomed heir nicknamed “Davidito” and documented in childhood through a notorious internal publication that recorded his abuse — had left the group in 1999. On 8 January 2005 he killed Angela Smith, a Family member he associated with his abuse, and the next day died by suicide. He left a video describing himself as acting for the children he believed the movement had harmed. His death drew global attention to the second generation’s suffering and became a grim marker of what the “Law of Love” had meant in practice.

The mechanism here was not a single catastrophe but a slow doctrinal capture: a charismatic leader who rewrote the boundaries of acceptable behavior letter by letter, an isolated communal world that enforced his redefinitions, and a theology that recast coercion as love so thoroughly that members struggled to name the harm even as it was happening to their own children.