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

Summary

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.

Timeline

The promise: a family for the lost

The Children of God reached people at their most untethered. In 1968 the United States was full of young people who had stepped away from mainstream churches, families, and futures, and Berg offered them a total alternative: a communal life of shared poverty, urgent purpose, and belonging, framed by the conviction that the end of the world was near and ordinary society was doomed. Members "forsook all," surrendering possessions and outside ties, and threw themselves into street evangelism. For many, the early movement supplied exactly what the wider culture had failed to give them — a family, a mission, and certainty.

That appeal was real, and it explains the speed of the growth. Within a few years the group had spread across continents and counted thousands of full-time members, most of them teenagers and people in their early twenties. They were not, in the main, predators or cynics; they were idealistic young people who believed they had found a purer Christianity and a community that loved them. The tragedy is that the same total commitment that made the movement feel like salvation also handed Berg an almost unlimited authority over their bodies and their children.

The tightening: a doctrine that erased the line

Berg ruled at a distance, through the Mo Letters, and over time those letters redrew the boundaries of acceptable conduct. He preached a "Law of Love" that, in his telling, superseded conventional morality: if an act was done in love, he taught, it could not be sin. From the mid-1970s this doctrine licensed "Flirty Fishing," in which female members used sexual relationships to recruit and to secure support, a practice carried out by members from 1974 until it was ended in 1987. The redefinition did not stop at adults. In a closed world where the leader's word was scripture, the same logic was extended in some communities to children, and Berg's writings presented that extension as love rather than abuse.

Isolation made the redefinitions stick. Communal homes were sealed-off worlds with their own publications, their own discipline, and intense pressure against outside contact, skepticism, or exit. Children were raised inside this system with no external reference point by which to recognize that what was being done to them was wrong, and adults who might have objected had already accepted, letter by letter, that the leader defined love. The "Davidito" publication, which documented the childhood of Berg and Zerby's groomed heir, circulated internally as guidance. When a movement's most intimate boundaries are set by one unaccountable figure and enforced in isolation, the ordinary instinct to protect a child can be overridden by doctrine.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The lasting toll of the Children of God falls most heavily on its second generation, many of whom have spent adulthood recovering from childhood sexual abuse, disrupted education, and severed family ties. Survivors built support networks, published accounts, and pressed for acknowledgment; some, like Ricky Rodriguez, did not survive the weight of it. The movement itself acknowledged that minors had been subjected to inappropriate sexual conduct before its mid-1980s prohibitions, and courts in several countries documented past abuse while finding the group had reformed. No leader was convicted of the underlying abuse, and Berg died in 1994 before facing trial.

As a communal movement, the Children of God effectively ended with the 2010 "Reboot," which dismantled the shared-living model and shifted the much-diminished membership to a loose online network; adult membership fell by roughly a third within two years and the remaining members are largely aging first-generation believers. The case reshaped how scholars, child-protection authorities, and journalists understand the risks faced by children raised inside high-control religious groups, and it stands as a documented example of how a doctrine of "love" can be turned into a system of abuse. It is remembered today less for its founder's prophecies than for the children who paid for them.

Lessons

References

• The Family International WIKIPEDIA
• The Family International | Christian Commune, Controversy & History BRITANNICA
• Children of God / The Family International CDAMM (CAMBRIDGE)
• Ricky Rodriguez WIKIPEDIA
• The Family International (2010–Present) WORLD RELIGIONS AND SPIRITUALITY PROJECT