Nowadays, Dr. Miriam Williams Boeri (left) is a respected Asst. Professor of Sociology (Kennesaw State), where she researches such topics as methamphetamine use in suburbia. But I first learned of her (and the Children of God, for that matter) back in 1999 after picking up a copy of her 1998 memoir, Heaven’s Harlots: My Fifteen Years as a Sacred Prostitute in the Children of God Cult,* in which she candidly chronicled her induction, work, and ultimate defection from the Children of God. With the insight that can only come from insiders, Dr. Boeri described not only the lightning brief introduction to the cult, but the slowly developing indoctrination process that began with reasonable fundamentalists beliefs, and ended through the looking glass.

Her story starts in Greenwich Village--1971--where she watched The Ultimate Trip, a documentary about the CoG, at a local church. The cult came across as utopian, and that positively impressed her:

Here was pure communism, but these people were happy, not severe, like that [Maoist] boy in Washington. These people were Christians, yet they looked like hippies in long skirts and flowing hair. And they had a vision--to change the world! Leaving the church as soon as the film was over, I tried to hide the tears in my eyes. I felt I had just seen the living purity of Jesus’ words. I wanted to be like these people--to love everyone; to give my life for others; to be part of a true community.

She by chance met a CoG follower the next day, and, on the spot, he invited her to visit a local compound. She accepted. The process of indoctrination began immediately on the bus ride up, with members telling her that her baptism, her beliefs, and her previous practices of faith weren‘t enough for salvation. A few days later, they told her that her clothes (jeans and army jacket) weren’t “feminine enough, and that she should exchange clothes at their “Forsake All.” They kept her under constant surveillance, lovebombed her, and repetitively, relentlessly quoted scriptures to her. Before she knew it, she was committing more and more to the cult until she was in over her head:

Although I don’t remember making any verbal decision to join or signing anything, I handed over to the group all my belongings, including my driver’s license, which was never returned. In my purse, I’d had only the few dollars we had panhandled [busked, actually] in New York, which was also handed over, and I never held money again for years.

At the time she entered the CoG, the cult still disallowed sex outside of marriage. She noticed how the prospect of betrothal consequently preoccupied the thoughts of many of her peers, “since no physical contact was allowed between boys and girls unless they were married to each other.“

Like many others, she was betrothed to another cult member she had limited contact with beforehand. Former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Jeremy Spencer conned her into performing a skit, which in reality was a wedding proposal to the drummer of his new band.** At the time (1972), David Berg had issued a Mo Letter mandating three-to-six month courtships for all betrothals. Despite the bonding time, she realized on her wedding night that they had no chemistry:

I lay awake most of the night wondering what I had done and why. Cal [Caleb, her husband] was a very nice person, much better looking and better groomed than most of the boys at the camp, but I did not think I loved him. Romantic love was one of the lies of the devil, I had been told by an older sister.***

Dr. Boeri assumed that she would travel with her husband, who would travel with the band. And, for awhile, her assumptions played out as expected. But leadership saw fit to send them to a colony in Essen, Germany, where “The colony leaders were Samson and Naomi, who together ruled the home with Gestapo-like authority.”

She and her husband subsequently spent most of her time trying to augment the revenues of the CoG through literature witnessing (or “litnessing”): selling copies of GP-rated Mo Letters and other materials, in the hopes of raising money. If lucky, a litnesser could also induct others, who would then forfeit their worldly possessions and collect donations from family members. Needless to say, this was a pretty grueling existence. Litnessers had a daily quota, which could easily take them twelve to fourteen hours to meet.

The cult then ordered Cal to Paris, leaving Miriam alone with their son. A sympathetic cult member with considerable clout in the organization, managed to reunite the family in France, during which time, they received word of the new wife-swapping doctrine. She quickly noticed that the new sexual liberty granted by Berg seemed to become an obsession with those who were previously sexually conservative, those with “more religious fundamentalist backgrounds.”

While in Paris, her mission was to set up a nursery. After she finished that, it was back to the litnessing salt mines. This time, however, she and Cal decided to busk to make quota. This group became quite popular, even making an appearance of national television.**** While hard work, it probably beat sweating bullets to see if you could make quota. But one CoG officer, specifically Berg’s daughter Faith, found a shortcut to surpassing that quota, when sent to Libya in 1973 as Berg‘s personal envoy to Muammar Qaddafi.

Figure 1. Faith and Jonathan Berg with Col. Qaddafi

As she explained in the 1998 documentary The Love Prophet, Faith had attempted to convert a male Muslim when, for some unexplained reason, they wound up having sex. Ashamed, she immediately called her father to confess the indiscretion. But if she expected something on the order of excommunication at worst, or a strong rebuke in the least, her father‘s response would surprise her:

’Cause I had never, ever, had sex with anybody that I wasn’t married to. And I had never had sex with anybody that was--what I would consider--a heathen…

And then my father said, ‘Why it’s exactly the same day we got this prophecy called the Flirty Fish.’ And he said, ‘Why it’s amazing,‘ and, ‘This is exactly what God is revealing to us; that there would be instances, in which we would have to portray God’s love in a physical way, and that there was nothing wrong with it.

The fish metaphor came from the Gospels: the story of how Christ told Simon Peter to be a “fisher of men.“ In other words, the fish were souls who needed saving. Flirting, in a literal sense, might make many males (and some females--Berg rigorously defended female homosexuality) more receptive to the message. But what Berg now instructed of his female disciples went considerably beyond batting pretty eyelashes, or whispering sweet nothing into the ears of potential recruits. He wanted them to go all the way.

Initially, Flirty Fishing (or FF-ing, for short) served as a way of recruiting (mostly) males into the cult. It  paid big dividends early on when one of Berg’s earliest followers landed a barracuda. In 1973, Barbara Kaliher (right) hooked, inducted, and then married, Victor Emanuele Canevaro, the Italian Duke of Zoagli and Castelvari, thus making her a real-life duchess. According to a Time magazine article dated 22 August 1977, Duke Canevero owned a rather large estate and mansion near Florence, of which Berg and the CoG took immediate advantage.

After litnessing all day, Dr. Boeri would then Flirty Fish all night. She soon found herself doing it in parties and clubs populated by such glitterati as Andy Warhol and Catherine Deneuve, and by such infamous figures as Adnan Khashoggi. By that time, the church had separated her from both her son and husband, who now had an approved mistress, who more or less took her place. These things emotionally took its toll on her.

She might have suspected that in regards to FF-ing the CoG had something other than winning souls in mind. After ff-ing a man she referred to as Salim, she was somewhat dismayed when the fish, instead of converting like it said so in the King Arthur Letters, gave her money instead.***** She called into leadership to report the incident. Her superiors told her that even though she failed to land the fish, accepting the monetary “gift” on behalf of the organization was also fine.

It’s one thing for your spiritual leader to tell you to go and have indiscriminate sex in order to comfort them, make them feel less lonely, or to save their soul. It’s another thing for a spiritual leader to tell you to have indiscriminate sex in order to collect money--which you will then turn over to said spiritual leader, who will thus provide for you, albeit not very well.


Under those circumstances, you might have difficulty separating the role of CoG leaders from that of a garden-variety pimp. And like a pimp, the cult ran this enterprise like a business. It didn’t take very long for them to thoroughly organize the practice.
____________________________

*A subsequent edition of this book is titled Heaven’s Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult.

**Spencer joined the CoG after leaving Fleetwood Mac. Afterwards, he starred in the cult’s musical ensembles, thus giving them an air of legitimacy.

***CoG members referred to each other as brother and sister, the collective children of Berg (whom they addressed as ‘Dad’) and Karen Zerby (Mama ‘Maria’).

****In Heaven’s Harlots, she simply refers to the program as The Guy Lux Show. It would seem that she’s really talking about Samedi est à vous (Saturday is with You), a teen/young adult show hosted by Guy Lux.

*****The King Arthur Nights were a series of Mo Letters dedicated to FF-ing.