Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult by Miriam Williams Page B

over, and I never held money again for years. It would also be years before I went to a store to buy anything, read a book, listened to radio, or watched TV. How I spent every minute of my life was decided for me, or rather, I let them decide it for me. Many nights as I lay in bed—the only time I was alone—I would review my past life, which now seemed so very distant. At first I was saddened that I would never finish college, but soon these thoughts receded further and further away, and finally they never appeared again. I missed my family, but I believed I had met God’s True Family. After all, that was what I had been praying for, and didn’t God answer prayers? I read a passage from a booklet that was given me, which said, we belong to the greatest Family in the world, the Family of God’s Love. Surely God must think you worthy to give you such a priceless privilege to be a member of His Family! we’re the mighty army of Christian soldiers, fighting a relentless war for the truth and love of God, against the confusion of Babylon, the anti-God, Antichrist systems of the world…we are the hard-core, the spearhead, the avant garde of this last spiritual revolution. We are the Cadre, the leadership of it, that requires one hundred percent dedication…
    We called ourselves “revolutionaries” in a spiritual and material sense combined. I knew it would be hard. It was like joining an army, giving up my personal desires for a greater cause. But I felt like I was meant to do this—it was my purpose in life. And as I was told, I was still young enough to change, In another few years I would have become so ingrained with “system” thoughts, I could never be a “revolutionary.” My life in those days as a new disciple meant waking up early to pray alone for one hour and then together with a group of girls led by our “tribe leader.” After a breakfast of powdered milk, doughnuts, and oatmeal, I helped to clean the camp, which, considering that it sometimes housed up to three hundred people, was kept fairly clean. Then began a long day of Bible classes, broken only by a small lunch of a sandwich or sometimes a fruit salad. At the end of the day, we were given time to memorize verses, always with an older brother or sister to guide us, and then to read the Bible silently, but not alone.
    A late dinner was followed by “inspiration,” which included a few hours of singing and then a message from our leader. it was after a few weeks of those messages that I understood that our top leader and founder was a man who called himself Moses David.
    Moses, called Mo for short, based his philosophy of a Christian communal life—which he preached, taught, and enforced through writings called Mo letters—on the biblical scriptures. Just as the Russian Communists were inspired by the Communist Manifesto, and the Nazi movement by Mein Kampf, the Mo letters told us what to believe in, and how to live this belief. Like those other revolutionary works, the Mo letters gave us the hope that we would change the world. However, the big difference was—our leader heard straight from God, and God was still speaking!
    Mo wrote that “ninety percent of our ministry here is condemning the church and the church people and the damn system” (“A Sample, Not a Sermon” J, 55). When he began preaching that to the hippies gathering in a coffeehouse in Huntington Beach, California, they listened to this strange man in his late forties wearing a beard and sunglasses. He looked like one of them, only older and wiser, and he had a plan taken from one of the greatest plans ever written for humanity—the New Testament.
    But Mo wasn’t always a bohemian prophet. He started his adult life in the shadow of his famous evangelist mother, Virginia Brandt Berg, whom he claimed had been paralyzed by a car accident and miraculously healed.
    She became a relatively successful Christian evangelist and eventually had her own radio program called