Jesus Freaks Read online

  One cold night we woke up in the middle of the night with no heat and quite cold. Apparently, I must have been stirring and my mother must have been cold and realized that I was cold too, so suddenly in an almost impulsive movement she threw her arms around me and snuggled me real tight. My back was to her at the time—I was lying on my right side and she on her right side—so that as she embraced me and pulled me close against her bosom, she tucked her knees up under my knees and wrapped her body around mine!…

  My first reaction was absolute terrified shock to think that my mother would get so close to me and wrap her arms around me and her very body around mine in such an almost sexual embrace. It certainly was a loving embrace and affectionate and perhaps she meant nothing by it whatsoever…but I think for the first time in my life I had sexual feelings about my mother!

  And in those days when very young I was quite virile and potent. I can remember having her snuggle and feeling her warm soft body against mine, her bosoms against my back. She had on a nightgown, a very thin nightgown. She was still a beautiful woman at fifty-five, charming and although a little on the plump side, quite pretty and very attractive [and there she was] with her bosoms against my back and her arms wrapped around me and almost her legs wrapped around me. I suddenly got quite an electric sexual jolt that I had never expected before, and I was almost immediately erect!…

  Perhaps if I had not been so conservative and extremely narrow minded in my theology and religion at that time and so absolutely frightened of my mother’s seeming abandon at the moment I might have [been] a little bit more responsive. Perhaps [I could have] satisfied both of us and our mutual tremendous sexual needs. It could have developed into a beautiful sexual relationship.8

  By then, David had been driving his mother back and forth across the country for several years. “I had been more faithful to her than her own husband,” he confided. “We had a very beautiful, marvelous wonderful mutual spiritual and filial relationship which was beyond what any actual fleshly sex could have ever been.”

  Since his father had resigned his pastorate in Ukiah back in the summer of 1917, Hjalmer and his wife had been spending less and less time together. Virginia was clearly the star attraction of the Berg Evangelistic Dramatic Company.

  Life on the road was hard on David. He never graduated from high school in Miami, but later managed to get his diploma at age nineteen at Monterey Union High School on the central California coast, where his older brother worked as a teacher.

  Other young men Berg’s age were valiantly marching off to World War II. David was in his twenties and spent the war years helping his mother with her revival meetings—just as he’d always done. Writing in his diary on March 28, 1941, Berg confessed that he “awoke with a deep desire to strike out on my own, at least to ‘prove myself.’

  “Took stock of my abilities—with not very encouraging results on the side of job experience and health. Fair intelligence and singing voice. Can speak if compelled to. Knowledge of spiritual things. Inclined to feel inferior because of poor physique. Never had a job, was always different from the other boys.”9

  Writing in his diary later that year, Berg reveals how a government agent told him that the best way to stay out of the war was to get ordained and “enter a plea of mother’s dependency on my help.” Five days later, on September 25, 1941, Berg writes that he was “ordained today by Dr. Jay C. Kellogg, President of the British-American Ministerial Federation. I’m now a full-fledged minister!”

  During the war Berg obtained conscientious objector status with the Army Corps of Engineers and a disability discharge because of a heart ailment.

  Two years later, he met his wife, Jane Miller, the secretary and youth director at an Alliance congregation in southern California, the Little Church of Sherman Oaks. He was there helping his mother stage revival meetings. They eloped and married in Glendale, California, on July 22, 1944, and took off to Palm Springs. Deborah, their first child, was born September 10, 1945, followed by their first son, Aaron, on June 21, 1947.

  Berg was ready to head out on his own. But he was still working as his mother’s song leader in 1948 when the Berg Evangelistic Dramatic Company rolled into Richmond, California, for yet another round of revival meetings. “I knew them both quite well,” said the Reverend Charlie Dale, the pastor of the Richmond Alliance Church from 1945 to 1952. “Virginia held lots of meetings in our church. She was a good preacher and an intelligent woman. David was uneducated—never really went to college or seminary—and always seemed closely tied to his mother.10

  “David was ordained [into the Alliance churches] in 1947 or 1948,” the old preacher recalled. “I remember that because I gave him a suit of clothes for his ordination—a zoot suit.”

  Berg started his first and only position as an Alliance pastor when he was assigned to a struggling church in Valley Farms, Arizona.

  Valley Farms was born out of the Great Depression, one of thirty-seven communities created by the Resettlement Administration, a federal agency established in 1935. One of the most controversial experiments of the New Deal, the idea behind this part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s recovery plan was to relocate struggling families to cooperative farms and “garden cities.”

  By the spring of 1940, the federal government had spent $817,000 to build sixty simple homes and a grocery store/community center in the sun-baked fields outside Florence, Arizona. Government photographs designed to show off the program’s collective accomplishments depict children picking flowers outside a freshly whitewashed adobe home, neatly stacked bales of hay in a new barn, and dairy cattle poking their heads through a new fence. Another image, “Leaving the Grocery Store at Casa Grande Farms,” depicts three women and a young girl wearing their Sunday best as they emerge through the front door of the new community center.

  Berg arrived eight years later with Jane and the first of their two young children. The Depression was over, as well as World War II and the collective experiment at Valley Farms. Berg was almost thirty years old and finally able to step out of his mother’s shadow and into his own pulpit.

  Sometime between Christmas and New Year’s Day, Berg sent out his first fundraising letter—to his mother’s network of supporters.

  This was intended to be our Christmas greeting to you, but we have been so busy moving, getting settled, and taking up work here that we have been delayed in getting it off to you. We hope you have had a very blessed Christmas season! Our own hearts are simply welling over with praises to Him this season for all the manifold blessings with which He has showered us, especially the glorious opportunity which He has given us here in Valley Farms. We are preparing to build a church in this churchless community, just such pioneering missionary work that we have been longing to do, feeling keenly the Lord’s command to go out into the highways and byways and compel them to go in….

  How grateful we are for our training in the evangelistic field for this type of work, especially the lessons learned in living the life of faith and for Mother’s inspiring example and teaching along this line! She is now in Santa Barbara with Dad preparing for another evangelistic tour.11

  At the Colorado Springs headquarters of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, it’s hard to find any records or any person able to shed light on what happened following Berg’s appointment to lead the flock at Valley Farms. But something happened at Valley Farms. There was a sex scandal or a political controversy or something. David Berg got kicked out of town and was never the same again.

  His appointment to the church was reported in the February 5, 1949, edition of the denomination’s official publication, Alliance Weekly, which lists his name among six “New Workers” sent out to missionary assignments around the country. His name reappears in the magazine two years later, in the May 5, 1951, edition under the “Transfers” section of the church news column. There are twenty-seven transfers reported in the column. Only two pastors, including Berg, are listed as “Unassigned.”

  The
Christian and Missionary Alliance was founded by the Reverend Albert Benjamin Simpson in 1887. Simpson was a Presbyterian minister swept up in the faith healing, holiness, and apocalyptic Christian revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the year 2005 the Alliance would claim nearly 2,000 churches attended by 420,000 people in the United States. Internationally, the denomination reports another 18,000 churches and three million members in eighty-four countries.

  No one at the Christian and Missionary Alliance could shed light on this early chapter in the life of David Berg. Officials at the denomination’s Colorado Springs headquarters said any documents would have been kept at its South Pacific District office in Riverside, California. Don Brust, the district superintendent there, said he could find no records explaining whatever happened to David Berg or his flock.

  Harold Mangham, who preceded Brust as district superintendent, remembers the congregation, but not Berg. “Yes, we had a church in that community,” Mangham said. “It was an interesting place. Roosevelt set it up. It was kind of like a kibbutz that you might find in Israel.” Mangham said he made several visits to Valley Farms and remembers that the congregation was still struggling when he left his post in 1987.

  Two young women who were assigned to Valley Farms in 1947 preceded Berg as the first missionaries sent out by the Alliance. One of them was Betty Findley. “We were just missionary girls back then, but we had a large youth group and held six meetings a week at the community center,” Betty recalled. “We used to call the place ‘Little Russia.’ People didn’t have their own things—they were all together. They farmed together, and I guess they shared the profits.”

  Findley stayed at the Valley Farms cooperative until she left to marry and has just a vague memory of the man who would succeed her. “He came after I left, but I remember seeing him at some of our revivals. I didn’t really hear anything against him, but I’d like to know why he left, too.”12

  Charlie Dale recalled a story about how David dug a big hole for a swimming pool on the church property, then used the clay to make adobe brick for a little chapel. Deborah Berg remembers her father collecting bricks from nearby ruins to build his church. Berg stated his intentions to build a church at Valley Farms in his Christmas fundraising letter of 1948. Services were being held in the home of the “women missionaries who preceded us here,” he wrote, until “a modest chapel can be erected on the adjoining lot.

  “The entire property is being purchased at a very reasonable figure on long-term payments,” Berg wrote. “We expect to begin building the first little church in Valley Farms next month, the Lord willing. Far removed from the nearest towns with churches, this village is sorely in need of such a Gospel Lighthouse, especially for the sake of the young people and children.”13

  Valley Farms is a ninety-minute drive from Tucson via the Pinal Pioneer Parkway, a road that winds through desert landscape dotted with sagebrush and saguaro, the stately cactus and proud symbol of the Arizona highway. Most of the sixty homes built by the Resettlement Administration stand today in various states of disrepair. Some have been abandoned. Others have been expanded in an architectural style inspired by generations of poverty and an absence of building codes.

  Berg’s adobe church was still there. Along its sides the original adobe peeked through cracked pink plaster. Several of the windows were boarded up. There was an old dishwasher, toilet, and other trashed appliances piled near double doors that once led into the sanctuary. A cross of white bricks adorning the building’s beige facade confirmed its history as a house of worship, but the Christian beacon was mostly hidden behind an overgrown shrub. There was no evidence of a swimming pool in the backyard, just a weedy lot facing a golden field of freshly cut hay.

  No one answered the door, but a neighbor working on a truck provided some information. “It hasn’t been used as a church for years,” he said. “There were some Mexicans living in there, but I think the place is abandoned.”

  Ruby Webb was the only Valley Farms resident left from the time Berg was there. Ruby lives in a trailer down the street from the abandoned church. Her place faces a dusty parking area and the only sign of the town’s collective past—a brick monument with an old plow and faded letters. “Welcome to Valley Farms—Established 1934.”

  Ruby moved here in 1941, but had been alone since her husband, Floyd, died in 2002. She said the old collective spirit of Valley Farms died a long time before her husband. According to the local gossip, the church that David Berg built was a drug house in its most recent incarnation. “You used to know everybody in town,” Ruby sighed. “Now you have to lock your doors.”

  She remembered Berg as one of several preachers who came to town over the years and tried to turn the church into a viable congregation. “I don’t know why he left,” she said. “But I’m eighty-six, and I don’t remember lots of things.”

  Whatever happened at Valley Farms was serious enough to cause Berg’s flock to expel him from their fellowship. According to his daughter, Deborah, Berg left amid rumors of a sex scandal at Valley Farms. Around the time of his dismissal, Berg sent his mother a tape recording in which he “categorically denied the charge of sexual misconduct.”14 Berg would say later that he left Valley Farms in a dispute with racist church members over whether he should allow “dirty, barefooted Indians to the church service on Sunday.”

  Deborah Berg, who was five years old when her family left Valley Farms, would soon have firsthand experience of her father’s sexual misconduct. At age seven, she says her father began “attempts at incest” that would continue for five years. “From that time on, I was terrified of being left alone with him. At age twelve I was more consciously aware of the ‘strangeness of his actions,’ but I still had no understanding of what he was attempting. I determinedly resisted, threatening to jump out of the window if he touched me. He tried to explain he wanted me to fulfill special needs that my mother didn’t completely meet. Unlike twelve-year-olds today, I was totally naïve about sex, and it wasn’t until I was married that I realized what his intentions had been.”15

  In her account of her childhood, Deborah says her younger sister, Faithy, had an incestuous relationship with their father. “Unlike me,” Deborah writes, “she did not resist him.”16 Faithy later defended her father’s endorsement of adults masturbating children to help them relax. “It reminded me of how [dad] used to put me to sleep when I was a little girl, three or four. Wow! Daddy did it best! Back rubbin’ that is, and front rubbin’ too!…Daddy just made me feel good all over…. I don’t think it perverted me, none at all, but it sure converted me to his call! So I believe our parents should try it and help our kids to get the natural habit…. Oh, I could write a book, but this is just a look into my childhood sex.”17

  In the end, it doesn’t really matter if Berg was expelled from Valley Farms for sexual misconduct or because he could no longer stomach the racist hypocrites in his ignorant flock. Either way, Berg would never again minister to the mundane spiritual needs of an actual congregation. He had convinced himself that he was a prophet, not a pastor

  “It seems the Lord is showing me that belonging to anything other than the Lord Himself is too binding, too hindering, too man-made,” he wrote in a May 31, 1951, letter to his mother, the same month he was removed from Valley Farms. “It obligates you to follow the dictates of man rather than God. When you follow God instead of man they kick you out anyhow, so you might as well not stay in or get in…. Evidently, I was never cut out to be a kowtowing, hypocritical, beating-around-the-bush, please-everybody pastor.”18

  Following his abrupt departure from Valley Farms, Berg enrolled at a Phoenix college and took courses in philosophy, psychology, and political science. He also signed up for a personal witnessing course at the American Soul Clinic, a missionary training school founded in 1944 by evangelist Fred Jordan. Berg would spend the next fifteen years working for Jordan, helping Jordan promote his missionary training camp and a radio and television ministry c
alled the “Church in the Home.” Now he was in Jordan’s shadow, rather than his mother’s.

  In 1966, Berg had a falling out with Jordan and took his kids on the road as the “Berg Family Singers.” They were a flop.

  At the time, Virginia Berg was retired and living in a Huntington Beach cottage. She had begun to see lots of restless, seemingly lost, teenagers hanging around this town on the southern California coast. They were about the same age as her grandchildren, but they had long hair and wore wild clothing. They smoked marijuana and took other mind-altering drugs. Huntington Beach was turning into southern California’s version of the infamous Haight-Ashbury neighborhood up the coast in San Francisco.

  Virginia knew lost souls when she saw them. The old revivalist started passing out peanut butter sandwiches to the hippies and the beach bums in Huntington Beach. Then she’d tell them about Jesus. Meanwhile, her son was approaching his fiftieth birthday and had nowhere else to go. Maybe God would give poor David one more chance.

  Mama Berg called her son home.

  3

  Jesus Freaks

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  May 1967 – Corner of Haight and Ashbury streets

  GOD WAS SPEAKING to Kent Philpott through his car radio. Actually, it was the voice of Scott MacKenzie singing his new song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” But the Almighty was speaking through the music and had a clear message for this young Baptist preacher. “God called me to the hippies,” he says. “Right there and then.”

  Faithy Berg (right) ministers to the hippies in the early seventies.