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Perry Bulwer's firsthand account in his memoir titled Misguided: My Jesus Freak Life In a Doomsday Cult (New Star Books $26.00) provides a chilling insight into life within the Children of God, also known as The Family, a millennial doomsday sex cult led by charismatic figure David Berg. In 1972, Bulwer, a naive 16-year-old from Port Alberni, British Columbia, abandoned high school to join this radical Christian cult. What follows is a harrowing journey where Bulwer becomes a preacher, spreading the cult's doomsday message across major global cities. Bulwer's narrative delves into the disturbing realms of biblical literalism, fundamentalist end-time prophecies, paranormal spirituality, evangelical extremism, and ritual abuse. The Family, under David Berg's influence, justified licentious sexual doctrines, evangelical prostitution, and child sexual abuse through liberally interpreted biblical teachings. Berg's predictions of America's imminent destruction, the Antichrist's appearance in 1985, and Jesus' Second Coming in 1993 fueled the cult's activities until Berg's death in 1994, evading law enforcement. Bulwer managed to escape The Family in 1991 while living in Asia, later returning to Canada. Transitioning from a religious extremist to a secular humanist lawyer, he fought for the rights of marginalized groups in Vancouver, haunted by his past. He became an advocate for second-generation survivors, shedding light on the child abuse and psychological trauma inflicted by the cult. 9781554202058
Misguided: My Jesus Freak Life In a Doomsday Cult by Perry Bulwer (New Star $26)
Review by John Moore (BCBW 2023)
Perry Bulwer’s account of his 20 years as a “Jesus freak” in an apocalyptic cult should be required reading for those whose children are undergoing the baptism of fire euphemistically described as “young adulthood” in parenting manuals. The combination of adult emotions and ideas with an almost total lack of adult experience is as pleasant to be around as a carafe of nitro-glycerine.
So when an idealistic yet listless, unmotivated, young person comes home one day, no longer unpredictably sullen or angry but smiling serenely as if they’ve come through the rapids and hit calm water, parents are inclined to heave huge sighs of relief. Unfortunately, it may mean your child has either discovered heroin or been “fished” by a cult and you should seek help from mental health professionals at once.
Like many late boomers, Bulwer missed the 1967 Summer of Love and got stuck with the hand-me-down, tie-dyed, Be-In t-shirt. Growing up in a small Vancouver Island city, Port Alberni, where a stable future meant a good job at the mill, Bulwer was sixteen in 1972 and the vaguely inclusive ideals of universal love, peace and goodwill of the Now Generation were starting to spin into a hedonistic crash dive of careless sex, harder drugs and mindless heavy metal music.
Despite his Catholic upbringing and a secondary education that failed to provide him with critical thinking skills, Bulwer was intelligent enough to realize Flower Power had been wilting into something much uglier than an unloved houseplant since the infamous 1969 Rolling Stones Altamont concert where a Black man was beaten to death by Hells Angels gang members employed as “security.” Philosophically and emotionally adrift, Perry was ripe for recruitment by any organized group that claimed to have exclusive copyright on The Truth.
At that vulnerable time in his life, he could have become a Marxist, a Maoist, a chanting Buddhist, a Hare Krishna, a convert jihadist or convert Zionist, joined the French Foreign Legion or the US Marines. It would have made no difference. What he was seeking was a world view—a vision of truth and a code of behaviour that would give him a sense of direction, purpose and meaning that he was unequipped and unable to define for himself. For the Children of God, Bulwer was “fresh meat” and they descended on him like vultures who’d missed lunch.
He didn’t know the friendly young men he met in a Port Alberni diner were missionaries from a cult group created by a shadowy American evangelical hustler and self-proclaimed prophet, David Berg, a man so immodest he liked to be called Mo, short for Moses. Bulwer didn’t know they had been trained to recognize and target vulnerable young people by a man who’d been literally born and raised in the tent revival subculture that was a popular feature of life in the American South and Midwest for the first half of the 20th century BTV (before television).
Born in 1919, David Berg had been involved with that subculture as it evolved from gypsy tents to regular Sunday morning radio broadcasts to televised “crusades” that filled stadiums where self-appointed apostles of God smacked shills planted in audiences on the forehead to cast out demons and demanded they throw away their crutches and rise from their wheelchairs and praise Jesus! It was the age of bogus faith-healing theatrics of mouth-foaming frauds like Jimmy Swaggart (subject of three scandals involving prostitutes in the late 1980s and early 90s), and Oral Roberts (who parlayed his tax-free status into a financial empire including a university).
Distrusting the risks of celebrity (no doubt he’d seen the film Elmer Gantry), David Berg chose the darker path of the reclusive prophet. Despite being in his forties in the 1960s, he sensed his moment had come. The most numerous and potentially wealthiest generation of the 20th century were waking up from the Swinging Sixties/Now Generation/Flower Power party with an apocalyptic spiritual hangover. Tattered copies of I Ching, the faux-Tibetan fictions of
T. Lobsang Rampa, and Carlos Castaneda’s equally bogus accounts of Yaqui shaman Don Juan weren’t getting them through the existential “morning after.” In spiritual distress, some hippies turned to a guy they remembered from Sunday school, Jesus of Nazareth. The Hare Krishnas and chanting Buddhists who’d replaced panhandling hippies on the sidewalks were joined by Jesus freaks. Berg’s minions were there to welcome them like lost sheep returned to the fold.
Cults are always with us. In times of social confidence and economic prosperity they’re mostly harmless, like benign tumours, providing an outlet for people whose intellectual frailty compels them to seek supernatural causes and remedies for their despair. But in times of political, social and economic insecurity and mass despair (the last 50 years, for instance), cults easily become malignant.
The most dangerous cults are those that tailgate established religions. In our nominally Judeo-Christian derived culture, co-opting Jesus was a cynical no-brainer for a would-be Messiah like Berg. His Children of God Communes, funded by legions of come-to-Jesus panhandlers, morphed into The Divine Family, then The Family; and lied about rescuing people from drug and alcohol addictions as it practised pedophilia, vicious corporal punishment for backsliders and advocated “flirty fishing” (sexual recruitment) of new converts. Berg’s “Mo Letters” to converts are case studies in opportunistic megalomania, demonstrating the fascism inherent in all cults centered around a leader or “prophet” instead of being based on a depersonalized spiritual doctrine.
Despite having wasted twenty of the best years of his life, Perry Bulwer was lucky. He had just enough of the right stuff to walk away at the age of 36. Smart enough to grasp Socrates’ assertion that the first step toward wisdom is to realize you know nothing, he started educating himself at the library and developing critical thinking that might have truly saved him twenty years earlier. He went to university and became a lawyer advocating for cult survivors, especially children born and raised within cults.
Numerous accounts by survivors of the Children of God have been published, some more lurid than others. Bulwer’s mostly avoids sensationalism to deliver a true account of the spiritual journey of a lonely soul who took the wrong path but had the sense to recognize it, turn around and survive the long hard walk back to sanity.
9781554202058
John Moore writes and rants from Garibaldi Highlands.
BOOKS:
Review by John Moore (BCBW 2023)
Perry Bulwer’s account of his 20 years as a “Jesus freak” in an apocalyptic cult should be required reading for those whose children are undergoing the baptism of fire euphemistically described as “young adulthood” in parenting manuals. The combination of adult emotions and ideas with an almost total lack of adult experience is as pleasant to be around as a carafe of nitro-glycerine.
So when an idealistic yet listless, unmotivated, young person comes home one day, no longer unpredictably sullen or angry but smiling serenely as if they’ve come through the rapids and hit calm water, parents are inclined to heave huge sighs of relief. Unfortunately, it may mean your child has either discovered heroin or been “fished” by a cult and you should seek help from mental health professionals at once.
Like many late boomers, Bulwer missed the 1967 Summer of Love and got stuck with the hand-me-down, tie-dyed, Be-In t-shirt. Growing up in a small Vancouver Island city, Port Alberni, where a stable future meant a good job at the mill, Bulwer was sixteen in 1972 and the vaguely inclusive ideals of universal love, peace and goodwill of the Now Generation were starting to spin into a hedonistic crash dive of careless sex, harder drugs and mindless heavy metal music.
Despite his Catholic upbringing and a secondary education that failed to provide him with critical thinking skills, Bulwer was intelligent enough to realize Flower Power had been wilting into something much uglier than an unloved houseplant since the infamous 1969 Rolling Stones Altamont concert where a Black man was beaten to death by Hells Angels gang members employed as “security.” Philosophically and emotionally adrift, Perry was ripe for recruitment by any organized group that claimed to have exclusive copyright on The Truth.
At that vulnerable time in his life, he could have become a Marxist, a Maoist, a chanting Buddhist, a Hare Krishna, a convert jihadist or convert Zionist, joined the French Foreign Legion or the US Marines. It would have made no difference. What he was seeking was a world view—a vision of truth and a code of behaviour that would give him a sense of direction, purpose and meaning that he was unequipped and unable to define for himself. For the Children of God, Bulwer was “fresh meat” and they descended on him like vultures who’d missed lunch.
He didn’t know the friendly young men he met in a Port Alberni diner were missionaries from a cult group created by a shadowy American evangelical hustler and self-proclaimed prophet, David Berg, a man so immodest he liked to be called Mo, short for Moses. Bulwer didn’t know they had been trained to recognize and target vulnerable young people by a man who’d been literally born and raised in the tent revival subculture that was a popular feature of life in the American South and Midwest for the first half of the 20th century BTV (before television).
Born in 1919, David Berg had been involved with that subculture as it evolved from gypsy tents to regular Sunday morning radio broadcasts to televised “crusades” that filled stadiums where self-appointed apostles of God smacked shills planted in audiences on the forehead to cast out demons and demanded they throw away their crutches and rise from their wheelchairs and praise Jesus! It was the age of bogus faith-healing theatrics of mouth-foaming frauds like Jimmy Swaggart (subject of three scandals involving prostitutes in the late 1980s and early 90s), and Oral Roberts (who parlayed his tax-free status into a financial empire including a university).
Distrusting the risks of celebrity (no doubt he’d seen the film Elmer Gantry), David Berg chose the darker path of the reclusive prophet. Despite being in his forties in the 1960s, he sensed his moment had come. The most numerous and potentially wealthiest generation of the 20th century were waking up from the Swinging Sixties/Now Generation/Flower Power party with an apocalyptic spiritual hangover. Tattered copies of I Ching, the faux-Tibetan fictions of
T. Lobsang Rampa, and Carlos Castaneda’s equally bogus accounts of Yaqui shaman Don Juan weren’t getting them through the existential “morning after.” In spiritual distress, some hippies turned to a guy they remembered from Sunday school, Jesus of Nazareth. The Hare Krishnas and chanting Buddhists who’d replaced panhandling hippies on the sidewalks were joined by Jesus freaks. Berg’s minions were there to welcome them like lost sheep returned to the fold.
Cults are always with us. In times of social confidence and economic prosperity they’re mostly harmless, like benign tumours, providing an outlet for people whose intellectual frailty compels them to seek supernatural causes and remedies for their despair. But in times of political, social and economic insecurity and mass despair (the last 50 years, for instance), cults easily become malignant.
The most dangerous cults are those that tailgate established religions. In our nominally Judeo-Christian derived culture, co-opting Jesus was a cynical no-brainer for a would-be Messiah like Berg. His Children of God Communes, funded by legions of come-to-Jesus panhandlers, morphed into The Divine Family, then The Family; and lied about rescuing people from drug and alcohol addictions as it practised pedophilia, vicious corporal punishment for backsliders and advocated “flirty fishing” (sexual recruitment) of new converts. Berg’s “Mo Letters” to converts are case studies in opportunistic megalomania, demonstrating the fascism inherent in all cults centered around a leader or “prophet” instead of being based on a depersonalized spiritual doctrine.
Despite having wasted twenty of the best years of his life, Perry Bulwer was lucky. He had just enough of the right stuff to walk away at the age of 36. Smart enough to grasp Socrates’ assertion that the first step toward wisdom is to realize you know nothing, he started educating himself at the library and developing critical thinking that might have truly saved him twenty years earlier. He went to university and became a lawyer advocating for cult survivors, especially children born and raised within cults.
Numerous accounts by survivors of the Children of God have been published, some more lurid than others. Bulwer’s mostly avoids sensationalism to deliver a true account of the spiritual journey of a lonely soul who took the wrong path but had the sense to recognize it, turn around and survive the long hard walk back to sanity.
9781554202058
John Moore writes and rants from Garibaldi Highlands.
BOOKS:
Misguided: My Jesus Freak Life In a Doomsday Cult (New Star Books, 2023) $26.00 9781554202058
