The Sex Cult Nun

Today we’re going to talk with someone who wrote a book called The Sex Cult Nun. Are you ready for this? Because buckle up. When we dive into this, you’re going to want to share this with three people because this is just gonna blow your mind today. We’re gonna have a lot of fun and we’re also going to get really down and have some real talk. So today my guest Her goal is to see people united and empowered because of her life story, and, again, she’s the author of the Sex Cult Nun, TEDx speaker and creator of the 10 Golden principles of integrity. Faith Jones, welcome.

 

 Hi, Rick. Thanks for having me. I’m so happy to be here. Love your intro! 

 

Yeah, I know, right? Yeah, we like to rock this a bit here. So tell me, your book is based upon what you’ve gone through. Where should we start? Because I mean, the book title in and of itself is just incredible. Right? It’s meant to capture people’s attention, and what is the basis of the whole thing you know, how did you get into this? I saw on the cover you had a male symbol too, which was intriguing to me because of the juxtaposition of a Sex Cult Nun. But then you have a male. 

 

It’s a female symbol, actually, it’s a female symbol on a fishhook. It’s kind of expressing the exploitation of women and particularly, there was a practice within this organization called Flirty Fishing, which I can explain a little bit about, so then you’ll understand that symbol.

 

So I guess, jumping into it, the book is about my life growing up in a cult that was actually founded by my family, my grandfather, my parents, and it was founded in 1968, in Huntington Beach, California, and eventually, shortly thereafter, spread all over the world. It was in over 100 countries with over 10,000 members for decades, and it’s really my question, I didn’t leave so I was born into this group. This was all I knew and I didn’t leave till I was in my early 20s.

 

Of course, you know, I knew everybody else called us a cult, but we were not a cult. We were a religious movement. We were God’s elite and time army, you know, that kind of stuff. So it really took a long time after I left for me to understand what had happened to me in the group, for me to understand the aspects of it being a cult, and so I wanted to tell the story. Not only to give people a peek or a window inside of a very secretive group, and there has been quite a bit written about it, but there’s been quite a few documentaries done on it, but always done in kind of the looking back, you know, like I got out and these are the bad things that happened to me and I’m looking back on my life, right.

 

I remember actually reading The Glass Castle not long after I left when I was in college. I thought “I just love the way that she wrote about her life.” I said, you know, “If I ever write a book, I’m going to write it like that because I want to write about it at the moment.” I mean, I love to read novels. I love that immediacy of being right there, you know, with the character going through it not, you know, oh, this happened to me 20 years ago, or 40 years ago, right. So I wanted to write it in the moment because I also wanted to give people a window into how I thought at the time, how people within the group saw or felt about what was happening and what they were doing, versus a look back, which is when you when you’re looking back on something, you have to have a judgment about it, you know, versus saying okay, no, this is what we thought and felt in the moment. 

 

Are you specifically speaking to maybe some of the brainwashing?

 

So as to the brainwashing, yes. Although brainwashing is kind of an unscientific term perhaps, but specifically to the there were different sexual practices, things that I experienced in the group, right, and there was different kinds of abuse, which now I look back and I said, “Well, that was abuse.” I mean, there’s just no question, right? But at the time, I didn’t think so and I didn’t know it and so how do people engage in sometimes terrible abuses or submit themselves to it and not realize it? Right? They think they’re doing the right thing. It’s a very strange mindset, and I wanted to give people a window into what that was like, what that world was like. 

 

Yeah, and it was a submission, right? You’re bought into the ideologies of what’s going on. It wasn’t necessarily anything that was if you want to use the word force, but forced as traditional rape would be considered or something like that. It wasn’t that it was more submissive because of the ideologies, correct?

 

Yes, but I want to I want to change the way we think about rape, right. So that’s another important aspect of this. It wasn’t something and I talked about this, you know, sort of my realizations when I got into college and, you know, law school and things like that, but I realized that the things that I had experienced, were rape, but I didn’t know it at the time. So for instance, if you’re pressured into having sex and you don’t want to, with someone you don’t want to, but you’re pressured into it through fear of punishment.

 

You know, fear that you’re going to have to go through a public you know, humiliation breaking, be put on probation, or whatever that is because you’re on yielded, right? So the way it happened in the group was, and we should probably get into a little bit more about the aspects of the group and the beliefs and so on. Otherwise, you’re not going to understand what I’m saying now. Yeah, we were jumping ahead a little bit, but um, but when you think about it, it wasn’t like they would say okay, if like, there’s a story in the book when I’m in Kazakhstan, and I This book takes you all over the world because I lived in so many countries. 

 

So there’s a story in the book when I’m in Kazakhstan. I’m a teenager. I’m like maybe 18 and the shepherd in the home. The leader is telling me I need to sleep with this young man in the home, and I don’t want to and I really don’t I you know, I kind of repulsed by that idea. But because I keep avoiding it, then I get into a situation where they’re like having a public prayer over me for my annealed witness and you know, I’m put into a very difficult, emotional, traumatic situation and it’s not like they’re saying, if you don’t have sex with the person, we’re gonna punish you. But if you don’t have sex with the person, you’re unyielded it to God, therefore we’re gonna punish you see? 

 

Convenient dissociation. 

 

That’s how the trajectory goes, and so when I realized years later, when I was at Georgetown, actually, and talking to my then boyfriend, who was a lawyer, and he when I described it to him, he was like, “Well, that’s rape, you know, that’s rape. If you’re if you feel pressured or coerced into it. Somebody doesn’t have to physically hold you down. Even if you walk into that room willingly, that’s still rape.” This goes to a lot of, well, you know, for instance, human trafficking victims, right? They’re put in a situation where they can’t say no, where they will be punished and they have to look like that they’re there, you know, and that it’s okay with them and they’re enjoying it or whatever. But obviously, that is rape and abuse and you know, that’s not consensual. 

 

So, similar scenario, so like you were saying to where it’s not necessarily punishment for not doing that exact thing, but there’s a roundabout way with almost one degree of separation to something else. It’s emotional and psychological manipulation. 

 

Yeah. So but let’s get back to a little bit more about the book The story just so you people can get a little more of a background in there. 

 

How old were you when the cult was started by your parents? 

 

I wasn’t born yet. It was before I was born. Yeah. So it was started in 1968. 

 

You were literally born into this then?

 

I was literally born into it. Yes. In Hong Kong. My parents had gone out there. So part of the messages of the group, and this is the interesting thing people don’t realize about cults, right people like oh, why would somebody join a cult? Well, they don’t join a call. They joined a family and people were literally like hippies off the street. In Huntington Beach, California. We’re literally joining my parents family, like my grandparents family, right my granddad and he became dad to all of them and eventually he became grandpa like the whole, you know, so creating this kind of false sense of family and intimacy.

 

So, you know, these are young kids looking for purpose, looking for a sense of belonging, and very idealistic, many of them very smart from good families. They were not like you know, the trash. So, people ask, “Why does this happen?” In fact, studies have been done that the kind of people more likely to join cults are people who are intelligent, good natured, and idealistic. They want something more and that’s not what most people would think of, you know, the kind of people that would join cults. 

 

So, you know, after I left years later, and I realized I was like, wow, this is some stuff that was really messed up, you know, there was well, I’ll go into some of that, but I began to ask myself, what went wrong? How do these very idealistic people, I mean, these people were willing to sacrifice everything. It was not like they were living, you know, in the Ritz, you know, just super basic. You know, people were sleeping when they would join, they’d be sleeping on the floor, like just you know, working. They’d be memorizing scriptures for hours a day. They’re considered like military lifestyle barracks. 

 

A lot of these intelligent people as you describe them, did they come from more affluent backgrounds?

 

They came from all different backgrounds, but yeah, yeah, oftentimes they did. So, you know, they wanted to serve God. They wanted to serve humanity. They wanted to create a new society, you know, that was their, this was their vision. So I was like, “Well, how did that go so wrong? What happened? What was the seed of corruption that ended up putting them on this path that got them to this place where they were just, you know, it was just some terrible things that were happening?” So that’s what I finally figured out, and we can talk about that in a little bit.

 

But before that, let’s talk a bit about the a bit about some of the some of the beliefs because people don’t always understand so it was, it was ultimately a fundamentalist Christian cult, except that my grandfather who considered himself the Prophet of the Last Days, and getting revelations from God, that he, you know, he would hear from God and prophecy and basically all of his words were recorded and sent out to the group as letters, because very early on he had to go into hiding from the authorities. 

 

Sure, you said this was founded in Hong Kong, right? 

 

No, no, it was founded in California. My parents moved to Hong Kong. So one of the other tenants was, everyone had to forsake everything, give up their lives, give up their families. all their possessions and be full time missionaries. So it meant that this spread very, very fast, they moved in and they live. We lived communally. Nobody had jobs so they could devote themselves full time to the work. You had to live off of donations. So people ended up moving to all these countries India, Brazil, everywhere and you know, often very poor countries. So it wasn’t like they were you know, and then trying to live off of donations. You know, it was a pretty tough life. But that was so that they could devote themselves full time to preaching the gospel. Now, where did it start to kind of get that sounds pretty, you’re out there but you’re nuts.

 

Just pretty hardcore Baptistm right?

 

Very hard to read the word to the world. Yeah, right, and when it started initially, people don’t realize it didn’t have like weird sexual practices. They’re very strict. I mean, the, you know, young members couldn’t even hold hands unless they were married. So, it wasn’t long after. My grandfather began to get these revelations. I think what really happened was that this young woman showed up, one of the new disciples, and her name was Karen Zerby but she took on the name Maria and became his secretary, so then he wanted to take her as a second wife. So obviously, this is not really aligned with traditional church practices and teaching depending on what church you go to, I guess. So he began to have these revelations about something called the law of love.

 

Of course, you have to and this is also coming out of the era of the 60s free love, free sex. Everybody’s running around at Woodstock. You know, my mom went to Woodstock and she was a hippie. So it’s that era, but my grandfather began to have these revelations that the verse in the Bible that says, you know, basically God’s only laws love that that meant that nothing was wrong. If it was done in love, that love was the only law.

 

So, this began to expand t being able to take a second wife began, it’s opened up to having sex outside of marriage, and then that he also began  practicing this with this young wife, his new wife. Well, Mistress, I guess, because he was already married to my grandmother at the time, but he began to do a practice, test out of practice, and write letters about it called Flirty Fishing, where he he and his wife would go to clubs and bars, and she would flirt with men and dance with them and then sometimes take them home and have sex with them, and then bring them to him and have him you know, and they would talk to them about Jesus. So this practice that he began to institute until all the other followers that they had to do it was as a way to was considered sacrificing yourself right? 

 

He said, “Well, sex is a need”, just like you know, the Bible says to give people food and shelter, clothes, it’s like, “Well, sex is a bodily need,” you can see where this is coming from. So you know, you need to sacrifice yourself to the women and give them and this and then he can, you know, so that he can be open to hearing about Jesus and, and so on and so forth. But really, it became a way to get donations for the group and to get businessmen, wealthy businessmen to help support the homes and support these women. 

 

It was almost prostitution. 

 

Yes, yeah.

 

I’m tracking you. His wife would go out to the bars and pick a man and whether they converted to Jesus or not, They would pay or donate whatever, for the sex. 

 

Yes, and so actually, the the group got in trouble legally in a lot of countries for prostitution. The authorities would show up and raid the homes and stuff they raided the home in which my grandfather was at at one point based on claims of prostitution. So the cover of the book where it has this hook and the female symbol on it, is because within the literature, and you can you can go online and look at this It’s xfamil double.org. There’s 1000s of pages of the book of my grandfather’s writings and literature, and there were all of these letters in the 70s called about flirty fishing and the images. They used cartoons. To, you know, which is a great thing. Very smart. I mean, my grandfather was quite brilliant in his own way. Yeah, they used cartoons as a way to communicate the messaging. So there were all these images of women, you know, naked women like being stuck through the chest with a big hook. You know, being dangled out there for men. There were other really horrible images of naked women sacrificed on the cross saying that you need to sacrifice your body like Jesus did. So, of course, I grew up with these images because they were also in all of our children’s comic books.

 

So, you know, the sense was that there was nothing wrong with sex and which, the messaging was, you know, sex is good and godly and healthy and normal, and we don’t want you to grow up to be ashamed of it or you know, have these kinds of inhibitions and so on, which is all valid. 

 

That in of itself is perfect. 

 

But when you’re talking about like little little kids like I mean, my first coloring book was about sex, like, Where do I come from with fully nude images of adults, you know, engaging in sex and stuff, and all the organs and I read about it in the book, and I was like, I get annoyed because it was, I had color it all in one color. Basically, it was really boring because they’re all naked, but you know, so what color did you choose? 

 

What color did you choose, cause we need a little comic relief here.

 

I chose beige.

 

There you go. So oh, so it was flesh tone appropriate there.

 

That was at three years old. So I write in the book. I didn’t know there wasn’t a time I didn’t know like about sex. I don’t even remember you know, and one of my early memories, just like four years old, is my mother actually doing a demonstration on my father and showing me how a guy comes and stuff, and so this kind of knowledge I think and done in the way it was done was very it’s just knowledge kids don’t need to have right over one thing when you’re when you’re, like, over sexualizing young children, and you’re just pushing that in their face all the time versus, you know, just saying, “Okay, this is an adult thing, and, you know, if you come and you have questions, and you answer the questions.” You know, versus you know, it was in our literature, it was in my comic books, it was like everywhere, like you know, my favorite child story as a little kid. They started coming out with this novelization of Heaven’s girl and I loved Heaven’s girl. I mean, she was our hero. I was like eight years old and in the first episode, you know, she’s gang raped by a bunch of the Antichrist soldiers, before they throw her into a dungeon.

 

Wow.

 

You know, it’s like, why are you giving this to kids, and the idea is that she’s supposed to submit herself and she’s a 15 year old girl in this comic, right? While they’re raping her, she’s like whispering in their ear about Jesus to try to save them.

 

No kidding. How old were you with the demonstration? How old were you?

 

I was four.

 

You were four when you had this very visual demonstration with your mom and dad. 

 

Yes. It got worse because of my grandfather due to his own perversions, I believe, because he did have issues with this and this is documented by his own daughters that it was happening with them when they were little, before the family even started. Of like sexual interaction with little girls. Right, pedophilia. So he was also teaching at that time that any kind of sexual contact is okay, including adults with children, and so they wrote a book about which was the son he had while kind of with his new wife, but technically he wasn’t the father who the father of the child but I mean, he claimed him like this is the new prince and the heir apparent and because his older children were including my father were pushed out you know, when Maria as she kind of gathered power, but the book was basically like a manual because I say it’s a manual on pedophilia. 

 

Just like just really terrible oversight, sexualization and you know, sexual contact and and sadly, this young man, years later when he left the group, he he was so traumatized by it all that he actually killed one of his nannies who had sexually abused him. He was trying to kill his mother but she didn’t show up and then killed himself and it was very big news. It was in the early 2000s, and this was just really sad to see, you know, that kind of play out all the way to the end. That had an impact, a very big impact on me at the time when that happened, which I also write about in the book but so what began to happen is that children were and I had my own experience with like an adult man, when I was like, six, and I write about that.

 

So this went on for some years. People thought, “Oh, well, you know, the kids are happy to do it. Like, you know, we just asked them and they want to do that’s okay, right?” They don’t realize that children cannot consent, and this is part of the issue. It is impossible for a child to consent and when I created this framework, I can show people exactly the points that are being violated, right by that so that even if I’m talking to a group like this, I can express to them why this ideology cannot be correct.

 

So I had I had my own experiences of this like, you know, child sexual abuse with men in the group. It had a very strong impact on me. I think later on when I was about 10 years old, they banned the practice in the group because it was just getting too much attention from the authorities. Also some of the first group of kids you know, which I was one of the younger ones of the first kind of crop of children. Were becoming teenagers and were expressing the really bad impact this kind of thing had had on them, and you know, they were expressing that they felt traumatized by that. So you know, the group did shift gears in that sense, and so it banned any kind of adult child sexual contact, and if you persisted in that you would be excommunicated.

 

But of course, you had a lot of people now in the group who you know, there were a lot of people who I think weren’t necessarily they didn’t have that particular perversion, right. Sometimes they just did it because they thought they were supposed to or whatever. But then you also had people who were actually like, really pedophiles and you know, they continued to abuse children or them or their own children or other things like that for years afterwards, until maybe they got kicked out. So it created some deep traumas for a lot of young people But then the issue was like as I got older, it wasn’t that it was.

 

It became this issue of more of the manipulation and the and the coercion of sexual abuse, like I said, and that was true, and that didn’t really stop, right, that that didn’t end because it was part of the ethos, and what was that ethos? The ethos was that your body did not belong to you that you did not own yourself. So anything that they thought that you should do, that was right, that was God’s will, you know, and that was really the core of corruption and the other thing that was happening was, you know, this was an apocalyptic cult where they were saying, the end is coming any day.

 

Jesus is coming back, the Antichrist may have already risen in secret, and my grandfather had gotten prophecies that Jesus would return in 1993, which meant the Antichrist had to arise seven years before that, right. So all of us growing up, we didn’t think we were going to live to be adults. I mean, my parents didn’t think they were going to be old. You know, we all kind of die in the tribulation or go up, you know, Jesus, when I was you know, a teenager. So nobody prepared anything for the future. Nobody had property. Nobody thought about retirement. Nobody. You know, you could you were just constantly living on This knife’s edge of both economically which is why I have a strong focus in my work on what I do to economically is and and emotionally like, I mean, when I was a little kid I was thinking about you know, I would lay in bed at night and I think, “Okay, so what happens if the Antichrist soldiers come, and I like hide and escape, but then I’m on my own and everyone else is in jail, and how am I going to get back?” Sure. 

 

Yeah, you know, typical style of dreams that kids would have Yeah, except there might be about you know, Harry Potter or something like that and they’re dreaming. They’re, in Hogwarts, you know, and the Dementors are coming to get them. It’s very similar, but yours was perpetuated by I’m so curious about these comic books that you read, and this constant mental barrage of all this imagery and all this ethos, were those in internal publication, where did these come from? 

 

They were internal publications. So one of the strengths of this organization because my grandfather went into hiding so early on the really the entire communication network was through the mail. So every couple of weeks we would get a package in the mail, which would have the latest letters from my grandfather with you know, the newest revelations, and then also, you know, they started producing because the group had so many children because they believed in not having birth control, and then everyone was having sex. Yeah, all the time. You know, I mean, the group got to the point where it was like, two thirds kids, and so there was a huge focus on the kids. So they began to produce a lot of material. So the other thing is that outside influence and material was not permitted. 

 

So my next question, you know, with everybody living in normal society, how was that prevented? 

 

They weren’t living in normal society and we didn’t have the internet then either remember? Yeah. Um, so people lived communally in small homes anywhere from 1020-30 people in a home to I mean, some of the large ones were 200 people, but they lived communally. They were separated from society. They didn’t have jobs. They didn’t go to school. We weren’t allowed to go to school. There were a couple of times when we were very young that they allowed us to go to school as a way to kind of not me, but my older siblings, and then that was cut off and it was all homeschooling.

 

So, the group was actually very good with early childhood education, Montessori methods, the kids were reading, like 123 years old. It was very good in that sense. But you know, a few more grades later. That was very little. It was considered you dead write, and you know, do math if you were going to basically just be a missionary your whole life didn’t really need it anything passed like a sixth grade education. You just needed to be able to read, right? You just needed to be able to do math.

 

There was no, there was no like, Junior School. There’s no high school. There was nothing above that and you weren’t allowed to read outside. books or novels. So everything was produced within the group story tapes. Songs, they wrote a lot of songs, they had a lot of song tapes. It was a very creative group, I guess you could say. They produced a ton of material for all these comic books. I mean, we had stacks of books like these comic books produced by the family.

 

They would take like the adult letters and turn them into some more simplified comic form for the children. So you know, in that sense, but for me, I struggled even as a kid because I would just be bored. I’d be you know, like, anytime like a new story comes out, I was so excited. But you know, otherwise, you’re just kind of reading the same sort of stuff over and over again. That’s all you got. You know, I mean, the first time I read a novel, I was 10, and I found this novel that someone was throwing away because we weren’t supposed to have them and it was called The Secret Garden and I hid it in the loft, and I would sneak up there and I would read it and just for me, it just opened this whole world. I fell in love with stories like this.

 

Until it got confiscated. But, um, you know, that piqued my thirst, I guess for that. So, um, yeah, that’d be that’s, that’s kind of the background on this organization.

 

 Yeah, I was curious as you tie in, you address this too, because if everyone I know everyone was living communally. If they were sent out as missionaries across the world, surely there must have been some contact with society, especially since this all started with your grandfather’s wife, your grandmother going into bars? How would this organization recruit new members? 

 

So it wasn’t my grandfather’s wife, it was not my grandmother. This was the second wife, the one who was the same age as my parents.

 

No, we were out all the time talking to people. But the difference is that we would have had hundreds of visitors to our house but you’re only interacting or communicating with them from the role of I’m teaching you about Jesus or about the end time. You’re not really making friends with them because you can’t because they are outside. They are the world, they are the SIS. We had a term for them called systemize. Right? So you don’t trust the system. If you don’t talk to them about anything going on. Like all the children were taught from a very young age, you know, we would know what we could and couldn’t talk about with outsiders.

 

It was very, very strict, so you were never, you never like , had your guard down or relaxed or had true friendships. They might have thought that you were their friend, because you would talk to them about their problems and their issues. So that you could help them with, you know, by preaching to them, but that was really the only interaction we had. I mean, my family was the Von Trapp family of Asia. We sang all over China, Hong Kong, Macau, radio, TV, hospitals, you know, so I grew up doing that from, you know, before I was two years old. Sowe were always out interacting in that sense, but for a very one directional interaction, or one sided interaction. So that was so interesting, a lot of crazy stuff and I go into it in the book. There’s a lot of, I mean, just all the different things and my first experience coming to America when I was like 12, and you know, my shift for you, you know, 

 

What age were you like, “This just doesn’t feel right anymore?”

 

So, actually, something happened. That was quite a shift for me. When I was 12, my parents were forcibly separated, which they would do, because they were like, you know, you need to put God first and stuff. So, and then my mother, we ended up in Thailand. My mother ended up having a breakdown, and then we ended up going to the US and we got accidentally excommunicated.

 

I could describe how that happened, which was kind of crazy. So it’s my mother myself. I’m 12 and two, like baby siblings that we had, that I had, and so I had to become the other adult and we had a camper that my grandfather had helped her get, and he wasn’t in the family, and so I remember like, I was having to beg in parking lots like with the can, you know, like, you know, how they go around saying, Oh, just here’s the wonderful work, missionary work we’re doing. Please give donations, but I was like begging in these parking lots at Safeway and stuff, just to make a few dollars to feed my family. So we didn’t have a way to support ourselves outside of the group and my mother tried to get a job, but she hadn’t finished her education. She left just before she finished high school even though she was a very good student.

 

So, you know, we just ended up in a really, really difficult position. We ended up staying with my grandmother for a while and this was the first time I went to school, and so I managed to go to one semester of school, and it kind of was in its own way life changing for me to live like that. Then my father came and bought us. Eventually we went back to the farm. But going through that experience, and watching my mother kind of also lose her faith in the family, right? Not in the doctrine, not in the word but in the leadership, and in the people who were kind of putting down these directives and controlling people’s lives and manipulating them and, and just making decisions that were obviously really wrong, you know? So that shifted things for me too, in that sense and my parents became less like parents and more like just human beings that needed help, you know, so, I mean, I grew up very fast, and so that shifted things even though I went back into the family and I was in the family for years afterwards. There was a way in which I knew that it was up to me.

 

I couldn’t rely on other people. I couldn’t rely on my parents. Things began to happen. You begin to see how, you know your trust is abused and taken advantage of. So in that sense, but I didn’t know that the doctrines were wrong, because this was really all I’d ever known. It wasn’t even until I was out of the group for some years that I was able to look back and reassess. So I had to create a new when you’re, when that’s all you’ve known, one way of looking at the world is all you know you actually have to have time to recreate to create a different framework for your worldview, so that you have a different platform to stand on to actually look back and observe what you believed, and that process takes some time, and when I left, I left because I actually became depressed. I just didn’t see a future for myself. I think this is what depression is. Typically, when you don’t see a future for yourself that you want to live. You know, it’s just like, oh my god, this is my life. After some of my experiences with books and things like that, I knew I had this burning desire to go to college.

 

So when I left the group it was to go to college. That was my dream. That was what I was fighting for. I was 23, I just turned 23 But I looked very young. So sure. I had a whole world of experience. I was quite different from my classmates. 

 

Sure your parents stayed in when you left?

 

So at this time, some people were starting to leave my mother. Actually, I didn’t know it at the time I left but she actually secretly was like leaving at the time too. But we weren’t living together. So you know, because I left home very young. As we all did, we all would move to another country within another home. My father stayed in for some time after some years afterwards, but you know, after my grandfather died in 1994, and his wife took over, Maria, I think there was a way in which some of the old guard you know, some of them were still very committed and very dedicated, but I think some of them were kind of like, oh, well, you know, a bit disappointed.

 

Jesus hadn’t come yet. And of course, they had all kinds of excuses for it. 

 

Of course, it’s past 1993 at this point. Yeah. Yeah. It’s crazy to me because I mean, I grew up in a very spiritual home, and you know, nondenominational kind of thing and very foundational, and it’s just interesting, because that was one of the things I remember was that scripture of “No man knows the day or the hour.” That’s mind boggling that somehow they were able to I mean, there’s, there’s cults all over the world that have done this but that was one of the things that always just tripped me up is like, how do they know you know, how do they just eliminate this one scripture and they’re like, “Oh, you know what? This? Jesus just came and spoke to me personally.” I’m like, “Really cool. What kind of drugs are you on that night? Was he with you?”

 

Are you saying just like all of I mean, I remember when I was in college, I finally went back and I started researching my boyfriend actually, like made me turn around face it, because at this point, I was just like, leave it all behind and just go forward with all my strength. I was like, “Okay, well, ws my grandfather’s interpretation of the law of love accurate?” When we really like to look at it because I mean, we have memorized hundreds of verses. Supposedly these topics are supposedly supporting a certain interpretation, but when you go back and read them in the original context of like, does it really say that? I don’t think it does. You know, like contextually so that’s a big issue with this type of interpretation.

 

Is this cult still going on today? 

 

I mean, it’s gone through many iterations, and that’s one thing that changes its beliefs. It changes. It’s, you know, it’s gone through many iterations. 

 

It kind of had to do with Jesus didn’t coming in 1993. 

 

Right, but many other iterations, I guess you could say, yeah, um, so now, if you go online, it’s called The Family International, and their website just says they’re a community of Christian you know, missionaries or whatever they’re basically been disbanded. I think Maria and her husband got too old to keep it up. So I think it’s basically been disbanded. They had put out a thing about not living communally and that it was okay to have jobs and stuff. Because you have to think about all of these people, parents age in their 70s and they don’t have retirement. They barely have Social Security, just like the bare minimum because they didn’t work right. I mean, I admire my mother because when she left like me, she went back to school in her 50s and she ended up like she worked really hard. She went and got a job and, you know, put away money for retirement and you know, she and a lot of these people didn’t, a lot of people didn’t, they were too old at that time. 

 

Faith you’ve brought so much to the table today and so much to think about I I feel for you because you’ve what you’ve been through, and I’m also grateful that you’ve had that boyfriend of yours that forced you to look back on everything because your mind is incredibly analytical and just be able to bring that experience to everybody to say,” Hey, this is what I learned from an incredible perspective. Thank you. 

 

Thank you so much for having me.

 

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