Jesus Freaks (7 page)

“Hi,” Karen said. “I'm really interested, I really appreciated your talk!”

“Thanks,” Faithy replied. “”Where are you from?”

“Tucson.”

“Oh, we're going to be in Tucson in a week, why don't you come?”
¹³

They talked for a few minutes. Faithy handed Karen a card with the address for the upcoming Tucson meeting. They were only going to be there one night, but here was Karen's big chance for her dream vocation. She went to the meeting and ran off to southern California with her new friends the next day.

On the day she left, Karen showed up at her family's Tucson home with—of all people—Jane Berg, the woman she would soon replace as David Berg's primary wife. “I vividly remember watching my mom and dad cry,” Rosemary said. “Karen came in along with Jane, who was talking to my mom and dad to distract them when Karen went in and got her things. She just walked out and said she was going off with them.”
¹⁴

Karen Zerby and Jane Berg jumped into a van and sped off—driving straight to Huntington Beach. They were just a couple miles away from the Zerby's home in Tucson when Jane turned to Karen and asked, “Honey, what job have you been doing?”

“Well, I've been a secretary,” Karen replied, “but I'm glad I'm done with that now.”

“Oh, we need secretaries,” Jane said. “Maybe you could help out!”

Karen began having second thoughts about running away with the Jesus people.

“I was already so sad I was leaving home,” she recalled years later. “I'd never been away for very long from my parents, and I thought, ‘How can I bear this? It's bad enough leaving home and my parents, then having to go back to that boring job again.'”

They arrived at the Light Club after midnight. “The kids were still in the club,” Karen recalled. “I walked in and there was a group of people there singing. The thing that really impressed me was Aaron standing there with his guitar. The light was shining on him and his beautiful blonde hair and it looked like he had a halo around his head.”
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Karen started typing letters and other secretarial work in the Huntington Beach garage Berg had inherited from his mother. Virginia
Berg had been dead now for almost a year, and her fifty-year-old son was finally coming into his own. One day, David wandered out into the garage to see Karen.

“It was winter,” Berg recalled. “I was afraid she was cold, so I went out there to make sure she had heat. She said she was cold, so I think I put her sweater around her or something.”

“I wish you'd pray for my back,” Karen said. “I'm having backaches lately.”

“Well, where is it? Is it here? Higher? Lower? Is that it? I'll give you a little massage.”

After a few minutes of back rubbing, Berg had made his diagnosis. “Your backache sounds to me like maybe it's your kidneys. Of course, a lot of women get backaches from congestion back here because of sexual tension, they don't have any sexual release, and you're not married.”

At that point, Berg says, Karen confessed that she had an attraction toward Jethro, the husband of Deborah Berg, the prophet's eldest daughter. “He's married and has got five children,” Karen wept. “I couldn't steal another woman's husband!”

“Well, that's true,” Berg replied. “You certainly couldn't have him.”

Berg and Zerby related this account of that winter day in Huntington Beach nearly a decade after the event in a 1978 letter entitled “Our Love Story!”
¹⁶

“Of course,” Berg recalled in the letter, “I hadn't boned up enough on our doctrine of having an additional wife in those days, but I got around to it real fast after I got hooked on [Karen]. So I didn't know enough then to tell her, ‘Well, you wouldn't have to steal him, maybe you could just be added!'”

By the time Karen Zerby walked into the Light Club, Berg was plotting his next move. Concerned parents, police, and school administrators were worried about the beatnik prophet and his diehard followers. Then, suddenly, in the spring of 1969, he and his flock disappeared from the streets of southern California.

They resurfaced when a convoy of cars and campers were spotted in the parking lot of the Sears Roebuck department store in Tucson.
Berg consummated the affair with Zerby in April. They made love in “The Ark,” the twenty-six-foot-long 1962 Dodge camper that slept twelve and served as Berg's mobile headquarters in the early years.

“Mostly we were just doing what we used to call ‘necking,' just kissing, cuddling, fondling and petting. She was a virgin, so it took me a little while to get her opened up. But, finally, one night we got it together!”

Jane Berg was suspicious of her husband's young secretary. “Once or twice dear little mother came home early and came bursting in the door,” David Berg said. “All we had was a little curtain across the aisle to hide the beds. Suddenly we heard mother coming and Maria [Karen Zerby] would scramble out of my bed as fast as she could and go back up in the top bunk and pretend to be asleep.

“We used to park a whole convoy there [in the Sears parking lot] on the weekend when there was nobody there,” Berg explained. “It was a good place to park, vacant and lots of room. I think Mother began to suspect something was going on for sure. I hadn't quite sold her yet on the doctrine of polygamy. I was even having a hard time selling [Karen] on the doctrine of polygamy. I don't think I got her sold on that until we got to Texas. But she was at least enjoying participating [having sex with Berg] even if she didn't understand the doctrine.”

Berg had been caught, but he was unrepentant. No one, especially his aging wife, could question the Endtime Prophet. His time had come. Young people were finally following him.

Berg saw something in Karen Zerby. She certainly wasn't one of the prettiest females in the flock. She was skinny, bucktoothed, and extraordinarily plain. She was the same generation as Berg's own children, but more of a blank slate. She hadn't seen the shadow side of the Endtime Prophet during all those tough years on the road—his alcoholism, his tirades, his infidelity to his wife, his incestuous impulses. Karen was searching for the truth, and Berg convinced her that he had the truth and could pass it onto her

In recalling her childhood, Zerby said, “Obeying my parents was obeying the Lord.” Karen's sister thinks she transferred that loyalty from her preacher father to the Endtime Prophet. “He could definitely mold her,” Rosemary said. “If she had faith in him she would give him
everything. I heard that later a lot of it was guilt. She felt guilty for things she had done with him and he used that against her.”

Tucson was just a stop along the way. Berg put out the word for his flock to meet up with him in Canada. What would later be seen as the founding convention of The Family was held in the summer of 1969 at a campground in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec. David Berg was the new Moses, and the hippies were his Chosen People. God's prophecy was pouring through him, and his people were finally listening.

Berg then called the leaders of the fledgling movement to a meeting in Vienna, Virginia, where his prophecies included a spiritual justification for his sexual affair with Zerby, whom the Endtime Prophet christened “Maria.” That prophecy, later published as “Old Love, New Love,” declared Jane Berg, his wife of more than twenty years, to be the “Old Church.” Zerby was the “New Church.”

At that moment, the course of The Family was set. Berg was the Endtime Prophet and Karen Zerby was his queen. They would lead
the hippie army through the Great Tribulation and into the new millennium. There was no time to waste. The end of the old order was near. Jesus was coming again. It was time to spread the news.

“Be prepared! Join us now! Tomorrow may be too late!” one early tract screamed. “Come see us TODAY or write NOW for the location of our nearest colony and more information on how to survive in the days ahead!”
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Nothing motivates the troops like the end of the world, and Berg would often use his apocalyptic prophecies to inspire his followers to new fields of battle and higher levels of commitment. California was going to be destroyed by earthquakes, so they all fled to Europe. Then Europe and North America were to burn in a nuclear holocaust, so the troops headed down to Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.

Dates were set. The Great Tribulation would begin in the eighties and last for seven years. Ricky and his mother—Davidito and Maria—would lead the Endtime army. Jesus would return and The Family would be raptured to heaven in 1993. “We were always having to get ready spiritually for the Endtime,” recalled one longtime member of Berg's inner circle. “It keeps you in this hyper state of mind—kind of like the war on terror. The bad guys are everywhere, but you can't really see them. It changes the way you think. Why worry about consequences when the whole world is about to end? Why take the time to work out your relationship with your wife? Why take on long-term projects? People were not thinking about things like growing old or sending the kids to college.”
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It may have all been very exciting, but there was little new in Berg's doomsday scenario. Religious prophets have been warning about the end of world since the world began. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, apocalyptic prophecies begin with the Hebrew Bible and the Book of Daniel, which was written several centuries before the first coming of Jesus and meant to comfort Jewish Zealots living under the oppressive rule of a Syrian monarch. Sometime around ad 70, the Book of Revelation, the last chapter of the New Testament, was written to inspire the persecuted followers of Jesus.

In the modern era, an Englishman named John Nelson Darby pioneered the still popular theory of “dispensationalism” or “pretribula
tion premillennialism.” Darby, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, envisioned a “Secret Rapture” to snatch true believers up to heaven and concluded that the Book of Revelation was written to describe the last seven years of Earth's history. The basic idea is that the Antichrist is at work in the world, making things worse and worse. Even the churches are corrupt. But before the Antichrist is revealed in the flesh, Jesus will appear and rapture true believers up to heaven with him. They escape the seven years of intense earthly tribulation and disaster. Then there is the final battle of Armageddon, with Christ fighting the Antichrist. Christ wins and Satan is bound and kept away for one thousand perfect years when the lions lie with the lambs. Finally, there comes the Last Judgment. People go to heaven or hell. Human history ends.

This scenario of the end of the world—one favored by many of today's televangelists—has only become the mainstream evangelical scenario over the last fifty years. This vision really caught on in the seventies when author Hal Lindsey published the
Late Great Planet Earth
, the best-selling book of that decade. Lindsey used Bible prophecy to explain how Israel recaptured Jerusalem in 1967. Russia was the home of the Antichrist of that era, so Lindsey predicted a Soviet invasion and Middle Eastern war in the eighties as his Battle of Armageddon.

Lindsey's work foreshadowed the more recent success of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, the evangelical authors whose series of
Left Behind
books have sold more than sixty million copies, plus millions more in home video. In their Endtime scenario, the Antichrist uses the United Nations to establish a one-world government, currency, and religion. Baghdad—the old Babylon—is the new world capital.

That's not much different than the gospel according to Berg, where the emissaries of Satan “crept into our institutions in the form of university professors and high school teachers, and into our churches as moralistic pastors.

“The Antichrist agents had thoroughly infiltrated our government agencies and our militaristic establishments so that every move was known by their central intelligence agency in the headquarters of the Antichrist government.”

It was not a new message, but it rang true to many in the political left and hippie counterculture of the late sixties and early seventies. Berg disciples spread the ancient warning with renewed fervor. They donned red sackcloth and wore large wooden yokes around their necks. They smeared ashes on their foreheads, carrying Bibles in one hand and large staves in the other, pounding them on the ground in a mournful rhythm. They appeared at churches and government buildings around the nation, generating media interest wherever they went. They warned of impending doom raining down upon a decadent nation. It was quite a sight. John the Baptist had come back to Earth and taken over the dirty bodies of a bunch of crazed hippies.

Meanwhile, Berg was mending fences with his old boss, Fred Jordan, who allowed the hippie army to occupy the televangelist's abandoned ranch at Thurber, an old coal-mining settlement and one of the finest ghost towns in west Texas. Another garrison of Berg's troops went to Jordan's skid row mission in downtown Los Angeles, while others settled in Florida with Jane Berg, who had accepted her demotion and along with her children continued to bring new disciples into the fold.