Ahead of this weekend’s Decult Conference in Christchurch, Children of God survivor Maria Esguerra speaks out about her disturbing childhood in the Australian branch of the worldwide cult. Ryan Boswell reports.
Maria Esguerra had a childhood filled with fear.
She was born and raised in The Children of God, also known as The Family International, a Christian-based apocalyptic cult, known for exploitation and abuse.
At its height, the movement had tens of thousands of members worldwide in 70 countries – it’s often mentioned in association with actors Joaquin and River Phoenix and Rose McGowan, all of whom spent time in various branches of the cult as children, as well as British musician and original Fleetwood Mac member Jeremy Spencer who became a member.
Growing up in an Australian branch, Esguerra was told that the world was engulfed in spiritual warfare which would lead to it ending, and that she could die at any moment – an education that imbued her with a fear of the outside world.
Conditions within the cult were often cramped. The group would put dozens of people together in one house, even up to 100 in the larger communes, and isolate them from the outside world.
“It was really that extreme belief around trusting God for everything,” says Esguerra. “No one had jobs or went to school. A lot of our homeschooling was the leaders’ dogmatic teachings and information was highly controlled.”
Esguerra likens the group’s acceptance of extreme conditions to the proverbial frog in a pot. “If you put a frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it will just boil and it won’t jump out. But if you throw it in a boiling pot, it jumps straight out.”
For children, she says, this is extreme because they lack critical thinking skills and have no other point of reference.
The ‘law of love’
The Children of God was founded in 1968 by the late David Berg. Originally an evangelistic preacher in Oakland, California, he resigned his post after a disagreement and took his wife and four children to establish a commune in the small Californian city of Huntington Beach, which attracted 35 members.
He introduced the ‘law of love’, which promoted sex without boundaries, claiming it wasn’t a sin. Members were told that God was love and love was sex, so there should be no limits to actions as long as they were “done in love”.
Although, paradoxically, the cult considered homosexuality such a grave offence that it warranted ex-communication.
Contraception was banned in the cult, and Esguerra was her mother’s seventh child in nine years, born to several different fathers, which made life chaotic, she says.
Group members would have multiple romantic or sexual relationships, but the polyamory “was more coerced than it was voluntary”.
Esguerra says Berg had an affair with the group’s current leader (Karen Zerby, who he later married) and she believes the pair created this boundary-free belief system to justify their actions and Berg’s proclivities.
Although never convicted, Berg has been widely accused of being a paedophile, using the doctrine he invented to justify his behaviour.
“Your body is not your own,” says Esguerra. “Your mind is not your own.”
She describes the belief system as “hyper-communistic, almost on steroids, where we shared everything. We shared our food, everyone gave every last cent to the group and we shared families.
“There were limited attachments to your own families. They tried to break that down.”
Situation ‘ripe for abuse’
The combination of the cult’s “institutional style, authoritarian settings” and Berg’s belief systems around sexual boundaries created an environment that was “ripe for abuse”, says Esguerra.
“Berg was an incredibly harmful person… he was incredibly abusive.” she says.
“Beliefs became more and more bizarre as he got more power and control. We’re talking about tens of thousands of people believing in these ludicrous belief systems.”
When Esguerra was four, her dad got sick with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He was denied access to medical treatment as the group didn’t believe in it, and was instead shamed by David Berg. Berg wrote “Mo Letters” (he named himself Moses David), judging people who got sick, which was “really cruel and nasty”, says Esguerra. Illness was seen as a punishment for spiritual sins.
As a child Esguerra felt a natural empathy and sadness for her dad and, despite the propaganda being spouted, the attack felt wrong. “They were talking about love but were just cruel.
“I had a lot of sickness growing up as well. We never had any vaccinations for measles, chicken pox, mumps.” She was also legally blind (-4) with no access to glasses, and regular migraine headaches.
Teen motherhood and a ticket out
There was pressure on women in the cult to have babies at a very young age and by age 19, Esguerra was pregnant. When her baby was only a few months old he became very ill with meningitis and almost lost his life.
The treatment was to sing and pray for the baby’s survival, put olive oil on his head, and speak in tongues. After days of this “treatment”, her baby fell into a coma and, after pleas, he was taken to the hospital where he eventually recovered went on to suffer from developmental delays.
Two years later Esguerra had a second son. During his birth she haemorrhaged badly and it was that experience that made her think she needed to get out of the cult.
“I was looking at my little baby who was a couple of days old and my toddler with a brain injury, I was sick and weak and I just realised [being in the cult was] giving up their future and their life.
“It was like I couldn’t [leave] for myself but I was seeing the sacrifice of giving up my children’s future and their lives for this cause I didn’t believe in and for the family that actually wasn’t mine at all.
“People who didn’t care about me and my family.”
The Australian Government’s ‘baby bonus’ Newborn Supplement provided Esguerra with just enough money to pack up and leave the group, but she was still conflicted.
Not only was she still mentally chained to the group but getting out was practically difficult too, given she knew no one outside the Children of God and had been raised to fear the outside world.
“I was going to die or get AIDS or horrible things were going to happen. God is going to judge me. You don’t have an education. You don’t have any money or resources. You don’t know how to navigate the world,” she says.
“But that extreme sense of ‘I have to protect my kids and this is about them and their future’ – that helped me to sort of get out of that.”
Turning trauma into helping others
Now a successful businesswoman based in Brisbane, Esguerra trained for ten years to be a psychologist. She uses her firsthand experience to support fellow survivors of cults and institutional abuse, advocating for specialised understanding, interventions and access to governmental schemes.
She runs a support group that has a couple of goals. “Number one: to get support for the victims and people who have survived these groups.
“But number two: to help people understand what happens if you give up your entire life and belief system to a narcissistic leader who has not really got your best interests at heart.
“It can destroy not only your life but your children’s and generations to come. There can be many very painful experiences as a result of that.
“So it’s just supporting people to have self-sovereignty, to understand who they are, to understand critical thinking and the playbook that these groups use to control people.”
Maria Esguerra is speaking at the Decult Conference, October 19-20, Tūranga Central Library, Christchurch.
