Comments

Good review. Even though you express qualms about a couple errata, ie. doctrinal labels and defining Berg as Evangelical; to my mind they are moot points. You say, "...the topic of the book and Lattin’s reputation as a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle make me want to spend more time with the uncorrected proof we received in today's mail."

The Children of God were a pop culture phenomena and therefore encompassed the whole array of the 60's and 70's sexual, multi-media awakening. Labels and definitions were and are always morphing on the streets, and in the black top crucible this particular group gained its rep. Sociologists have already been bought off to put the correct labels on each doctrinal shibboleth.

The main point for me is:

It was a lurid experience for those who joined and deserves a good journalist's treatment--for alas, good journalism may be a dieing breed.

I hope the book lives up to the title. Many don't.

David –

Thank you for your thoughts on the title and the first few pages of “Jesus Freaks – A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge.” I look forward to hearing more once you’ve read the rest of my book. Please remember that you were sent an uncorrected proof and that changes are still being made as we “speak.”

Your point on my description of the Christian and Missionary Alliance is a good one. Perhaps a better way to put it would be to say that the early leaders of the alliance came out of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements. I would note, however, that the C&MA website states that their churches still believe that “speaking in tongues is a valid gift for today.” It’s also my understanding that the Rev. A.B. Simpson, the founder of the C&MA, was closely identified with the early Pentecostal movement, but I bow to your greater knowledge on these matters.

On your main point, I am certainly not saying that all evangelicals are “dangerous and deluded.” Thus the words “evangelical edge.” Yet the fact remains that David Berg came out of the American evangelical movement. Most of his missionaries saw themselves as sincere evangelists bringing converts to Christ. My sincere hope is that Christians will read this book as a cautionary tale about what can happen when well-intentioned evangelicals follow a dangerous and deluded man who claims to speak for God.

-- Don Lattin

Don, I'm afraid you're still not quite on target with your growing understanding of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Its founders and leaders did NOT "come out of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements"; they were Presbyterian and Episcopalian.

A.B.Simpson, founder of the C & M A, was a staunch Scottish Presbyterian from Canada, the top graduate of Ontario's Knox Theological Seminary and a fine theologian, as Presbyterians are expected to be. He pastored several of the more prestigious Presbyterian churches in North America while he continued to ponder the implications of the indwelling Christ. He was indeed known in his own day by the public more for his association with public "healing" meetings than for his doctrine, so you are right that many historians associate him with the Pentecostal movement, though that is an anachronism.
As Simpson grew into a more personal spiritual orientation, he eventually found the slowly-deliberating presbytery system too much of an encumbrance for his entrepreneurial energies, and founded the church movement that later became the C & M A denomination.

Some twenty years after the founding of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Azusa Street movement that is generally recognized as the birth of Pentecostalism took place, and many Alliance branches went with the new (but as David rightly says, not sanctioned by the Alliance) view of tongues speaking.
One might say that many leaders of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements came out of the Christian and Missionary Alliance movement, but not vice versa.

And David, just a small quibble, but the Alliance did not, either, line up perfectly with the Holiness movement or the Keswick movement in the 19th century. Close affinities, to be sure, but the nuances of difference between the emphasis on "death to self" and "second work of grace" in the (mostly arminian) Holiness movement, and the Alliance's emphasis on "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (and the key to a victorious life) are significant. See Samuel Stoesz, Sanctification, (Camp Hill: Christian Publications) for a wonderfully succinct but clear picture of how Simpson's doctrine was a sort of pivotal balance between several doctrinal and spiritual life streams of thought vying for predominance in the late 19th century. (Far beyond the scope of this blog, I know)

Thanks, Gene. Maybe I'll just stop trying that describe the Christian and Missionary Alliance. After all, the point of my mentioning it in the book is just to show that David Berg and his mother came out of the evangelical movement. I hope we can all agree that the Christian and Missionary Alliance was and is "evangelical."

Interesting that all the comments and review talk about this Cult in the past tense. I am no expert but it was certainly alive and 'well' (if that is the right term - just a few years back in the UK and France - presumably it still is.

Alan -- You are right about that. They are very much alive and operating around the world.
David Berg, however, has been dead for more than a decade.

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