When David Brandt Berg first started the cult, The Children of God, in the late 60’s during the hippie era, he said he looked around at the lost children and his heart went out to them, he wept. These young people were fighting against “the system”, they were protesting the vietnam war. They were challenging the powers that be and he swooped in and started preaching his version of christianity but like a free love, sexual version, and they ate it up. His little group grew quite rapidly. 

These lost children, “forgotten ones”, thought they were entering a utopia when they joined. It was this same utopia which spawned someone like me. Born into this group, I suffered immensely in this “utopia”, and so did thousands of other little girls and boys who were physically, psychologically, and sexually abused and exploited.

But my Story, is not unique in actuality.

Because there are millions of people out there right now who are being abused and exploited, not just inside of other christian white supremacist -fundamentalist or extremist- groups, but inside of and because of the patriarchal greater societal structure which spawned these types of groups in the first place. 

Those who speak up about it are so few but there are many many many of us. I somehow have the balls to talk about it now after years and years of processing it all and after learning how to operate in the greater world. 

What I have found is that this societal structure that we currently live in was created upon foundations that are racist, exploitative, and cruel and which spawn all of these types of environments that are also exploitative by their very nature.

I grew up being taught that Black people were cursed but if they accept this flavor of Jesus that  is being offered they are saved from their inherent sin. Boom, right there you have white christian supremacy.

One guy dominating over the whole proceeding. A guy that everyone called father. Boom you have the patriarchy.

This current flavor of capitalism, which props up corporations over people, which measures its success in endless and endless GDP growth, which looks at people as units of productivity, by not providing ample education, and a social net and structure it is woefully insufficient, inadequate and exploitative to all (including animals and the very planet itself), but perhaps 1% of humanity, and allows huge swathes people to fall through the cracks and some of them, out of desperation, give their lives over to this other exploitative structure. So you’re going from one exploitative structure to another. 

We have the technology to save this planet and everyone on it, we have the knowledge and the resources to do so. So you have to ask yourself, what is going on with these people who are fighting so hard to enforce and defend and support these horrific and barbaric systems. Are they ok?

We live in a net or web of exploitative structures and if we don’t all get together and use our heads to update these systems, more and more little children, more and more little girls like I was will continue to suffer brutalizations and abuse. 

And so I was “born in the dark”, as bane says. But so were all of you. We were molded by it, inducted, indoctrinated and branded into all of these patriarchal beliefs. 

I used to rail against my past. I used to deny the depth and breadth of it. But now I see it as my biggest weapon in this fight.

Your abuse, your pain, your fears, your exploitation, when you’re ready, if you can just sit with them. Don’t deny them, don’t swat them away. Just sit with them and feel them. Your world will open up to you.

Then you take that knowledge, whatever piece of the puzzle was revealed to you and let it fuel you. Then, when you’re ready, talk about it to others. Your knowledge will be used to paint a bigger picture, a giant tapestry, and we can use this to pick apart the very fabric of this outdated and barbaric structure that currently exists. We have the knowledge of good and evil. That is our birthright. In spite of all that horror I experienced I am privileged in so many ways. Because of my having been born into a white supremacist organization I talk white. And now I intend to use my voice to challenge the very system that spawned me.

My goal here is twofold. 

A: To encourage more and more people like me and allies to speak up and speak out. Use the tools you were given to try to save us all.

B: To use my life as an example to people of just how dark it can look when you’re a child of the forgotten ones but when you finally open your eyes, when you do that work on yourself, you realize, that you had the power all along. You just had to believe in it.