A criticism-free letter to current family youth

from Wolf - Saturday, January 22, 2005
accessed 1943 times

To regular movingon members: I realize that this is a public web site and you can post anything you want, but I would greatly appreciate it if you could avoid posting derogatory replies to any posts under this article. I aim to, if possible, open constructive dialog with current Family member young people, and can only make this attempt through this site, since Family sites won’t allow posts from outsiders (or unwanted posts from their own members).

To current born-in members of the Family: I was looking over the posts on myconclusion.com and I am somewhat saddened by the apparent misunderstanding of the actions and intentions of many young ex-members. I would like a chance to explain them from my point of view.

I am not planning to criticize your beliefs or even your leadership, or try to persuade you to leave the group. If you are fully aware of your leadership’s history and intentions and want to stay in the group anyway, I sincerely hope you do so.

First, I haven’t heard of one ex-member who wants your children taken away from you. I don’t know of anybody who wants the police to raid your homes either. Ex-members that have spoken to the mass media told them that large scale sexual abuse is no longer an issue in the Family, in order to prevent this kind of potentially harmful action. I have to admit that some people who were children during the previous raids actually wish they would’ve been taken away from their parents back then, and it’s possible that your kids will eventually wish somebody would have taken them away from you, but let’s hope that can be avoided.

Second, I am disappointed that Ricky killed Angela and I understand that most ex-family young people feel the same way.

Third, and most important, the actions of ex-family members who are supposedly fighting “against the Family” are actually aimed a bringing a few specific people, all first generation Family members, to justice for crimes they committed that seriously hurt the individuals involved. I’m not talking about crimes like selling without a license, smoking pot or other generally harmless misdemeanors. I’m talking about mothers who held their children down while their fathers raped them, men who put their hands inside of little girl’s bottoms, and other crimes that are unspeakably disgusting.

You may think “You guys are such losers, you keep bringing up the same old child abuse accusations”.

Well, if you had a man’s hand up your butt when you were a little girl, how long would it take you to forget? Do you think the memory would just go away? What if both that person and the leadership said you were lying, even though they knew the truth? Would you be able to forgive and forget?

If some of these people would just admit they were wrong and apologize, their victims might decide to give up the fight and get on with their lives. Instead of apologizing, many of these people and their leadership have demonized the victim! And then they have the nerve to talk like they’re such great people who are helping the world in so many ways.

I was abused myself as a child, and my parents are largely responsible for my abuse, but they have seen the error of their ways and apologized, and I have forgiven them. There’s no way I would desire legal action against them.

I would, however, gladly participate in legal action against individuals who have participated in horrible abuse but refuse to admit it and instead talk like their God’s gift to the world. It doesn’t matter that the abuse happened 10 or 15 years ago, if the person that perpetrated it has done nothing to make things right.

Allow me to explain, in addition, why most of us consider the apologies written by Berg, Peter and Maria, though lengthy, to be insufficient: they have failed to place responsibility where it lies, on Berg’s writings. Every first generation member knows that adults engaged in sex with children because Berg condoned it, and virtually told people to do it by publishing the Davidito book (we all know that first generation adults tried to emulate things that happened in Berg’s home).

A genuine apology would go something like this “Berg’s writings in letters like “the Devil Hates Sex”, where he clearly states that sex should know no age limits, caused a wave of child abuse in the Family that deeply hurt hundreds of children. We have since realized that a child’s consent to sex cannot in fact be genuine, since many children will not say no for fear of retribution. On behalf of Berg, we apologize for publishing these writings. We also apologize on our own behalf for the part we played in publishing these writings. We admit that we actively tried to protect known child abusers from the authorities, by helping them move from country to country, and in many cases they continued to abuse children in each new country. We are extremely sorry for the great pain that our irresponsible actions caused.”

In many of your posts on myconclusion.com you imply that we have given our lives over to hate and darkness. I certainly can’t speak for everybody, and maybe some ex-members are focused on negative issues. However, I certainly don’t feel that hate and I don’t see the darkness you speak of. In fact, my life has much more meaning to me and my future looks much brighter than it did while I was in the Family. My interactions are no longer always friendly, but I personally feel this is more natural: in the Family I was required to love everybody. I don’t think a person can naturally love everybody, so much of this love was contrived. Now, if I love somebody, I love them for real, and if I dislike somebody, I am free to express it. My interactions on this site are not entirely friendly and certainly not all “loving”. This doesn’t mean I am more of a negative person than I was in the Family. It means I now feel free to express both positive and negative emotions.

I would also like to briefly touch on the apostates issue: apostasy is defined in Random House as “renunciation or abandonment of a previous loyalty, as to one's religious faith.” This obviously applies to first-generation adults who joined the Family and then left. It does not, however, necessarily apply to those of us who were born in the Family. Some of us never chose to be loyal to the Family, and thus are not apostates. Also, we aren’t just bitter ex-members. We are children who were raised in the Family. We were meant to be the elite generation, the showcase disciples. When we left the Family, we were leaving a group we never chose to be in.

When speaking with current Family members about the crimes of current and past leadership, I seem to always receive the same reply: I’m not in it for my leaders, I’m in it for Jesus. I don’t have anything against that line of thought, but I’m afraid that in most cases it’s not actually true. If you only depend on and follow what you hear from Jesus yourself, then I suppose it is true. But if you follow the words of Jesus as passed on to you by your leadership, then the integrity of your leadership should be very important to you. And remember that “nice” doesn’t necessarily mean “good”. Many serial killers and rapists are considered “nice” by their neighbors and colleagues.

In closing, I would like to ask you to think about something: the truth should hold up to criticism, shouldn’t it? I ask you to take a look at history and see which people and governments attempted to censor information, supposedly “in the best interests” of their constituents. You will probably find that they were all people and governments who had something to hide, who were afraid that their constituents would make choices unfavorable to them if they knew the full truth.

If any of you would like to discuss these or other issues, I promise to be respectful to you and your choices in my comments. Though we have made different choices, we have very similar backgrounds and probably have more in common than you think.