Faith Jones
HarperCollins
Otago Daily Times, April 9th 2022
Born into the Children of God, an evangelical, end-times religious order established by her grandfather, David Brandt, Californian activist and lawyer Faith Jones spent her first 23 years moving from place to place – Macau, Thailand, America, Japan, China, Kazakhstan – spreading the Word and believing “I would be a missionary until I was martyred in the Tribulation or went up in the Rapture”.
The movement, now known as the Family International, had its origins in Southern California’s hippy community in 1959 and bore all the hallmarks of a cult: a rejection of mainstream institutions, obedience to its founder’s idiosyncratic teachings, and the sublimation of the self to the collective. What set the Children of God apart (and occasioned the memoir’s tabloid-esque title) was the primacy given to the ‘The Law of Love’. Although teaching that sex is pure and Godly is not in itself a bad thing, the idea that all things are lawful under love is an open invitation to abuse. Despite active discouragement of sexual contact between adults and children in the late 80s and the cessation of Flirty Fishing (the recruitment of new members and patrons by seduction) with the advent of AIDS, women were still expected to ‘share’ themselves with men of the Family upon request and shamed or shunned for being unyielding. Increasingly distressed by these and other strictures and ashamed of her inability to submit joyfully to God’s will, Faith eventually left the Family, home-schooled her way onto the American college system and graduated summa cum laude from Georgetown University. It is also here, in the outside world, that she began questioning the Family’s teachings and addressing the trauma of her upbringing.
Jones’ experiences share significant similarities with those recounted in Tara Westover’s Educated, including an ambivalent relationship with her past. Struggling to understand how her parents allowed her to be abused to the point where she can no longer form healthy or emotionally intimate relationships, she recognises them too as victims of the Family’s ideology: “They saw themselves as loving, Godly parents…I see it’s how they defined child abuse that made all the difference”. She reflects on the irony that a community based on sexual liberation and gender equality quickly devolved into one where women were robbed of physical and social agency, and tries to understand how so many intelligent and idealistic people could inflict such damage. Although she acknowledges that the abuse of women and children is a global problem, her answers are distinctly American – giving up individual ownership to a collective society leads eventually to an abdication of responsibility – and I am suspicious of her “crystalization [of] our fundamental moral philosophy, the DNA of our legal system, morality, and human rights into a single simple diagram that I can teach to a curious eight-year-old.” Despite this, her analysis of the causes are thought-provoking and her insights into cult psychology are a valuable addition to a growing body of popular and academic discourse.
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