A real charmer and con man: The Music Man—known on both the stage and screen, with book, music, and lyrics by Meredith Willson, concerns con man Harold Hill, who charmingly poses as a boys’ band organizer and leader. He sells band instruments and uniforms to naïve Midwestern townsfolk, promising to train the members of the new band. Harold is no musician, however, and plans to skip town without giving any music lessons and without delivering any band instruments or uniforms. The photo above features Edward Watts as Harold Hill in the Goodspeed Theater, East Haddam, Connecticut 2019 production of The Music Man
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Beware of being charmed by some teacher or leader claiming great insight into and about the highest things.
The leader and founder of the group later known as the Children of God—his name was David Berg—certainly employed a good deal of charm, or, to use his own phrase, coined to deny he had such a thing, “charismatic charm.” If one were to regard this asset, as it were, as something capable of being accumulated, a sort of capital, a reservoir of “charmingness,” one might say, then he spent a great deal of that accumulated capital advancing perverse doctrines, but this was done as though he were revealing great truths—and, of course, none of us knew any of it was perverse; you don’t hang around long with what’s obviously so! No, it was all under wraps and not seen clearly at all, and the charm is what helped keep it hidden. Part of the charm was that none of us knew him so much as David Berg as “Mo,” or “Moses David.” Mo’s a lot more approachable, a lot more accessible, than a conventional, regular name, or so I think.
But what was perverse in what he taught? Well, Berg made his case—not initially, but after a good while—for a higher form of evangelism which would require our sexual liberation. This sexual freedom doctrine was revealed by means of charming stories, asides and anecdotes—suggestive, titillating, romantic, apparently heartfelt, humorous, ironic—in the various missives he sent us—charming epistles called “Mo Letters.” There were many hints and innuendos about his inclinations toward these things in the earlier Mo Letters, all suggesting he was revealing great truths that had been long hidden. The full aim of David Berg’s intentions regarding the use of sex for so-called evangelical purposes came out in a later series he entitled “King Arthur’s Nights” some seven years after the launching of the group. It was all presented as a way of love and sacrifice, and as a deep understanding of our freedom in Christ. He named the whole project “Flirty Fishing.”
In this series of Mo Letters he described in great detail how he used his mistress, Karen Zerby, known as Maria, as “bait” in his effort to win an Englishman named Arthur to Mo’s notion of Christianity. These were not published for all the members of the Children of God until 1976, though they describe events covering a period from 1973 through the middle of 1976. Thus David Berg’s plan and new strategy for the group was tested more or less in secret for about three years before he decided to share it with us all, and then to push us to adopt it.
Berg used the Bible all the time in the process of advancing this teaching, but he steadfastly and willfully misinterpreted it. Would that the Bible had been so precious to me that I could have seen how it was being twisted. But perhaps it would have taken unusual strength and foresight in one initially so ignorant of it, to see the Bible rightly through all the misinterpretations with which we were so thoroughly and charmingly taken in. But if we’d known how he was twisting things, we’d not long have stayed; the thing is, we didn’t know and furthermore, we’d been very well-persuaded—“charmed” even—that Mo was really God’s man. So what I’m trying to say here is that I think David Berg had a kind of allure associated with his persuasive skill, though he minimized this in his writings. In one of his missives to us he wrote:
“This is totally different from any of these other sects. Everyone [sic] of them is headed by some man who appears personally and charms the audiences by the hundreds or thousands. ….BUT OURS IS THE ONLY ONE ACTUALLY NOT LED BY THE “CHARISMATIC CHARM” AND “MAGNETIC PERSONALITY” OF SOME VISIBLE LEADER: Very few people ever saw me, knew me or heard me in person‚ so it couldn’t have been my personal charm.”[1]
Charm is very much the art of pleasing and charm is very able to disguise things that are other than charming. The things David Berg wrote to us were charming, both to the unguarded and virile nature of young men, and to the uniquely strong passions and emotions of young women. They were also charming in the way he pictured himself to us through exceedingly well-drawn covers of the Mo Letters where he was depicted as a great, loveable, wise lion. Moses David was often pictured in the Mo Letter illustrations and covers in a quasi-human form with a great lion’s head and mane, and great paws, but standing upright, looking very human and leonine at the same time. A great, charming, benign lion—“That’s our leader!” we could say.
These illustrations, and so much of what he wrote, tended to endear him to us. He was very good at making himself seem loveable, though at times he also played the fierce lion. This leonine imagery was well-chosen and effective in making what the Mo Letters contained all the more palatable. He used this disguise and his charming talk to promote his teachings, teachings that were very much contrary to what the Bible truly teaches, but Mo persuaded us that he was revealing hidden and real biblical truths which the rest of Christendom hadn’t perceived.
But our leader—and this is true of cult leaders generally—could not have cultivated such popularity among us without our enthusiastic cooperation. How did he do it? I think charm is a big part of the explanation. Mo knew how to flatter us—“No one is following Christ the way you are!” and how to employ our faculty of imagination—“We are true revolutionaries, bringing the true Jesus revolution to the world in the time just before the Second Coming! Imagine it!” And both flattery and employment of our faculties of imagination were applied to us by means of Mo’s charm.
Charm can be the vehicle by means of which these other agents of persuasion were delivered. Charm is a large component of the allure and power we call “charisma.” Perhaps we could even say charm is the active ingredient in charisma. Indeed, I would like to leave aside the term “charisma,” which is only an adjective in the phrase Mo used above—“charismatic charm”—and just consider the term as the noun—“charm.” What is charm? It’s worth asking, for David Berg and, indeed, cult leaders generally, have long specialized in it—in charm.
Mo’s style—if I may add yet another term to my description of the man, that is, the way he portrayed himself to us in the rank and file of the Children of God—had a personableness and a strongly endearing pastoral appeal, too—an exceedingly charming appeal. But how does charm work?
When charm is at work in a person, we sometimes call such a one a “charmer,” but when we speak at times of a “charmer,” what do we mean? For one thing, a charmer is one who reads others well and knows how to play them if he wants to, by pleasing them. A charmer is someone who senses how far he—or she—can push something and, with that knowledge, charmingly does so. One cannot be a charmer without a strong capacity to gauge the person or persons one is seeking to charm—to engage them and then to gauge who they are and what it will take to win them over.
So I would say Mo was a charmer. He knew how to engage you, how to make himself admired; he knew how to make himself attractive because he had a sense of who it was he was talking to. Let me here refer to that Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spencer, and his epic poem, The Faeire Queen.
The poem, which is so very long, features a beguiling witch—the False Duessa—who, disguised as a ravishing beauty, knew and used her charm to consolidate her power over the young knight she had beguiled.
With her charms—her words and her jaw-dropping gorgeousnes—she confirmed her grip over him, though he didn’t realize this because her charm hid her true very ugly nature.
Charm was useful, furthermore, the better to manipulate and seek to destroy his relationship with his true love, a genuine, noble, honorable, honestly delightful, beautiful and virtuous woman—her name in the poem is “Una”—someone whom the wicked witch and her magician master both hate. Una is a name indicative of her integrity, her lack of duplicity—her “oneness” as opposed to the false Duessa’s “two-ness,” her non-integrity.
Like “the Music Man” and the False Duessa,, a “two-faced” Moses David sought, using charm, to draw us from our “Una,” the one true love we wanted to serve, which was Jesus Christ, to his false Christ, the “Revolutionary Jesus” who championed libertine sex and approved of Berg’s growing inclination to flirt with the occult. Berg taught of a world of so-called “spirit helpers” who helped him lead the Children of God. This was yet another way David Berg rebelled against biblical teachings and flirted with darkness.
But like the poet Edmund Spencer’s false beauty—Duessa—David Berg was a charming figure; he knew what a “charm offensive” was and just how far his charm could take him.
Now charm is not always used cynically; charm can even heal and soothe and mend. But it can just as well be used by the cynic and the charlatan—indeed, imaginative literature is full of charming rogues. Think of the salesman who used charm to get his way—“Professor” Harold Hill, played by Robert Preston in the 1957 Broadway musical, The Music Man (and in the 1962 film version). He sold musical instruments for the children of unsuspecting small-town folks and claimed to be able to teach their kids to play using the “think method,” a charade, and who then skipped town as soon as he has collected all the cash he’d persuaded their folks to hand over well before the musical instruments ever arrived—and they usually never did arrive. If you have seen the film, you could not deny the protagonist in “The Music Man” possessed a certain charm.
The point is, charm is something one can put on, if one knows how. It can be a mask—it can hide something. Yes, yes, again sometimes this “hiding” aspect of charm can even be a good thing and used for good, but it can just as easily be ominous. Charm was one of David Berg’s great talents, but in his case it masked something very dark.
The charmer seems to want to please you. But such persons can use being pleasing for whatever ends they wish, and they don’t have to reveal the end to which they are tending; charm can lean toward wisdom, or toward worldliness—or great wickedness. The goal or end of the charmer is masked by his charm—it’s hard to tell what he’s really after. Ask “The Music Man,” ask Edmund Spencer’s “False Duessa,” and you see how easily charm can be used to procure ends that reveal the stark moral deficiencies of the charmer.
In David Berg’s case charm masked a disposition unwilling to resist sexual sin and to lead others into it as well. It also was used to mask and make appealing an inclination toward the occult, a hatred of institutional Christianity, and finally, a deep rebellion toward the real Jesus Christ of the Bible.
“Moses David” Berg was very self-aware—and so was ready “to read” the hearers who flocked to him through the allure provided by the young people with whom he surrounded himself, with whom one could even say he “dressed himself,” beginning with his own young-adult children, whom he used very consciously and skillfully to forge the outward appearance of the Children of God, with all its beautiful camaraderie and winsome appeal.
The cult led by David Berg strongly claimed to be Christian, but ultimately David Berg wanted to use Christ for his own purposes—to help attach us not to the cause of Jesus Christ, but to himself and to his frankly anti-Christ teachings. And to do this he had to lead us away from Jesus Christ, which he surely did, but in a way we did not notice because of his charm. Mo appealed to us in the name of Jesus Christ, but if he appeared to be submitted to Jesus as he charmed us in various ways, his secret life most certainly contradicted this, and thankfully, after a long time, that secret life was no longer hidden.
It is this power to charm, to endearingly persuade, that one has to learn to look out for, as by means of it a person is disarmed and made more able to yield to the persuasion of the charmer. This was how David Berg was so successful in introducing sexual libertinism as a doctrine to be practiced among the Children of God. Of course this notion of sexual liberation is something very agreeable to natural desires, but the New Testament—and the Old—repeatedly make the case for resisting natural desires, not in order to punish human beings, but to protect them and aid in human flourishing as it channels sexual desire into faithful marriage.
After my seventh year in the group Mo’s Letters were pushing sexual “freedom” continually—by this time well over half the Mo Letters we were receiving were on this subject. He wanted us to get going with his sexual revolution. Charm was mixed with sex more and more in his writings. Almost imperceptibly he slowly but surely became less and less charming, though I could not admit this to myself while I was still in the cult. Some of the most loyal old veterans continued to find David Berg’s charm such an antidote for all that was drab about life that they stuck with him in spite of everything. And yes, I was still with him, too, up to almost the very end of my nine years with the group in 1978, but with the news of the Jonestown horror and Mo’s reaction to it, I realized something was seriously wrong. But it took me so long to see these things. Why?
One explanation is that the well-practiced charms of the cult leader keep the charmed followers from thinking clearly. Thus it can be so difficult to pull away, to leave a cult. To resist being charmed one has to see charm as the means by which the charmer seeks to be worshiped and obeyed by those he charms, but those who are charmed are blinded by the charm. What, then, is the way out? What is the antidote?
Something has to shake you awake—as I was shaken awake by Mo’s sympathy for Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple group. Mo felt they’d been pushed into a corner by the evil U.S. government (he was always descrying the American regime), so that even in far-away Guyana, on the north coast of South America, American officials were investigating what they were up to—or so Mo told us in a new Mo Letter shortly after the demise of that cult–those poor, deluded people who were deceived into drinking that poisoned Kool-Aid; they thought they were doing a righteous thing. Mo was ready to sympathize with the notion that persecution had forced them to take supposedly the only escape left—mass suicide.
This Mo Letter shook me up. There is such a thing as misjudging the power of charm. I think this is what happened, and so in my case, he’d gone too far. But I so shaken! Perhaps this is the temptation of charmers—to push their game just a little too far and so break the spell, as it were. And with my awakening I think I became aware I had long been excepting Mo from criticism, and that I was elevating him above it habitually. It wasn’t entirely, wholly, man-worship, but it was in the neighborhood of it. I think I was beginning to be aware that Mo’s “charm”—call it the charm of the cult leader—had drawn me to trust him, to follow him, to love him, indeed practically to worship him, a mere man, until I saw suddenly that that was a mistake.
The charming person can be delightful for a time, and his or her attention towards you can be so flattering. But charm may also be the means by which a person can be turned away from that which he or she knows to be good and right and the highest thing one knows, so that that which is never, ever to be honored or done is now honored and done. Beware of letting yourself be charmed by someone using great and glittering words, claiming to have great truths about the highest things—he may be leading you in the most pleasing kinds of ways in a direction that’s finally not only away from what is true and good and right but into a fatal net woven of lies. Even noble knights and ladies—can’t we imagine ourselves being such persons—can be naïve and subject to deception and to, well, charm, and so can be caught in a net from which there appears to be no escape. As may be said of the charms of the false Duessa, “Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death,” so it may be said of the charming cult leader.[2] Men and women alike can be profoundly fooled by charming, attractive beguilers, flatters, deceivers, who, unrecognized as such, are really wolves in sheep’s clothing. For a long time I failed to be aware that the charms of the charming David Berg were not good for me or for anyone. So, beware of being charmed by some teacher or leader claiming great insight into and about the highest things. It may start innocuously enough, but it will not end that way.
[1] Moses David, aka “Father David,” “What Now?–Persecution & Fleeing–NRS2,” DFO (for Disciples and Friends Only), No. 748, December 14, 1978 (Rome, Italy: The Family of Love), paragraphs 1-6. XFamily.org Publications Database, https://pubs.xfamily.org/text.php?t=748, Accessed April 3, 2021, 7:37 pm, CST.
[2] Proverbs 7:27
