Religion: Children of Doom

The freakish fringe of religion is changing so fast these days that fiction cannot keep up with reality. Last week ABC Television presented Can Ellen Be Saved?, a TV movie that depicted an aggressive, doctrinaire Jesus sect called the Children of Jesus. The fictitious sect was obviously a thinly disguised counterpart of the real-life Children of God, complete with a West Coast farming commune, buses that sweep into cities to pick up new converts, biblical aliases for the members and a frank affection for the money and property gleaned from converts.

In fact, the dramatization was more like the Children of God of two years ago (TIME, Jan. 24, 1972). Today the Children are scattered to the four corners of the earth, preaching doom to America, buttering up Libya's latter-day caliph, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, and loosening up their sex ethics enough to lure new members. Only a few hundred of the 3,000 or so hard-core members remain in the U.S. The reason, according to Founding Father David Berg, alias "Moses David," has to do with the comet Kohoutek, which was supposed to herald catastrophe to the nation beginning on or about Jan. 31. In the weeks before doomsday, some of the Children of God appeared in red sackcloth at United Nations Plaza in New York City warning Americans to flee. A good many of the Children took their own advice, removing themselves also from the scrutiny of New York State's attorney general, whose charity frauds bureau last month issued a 23-page report on the sect and recommended that its questionable activities come "under the umbrella of state regulation and scrutiny."

The information center for the Children of God today is London. But Leader Moses David stays as elusive as Howard Hughes, making contact with the members only in his weekly epistles called "Mo Letters" and through what might be described as fundamentalist pornography. Berg's poem Mountin' Maid, for instance, is 300 lines of awful doggerel urging women to bare their breasts. Sample line: Can't we leave those summits bare Without all that underwear?

An even stranger flight of fancy is Berg's courtship of Libyan Strongman Gaddafi. Last spring, the Mo Letters began to talk about "godly socialism" and to describe Gaddafi as the savior who will ignite the young and rescue them from those twin sources of evil, godless Communism and American materialism. The Moslem leader, in return, has commended the C.O.G. on Libyan radio and has invited a son and daughter of Berg to visit him in Tripoli.