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17 hours ago
7
In 1991, I was living in a commune with 200 other people in Japan, as a member of a cult called the Children of God, which preached that the world was going to end in 1993. Everything I did – from where I slept each night, to who I was allowed to sleep with – was decided by the head of my commune. I was encouraged to keep a diary, and then turn it over to the leaders every night, so they could comb through it for signs of dissent. I was only allowed to listen to cult-sanctioned music, and I was only allowed to watch movies with happy endings, because those were the types of films of which the cult’s supreme leader – David Berg – approved. The Sound of Music was one of Berg’s favourite films, so we watched it on repeat.
By the time I was living in Japan, I was in my mid-30s, and I’d been part of the cult for 20 years. I was indoctrinated by a young hippy couple when I was 16, and persuaded to run away from my family and join a sect of the cult near my home town in Canada. I was a lonely teenager and desperately searching for some kind of meaning. Everybody I knew worked in the lumber mill in my small town, and the thought that I was doomed to live that life scared the hell out of me. The first time I visited the commune, everyone hugged me when I walked in, just to say “hello”. It was intoxicating.
But by 1991, after two decades in the cult, my faith was weakening. It was becoming clearer to me that Berg was wrong about the world ending in 1993. A whole series of events that were meant to directly precede the Second Coming hadn’t happened, and Berg – who lived in secrecy and communicated with his followers by written “prophecies” – kept issuing increasingly unconvincing excuses.
I was also becoming more resistant to the way the cult leaders sought to control the most intimate parts of my life. When I joined the cult, it was very sexually conservative. If you wanted to date another member of the community, you had to ask for permission from the leadership. But as the years went by, Berg started preaching a doctrine of sexual freedom, and ordering his members to couple-swap. I had got married to another cult member in the 1980s, and was living with her in a Children of God commune in Japan. Because I resisted couple-swapping I was forcibly separated from my wife as a punishment – and ordered to live in a different commune on my own.
There was also an even darker side to the Children of God that I was trying to shut my eyes to. Berg had released a written decree which permitted adult cult members to have sex with children. I never witnessed any sexual contact with children, and while I did read that decree when it was released in the 1980s, I refused to accept it. Still, it horrified me.
Forcibly separated from my wife, and with Berg’s teachings becoming more twisted, I was in a state of spiritual turmoil. But it was only when I heard REM’s song Losing My Religion that I was pushed to action. Cult members were allowed to own Walkmans, because the Children of God released their own music on cassette, but we were forbidden from listening to “worldly” music. As my will to blindly obey crumbled, I began to secretly tune in to the American armed forces radio station that broadcast in Japan. (Technically, I’d always had the power to covertly listen to music this way, but it’s a sign of how indoctrinated I was that I had never allowed myself to do so before.) One day, Losing My Religion came on, and I remember hearing it for the first time and freezing. I physically stopped walking.
It was that lyric, ”That’s me in the spotlight / Losing my religion”, that shook me. Hearing that line was the first time I’d even had words for what was happening to me. Then I heard the lyric, “Every whisper of every waking hour / I’m choosing my confessions”, and I began to think about the way the leaders made us write those daily diaries of our feelings, and then hand them over for inspection. I had learned to self-censor, because I was afraid that expressing my real feelings and doubts would result in punishment. I had been “choosing my confessions” for many years.
In 1991, Losing My Religion was a brand new song and the radio station had it on heavy rotation. Every day I’d go on my walk and hear it again, and at first, it made me terrified. I was a 36-year-old high school dropout with no possessions, and I had nothing to go back to. You had to turn all your money over to the cult, so I had barely anything to my name. But with every re-listen, I became more determined to leave. It took me about five months, but I finally escaped the commune in the autumn of 1991. I moved back in with my parents, and ended up training to become a lawyer, but I have remained haunted by my decades with the cult. I’ve spent my career advocating for the children who were abused by Berg and some of his followers.
A few years ago, I was surprised to learn that according to REM frontman Michael Stipe, Losing My Religion isn’t about someone losing faith at all; it’s about unrequited love. He explained that the phrase is a common expression in the American south “meaning to lose one’s temper or civility, or to feel frustrated and desperate”. However, like poetry, songs are open to the interpretation of listeners who apply their own meanings to the lyrics. I applied that song to my own life and everything changed.
