Jesus Freaks (5 page)

She remembered Berg as one of several preachers who came to town over the years and tried to turn the church into a viable congregation. “I don't know why he left,” she said. “But I'm eighty-six, and I don't remember lots of things.”

Whatever happened at Valley Farms was serious enough to cause Berg's flock to expel him from their fellowship. According to his daughter, Deborah, Berg left amid rumors of a sex scandal at Valley Farms. Around the time of his dismissal, Berg sent his mother a tape recording in which he “categorically denied the charge of sexual misconduct.”
¹⁴
Berg would say later that he left Valley Farms in a dispute with racist church members over whether he should allow “dirty, barefooted Indians to the church service on Sunday.”

Deborah Berg, who was five years old when her family left Valley Farms, would soon have firsthand experience of her father's sexual misconduct. At age seven, she says her father began “attempts at incest” that would continue for five years. “From that time on, I was terrified of being left alone with him. At age twelve I was more consciously aware of the ‘strangeness of his actions,' but I still had no understanding of what he was attempting. I determinedly resisted, threatening to jump out of the window if he touched me. He tried to explain he wanted me to fulfill special needs that my mother didn't completely meet. Unlike twelve-year-olds today, I was totally naïve
about sex, and it wasn't until I was married that I realized what his intentions had been.”
¹⁵

In her account of her childhood, Deborah says her younger sister, Faithy, had an incestuous relationship with their father. “Unlike me,” Deborah writes, “she did not resist him.”
¹⁶
Faithy later defended her father's endorsement of adults masturbating children to help them relax. “It reminded me of how [dad] used to put me to sleep when I was a little girl, three or four. Wow! Daddy did it best! Back rubbin' that is, and front rubbin' too!…Daddy just made me feel good all over…. I don't think it perverted me, none at all, but it sure converted me to his call! So I believe our parents should try it and help our kids to get the natural habit…. Oh, I could write a book, but this is just a look into my childhood sex.”
¹⁷

In the end, it doesn't really matter if Berg was expelled from Valley Farms for sexual misconduct or because he could no longer stomach the racist hypocrites in his ignorant flock. Either way, Berg would never again minister to the mundane spiritual needs of an actual congregation. He had convinced himself that he was a prophet, not a pastor

“It seems the Lord is showing me that belonging to anything other than the Lord Himself is too binding, too hindering, too man-made,” he wrote in a May 31, 1951, letter to his mother, the same month he was removed from Valley Farms. “It obligates you to follow the dictates of man rather than God. When you follow God instead of man they kick you out anyhow, so you might as well not stay in or get in…. Evidently, I was never cut out to be a kowtowing, hypocritical, beating-around-the-bush, please-everybody pastor.”
¹⁸

Following his abrupt departure from Valley Farms, Berg enrolled at a Phoenix college and took courses in philosophy, psychology, and political science. He also signed up for a personal witnessing course at the American Soul Clinic, a missionary training school founded in 1944 by evangelist Fred Jordan. Berg would spend the next fifteen years working for Jordan, helping Jordan promote his missionary training camp and a radio and television ministry called the “Church in the Home.” Now he was in Jordan's shadow, rather than his mother's.

In 1966, Berg had a falling out with Jordan and took his kids on the road as the “Berg Family Singers.” They were a flop.

At the time, Virginia Berg was retired and living in a Huntington Beach cottage. She had begun to see lots of restless, seemingly lost, teenagers hanging around this town on the southern California coast. They were about the same age as her grandchildren, but they had long hair and wore wild clothing. They smoked marijuana and took other mind-altering drugs. Huntington Beach was turning into southern California's version of the infamous Haight-Ashbury neighborhood up the coast in San Francisco.

Virginia knew lost souls when she saw them. The old revivalist started passing out peanut butter sandwiches to the hippies and the beach bums in Huntington Beach. Then she'd tell them about Jesus. Meanwhile, her son was approaching his fiftieth birthday and had nowhere else to go. Maybe God would give poor David one more chance.

Mama Berg called her son home.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
May 1967 – Corner of Haight and Ashbury streets

GOD WAS SPEAKING
to Kent Philpott through his car radio. Actually, it was the voice of Scott MacKenzie singing his new song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” But the Almighty was speaking through the music and had a clear message for this young Baptist preacher. “God called me to the hippies,” he says. “Right there and then.”

Faithy Berg (right) ministers to the hippies in the early seventies.

Kent had just crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and was heading north out of the city on Highway 101. The song came on as his car was approaching the Seminary Avenue off-ramp in central Marin County. Kent was in his second year of studies at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, selling shoes at J.C. Penny's, and serving as the part-time pastor of a tiny Baptist church way out in Byron, a farming community about fifty miles east of San Francisco. There were no hippies in Byron. It wasn't happening in Byron. It was happening in the Haight, and that's where God wanted Philpott to go.

Philpott wasn't sure where the Haight was, but the next day he headed back into the city to find out. He'd been raised in southern California, joined the military, and converted to Christianity through the work of a Baptist preacher at Travis Air Force Base northeast of San Francisco. Now, at age twenty-five, Kent was on his own mission from God.

“San Francisco,” MacKenzie's sentimental ode to peace and love, was an instant worldwide hit when it was released in the spring of 1967. Now everyone knew about the strange vibrations emanating from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets.

There was a cultural revolution erupting in this blue-collar neighborhood of dilapidated Victorians and struggling shops. Rents were cheaper than over in North Beach, where the edgy artists, Beat poets, and assorted hangers-on were losing their monopoly on hip. In Berkeley, on the other side of San Francisco Bay, the revolution was political and had a harder edge. It was mellow in the Haight. Golden Gate Park was just a few blocks away. What would come to be known as “the San Francisco sound” was taking shape in the form of rock bands like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. And there was this little chemical called LSD.

Philpott got the call from God just weeks before the official opening of the Summer of Love. By then, the advance guard of the hippie
movement—led by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters—had already put on the Trips Festival, a drug-fueled celebration held in January 1966 at the Longshoremen's Hall near Fisherman's Wharf. A year later, there was the Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg chanted “We are one!” Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor and psychedelic evangelist, made his first public appearance in San Francisco. Hare Krishna devotees danced in ecstasy. Thousands of revelers poured onto the Polo Field, and the bands played on.

That was just a warm-up for the summer of 1967, when the scene got very crowded and very crazy. Suddenly, it seemed like all the loose screws were rolling into San Francisco from across the nation and around the world. There was talk of peace and love, but there was also hunger, homelessness, rape, and lots of people strung out on drugs. For a freshly ordained street preacher, it was an evangelical gold mine.

On his first day in the Haight, Philpott thought it wise to see what was happening—if anything—at an evangelical church close to ground zero. So he found his way to Hamilton Square Baptist Church and was looking in the window when a young man tapped him on the shoulder. “Would you like to meet someone who
really
knows God?” the man asked.

Kent took the bait and began a lifelong friendship with David Hoyt.

Hoyt had also grown up in southern California, but had a much rougher time of it than his newfound friend. He'd bounced around foster homes and juvenile halls and wound up in Lompoc Federal Penitentiary on a drug conviction. In prison, Hoyt passed the time reading about Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Eastern philosophies.

Hoyt moved to San Francisco following his parole in September 1966. By the spring of 1967 he had become a disciple of Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, also known as the Hare Krishnas.
That
was whom David Hoyt wanted Kent Philpott to meet. Krishna was the god he was talking about. But that didn't stop the Baptist preacher and the Krishna devotee from developing a close friendship. They got together often, Kent with his well-worn Bible and David holding his copy of the Bhagavad
Gita. “He'd try to convert me to Hinduism,” Philpott recalled, “while I taught him scripture.”
¹

When Hoyt moved into the Hare Krishna temple in San Francisco, he and Philpott continued their Bible study in the basement and drew in a few other students at the temple. “When the Swami heard about me, I had to explain what I was doing,” Philpott recalled. “He agreed to let me continue if I came to
their
worship—the
kirtan—
and stayed for an hour and a half of chanting. They'd go on and on dancing and chanting until they worked themselves into a frenzy. It was like being out on Hippie Hill on acid listening to the Grateful Dead, but it was a worship service. After the
kirtan
, David and I would go in the basement and study the Bible.”

Jesus would prevail over Krishna, but it took a dream and a fire to seal Hoyt's conversion. Asleep one night in the temple basement, David dreamt that he was missing out on the Rapture—that all the true Christians all around him were rising up into heaven while his feet stayed on the ground. Then he woke up to find his personal altar ablaze. “I always thought he just left a candle burning,” Philpott mused. “But David attributed it to God.”

Hoyt moved into Philpott's room at the Baptist seminary in Marin County and stayed through the Summer of Love. “We started an intense on-the-street ministry that summer,” Kent recalled. “We'd just walk up to people and tell them about Jesus. That was the whole thing. We didn't even have any literature, but we sure went to town. We were there all the time.”

They didn't know it at the time, but Kent and David were helping birth the Jesus movement, a wave of counterculture conversion that would alter the face of American Christianity. Some called them “Jesus people.” Others preferred the term “Jesus freaks.” By the end of the year, another group of Marin County converts had opened up a coffeehouse in the Haight called the Living Room and soon took their mission down to southern California, opening two more Christian communes. Theologically, they were conservative evangelicals, but sociologically, they kept many of the trappings and the values of the emerging sixties counterculture.

Across the bay in Berkeley, the Jesus movement took form as the Christian World Liberation Front. Jack Sparks, a Pennsylvania State University professor who had been involved with the evangelical Campus Crusade for Christ, started the group and an underground Christian newspaper called
Right On
, which blended the love of Jesus with the radical rap of the New Left. Here's a sample from a Christian World Liberation Front tract entitled “The Second Letter to the Christians.”

Two of the fastest-growing evangelical churches of the seventies and eighties—Calvary Chapel and Vineyard Fellowship—were fueled by the Jesus movement of the late sixties. Chuck Smith, who started Calvary Chapel in late 1965, was not an early fan of the hippies. “These long-haired, bearded dirty kids going around the streets repulsed me,” he later wrote. “They stood for everything I stood against. We were miles apart in our thinking, philosophies, everything.”
³

To many Americans, the Jesus freaks were a contradiction in terms. The counterculture was supposed to be about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Evangelicals were supposed to be about piety and sexual purity. But evangelical Christians—especially before the rise of the religious right and its alliance with the Republican Party in the late seventies—
were
countercultural. In the late sixties and early seventies, a growing cadre of avant-garde evangelicals found a receptive audience among the
hippies, whose rejection of materialism and search for spiritual experience provided common ground. This was especially true in Pentecostal churches and charismatic Christian circles, where a lively style of worship and openness to religious ecstasy rang true for spiritual seekers of other stripes. Both the hippies and the evangelicals envisioned a world beyond the confines of ordinary time and space. Both practiced spiritual healing and were open to the wisdom of living prophets. In the end, it wasn't a great leap from the Age of Aquarius to the Second Coming of Christ.

Chuck Smith began to change his mind about the hippies when his daughter started dating one. His name was John. A few years back, before his Christian conversion, the young man had dropped acid and reveled in all that sin and sexuality up in San Francisco.

“One night I opened the door and there was John with a long-haired, bearded kid with bells on this feet and flowers in his hair,” Smith recalled. “An honest-to-goodness hippie!”

“Chuck,” John said. “I want you to meet Lonnie Frisbee.”

Lonnie grew up in Orange County, left home as a teenager, and wound up in San Francisco for the Summer of Love. One of the first converts of the Jesus movement, Frisbee helped set up the Living Room in the Haight in late 1967, but headed home the following year. Lonnie still had the fire of a fresh convert when he showed up on Chuck Smith's doorstep.

“I put out my hand and welcomed him into the house,” Smith said. “As he began to share, I wasn't prepared for the love that came forth from this kid. His love of Jesus Christ was infectious. The anointing of the Spirit was upon his life.”
⁴

Smith helped Lonnie rent a two-bedroom house on Nineteenth Street in Costa Mesa and open the House of Miracles, one of the first crash pads for Jesus freaks. Meanwhile, on the other side of Los Angeles, David Hoyt had rented an old sanitarium in Lancaster and founded The Way Inn, another early Christian commune. Frisbee had nearly two dozen converts the first week. He built bunk beds in the garage at the House of Miracles. One kid slept in the bathtub. It was the spring of 1968, and the Jesus movement was taking off.

But Frisbee wasn't the only young evangelist harvesting hippies in Orange County. He and other leaders in the fledgling Jesus movement had begun hearing stories about a zealous band of young Christian evangelists in nearby Huntington Beach calling themselves “Teens for Christ.” Frisbee, who was only nineteen years old at the time, asked two street preachers with a little more savvy—Kent Philpott and David Hoyt—to help check them out.

Berg and his family had just arrived in Huntington Beach after their flop as the Berg Family Singers. They arrived at Virginia's cottage in early 1968 with a few followers they'd picked up along the way. Two brothers had joined the troop at the New York World's Fair. David Berg married one of them off to Faithy in February 1967 when his youngest daughter turned sixteen years of age. Another teenage devotee married Berg's son, Aaron, in November. Berg's oldest daughter, Deborah, had already married a man who met the Bergs at a Florida Bible college.
⁵

Lonnie Frisbee, Kent Philpott, and David Hoyt arrived late in the day for their meeting with the Teens for Christ. “Berg and his sons were sitting there with some other guys. What I remember most is that they were dressed in black suits. That was very astonishing to us. They looked like establishment-type people.

“It was not like a conversation between brothers in Christ. It was more like, ‘Who are you?' Sort of a suspicious tone,” Philpott said. “After the meeting, we recommended that Lonnie stay away from them.”

Hoyt has a similar memory of the bad vibes in Huntington Beach. “It seemed a little strange to me,” he said. “There was a strange spirit there.”
⁶

Lonnie Frisbee listened to his Christian brothers' wise counsel and stayed away from the Bergs. A few years later, David Hoyt would fail to take his own advice. It was a decision he'd regret for the rest of his life.