00:00Where would we be without love?
00:04How many children do you have, Fiona?
00:06The apocalypse was going to happen when the world was going to burn up into oblivion
00:10and only people who were saved would go up to heaven
00:13and everyone else would either stay in purgatory or go to hell.
00:16So it was our job to offer every single person on earth salvation.
00:20Love is going to conquer the world.
00:23I have seven.
00:24Seven children.
00:25Love's going to conquer the world.
00:27Nobody joins a cult.
00:29Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know what?
00:31I'm going to join this cult.
00:32No one even knew it was a cult until way later.
00:35I believe it.
00:36I believe it.
00:37I believe it.
00:38I believe it.
00:39I believe it.
00:40Love's going to conquer the world.
00:54My name is Flora Edwards and I grew up in the apocalyptic cult known as the Children of God.
00:58The Children of God was a group that started on the shores of Huntington Beach.
01:06I always say it had very humble beginnings.
01:11Father David was the leader.
01:12He was the son of an evangelist preacher.
01:15And he came out to California and wanted to give the young people something to live for.
01:21And it just was a bunch of young people during the 1960s trying to get off of drugs and as they put it high on Jesus.
01:28I always point out the three main teachings of the Children of God.
01:32One, it was apocalyptic.
01:34So they believed that the world was going to end.
01:37The date for the end was 1993.
01:40The second one was that he believed that the West was evil.
01:44And the third belief, he sort of wanted to adopt this new belief system that sex was a part of God's love.
01:50So he had some very controversial beliefs around sex and the body.
02:04People always want to know how did it turn from something that was good and innocent to something that was actually quite dark.
02:14My answer to that is the adults had to find a way to control the children because we weren't there on our own free will.
02:21They were raising us to basically save the world.
02:34There were a lot of reports of incest within the group or encouraging children to have sex with other children.
02:42There were incidents where even within Father David's own family, incest,
02:48he had this conflict between his commitment to serve God and his sexual desire.
02:56He had drinking problems. He was a sex addict, narcissist, just all the different things that come with the cult leader.
03:03He was also very charismatic. He was also very intelligent, very brilliant.
03:07He would not have been able to gather such a large group of people if he didn't have some sort of enticing quality to him.
03:18Leaving the cult was very difficult because we had been completely cut off from the world.
03:22My parents had no education, no money. Everyone inside was terrified to leave.
03:27It's like they stay and have this community of people or they leave and die basically.
03:33And a lot of them actually, they ended up committing suicide when they left.
03:36I did realize that there was tremendous beauty in my childhood.
03:46People always want like a sad sob story.
03:49There was awful things that went on, but this was my story to tell.
03:54All the day is hell.
03:57Oh
04:01To begin with.
04:05How did I have this
