Inside my life growing up asa ‘sex cult nun’

Faith Jones was 22 when she left religious order Children of God, but she didn’t realize until years later that elder members had used her as a sexual pawn. Now she’s telling all . . .

ABOUT 10 years ago, Faith Jones went to the mountains of Sri Lanka for a meditation retreat. “I’m the kind of person who has to be busy all the time,” the Las Vegas-based lawyer told The Post. “I thought, I’m gonna go crazy trying to sit there for eight hours a day meditating!” Instead, she felt instantly at home among the Buddhist monks and nuns who spent their days doing chores and chanting scriptures in the middle of nowhere.

“I was like, ‘Why does this seem so familiar to me?’ ” Jones, 44, recalled. “And then it hit me. I grew up like this! I grew up like a little nun, except there was a lot of sex involved!”

She then told herself: “I’m gonna write a book, and I’m going to call it ‘My Life As a Sex Cult Nun.’ ”

Jones wasn’t kidding. “Sex Cult Nun,” her new memoir (William Morrow), out now, details her upbringing in the notorious Children of God cult. Her grandfather founded the group, later called The Family, and it gained infamy for its disturbing sex practices and allegations of abuse — including encouraging sexual relations between adults and children.

Jones grew up believing “The Law of Love,” which pushed women to show Jesus’ love by submitting to sex with men. Jones felt that pressure as early as 6 years old. She finally escaped The Family when she was 22, getting her college degree and attending Berkeley Law. Yet she said it took her years to fully come to terms with the abuse she endured.

“When I left, I still didn’t think that what I’d been taught was wrong, necessarily,” she said. “It took a few years of living in regular society [before] I could look back on my life and be like, ‘Oh, that’s what happened.’ ”

Jones was born in Hong Kong in 1977, the seventh child in a polygamous family in the Children of God. She grew up with six older half-siblings, two mothers (Mommy Esther, her father’s first wife, and Mommy Ruthie, her biological mother) and no schooling.

Jones’ father, Hosea, was the son of Children of God leader David Berg, a k a Moses David, an itinerant preacher who eventually started the group in 1968. Hosea grew up “witnessing” alongside his dad across the US and was one of the cult’s earliest disciples, even taking Berg’s message abroad when the group started facing legal scrutiny in the US. That’s where he met Faith’s mom, Ruthie — a beautiful bohemian from Long Island who joined the group in 1971. Ruthie’s devotion so impressed Berg that he suggested Hosea take her as his second wife.

By the time Faith came along, The Children of God had expanded into Asia, and Hosea and Ruthie opened a printing press in Hong Kong, where they published Berg’s prophecies to circulate among the cult’s 10,000 members. Yet Hosea soon fell out of favor when Berg discovered he was printing material for clients outside the group. Jones never met her grandfather before his death in 1994. “It was a very strange thing, because I felt very abandoned and rejected and didn’t know why,” she said of never meeting Berg. “But now I’m quite grateful.”

In 1981, Jones was 4 when her family moved to a remote farm in Macau, off the south coast of China, after a Hong Kong newspaper published an exposé on the group. At first, the family didn’t have a toilet, reliable electricity or a shower. (They took baths in a barrel.) But eventually, her father spruced up the place, turning the property into a fully functioning religious commune.

“We were living communally, no possessions, hours spent in prayer and reading, proselytizing,” Jones said. “But the difference is that most religious orders ban sex; we emphasized it.” Cartoon images of naked women adorned their religious literature. (The Holy Spirit was depicted, Jones writes, as “a buxom, hot, horny goddess wearing only a heart-shaped bikini held on with pearl strings.”) One of Jones’ first coloring books had detailed diagrams of sexual organs and a drawing of a “fully aroused man” penetrating a woman wearing a flower crown on her head.

In the early 1980s, Jones occasionally

went on her mother’s “Flirty Fishing” missions — where women were expected to prostitute themselves for Christ, seducing men to the cause. Jones said she actually looked forward to these trips.

“For me, it was even a bit of fun because we got to go out to nice restaurants and ride in fancy cars,” she said.

When she was about 6, her “Uncle Jeff ” — the children referred to all adults in the cult as “uncle” or “aunt” — showed her how to pleasure him with her hands. At 10, two older “uncles” French kissed her. When she tried to avoid them and other men on the farm, she was asked, “Why can’t you be more loving?” (Her older brothers, by the time they were 10, had already had sex: “Boys were asked which ‘auntie’ they wanted to have sexy time with, and then they went into different rooms and did what the boy wanted — full sex or just cuddling,” she writes.)

By the early 1990s, when Jones was 10, The Family tried to rein in the child sex, but Jones suffered other hardships. She, her mother and her mother’s two younger children were sent to a compound in Thailand, where Jones spent her whole first month forbidden from communicating with anyone until she learned “to be submissive.”

“That was the most difficult time for me,” Jones said. “It attacked my whole sense of individuality.”

Later her mother took them to the US, where Jones spent some time with her grandmother in Atlanta and went to a real school for a few months. She loved it.

“I discovered I have this insatiable desire to learn, to explore, to understand,” Jones said.

Still, Jones remained a true believer, and when her father showed up in Atlanta, the family headed back to Macau and later China. Jones convinced her mother to send for a CLE homeschooling course from the Mennonites, and she taught herself math, English, social studies and science.

She was 16 when she lost her virginity to a boy outside The Family. At 18, she went to Kazakhstan, where the elders chastised her for not “sharing her love” with another man in the commune.

At 22, in 1999, she finally decided to leave and pursue a college education.

“I was just really unhappy,” she said. [But] even at the time, I was like, maybe I’ll come back.”

Jones’ parents (by now disillusioned with the group) supported her decision and she moved in with her mother’s sister in California, attending community college before getting a scholarship to Georgetown in 2002 and graduating from law school in 2008. She started her own firm and consulting business in 2018.

When she first got out of the group, she said she found herself getting pressured into sex she didn’t want because, she explained, “I didn’t think I could refuse.”

But today, she said she has a loving boyfriend and “I’m very comfortable with my sexuality. That is definitely a part of [my] healing.”

Her parents and siblings have since left the group as well. Her mom and dad (now divorced) have apologized for the trauma that they put her through. (Her parents never sexually abused her themselves.)

“I did, of course, experience anger [at them],” Jones said. “I was like, ‘How could you let these things happen?’ ”

But “I understand how people can be genuinely and deeply deceived. It doesn’t change that the action is wrong or a violation, but it does change how I perceive it.” She said she wrote “Sex Cult Nun” to give hope to those from similar backgrounds to stand up for themselves.

“I hope we can make a cultural shift around some of these areas of abuse and manipulation — women’s rights and children’s rights,” she said. “I shine a light on it from my personal experiences in this cult, but these topics are relevant to everybody.”

I grew up like a little nun, except there was a lot of sex involved! — Faith Jones