When the books were finally ready, my father left my six-months-pregnant mother behind in Hong Kong to travel to Tenerife to bring the printed copies to his father.
Around this time, Moses David decided to introduce FFing to the rank-and-file disciples, now that he had tested the model on a small scale for a few years. To prepare his disciples for this new revelation, over the previous year, Grandpa had been incorporating more and more explicit sexual material into his Letters. In 1976, Grandpa published a twenty-three-letter series titled King Arthur’s Knights, about Mama Maria’s escapades in London. The FFing Mo Letters came in quick succession, describing and justifying this new ministry and touting its success. Not everyone was immediately on board; some of the leaders and disciples, especially those who were already happily married, were reluctant to participate. But for the most part, followers were eager to follow Grandpa’s edict, convinced he was speaking God’s message for a new day.
AUTHORITIES MAKE PROSTITUTION ARRESTS
However, not long after he went public to the Family with his revelation, a photographer who had gone undercover sold a photograph of the End-Time Prophet posing with some of his Flirty Fishers to the West German magazine Stern, and they opted to feature it on their cover. Time magazine followed suit, publishing the photo alongside a feature article entitled “Tracking the Children of God” in its August 22, 1977, edition.
Authorities in Tenerife acted swiftly, arresting a handful of the women from Moses David’s home and charging them with prostitution. Everyone not arrested in the sweep, including my father and Esther, who had just arrived for their visit, hightailed it out of the country. The police were looking for Moses David to arrest him as a pimp, but he and Maria escaped the island with Davidito and eventually formed their new Home in Barcelona.
After nearly six months in Europe, my father finally returned to Hong Kong, where I, at three months old, was living with my mother and a small team of disciples in a high-rise apartment building. My father insisted Esther and the kids join him and my mother in Hong Kong. Fearing she might lose her children and place if she disobeyed, Esther joined us there a few months later, and not long after my first birthday, my six siblings arrived with their nanny. For the first time, my father and his two wives and all his children were living together under one roof.
THE RNR BOMB—GRANDPA FIRES ALL THE LEADERS
To house his ten-person family (plus helpers) on a small income, my father moved us to the nearby Portuguese colony of Macau in 1978. Just as everyone was settling in, Moses David sent out a shocking order for the “Re-Organisation, [sic] Nationalisation [sic] Revolution,” or RNR. In a Mo Letter, REBIRTHDAY!, published on his birthday, February 18, 1978, Moses David fired three hundred of the top leaders, including the Royal Family, his children and Mother Eve. He declared that the Children of God’s leadership, or “government,” as he called it, had “become so complicated with such a tangled web of officers and so top-heavy with bureaucracy that it could hardly move and get the job done.”
He was tired of the leaders dragging their feet in implementing his decrees. “MANY A DEMOCRACY HAS FAILED and ended in wrangling confusion, corruption and economic collapse, necessitating a military or political coup by a strong man fed up with it all!” he wrote.
The Children of God had started with the very strict, even abusive militaristic “training” period at the Ranch in 1970, designed to make all but the most die-hard disciples leave, and that same dictatorial leadership and culture had continued during the pioneering of Europe and other countries. But the disciples were ready to implode, prompting the Prophet to loosen the reins of strict control and unquestioning obedience for a time with his reorganization decree. He told the Homes they could hold elections for the new local leaders.
He used this opportunity to officially disband the Children of God and create distance from the ongoing allegations of sexual and financial illegality. He told everyone to call themselves the Family of Love, which would eventually be shortened to the Family.
Although my father was no longer considered a top leader, he continued to work on publishing the Mo Letters in Hong Kong, an important, if narrower, sphere of influence. But many of the old leadership who had lost their privileged positions, including Mother Eve, left the Family. For years, Mother Eve had been focusing on her own team of disciples based in southern France, so she, her helper Steven, and a few other disciples went to Houston, Texas, and started a more traditional church ministry. She continued to receive money from Moses David for years and never publicly condemned him.
For the next several years, there was no real leadership. Moses David continued to direct his followers through the Family News, a monthly compilation of members’ testimonies and tips, and Mo Letters, but disciples could pioneer and do what they wanted and go where they had the faith for without asking for permission. Some even started taking System jobs to earn money, which was easier than the constant fundraising on the streets and knocking on doors for donations. The freedom was a welcome relief for the disciples, who, without birth control, had been forming large families.
Despite my father submitting to the demotions and eagerly jumping on board with FFing and Moses David’s new revelations, the storm was not over.
MY PARENTS’ DISMISSAL AND HUMILIATION
At Christmas in 1980, without warning, Esther was rebuked in a public Mo Letter. She had been accused by members of a Home she visited in the Philippines of stating that Grandpa and my father approved of pornographic movies. To this day, she claims she still has never seen a porno film and never said anything of the sort. But under public threat of excommunication and losing her children, she could not defend herself; her only hope was to subjugate herself completely.
This began a series of a dozen Mo Letters called the Prodigal Prodigies, which rebuked my father for not keeping Esther under control and for his own independence and disobedience. Hosea was running a printing business out of Hong Kong, where he printed books for System clients, against his father’s instructions, as well as the Family Mo Books. My father, like Esther, had to write a public confession of his wrongdoing and apology, which was printed with Moses David’s and Maria’s commentary.
This public disgrace of my father seemed to justify Moses David’s decision to remove him from top leadership in the RNR, despite his continued loyalty, and to set up a new Royal Family with Davidito and Maria.