Manias are nothing new in America, and one that stretched from Huntington Beach to Thailand was that of The Children of God, a cult infamous for Flirty Fishing and Hookers for Jesus, which was rife with child abuse and perhaps worse. The group was the subject of “A Violent Act Jolts the Serenity of the Peace-Preaching Children of God,” a 1975 article by Jerome Doolittle of OUI, a middling vagina periodical. The cult “rebranded” itself a few years after this piece was published. The opening:

The Victory Monument in Bangkok sits in the middle of a huge traffic circle. All around the circle are bus stops. Vendors sit on the sidewalks in the heat, selling mangoes and durians and mangosteens and little pieces of broiled chicken liver spitted on bamboo slivers. People are everywhere, practically all of them Buddhists. Three are not, though. They are:

• Little John, 20 a Thai student wearing a faded-blue T-shirt decorated with a giant Levi Strauss & Co. emblem
• Gang, a four-year-old Thai boy
• Shema, an 18-year-old American girl who is braless in accordance with the precepts of her religion, which is Christianity as interpreted and amended by David Brandt Berg, 55, aka Moses David.

The three are passing out Thai translations of a brief tract called ‘You Gotta Be a Baby.’ It reads, in part: Dear Lord, please forgive me for being bad and naughty and deserving a good spanking! Thank You so much for sending Jesus, Your son, to take my spanking for me.

They are distributing the tracts on behalf of a sect called the Children of God, and the distribution process is know as litnessing– witnessing by literature. For a time there, the Children of God in Bangkok had to cool it on the litnessing, but now the hullabaloo over the murder has pretty much died down and they are back at it again, as other Children of God are doing in 100 countries all over the earth. Praise God!

In Bangkok the Children of God work out of a former noodle shop in an alley behind a movie theater. The neighborhood is not fashionable and neither is the theater. One day not long ago, to give you an idea, it was playing a winner called The Crazy Boys at the Supermarket.

The steel folding shutters of the noodle shop were almost closed, leaving just enough of a gap for someone to squeeze through. Since the murder, no one at C.O.G. headquarters has been anxious to overexpose himself. Inside were two American males, caught in the tension zone between boyhood and manhood, complexions not quite cleared up yet. Around their necks, they wore chains from which hung small metal yokes, symbols of their servitude to God. On their faces, they wore smiles- the slightly awkward smiles offered by people told to smile for the camera.

OUI magazine? They were sorry, but they hadn’t heard of it. It sounded interesting, though; the human form was beautiful, nothing to be ashamed of. (Or parts of it, at any rate. In the letters of Moses, it is written: “I don’t see anything beautiful about these crotch shots of the women sticking their fannies right under your nose.” And it is further written: “You’d rather see some beautifully draped cloth covering that uncomely part” and making her form even more attractive, than just plain corny-porny, ugly-wugly, nitty-gritty, smarty-smelly, hara-kiri crotches!”)

Perhaps I would like to stop by a little later in the day, when Gibeah would be there. Gibeah speaks for us. What hotel was I in? The Trocadero, hadn’t I said? What room number had I said? I hadn’t said, but it was 421. (Why would they want to know the room number? Did they want to visit me? With what in mind? I was nervous because of the murder.)

When I went back, it turned out that the Children of God were nervous about my motives, too.•