“…and I will make you fishers of men.”
Up for some Flirty Fishing, anyone?
Ouch, where exactly did the point of that fish hook go?
It seems that the religious organization (“cult”, to its detractors, but then every small marginal religion is a cult to its detractors) known as “The Children of God” or “The Family” used to practice a modern form of temple prostitution, both to gain new adherents and to earn revenue for the organization. They called this practice “Flirty Fishing”:
Flirty Fishing (FFing) was a form of religious prostitution practiced by the Children of God/The Family cult from 1974 until it was officially discontinued in 1987 (due, in part, to the AIDS scare). Its etymology can be traced to Matthew 4:19 where Jesus says “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
Flirty Fishing was a subset of The Family’s love bombing activities and involved the use of sexual attraction and intercourse to win converts and favors. Female members were told to be “God’s whores” and “hookers for Jesus”, and soon after its launch as a method of witnessing, sex was given to complete strangers in combination with a request for a “donation”, or for a required fee in line with Escort Servicing (ESing) or freelance ESing.
There’s nothing new about fishing for converts using loving, available women as bait. But these people didn’t shrink from their metaphor:
Ouch, again. The text is explicit about this piercing business:
Art thou willing to become my bait? Then yield thyself therefore to be pierced through by many sorrows!
For the bait is placed again and again on the hook and pierced many times ere it is finally devoured, that it may catch many for my kingdom!
The bait is taken:
Make no mistake, though; this was not a joyous nor a sex-positive operation. Dig the text from the tract (my emphasis added):
“Art thou willing to kiss many with My kiss of life? Through thy death to thyself thou shalt bring life to many that would devour thee and feast upon thy flesh. You flirt to entice them that they may be caught!”
There are a great many more of these well-illustrated True Komix tracts on various subjects — apparently tract sales were another source of revenue — and sexual imagery was prevalent, and often very attractively presented:
But the whole sex / piercing / death theme is never very far away:
Did I say “Ouch” yet?
Given that we live in a world where popular religions are either actively hostile to sex (the sex people actually have all the time, I mean, not the limited subset involving marriage and procreation), or are (at best) tolerant of it, it’s a bit mind-warping to find religious advertising that makes graphic use of sexual imagery. Doubtless they got a lot of attention for themselves using these seductive tactics. But I think the “big-nail-driven-into-her-pussy” image says all we really need to know about the role of women in that church. Ugh.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=1844
I find the whole Children of God thing very uncomfortable. On the one hand, I’m all for a progressive attitude to sexuality, where people aren’t ashamed or hung-up about sex – especially within (normally repressive) religion.
But on the other hand, the British TV broadcaster Channel 4 made a documentary (from an award winning series) about the Children of God, which showed the endemic child abuse and incest that was ritually performed as part of their religious philosophy. After watching it, I was extremely disturbed and continue to be so: ‘cult’ or not, this seems to be abuse masquerading as religion, and the people who suffered as a result, were the most vulnerable – ie. the children.
I don’t want to fill Erosblog with propaganda Bacchus, but I do think this documentary is worth a look, so if you’re interested, I think it can be viewed here:
http://www.xfam...Story
And there’s also a website run by the abuse survivors, with a lot of background information about how Children of God worked:
http://www.movi...t.asp
Finally, great post: not many people would highlight the (often subjugated) role of women in religion, I applaud you for doing so.
On the one hand, that’s deeply disturbing.
On the other, i love the artwork. Taken out of context it’s just bizarre and confusing.
The Girl, thanks for your comment, with its useful-sounding links and carefully neutral presentation thereof.
However, I want to warn other potential commenters that this thread will not become a forum to discuss the possible cult-ness of the Children of God, nor events of abuse attributed to them.
The reason is simple. Every small religion has enemies, usually very noisy ones. And those enemies will tend to say anything that has sufficient potential to be hurtful.
When the small religion in question has unusual sexual practices, allegations of sexual abuse are standard. The label of “child abuser”, especially, is a very powerful label with which to attack one’s enemies.
It’s not so very long ago that today’s respected Christian sects were accusing each other, or the Jews, of ritual child abuse, and as for practitioners of pagan ways, they were routinely accused of stealing, raping and eating babies. We tend to scoff — rightly — at these ancient accusations, because they are so laughable. But oddly, we tend to believe the fresher ones, despite the ancient history of using child abuse allegations to smear sexually dissident religionists and justify burning them at the stake.
Right now in the United States we’re going through one of our periodic spasms of demonizing dissident Mormonish sects of polygamists. Allegations of rape and abuse are rampant, and it’s very difficult to separate truth from falsehood. But the language of the witch hunt is very hard to miss, and it always makes me nervous, if not reflexively sympathetic to the party being hunted. I have too many pagan friends to take this sort of thing lightly.
Which is, ultimately, why we’re not going to have that discussion here. I know nothing about the Children of God. But I know enough to know that however horrible they may be, there are folks willing to lie and say they are worse than that. Having no ability to discern between fair criticism and demonizing witch hunt, and having a palpable distaste (to put it mildly) for witch hunts, I’m not going to condone the publication of anything here that could potentially be the product of witch hunt, even if it’s being repeated or linked to in good will by folks who also don’t know whether it’s real or demonization.
And that, The Girl, is why I hesitated before allowing your post through moderation. Ultimately I decided it was worth raising the red flag and giving folks the heads up that they might want to Google further before saying “cool, a sex religion”. But that’s about as far as I’m willing to go; this is just not a good forum for that sort of discussion.
It would appear that the crux of the issue here (sorry for the pun) is choice, and along with that, equality. Involuntary subjugation, whether within the Children of God, the polygamist communities of northern Arizona or the People’s Temple is the very serious problem and question at hand. There are really no easy answers.
To be more precise, the question of involuntary subjugation and whether it’s a problem in any of these minority religions is not the question at hand, because I’m specifically declaring it off limits on this blog. I don’t have any information or insight on the subject, nor any desire to moderate the heated debate that always results when this comes up in open internet fora.
Sorry–I truly didn’t mean to offend! I enjoy your blog and certainly did not intend to cause a problem–
:::back to lurk mode:::
None taken Jefiner, no worries. Just wanted to be clear, since you were talking about “the issue” right after I’d rather pedantically taken it off the table.
I met one of these girls in London in the late ’70s. I was cycling home in the rush hour along a busy main road and had to stop at some lights. A very smart girl in a business suit with long dark hair came up to me and said: ‘Are you interested in the love of God? And I mean LOVE!’ With that she opened her jacket so that only I could see inside.
I was outraged – for half a mile, and since then wondered what it would have been like. ‘All the most interestng questions are theological ones’.
When I was 11 or 12, I met a Children of God couple in the Paris metro. This was the seventies. They were beautiful and long-haired and friendly and American and they gave me very nice comic books about their group. The encounter was strange but pleasant and easy-going. I was surprised that my parents looked a bit upset when I got home and showed them the comics. I had no further contact with the Children of God. To this day I can’t convince myself that they weren’t nice people. They were certainly very attractive!
I am scared, repulsed and confused all at once by this!
I wonder when the killings would have began, if they were not stopped. When cults get pushed against the wall, out comes the tainted Kool-Aid!
Tut-tut, Liras. Please see comment #3.
A cult is just a religion that needs better PR people.