Oct 6, 2023

Book review: Doomsday cult memoir tracks being 'blinded by faith' but seeking the light

Perry Bulwer’s memoir offers innumerable revelations and the price paid for blind faith

Brett Josef Grubisic
Vancouver Sun
October 6, 2023


Misguided: My Jesus Freak Life In a Doomsday Cult
Perry Bulwer | New Star Books
320 pages

Without a glance at the fine print (or, for that matter, even bothering with the publisher’s description), I jumped at the chance to read and then write about Perry Bulwer’s Misguided.

Misguided: My Jesus Freak Life In a Doomsday Cult

The book’s vibrant jacket — a smiling long-haired ‘70s dude in an ascot who’s strumming an acoustic guitar, that tantalizing subtitle, My Jesus Freak Life In a Doomsday Cult — inspired me to jump to the conclusion that I’d be amused by material David Sedaris might have concocted after he made a wrong turn into a brief residence at a commune.

Misguided’s not that, it really isn’t. Bulwer’s not a humorist, for one, and irreverent witticisms don’t appear on his pages. Nor does he make light of the damaging events of his past.

Informative and fascinating, the memoir is disturbing and not a little saddening. Bulwer’s well-intended “cautionary tale” recounts a dedicated search for meaning and a promised land that led him to a confining place of falsehood and lasting psychological harm.

Broken, impoverished, licking his wounds, and living in reclusive solitude at the end of the memoir where there’s “no happy ending,” Bulwer’s account of his decades being swayed by “irrational religious dogma” is an exceptional story. How unfortunate, though, that he draws the tale from personal experiences.

Bulwer’s history begins in the early 1970s, with a large Catholic family in Port Alberni, then Vancouver Island’s primary mill town.

Eager to not follow in the family’s tradition of mill work, young Bulwer, a thoughtful if impressionable altar boy, began to question norms. After an impromptu hitchhiking trip to California, he met groovy evangelicals, “part of a wave of Jesus People who came to Canada from California.” Their promises of peace, a new path, and being “set free by the truth” enticed him. Only later would Bulwer — taking the biblical name Obil — learn they considered themselves “endtime Christian soldiers fighting a spiritual war.”

Listless and lacking in adult guidance, the 16-year old quit school, left his family, and moved into the first of many, many Children of God communes. This “teen menace” and “radical religious sect” — as a Vancouver Sun article deemed Children of God — assigned him to a new commune in Nanaimo for basic training. Bulwer did not see his family again for four years.

Bursting with startling information, the memoir chronicles Bulwer’s indoctrination and years of travel across North America and Southeast Asia.

Misguided also describes daily life and routines; and Bulwer explores the effects of toeing the line and remaining obedient to the orthodoxy of his community, where “doubts were devilish.” “It narrowed my worldview, closed my mind, and broke my will,” he summarizes.

The portrait of the self-described “God’s final endgame prophet,” Children of God founder David Berg, a.k.a. Moses, is likewise remarkable. The man’s history as well as his beliefs and claims are never short of astonishing.

In voluminous writings, called Mo Letters — that covered everything from vaccines and homosexuality to masturbation and Ronald Reagan — he both addressed and attracted followers. Letters included 40 Days and a prediction that the U.S. would be destroyed the Kohoutek comet in 1973, Revolutionary Sex (which celebrates sex, including polygamy and child marriage, but labelled male homosexuality, abortion, and birth control contrary to God), and The Little Flirty Fishy, where Berg approved of prostitution in the name of religious gain.

In hundreds of communes, converts “litnessed” on street corners, asking donations for Children of God pamphlets; all communes tithed income to Berg and his management.

The man — autocratic, paranoid, capricious, punitive, and somehow charismatic, too — proclaimed himself to be clairvoyant and a visitor to the heavenly realm, which he believed was inside the moon; he also had a direct line to God.

He preached that he’d send messages to a wicked world and point to specific events with biblical significance. After the appearance of the Antichrist in Jerusalem, Jesus would return in 1993. His “chosen cadre” would then frolic in paradise for the next 1,000 years.

Needless to say, Bulwer observes, Berg was a “master manipulator.”

Later renamed Mike — after Michael, the archangel named in Revelation — Bulwer continued to work overseas. After a spiritual crisis in 1977, he returned home as “a high-school dropout with no work history, money, possessions or plans.”

Bulwer quit his mill job before his first shift ended and turned to “drinks and drugs.” Finding the “real world” difficult he soon learned the autocratic and paranoid Children of God had rebranded itself as tolerant, inclusive, and sexually progressive Family of Love, albeit still apocalyptic and advocating exorcisms: Reagan and Mount St. Helens proved to Berg that “the end is coming, & it’s getting might close!”

Unfulfilled, sad, lonely, and fearful in 1991 Bulwer returned to Port Alberni, done with the “strangeness of (his) Jesus-freak life” and a stranger to his own homeland. Despite plans and considerable efforts, breakdowns, rebounds, and acceptance of his brokenness ensued.

Documenting a hard-won release from bondage, Bulwer’s memoir offers innumerable revelations and the price paid for blind faith.

Salt Spring Island resident Brett Josef Grubisic is the author of five novels, including My Two-Faced Luck and The Age of Cities.



https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/books/review-misguided-my-jesus-freak-life-doomsday-cult

 

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