The show you're about to listen to may contain themes of violence, occult activities, strong language, and other sensitive material.

With an emphasis on cult's murder and other adult matters, listener discretion is advised.

On cult leader, I strive for telling stories in a truthful matter, though press, media, and other resources cannot always be verified.

Sources can be found in the show notes. Hello and welcome back to cold leader.

I'm your cult leader, Spencer Henry, and I'm back with

Children of God Part D. Except technically by the time we left off in part one, they weren't even

calling themselves the children of God anymore. By 1978, they were the family of love.

Said it before, I'll say it again. We love a rebrand, surprise that we haven't gotten there yet, but who knows? We're heading into what year eight at this point? Maybe something, maybe a big change coming this year. Probably not, though. For them, it was supposed to be this cleaner, softer version of the group, the cult, the intentional community. But yeah, it didn't end up going that way. It was totally wrong. The rebrand actually didn't help anything. Actually, it made everything worse. Sometimes it happens, right? Rebrands can make things worse. Your favorite star, they try and make a comeback and it's just like, babe, you shouldn't have done it. Or like when a show from your childhood comes back and you're like, oh my God, this is so nostalgic, incredible. But then all these other shows start doing comebacks, right? These reboots. And you're like, eh, you probably just should have left it where it was because now you've run this thing into the ground. But yeah, it didn't help. It made things so much worse that honestly it needed its own episode.

We have to unpack this all.

Quick refresher from where we left off last week.

This rebirth basically nuked the leadership structure overnight and rebuilt it from scratch.

Chains of command got shuffled around.

Whole communities were literally broken up into smaller units,

sometimes with zero warning whatsoever. Families were reassigned, split up, and scattered across

dozens of countries, usually with no explanation beyond it being, quote unquote, God's will,

or some vague end times doomsday type of excuse. And amidst all that

chaos, a lot of people started bailing, right? Thousands left the quote unquote children of God

movement entirely. From the outside, it looked like the group was just fading out. Less press,

fewer public blowups, kind of their, their flop

era, right? Fewer clashes with law enforcement and former members. Fewer headline grabbing

scandals. And so people stopped paying attention. Very much out of sight, out of mind. But they

weren't gone. They just got quieter. More insular, and way harder to track.

...