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Sex Cult Nun

Faith Jones

4.45

Named a Best Book of 2021 by Newsweek and Recommended by People, TIME, USA Today, Real Simple, Glamour, Nylon, Bustle, Purewow, Shondaland, and more!

Educated meets The Vow in this story of liberation and self-empowerment—an inspiring true story and stranger-than-fiction cult memoir of growing up in and breaking free from the Children of God, an oppressive, extremist religious cult.

Faith Jones was raised to be part of a religious army preparing for the End Times. Growing up on an isolated farm in Macau, she prayed for hours every day and read letters of prophecy written by her grandfather, the founder of the Children of God. Tens of thousands of members strong, the cult followers looked to Faith’s grandfather as their guiding light. As such, Faith was celebrated as special and then punished doubly to remind her that she was not.

Over decades, the Children of God grew into an international organization that became notorious for its alarming sex practices and allegations of abuse and exploitation. But with indomitable grit, Faith survived, creating a world of her own—pilfering books and teaching herself high school curriculum. Finally, at age twenty-three, thirsting for knowledge and freedom, she broke away, leaving behind everything she knew to forge her own path in America.

Honest, eye-opening, uplifting, and intensely affecting, Sex Cult Nun is a must-read memoir and a complicated family story mixed with an intimate coming-of-age narrative that brings to life a hidden world that’s hypnotically alien yet unexpectedly relatable.

How does a girl raised to be a soldier for God find the courage to save herself?

An Unbelievable True Story: What it was like growing up as the granddaughter of David Brandt Berg, the controversial prophet of the notorious Children of God cult.Survival Against the Odds: How a young woman, denied a formal education, secretly taught herself a high school curriculum and planned her escape from an isolated farm in Macau.The Courage to Leave: The harrowing decision to break away at age twenty-three, leaving behind her entire family and the only world she had ever known to start over in America.Inside an Extremist Cult: An honest, eye-opening look at the infamous sex practices and exploitation within the Children of God, told from the inside.

Adult
Pages
475
First published
November 30, 2021
Language
English
Edition
Ebook

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Reviews

  • challengingemotionalreflectiveMedium-paced

    Started July 17, 2025 · Finished July 18, 2025

    Very well written and relatable though I confess to being a little let down at the end when I was like 'oh wow she's been through so much and come so far aaaaaaaand now she's a corporate lawyer who thinks copyright is part of bodily autonomy oh ok'. Ending a memoir on a tedX talk is also like. TedX talks matter to the kinds of people who watch TedX talks and absolutely nobody else. (And genuinely the copyright thing is weird! Not even in a pro-piracy way it's just a weird take out of nowhere!) Somehow this seems to be a common thing in memoirs like this as 'stuff is mostly normal for me now but I'm still kind of figuring stuff out' is obviously hard to write into a narratively satisfying conclusion. Which is fair but a tedX talk though seriously. In any case, as an account of leaving a sexually oppressive religion it was very powerful, especially the sections showing her mother struggling to process the same situations and the generational differences.