FAITH JONES SEX CULT NUN

Harpercollins, 400pp, £16.99

With a title like Sex Cult Nun, Faith Jones’s memoir should fly off the shelves. Marion Winik in the

Washington Post pointed out that the lurid title ‘doesn’t remotely capture the flavour of Jones’s thoughtful, carefully recounted memoir. Not to imply the book is not disturbing. There are many images you will wish you could forget, and descriptions of sexual mores and practices that call into question basic human values. But there are no nuns, and Jones’s life was anything but chaste, though not by choice.’

Jones was raised in a commune on the island of Macau, part of a cult, The Children of God, founded in 1968 by her grandfather, David Brandt Berg. As Winik puts it, ‘This was no tiny splinter group of crackpots, but rather a highly organised international group that ran for almost 50 years with some 10,000 live-in disciples in 170 countries. Its extensive, secretive bureaucratic infrastructure involved so many acronyms and neologisms that the author provides a glossary.’ Life was dictated by Brandt’s ‘Law of Love’, which encouraged incestuous relationships with children, family members and fellow cult-members that believed in the impending apocalypse. In an interview with the website

Bitchmedia, Jones, now a lawyer, was asked why she thought so many cults were apocalyptic movements. ‘Psychologically, to get people to act, you have to have a sense of urgency. An imminent threat. It’s that imminent threat of danger, attack, and catastrophe that gets people to act, oftentimes against their best interests.’