Flor Edwards was born and raised in the apocalyptic sex cult 'The Children of God'. She spent her entire childhood knowing only what the cult leader had told her, her parents, and her group, including 'God's warning of a 1993 apocalypse', leading her to live every day preparing to die at 12 years old.
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00:00Where would we be without love?
00:04How many children do you have, Fiona?
00:06The apocalypse was going to happen when the world was going to burn up into oblivion
00:10and only people who were saved would go up to heaven
00:13and everyone else would either stay in purgatory or go to hell.
00:16So it was our job to offer every single person on earth salvation.
00:20Love is going to conquer the world.
00:23I have seven.
00:24Seven children.
00:25Love's going to conquer the world.
00:27Nobody joins a cult.
00:29Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know what?
00:31I'm going to join this cult.
00:32No one even knew it was a cult until way later.
00:35I believe it.
00:36I believe it.
00:37I believe it.
00:38I believe it.
00:39I believe it.
00:40Love's going to conquer the world.
00:54My name is Flora Edwards and I grew up in the apocalyptic cult known as the Children of God.
00:58The Children of God was a group that started on the shores of Huntington Beach.
01:06I always say it had very humble beginnings.
01:11Father David was the leader.
01:12He was the son of an evangelist preacher.
01:15And he came out to California and wanted to give the young people something to live for.
01:21And it just was a bunch of young people during the 1960s trying to get off of drugs and as they put it high on Jesus.
01:28I always point out the three main teachings of the Children of God.
01:32One, it was apocalyptic.
01:34So they believed that the world was going to end.
01:37The date for the end was 1993.
01:40The second one was that he believed that the West was evil.
01:44And the third belief, he sort of wanted to adopt this new belief system that sex was a part of God's love.
01:50So he had some very controversial beliefs around sex and the body.
02:04People always want to know how did it turn from something that was good and innocent to something that was actually quite dark.
02:14My answer to that is the adults had to find a way to control the children because we weren't there on our own free will.
02:21They were raising us to basically save the world.
02:34There were a lot of reports of incest within the group or encouraging children to have sex with other children.
02:42There were incidents where even within Father David's own family, incest,
02:48he had this conflict between his commitment to serve God and his sexual desire.
02:56He had drinking problems. He was a sex addict, narcissist, just all the different things that come with the cult leader.
03:03He was also very charismatic. He was also very intelligent, very brilliant.
03:07He would not have been able to gather such a large group of people if he didn't have some sort of enticing quality to him.
03:18Leaving the cult was very difficult because we had been completely cut off from the world.
03:22My parents had no education, no money. Everyone inside was terrified to leave.
03:27It's like they stay and have this community of people or they leave and die basically.
03:33And a lot of them actually, they ended up committing suicide when they left.
03:36I did realize that there was tremendous beauty in my childhood.
03:46People always want like a sad sob story.
03:49There was awful things that went on, but this was my story to tell.
03:54All the day is hell.
03:57Oh
04:01To begin with.
04:05How did I have this