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them, and I respect them.
    On this first Saturday night in 2005, no agent of the state stopped Ricky at the state line. No one noticed his bloody pants on the floor and ordered him out of the car. He made it to California.
    Ricky would have gotten there sooner if he hadn’t roared past the junction of Interstate 10 and Interstate 8, missing the most direct route from Tucson to San Diego. But the avenging prophet had blood on his hands and a lot on his mind. His own Battle of Armageddon had begun, and the ghosts of his life and those of his spiritual father were already too much to take. He had missed the Interstate 8 turnoff in Casa Grande, Arizona, which just happens to be where the story begins.

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Mama Berg
    PIMA COUNTY, ARIZONA
December 1948 – Casa Grande Valley Farms
    Virginia Brandt Berg, 1885–1969.
    DAVID BERG WAS a preacher’s kid.
    His mother, Virginia Brandt Berg, was a radio evangelist and itinerant preacher. Mama Berg made her name in the Pentecostal revival that began in a little church in Los Angeles and swept across the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. Virginia rode the great revival from northern California to southern Florida, where she billed herself as the “Miracle Woman” and packed thousands into her most successful church operation—the Gospel Tabernacle of Miami.
    Virginia was a preacher’s kid herself. She was the daughter of the Reverend John Lincoln Brandt, a wealthy Methodist preacher. Brandt joined the Campbellites, a Christian restoration movement that sought a return to the perceived purity of the church described in the New Testament. The teachings of Alexander Campbell (1788–1866) and his distrust of church government inspired the movement and can be seen a century later in David Berg’s condemnation of organized Christianity, something he and his mother called “churchianity.”
    Religious purity inspired David and Virginia’s ancestors—three brothers named Adam, Isaac, and Jacob Brandt—to sail to the American colonies in 1745. They were Jews from Stuttgart, Germany, who to their parents’ horror converted to the Christian faith. Disowned by their clan, Adam, Isaac, and Jacob brought their new faith to the New World as farmers in Pennsylvania and Ohio. They were part of a Mennonite sect known as the Brethren or “the Dunkers,” so named because of their insistence on total immersion during the rite of baptism.
    John Lincoln Brandt, a descendent of Isaac Brandt, was born in 1860 in Somerset, Ohio. David Brandt Berg would later write that his grandfather “was always a fighter, too, and I guess that’s where I get a little bit of it. He was always fighting the Catholics or the Mormons, or in politics or something.”
    The Catholics burnt down his house in Toledo; the Mormons shot at him in Utah; and he was always right up in the thick of it somewhere, fighting something. But I never heard that he ever accomplished much with all that fighting. I don’t know that that’s any great advantage. I think he’d accomplished more by just loving them. But that was his way of loving them. He was trying to fight off the System that they were in and trying to keep the sheep in, and he packed the people in. He was colorful and dramatic and he really packed ’em in by the thousands in his church. He was also a gambler; he loved to gamble, and he had a stock market tickertape right in the office of his church, so he could keep up with the stock market. That’s the way he made his three million dollars, and in those days, that was worth about ten times as much as it would be today.
    So my grandfather became very rich as a result of his investments in the stock market, his books, his travels and tours. He could think of more ways of making money than a dog has fleas. It was just born in him, he was Jewish to the core. And even as a preacher he figured out ways of makin’