Our Stories: Escape From Faith Assembly - With Sara Rundell

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org. And with me I have my very special guest, Sarah Rundell, former member of Faith Assembly.

Sarah, it's good to have you. We have Chino and I have explored all things Hobart Freeman and all things Faith Assembly. And we've had either one or two guests now who are from the Faith Assembly called.

And it's interesting to get different perspectives because what I have found with all of these groups is that the way in which the group think works, one person's perspective of the group is entirely different in many cases as another person's perspective.

So I'm very glad to get you on here and to share your story. So maybe you could just start by telling everybody a little bit about yourself. Thank you, John. And it's really a pleasure to be here as so many in the Faith Assembly church who grew up in a large family. There are nine kids in my family.

And it can be hard to get a word and edge-wise. So it's really an honor and a pleasure to have perhaps an hour where I can tell my version of the story here without massive interruptions.

So you can imagine what the dinner table was like for the nine of us at our parents. Yeah, as John said, I actually grew up in the Faith Assembly church, which is now, of course, commonly referred to as a cult.

I was actually basically born into the church. My parents grew up in Massachusetts. My parents were actually heading to California. My dad wanted to attend seminary there. And they had heard some of the teachings of Faith Assembly and they had a friend who attended Faith Assembly.

And so they stopped in Indiana to visit the church. And the way my grandmother in Massachusetts told it, all of a sudden she started getting letters from my mother in Indiana. She said, what's he melda?

He melded Kirk off my mother doing in Indiana. She's supposed to be in California. And I talked to my parents about this later on what happened. What was it about Faith Assembly that interfered with your plans?

Because, well, obviously, I was supposed to be a California girl and I ended up being an Indiana girl. And my mother talked about the community and the fellowship that she found in the Faith Assembly church.

I guess initially before everyone had eight, nine, ten, twelve kids, before things got more and more extreme. It was a gathering of like-minded people who were searching for answers they couldn't find in common society and couldn't find.

find in other church settings and they would get together, they would break bread, they would have meals, they would share scriptures, they would debate scriptures. So for her, it was very much about community.

I asked my dad what he thought, you know, it wasn't the anointing, what was it that brought you here, drew you here, kept you here, and he said, you know, there was your mother, your older brother, and we just ran out of money.

So he stopped and he started working, they stopped in Indiana here and he started working on jobs, house painting, factory work, so forth. Now he had been the first in his family to get a degree, which I think Chino and John you talked about how that was a bit unusual in faith assembly and people over time were encouraged to not pursue the education of the world and not pursue even independent thinking at some level.

But at that time when they first joined and this would have been summer of 1978, I was on board in 1979, there was a heavy emphasis on what seemed like an intellectual life. My father thought he was getting college level Hebrew and Greek courses and so forth.

And it would spend hours studying the Greek and Hebrew texts and so he really thought this was a fantastic way to grow as a minister and thought he felt called to the ministry and as a Christian, a baby Christian newly in his walk with the Lord.

And of course over time it got increasingly more extreme. One of the main features, John I know you and Chino have talked about was this faith healing which became kind of one of the predominant features of faith assembly and perhaps in many ways it's downfall.

I was born in a hospital when I was born in 1979. My parents I guess still felt they didn't have quite the light of faith for healing. So I was born in a hospital in Goshen hospital in 1979.

My parents then had seven more children each at home, each without really trained medical attendance. The way would happen each time is you know I was a little kid and my parents would be saying, oh it's time, it's time.

And dad would call, it was one of the sisters from the church and he put a big old cot on the boil and we'd all go to bed and when I wake up in the morning there would be a new brother and sister and this just happened over and over again for many years.

My mom had nine children 15 years. So that was sort of that's how it got started and of course being born directly into the church that was the only culture that I knew. This was my everything from the day I was born that women should wear dresses and you shouldn't have TVs and you shouldn't go to doctors.

Jesus is our doctor. Ironically my dad's degree was in psychology of course shortly after joining faith assembly he threw tore up his diploma and threw it away because Jesus is our psychologist. And that of course became the driving theme of so much of our lives.

I'm actually glad that you brought that. up. We've had people come on the podcast and they have talked about how the level of community is much more attractive, I guess you'd say, in some of these call groups. I've actually had people who have told me in private, we would leave our cult group, depending on which one it was. We would leave our cult group if not for the community, because we know the moment that we leave all of our friends and family will instantly cut us off, and so we're staying here. We don't believe any of it, but we're going to stay anyway.

But one of the points that you mentioned, which I don't think anybody really has, is that whenever you're under the indoctrination of a Doomsday cult, which these, in effect, were the education, there's this need for a human to learn more, and there's a need for education, but they begin to educate themselves on things that aren't relevant to the world, but instead relevant to the cult. Now, I preface that with this caveat, there are a lot of Christians who believe that the study of Hebrew is relevant, but what I'm trying to say is the focus is so heavily emphasized with the cult indoctrination that it's a different

type of education of the Hebrew language than say what other Christians might have, but anyway, it sounds like you had a large family, you were in this, and what was it like living that life? Did you feel different from other Christians?

Absolutely, and I know, you know, you have covered this as well, but there was very much a sense that we and we only had the light, and that light kept moving, kept getting nearer or in there over time. And obviously, I was a little child. We attended the still-called mothership through, where Hobart Freeman had taught until his death in 1984. We attended there through, I want to say the late 80s, and then we attended Jeff Barnett's church, faith Christian assembly, and acting for probably two or three years, and we finished at Tim Neely's church in Goshen. So we attended these various splinter-offs over the year.

So basically, my entire childhood into my teenage years was absolutely in this unique culture, right? And in terms of education, you mentioned that, and I think the Hebrew and Greek kind of fell off over time. It just became whatever Hobart said or whatever the preacher said was just the way it was. And we did not, of course, emphasize education, at least in terms of the way you were, I might think of it, or the general American public might think of it.

So my mom did try to learn things like, you know, home canning and gardening and sewing her own clothes and those sorts of things. But I think the primary education, quite frankly, was, yes, preparing for the end times, preparing for this idea of immediate obedience of complete faith, complete mind control, emotional control. So, you know, we were, we were the elect, army of God, and we had to have this sort of mystical, magical connection to God that the general world and certainly other, even very well-intentioned Christians who didn't have a light, didn't have.

So that was everything growing up, right? That idea you should always be praying, you should always pray without CC, you should always be memorizing scripture, you should always be ready for Jesus to come back any minute.

If you talked about the future, if you talked about always, springs just around the corner if the Lord carries. And everything was if the Lord tears, if he thought he was coming back any minute.

And I absolutely grew up with that, you know, and so that was, that, there just wasn't to focus on planning for the future, certainly no insurance or sort of meaningful education or degrees, or even things like, you know, I would have loved to take in guitar lessons or something.

There just wasn't a lot of emphasis on that. There was this idea that if you were going to be good at something, it was the Lord's anointing. The voice of God speaking through you, it wasn't that you could learn a skill, build it up, and explore it over time, get better at over time.

And so our education was, as you might expect, quite minimal, right? I actually homeschooled through the eighth grade. My siblings, most of them were kind of in and out of public school, as there were more and more of us.

And as we eventually sort of loosened the strings a little, increasingly they were in public school. Through the eighth grade. And my mother had been kicked out of three high schools. She was a 60s, 70s hippie, and had eventually gotten a GED.

So, you know, she tried to teach me how to read. And then after that we worked off of self-packs, and a lot of it was just up to us to complete the sort of self-study program and mom and son of the test, and they'd get them back, and we just didn't even bother to do school one year.

So that's how little emphasis there was on education, right? So I was, I mean, I would babysit my siblings or the neighbor kids sometimes 14, 16, 18 hours a day. And so it just was not.

Education was just not a big part of our lives, and then I was going to be a godly wife and mother. So it was more important for me to know how to attend the babies, which is most of what I did, I think, when I was younger, even 7, 8, 10, 12 years old.

Yeah, the educational aspect of it was quite minimal. Yeah. I laughed and had to laugh when I was said, if should the Lord Terry, there are phrases that we said so many times. I can tell you, I still say some of them in my sleep, because we said them so often, and that was one that the Brannum cult said, if the Lord Terry's, nothing can be in the future far enough, but the Lord might come and take you away, that's how we thought.

In our education, you know, I went from church, from cult churches, from coast to coast, and there were different varying levels of the education doctrine. Some just outright would not permit it in their churches.

Others, it was just, I don't know, I don't know. I'd use the word forbidden, but it was strongly discouraged. They strongly discouraged education because if the world is going to end tomorrow, why do you need an education?

Why would you waste your money on this? Give me the pastor your money instead. That was that kind of thing. So the similarities, whenever I hear people talking from the Freeman call, it's just mind boggling.

Even right down to the loaded language, we're saying the same things. How did the Doomsday aspect of this? If the Lord Terry's, the opposite side of that is, what if the Lord doesn't, Terry?

What if tomorrow is the end of everything? Did that ever affect you in any way as you were growing up in this thing? I think that was a dominant message. I think we expected Jesus to come back any day.

We were constantly preparing for that, right? And so memorizing the Bible or praying or evidencing your connection to God and your faith by having manifested healings and so forth, that was everything in the church.

And then trying to be more holy and more pure and, you know, a women, of course, had to wear the baggy clothes and you couldn't have TV and you weren't over time increasingly. There was mockery of the media, I think, especially as words start getting out about the deaths and faith assembly.

And so eventually we weren't really supposed to have magazines, newspapers. Now I will say, I had a friend who grew up in faith assembly or branch office of it who were very limited in what they were permitted to read.

And my parents started out doing that, but we were her gracious readers, my older brother, my sister and I, and I'll just say, there's also a generational divine in my family. The three oldest grew up in faith assembly proper.

The three middle ones kind of overlaps. So they kind of grew up in faith assembly and kind of a little more out in the modern world after we left faith assembly. And then the youngest three primarily were educated in public school, maybe had, you know, by the time they were old enough to remember, maybe we had TV, we were in pants, we were more of a worldly family.

There's almost a generational divide. But for the oldest three, it was faith assembly, faith assembly, and increasingly restrictive. And my brother loved to play baseball at some point. One of the, one of the preachers, I think this was a Tim Nealey's church at that point.

Basically said, you know, you shouldn't be bringing your, your bats and balls and mits to church get together, should be about the lore, not about things of the world. Which was a big difference from when they first started.

My dad used to play basketball. He used to play games with the brothers with the preachers at faith assembly early on. And he, he'll tell you he had stopped playing with someone who's got like they cheated.

But it really got more and more like that. Or even, you know, again, Tim Nealey's church, one of the, one of the leaders there, start telling people that, that men couldn't wear t-shirts. They could only wear buttoned down shirts on Sunday.

Or, you know, it got, it just got more and more, what they call legalistic. So, you know, if people don't believe what we believe, we say they don't have a light. If they go a little more extreme, then we say they're legalistic.

That's kind of how... work in this particular type of group setting yeah exactly and it really becomes an us versus them mentality it's there aren't physical barriers around the cult but instead there's this mental barrier we dress this way the word the quote unquote world dresses this other way or you know the unbelievers and they they like to emphasize the rules to make people realize that they're different and I don't know how it was in faith assembly but I know in some of the random cult churches there were even sermons of how we how we look different you can tell work Christians because

they look different than us and so it's it's this us versus them mentality that that grows and um you know being homeschooled it's different because you don't you're not around children like this I was not homeschooled and so I would be around other kids and they would be wearing shorts and I couldn't and you know they we I was allowed to wear some of the t-shirts but some cult members weren't allowed to wear those so there was always this this mental tug of war that you were playing in your mind and so you grew up in this and you you had a set of you know had a

lifestyle that was different from the quote unquote world what was what would you say was the point where you realized that you were different you know then then those who weren't part of faith assembly I think I knew that early on I know even um in what must have been 1983 84 we moved to a new house and my dad went over was talking to some you know a retired couple up the street and he brought me with him so they did a thoughtful thing that any grandparent would do they turn their little TV onto a kids show and sat me in front of it to entertain this little child while

they got to know the new neighbor when we got home of course I had to go through deliverance now the irony is I couldn't see a darn thing on that TV because I was born extremely near-sighted negative 6.5 extremely extremely near-sighted so my entire life I had never looked a human in the eyes I couldn't see anything I couldn't see leaves I couldn't see my own hand um and I'll actually go on that story there so um after we left the church I I tried to imagine a future for myself and I had such a hard time doing it and I told my parents I have to go to public high school

well I had never you know I had I didn't know movies I didn't know pop culture I didn't know music I did not dress the way other people dressed I went to I think fashion bung and got a pair of pants that was 70% off and you know that's how I started to try to be it we have normal a normal normal clothing normal kind of life in my own and my my own way as best I could but I had to get glasses and and I had saved up money baby sting for my family for 50 cents an hour when they

could afford it and for the neighbor families at a dollar an hour and my mom drove me to the doctors and um she said he looked at her like she was such a child abuser I couldn't see I couldn't see the expression on his face but I do remember that when I picked up my first pair of class is so I'm about 15 heading into high school here. I get a little older than most high schoolers because we just didn't do school one year. I'm 15 and I remember walking into the house and putting my hand on the vanister to go downstairs and just picking up

my hand and just looking at it like right left I couldn't believe how how detailed it was how tiny it was because I'd only ever seen a blur when I looked down at my own hand.

So that was and you know growing up that way all the adults around me including my father they had these stories of miraculous healing. So when my parents got to Indiana my dad had of course good Indiana license and he failed the eye test he did his glasses I think most of his life is not all of his life as he was driving away he said no I I prayed I believed that I was healed I am healed and he went back he said I want to retake the eye test he retook it and he passed so he had been recklessly healed I grew up with those stories right

and so then there's me and I am blind as a bat I cannot read you know all the McDonald's menu I've had my little sister read it for me and and so there was always this idea that there was something wrong with me it you know was it someone confess sin was it some you know lack of faith in my part but I believed when you're a child you don't know any better than to believe I had a dream when I was a kid once that I walked on air and I walked woke up in the morning

I was in the hallway and I was like you have faith and you believe in your heart you know so I jumped up in the air thinking I'd be able to walk on air like in my dream and it didn't happen but I really believed so I jumped up again and it still didn't happen and I still couldn't walk on air and and so you think well but I believed I was it's not working and there was the same thing for my eyes right that was always any any you know and also I had you know crooked teeth

my brother had nice traits any any sort of flaw that you had was a lack of faith on your part and there's that constant way of sort of guilt and shame and what's wrong with me you know um that that's just that's just so much a part of of your childhood and you grow up in that kind of background right I have I'm close to people who were you know in the random cults we didn't have the healing doctrines to the same level people could go to the doctor they could wear eyeglasses but there was always this notion that you had stronger faith if you didn't have to and so people

would try to like I know this guy he took the eye test for the driver's license and he told me he squinted like everything to be able to pass that without his glasses because he did not want glasses on his driver's license and the funny part about that is well afterwards you you hear the story growing from that into God healed me and I didn't need them for that eye test well no man you squinted and you you you compressed your eyeball where it could see differently than you normally could and things like that you see both sides of it and then you start to understand there's

there's a little bit more to this picture than what they're telling me, but I also grew up with people who had chronic illnesses, and it's fortunate, at least in the brand of course, that you could go to the doctors, but the unfortunate side of it is the people who had the chronic illnesses, they were indoctrinated to believe that their faith was not strong enough, and it was because they had sin in their lives.

And so I can clearly remember one family member in particular, just stressing over what on earth had they done, they don't even remember the sin, that caused them to be in this chronic illness situation that they had, and they had it the whole rest of their life, I mean, they suffered the whole rest of their life.

So things like that, even though it was different with the Hobart Freeman doctrine, version of branemism, the foundation was the same, it just developed into a more extremist version of it, and all of this, you know, can be traced back to the healing revivals, there were varying levels of that doctrine that were spreading throughout the healing revivals.

What was it like, whenever you, so whenever you realize that now I have, I can see, if I have glasses, I can see what my hand looks like on both sides, what was it like coming to terms with the fact that now I'm using this medical device, these glasses, when all of my life I was told not to, did that create any awkward scenarios for you where you're trying to, trying to take a leap of faith that you didn't normally take?

At that point I had accepted it, and part of the reason I had was, so we were in Timnily's Church, I must have been around 13, and my brother broke his arm, the number 4, I guess, and the line of the children broke his arm and came downstairs, sort of cradling a snap pin out of the socket.

So we were a straight up faith healing family, a hundred percent, so my sister stepped on a rusty nail and she was a little bit afraid for her to be healed. My brother put his arms through plate glass, and he cut, you know, four years old I think, and cut very, very deeply here, wrapped it, you know, in cloth diapers, and was bleeding through them, he was bleeding so badly, we prayed for him.

He still has a nasty nasty scar, but he was healed. My dad heard his back and would crawl from his bedroom down the hallway to the bathroom. My dad's six, two, my big strong dad, just pulling himself arm over arm, you know, from his bedroom into the bathroom, but he got his healing.

That's just how we were. So my brother broke his arm, he had to clean out his socket, he must have been, I want to say around eight give or take, I have to kind of go back and do the math a bit, but so we put him on the couch, and yeah, mom did what you do for someone who's got a fever, he made him like chicken, it'll suit, but you've got a little blanket around him.

And he was there for, I want to say about a week, and everyone in the church kept calling us and saying, Lord, told me, or I had this dream, or you know, everyone was encouraging us to keep the faith, and he wasn't healed after a week.

And my parents, my dad came home from work, my mom said, no, we've got to call someone. We've to do something about this. He's not healed. And I had this absolute faith. Every time we went into that church, I looked at the, there was kind of a fence, you know, a cross-hatch fence behind the pulpit, to that little church we were attending, to Miele's church there.

And every time I went in there, I was like, this is the day, I'm going to see it clearly. Thank you Jesus. Then it just never happened. But anyway, so we're in this church, we're dealing with this broken arm. My parents actually looked up the OB-GYN who'd helped deliver me in Goshen India. They looked them up in the phone book. And they called him. Because that was the last time they'd seen a doctor, they had no idea what to do. And he told him, they'll take him to Goshen, let them know. He just now was vaccinations. They had

to put him in the adult room so he could be around the other children. And we got a cast on his arm. And I think that was kind of the end of the church for us. My parents, I don't think my mom ever went back to Tim Miele's church. I think my dad went back a couple of times. But they had been starting to tell my parents some pretty extreme things.

My mom had been married for just a few months when she was a teenager and her husband had left her. And they basically told her, you've got to leave your husband 15 years and your nine kids and go find that guy in the room. And your whole family is going to be cursed.

It was that kind of thing. So I don't know if it was, I kind of thought it was, we'd fail the test today. It would be a simple explanation there. We obviously showed that we didn't belong in that group anymore. But my dad thinks it was more legalism. I'm just didn't want anything to do with the church after that. So we kind of, at that point, stopped attending church. My family did sort of fall apart for a time as so often happens when you leave the trauma. My mom had untreated depression for a long time and she ended up hospitalized

in that period with my sister and me, you know, at home taking care of the kids by and large. And we started, you know, wearing pants and we got a TV. So by the time I got the glasses, it was an incremental step. And it didn't, I guess it didn't at that point feel so much to me, like a failure of my faith. It was just just the way it was, it's the way it needed to be.

You mentioned depression, which is another interesting thing that fascinates me to know in that I know a lot of people who were in the brand of cult that struggled with it. And I also, especially when I was leaving, I went through bouts of depression, but it seems to be widespread among these movements, especially the Doomsday cult. Were you aware of any other people who were battling depression while you were in it?

I don't know if there were others. I think my mom felt like she was a freak and everyone acted like she was a freak because you were supposed to be walking in the light, walking in the joy, refused to receive bad news. Anything comes along. Take no thought, Hobart.

I said, I'm the best one for taking no thought. My wife would be the first to tell you. You're not supposed to think about bad things, you know, whatsoever is excellent worthy of praise and got me that sort of thing. And so when you had depression, it was some failure in you. Even if you're, you know, given birth to nine kids in 15 years, you've got no support network. You've got no money. You've got no future. You're being brainwashed and taught to brainwash yourself, deny your...

feelings, deny your physical bodily needs as astonishing everyone wasn't depressed. But of course, in this church group, the solution for that was casting out demons. And so I think part of the reason why we ended up beating the Faith Assembly proper, I think it was under Steve Hill's leadership at that point in the late 80s.

So the brothers told my dad, we got to cast out this demon. We got to cast out these demons that are playing her. So I think Jim Trout, maybe Jim Mansfield, Jerry Readers, several of the brothers came over to pray for my mom.

And we kids were upstairs with sister Trout, she was kind of keeping an eye on us while they had this prayer session, that we could hear through this event in our house, we could hear these voices.

And they just got louder and louder, praying in their tongues, just like they were almost furious or terrified or something. And the way my dad tells it is, I guess voices started coming out of my mom, almost like different personalities, different people speaking out of her and making all kinds of threats and saying all sorts of terrible things and we were going to make you so miserable, you won't want to be with her.

And just saying these horrible things. And my dad says the brothers were running. They like, took off, couldn't get out of their fasteners, went running to get away from whatever was really going on here.

And I don't recall this part, my dad says after that, my mom was not capable of getting out of bed for weeks or months at a time. She was stuck in bed for a long time after that.

So that was the deliverance story, that's how we dealt with psychological needs. But my goodness, you're right though, how could anyone not be depressed? And that type of situation where there's just no positive and any, you know, you've got to keep the happy face.

You can't say anything negative, you can't say anything critically, you can't think for yourself. You can't, you know, it's just how could anyone not be depressed and dealing with some of that? Yeah. I don't think it's aired yet, but soon, within the next couple weeks, it'll come out before this one comes out.

We, Charles and I explore the deliverance ministries and we have pieced together based off of the things that Chino has in his timeline and the things we have with ours. We know where Hobart Freeman went to his deliverance training and the story that he gives is not quite, the story that Hobart Freeman gives is not quite accurate if you go back and look at it.

William Brannum towards the end of his life started a series of deliverance seminars with Gordon Lindsay and it appears based on the timeline that that's exactly where Hobart Freeman went. And then from there, it developed into this weird thing where ministers claim to be, I don't know, almost sorcerers or Harry Potter, where they can zap the demons out.

I've often thought about going back and just doing a full, full thorough investigation of how the deliverance notion started because if you go back into early Pentecostalism, it was about 1907, I think it was six or seven.

You had FF Bosworth who was William Brannum's mentor and you had John G. Lake. And you had Charles Fox Parham, the founder of Pentecostalism, they started a sect in Zion Illinois, and the sect did exactly what you're describing into this hype, into these chanting, got a woman on a table, and actually killed the woman.

They wanted to straighten her crooked broken bones, or her crooked arthritic bones, and they actually snapped several of them, and it's horrific if you understand the story of what happened there. But then it developed into, none of them went to jail, which was really odd.

That's not the only person that killed. But it developed into a theme that entered in a Pentecostalism, and what you're describing, it puts the victim into this mental state, where they're, I don't know, almost in a trance, and the things that come out of their mouth, it might seem demonic, because they have literally scared the person into a state of euphoria, and it's not a happy euphoria they're in.

It's mind-boggling that adults think that this is a good thing to happen, and it's widespread. That's also something that is shared between the Hobart Freeman cult and the Brannum cult. Fortunately, I never went through that, and I'm assuming you never had to go through that kind of deliverance, quote unquote, sorcery.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started, or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic, and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org.

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We went over to the house, and it was a mother, her husband, I think, was a truck driver. She was there with, I want to say, three or four children, a couple of them were around my age, and she would tell the kids, like, you put on the TV whatever Sarah wants, because they can't afford a TV, so she meant it very kindly and very generously.

Because they put on smurfs. And I turned the little seat around and stared back at the kitchen, back to the TV. I didn't know how to explain to her, like, I can't watch TV, demons will get inside, and you'll have to have them cast out.

Yeah, that's, and then there was also the incident at the end of Green Gables. We all read, you know, we were, like I said, we were a voracious reader. So we read the end of Green Gables, all the whole series of those books, and at some point at the faith Christian assembly level, I guess it came out that the author had dedicated one of her books to some foreign goddess, some goddess or something.

Because of that, everyone who read the end of Green Gables had to go to deliverance. But it was just my dad. So I didn't have that level of, dare I say, insanity around me, where people are screaming in tongues and, like, shaking the room, you know, having a heart attack over this.

So it was much, you know, so did I go through deliverance? Yes. Did it do much good? Perhaps not. Haha. I'm trying to picture being delivered of a smurf, and that's, it's making all of these funny thoughts in my head.

Haha. Well, I didn't have to, because I turned my back on the TV, and that poor woman, she was like, I'm so sorry, you know, it was something else you'd like to watch. Haha.

I haven't tried to convert all the neighbors, too. I'm trying to, oh, you know, if you have faith, you know, you can, you can have a black plague spit on your hands. I heard some story about this.

So black plague spit on your hand, and you won't get sick if you have enough faith. And the neighbors just look at it and be like, uh-huh. What is strange little child? Haha. Yeah.

And that's, that's another interesting point. I can recognize points of time in my childhood, where people looked at me and thought, well, that's just really odd. And for me, it, it wasn't odd, because all of the adults acted this way, all of the children acted this way, but you come in contact with somebody who doesn't know the cult theology and is not indoctrinated, and they say, this is just a little bit weird.

And many people, because it's funny to them in some cases, they don't mind saying that. But when you're a child and you come in contact with somebody who thinks you're weird, it's different for a child than an adult.

You really want to know, well, why is that weird? Why are you, why do you see me differently than yourself? And for an adult, in a cult, they see it as pride. They want to think, well, I'm, I'm different, and they see me as different, and therefore I'm holy.

And it becomes this holy through being different, which is another aspect. I don't think many people have talked much about in the podcast that I'm doing. The notion that you can become different from the world, and that the world can see you as weird, is seen as righteousness in these cults, and I'm assuming based off of what you said, that that matches 100% between brotherism and Hobart Freeman.

Yes. I'm least all right. You know, I don't think I ever heard the word or the name William Brown growing up. I think that Hobart took everything he might have learned from others and packaged it as God's word to him.

Yes. So I didn't, I had no idea of any of these sorts of links, but definitely there was that mindset and almost that arrogance. So I just knew that we had the light, we had the word.

If we cared about our neighbors, we had to convert them and get them to accept our version of Christianity and so forth. And so I tried. You know, and I've explained to the neighbor girl how she had to wear dresses to church and what have you, because you know, women shouldn't wear pants.

And when you're a child, you grow up in that. That's all you know. Even the retired couple up the street who were, he was a retired pastor, even they, they didn't have a light.

We should try to share our light with them. And so I tried to administer to him and, you know, this retired pastor up the street from me. I was trying to preach to him about the way Christianity should be and the way the light should be.

But, you know, it was, I don't think I realized how strange it was until I got, probably to high school, right? And I never looked people in the eyes. I had no idea about music or about pop culture.

I think I listened to the music a couple of times, you know, someone, a neighbor was washing a truck and had a Beatles song glaring on the, on his boom box there. And I walked by and was like, this doesn't sound so terrible.

It was really such a sin, but I rushed on because I was worried. I was sitting listening to that terrible horrible, secular music. So you get out in the world and, you know, people are dressing differently.

They're talking differently. They're interacting differently. We weren't supposed to gossip. We weren't supposed to talk about people. So it wasn't that sort of shit, you know, we just didn't have, we're supposed to talk about godly things in the Bible.

I didn't know how to interact with humans. I didn't know how to dress. I know my, I think it was my freshman year in high school. Someone came over to the table with a, like a 17 magazine, one of these, these growing magazines and I had this actor on the front.

And I read it and I said, he knew Reeves. Who is that? And it's what the 90s. He was everything in the 90s. And this girl went running from table to table, she had no, she had no reason, she had no, she had no reason, she had no, she had no reason.

There was a kid in my biology class who reached forward, cat me on the shoulder, he's like, are you a Russian spy? And people were asking where I was from and what country I was from.

I had grown up, you know, a few miles away from the high school and were assigned the end or right up the street. But I had grown up in such a limited world that I had no idea how the world worked.

And that was quite the adjustment and it continued to be, you know, I'd never looked at human in the eyes before I was 15. I didn't know how to even have a conversation, you know, we never, didn't do public speaking, didn't do education, didn't, you know, there was so much that was missing in all these gaps that I've had to film.

Probably most people who grew up with some version of this cold have to fill. But it gets goofy, it gets funny over time when you look back, she's like, no, cuter, Reeves, she's no, cuter, Reeves, or even the things like, you know, I still don't know how to swim to this day and the reason I don't know how to swim, you know, we couldn't dress in those evil, tempting bathing suits even as four or five year olds, we'd tempt God the man, I guess.

So we could wear bathing suits. So a couple of times we went to the beach that haven't been evil with all those people wearing their, you know, all those women wearing those tempting clothes.

The couple of times we went to the beach, I had to wear a long dress. So I either had an air bubble holding me up or a dead weight pulling me down. So is it anyone right never learned how to swim, you know, just those kinds of things.

You look back now like, oh my gosh, but I thought I thought it was human, it was right. And I wanted to share it with everybody. Yeah, we share a lot in common. I remember when I was in, gosh, I think I was.

sixteen years old. There was a brother from the church who rented the whole YMCA because he felt so sorry for the children not being able to do the things that other kids do. And so we're all excited. We go, well, one of the deacons shows up and you women, you have to swim in your long dress. I mean, these are women in gene skirts. These things do not float up like you're describing. They sink. And so all of the girls were having to swim with these heavy, heavy clothes. And the guys had to swim in their blue jeans.

And one guy just totally messed his face up during this because he dove in. And it's hard to swim like that. But you're talking about key new reaves. Whenever I, after we escaped and I began to deprogram and started interacting with people, I began to notice things that I'd never had picked up on about just how different I was from everybody else. The conversations they were having was using pop culture, which I defully did not understand. And it was, you know, their conversations, you had to understand it to understand what they were saying.

So I'm a little bit embarrassed to say that during the first gosh, five years, seven years, something like that, I worked from home a lot. I was a consultant. And so I watched the entire collection of TV land. And I mean, like the entire thing, I watch every series, every show back to back with the subtitles on so I could hopefully pick up on some things.

But even still today, people will have conversations. And I just have no clue what they're talking about because they grew up in a normal world. And I grew up in this abnormal world. Yes. Yeah. And that effect lingers to me. Although during COVID, I was working from home quite a bit. So I got to watch, you know, the top gun and some of those movies that everyone always referenced said that the 70s, 80s, Westerns and so forth, the Clint Eastwood Westerns kind of got caught up in some of those, some of the Alfred Hitchcock movies. So I started

to sort of fill in some of those gaps in my education. Music as well, my significant others really into 80s rock. So he's playing all these songs. Maybe I've heard and he's explaining like this is so and so on. This is Rush's journey. This is whoever it is.

Like, oh, that's what people are talking about, you know. So some of those gaps were starting to get filled in. But, you know, over time, I think those particular parts that don't matter as much. I think that the hard part that the part that continues to be such a challenge is your standards of how you should be treated and your boundaries were set so far and you were not supposed to be an individual. You're not supposed to speak up. You're supposed to buy completely into this mindset. If you even looked at your parents' scans, that

was a spirit of rebellion. So your standards for how you should be treated, your boundaries are so far over that you think you're setting good boundaries and have a healthy working relationship or whatever it might be. And eventually you realize, well, I'm kind of being walked all over here. And I don't know how to be any other way. So you really, that's the challenge, the ongoing challenge, I think, for people who grew up in this...

You're so depersonalized or dehumanized, and your expectations of how you should be treated are set so far outside a healthy range. It's hard to reset that, and that's something that I continually revisit, even in my 40s now, and I suspect that's the case of many people who've come out of this group, Faith Assembly, or the William Brandon Colt, dare I say, or other like groups.

Yeah. It's almost the same across all of the cult. You experience many of the same things, but in different ways, and so from one cult to the next, it seems like it's different because their doctrine may be different, but the framework is actually very similar across them all.

And a lot of people who they escape, the things that you and I are talking about, and we can laugh at now because we've been through it, there are other people that don't really understand how to get through it.

They struggle to get their head above water, get their footing after leaving a cult. And a lot of them desperately need therapy, and it's a widespread problem that I know a lot of therapists even contact me, and they're saying, how do we help?

How can you apply therapy to a vast number of people, and there's not really a good way? Have you, since you've left, have you experienced situations where you felt like you needed therapy or did any of the people who escaped with you, did they have to go through therapy to heal?

Certainly several people in my family, and as you might expect, we've had so many struggles with maybe abusive relationships or addictions and so forth, as people do when they grow up in terrible, terrible trauma, right, and then don't know how to deal, and don't know how to handle it.

And there were definitely a lot of things that happened, certainly in our church, but also in our home, that never should have happened. But I know my mom went through therapy, some of my siblings have, I certainly have, and in fact, I think when I started at a law firm, I was having some relationship problems, I went to a therapist.

I started talking about my childhood, and she essentially just, at some point looked at me and said, have you ever thought about having no contact with your family for a while? Because it was that level of, you know, you don't just outroll it, you don't go beyond it, still so much inside you, but I've been through a lot of therapy, I've even done the sort of EMDR for deep trauma, and that's actually what helped the most, I think, to melt that ball of tear and fear that we were all taught to carry around with us, to control

everything that we said and did. You fall one, you know, one jot or tittle short and boom, you're cut off from God forever. That's just such a founding premise of these organizations that, yeah, so I've been through a lot of therapy over the years, and the other thing is just, you know, time and space, right?

And then seeing, finding your own way in the world, and saying, okay, so I had this weird bizarre background, and you know, it creates some goofy stories and some scary stories, and it's just my background, everyone has a background, and no one has a perfect life, a perfect childhood.

I think some of those differences, kind of, maybe not quite even now, but people have different stories, different times, and there are lots. Maybe it's not a cold, but everyone has struggles. So I think some of those things tend to become just the pressure and the weight of them.

Can ease over time, therapy certainly helps. And being honest about it certainly helps. And then having your setting up some kind of different life for yourself, whether it's good relationships and my siblings have by and large managed to be good parents and good memories of society against all odds or work success at work, getting, in my case, I got degrees and had, I ended up, all right.

We're taught not to talk about ourselves, but I'm gonna say this, okay, so I graduated of our Victoria from high school, summa cum laude from college, had a full bright fellowship to Morocco and went to Harvard Law School.

So they, my path in this world came together, not easily, and it took a lot of work and a lot of therapy, but it did come together. And so having those, whatever it is, again, family ties, community ties, work, whatever it is, that gives you meaning in this world outside of the cult.

If you can find that for yourself over time, I think there is a path to a, well, we might consider a good life. Yeah, there's a couple of points that you mentioned that I'm actually really glad that you did.

I don't think these have, so many things you've said have never come up on my podcast before. The EMDR I know has, I know people that that has helped significantly, people who struggle with the, especially with PTSD from coming out of a cult.

I'm told that it is very highly effective, a really good thing. But there's a point that you mentioned that I'm hesitant, I was hesitant to bring it up, now that you mentioned it, I can.

Whenever you leave one of these cults, your connections into the cult remain and your healing is often hindered by your thoughts of the people who are still in the cult. And worse than that, sometimes the people can escape the cult and you're still deeply connected to them, but your connection to them is because of the cult.

And therefore, when you are around those people, those people remind you of the cult and it's really hard to heal. It's like they open wound scenario where you're constantly rubbing the open wound. Each time you're around this person, it reminds you of your past and it reminds you of the pain, suffering, et cetera.

And so therapists will often recommend it's separate for a period of time. Let yourself heal, then work with the other people and it's really difficult because those people should you separate yourself from them because of the way they've been indoctrinated.

They see this as a threat, suddenly you're pulling away. And the quote was in the random cults, they went out of us because they were not, they went out from us because they were not of us.

And they start to get that mindset and oh no, what have I done? Have I offended that person? But there's a healthy way to do it. You can tell the person, look, I'm going through something severe.

This is causing me pain and it's nothing against you, but my therapist says that I need to separate for a bit and it's helpful. It would be, you know, same thing if you were in, if you had a bodily injury, say, your leg and you had a, you were around a bunch of athletes who like to run.

Well, you're no longer able to run. You need to separate yourself. Some glad that you brought that up. What would be beyond that advice? What would you say to people who have left faith assembly and who are struggling to find their way?

What would you say would be good advice to help them to gain their footing? If you can find people who've been through some version of it, I've got a friend who grew up on this.

We've been able to share stories. I've got a friend who grew up in a strict version of Mormonism, right? If you can find people who've been through something similar, they may be more helpful to people who grew up in your cult or even to people in mainstream churches.

Because even, you know, I think I said it within my, within my family, there's almost a cultural divide. The youngest children grew up in a much more, quote, normal circumstances. We were attending churches that were not faith assembly or faith assembly associated.

They were in public school. So even talking to them, I find, I, it's hard to explain what the trauma is and what I'm talking about. And so they'll, they'll come back with Bible verses or with prayers or, you know, I did.

It was just a sense even talking to very well-meaning Christians who did not grow up in such extreme circumstances. So to them, the word of God is a tool for life and health and healing and not for destruction.

So that is, that's where church people tend to go and you just have to be aware of that. And just be honest with yourself, it's someone's given you from Bible verses that you when you're hurting in ways that they may not understand.

Maybe you don't go to that person anymore. And of course, that limits your options if we can go to. That is a challenge. That's a big challenge. And one that I still deal with.

And fortunately, I found people, even people who were not in anything like this, to professors and co-workers, friends who have been kind of supportive and mentoring and helped me kind of talk through things and really appreciated my stories.

But yeah, if you can find people who've been through something similar, that's helpful. EMDR, excellent, excellent because there are usually, at least in my case, and I think this is true in many cases, and this is the sort of chronic, chronic, almost abuser neglect or gaslighting or the different things that go on in these churches.

There are usually a handful of moments that really punch you in the gut and there were a couple of for me. There was one that had me curled up and involved every time I thought of it.

So that's one that I really worked with through EMDR, right? So you can find those moments and walk through them. It does take, I think it's even hard to find good therapist for this kind of things.

I don't, I think the therapist who specializes in religious treatment sometimes want to take a Bible-based approach, and that again, that alone can be traumatic. And I've got, I've got some things who won't put in a church who really haven't, you know, dealt with, haven't gotten a therapy and so forth.

It is difficult. I think even when we sometimes get together as a family, because there are a lot of things we can't talk about. Right? We can't bring it up because I have this perspective.

after this little war maybe healed. My sister has this memory of being in this horrible situation. What are we gonna do attack our parents? Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like it's, there's just a lot of things I think as a family we don't talk about.

And I did have to get away. I went off to France for a year in college. I went off to Morocco for a year. I went off to Massachusetts, went to law school. I lived in Washington DC as a paralegal.

I went off to Denver, work as an attorney there. I came back to Indiana and worked for a few years as an adult. And I was glad that I had that experience because I had been removed long enough that I was just good to reintroduce myself and re-get to know my siblings as adults and as good people.

But yeah, maybe it does take moving away. But I do think you gotta be so careful who you reach out to, especially if you go, if you've attended a church like that because you're so used to having someone else tell you what to think and how to act.

That is hard to listen to. And we could call this still small voice. That's what we'll just speak again. It's hard to listen to that voice inside you that says this isn't right for me.

That what this experience or this Bible versus this prayer, that's not what I need. It takes a lot of work to know yourself, know your own thoughts, know your own feelings and work through that.

Yeah, it's like you're taking the words out of my mouth before I can get to them. The one of the things that I recommend to people when you have escaped a religious cult and you have been, they've literally weaponized the Bible against you.

You're under religious spiritual abuse and words and phrases they've indoctrinated you to with loaded language based off of those words and phrases. Going to a Christian counselor is counterproductive in many, many cases. I actually recommend when somebody escapes a Christian cult, don't go immediately to Christian counseling and it's not that Christian counseling is bad by no means but it sometimes has the opposite effect of what you're wanting and sometimes it's better to separate yourself from it for a period of time and then once you heal once you're able to hear a Bible verse without feeling abrasive,

then that's the point at which Christian counseling can help. I am one of the people who immediately after leaving and gosh, it was probably, I don't know, five or six years. If I had gone to a Christian counselor and they were to mention a Bible verse, it was so abrasive, it would have just sent me into a state of shock and I just, I couldn't do it.

I was shell shocked. Now I'm healed to the point where I can talk about things like that but when I left I couldn't and a lot of people really struggle with that. So fully agree, separate yourself from that if you can and it's all good advice.

If you could go back in time and give yourself some advice whenever you were in this religion and now you've got the inside of an adult who's escaped, what would you tell yourself to help give yourself some encouragement?

You're doing great, you're doing fine, you know. There's this idea that anything you do is that all short is gonna cut you off from God permanently. maybe that's a little exaggerated. You're doing great, you're doing fine, and this isn't forever.

There is a world out there, there is a life out there, and there's more to this world, and there are more ways to live a good life than you know. And sometimes you just wish you could go back and give your little minutes yourself a little hug. I'm glad that you came on and that you're able to share your story with others, and hopefully give some people some help with escaping not only the Freeman Cult, but the others. So thank you very much for joining us. Oh, it's my pleasure.

And you know if there are others who want to talk to someone, it would be my honor and pleasure. I have worked through a lot. I can be a good listening ear. Don't have all the answers.

I will not quote first is that you to force you back into a bad situation. I can promise you that happy to be a support network for others who might need that as well.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for doing this, and I'm certain that our listeners are going to really enjoy it. So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org. For more information about the dark side of the NAR, you can read Weaponize Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and soon, Unautable.