Sex, Lies, and Sermon Tape: Relationships in a Doomsday Cult

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host, minister and friend, Chino Ross, pastor and the voice of the understanding scripture and truth by Chino D Ross, YouTube channel. Chino, it's good to be back. I'll warn the audience ahead of time I'm getting over a cold or something so I'm not sure how long my voice is going to last but I do have it right now so I can. I'm glad you're over there and I'm over

here. I'm sure you are. It's not as much fun as that sounded but but you have had quite a bit of fun from what I understand. We have you know we have these episodes queued ahead of time. We've recorded I don't know how many five or six ahead and we record every week but this will go out long after this event has happened but you've received all kinds of stuff from the desk of Hobart Freeman and I'm a little excited to get into that and go through that because I'm certain you're gonna find things that researchers for years have decades have

not been able to really understand all of the keys to his kingdom are now in your hands and I'm a little excited to go through that. Yeah imagine my surprise John when I pulled up to my house it was one day last week actually I think it was the day I had to rerecord it last week and I can see sitting up on my front porch some boxes and I was expecting them someone said I've got some stuff I'm gonna send you but we live on a hay farm it's a long quarter mile driveway off the main road up our drive we set up on the top of the hill the driveway to

the house I can see that yes it it definitely did arrive and it and it was a couple of boxes and I'm supposed to get several more tomorrow which contain not photocopies not someone else's notes of Hobart sermons as he preached but Dr. Freeman's own actual sermon notes every single one of them. Wow he typed he typed a lot of his stuff he did right in the margin some of them are hand written but I just sent you one little shot of just one, I guess it's just a bottom half of one page of some notes if you'd like to show that to everyone.

So here's what it looks like. I mean, here is what we've just seen. Here's some more sermons. Hobart's got all kinds of writing in red in the margins. I will say one thing about Dr. Freeman.

He has absolutely beautiful handwriting. My handwriting is terrible. You can barely read it. Yeah, mine too. But from his letters, I used to get from him. I remember he had good handwriting, and you can definitely see that in all of his notes. I mean, he just has exquisite handwriting.

So I'll give him props for that. Most of his sermons were typed up, but there's one example here that we just saw, and I just pulled this was actually in the very top folder. There's a lot of folders in these boxes. They're all bound up. They've got rubber bands around them, and then you dig through them, and they all have titles to them. And I'm talking about his seminary classroom notes. I'm talking about when he was a professor at Grace Seminary, all the classes that he taught, his notes that he used for those classes, his notes that he used for things teaching around

the church at Faith Assembly, all of the sermons. Now if it was just, let's just say kind of an ad-lib sermon on faith or healing, he might not have that all written down in a formal piece of paper.

But all the rest of these series are definitely typed out or written now. He did a legendary series. Everyone who followed Faith Assembly will remember the series that he did about a dozen messages entitled deeper discernment and deliverance. And it was the worst psycho-babel garbage and nonsense.

I don't mind calling it that. It is absolutely ridiculous. It's all about how you could possibly have let demons into your life. He talks a lot about the child centered home, the woman run home.

He talks about the man being Dagwood who is at the bottom of the totem pole in his family and such things. But in this, what we just saw, it said, the child is happy. He's easy going at school and at home. But have you noticed over the years? I mean, he has it all in shorthand, but this is what the notes said that you have just put up. Whenever we go out to eat, sulks, moody, you have to make him get out of the car. And go in. He's not hungry. But then he runs ahead and grabs the best seat.

And then he becomes... picky about his food and then he complains and the same behavior happens when company comes over. I mean I remember this very sermon that he preached. All people at the do is go back and find these deeper deliverance and discernment sermons messages and they'll know oh I remember exactly when he gave this little story. Said if you discipline and over discipline and years of maturity if this behavior doesn't change then you are probably dealing with a spirit. Somewhere somehow through television which he has a red star by something opened the doors to the spirits. Spirit of selfishness, spirit of attention,

spirit of rebellion, spirit of torment. He said most people don't know how to cope with this. The psychologist will say it's a problem child and they'll say don't punish. Don't bribe a child. Don't punish a child but rather bribe him. Say this to the child. If you will eat your food. If you'll I'll let you stay up and watch TV whenever we get home. I'll let you have some cooks and that spirit not only remains undetected but unmolested because the spirit enjoys the TV mayhem and cooks. I grew up in a world that was controlled by evil demons. Whenever

the preacher would preach or we listen to a lot of the recordings of Branum but sometimes we hear preachers preach and they would talk about this evil world that we lived in and they would call it Satan's Eden that was the code word for. There's devils everywhere be scared man be scared and I grew up in that world and you it really impacts every aspect of your life because you feel no protection. All you're thinking about are the demons around the corner and you might accidentally catch one if you're not careful. And then to further complicate it this this is so widespread this is not just limited to

these cults. These cults have influenced even mainstream Christianity to a large degree and you can see it in the comment feeds whenever I make comments like the one I'm about to make now I'll get I'll get some hate mail for it for it but we went after leaving the cult we went to a not quote unquote normal Baptist church. I'm not gonna give the name I'll try to disconnect as much as I can but right after leaving this cult where we're trained and manipulated to be scared of everything they held this big seminar in the

gymnasium talking about exactly what you're reading talking about all of the demons and how they operate and demons can they would get required up next to the mic demons can talk to each other without you knowing it and that's how they spread what their knowledge they have I have about your innermost secrets of your life and it'll get all the way to Satan and he'll command the legions to come down and get you.

I mean, it was looking back, it's horrific that they did this to our minds, but this was after the call, and so my perception immediately after leaving was that this was a normal thing.

And that perception stayed with me for a long time, but we tried a variety of different churches, and I recommend anybody who's in one of these things, when you escape, try many different churches because that way you get the whole picture of what is Christianity rather than a one-sided view.

I started to realize that the church that we escaped from was manipulating our heads in the same way that the church that we escaped to was manipulating our heads. And then I'm like, well, what do we do now?

Or all church is evil, and that thought goes through your head, you have to be very careful. And it all comes back to exactly what you're reading from these notes, they want to scare you and think that they are the protector of all evil.

It's gonna take me a while, a long while. I'm sure to get through a Freeman's note, she just will not believe it's thousands of pages, and I've just barely begun to try to process, but I know one thing that I think I can say this up front, and I barely even opened the first two folders.

I don't think, honestly, John, I don't think I'm gonna find, I don't think I'm gonna find anything new. I don't think I'm gonna find anything surprising, simply because I've heard all the messages, and I know where he's coming from.

But if one thing you will see, I'm pretty sure in the notes, because I could tell from his teaching, and the little bit that I've looked in these folders, it's definitely true, he has his sermons crafted out, they're all in shorthand, but they're crafted out, they actually have paperclipped onto them, which newspaper article, or magazine article, he wants to reference, and then he also has where he wants to insert a joke, and then he has out beside that, listen to this, har har har, h-r-r, h-r-r-r, that's his cue to himself, tell the joke so he can get a response.

And I knew that you can tell that from listening to the tapes, but I think the people there, the poor people there, who were under this for all those years, they literally thought he was the mouthpiece of God, and these are the oracles of God being spoken, and when you can break it down, and see it from a human perspective, and when you can look at his notes, and see where he has his- little thing scribbled in and this one marked down and be sure to tell this joke. You know it just humanizes all of it. Someone said to me the other day

since we did our last podcast a new person that I talked to John said hey I noticed you rarely ever call him Dr. Freeman you call him Hobart or Freeman. And I said that's true and I said I did it on purpose not that I have a problem calling him Dr. Freeman. He has an earned THD degree an earned doctor degrees a difficult thing to get. If you've earned the degree you earned to be call doctor that I have no problem with at all. I've actually got two of my children who were two of two of my five. I have five children. Two of them had

earned doctorates. One in education and one in accounting. Now they don't insist that I call him doctor but if they did I probably would because you know you're super proud of someone especially a child of yours who's becoming a adult and has an earned doctor degree and I have a daughter-in-law who has an earned medical degree. So she's a doctor in the medical world. So I said it's not because I don't believe in calling him Dr. Freeman. I just call him Hobart or Freeman because I just want to humanizing not demonizing I just want to

humanizing that he's a man that study the Bible that came up with ideas that wrote down notes that drove the church, it preached a sermon and went back home and did it all over again just like any other minister does. He was not a prophet and he was not the mouthpiece for God. So yeah this is better than King Touch Tomb I think what has been delivered on my front porch and I really appreciate it the people out there got a lot of really good people following your podcast John and following this section of them since they're very

interested in Hobart Freeman. Well last time we were talking about corporal punishment and you know right after we did the corporal punishment one which hasn't even aired yet the child of Faith Assembly Facebook page I mean the next day had this post on there someone said my father whipped his five boys what were the results? I left home at the age of 13 and never looked back two of my brothers died of substance abuse problems my other two brothers tried raising their kids the way he did and as adults none of their kids speak to

them lesson learned it is normal to hate people who hurt you and one of the comments that someone put on really struck home because it goes back to Bruce Kinsey days and Bruce had a meeting over near Purdue University in West Lafayette Indiana this person said we went to the Lafayette body which at one time and was a converted bowling alley.

The hallway behind the lanes was the spanking room. Children were being spanked because we couldn't sit still in a three to four hour church service if you want to call what happened, spanking. So, you know, that's just unsolicited testimony that had nothing to do with our podcast because it was done before you and I ever spoke last week.

But this was a movement that was motivated by fear. They were taught through legosism at produced bondage. They thought they had discovered all the little tricks in gimmicks and shortcuts and incantations. Any hocus pocus that could bring you to a deeper walk with God, but as we continue to stress, this is just not biblical Christianity.

Biblical Christianity is based on biblical theology. It's based on biblical truth. It involves a personal walk in relationship with God. It involves a change of the inner man and this long history we have in American evangelicalism of legalisms of the holiness cults has probably done more damage than it has done good.

And maybe the ministers meant well. I think they might could look out in their congregation and maybe wish they had seen some more spirituality. But, you know, John in every church, you're gonna have all different levels in groups of people.

We all would like to be a part of something pure, quote unquote, but we're not pure. So as soon as we join it, the purity's been messed up right there. We'd like to see everybody just super spiritual and hungry for God and reading their Bible and praying and turned on to serving the Lord.

But you're just gonna have because that's just human nature and that's the nature of a local group of Christians. You're gonna have people at different stages of their walk. There were all kinds of people at all kinds of levels and there was freedom and love and joy and acceptance and excitement over what the next week and the next day was gonna bring in their Christian life.

My goodness. By the time we get to the early 80s and the new faith assembly building, I mean, everybody's in a straight jacket. Everybody marches to the same beat. They all look the same, speak the same, talk the same, act the same, dress the same and Hobart had encouraged that.

First Corinthians 1, 10 was their motto that they had up front in the building painted on the wall that there cannot be any divisions among us. We must all speak the same thing and so forth.

What Paul says in First Corinthians 1, 10. But as I said before, you have to leave that up to the Holy Spirit to bring that about. And it's an ideal situation that we were gonna...

definitely strive for, but it's not something that we are going to arrive at. This is just not the way Christianity works. So then the last thing that we talked about on the previous interview, John, was we got, I'm trying to work my way chronologically from when the child is born, you know, you spank the daylights out of him and the dads at the top and the mom and the kids are down at the bottom, then when you get five and six and eight and nine years old, this was not something I ever heard Hobart say, but it was something that another minister, if

not several other ministers tall, and that is that little boys and girls were not allowed to play together. And I asked you last time, do you know why they were not allowed to play together?

And I don't want to put you on the spot. So I'll fill in the answer because they might actually rub up against each other. And you know, we still laugh when we even hear that, don't we?

It's so messed up, man. It's messed up. Eight and nine year old children, I mean, they didn't want to touch against each other because maybe touching would lead to rubbing or something. Oh, my word, oh, my word, I remember in the Facebook group also, that's a Facebook group that has post John that go back 16, 18 years ago.

And I have read every one of those posts, some of them have as many as 50 comments and I've read every single comment more than once. And after saying what I said last week about little boys and girls, I do remember seeing comments made by adult women now who said that there was a minister or ministers that gave them the creeps back in the day that wanted them to sit on their lap or wanted to just, I don't know snuggle a little bit too much.

I mean, this isn't, I didn't say this. I'm just reporting what other adults have said, it's from their past. I'm just, and it's all public, it's on a public Facebook page. They said they gave us the creeps or they gave us the creeps and my dad didn't allow him to come back to our house anymore.

So I mean, there is something there. I don't think it was, maybe it wasn't a huge issue at faith assembly, but for someone to do this psychological projecting and be talking about little boys and girls, doing, you know, let's don't let them play together because we don't know what that might lead to.

We want to protect them. There's something there, you know, I'm not a psychiatrist. I'd like to turn this over to someone who has a specialist in this field and they could probably get to the bottom of things that we don't want to hear about.

They'd probably take one look at the whole. whole thing and say, this is just messed up, all of it's messed up. Every aspect trains you in the wrong way from parenthood to Christianity to more.

You know, in the random cults, the women, there was this doctrine that came out in the sixties that women were the root of all evil. And you mentioned that in the last episode, you're talking about Hobart, talking about how women were behind every evil deed that happened or whatever.

That was Brannemism 101. Brannem used to get in front of crowds with these papers of statistics. And I don't know where he got them. In fact, I don't think they were real statistics. I think he just made them up for the show.

But he would say, out of every crime that happens in the United States, every one of them, there's a woman behind it. We have statistics here. He would hold them up and you're like, where did you get that, man?

That's not how that works. But the doctrine was such that the women were the root of all evil. And he took it straight back to the Garden of Eden and claimed that the, like I said, the woman wasn't in the original creation, but he took it further.

I don't know if I mentioned this in the last episode. He said that women were designed by Satan, not by God, to deceive man into sex. And that's all they literally, that's all they were created for towards the end of his life.

This was a doctrine. And so, you know, I know some of the old timers that didn't agree with that and you can talk to them today, but as a, as a male growing up in it and listening to this thing and thinking that it's true, you're like, oh my gosh, they're out to get me.

I have hormones and that's how every man is that's growing up in this. And then I don't know that we had it to the level that you're talking about that the girls and the boys couldn't be together, but there were certainly some freaks among the ministers that had some weird things about the girls and the boys.

And I too question whether it was a result of the doctrines or whether they had a psychological issue or could be that there's somebody in the crowd that they know is really messed up and they're trying to, maybe they are trying to protect people, I don't know.

But the whole thing is just so odd that I think a psychologist would look at and say, well, I think to be honest, we just need like 30 or 40 padded rooms and let's just put a bunch of them in it.

Oh, yeah, I think we need to shut this religion down and, and, and scrub it all and start all over again. I don't know what parts of Hobart Freeman's views about women came from random and what parts just came from, I mean, he was a depression era child, he came from a different generation.

He was in a family of, you know, nothing but sisters and there were a lot of them. I don't really know where it all originated. But we know that there are connections between Hobart and, and, um, William, and so it does make you wonder.

I know he was listening to a lot of what random had to say. Now he never said anything as extreme as what you just said, that random said what the purpose of women was.

But the thrust of his message about male and female relationships almost started to go down that path. I mean, it was definitely heavily male dominated. And he would use verses for that and I understand that.

But even beyond the verses, it just seemed like that was something that was coming to him pretty naturally anyway. So speaking of hormones, let's graduate from eight and nine years old to now we're into the teenage years.

And this is a John Collins show, not a Howard Stern show. So we have to be very careful what we say. But hope aren't outlawed dating. And that became, you know, dating was not allowed at faith assembly.

They would just give all of these warnings. And there are warnings. I always want to say there are warnings in scripture to avoid youthful lusts and to flee fornication. And those warnings are there because we as Christian people obviously need those warnings.

And that's what God has given to us in the Bible. But the way that they would go about it, John, there's so much legislation involved and so much legalism involved that it just came to be way out of balance.

Everything, Hobart would say that he always called the invention of the automobile. That was something terrible. And he said he always called the automobile the mobile bedroom, so he was really, he was really big on things like that.

But everything that came from faith assembly was so spooky and so guilt-ridden. And so as you just said a moment ago, I mean, I'm 60, almost 66 years old. So it's a little harder at my age to put myself back when I was 16 and 17.

But what you just said is so true. Teenagers have hormones that are raging and they're supposed to be. You know, they're not raging at my age like they were raging when I was 15 and 16 and 17 years old.

And so it does no good to deny that the hormones are there, which is almost what faith assembly would do. You know, we just need to be it's, not males or females, just it's robots.

You know, we've got to deny these hormones. They wouldn't say less deny hormones, but I'm just saying the way they put pressure on the young people to stay away from each other, no dating.

You just got to wait till you get married. All of that stuff is for married couples, which is true. All of that stuff is for married couples. That's not for you teenagers now. But because of the bondage and legalism that Hobart Freeman was in himself, that he talked to the other ministers, they could not help but communicate that same message to all of these people.

And so let's just pretend you are a 17 year old boy. And without being graphic, you just have hormones. And there's a cute girl in the church. What are you supposed to do about it?

I mean, they were in a no-end situation because A, they didn't have any good, balanced, kind, fatherly, welcoming, teaching and advice. They didn't have that, but B, in its place, they had all of this legalism and all of this spooky stuff.

They had this positive thinking and confession. Let's just deny those things even exist. Let's just deny that I'm having hormonal feelings right now. But I'm gonna promise you this, it doesn't work. It's just like beating the daylights out of an eight month old child to get them to be quiet and stop crying.

Guess what, it's not gonna work. It will not work. And trying to separate these teenagers in the way in which they did to almost get them to deny what they were feeling, pretend that it doesn't exist, make them feel guilty if they do feel anything.

It is simply not going to work. There had to have been a more biblical, insane and adult way to talk about these things. And just to say, no dating, and just to say the automobile is a mobile bedroom, and just to throw those things out there and not be able to have someone, and it didn't have to be Dr. Freeman, it could have been someone else, closer to their age, someone who would be able to communicate with them those hormones that you're feeling.

Thank God you have them because we wouldn't have a human race if you didn't have hormones. You know, someone to acknowledge and affirm you're totally normal. There's nothing wrong with you, but I promise you because I know the way Hobart Freeman did everything, and I know the culture that it created, I promise you there were young men and young women, late teens early 20s, basically trying to deny reality.

That, hey, I'm a male or hey, I'm a female. You know, basically trying to deny, the reality of who they were, so afraid that if I acknowledge, like, talk to my parents or talk to a male friend of mine, if you're a male or a female, say, you know, wow, who meant my hormones? You know, I used to be 10 years old. Now I'm 17. Man, there's a big difference between those ages. And just be able to freely talk about it. You know, I'm a big believer that if you can talk about things like that with people, you take away the

the guilt and the evil and just the mystique. You know, when you're 17, John, you remember, you have no experience. You have no knowledge. You have no experience. You're dumb as a wooden spoon about everything connected to that. And you're desperate for information. You're desperate for knowledge. And here you've got this 60 plus year old guy up front, Dr. Killjoy, who is years past his father and children age. You know, he's your grandfather up there. And you've already heard all of this other stuff from him where he's taking everything away from you. And now he's

basically saying, you know, you're not allowed to be a teenager. And I know he didn't say that in so many words, but this is what comes across those, those feelings, those hormones, whatever name you want to put on them, you need to crucify the flesh. You need to deny the flesh. You need to pray more, spend more time in the Bible. Instead of someone being able to communicate to them, you're at a pivotal time in your life. Those hormones are natural. They're actually all God given. If you don't have these hormones, then you're going to bring an end to the human race because

we need those hormones. So you can do what people do when they get married and produce children. And the way it was brought across, it just needed to be done in a way where people felt normal, where young men and young women felt normal and where they just felt comfortable in their own skin. And there is a way to do that and also bring with that the message of the New Testament that we need to abstain from fleshly lust, which war against the soul. We need to flee for an occasion. We need to avoid youthful lust. I mean, those are all good teachings in the Bible. They're

therefore reason. God wants us to follow them so that our conscience isn't seared. But I just hope that our audience can understand that they're just needed to be a much, much better balance in that whole area. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started?

Or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter-rain, 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.

On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. You know, I said before that these cults have largely impacted mainstream Christianity, not all, but we experienced various similarities in some of the churches we tried.

It took me a long time to grasp this. I had to study quite a bit. I actually had to dive into studying psychology a good bit. One of the most powerful tools of manipulation by a central figure of a cult is anything that you cannot control that everybody has.

If they can turn you against that and make you think that they're the answer to it, everybody has it, and they've got this magical mixture of themselves that they can sell to the people.

The hormones being one of the biggest ones, right? Everybody, like you said, the human race would have died out. To this day, ingrained in the back of my head, is that anytime your hormones are raging or anytime you see beauty, we were taught and manipulated to merge together.

Beauty and lust. Anything that was beautiful, if you admire the beauty, you also were lusting. And so it fell into this weird category as a human male. If you go to the store and you see a beautiful woman in the line in front of you, you're going to notice the beauty.

You're a human male. You have hormones. That's the way it works. But we were so manipulated to think that was evil that I'm literally... I can remember this. I was literally becoming uncomfortable that there was a female in front of me in the line.

And this wasn't something that ended. I mean, even after leaving, it took a long time for me to get all of that out of my head. And there are many... I'm not going to go too far with this, I don't want to, but there are many cases in which there are male members of these cults who get together and discuss the problems that they face with this sort of thing.

And even among the groups, I've been actually part of that discussion. Even among the groups, they are manipulated... much that the groups are further supporting the notion in private that the cult leader is right that if you have hormones and if you see something beautiful you have sand and satan is getting into your head. So again leaving the cult we started to experience some of this to some extent and mainstream churches but it wasn't until I I can't remember what church this was at but I sat down with some guy and he was explaining the difference between beauty and lust which is

a fascinating subject if you really want to study it but he was from Europe and he started explaining in Europe you go to nude beach right and he says I grew up here and if you take one of these Pentecostal cult style people in their adolescence and put them there they will just go nuts because they don't know how to conduct themselves but any human male that grew up in that environment it's nothing to them they've you know everybody has body parts that's the way this is and there's still an attraction there's still a beauty but it's a difference between beauty and lust

and he says the beauty and he was explaining you know the he was he was a Christian minister and he was explaining the problems of lust and it is you know there are Bible passages that talk about this but also there's beauty in their Bible Bible passages that are talking about admiring the beauty and I got to thinking back of the way I was raised and I can remember entire sermons preached about how Satan's Eden was filled with beauty because Satan loves beauty and God does not and I grew up thinking this and as I'm reading the Bible again and again and cleansing this out of my head

I'm starting to notice in all these passages where God loves beauty otherwise he wouldn't have created such a beautiful world and beautiful people in it so to get that out of your head after being manipulated it's very very difficult I didn't know how this part of our interview would even come across John so I'm really glad to hear that it resonates with you you've had the you had the same experience in that in that group that you were a part of which was not a faith assembly group but you are you are so right there is beauty I was talking to someone on the phone

this week totally totally different subject it had to do with music and he said he was a musician still is he's down in Nashville right now but he had just I guess he had just found out about faith assembly and at the same time he had just had I don't know a thousand or two vinyl records printed and he realized that this because it is not a gospel tune or gospel music you know it's evil so he said I threw them all in the fire and burned them all but I told people there and it's one thing they're there's music out there that's just every other word is a black

some misword or a cuss word. I have no interest in hearing that. But there are beautiful music out there that's very romantic that may have some great, you know, the husband and wife may have some great connection to the tune or to the lyrics. But if faith assembly, that would have obviously been sin.

So it's just like what you're saying. Anything that is not following the call, you know, following it to the letter, there's something wrong with it. I don't know if you or your audience has ever heard of the book I Kissed Dating Goodbye. But this was a popular, it was a New York Times bestseller. And it came out in the late 1990s by Joshua Harris. And it came out during a period of time in the Evangelical Church where there was a movement called the Chastity Movement, where a boyfriend and girlfriend would wrap little finger around little finger and promise

to have no relations with each other until they were married. So they wouldn't kiss, they wouldn't even kiss, they wouldn't date, they wouldn't hold hands, you know, they really wouldn't do anything. And it was called the Chastity Movement. And so this came about long after faith assembly. But I think this is, this just pops up down through church history of Christians trying to figure out how do we handle this whole area. And we can't do it on a podcast obviously, but it's a valid question. How do we handle this area? And what I would suggest is we need mature

leadership in the church that can relate to the people of that age, teenagers in 20s that can instruct them. And Hobart Freeman just wasn't somebody he could do that. He had already disqualified himself as an instructor of teens and early 20s with all of his other legalisms. But my point in mentioning this book, I kiss dating goodbye, it's a really fascinating book. Not so much the book, it's where Joshua Harris is today. He was a part of that movement where, you know, everything was kind of spooky and everything was legalistic and everything was forbidden. And you know,

there's a lot of guilt involved and anything connected to hormones. And I would just recommend, not that you someone read the book, but go and read what Joshua Harris has said about his own book, you know, 25 years later. Unfortunately, you know, the man and his wife ended up divorced.

Unfortunately, Joshua Harris says, I'm no longer a Christian anymore. I don't want to have anything to do with Christianity. And it makes me sad to see that, but if you read what he has said about his own book that was a bestseller, he said it put people in all kinds of bondages. You know, it just created expectations that weren't real. It put people in bondage. It made People feel guilty, and enough on that.

People can read that for themselves. So then what do you do if you can't date? Well, you just claim a mate. That's what they were told to do. We can't date, but we can get a mate by claiming one.

So you just claim a mate. And whoa, my word, oh man, what does that lead to? I mean, dating someone, and we'll let everybody else figure out how to teach dating and how to understand that.

But the purpose of dating, or you could call it courtship, that dating seems to be too modern and too American and too promiscuous of a phrase, whatever you want to call it, that's your opportunity to get to know this person, and them to get to know you.

And I think that is very important. So just to stay in your parents' basement and claim a mate, what does that entail? What does that mean? When are they going to appear at your doorstep?

How does that happen? How does that actually transpire? So what they realized is, I need somebody like myself. So you're going to marry within the sect. Faith assembly, the mother church was big. You had a lot of prospective people out there to marry.

So what was interesting is all of the little satellite groups, they would start, when you get to 10 and 11 years old, it never crosses your mind, but you know when you're 15, and then when you're 21 and not married yet, and you're looking around your own little satellite group in New Mexico that has five members and four of them are over the age of 60, then you become very concerned, well what am I going to do about a spouse?

That brought a lot of people to faith assembly. I'm talking to someone now just really beloved brother in, let's just say in another country, and three of his siblings moved to Indiana, to faith assembly, and all three married spouses there.

And so if you couldn't get to faith assembly, and you couldn't find someone in your own satellite group, then it created a lot of travel opportunities among the satellite groups. And so the group in Alabama would go visit the group in Michigan, and the group in Massachusetts, I'm thinking of groups would go and visit the group in Virginia, and there were groups everywhere.

And these young people are looking for a potential mate, and I don't blame them, I mean you want to get married, you're looking for a potential mate. And I don't blame the fact that you're looking for someone that has your thoughts and beliefs, because normally a method is...

Mary's a Methodist and a Catholic, Mary's a Catholic, you know? The statistics are the closer you are in agreement over important matters, the better chance you're going to stay married. So I don't have any problem with that.

The problem is whenever you're a cult member and you marry another cult member, now you have two cult members and one family instead of just one. Now how are you ever going to get out of that if both of you are in?

And what we've seen too many times is one person decides to leave and the other person is going to stay a freemanite to the end and it just has produced all kinds of problems.

I can remember however a group in Minnesota, some people in that, one of the families actually came on several occasions and heard me when I was teaching and pasturing a group in Minnesota and I remember one of the little girls that they had.

Fast forward 20 something years, that young lady is a young adult and she couldn't find anybody evidently in her own group so she came down to the Shelbyville Kentucky group. And I remember this so well because I knew her as a little child in my church and whenever I found out she had come to the Shelbyville Kentucky at the call to just to welcome her you know you move from another state, you've left mom and dad, you're down here, she did end up marrying somebody in that group but the phone conversation was very telling to me, I was friendly, you know I'm an old guy compared to her but I was just saying welcome

to the great state of Kentucky, I got the cold shoulder, oh boy I could not even get a comment out of her, I got the cold shoulder and I was trying to be friendly and neighborly but I think the reason I probably got the cold shoulder is because they knew I was in a freemenite, you know I was one of these guys wandering around on the outside and I know later that same family in Minnesota, two of their daughters moved to Shelbyville Kentucky and married two brothers in one of the main families in that church.

So that's just the way you do it, you don't date, you claim a mate, you make the satellite circles or you head back to the mother ship that faith assembly and you're looking for a spouse there, can we dare move to my next point here John, oh my, it only gets worse as we go along here, so now we're married, I don't know how we got married because we can't have any feelings, no hormones, no dating, so we claim a mate and somehow God delivers one, okay now we're married and now married couples do things, however there is a there

is a pastor up front in the pulpit who is Dr. Killjoy. And so, on many occasions, and it would come out in this deeper discernment and deliverance series, which I'm telling you, is I call it psycho-babel mumbo-jumbo nonsense is what it is, but it came out and once, I think once he said it one time, then he felt comfortable saying it, you know, repeatedly, and then it became part of church doctrine, and that was a prohibition against any marital foreplay. Not going to say any more terminology wise, but can you put yourself in the position, because I have done this, as I heard these things, I

just thought, no, I never taught anything like this at all. No, no, no. Don't be saying that. Can you imagine this 24-year-old young man who's just married a 22-year old young woman, they're at faith assembly, you know, you don't know, diddly squat about the birds and bees at that time, and now your pastor has just stood up there and said, no foreplay. And they probably knew what foreplay was, but the reason that no foreplay was allowed is it might incite lust. This is your spouser married to you. You better have some kind of something going on. I mean, for goodness

sake, this is your wife. She's your wife. But they just want to prohibit and put boundaries and hedges and walls around everything. You know, John, after this was way back when you and I first started doing podcasts together, I'm going to say it was the very first phone call I got from someone who had been a member at faith assembly. They live in another state now, happily married to the same woman and they have a good life. He had been a part of faith assembly. He was in, let's just say, the construction world so that he actually worked in homes of

some of the tier one ministers there. But as soon as he got me on the phone, it was just hilarious. He said, channel, he said, I just, you know, every now and then, he's one of these people who said every now and then, I'll just Google, Faith, Assembly and Hobart Freeman to see if there's anything new. And he said, low and behold, I couldn't believe that you and John Collins had just started doing podcasts. And I mean, we had only done one or two or three, John, it was early on.

And he tracked me down, picked up the phone and called me. And these people, We have 40 to 45 years of stuff locked up inside. Just stuff. I had someone I talked to the other day, he said, I've wanted to talk to someone for 40 years.

I've tried to talk to my other Christian friends about it and they look at me like, are you nuts? Were you a cult member or what were you, you know? You can't even talk about this stuff because nobody unless you've been a part of it can even understand this foolishness that you and I keep talking about all the time.

You know, a normal person goes, what in the world are you talking about? But he said, you know, he said, when Hobart started preaching no sermons about no foreplay, it might incite lust, he said, you know, I'm a married man.

You know, 20 or 30 years old or however old he was at the time. He said, what am I supposed to do with that? He said, you know, I can't really talk to my wife about it because what does she think that I'm willing to rebel against the pastor and no foreplay, you know?

Who do I even talk to about it? So he said, I would, he said, I had some really good Christian brothers. We were all part of the same church and he said, we weren't gonna let anybody know about it, but we were gonna talk about it.

And so he said, so I asked my friends without being explicit, he said, does that mean I cannot even touch my wife? I mean, what does that mean? It's one thing to stand up there is this almighty mouthpiece of God and say no foreplay at mind and sight lust.

What do you mean by that? You gotta give the people something. They had no idea how to deal with that, except somehow anything closely related to marital relations, to sex and marriage, somehow it must be dirty, somehow it must be unclean, somehow it must be wrong.

And I really do think based on all these things I'm saying came from Dr. Freeman's ministry, there was something not right in Hobart's mind about this whole business, there was something not right in his, in his mind.

And so he's laying all of his fears and bondages in the laps of the people and just what a terrible thing it was. We've got a 60 plus zero grumpy old man with no professional training in marriage counseling and sex counseling and sex therapy, no social skills, no interpersonal skills, a hermit who'd rather live alone than ever see anybody and you're gonna let him be the authority on child rearing and dating and what happens behind closed doors in a marriage, I don't think so.

You know, I really don't wanna go too far with this one, but it does impact a marriage and it really messes things up for some. and even mechanically, and I'm not going to go too far with that at all, but if you take away some of the elements of fun mechanically, there are things that just don't work in some men.

So there's that problem, but then there's also the psychological problems that this creates for the men, and it's unbelievable. I, and I'm not going to go too far with this story either, but one of the men that I know on their wedding night, surprised the wife by saying, now what we're about to do is purely evil.

It's of, it's of the devil, but we do it because we're in this world. So let's get down and pray before we do this thing. We're about to do on our wedding night. And think of the, I mean, it's funny, and if you're, if you've never been in this, and you hear that, you're probably laughing like crazy right now.

But if you have been in this, you understand the depth of that. It just impacts every aspect of your marriage, of your life. It causes, there are studies, you can go look them up, and I'm not going to, and I'm not going to go too deep with this either, but there are studies on the way in which these types of religions warp the minds of the men who are raised in them.

Because they've been taught a different, they've been taught to be a different type of human than the one that actually exists. They've been taught that their hormones are evil, that the natural acts of recreation are evil, that the thoughts of it are purely evil. You can't even think about it.

And it just messes with your mind, and there are studies on this. There are psychological profiles of people who, who get into trouble because of this. And I look back and I'm just, for my children, I'm just so glad that I got them out of this before they could get to that level.

Yeah, so true, John, there's just so much trauma that everybody experienced. My wife and I are funny about all these things. Funny in the sense that just everything is cool. We'll be driving down the road, and I'll see her turn her head.

And I'll say, what were you looking at? She said, that guy was a really handsome man. And you know, we just laugh over because I'm the same way. I'll say, wow, that woman is just gorgeous.

This doesn't mean I want to do anything about it. It just means that is a very beautiful woman. But you have to have some kind of maturity in your relationship and no insecurity. And that's all this stuff that Hobart talk could possibly have produced, John, and everybody.

And every form and fashion is insecurity. And you're just way, way, way out of balance whenever you live your life that way. One last thing, because we have to cover this to wrap it all up, since we're talking about male, female relationships.

And that is the subject of birth control. You know, you go back, you go back years ago to the glory barn. You've got a young couple and they get married and they're all excited.

They say, let's have a baby and they have a baby. And then they have another one and you know, then they have a third one. They have three wonderful, beautiful children and Around this time two things are happening one. You're noticing just looking around you that everybody else is having a lot of children and then two You hear from the pulpit that If you try to prevent these arrows from coming into your quiver if you try to prevent these blessings and that would be sin and so Here comes down the pipe blind no birth control and it only makes sense that this is just going to be a part of

Of this whole business. So here. Let me just read this is hand-written Part of Hobart Freeman's Sermon notes whenever he dealt with his subject and see if it doesn't make the hair on the back of your neck stand up if men and or women have ever used birth control methods and devices This was an opening for Satan's control over the female reproductive organs and Even though no birth control methods are being used now deeper Deliverance is required from these birth control spirits Even though a woman has conceived and born in parentheses delivered a living or in parentheses a dead child

Her reproductive organs are still under Satan's control If not only repinitum but delivered from That could be the cause for deaths of Babies because of the use of birth control previously if not totally delivered from Give Satan the right to take the life of the baby So this was their hocus-pocus view that if you ever used not just the pill But any kind of birth control method. He said device or method Then you have opened the door for invasion of evil spirits Now he was big on the pill the pill definitely you're opening the door to evil spirits

But he just said any method or device We hasn't God given women a Natural method where they are fertile certain times of the month and certain times they aren't that's birth control right there And that's a natural form of birth control You know if God is against all birth control a woman should be able to conceive pretty much all the time But it's just not the way that it happened After Freeman passed off the scene there was another movement called the quiver full movement Quiver full have a full quiver of arrows from the book of Psalms that

Really um affected the evangelical in the charismatic church world, not connected to Hobart at all, and just saying, these are different issues, whether dating, whether any form of birth control, whether any kind of four-play in marriage. These are not new things. People have thought about these, talked about them, and people have taught against them in the past. I'm just saying here at Faith Assembly was a minister and was a church that made a big deal about all of these things, simply because he loved talking about divine order in the home, and his version of divine order versus disorder in the home

included all of these things that we have discussed. But surely adult men and women, reasonable people can look back on all this and say that ministers need to stand up the bedrooms of married couples and their personal lives, newly married, figuring each other out.

It's hard enough, John, being newly married, figuring each other out physically, spiritually, emotionally. That doesn't just happen overnight. It's hard enough to figure each other out. It's hard enough to figure out the physical stuff in your marriage just between the two of you without having some 17th century monk knocking on the door of your bedroom, wanting to come in and tell you guys what you should and shouldn't do. It's just a very tragic part of the history of Faith Assembly. You know, I said I was dreading this subject whenever we got into the last one, but

you know, it's just so wrong. You could tell in the Brandon movements by looking at the number of children which family adhered to the birth control and who did not. I can clearly remember every minister that was teaching against it the way they did it was very insidious. They would say no, no, I'm not going to tell you whether it's right or wrong to do birth control, but we know how William Brannum felt about that. So you're going to essentially, your head's going to go, well wait a minute. What did he think about that? And so people would go pour over his sermons

and try to find his notes and Brannum himself was insidious. So he manipulated people in the same way without just coming out and saying it because he would have it revolt if he were to start to do this. But the other insidious thing that they did and this was playing in the back of my head as you were talking, it's a little uncomfortable. These ministers, whenever they would start preaching in this manipulative way, they would say it wasn't so from the beginning. And every single thing that they did not want you to do, they would go it wasn't so from the beginning. And we didn't have

the critical thinking. I mean, what We're going to do man, you sit there in the pew and you say in this, well neither was your suit that you're wearing, neither was your watch. Your watch wasn't so from the beginning.

What aspect of your life can you apply this to, man? But they would say that, and they would get real slow with their words when they said it. It was just a manipulation tool.

And after having been manipulated for 37 years of my life, I can tell you that of those churches that I've mentioned that I went to. If I'm in a church and a minister starts just preaching on fire and then going, but think about the things that I'm saying.

And starts talking really slow like this. I'm going to get up at the moment he does it and I'm going to walk out, I've done it. Because I'm not going to let them toy with my head and that's the way that they do it.

And the problem is, it's not limited to the cults. So when people leave this thing and after they've been manipulated, they're really uncomfortable being manipulated again once they realize it. So they go to a church and then they find the same things happening.

Because there are bad actors in every church, every church denomination I should say. Every church denomination has bad actors and good ones. But if you experience a bad one, you're going to think, oh, this is how Christianity is.

All of it's like this. They're all manipulating me. And then those bad actors cause a person who has been manipulated all their life to suddenly just throw it all away. And I'm here to tell you that if you try several different churches, you're going to very quickly find out which ones are manipulating you and which ones are not.

And after you experience some where they're not, you look at those ones that you went to that were manipulating your head and you're thinking, what's wrong with them? Why were they doing that? If I'm having a conversation with you, Chino, and we're in the car and we're driving along, I'm wanting to impress my opinion on you, nice.

I get real slow and I talk like this. You're going to look at my like, what's wrong with you, John, are you drunk? But that's what they do from buying the pulpit, man. So like I said, I'm glad I got my children out of this.

I'm glad they don't. This subject is so weird to me that we're even having to have, as adults, we're having to have this conversation about sex. I can't believe we're doing this, but that's the way it was in these cults, man.

So I'm glad my children wasn't in it and I'm glad that you took the majority of the subject and ran with it because I don't know that I could have done it. Well, just thanks for giving me the opportunity, John.

I wanted to do it in a way that definitely was g-rated and it probably would put some smiles on people's faces out there, but also show them the reality of it and they can probably think back early in their life and remember some trauma, probably some hard discussions between husband and wife after hearing one of these messages, like, where does that leave us or what do we do?

It's all a reality, but I didn't want to spend months- months on this. Let's let's sum it all up and move on from here. So I appreciate the opportunity. Awesome. Well, I'm glad you did. 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. From more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Soon, Audible.