Building Character: Finding the Good in a Toxic Religion - With Bob Scott

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-brandham.org, and with me I have my very special guest, Bob Scott, former co-founder of Kansas City Fellowship and author of Some Said They Blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Bickle, the Kansas City Profits, and the International House of Prayer.

Bob, it's good to be back, and it's good to see that you have thought out. We've had a massive snowstorm that hit us, and they've closed a good bit of Louisville for the past, I don't know, two or three days, but I hear you had it even worse.

Yeah, we had the second biggest storm in the history of Kansas City, and I work with a company that does snow removal, so it pushed us to the limit and beyond, but we've tried to stay on top of it, but oh my gosh.

The problem, not only do we get a lot of snow, but the state got way behind in their plowing, so the roads for basically two days were not drivable, you know? Yeah. So fortunately for me, I have a little Hyundai Santa Cruz, which is like a little truck car hybrid, you know, kind of deal.

It's four wheel drive, so I was out driving around through all this, and I was dodging cars that had just gone sideways on the road, and people had just got out and left them there, and the plows had gone around them, and so I was like, a little bit like, you know, like a battlefield, which is navigating cars.

I don't know why people didn't stay home. Yeah, it's kind of crazy here. It's a little bit the opposite. There's a lot of people staying home except for the nuts, and the nuts are not, they're not cleaning the top of their cars, and they're showing on the news these big chunks of ice going through windshields, and I've got a four by four, so I'm good.

But I've had to help my neighbors get in their driveway because they tried to get out and got stuck. Right. But so today we have a topic that's going to make a lot of people angry, and who better to make people angry than, you know, talking to Bob Scott?

It's a two-hole-farts thing. Yeah, I know we're like those guys on the muppets that's up in the balcony Exactly and I'm getting old enough. I start to feel like that Yeah, yeah, I just did a Facebook post the other day and that's I that was my opening line the one of the characteristics of age Is you've seen you're starting to see history repeat itself? Yeah, right and and people's behaviors Decisions that are being made and you find yourself a muttering under your breath and they're done that already, you know Yeah, it's I kind of understand the whole concept of a grumpy old man

I'm getting there too, buddy Well, no because you you're watching things and you're kind of oh my gosh here we go again And you have absolutely no power to influence anything, right? And so you just sit there and you're just rolling your eyes and going okay, I'll just go back to my coffee. Yeah And watch this crash and burn and it's funny you say that because I have colleagues that So in this effort to help people who have been in a cult or help people escape and all this

Each cult has their loaded language and they become like parrots the people who are trapped in it and they don't realize that they're like this But whenever you start to work with them and they start to give you the paraded insults It's kind of funny because I was never in some of the cults that attacked me And they'll say something that's just really odd so I got to go look it up and sure enough I find out this is their loaded language for insulting a another Christian So I'll listen to it and and I'll hear it and I'll just kind of you know put aside

They were in a call that's their loaded language and I'll respond with courtesy Well, what happens is over time after you get a hundred people with the same exact insult It's human nature. You kind of get tired of it, right? So right if you watch the news One of the things you hear all the time is oh, it's talking points Yeah, right and we see that as a political thing right you know political parties have talking points People don't realize that religious groups have talking points. Yeah, right?

And what's the talking points are out? It's it's just paraded. That's why Even on my Facebook page I talk about this. I go I I struggle with echoes and I'm looking for voices right Because the vast majority of people just echo something that someone else told them when I Where my spirit or my soul gets you know like Energizes when I find somebody that's got a real voice like it somebody that's actually thought this through You know, and I mean they have understanding they've right depth. They've pondered it right and you're looking at that going

Okay, this isn't one of those flippant talking points. This is somebody how to use actually process this. And they have a very clear, and the big one is they know why. But one of the things that's interesting when you push people on their perspective is when you drill down a little bit and you ask them how they got it.

Yeah, that's no idea of how they came to that conclusion. Well, you know what, the number one answer is, well pastor said that. Yeah. Right, the number one in religious circles, the number one comeback of people's perspective is, well, my pastor said it.

Right. Or, you know, I heard it on DasedRTV. No. Something like that, right? And so what I, you know, and that's fine. I mean, I'm not being critical of that, but it's just for me and the way that I'm wired, I'm always looking for those voices, right?

Yeah. I want to be like semi in the temple who recognized in a cry of a little child in a baby, the purpose of God, right? That ability to find that authentic thing. So.

And that's why, you know, I said the grumpy men. So the, so one of the things that we fight as in doing this is you hear over and over and over the same insults and just simply the fact that it's in.

So it's hard not to become a grumpy old man. So I fight it. But, but topics like we're doing today kind of help me with that a bit. And like I said, I know we're going to make a bunch of people angry, but you asked me, could we do a podcast on talking about the good times we had in the cult?

Because, I mean, me for 10 years, I focused on the critical information, the bad. But there was good. And so it's going to make some people angry because there are true victims in the cult who truly experienced bad times who really, some of them can find no good.

But there are some of us like myself. I, I really didn't have that bad of a time up until the end. Once I began to realize that, no, this whole thing's kind of false.

And you ask questions, that's for me, that's when the bad times start when you start asking questions. Well, I became aware of it after the release of the book. You know, shockingly, I haven't actually had a lot criticism about the book.

But the two that I got, one was that I charged for it, which was kind of ignorant. Yeah. I do not understand the amount of money that it cost me to do this. Right.

It's like, I don't have deep pockets here to give this out for free, right? But the second one was really the one that was interesting to me. And what it was was people were upset because I wrote a book that was balanced and I didn't excoriate much.

Like people were coming at me going, he's a child predator. He needs to be... in prison, I can't believe you were, you know, and like they wanted me to lynch them in the book, right?

Well, I was trying to approach the whole story like a historian, right? In other words, I didn't have an agenda. I was trying to tell a story, right? I was trying to communicate what happened and then maybe give some evaluation as to why it happened, right?

But with one of the underlying themes all the way through the book is that, in my view, and again, these are my perspectives, but my perspective is that God's way has always been broken clay vessels and the grace of God.

That theme runs all the way through the historical record in the Bible. Yeah. Like there's things happening, right? At least the perception is God's at work, but then the people that he's working through are kind of broken.

So I remind people, I go, do you realize that the second generation of humanity already had a murder, right? The first family had a murder, right? People have people problems. People problems. One of my little things, I don't even know what the word is for it, is I try to explain to people, I go, if you actually read the Bible, you are looking at an R-rated movie filled with violence and sex that gets sanitized every Sunday morning all the way around the world and creates a perception in people of almost a fantasy about a lot of these, like,

in other words, the cartoon-ness that we learned, you know, the little cute cartoons we learned in Bible school, you know, and we were kids, right? Tend to hang with us all the way through adulthood, and so every one of these guys is sort of an idealized cartoon character almost.

There's a, you know what I mean? And yet, there's a mess, right? I mean, I remind people, Judah, right? Where we get the word Jews from, right? This is the patriarch of the Jews, slept with his daughter-in-law, right?

We have Abraham, right, who basically pings his wife out to Pharaoh because he's scared to death, he's going to get killed, and he gets wealthy, and then when they figure out that he's already married and God's judging him, they give him even more money and say, get out of town, right?

So the guy walks out of there, like, Bukku Bucks, right, we've got King David, right? What a mess that whole thing is. You know, how did Solomon become the king when he's not even- In the first born, can you imagine all the palace intrigue that goes on there?

Right? Then you get into the early church, Peter and Paul don't even agree what the church looks like. And whether Gentiles should even be a part of it, right? This thing's always been a mess.

Yeah. And the thing about it is, is in that mess, is where's the grace? Like where do we, is there light in here anywhere? Is there, do we see God at work even in all the broken humanity?

The thing of it is, the fantasy world that has been painted, ironically ties him to your earlier comment about people being angry about you charging for the book. When I, when I first began this journey, you're publishing on Amazon, so you're familiar with this.

Amazon requires money because it costs them to produce the book, right? There's no, there's no other choice. When I first began this, I had it as low as Amazon would go for the pricing.

Meaning I got, I think it was like a penny of book. It wasn't much. And yet Amazon charges, especially for a thick book, they're going to charge you a good amount of money. Well, people were attacking me for my penny and I began to realize, no, wait a minute, if they're going to attack for that, they really have no concept of what this is.

But it was Dr. Stephen Hassan that I had a long conversation with him on a, we were taking a trip out of country and he explained to me, John, the problem is doing what you're doing, you'll end up killing yourself.

And the reason why you're not charging is common among all of the people who are victims of cults. And I said, really? And he said, yeah, let me explain this. He said, a cult is a high demand group and they will demand much of your time, your money, your effort. They want to, they basically want to break you down.

And they do this in various ways, sometimes sleep deprivation. Well, one of the things that a cult will train you to do is that when you have something to offer as a service, the cult wants you to offer it for free.

And I stopped and I thought about what he said and good Lord, man, I can't tell you the number of times I have offered my services for free for people in the cult and vice versa. That's just the way it worked.

I never really thought about that. My time is worth money. And at the time he said it, I was having one of the best years of all of my business. My bill rate, I want to say it was either 175 or 200 an hour.

And I had expenses on top of that. So I'd have to pay all the employees. So that sounds like this fascinating number, right? But when you've got the expenses, I didn't get all of that. I got a part of it.

However, the time that I was investing in writing the book and researching, et cetera, was time that I was not billing my clients. So therefore, I can literally say this book costs me $200.

hour minus the expenses, right? And he explained all that to me and he said, John, you have to your time is worth money and the cults try to teach their people that time is actually not worth money.

And once he explained it in the terms of business, I began to understand, yeah, man, I think of the business that I could have had, had I not, had not been researching. But the cult indoctrinates you in that way, which also leads to this topic we're talking about today, the good times in the cult. When everybody is offering free services, or mostly for a year conducted, you have the sense of community that honestly, you don't find it outside of a cult.

And so when people escape, a lot of them try to either plug into a different cult and they're or they get re-victimized because they're missing that sense of community. And the community itself is much like the fantasy world you describe. It's a fantasy where everything is bliss. And if it's not bliss, we're going to ostracize whatever is creating the friction, cast them out and demonize them so that we have this utopian society. Interesting, yeah. Well, one of the things I wrote about in the book, which fascinated me, was that there was all of this focus from Mike on things high level,

hardcore, apostolic, end time. Those were the four words that I've in hindsight, I look back at and it seemed like everything he would communicate at one of those words were always throwing in, everything was pedal to the metal, all out, all in, whatever. And so all the focus was on the prophetic and prayer and going to all these meetings. What ended up happening was that when we move from St. Louis to Kansas City, Mike is sort of what it's funny is Mike's sort of a creature of habit.

And he ended up moving back or he'd grown up, which was a very rough part of town, right? So we end up basically getting two sides of a duplex. Mike and Dan were on one side and Tracey and on the other side of this duplex, right? And Mike's sister lived down the street. Well, they were drug addicts. You know, he was basically running a theft ring like they would raid semi-trucks, right? And so this whole neighborhood was filled with either prostitutes or drug addicts or it was rough, right? I mean, the police helicopters were there all the time, squad cars were in there,

right? It was really crazy, right? That's where we, that was the environment that we launched the church in. Well, then what ends up here? happening is is that and we're all young remember we're all in our 20s, you know, we all have little kids. So it's not the ideal world to raise little kids. Well, then what happened is is people either in Kansas City that are either removing Kansas City or in Kansas City getting married would go get a duplex.

And I was there was a horseshoe and then another street so I'm and I want to say there may be were 70 units I don't know for sure that but it's like there was 70 units.

Well over the course of the next couple years because the clientele moved in and out so fast. You know church people would move in there and pretty certain before you knew it we had this whole community of young families with young kids.

The units all started getting cleaned up the yards guy cleaned up things right the whole environment actually transformed over the course of about two or three years. My children to this day say that was the most enjoyable time of their life because they had hundreds of other friends like it was like this or some kids right all roaming the neighborhood and things right.

And you know what it wasn't even the focus right the whole focus was this end time hardcore high level apostolic movement we were building and this other little thing over here was just like insignificant in hindsight as I look back on it.

I think that was actually the more significant thing because people to this day have relationships that were germinated in that environment I mean lifelong friendships yeah that are 40 years old not right right that were based because we all moved in together in this really weird little we created this little pocket of goodness in the middle of it.

Out of that was what you and I were talking about a little bit earlier there was this give and take like somebody needed milk like their baby was crying go next door I got milk right I mean there was just this natural sharing carrying you know commerce moving for free between us but it's because we love and cared for one another right it was it wasn't.

In other words the thing that wasn't considered spiritual in my view was the actual spiritual thing. Well that's the irony of the cults right because the Christian cult session clarify but. Christianity is meant to be like this you're supposed to be loving of your neighbor you're supposed to be kind you're supposed to help.

You're not supposed to offer your services for free forever like like some of the cults of train but you get what I'm saying it is supposed to be a community of love. Problem, especially with the more destructive groups like I escaped, is they clarify what it means to be, quote, unquote, Christian.

In other words, we're Christians, and the other Christians are not. So that same love and that sense of community doesn't exist with the other churches. I remember this was a big deal for me.

I was still in the cult when it happened, I believe, if I remember correctly, but this massive tornado system came through here and just demolished one of the areas close to me. The cult was very quick to help the people who lost their homes who were in the cult, but not the people who weren't.

There were people that died, which is really sad. There were people who got injured and died, and the cult put out this big announcement that not a single Christian was injured in this series of tornadoes.

Well, no, man, that's not true. There were Christians who were injured, but they clarified what it meant to be Christian. In other words, the sense of community that you're describing was only for the cult, not for the outside world of Christians, but Christianity isn't just that.

Who is your neighbor? You know, the Bible passages of examples, who is your neighbor? It's not just the Christians you're supposed to be this way with. You're supposed to be loving and kind to everyone, but these groups have changed to, you know, change your mindset to where it's not like this.

And ironically, that's one of the reasons I have found in working with the support groups for the victims of a cult, whenever they first escape, they talk about this sense of, you know, never feeling like they belonged, never having a good time, never, never feeling that sense of community.

And obviously they were in it, so they felt it at one time, right? But what I have come to understand, especially for the people who just had left, when they leave, they know how they cut people off who weren't in the cult.

They know that that mental, whatever it is that makes them not see other people as human. They know that that existed while they were in it. And so that they know also when they leave, those same people are going to be just as condemning of them because they're not in that core group.

So they see this, this thing is having always existed. They've never had a good time in the cult because they remember how they were to other people. And all of this to say, and not to not to make light of the victims.

There are cult victims who truly had a bad time, don't get me wrong. But a lot of people did have a good time. They are just having trouble reconciling what happened in the shell shock that they feel when they leave, right?

Well, here's an old guy observation. So this whole concept of community, because it My view, that was sort of the essence of Jesus teaching, which was, in my view, it's real simple. It's basically Jesus understood we have a propensity towards self-centeredness and selfishness.

And through the transformation of the Holy Spirit, we become lovers of others. Like there's a transformation. Transformation of the soul is the soul of transformation. Otherwise when humans change from self-centeredness to lovers of others, the culture change is around them.

That's kind of that basic. One of the things that I, this is again, an old guy observation, every, well not every, most every spiritual movement, if we want to use that word, that believe that living in community was a higher form of Christianity, right?

In other words, they were on this mission to prove this, whatever, this way of life, all imploded.

I'm almost everywhere, because I studied them all. I traveled all of it. I went and visited the Amas, the Haderite, like all these anabaptist groups, because I was so curious about it all. But all of the sort of splinter groups that went off to try to live together, because it was a higher way, right?

They got self-righteous. And this is what I've noticed about this. They got self-righteous and arrogant, right? And eventually that sea, that leaven, that thing that was in the foundation when it started, that sort of spiritual arrogance, ended up later being the very catalyst for the thing that come tumbling down.

I could implode it internally, conflict, relational conflicts, right? What's crazy about the thing, we call it the true dupes, about that, was it was nothing. It was never organized. There was no mission from God, right?

The mission from God was over at the church, where we're praying 24 hours a day, and we're gonna bring revival in and all, right? That was where the mission was. This thing over here just happened.

Well, it lasted for years. Yeah. Because it was just natural. And so that really, you know, in hindsight, looking back at that, I'm like, this is so fascinating to me, because all the people tried to be spiritual and it ended up self-destructing, and all the people that were just being people, like loving others, ended up having this community and those relationships have continued on.

And some of these other groups, these people hate each other. What's the community, you know? They all imploded, right? They were at each other's throats, and I'm like, wow, this is really interesting, right?

The groups that tried to be something failed, and the groups that were just trying to be succeeded. Yeah, well, it's the human problem, right? You get humans together and humans have personalities. Sometimes this personalities are in conflict with one another and it turns into something that it really wasn't.

You know, you're describing the early days of the church was much like this. It was supposed to be a community. They weren't, you know, there is no Bible verse for go build this massive mega church and have all of these people come on Sunday and dress up fancy.

It wasn't like that. It was community. I'd have there 300 years later now at the beginning. Yeah, in fact, what is it? The first Thessalonians, I think it is, Paul says, we who are alive and remain.

I get, I have these moments whenever I'm in church that I just really get upset with the pastor because they take things so far out of context. That verse Paul wrote with the understanding that he was going to be raptured or Jesus was going to return while he was alive and remained while the church, while this community was alive and remained.

And if you take that out of context, you're doing an injustice to what Paul is saying here because you have to put yourself in Paul's frame of mind. Paul's frame of mind is we're a community.

We love one another. Jesus is coming back and he's coming back. Some of us are still going to be alive whenever he returns and takes the church away. If you really understand what he's saying there, but what has happened is people take that out of context and therefore, because it's taken out of context, they have rewritten the DNA of Christianity.

To mean we must have mega churches, our community now must expand to our church people. And even I've visited some of the larger churches, even in some of the larger churches that I would not consider a cult, they have a slightly cultish mindset in that their community is them.

It's not the broader community of Christians. It's this church. Well, as I remind people, we talk about church. Jesus talked about the kingdom. He didn't talk about churches. He never talked about building churches.

He talked about the kingdom of God. He talked about human beings that were transformed. I mean, if you go back, look at the sermon on the Mount. Everything he talks about, right? There's nothing in there where he's looking to start another organization, a new thing, right?

Anywhere, he doesn't set up any leadership structure other than he tells Peter something, right? But I mean, this is what we have now doesn't look anything like how it was in the beginning. It was just a way of life.

And again, part of what was driving all that was and drove it for 300 years was persecution, right? There was a very real dynamic going on where people... who were losing their lives so they needed each other.

Like this was practical, right? Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned 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. 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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Anyways, let me circle back because you still haven't answered my question. Tell me something good. Can you find something good in the midst of heresy? Can you find something good in the midst of heresy,

you know, arrogance, corruption, like in the middle of, in the midst of that whole Brannum ladder rain thing, which you and I know, it's ugly when you get underneath. But what was the good?

Was there any good that you can find out of that? Right. Yeah, I've actually, you know what I mean? I've actually put long, hard thought into this because for me, that is my way of therapy.

See, if you stay, if you leave a cult or one of these high demand groups with a mindset that I am going to forever hate everything about me, about the cult, about my past, I'm going to hate it, I'm not going to like it, and I'm going to revile that part of my life, you're going to end up to be a bitter angry person.

Good point. You have seen the way that I laugh in these podcasts. There's not a way that you can make me bitter and angry. I just not like this, right? So the way that I have learned to cope with what happened to me, there are aspects of it that are very, very painful.

And if those painful memories, if I bring them up, it's hard not to say the entire time I was in the cult was bad because you're thinking of the most painful memories. And often the people that I'm working with in support groups, whenever they talk about how bad it was in the cult, generally, they're only talking about maybe five to 10, really bad episodes of something happening, whatever it was, five instances, is of pain, right?

But I was in it for what, 37 years. So while I may have had four or five bad, really bad times in the call, 37 years of good times was outweighing that by far.

So what I've learned to do over time is I compartmentalize that. I take all of the bad things and I put those in this compartment in my memory. And I think, okay, these are my bad memories.

And I'm kind of build a wall around it. Yes, they were bad memories, but in the framework of what happened, there's a lot of reasons why those bad memories exist. And I put them off to one side and then I put the good memories on the other side.

So when I think about the cult and I think about my time in it, I try to actually focus on the better times. And you have to even do that with people. There are people who, during the last, what was it?

I wanna say, it was three months of me asking questions that it turned bad. So the faces within those three months, still for me have this burning memory of this was awful. This was the most painful thing I'd ever experienced.

And so even those people, I have to put in that little compartment, right? But I try to put just the time that they were in that mode of hatred. I put them in that compartment, but I remember all the good times I had with them.

So I did have good times. The times. So relationships would be one of the pieces of gold you could pull out of it. Like you had some good relationships. I had some very good relationships.

There are really good people in it. And I'm kind of in the same unique position as you. I know some of the people who made it very difficult for other people because I was near to the top, or my grandfather ruined the lives of people.

There's no question about it. Some of the victims of abuse have contacted me and I'm mortified to think that my grandfather did does. But I also have good memories of my grandfather. In fact, I just had this conversation with Charles who does the historical revival history podcast with me.

I worded it like this. My grandfather was the nicest, kindest man when you were kind to him. And honestly, that's the way it is with a lot of people in the cult. They're really good people.

But because they have that cult mindset, the moment in which you challenge their faith, they turn on you. So I put that off into the compartment and I remember the good fond memories I have of people.

But the good that came from the cult is far beyond that. A lot of people really wrestle. I've seen it in the support groups. They really wrestle with the time that they quote, unquote, wasted in a cult.

And I basically look at it much like... I would boot camp in the army. So you go to boot camp in the army, it's not fun. And they're going to treat you, they're going to do just like the cult.

They're going to wear you out. They want to break you down because that's what boot camp is. They break you down, build you up, and then you become a good marine or soldier, whatever.

Well, in the cult, they did break us down mentally, sometimes physically. But one of the good things that came from this is it gives people who are in a cult a tremendously good, worth ethic.

I know people, I know people, in fact, I have hired people who came from the cult because they will work harder than people who weren't. And they tend to be loyal. Exactly, that loyal to the end, man.

They're really good people. So my problem isn't with the people. My problem, even with theology. So here's the funny part. You were mentioning the ways in which the church has changed and the way in which they had become not like the early Christians, right?

Well, we become institutionalized. Institutionalized. So here's the irony. I had this conversation with my wife, maybe six months ago, but it's kind of funny because we had this exact same conversation, how the church today is nothing like it was in the early church, right?

Not at all. And here's the irony. When you think of cult indoctrination and cult doctrine, I should say, there's this false notion that it remained static. In other words, what they taught at the beginning is also what they taught at the end, but that's not true at all.

In fact, it's in a cult, it's actually quite opposite of the truth. Many times in the beginning, it's really, really good. The things that they say, well, slightly off the mark. Well, what it is, so they have some truth and that truth that they hold to is probably good.

It's a good ideology. But what they've done is they've mixed something that wasn't Christian with that truth and that's what makes it go off the rails. It's not truly based on the Bible. It's based off of the Bible and this other ideology.

That's how a cult starts. Well, I think the trap for that is at least what I've seen is that what started the cult or the sect or whatever you want to call it was something unique.

Right? In other words, I have started because I believe that we should have 24 hour prayer, right? So that was their thing if you want to call it. That was what it was based on.

Random had his thing. The problem is, is that once you start off like that, the thing that attracted people was it was... and fresh. It was different, right? You got to keep maintaining that to keep people, right?

After time, people get bored, people, whatever, like, and it's like, well, what's the next great thing? So what we want in the minute, you create an institution, right? Where you have, you know, people on staff that are getting paid salaries. You have buildings. You have, right? You create this whole institutional machine. It has to be fed. It needs money.

Yeah. And then what ends up happening is, is in order to keep the money rolling in, I got to come up with something new, right? And I see this all the time. It's like, you see these guys, you know, it's like, and I talked about it a few weeks ago where the whole church growth thing that happened in the 1980s was basically just ripping off what was going on in the corporate world and putting Christian terms on it, right? And the church has been doing that for years. They've seen something out there and they go, oh, not I just put,

you know, put Christian jingle to it, right? Let's, let's Christianize this, right? And we co-op all this stuff because we got to keep, you know, people constantly feeding with something new. And that's where I think people go off the rails, right? In this desperate need, the constantly have something sensational, something to keep the people coming back. They just go off the rails and it gets weird, you know? Well, see, that's the irony. So when all of this began with Brannum, Brannumism, Latter-Rain, led to Charismatic, led to the NAR, all of it began with this one principle, which actually wasn't that much different than

what you and I are talking about. This was during the era in which Christianity was changing and evolving. And there were new ideas coming in. And churches were becoming more institutionalized than they had been in the past. And you had new ideas such as evolution was one of the things. So this was a hot topic during the fundamentalists.

Well, in the thirties, right? That big court case was a derro and something. Yeah, this, what was Jennings? That's a topic that's actually in my latest book, I believe, because it led to all of this. See, in the early years, William Brannum was not always an isolationist cult leader.

In the early years, he would say things like, people are the institutions are what's wrong. We need people to come together in a community. If somebody draws you out of their circle, draw a bigger circle and draw them back in. That was the ideology that was spread throughout the movement mixed with Christian identity. So Christian identity was the thing that drove it off the rails. But the idea was to come out of these big institutional churches joined together as a community. That's it.

actually not a bad thing. And that, I see, I studied, Branum much like I studied the Bible afterwards. I knew that he said those things and that was what molded my mindset. I've always been a people person and I don't care if, I don't care man, if you're a Methodist, Baptist, I don't care if you're atheist.

I'm gonna be nice to you. I'm your, I'll be your friend, right? That's my mentality. And I actually got that from Branumism. Believe it or not. So it has molded me in many things that he taught, not all of them were bad.

Some of them were good with the caveat that if you, you know, a little 11, 11's the whole lump. If you take something that's really good and then pour something really bad in it, you're not gonna eat it.

So I have to question some of the things that have been taught because he had very bad doctrine to mix with it. But like I, like I compartmentalize my memories, I take the bad doctrines, I put those in one side and then the good things that he said, I hold fast to those.

Well, one of the dynamics that I noticed that similar to Branum and Bechel is that after they've found success, they then sort of created this perception that they were elite, right? In other words, they started believing their own press clippings as we say, right?

And so suddenly now stories that Mike had, and I had experienced in the 70s and 80s where it was like I had this impression, suddenly our being told, has got appeared to me. I had an open revelation.

I went to heaven, right? Right? In other words, this whole, it's like I now have to live up to who I, who everybody perceives I am, right? Like I've started this thing, I've gotten famous and then there's suddenly this eliteness comes in and that's where I saw a lot of change, right?

Suddenly now I'm other, right? There's everyone else and then I'm other, right? I think because I'm the guy driving this thing and that was where I started getting, at least for me, that's where my relationship with Mike started going sideways.

Because we started off as two teenagers, right? I knew it was my friend, like this is my buddy and I watched him evolve, right? And then get to this certain point where he became, as I said in my book, he became Ickress.

Yeah. Right, he got so caught up in things and he just flew, you know, he kept going higher and higher and higher and creating this whole persona around himself that I'm other, you know, there's you guys and then there's me.

And... And that then ironically became the selling point, right? In other words, I'm special. And I have this special calling in my life. Well, if you wanna be special and you wanna have a special calling on your life, join me.

And I'll take you there, right? And then that's, I think that's where a lot of people now, that's where a lot of the pain is. And I know we don't have a lot of time, but there's another point here that I wanna make that I think you'll concur with.

Have you noticed in talking with people that the way they told the story maybe a year after they left the cult? And then how they tell the story five years later and then maybe 20 years later is different?

Absolutely. Right, so for me, right? So here's why, let me unpack that because I know people that confuses people, but here's what neuroscience has figured out. We actually tell stories based on our current mood.

Yeah. Right? In other words, we're not objective. We're emotional. We're humans, right? So what happens is, is if you're in it, so and the reason I say this is because of what, you know, at least in my world, the eye hoppers and the people in that whole world that are so disillusioned right now, they're angry, right?

So the conversations that I'm having, there's pain, there's anger, the stories that they're telling are all negative and bad and like they want a lynch mic, right? There's all that, right? But 10 years from now, once they get away from this, the motions calm down, whatever, what they're gonna end up doing is they're gonna tell that same story because they're in a different place and they're gonna tell it differently.

Absolutely. And that goes to one of the points that I have come to identify with. This was a large part of my progression as I was leaving the cult. So people have people problems.

Cult leaders are not immune to this. In fact, there's some studies out there. I think I first came across it in Dr. Hassan's book, combating cult mind control, but most of the central figures of a cult have some form of narcissistic personality disorder.

Otherwise, they would not have become this. And when you read this or when you've been abused by somebody who's narcissist, either mentally or emotionally, you think of all narcissists as bad. However, not all narcissists, while they have this disorder, many of them become strong leaders.

You find many of the presents. Big things. Oh yeah, you find some of the presents. You'd get small things, but if they got to run a big company, right? Or a big thing, they're actually perfectly suited for it.

Yeah, so it's not, it is a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, but it's not. best thing relationally. It's a bad thing relationally. Yeah, it's not it can be an asset institutionally. Yeah, but what happens is part of the so the dynamics between the narcissist and the people who are in his relationships are such that while anybody who's out on the outside listening might not pick up on it as evidently as the people who are under the control.

They the people who are submitting to the narcissist often get mentally broke down. And it's not something that happens instantly. It's a gradual over time. They're just beat down to their broken man. Some of the people and that's why in the cults you you're under the narcissistic personality of a cult leader. You over time get mentally broken down not instantly. So when people join into the cults it's everything's eternally bliss. Everybody's happy. Everybody's nice to me. There's all this love bombing. The things the leaders are saying are good. When people join they don't join because the leaders this evil personality. It's not until this long process

of being mentally broken down. But what happens is then when you leave this goes exactly with what you're saying. The emotionally broken state at the point of time in which you leave has you emotionally blocking all of the good memories because you were broken down. And who broke you down the cult leader? Can you identify one single example? No. It's like a thousand is like death by a thousand pricks, right? So what happens is when they leave they're emotionally in that state they absolutely hate the cult leader. But this is the irony. A lot of them can't really explain why.

And so in the support groups you really have to work with them because I have I've watched people time and time again they'll join and let's say I just have really I have a hard time saying anything bad about the central figure because he was a good man. I don't understand he taught some bad things that I don't understand. They're not understanding the full depth of what happened to their head. They're just understanding that I just escaped and something has bad happened something bad has happened to my head. What is it? And it's because of this process they've been mentally broken

down. You have to be mentally built back up before you can really process and look at all of the good and the bad equally. Yeah, I agree. So I'm going to share something. I'm going to be very vulnerable with our audience here because I don't want to talk about others. I'm going to talk about me, which other people will identify with. And I think you will too. I was adopted.

So I grew up in a family very loving. adopted parents, I mean, I had a great situation. I went from what could have been it now. I only discovered what my biological family was a couple years ago.

And thank God I got adopted. Having said that when I got to be a teenager, I had a problem. I didn't look, talk, think, or be like anyone in my family where most people that grew up in a genetic family, the gene traits are, you know, oh, you got Uncle Sones, those nose.

Oh, you're, you got the person, right? You, you, you fit into an environment where you see yourself. I didn't have that, right? No one in my world looked like me. I didn't even know what me was, right?

So I had this sort of soul that was like a whiteboard with nothing written on it, right? So here I am, I get saved at 18. I go to Bible school and I meet Mike.

Mike's got it all figured out. He is confident, dogmatic. He's got the answers to everything.

And I didn't even realize until again, these are hindsight, you know, things you look back at. And I realized he filled something in me that I didn't have. I had no sense of self, right?

So I ended up defaulting to him, right? Because he did. And this is one of the things. And again, I don't wanna insult people here, but cults and a lot of us are filled by people who don't know who they are.

They don't have a strong sense of self. They don't have their own, right? And so they end up abdicating to this other person who seems to have this connection with God, seems to have, you know, this not like they know, right?

And so I think the reason I'm bringing all this up is because I think we have a vulnerability, a serious vulnerability that causes us to end up getting sucked into these situations because we don't have a strong sense of ourselves, right?

We don't know who we are and we're looking for it. It's kind of like the little, I don't know, it's a cartoon I've seen like the little chick of a little duck, you know, comes out of the egg and goes, are you my mama?

Are you my daddy? I love that cartoon. It's like, who's your daddy, right? And I'm just saying, I think a lot of people that get caught up in these cults situations are going, asking, who's your dad?

You know, who's my daddy? Like who am, you know what I mean? Because I don't have any, I don't know who I am. I look back, now I've had so many people tell me that their pain in the IHOP world is because Mike formed their own.

whole sense of self, their world view, everything, like their whole existence was based on a world view and a value system that Mike gave them. Yeah. And it's the cult identity. There you go, right?

And so I knew you would, you would pick up on this because I think, you know, you saw that with in the whole brand of world as well, right? It's like people, people who are like these little vacuums, and suddenly it's like, oh my God, I'm going to put him inside me, right?

I'm going to maybe come little brand of lights, a little bit of lights, right? They talk like him, they have his vocabulary, they have his mannerisms, right? It's like this weird thing to you, and people don't even realize this, but I've seen it. It's just my little world, but you go into a church, right? And you look at all these people, they don't realize that they're all acting the same. And then you see the preacher get up there and you're like, oh my God, they're all acting just like him. And you're like, it's just this whole little weird world of, you know, little

copycats, you know? It's a bit scary. Once you once you recognize this, it's like the matrix when you take the pill, right? And you start to see everything whenever I, when I first left, I came across this notion early. I want to say it was, I left in January 1st, 2012, I want to say by 2013, I picked up on it. And I did this study like what types of people are attracted to cults? Because exactly what you said, man, that is exactly what happened. And in fact, it wasn't just me that said this. You can also find that, I believe in either freedom of mind or combating

cult mind control by Dr. Hassan. He talks about it. You assume the cult identity. But here's where it gets really scary. Not only the cults, we're talking in, even in mainstream churches, this problem exists. People get in a group and you begin to have group think. It's a psychological effect. It's not, not anything particular to a cult. However, the people who are at the top recognize it. That's where this really gets scary. In fact, there's one sermon I came across during the time I was studying this where William Brannum recognized that the people who were

coming to his cult communes were a little bit unstable. And he says, now you guys are all a bunch of nuts. But think about an automobile. It takes the nuts to hold the bolts together.

So he is openly recognizing that there's something unusual about the people. And so this got me to studying what kind of person was. I was I fool for being in this. And it's not, I tried to express my thoughts and I got in a lot of trouble.

This is very offensive to people who were in a cult. It's not something that has to do with how smart a person is. You can have highly intelligent people joining a cult. But what happens is the cult fills a void that they had.

And as soon as it fills the void, they become part of the group. And as soon as they become part of the group, they become part of the group think. The group think is all looking to one central figure.

And that one central figure now has the ability to imprint himself into the people that are in the group. I started noticing that at normal churches. What you're describing, I can actually tell you an interesting story about this.

So when Bob Jones showed up, right? Because remember, we were all, it was a young church. I mean, we had people in their 40s and 60s. But I would say three quarters of the church were under 30, right?

But I remember Bob Jones saying, well, they're all blank chalkboards. And I need to write on them. Wow. And now, see, at the time, I thought that was cool. I'm like, oh, cool, right?

But in hindsight, I'm looking back on it. And it's exactly what you're talking about, right? In his mind, they don't know anything. So I'm going to, you know what I mean? In other words, his view was, and I need to help them find God on their own, right?

In other words, my role here is to introduce you to have a relationship with God. So he can tell you who you are. Yeah. Right? My role is to tell you who you are.

And oh, my God, interesting. It looks just like me. Right. Yeah.

So I guess what we had, we had a whole church of little Bobites. Oh, it was crazy. Yeah. I mean, I'm talking about weird, right? Because Bob was all parabolic and, you know, everything was a type and a shadow.

And it's suddenly you couldn't have a conversation with someone, you know, like a regular conversation, like you and I, I mean, everything was parabolic and immense. Nothing meant what it was. It was always meant, nothing else.

Right? And so you were just constantly going, okay, right? And nobody could have a conversation with you without telling you a ten-minute story about some sort of spiritual dream or vision that they had, and you're just sitting there, right?

It's like, well, what's the point? I would just say that. Can you just tell me what the point is, right? Because it wasn't about the point. It was about them needing to let you know how spiritual they were by having this incredible spiritual experience, right?

That was all the Bob Jones influence that I realized later was like, oh, what have I ever seen. And the funny part about all of that is, if you've ever been around people who are in a mental episode, generally, that's how they talk.

They talk in the symbolic, and so I never forget. I have family members that struggle with mental health and I've, I've actually visited the hospital a couple times to see people who were in the hospital and you see, you get to talk to other people and it's kind of funny because if you were to apply the way that they're talking and then add the component of Christianity to it, it sounds exactly like cold people. But it's offensive for me to say that. So I'm going to tone it back a little bit. But no, again, it's, you know, we're, you know, we're trying to evaluate in hindsight

that's, but one of the things that if we could give people a takeaway that they could walk away from that's good is what I talk about in the book is I know disillusionment hurts. I know it's painful. I know it makes you angry. I know it hurts. But please understand it's really a good thing. It is, so it's, and the way that I describe it is that it's the forest fire that comes through the deadwood of a forest and burns it to the ground, right? And you just think everything is lost. And two, you go back a couple years later and suddenly there's this thriving

new life and of trees and wildlife and it comes, you know, it's just God's way. And so you may have gone, you know, through the disillusionment of been a part of the random cult or you may have been a part of the iHot cult or whatever, but understand that God actually rescued you. Your disillusionment is God's loving kindness to save you. Again, from yourself.

Yeah, for me, I guess the takeaway that I would give for people is, so I'm a musician. I have all of these instruments. Obviously. Obviously. If you watch my show, you know that I'm a musician. I do all the music in my video. All this stuff behind you, that's it. Yeah. So whenever I play a song and I first begin playing, it's not that good. You do not want to sit and listen to it. I'm picking around. I'm trying to find the melody, how, how to play it many times.

So I, I am self-taught with my instruments I play by ear. So often I've forgotten how to play the dang thing. And so I have to pick it up and remember how to even play it, right? When you first hear it, it's bad. And after I'm done with the song, you know, I'm a perfectionist as well.

So I'll play until I get it right. Well, when I get it right and you hear it, that's what you remember. You remember the part where I got it right. But all of the steps along the way that it took to make it sound like that were also required because I couldn't have jumped from point A to point B.

Being a part of something like this, while it was a destructive cult, it was horrifically bad. I'm not going to make light of it. This was a bad thing that we escaped. There were good parts of it, and you have to hold on to those.

Because like the instrument, if you didn't have those negative experiences, you'd never experience the positive. And they weren't all negative experiences. They were elements of molding your character. So my takeaway from all of this is, I am who I am today because I was in it.

And that's both good and bad. So to answer your question, what is the good? What is the bad that I had? I talked about the compartments, right? I've got the compartments of bad memories, and I've got the compartments of good memories.

And people who have escaped the cult are going to think that I'm navigating my life based off of the good ones, but that's not true. The good and the bad are what made me who I am today.

And if you don't have those, you won't be the same person. So my takeaway from this is, it was a learning experience. Some of it was good, some of it was bad. I have good memories, I have bad, but it molded the character that I am today.

And while I have a lot of faults, I'm not going to make light of that. I have a lot of good things too, and the good things, I can say some of it came from the cult, some of it did not.

Well, there's a principle in life. God made it. Don't argue with me. I didn't do this. It's a reality, and it's this. Resistance builds strength. Yes. You may not like it, but it's the truth, and it's physically, mentally, and spiritually.

So it's the things that you have to overcome that make you who you are. Absolutely. Well, this was crazy fun, and at the same time, crazy difficult. Thank you so much for the topic. This was actually an interesting topic. I think people are going to really, really connect with this.

Yeah. Our scars, our beauty marks, just remember that. Absolutely. All right, buddy. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at www.William-Branum.org.

For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.