The Cult of Emotion: Charismatic Christianity Under the Microscope

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 very special guest, Chris Thomason, full remember of the charismatic movement. Chris it's good to be talking to you and telling your story on the podcast. We've exchanged several emails and life circumstances etc has gotten in the way but we finally finally connected and I'm very interested to hear your story especially parts of your story lead towards something that really interests me. I'm wanting to learn more about

youth with a mission which is just one small part of your story but anyway very glad to have you. Maybe if you could just tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Yeah my name is Chris. I'm 38 years old. I'm in the Fave now for around 15 years. I came to Fave in 2012, got baptized in 2014.

Yeah and started my journey in a charismatic church and that's when I was connected to Y-Wen to some friends at the time. Excellent so you were converted to the charismatic movement and I'm trying to understand what that would have been like. So for a person who had not experienced this, I was born and raised and not cares mania but in something that was the precursor to it. So my entire worldview, my life experience, I was molded and shaped to be like this. What was it like for somebody who wasn't who just came in contact with this? How much

of a shock to your system was it to become charismatic? At first it created some distance between me and the congregation itself. I had no language to describe what's going on. I was not Christian educated you could say. And as soon as I saw things like people shivering in the background, falling all over the place and other very weird stuff, I distanced myself from my friends and from the congregation and started. It was a huge motivation for me to start my own Bible study. That's when I bought my first Bible.

It's some kind of funny because the first Bible I ever bought was a Schlachter 2000. You could translate that into term. Hey, to our slayer 2000, that's very funny. And that was the reason why I bought the Bible.

And in fact, it was a comic of a study Bible. That was my first Bible. And yeah, I realized that most of the things that were taught in my congregation were not billically at all.

They couldn't justify what they were teaching. In some kind of way, it was extreme that make two examples that really drove me off.

We had a weekends special where we were talking about some kind of demonic possession via blood. One of the mothers, one of my friends of the congregation, was in a blood-giving charity. I don't know, how do you say it in English?

What's the word blood charity? Yeah, we have, I think it's called, in fact, I think it might be the red cross that does the big blood drive here. But we have blood donations, I think is how we say it.

Blood donation, yeah, right. One of the main topics at the weekend were blood donations because one of the mothers of the congregation were doing blood donations on a regular basis. And the topic was, if your blood enters the body of a different person, then you get possessed by that person.

And we started to talk about the mother, like she was demonic possessed, that was very weird. And in the evening of the same day,

they started to talk about Harry Potter fiction stories, yeah. We had, and she's one of the main characters in this story in regards to Y-Wam. We talked about her because she read Harry Potter fiction novels and they started to exercise Harry Potter demons on her.

They circled around her, laid on hands until she vomited into a basket. And that was exercising the Harry Potter demon out of her. So it was demonic to read fantastic novels or sci-fi novels or any witchcraft stuff like that, yeah.

That was Star Wars fan. I can imagine them trying to exercise Chewbacca out of me. And Chewbacca is much larger, right? You know, it's funny. We had the same kind of thing here. In the Brannamite cult, the sects that I was a part of, we weren't allowed to watch TV or movies by and large.

And so they did not have the Harry Potter craze. But we did in America have people that were doing this. And we, as the Brannamites, were looking at charismatic thinking, this is such an nonsense.

Do you not know that this is a fictional character created by a book? But there's something else that you said I want to drive. drive closer to home because this hit me like a brick wall. You're talking about the blood transfusions and the transference of blood and demons through blood. All of that comes back to Christian identity. Whenever a brannemism spread throughout the globe and he strongly influenced key figures in charismatic movement, they were teaching through Christian identity. They were teaching that there were two bloodlines in the world. There were two bloodlines. One was good, one was evil, and it came into the world through a sexual

union between Eve and the serpent. This is what fueled the hate riots. I don't know if you've seen them from the 60s in the United States. Well, take a step way forward to my childhood. We had ministers that were saying the same thing. If you take a blood transfusion and you're donating blood, the people who received the transfusion might have that evil seed in the blood. There were people who could have survived and died because they refused to take a blood transfusion in the hospital. What's interesting is, in my podcast series with Charles, I think we covered this, but this heavily fueled the race hate that

was in the United States. We found one speech by the imperial wizard of the clan, which if you're familiar with this in your country, it is a domestic terrorist organization that was widely popular in the 20s. They had marches on Washington. You've seen the white robes, the white hoods. That's what, in the movies, when you see this, that is the clan, the Ku Klux clan is what it's called. The reason I use the word clan instead is because it gets past the YouTube filters. If I say the whole thing, it's such a nasty terrorist organization

that YouTube will usually block it. If you're listening and you hear a weird sentence, it's because I had to cut that out before YouTube would release it. Anyway, the leader of this group was saying the same exact thing. You cannot receive blood because you might get, and they called it mongrel blood, which is an offensive term for somebody who is mixed race, I think, is the best way to say it. We had the same doctrine, so it's very interesting that you had it there, too. There is a connection in the person of John G. Lake. One of the, when I came to faith, two of my childhood friends came to faith in different

parts of the city, and years later we met. When I was born again, they were born again, but they were like two or three years ahead of me, so they were educated already, invited me into their congregation. And one of my childhood friends was married to to Egor and Katarina and she was consummating American made carousmania stuff on a regular basis. And John Gileik was one of the guys I remember the most because when she started to read his books, her entire language changed. She started to say things like, I declare in the name of Jesus the specific word of declare to declare was something that she started

to use or I declared a million of it is cool in the name of Jesus. Her entire language changed. Now I know it's the word of faith teaching that leads to that. That's a very specific part and very important part for them to use this kind of language. And through this language, this entire world view that comes with the word of faith movement took place in my church, in my congregation and from there on it's such a weird tangled history.

People, there are people who like me, they're studying this mass and trying to understand what it is. And some of them go back to John Gileik simply because he was such a scoundrel icon artist basically. And there are papers out there you can find where he's clearly this is a gimmick that he's using as a means to make money all throughout Africa. He takes his apostolic faith missions and he has family members appointed to pretend to be sick in other states. And so you'll have the meetings and then they did like telegrams, I guess it was and

they would write back through the telegram and say, yes, I'm healed praise God. And this was a family member who I think the example that the author gave, he said one of his family members got healed like 17 times that they could count through all of these revivals and was never sick.

So that's, you know, there's that too. But what people don't understand because until you take you mentioned word of faith and it's deeper than just word of faith, but it displays itself in word of faith. So you could say word of faith is the fruit produced by this tree. You can also say the New Apostolic Reformation, Charismatic, the Prosper, all of it traces its roots. And not many people go back far enough is the problem. You have to go back to the scene in Zion City with John Alexander Dowey who was also a con artist who also John Gileik helped, helped Dowey do the same

types of cons. And what they were doing is they were pretending that they could heal the sick. And we, I have a book, it's called Critical Examination of John Alexander Dowey, which I go through some of the newspapers of this, but what they were doing, Knowing is they would pretend to heal the sick and many people were dying and they were slipping them out to the morgue under the cover of night.

So people had no idea. So many people were dying. They weren't allowed to go to doctors, to meet doctors, to get medical advice, right? Exactly. Well, he made $10 million in 10 years, which in today's money, this is a half a billion dollars, and so some massive amount of money, towards the end of his life, and right before the birth of modern Pentecostalism, he lost his mind, and everybody wanted to gain control of his empire.

So he had all this influx of, I found one newspaper article that said, Zion City is flooded with profits, pretending to be, they claimed that they were Elijah, the manifestation of Elijah. One of those people was Charles Fox Parham, who was the, he's basically- That's a name that's even known in Germany, that's the only name that you can approach to when you try to explain the history of the charismatic movement to the people he in Germany.

It's a huge problem, there's no connection to the historicity of the entire movement. They take all the books, all the culture, the entire language through a guy's like a Joyce Mayer, yeah, but they don't know what they're talking about, they don't trace it back.

Absolutely. And we have the same problem here, people, the problem is history keeps repeating itself, but people are unfamiliar with this history. Elijah thing, the Elijah thing, you just talked about, it happens a few times of the course of history, right?

Oh, several times, like, as far back as you want to go, I also found a newspaper article that said, the world is inundated with people claiming to be Elijah's or Moses's or David's, or they're all, it was a gimmick that they were doing, but the point I'm trying to drive at is there was a moment in time when the, in today's world, a billionaire loses his mind and he, his empire is at risk, all of these people come.

Charles Fox Parham creates this sect within Zion City. And John G. Lake was a member of his sect as was Fred Francis Bosworth, who meant toward William Brannum and the healing revivals. And they were doing this thing that you described where they, very much like Harry Potter, they could take control of the demons in the heads.

What happened was they became over zealous and doing so, and they were killing people. There were people with crippled backs. They were trying to straighten and they would physically torture the people. One lady, I can't even tell it on the podcast because it will get blocked, but simply put several of her bones were snapped as they tried to exercise the demon from her.

Well this is the very epicenter of... what is known as the deliverance movement. This became popularized through Laterane, and then in Carismania, Brannum and Gordon Lindsay of Christ for the nation started holding deliverance seminars to teach people how to do this magical thing and made lots and lots of money from it.

Yeah, it's the same pattern show here in Germany. They tried to sell it. One of the central things that come up here in Germany is hear the voice of God, how to hear the voice of God.

There was a central teaching in micro-negation back then that drove many of the people into, sometimes even into psychosis. Because at some point, some people can't make a difference between their own inner dialogue and God's voice.

What allows you to make a difference there, there's some people that could ground for that. So what allows you to make a difference there? They have schemes and like they try to teach you how to make the difference, but there's really no difference between your inner dialogue and what maybe is God's voice in you.

So yeah, that was a huge problem. Two people, what do you call it when people leave the faith? Is there word for it? Well, I use the word escape because usually people, what you're describing is a, it's a mental condition that is a pattern of this movement.

People get a, I use the word assimilated, they become part of the movement. Sometimes it is by their own will, but not fully by their will because their will gets hijacked in their head.

So they get sucked into this cult mindset and then you really have to break through the barriers and escape and the word that we use for people who leave, if you're on the inside, they're excommunicated.

We are no longer in communication with these people. We have excommunicated them. And it's a huge, huge problem. We have examples also dating back to John Alexander Dowey where people, they're so caught up in this hype.

They believe that God is there and they're trying, because very much like the Harry Potter mindset, they're trying to enter into this fantasy world that does not really exist, but their mind separates from reality.

And that is the point psychosis hits. And there are, I won't go into details, but there are clear examples of this all throughout the history of this movement. Yeah, we had people that right away escaped, as you said, from the congregation.

We had people that were on the brink of going into a psychiatry because they couldn't alone make a difference between reality and their own perception of reality. Other people kept going, but in the end, very unfortunate to stay in that movement and to stay connected to the people in the center.

Some of them destroyed their lives by sticking to this circle of people, to this circle of Kerrismania. Yeah, I've been trying to put into words. So most of my research was focused on until I began to realize that randomism was the foundation that many of these things grew from. And I've been trying to phrase the words in such a way that can help people in the Kerrismatic movement. And one of the struggles that I have is because people, it seems to me, in the Kerrismatic movement, people have been radicalized. And when you're radicalized, you can't understand your radicalization. So it can't be explained in the same way in people

understand it. But there's even even even more when that part of radicalness becomes part of your identity. For me, for me, in the end, it's all about identity. If you talk to those people and your, let's say you're able to explain all of this to them, you open the Bible, you go verse by verse, story through story, you explain all of this to them. In the end, they have to make a decision between them and their, let's say, congregation that all the life. And at some point, that's a part of their identity. People want to be special. People want to be recognized. And

when it comes to that point where they have to make, to make a cut, that means they have to question themselves and their identity. And that's the hardest part. You have to, like, say to yourselves, I was wrong. I was misled. I'm a loser. So that's the feeling. It is. It's very hard.

And even scholarly people, when they try to examine this movement, unfortunately, it's usually examined by Christian scholars. And it should be examined by both Christian and psychological scholars. Because what happens is a Christian scholar will often overlook the psychological aspects. And they try to trace the lineage through doctrine. And when you do this, it never works.

Because what happens is when somebody becomes radicalized, then they believe they've, they've entered this realm where they believe that they are in a spiritual realm. They're talking directly with God. But they're actually in psychosis. Those people start to produce new doctrines and the doctrine shift. And so what happens is something else emerges, emerges that is not the same scriptural or doctrinal foundation. It's something new. But the structure psychologically is the same.

They have separated themselves from reality. And yeah, you never, you never get to derude of the problem. always on the outside things start to get encapsulated. Yeah, more and more shells around around the root of the problem, right?

Absolutely. And it's a huge problem, right? So as you're trying to explain this to somebody who's charismatic, I get the comment often, I don't know if you've seen on YouTube site, John is trying to trace every single thread of religion through William Brannum. And it's not that. It's that Brannum created this recipe for indoctrinating people. And so I'll use the example. The characters, the persons they dare interchangeably, right? Doesn't matter at all.

One of the things that Brannum and he did this through Bosworth, Bosworth learned it from Dauy. But one of the things that they had was positive confession. And Charles and I just went deep into a discussion on radicalization. Positive confession is the recipe for brainwashing. Because if you have something that you know is wrong with your body, but you're indoctrinated to say the opposite of what is happening to your body. So I have cancer. I have a growth. I'm sick. I can barely move.

But I have to confess positively that I don't have any of this. Whereas I'm walking around day from my day to day life, I'm sick. I'm dying. If I have this cancer, I know something's wrong, but I have to lie about it. The difference is it's actually to the person who's doing this. It's not a lie. They have entered into this fantasy world, this Harry Potter world, where they're trying to believe that something, they're trying to believe in something that doesn't exist. And their mind separates at that point. So they've actually entered into mild psychosis. That's the point at

which you can fully indoctrinated a head whenever the head has left reality and they're in the state of mind where they will believe anything that you say into that fantasy world. And I would say there are two layers upon that, upon that. One layer would be you're into this kind of a group dynamic. And you want to be part of that. They have it. Why don't I have it? All this, I can hear him. I can feel how the whole the ghost is touching me, all this stuff. You're standing there. You don't get touched. You don't have the same feeling. So you start

questioning yourself, why can't I share this with them? Why don't do I experience all of this? And one other layer, and for me, that's the most important layer is, again, the

I would say identity crisis. In the moment, when you think through it, and maybe I'm just sick, maybe this all doesn't work out, at one point, you have to admit that you were wrong, and that you got fooled. And that's the hardest part for most of the people to admit that they were fooled. I'm actually glad you brought that one up because My journey of deprogramming my head, I've mentioned this a few times, I read the Bible over and over and over again, and each time I would read through, I would read from a different,

looking at the Bible from a different perspective. So the first time I read, covered to cover, I'm just reading to try to read it for what it says and not for what I have been told that it says.

But then I would do other exercises like I would read and try to understand the culture of the Bible. What were the cultures that the passages were referring to, what did they believe, et cetera?

One of them, I took very close attention to the way in which the New Testament describes sin. Because in the laterane movement, we were taught that unbelief is sin and anything that is sinful is the attributes of unbelief.

That's the trap, right? That's the trap. That was a way to indoctrinate heads. And I began to realize that. Well, the interesting part is, I wish I still had it because I had no idea I would be doing any of this that I'm doing today.

I did not keep any of this. But I kept a spreadsheet just lining up as I'm reading through, I would take note of what was the sin being mentioned and I had the spreadsheet of sins because we were very legalistic.

We wanted to know, well, what are the things? It was a rule of don'ts, a religion of don'ts. Don't do this, don't do that. Then you can go to heaven, which is the opposite of grace.

And so I'm reading it from this very skewed perspective. Yes, always a very strong dynamic, a strong power behind works righteousness. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, the interesting part is, as I'm going through and I'm telling these things, pride was the thing that was most mentioned.

And as you read through it, if you really understand what all of the sins being described are portraying, if you read it in its context, many of the other sins go back to the root of pride.

So pride became this tree of sin, right? Whereas we were taught, we were supposed to be prideful in this movement. And all of these movements have been flipped upside down where pride is the backbone to the religion.

So then I began to realize that pride itself can be interpreted as sin. I am so blessed, I'm so anointed. Absolutely, absolutely. Look at my fortune, God really loves me. Absolutely. If you're not rich, if you're not fortunate, then God doesn't love you or you haven't believed enough.

Like, yeah. Yeah, like I said, it's flipped upside down. And I began to realize that it wasn't just that they were teaching us false doctrine. It's that the foundation of doctrine from which everything was built upon was also false.

And that false doctrine, even though I grew up in the Brannemism side of things, as I began to understand all of the movements that emerge from it, charismatic movement, word of faith, prosper. disparity gospel, shepherding, all of those can be traced back to a sense of pride.

And once I began to understand that structure, I realized that you can't really look at doctrines and try to understand how this movement grew and evolved. You have to instead look at its architectural framework.

Is it built on something that is biblical or has it been flipped upside down and built on something that's actually anti-biblical? Maybe that's a huge leap, but gnosticism is based on the same feeling of pride because of the special knowledge only certain people have.

It's the root of everything. Just recently, I came across a quote from Martin Luther, and he identified one of those roots. It was, I have it here on my left, wait, enthusiasm. And here's an Adam and his children from the beginning, and is the origin, power, and strength of all heresy.

So what he meant by that is this is the inner dialogue, you're inner dialogue. And you are like, my thoughts are right. My thoughts are like given by God, and that's, you cannot be humble about it.

I'm glad actually that you went to gnosticism because in my, as I said, I read through the Bible several times, in my studying of the ancient cultures, you begin to understand how the ancient religions work, and you start to understand the difference between the God of Israel and the pagan gods, and then as you enter into the New Testament, you can see clearly a difference between Christianity, the gods of Rome, the Pantheons, et cetera.

And I stumbled on to gnosticism, and it led me down this rabbit trail for, I'll bet I spent a year just studying how gnostic's viewed life. And I went back to, I read the book, what is it, against heresies by Euroneas, I read it probably five times, and very carefully, because it's, it's a difficult book to read in today's language, but you have to read each section, and then go try to find what is the culture he's referring to, but he's referring to gnosticism.

And this led me, that path led me to the mystery religions. And this was a concept that was foreign to me, I had no idea what is a mystery religion. And what it is, it's a group of people who have formed a cult, and they believe they, they have the secret knowledge.

And the secret knowledge makes them different from other Christians or other people who are believers of whatever is the mystery religion. And Christianity, that is how this thing became birth. They had this secret knowledge of how you can get healed, and they would mix positive confession, different things in there, which is brew as they're trying to create a religion.

And then they would say, we're different from all other Christians because we have this special knowledge on how to do these things. If you take Pentecostalism, we have this special knowledge on how to speak in tongues.

That makes us different. This was the foundation for many different things that I began to study. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new Apostolic Reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brandham Historical Research's website, William-Brandham.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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I'm not used to speak in English. Most of all of my books are in English. Most of the content I watch or consume is in English, but I rarely have the opportunity to speak in English.

So I'm really sad I can't explain. All of the things I'm thinking right now, that's very hard for me, but it's exactly what you're saying. Like people pretend to be already on a higher plane of whom you humanity with their special knowledge.

And that's a huge problem because there is no objective truth anymore in that. You're already left the ground of objective truth. And that's the core of Christian identity. When you acknowledge God, then you in the same sentence or in the same knowledge, him as the only source of objective truth.

And that's a missing point there. So if you leave that ground, you can do whatever you want and declare it objective truth or your truth or whatever truth or whatever mystery. Sometimes it's even more useful for these kind of people to leave other peoples in the attention of mysteries.

You can't explain it, you can't know it fully, you can't understand it fully. Sometimes that's even useful for them, for their schemes. You know, in doing what I'm doing, I get all kinds of feedback from people.

I get emails talking about their cult. Many of the people are afraid to speak out publicly, but they write me and privately of what's going on. One of the emails that I received recently, the person was talking to me.

talking about. And it wasn't unique to them. I've heard this before. They were talking about their group was centered on this weird mystery wherein there was this prophecy that they had sealed in an envelope. And anybody who opens this envelope and reads this prophecy will die.

So there was a curse on the envelope. I mean, when we're talking Harry Potter or religion, this is the epitome of it. But they were saying, yeah, fantastic story. So basically, this might even be an empty envelope. You don't know. It could be a blank paper in there. We don't know because nobody's opened it. But what they're describing is the essence of a mystery religion. We have the special prophecy from God that nobody can know. And it's so backwards that when I say it's a false foundation, it's also a good representation of that because if God is speaking to a prophet, he's speaking for ears to hear the prophecy. And in this case,

it's a letter that's written that's sealed in an envelope. What do you do with this? What kind of God talks to the people but doesn't let them listen? That's kind of the opposite of what Christian or Revelation in a Christian sense means. That's God revealing himself to us through Jesus in truth in his word. And the picture of him and his character and his holiness is all written down for us, where to find him through his word. It's so easy. And for most of the people that are kind of attracted to these kind of movements, to mystery movements, as a taric

movement's new age stuff, that's too simple or even too narrow because it restricts their freedom, their freedom of identity, their freedom of self-expression. That's a huge problem that's growing. I see the same kind of fighting between denominations. Oftentimes I hear Catholics defend their position of faith. And I recognize, in the end, they're just talking about something that's important for them to identify themselves as Catholics. For them, it's not about truth. For them, it's about some particular ingredient of their personality that they can't let go off. So in the end, it's all about identification with some special movement. I am special

because I am part of that movement. I'm special because I'm Catholic. I'm special because I'm charismatic. These kind of games that people are playing. And the gospel, Jesus Christ, God's revelation to us in the end is far more simpler than the games they are playing or the world they create to justify themselves. Absolutely. I've thought through that That's quite a bit because in the Brannamite sect, we were identified with Brannam.

That's what made us different than other Christians. And after I left this, I began to find out there are people who identify with Kenneth Hagen because there were to Faith or T. L. Osborne, Joe Osteen.

And what they're doing essentially is they're creating even though they claim they're not worshipping these figures, they're creating them as a deity or at minimum, a mediator between God and man. And when you read the New Testament, Jesus said, I was in the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth.

But these people believe that they have to go to this human vessel to guide them into all truth. So what they have essentially done is they've replaced the need for a Holy Spirit and exchanged it for a human being.

And in many cases, we're saying that these human beings are not just incredibly flawed, but they're leading them away from truth. They're teaching false doctrines. So this turns into a huge problem. That grows over time.

You get more and more disconnected to the source, if I may say so. It's a huge problem. I mean, for, I hope, I don't sound, it doesn't sound strange when I say this. But for most lay people, it's hard enough to stick to the Bible to read it every day through, to ask questions, to stay in that kind of relationship between them and God.

It's still a personal relationship between them and God and His Word. His Word, as a mediator, you can say. So if there's a charismatic person

that seems to have all proof, he's good-looking, he has a great kind of language. Yeah, that's very attracting for many people who may be too lazy to read a Bible. That's another problem, or that's what's the word.

Responsibility. Yeah, that's another, yeah. Often people don't want to take this kind of responsibility for their own faith. It's not, and you're mentioning of identity. That's something that's really hard for people to grasp.

So I do this huge study, and I'm still studying, trying to understand the direction that Christian identity doctrine in the United States weighed the people. And it's deeper than just the Eve and the serpent and the bad blood race.

They wanted to identify as the lost 10 tribes of Israel because this emerged from British Israelism. And they were taking on the identity, right? And it's an identity shift because it's not... not just good enough to be a Christian and to believe in Christ.

You must identify with something. So structurally, even though the doctrines of Christian identity are far different from what you see in Charismatics, the foundation, the very foundation of it is the same. We want to identify and that makes us different than other Christians.

You can make easy examples if you look into like Hillsong or Bethel. But they sell to people. It's not a gospel. It's the entire lifestyle wrapped around a gospel. And then they put Jesus like a trademark on it and sell it to the people.

So if you criticize the movement, people feel like you are criticizing their identity. And even if you're right, and even if they some kind understand that you are right, that they are in the wrong, for them it feels like they must leave back all the music, all the lifestyle, the clothes as they wear.

Their entire identity is based, is a saturated, so my English isn't good enough to describe that kind of tension there. It is a cult indoctrinated programmed mindset of authoritarian control. People who are in this, like I said, they're radicalized.

They do not understand radicalization. So even if you try to explain to them, an example I could give of this, I'm a big fan of comedy. I love Jerry Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld for me is the king of comedy.

However, I love comedy if you were looking at it in terms of, it's not religion, but say that I'm looking at it in the same way that I look at religion. And Jerry Seinfeld is my hero of the faith of comedy.

So when he says something, it's funny to me. However, if he said something that I disagreed with, or that I did not think was funny, I would have no problem saying, well, Jerry Seinfeld is a funny guy, but I really didn't like the skit and I found it quite offensive.

I have separated Jerry Seinfeld from the realm of comedy, he's just a person in comedy. And these religions, they take these central figures of authoritarian control and they do the opposite. If the guy says some doctrine that's false, they will, unfortunately, attack the person who points out the false nature of it rather than try to examine the false statement.

I mean, that's a thing that we, you have that in your working environment as well. People, if you criticize what they are doing, they feel like you are criticizing themselves or criticizing the person, so yeah.

So what's the solution to all of this? We have this massive mass all throughout the world. I'm a little surprised to hear when you're talking through some of the things that you're experiencing. in Germany in different ways. It's odd to me because I did know that this crossed all throughout the world. I knew that there were people, different flavors of this.

But you're talking about the bloodlines and the blood transfusions. Some of those doctrines in the United States kind of dissipated and are forgotten. Even though in Brannemism we had this thing, most of the charismatic movement are unfamiliar with the blood transfusion doctrines that was in Laterane. So when you see that this big of a mess has been created, what do you think is the solution to the mess? I thought a lot about that problem and one main problem I identified was that there are no Bible schools that offer something different than let's go through the Bible

for one year. That's basically what every basic Bible school is doing. Let's go through the Bible for a whole year. Some details here, some details there. But there is no Bible school I recognize that starts with topics like day one of your faith. What do you need to do? And the first thing that I would recommend is look for a healthy congregation. Look for and then I would explain what that means basically. And take your time to do that. You don't have to look for a congregation within the next month or so. Sometimes it takes a year or two or three for me and my wife

here where we live, we took more than two years to find the congregation. We are in now for five years. So it's not easy to find a good and healthy congregation. So what does that mean?

Healthy congregation. So start to read the Bible like this and this and this. And then

what I often find very problematic is a disconnect from history. Sometimes for these people it feels I don't want to talk about feelings but they are disconnected from history. We had a case here in our city where one of the congregations we found initially was very healthy.

Everything was good. We were there for a few months. And then the church started to spit because some of the people in the congregation wanted to start to get more charismatic. So you had one part that wasn't about that one part wanted to get charismatic. And there was a podium discussion about it where it took part and I explained to these people like how God created revival in the past.

Let's take a Luther for Martin Luther for example. I told him. What he did was not about miracles and people raising from the dead and your leg grows and all of this kind of stuff, he let people to the world. That's reformation. Let's go back to the basics.

If you get lost in the woods, let's go back to the basics. Every real revival was always about the word. That's what I described to them. And the more these people get disconnected from our Christian history, the harder it's for them to recognize bad teaching. It's simple as that. A good knowledge of history prevents you from getting fooled. So that's what I do. Yeah. Absolutely.

You know, it's odd because whenever I look at the charismatic movement and what it accepts as its foundation, revival is the constant theme. In fact, many of the groups have emerged into the New Apostolic Reformation believing that revival is so important that there has to be an end of days revival. And this is what is going to bring down Jesus Christ to earth. Much like the Nostics or many of the pagan religions, they believe that if they chanted enough, if they whatever they did, they could bring God down through what they did instead of Christ's promise

in the Bible. And so the revival is centered on having to bring yourself into a level of emotion. And what you're describing as true revival is much different than the emotional aspects. And that's why whenever I look at the charismatic movement and I try to say that this all stems from the same foundational route, these revivals that happened in what was called the post-World War 2 healing revival, it was largely built upon the notion that if you captivated the emotions of the people, it would bring them into the spiritual state where they could heal themselves. That in

its essence, that's what it was. What emerged from this is the notion that it goes beyond just the healing. Now we need to have this revival in order to bring God down to earth. And so again, they're eliminating the need for the Holy Spirit whenever they do this. But insidiously, they have said, they have associated this with the Holy Spirit. So if you bring yourself into this hype, that is what you're what you're feeling is the Holy Spirit. It is a hype. But one thing that you said that's most important when you consider all of this is the urgency. They have indoctrinated

people to think it is so urgent. And so when people escape this, they often get re-victimized because they go to something else that has the same level of urgency. And they see that as Christianity rather than going back to the basics. Yeah, I think taking your time to, yeah, to be with God, to read the Bible, take part in different kind of congregations.

Yeah, that's, that's very important. Yeah, there's no real urgency. Take your time. Take your time. Most, many, many of the revivals are even fake. Maybe that's another topic, but I often experience that one of the cities I was living before, I got married, got a new ICF church. It's one of the biggest charismatic movements here in Germany that's originating from Switzerland. So they're all about, yeah, they're all about money.

And they opened some kind of coffee shop in that town. They wanted to attract teens, was very obvious, like cinematic atmosphere, coffee, etc., etc., very casual closing, tattoos, all over the place. I don't condemn that. I'm just saying that was their, their look and feel, okay. And when they opened their coffee shop, they attracted you from all of the other churches and I knew those persons. I knew the teens because I was for a, for a certain time span. I was around all of that churches around the teens and met them there again. And in the internet,

they would say, wow, you're revival, 20 new persons, but these kids were all Christians beforehand and they just got bored and they are old churches, old congregations, and to be there because it was cooler. That's it. There was no revival. They just drained teens and kids from other churches and called it revival. And that's not the only time I experienced something like that.

They just, yeah, like brain, brain, brain, brain, they drained kids and teens from other churches and then called it revival. You know, I just had this conversation yesterday with Bob Scott. I think that podcast may come out after this one, but what they do also on top of this is they heavily market. They, they use advertising schemes from business. They use marketing strategies.

One of the strategies is what you described, they would take a photograph. Here's all these teens. We've had this wonderful revival. This is because the teens are, it's a picture of teens. Now this becomes a youth revival. We have now youth ministries. Bob was talking about, and this is a problem that I have thought through, but not to the level that he has in Africa. If you were to start advertising, around the cities that come, we're going to have free food.

You'll have Africans by the thousands in some areas because they, you know, that's a very poor country. Some cases, they don't have much food. Well, what has happened is many of the revivalists will come into a town, the setup, a tent, they'll offer free food and they'll get 100,000 people from various cities and, you know, walking by bus, by bicycle.

Well, then they take a photograph. We had this massive revival of 100,000 people and nothing changes after the revivalists leaves. There is no, some of the people aren't even Christian any longer, they just show up and Christian while I can get good food.

But the marketing works, you take that photograph back into the United States, people don't understand this philosophy and, oh my gosh, they just had a massive revival, God has moved and it's not really that the spirit has moved, it's that the food has moved under the tent.

You may know Reinhard Bonke? No, I don't think I do. He's like the spiritual father of Daniel Kulenda. He's like the German Benihin. You did the exact same schemes you are just describing. Reinhard Bonke, he has like a huge magical tent to his tent crusade or something like that.

He was like Benihin in Germany and his spiritual son, Daniel Kulenda, is doing the same scheme in Africa again and again. We've, in the beginning of this, we were talking about all of the things that interested me, the charismatic movement, everything we've talked about really has.

But I really specifically want to get into discussing why, WAM, and you have some interesting connections. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? I knew a girl, around the time I got into Carus Mania, and she was basically a very broken person.

Her relationship with her father wasn't that good. Broken relationships with other young men and boys brought her own childhood. And then she came to faith and with all her enthusiasm she had at the time, she used the money that her father gave her to buy herself into

so-called outreach of why, WAM, and it was absurd. It was absurd. I can't find a better word to describe it. She paid around 1000 euros to go to Africa

to have poor children, et cetera, et cetera. And sometimes we even poked her because we said things like, are there no poor children in Germany that need help? Why do you have to go to Africa?

Do we have poor children? Aren't there enough? poor children in Germany, why do you have to pay thousands of euros to visit Africa? So she paid thousands of euros to work for Y-WAM in Africa.

It's absurd. Why would I pay to work? And after that, she was very excited about everything Y-WAM and booked another program that was called DTS, the cycle training school. And about six months, she was learning the entire gospel of Luke, like she could memorization, right?

Memorize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The goal was to memorize the entire gospel of Luke. And when she came back, she was excited again, but it was all just, yeah, she was pumped, she was hyped.

But all of her wounds to her family, all of the wounds in regards to all the broken relationships to other boys, et cetera, weren't healed. And these people just pumped her up, took her money, sent her work to Germany, and she started to reach out to different congregations to present the gospel of Luke.

And it doesn't took long, like two or three months until she broke down again. So she had depression, I think, that let her often to make such decisions to spend all her money on this kind of program twice, in and out, in and out, there was no stability in her life.

Because I'll just hype and pump and... It's really sad, because as you study the cults and how their internal structure works, it isn't just that a cult will recruit a person. If I was recruited into some cult and they had some agenda, I would be critically thinking about that agenda after I had been recruited.

But what the cults do are insidious, they give somebody who is recruited an instant purpose. If you can give them a purpose, they're thinking of their purpose rather than the critical thought about the religion.

And I've had a few conversations now with people who were involved with youth with a mission. Some people who are in favor of it, some people who are not. The ones who are in favor of it, they talk about the good things that the mission does, which I'll give at that, there are probably good intentions behind it.

But the ones who leave describe what you're saying. There is an emotional connection to the mission itself. And as soon as they get into that mission, they're in the mission mindset. And it's not even really that they came and they're in a Christian mindset.

more thinking about the mission. But then when they leave, the problem is that mission is no longer a part of their lives. And especially when they leave Y, Y, myself, that mission is no longer a part of their lives. And it leads to depression, it leads to an array of problems.

So for me, this is, it's really scary when I think about what they're doing to children. Because as an adult, if you go through something like this, you just move on. But when you're a child, those years are what mold your internal being and your psyche. So when you leave, now you have an emotional anchor that you're going to carry for most of the rest of your life.

Yeah. It's, it's some kind of emotional abuse, I would say. There are other testimonies online from people who left Y-Wam. They could explain similar stories. As I'm thinking about it, and I remember all the details. We were there in Bart Blankenburg. There was a bass in Bart Blankenburg. That's how I get connected to them. I helped to build the bass in Bart Blankenburg.

And that's when I started to ask questions because every evening they got hyped. They went out into the streets and what it was the same kind of language, prayer language that the people used from my old congregation like, we took the, we take dominion over this school, we take dominion over this building in the name of Jesus. Yeah, stuff like that. And the girl I am talking about, she was involved in that and was led by all those emotions, by all the hype, time and time, again, to spend all her money with, with Y-Wam. And as you said, like, like a drug,

when the effect of the drug disappears, you are thrown back into your depression, you are thrown back into your old life. And that's her problem. Still, until I mean, this goes back like 10 years ago, yeah, most of that happened 10 years ago. And even after she got disconnected from Y-Wam, there was a time when everyone of us was thinking like, okay, now she's in a stable position, now she has a stable life. She went back to the US, she's made her DTS, a school on Hawaii.

After some bad experience, she went back to the US, I got married to a young man and this young man was, of course, a charismatic as well. He was a drug addict. I remember a time when she would write me messages, asking me about how is it, is it allowed that a Christian can smoke wheat and stuff like that. And yes, later, even this marriage is broken, she's back now and job- knee. It doesn't take long and she's into a new relationship with the new boy and so on and so on and so on and so on. It's always the same pattern. And you see all these promises

from charismatic cults or from Y-Ram to be healed when you get involved and anointed and all of that. She's one example for all the lies, all the money she spent and in the end she's the same broken person because she relied on Y-Ram instead of relying on Jesus. Let me say it simple like that. Yeah, I mean that's really the underlying problem and you can take the name, youth with a mission or Y-Ram, you can take it out and literally replace what you said with each one of these movements. Once you join you get into the

emotion, the emotion is very draining and then if you ever leave this in many cases you're the same but it's in a lot of cases you're actually worse off than before you join them because now they have taken this emotion and they have manipulated that emotion and made it even worse. So very glad that you joined me today to talk through all of this. Thank you for telling your story. This has been fascinating to me. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks for your time. 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 William-Branham.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.