YWAM vs. Stanford Prison Experiment

Hello and welcome to another episode have the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host John Collins the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-branham.org and with me I have my co-host researcher and friend Jenny McGrath founder of Indwell Movement. Jenny it's good to be back and a little bit excited to talk about this subject that we're getting into today. I don't know if you know this or not but in some of the podcast it I've mentioned this before because it hit me one moment I was I was actually watching a movie when this happened and it was a movie

about a guy he's suffering PTSD had been in the wars and suddenly I realized that there were so many similarities between being in a prison camp in another country being raised in it and then suddenly coming back to United States and waking up and thinking oh my gosh I don't understand this culture I don't understand this life I came from this horrific place that I don't want to go back to but I don't really understand the place that I went to and that was my life coming out of a cult for the first few years I've obviously got over

that and then when you mentioned the Stanford prison experiment I got to thinking about all the similarities between that and the cult in a different way which it's interesting so I thought we'd talk to it because I don't think people realize how close they are to being in a prison when they're in one of these movements. Yeah I am very excited to wait into this conversation with you I think it's so important and you know I have been a mental health counselor for over a decade now and while there are as many ways to think about quote unquote mental health however we want to define that as

there are humans on the planet we are very hyper social beings and we really do respond to and react to the social setting that we are in and so whenever we are placed in these high control authoritarian systems whether that be a prison whether that be military regimes whether that be emissions organization it is going to affect the way that we see our own body and that we see other bodies.

The point that really struck me so I suffer with this problem my grandfather was a leader in it the group would have imploded had it not been for my grandfather and my grandfather was the cause of a lot of harm being spread and yet on the one hand I see him as the cult figure, but on the other hand, I also see him as my grandfather.

And he was a loving, kind, gentle man. If you knew him, people who knew him, they just hear some of the things that I say and they say, John, he wasn't like that. Not understanding that he was a cult leader and he caused destruction in the example where you're in a prison camp, POW camp.

You are in the enemy's camp and every person who is over you, the guards, the leader of the prison, whatever it is, they are over you and they are to you, they're evil because they're the enemy, right?

And it really doesn't fit because some of the people who are in a cult, all of the people who are in a cult are good people, but some of the people who are in leadership positions who are affecting harm on other people are doing it, not really understanding why they're doing it.

And I think that might explain, I'm trying to explain my grandfather, honestly, and some of the other people that I know, because they're good friends, but they've done a lot of harm. And the point that you made, whenever I started thinking just back through it, average people coming into this experiment, good people can do bad things.

And it turns into a, I don't know, it's like role assignment identity, I guess you would call it, they take on this identity and they feel empowered by it and they start abusing it.

And a good person can abuse it even though deep inside, they're good people. So there's so much on my mind to talk through, but just reconciling, how did this happen to me? How did the family, the good family that I know, how did they get involved with this?

How could they have treated people like this? And all of those questions are somewhat answered by whenever you go deep into the study of this experiment. Some of those questions are answered. We are very, very complicated beings and we're not all at the same time.

And psychologically, it is really, really, really terrifying for us to think that the way we think about the world is quote unquote wrong. Like it is less taxing psychologically to think that the entire world is wrong than we are wrong.

And so if we're put in these positions and we're asked to do things that create what is called a moral injury, when I do something that goes against my morals, it is much harder to really let that injury metabolize than to create cognitive dissonance and justify how the ends justify the means.

And once we start doing that, it is very, very quick that we can justify terrible means because we think that the ends are going to validate or be worth it. And it takes so much effort and I think communal safety for us to be able to to turn inward and be really honest about those things that we've done or we've said that have enacted harm.

And I think some of this is that split in this form of Christianity that says this is the only right, perfect, pure way, then it splits the world into binary. And people are, they're good or they're bad, decisions are right or wrong.

And we are actually more like slabs of marble that have, you know, various shades of good and bad and we can do good things or we can do bad things. And I don't really believe that anybody is all one thing.

So that's some, some things that come to mind for me. As you were talking, I was also thinking and I know a bunch of people are going to hate me for this because there's all of this weirdness about this movie, but my family just watch the wicked movies and it's interesting how similar it also comes into this because I've used the cult analogy of the Wizard of Oz and how similar cult leaders are to this.

We never really stop and think about the wicked witch. This was a person too and people are molded by the things that happen and I won't ruin the story for anybody that hasn't seen it, but pretty, pretty good movie and it does fit.

There are people who are just a set of circumstances has changed their lives. And I look at the cults much like this. People, especially in the divine healing cults, they, a lot of the people came because they had something wrong.

They needed a heal. They were looking for healing and maybe they got it, maybe they didn't, but they got assimilated into the group, which is just, it's really sad when you think of the number of people.

So let's begin first. For anybody who didn't hear the episode, we're talking about the Stanford prison experiment. There are probably people listening who have no idea what this is. I can try to explain it, but you're probably better than me, so I'll let you take it and just explain what this is to the listeners.

Yeah. So essentially it was a study to explore what we're talking about. Are people good or bad or do people get put into situations that make them act good or bad? And so it was a total randomized study group that was meant to reenact a prison.

And so some of the volunteers and the research participants were assigned like being prison wardens essentially, and some of them were assigned being prisoners. And horrifically within a very, very short amount of time, there was psychological abuse physical abuse, torture, deprivation, things that these people, they had just plucked to be part of this study, were doing to other human beings.

And there's a lot of controversy. around the reality that the study didn't get stopped right away too, which I think is its own thing of what does that make us bystanders when we see evil being done and we don't do something to stop it. But often, you know, the study is talking more about the participants of the study in themselves. And it's often used as an example to say, we're kind of going to assume those positions of perpetrator or victim largely because of the social situations and conditions that put us in those places. And I really like this idea that says nothing is a

problem until it's the only solution because I think that we can even become dogmatic about this and say, okay, so the leaders are all bad, the constituents are all good. And I think about Victor Frankel who talked about concentration camps and that he experienced nice Nazis that were running the camps and he experienced really evil Jewish people that were in the camps, that it's not all or nothing. It's not these binary things and people are really complicated. And so I think sometimes, you know, we can kind of create these dogmas or these ideas which I'm hesitant to say

and by and large, if we look at people that are given disproportionate power and authority over other people, that does something to their ability to empathize and humanize the people that they're interacting with, which then will in turn justify often various forms of harm and abuse.

And I'm reminded of the Milgram experiment, which is one of the things that I had to learn as I was going through my training on what a cult is and how it works. Milgram experiment where somebody is taken into an experiment and there's another guy who's pretending to scream and be in pain in the other room. He's told to push a button that sends all kinds of, I can't remember how many volts of electricity through his body and each time the question's wrong, he turns it up.

Well, the person who was probably a good person put enough electricity on that switch that it would have killed the other guy in the other room. And the variation that I saw before that was in Ghostbusters, which is a much funnier version of that. But needless to say, good people can do bad things and like you said, bad people can do good things. And so it makes it very complicated.

I, as I was studying Jim Jones, I had this black mentality, black and white mentality of him. This is an evil person, everybody died. But you read through the newspapers, he actually received awards for many of the good things that he did.

He changed communities, he worked with the poor, he and impoverished, lots of good things that he did. But then all of a sudden, at the end of his life, he's this infamous cult leader that everybody is afraid of.

I look at my family and I'm kind of, I hate to say it, but I look at them much in the same way. They're really, really good people. But where they ended up is not a good place and I was in this place because of it.

So I'm torn between all of this. And the prison experiment, that's something that really, as you were talking through it, it really hit me because the people who were in that experiment as they're rising through their ranks and they're trying to, they're trying to play out their roles.

They really don't think about how it's affecting other people because they just get so caught up in the roles. In the same way with the cult, you get caught up in the religion that you don't really think about what it does to people who aren't of your belief set.

And you become so, I don't know what the word is, you feel empowered, I guess, whenever you step on other people who aren't believing in the same way as you, much because of the doctrine, the doctrine is telling you that these people aren't as good as you.

You're elitist. They're not. So there's so many similarities to unpack, but for me, it was just, as you were talking, it was just answering the question of how can this be? How can my family be good and evil at the same time?

Yeah, I have been in private practice for over a decade now and I primarily work with adults, healing from childhood sexual abuse. And one of the hardest things for many, many, many people that experience this type of abuse is that there was a lot of goodness in the relationship that caused them the most amount of harm.

And it's easier if we can just say this person is all bad and so I can just cut them off, I don't have to think about them anymore. And I think humans are really complicated and they never cease to disappoint me and amaze me and inspire me and make me infuriated and so I think it's also really helpful.

I really believe that villains and perpetrators and cult leaders aren't born, they are made. And so I look at what are the conditions of possibility that enable someone to do this in the first place?

What was their own powerlessness that they didn't want to feel? What was their own disgust that they didn't want to feel? And I think so many forms of harm and dehumanization come from projections of the parts of ourselves that we don't want to face, that we don't want to have kindness for.

And so we find... other people that we can put those parts of ourselves onto and we can project them. And I think we see this in a lot of cases right now where different stereotypes or biases that have been projected are really just confessions.

And I think that that's often the case, is that the more someone is adamant about accusing someone else or calling someone else out for something, it's a lot of times the parts of themselves that are difficult to bear and to metabolize.

Absolutely. So after our conversation, I was reading through some of the study because I had heard of the Stanford prison experiment but I'd not really looked that much into it. And there are pictures you can find if you search on Google.

I think there might be some video out there, but the thing that hit me, the prison guards were wearing sunglasses so you couldn't see into their eyes, which immediately gives me this Jim Jones reference, right?

Because you can look at him and he's much the same way. But what that did, you take the combination of the sunglasses and the uniform, it created a separation of the humanity, right? They're a different class of people.

And much like a cult, the people who are in the cult, they may not be wearing sunglasses, but when they look at the other Christians in the, if it's a Christian cult, the other Christians in the world who don't have the secret knowledge of the special leader, well, there's a difference there.

Sometimes that difference is a dress code and our brand of might called it, we had a dress code so we could see, we look like this, they look the other way, right? They look differently.

And you look at the way the prison guards separated themselves and you begin to realize that there's so many parallels in just the attitude that they developed because they were different. And it gives you this sense of, I don't know, you've probably seen it where people are hiding behind what they're saying on the comment forums.

They're hiding behind their keyboards is one of the phrases that we use. There's a distance, there's a separation between them so they don't understand that there's a person on the other end that might get their feelings heard.

When the prison experiment, they are, they're separate just simply by even their dress code and so that class, I guess, the class system that separates them makes them different. In the cults, the people don't have to have uniforms or clothes that separate them sometimes, even just phrases that they use, loaded language that they use, creates this, I don't know, this group mentality where they're different than the outside.

And so the similarities for me was just, simply looking at the pictures online, you could tell that there is a difference between this and the normal world. It makes me think of this really powerful research one of my colleagues live short has done into what they call the positive affect of evangelicalism and I've seen this in a lot of experiences in Y-Wam and other specific Christian cults where the uniform is happiness and it is that idea of the shiny happy people and it becomes this cloak and this facade that if you aren't happy, if you aren't performing happiness, you're not one of us. And that in itself

becomes this othering and this dehumanization of other people, we just need to go save them so that they can join us and essentially put on this uniform of being happy. And I'm not against people being happy, I like being happy and when it becomes compulsory or it becomes this expectation, when nobody is really happy all of the time, we have, we get hangry, you know, we get frustrated, we have these other ranges of human emotions and yet if we've learned that something about us should be or needs to perform fundamentally different than other people, it actually

separates the human to human empathy where if I'm not in touch with my anger, my rage, my fill in the blank then it's that much easier for me to scapegoat you when I see you feeling into your emotions. And I really love Rick Steves, he does a lot of tourism throughout Europe and raising awareness of different cultures and one of the things he says is it's hard to hate up close and I think that that's so true and I think we need to be close to ourselves and to the parts of us that maybe are hard to be close to in order to be close to someone else and really not

so one of the questions I had as I was going through that study, understanding what is the what is the prison experiment? How did it work? One of the things that also hit me was that the outside information was controlled, the group, the reality of the group was the reality that they saw basically, the limit outside experience. In the brand of cult that I was raised in, it was weirdly the same way, we weren't allowed to watch television although some of the inner circle was allowed to, the majority of the people were not. So in a sense the leadership and those who

were in the inner circle of random had some access to outside information but they limited it to the people, you're not allowed to watch television, you're not allowed to see what's going on in the world. That cascaded down to other things, there are groups that avoided newspapers and radio and so the information that they were given by the cult about how the outside world worked is the information that became the reality and then it suddenly clicked as you're using that analogy for or youth with a mission.

Well, now you've got this group of people who are in other countries on these bases. Their access to information is through the group leaders. And I began to think, oh my gosh, it's like a prison experiment for children.

How bad is this? How could this be? So I wanted to ask you specifically about the control of information. How did information come into those bases in Y-Wam? Yeah, it is very insular. Well, there is some encouragement and rhetoric in Y-Wam that says, we're not a church, so you should be part of the church in the community.

What I experienced personally was that there wasn't a lot of friendships or relationships that were made outside of the base. And as everyone has to go through the discipleship training school, they have to read Lauren Cunningham's books.

And many books from different Y-Wammers, you know. So many of the literature is from fellow Y-Wammers. It's very rare that there's a sense of, here's someone we totally disagree with, or even we don't disagree with, but they're not part of this brand of our religion.

Let's hear what they have to say. And so it really does become an echo chamber. And I think some of that is normal. You know, this kind of benign example, I think of, is that I spent nine months living in South Africa with Y-Wam.

And there's the South African phrase people do when they drop something or someone tells them something that happened, they go, ah, shame. And I hated that phrase when I first moved to South Africa.

I was like, nails on a chalkboard. And then six, seven months later, I just noticed myself going, ah, shame. And it just came out of me without even thinking about it. And then, you know, I think we're always sponges to our environment.

But when the environment is so much specific language about Y-Wam and what that means and what being called into this ministry means, you really do develop more and more of a sense of, I can't even talk to my family about it because they're not going to get this language.

They haven't lived this life. They haven't had these experiences. These are the people that are really going to get me. And I think to some extent that that's true. You know, that's one of the things that's really hard for people leaving these worlds is that when you step out of it, just like when people still stepped out of the Stanford prison experiment, they're like, wait, it's only been two or three weeks.

For most people, nothing's really changed. And for the people in that experiment, I imagine their lives. or change significantly by what they experienced and what they witnessed. Yeah, I can't even imagine. It'd be like stepping into a time warp, you know.

Everybody else has aged and you're in this weird category of something else. One of the problems that I had, whenever I first met Dr. Stephen Hassan and he was explaining how cults work, one of the problems I had was he was giving extreme examples and he was comparing it to what I had.

And I looked at what we believed and I thought, well, it's not that extreme. He was talking about the moonies and he was talking about the sleep deprivation and all of the different aspects of control that they were using, control techniques that they were using on people.

And I began to think through that and he was explaining how it all worked and how it affected the mind. And it wasn't until probably a year after that conversation. I began to realize that we had many of those things but we had them in different ways.

It may not have been as extreme as the moonies but we had some of those things in different ways. And a lot of it was even self-inflicted which was kind of weird. When I was looking at the Stanford experiment the same kind of thing happened.

I was looking at that and I thought, you know, I'm trying to make this comparison cult or not and things like, what's a good example? The unpredictability of it, the arbitrary punishments, I did have sleep disruptions and rule changes, et cetera.

Making people in this unstable state of mind purposefully so. And I was thinking, you know, that's a little bit out there. I can't even relate that. But then I stopped and thought in the cults we had this belief that our version of the doctrine is static and it was always that way.

It has always been that way. The leader was consistent and we believe this thing was different from the world. But my research has told me quite differently. It changed over time significantly and many times it changed back and forth and back and forth.

And it was doing the same things that was happening in that experiment but not all at once. It was gradually over time. And then the thought suddenly hit me. That's actually a little bit more insidious because it's so subtle that you don't know the changes are happening, right?

Yeah, it makes me think about some of the language with Y-WAM is this isn't an organization, it's a movement.

And so what that does is create, you know, and I believe in movement is a big part of my whole thing. And I think that movement for our bodies to feel safe needs to be predictable and needs to have some level of control that we feel in control or we're at least conscious of the movements that we're making.

Where the language in Y-WAM is often like this is this movement We don't know where it's gonna go. We don't know where God's gonna call us. And kind of this frenzy of like God could call us to shut down why we am tomorrow.

And it's like, wait, what? That's really scary. This is my livelihood. And that is really ingrained that keeps you in the sense of, okay, I need to stay hyper vigilant because I don't know what's going to happen next.

And you know, I have not been to a base that didn't really have some type of physical deprivation, whether that was you need to wake up at 4 a.m. for your work duty or whether that was we're not gonna have adequate food for you or whether that was, you know, a million different things.

There's so many ways in which that deprivation on a nervous system level reads as, I'm not okay because our bodies know what they need and when they're not getting those things, that's going to put us in a state of stress and hypervigilance.

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You mentioned the fact that they might close the base and instantly I'm thinking all of the rhetoric that we had growing up, I would hear sermons, the government's gonna come and they're gonna close this church one day.

And the interesting thing is the church kind of closed itself because I started publishing the tax records. So in a weird way, there is a connection to the government, but that rhetoric of there's an urgency, something's going to happen and you're not safe.

I think that's really the key. Those combinations of things, when you feel that you're not safe, but you're relying on the leadership for your safety, that turns into a learned helplessness basically. And when I compare it to the present experiment, every attempt that they made was failing and eventually they just kind of gave up.

And they gave in and I look at some of the more stubborn people that I grew up with who I had friends who weren't really cult people they didn't like all the doctrines they didn't really adhere to anything I was a good little church boy I really was but some of my friends weren't yet later in life they're the ones who burled in deeper and I'm the one who left which is odd when you think about it I'm the one who I was the one who was just so dedicated and then I learned it all of this is false and I left but I also shared that learned helplessness I relied

on the cult for everything everything that I believed I relied on them and the outside world was out to get me so in many ways I I had this prison that was in my own making in my own mind instead of what they had which was physical totally I think I've shared this before but what's coming to mind is when I was really not doing well I had broken into shingles I had boils all over my legs my immune system was not working I was just not in a good space and I was thinking I needed some time to rest or figure something out one of the the base leaders wives told me oh

I had a dream that you were leading our preschool and so then I started leading the preschool and it was nothing that I wanted to do or even felt skilled or qualified to do I needed rest but it was the sense of well if God gave you this dream then that must be true and it really was a sense of deep listening to myself but not at the same time like I was always very strong in my convictions but then when someone who was a spiritual authority would say no this is what I think God wants you

to do it was nearly impossible for me to ever think otherwise almost all of these type of experiments have some sort of humiliation ritual which is interesting to me it's like the psychologists are in a psychology of how you do bad things to people and put them into bad experiments and one of them is going to be we're going to humiliate the people or have other people humiliate other people and it's weird and scary that the mind will go there but in that experiment you really learned that people can betray their own instincts to be kind to other people when given the right set of

circumstances that is another part of this that really helps me feel a little bit better about family because I know examples where there were people who were just humiliated beyond being able to rise back up over some of the things that were said and did I remember one later He humiliated in front of the entire crowd of people at the brand of tabernacle by my grandfather as she's crying and walking out of the building.

Everybody's watching her with the scorn that is coming from behind the pulpit. That's one of the memories that stuck in my head that is just so painful to try to wrestle with that a kind, gentle man would do this to a person.

But you look at these experiments and these are good people in the experiments as well. They're put into a situation that leads them down that pathway where they can humiliate other people. And I began to think through that, and suddenly it hit me that even on a smaller scale, people who are the rank and file members who aren't in the leadership, whenever they're talking to somebody, like I've been in conversations in the grocery store, and they meet somebody who's another Christian who just doesn't know that the central figure exists, and they feel like they can impress upon them scorn

for things that they believe differently. And it suddenly hit me that that exists to some miniature level on almost all people that I know of in the cult, whether they know they're doing it or not.

And then I began to think how does psychologically, how does that happen? How does a person get to the point where they have no problem insulting somebody else when they're talking to them? What does, from a psychological standpoint, what would you say that would cause that?

Something I often say is we are feeling being to think, not thinking beings who feel. And this is one of the reasons why I think it's so important to understand our nervous system and how it affects how we think.

And so a lot of this comes out of the work of Stephen Porges and Polly Vega theory. And the idea is that our Vegas nerve, which is called Vegas means wandering because of how much real estate it takes up in the body.

It's a cranial nerve that runs through our spinal cord and has branches in our throat, our chest, our belly, and pelvis. And it is responsible for enabling a state of rest. In part of Stephen's Porges theory is that we have multiple branches of our Vegas nerve that do different things and communicate different things.

And his idea is that we need to be in what's called a ventral vagal state, otherwise known as parasympathetic nervous system or rest and digest. And that is when we are able to feel safe enough to have a human to human connection, to have voice modulation, to read people's faces, to really have these social engagements online.

And the idea is that if we are not safe, we will move into our fight, our fight, our fight. freeze or appease nervous systems and those are survival states. And so if my survival is dependent on me being on that in those states, I really don't have a lot of capacity for empathy, for attunement, for kindness, for care, for another person. It really is this scrappy like I just need to survive feeling in our nervous system. And if we live in a context like you just described where we see public humiliation, whether it is conscious or not, our nervous system is going,

I'm not safe. This is not a safe place to be. And so it's going to be easier for me to acquiesce and fawn to the power structures than to really come into my safe nervous system.

So one of the questions that I had as I was thinking through this experiment is probably going to put you on the spot. And I'll try to be very careful how I do this. So as I'm looking at this experiment and you're taking good people, you're putting them over other people who are equals.

There is no difference really between the people. They're just given their authority. And suddenly they abuse the authority. That happens widespread in a cult. That's just simply how a cult framework works. Now take the dynamics of adults who are empowered like this over children who already, there was already a hierarchy because they're an adult and the others are children. So there's a hierarchy that already exists. And in many cases, that hierarchy becomes exponential whenever you add the cult authority. In the worst extreme cases, we have some documented on the website.

There were public beatings, spankings of children, very, very harsh spankings. Everybody would join into the community room and watch the children being spanked for whatever was the sin that they had committed. That's an example of the extreme authorities. And I'm not saying that youth with a mission has anything like this. However, in those examples, the cult framed the punishment as though what we're doing is out of love. We're doing this because we love you.

Public correction is because of love, forced reconciliation, because of love. There's this leadership mediated love that happens. And it's never really love. It's something that's horrific. Youth with a mission, on the other hand, has the same internal structure. So it's very difficult for me to think that it won't eventually happen, which I don't know. I'm not going to say that it is or it isn't. But to a limited extent, there must be something like this that exists just simply because of the nature of the structure of the organization. So I wanted to ask you, what are your thoughts on this?

as it relates to your experience in youth with a mission. I have a few thoughts. One is that pretty much every school in Y-Wam has an outreach phase, and pretty much every outreach ends in a debrief.

And one of the common things I saw in these debriefs was this sense of sort of like a complement sandwich where everyone would go around to one person. They would take turns, and you would say one thing that you wanted to affirm, and then you would call out something, basically that had pissed you off about that person in the last two, three months, and then you would give them another complement.

Well, that's awful. It really is awful. And we had all just had months of being in really intense experiences where not our best sides were coming out. And this became a public humiliation of everyone.

And this was leaders and people that were on the team as well. Nobody was immune from this. And this didn't just happen at the end of outreach, but that was the most common time I would see it.

We would also have these father heart of God or these really emotional, broken, and beautiful, or something like that. It was broken in something weeks. And it became these rituals of self-humiliation that you were supposed to confess the deepest, darkest, most horrific parts of yourself.

And of course, there were people that wouldn't participate. But for those of us who really wanted to be good in this system, we're like, OK, well, I guess this is what this means. And people would stand up and confess things that they hadn't even talked to their spouse about in front of hundreds of people.

And so there was this sense of just, again, this fear and panic around, what am I going? What is God going to ask me to tell people? Or what is God going to impress on someone else to tell me?

You know, whenever I'm hearing something that's incredibly bad, the way my mind works is I usually go to think of something that's comedy. And usually it's bugged bunny. It takes me to my happy place.

But as you were talking, I was thinking, how awful this would be to be in that experience. And I began thinking of Seinfeld's Festivus episode where they have the airing of grievances and how awkward that was for George, whenever that have, I don't know if you have seen Seinfeld.

But it's really sad when you think about it. Seinfeld was augmenting a situation that exists in many cases in the cold, where somebody is thrown off balance. And I don't know if people realize how powerful this is.

If you can get somebody into that awkward position, where their mind is thrown off balance, you can take control of the conversation and in a court scenario to somebody who is looking at leadership has thrown them off balance. The leader can actually take control of what they believe, what they think, how they view the situation.

Literally, you can hijack a mind by throwing somebody off balance. Now in a group setting with a bunch of children and young adults, throw them off balance by thinking about the anxiety of having to confess whatever it is you're going to confess while the other person is doing it.

That is the throwing off balance and suddenly you are put into this awkward position where I can't even imagine. What were they thinking? Why were they doing this? This is awful. I can't say this is why they were doing it, but really what it makes me think of is the little bit I know of Scientology and that part of the indoctrination is confessing and how that actually gets used as blackmail that I have seen these experiences where it's like these people now know this deepest darkest thing about me. So I need to stay in allegiance with them because if I break from this,

then I don't want what I've shared to find its way out of here. And so in some ways the insolerness of it is its own pseudo safety, where as hard and as scary and as awful as it is to share those things. I think there's some sense of like, but those things are safe here. As long as I don't become one of the scapegoats, then those things get aired out into the public.

And I know we're going to have commenters who say, but the Bible says, Confessure Sands, one to another, it's quite different when you think about what you're describing. There's a coerce of element to this, right? Especially a picture of the people sitting in the room, somebody has confessed and now it's your turn and there's awkward silence. What do you do with this? Now you're on edge, the pressure is on. What are you going to say? Do I tell all? And again, my mind goes to comedy.

There's this raced even song about the squirrel that went berserk in the church. If you haven't heard it, you need to listen to it, but it gets all the way down to the, they called it in the song, it's sister birth better than you. And she began to confess to Sands that would make a sailor blush with shame is what it talked about. And it's a crazy, funny song, but it relates to this because once you start that, everybody has to do it. You get into this group thing, you get into this group mindset and everybody's telling things that they wouldn't normally tell

the other problem that I have and we've wandered far from the prison experiment, but the other problem I have with this because I have, I've actually actually seen to a limited extent what you're describing in other situations.

Once you do it, once that awkwardness is on you and you say something, now everybody knows it and they hold it over your head. And now you've got this added weight of the thing that's held over your head that you may not have said other examples and I won't go into details because I don't want to out the person but there are people who haven't yet worked through the thing that they are confessing, the thing that is burning inside of them the most, they've not yet conquered it but they're put on the spot.

What do I say? Oh, this is the thing that's plaguing me day and night. I'm gonna say this and now everybody knows and you've not even yet conquered it. So whenever they confess it and in the confession it's an admission that not only you have had us in, it's now in the past, you've conquered it.

Well, if they haven't conquered it and they go back into it, now they're backslidden and so they're branded. So now you have the scarlet letter of being black, backslidden in the group. All of this because it's a coerced confession, it's not a normal confession.

Totally and you know, it was a little different when we were on our outreach and there was like nine of us but when this happened on basis in schools, I don't recall ever seeing the base leaders or the school leaders confessing.

Those who had the most power were usually calm as a cucumber and we're saying what does God want you to confess and maybe it would be like young staffers but mostly it was people that were there for their discipleship training school that were there for three months, five months and had not even developed long-term relationships with people and so it created this pseudo intimacy where it was like, well now you know this thing that nobody else knows about me so I guess I have to stay here forever.

And then you start to notice that the higher up you get in the organization, the less you're actually really supposed to talk about those things that everyone in the lower status is talking about.

Right, I just, I can't even imagine. I've had people tell me in the support groups that they were very close to the leader of the pastor, whatever it was and a pastor is somebody that you normally would confess to.

You would say, hey, will you help me pray through this? I have the sin in my life, I can't beat it. Whatever it is, the pastor prays with you. And then whenever you question authority and you start to leave, the pastor wants to out you for those sins so they're not confidential as people think.

And I'm looking at what you just said and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, now the leader has ammunition. Not only do they have the power to hijack your mind in the group setting, now if you ever try to leave, I know that thing that you did.

It would be a shame. My grandfather. told me this, it would be a shame if people were to find out everything that you've told me. I can't remember his exact words, but that's how the leaders work in this type of environment.

And you're going to open that door. I say close that door. Totally. And that makes me think, you know, even when it's not these public displays in most schools in Y-WAM, you have a one-on-one leader and you usually have a journal that is part of Y-WAM's curriculum that goes week to week of whatever you're going to be going through.

And that has very detailed questions about like, what is the sin God wants you to confess this week? What is the fill in the blank? And you give that journal to your one-on-one every week to read.

And so, the deep is most emotional things that you're going through have a direct connection to this person that is your superior, essentially, in this organization. And then, of course, you know, they need to maybe debrief that with their staff.

And so, nothing that you share is actually really in confidentiality, much less to your own safety. And interestingly, we have brought it full circle back to the prison, because when you do this, now you have given the leadership leverage over you.

And so, you have solidified the walls of the prison that you're in, because, say you have, I'm going to use a basic example, say you have the sin of pride, and you talk about it, you confess it to the group, now, anytime you try to do something that isn't what the leader wants, remember that sin of pride, my sister, my brother, you need to stay within your boundaries and not let that sin of pride take you out of this.

They have leveraged over you. And so, now, you have created your own prison walls, and it takes us back into the Stanford experiment. Yes. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. It also, this is a different, but also feels important to mention, because I think it's in the same vein that we would also have these things called giving nights.

And they were these immensely emotional, moving nights where you'd have a lot of worship first, and you'd get into these altered states. And then, literally, it was hours of what does God want you to give to someone else?

And person after person would come up to the microphone and say, God wants you me to give you my only laptop. God wants me to give you the rest of the money for your outreach.

And it was always like, it was almost like bigger and better. Like, who could come up with the bigger, better, or more sacrificial thing? And I do think that, you know, I myself had these compulsions that I was like, what's the one thing?

I don't want God to ask me to give. Oh my gosh, that must be the thing God's asking me to give. And I would give it away. And so that also felt like it was part of this frenzy.

Like I can never have some sense of consistency or control over who I am, the things that I move through, because I never know what God's gonna ask me to say or give away.

And it creates this really, really precarious environment that is this abdication of agency and autonomy so that you become a victimized and a victimer in this world. So you've actually got me angry. I don't know if you can tell it.

I smile when I'm angry. You've actually got me angry that this is happening to young adults and children. I think we should probably take a moment and just say, give people examples of what is a healthy alternative to this.

And what does it look like when it's forced confession, coerced confession, how can you identify that? How can you identify that you're being manipulated through your confession? I come back to this quote from Angela Chen that I really love often that says, if someone cannot say no, any yes that's given is meaningless.

And in these systems that we've talked about that our systems of obedience consent is revoked because you can't consent in a system of obedience. And so just asking, is this a place that I'm free to not confess if I don't want to or I don't feel ready to?

And if it's not, that's a pretty big red flag because I believe love doesn't push. It doesn't force, it doesn't have an agenda. I believe love is really merciful and expansive and spaciousness. And I think that Jesus really demonstrated his own radical agency and honoring the agency of others.

And so I think that that can become a litmus test of do I have ability to practice my agency? Can I say no without being punished without being left, without being abandoned?

And where are the places that I feel like I want to share out of an intimacy and a safety that's already there, not out of an attempt to get an intimacy or a safety that I don't already feel?

Part of the reason it angers me, there's a moment in my life that I'm remembering where I had, I used to go off to meetings away from my parents because my parents were not that healthy when I was growing up.

And so I've traveled to these meetings. I went to this one meeting that had a forced alter call. And something just didn't feel right, but it was a forest altar call. I was watching the youth go up, and the way it worked, they would go up, and they would whisper whatever it was in the pastor's ear, and then the pastor would pray.

They would kneel. And from, you know, from the congregation looking at it, it looked like a healthy thing. It looked like a thing of God, but something just didn't feel right. I'm one of the people that didn't go up because I had the feeling in my gut.

Something is not right here. And so I stayed back and I just prayed silently to myself, right? Well I began to realize over time after leaving the call, and it took me until after rewiring my head at whenever I had left.

Whenever you're in this type of situation where confession is expected instead of welcomed, that's wrong. That's not how you treat people. That is the wrong way to do it, right? So you can identify that if you're in a bad situation like I was, my gut was feeling wrong because it was expected.

It was a forest altar call. More than that, refusal in those scenarios usually has some sort of a either social or spiritual consequence. I don't think they were preaching fire and brimstone if you didn't go up.

But if you didn't go up, you were that guy who was sitting there when all the rest of us were up there. I was that guy, right? So I know how socially awkward this feels.

I was socially awkward, which isn't that far out of my element anyway. But the leaders had access to the spiritual lives and the inner secrets of every single person who went up there. And after I realized, after leaving the cult and deprogramming all of the stuff out of my head, after I realized what they're doing, I get so angry then and you just reignited that anger in me right now.

So our podcast has gone all kinds of different directions in my face as red if you're listening and can't see me. But I'm that angry. You can't do this to people. You can't do this to children.

So I think maybe we should end on a note on a happy note because I'm red in the face. There are people who go through this who can conquer it and get past it and not have any sort of baggage from being that one who is socially awkward.

I was that person, right? I'm over it. I'm a little angry when I see it happening to other people. What advice would you give to people like me who did experience something like this?

It makes me think about when my husband and I were considering leaving a Christian organization and we really were afraid because we said, well, we don't want to lose our community. And then we came to a different discussion where we said, if we lose our community because we don't go to this certain building one day a week, is that actual community or is that the type of community we want?

and I don't mean to minimize how incredibly connected we can feel to these communities. And I will say that as someone who has spent years on the other side, I have developed relationships that I know I can be messy, I can be disappointing, I can be frustrating, I can be angry, and there's still space. And if you don't feel that where you currently are, you do have things to lose for sure in leaving, I don't want to minimize that. And you have that much more to allow yourself to experience on the other side of that. I think about when Jesus said

what good is it for someone to gain the world and lose their soul. And if you're in a situation where your soul feels suffocated and terrified and hindered because of how you're having to conform, there's so much more expansiveness that I think we're invited into and how we move and breathe and have our being. Well thank you. Now I feel much better in my face is less red. Thank you for doing this with me. Absolutely. Thank you. 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 and www.IndoWellMovement.com. 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.