Our Stories: An Interview With Dr. Kerry Edwards

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org, and with me today I have my very special guest, Dr. Carey Edwards, Doctor of Religious and Theological Studies. Carey, it's good to have you on here. We've chatted a few times by an email about the history of Laterane and the Pentecostal movement, Apostolic Faith, etc. and you have some deep connections to all of this and you're a doctor of religious and theological studies. So we both thought it would be good for you to come on and

tell everybody a little bit about your story and some of your insights into the movements. Thank you very much. It's good to be here and I've watched the number of your podcasts and I find them to be fascinating. There's not a lot of people doing a lot of work analysing the history of the Laterane movement critically and so I really do appreciate your efforts in that regard. I was born into Pentecostal family, both my paternal and maternal grandparents were active in the Apostolic Church initially in Wales but in the UK in general. My paternal grandfather

was an ordained minister in the Apostolic Church. My maternal grandfather was a lay minister in the Apostolic Church in Wales. So I've been associated with Pentecostalism since I was born basically. Then shortly after I was born, I may have been one or two years old, my father was ordained in the Apostolic Church and he became a minister at a church in suburb of London, England and he didn't stay in the Apostolic Church very long. That was in 1955 I believe which was when the Laterane movement had been brought from North America to the UK via

a couple of people who my father knew quite well. One was Fred Poole who was apostolic. I think he was a general superintendent of the apostolic church in North America, if my memory serves correctly.

And then Cecil Cousin who was an apostolic minister that had emigrated to Canada probably in the mid-1940s and had run across a latter-rain movement in Detroit.

And they both came to the UK and brought whatever features of the latter-rain that they thought were relevant and the apostolic church found objectionable for one reason or another. It's not entirely clear to me what it was that the apostolic church found objectionable in the latter-rain because many of those ideas seemed consistent with the apostolic practices from the beginning.

But anyway, Cecil Cousin, or Fred Poole who brought it over to England, I think he went back to the US. He had a church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Cecil Cousin moved back to the UK and apostolic church promptly kicked him out for his association with the latter-rain.

And my father followed suit for, I don't know if he left of his own free will or if he was kicked out also along with Cecil Cousin. But anyway, he left the apostolic church and started to independent the latter-rain church in South Wales when I was quite young.

So I was initiated into the movement before I was conscious, really.

And so I grew up in South Wales in a latter-rain Pentecostal church.

And then eventually I could talk some more about this. If you want, my father emigrated to the United States and became a faculty member at Elon Bible Institute in upstate New York, which was a latter-rain Bible college that had been founded by Ivan Spencer and Ivan Spencer picked up the latter-rain in Detroit.

And I think that's where he met Cecil Cousin who turned out to be a very influential figure in the charismatic movement in the UK in the 60s and 70s, taking Pentecosts socialism from it, I would say it's working class roots in the UK into the more respectable denominations in the UK, Church of England and other denominations. Cecil Cousin was kind of an unusual figure in the apostolic church. He was the first apostolic to in the UK to go to university. He had a degree from Cambridge and I think that was largely because he came from a relatively wealthy family, one of the founders of the apostolic church.

And so he was probably well-suited, haven't been educated into the British upper class to take panacostalism from its working class roots and spread it around the UK. He had a weekly or monthly magazine. I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head. But anyway, before my father emigrated to the United States, he actually teamed up with Cecil Cousin in Yorkshire.

They co-pastered the church there. I think Cecil spent his time producing the literature and my father took care of the business end of a congregation. So that magazine, I presume I remember seeing it all around the house as a kid. I would read it periodically. My memory is very unclear about its contents. I assume it had a lot to do with the healing revivals that were taken place in North America. Yeah, I would say so. That was about the time when the healing revival went into the what they called the worldwide healing revival instead of just the United States. You're mentioning

all of these names and it makes me feel a little bit guilty. I've got approximately 200 now research requests and secret Cecil Cousins and Fred Poole are two men that I have in my list. I've just not been able to get to them yet. But what's interesting is you mentioned the your thoughts on the apostolic churches who denounced Laterane and yet held on to many of the themes. That's something that I too explored and wondered what in the world was going on because the assemblies of God, for example, were so deeply and deeply tied to Laterane and they were sponsoring it.

Even long after they were denouncing it, they were sponsoring it. And I was really shocked when I learned that the assemblies of God in the state of Indiana, the state of Indiana became a rogue state.

In other words, they supported Laterane against the will of the general council. Mainly because William Brannum was from Indiana, obviously, but Bureiet, they seem to denounce it yet hold many of its fundamentals, and the conclusion I have come to is basically that it wasn't so much the doctrine that they felt like they were losing control from the upper end of these things.

These organizations could not control where this was headed. Yeah, I think that's a very interesting observation. A couple of things. One is I don't think that the assemblies of God, either in North America or in the UK, believed that there were apostles that could be ordained in the 20th century.

They did not accept the idea that God was choosing apostles. That was a conflict between the Apostolic Church and the assemblies of God in the early 20th century in South Wales. When the latter reign came along, it's easy for me to see that conflict between the assemblies of God and the Apostolic Church because they're long been this argument as to whether or not people could be ordained as apostles and get some kind of pretty significant religious power in the organization as a result of that ordination.

But I agree with you. My kind of take on your view that the managerial elite was losing control is that the initial generation of Pentecostal leaders were aging out by the late 1940s. And so you had a new generation of Apostolics coming up.

My father in particular, if you use him as an example, he was drafted into World War II and then became an officer in the British Army. And so he already had a taste of managerial power as an officer in the British Army.

So I think you would find someone like that not likely to be the kind of person willing to take orders from the older generation that were aging out. They wanted to have some power themselves.

And I assume there were a fair number of Pentecostals who had served in World War II came back and wanted to maybe be the equals of the first generation of leaders. And this, those older leaders found undermining their authority, perhaps, is the way.

I would look at it. I agree. And there was also the financial aspect, right? There's so much money flowing through this and a lot of that money, even though it went into some of the offering baskets of the churches, the majority of the money went to these apostles or prophets that the letter ends and out.

That's a really interesting point because I can't speak to one key issue sore point with my father when he was a minister in the Apostolic Church in London. He was a fairly ambitious guy and would preach at

more than in his local congregation, right? He might have a revival meeting or something like that. And the way the Apostolic Church divided up the money in the UK, now I don't know all the details on this and I haven't looked at any records that shows their policy, but I have heard conversations between my mother and father about this issue.

All the ministers were paid the same. Now I don't know if they were paid the same in every church in the United Kingdom or maybe the regions were different. Perhaps someone got paid more in London and they did in a more remote area, but all the ministers got the same.

And if a minister carried out a revival and got some money for preaching at that revival, it did not belong to that minister. That minister had to turn over that money to the denomination and then that money was split up amongst the ministers in the church.

So it was probably a result of, this is again a kind of guess on my part, but the Apostolic Church was founded in highly unionized areas in the UK, was an industrial religion. And so union activity usually produces the same wages for every union member.

And so when the church initiated its remuneration policy, they said roughly we're gonna do the same thing that happens in the minds. And so they wanted to keep some kind of equal pay going out amongst its ministers.

And this pissed off my father, right? He thought he was doing the preaching at the revival. He should get to keep the money that he made because he was working a little harder than the other guy who didn't have a revival meeting that Friday night or whatever it was.

So the money component, you're correct. I think that is a very significant issue. And by view on why my father emigrated to the United States as a Pentecostal minister is because he saw great opportunities.

to make more money in the United States than he could in the UK. Now this is my some people would call it cynical, secular view of my father's motivations by siblings would disagree, right? They would say God called him to come to North America. And surely that's exactly what he said that God called him to come to North America. But that's what every Pentecostal minister says when they move around. But there's way more interesting and complex motivations than that in the background, I believe. Yeah, exactly. I've been digging deeply into Abyssin and the Christian missionary

alliance and their influence on Pentecostalism. As you know, Abyssin never really joined the Pentecostal movement. But many of his ideas showed up in the Pentecostal movement. So I've been tracing that history trying to find where it happened. And the point of transference appears to be Frank Sanford, Sanford influence, Parham and so on and so forth. But they were talking about in some of the newspaper reports I've read in today's money, man, it was millions of dollars that he was getting for some of these revivals. People were giving them deeds to their houses, necklaces, jewelry, money like you can't even imagine. And I found one argument in the newspaper between

Simpson and the newspaper journalist in which the journalist called him out and said, most of the funding, according to Simpson, most of the funding is handled by our treasurer. So you can't even put this on me. Well, then the journalist responded, well, your wife is the treasurer.

It's all going into her personal bank account. And so once it goes into the personal, how do you separate what's a personal expense and a business expense? And in the end, there's no way to do it, right? So this was this was the pattern and the style. And I'm not saying every Pentecostal minister is motivated by money. But if you look at some of the big names in the revival campaigns, there were William Brannum, the newspaper said that two hefty men were required to carry boxes or suitcases, I think they said suitcases of money from his meetings.

Yeah, there must have been a lot of money involved because didn't I or S go after him and he had to pay a $40,000 fine for avoiding taxes? $300,000. So if you do the math, yeah, if you do the math on the percentage of money, I want to say, you know, I'm taxed it like, I don't know what it is, it's 20, 30%, right? Well, if you're making that kind of money and you're paying $300,000 in taxes, I can't even imagine how much money. Oh, yes. So I would like to look at most of the Pentecostal

history that I've read does not delve into the financial records. And I think the financial records would shed a lot of light as to what was happening in the background That's not discussed in the open or wasn't discussed in the open or at least is not discussed in the open Except for people like you and me right who want who would like to know more about The economics of the movement. Yeah, I remember of my grandfather's church I was I was always forthright about the money, you know I didn't make that much money anyway, so when I paid the check I just I handed it to the treasure directly and

Every once in a while I would not get back the receipt at the end of the year with the same amount of money that I gave in And I'm talking it was off by thousands of dollars and so I had to go back and say well look there's a mistake made here and On the Bolton board as you walked into my grandfather's church they had this Financial report which was not much more than a bullet point list saying you gave us some money and we used it

That's about all it said and I come to find out that you know a lot of the things that were in that list weren't quite kosher and I didn't realize it until I went to my new church and I went to one of the Business meetings. I can't remember how they call it at the church But they handed each of us the stack of papers. I want to say it was like you know eighth of an inch thick And said here are the expenses that we have in the church and it was all the way down to

We need seven boxes of rolls of toilet paper. I mean, yeah, yes every it was so accountable, right? Versus at my grandfather's church not a single unit. You did not know where your money went So it's interesting. You know this that organization called Evangelicals for financial responsibility. I think that's the name of the organization and You can join it and then you have to provide some kind of document accounting that that you are Spending your money appropriately And I do know Laterane organizations that do currently belong to that organization But I don't know how long that's been around I doubt if it was around in the mid 1960s or the 50s or the 40s

um And I'm sure there are some that don't belong to it again, but the the issue of money is Actually quite intriguing to me on this issue partly because Of what I knew once we emigrated to the United States um, and then we moved to upstate New York where my father was on the faculty of Elon Bible Institute and that had a really interesting economic um System on that campus Which counters in many ways what we both think about how much money was coming into the that are in movement in the healing revivals.

Everybody who worked on that campus, now I'll have to make some exceptions to this, right? But everyone who worked on the campus got paid the same amount, whether it was the president or the janitor.

No one made more than anyone else. Everyone lived in housing provided by the institute and everyone ate meals in common. So it was a communist organization, even though when I say that to the people who lived there and I know they all just recoil in horror because they were all anti-communists while living in a communist organization.

Now there were some distinctions, like women got paid less than men. There weren't very many women working there. There were some, what you would have called secretaries. Nowadays it would be administrative assistance, receptionists, things like that.

They were paid less than men and married men were paid more than single men. And most married women, I think I would say all married women

there did not work. So it was in many ways, an egalitarian economic system, even though the authority was hierarchical, it was really run by a small cadre of powerful males but money-wise, at least on paper.

Now there were some, and this is relevant to our discussion about how do penicostles make money and how much do they make.

My father was there initially he was a faculty member, then he became the academic dean, then he became the vice president and eventually he became president of the college. My wife, who was also lived on that campus, her father was a mason and so he did the construction masonry, concrete work, work, all those kind of things.

And the place was expanding in the 1960s and 70s. And my mother-in-law had a great deal of resentment over the fact that the powerful ministers who ran the institution could go out and preach on a weekend and bring back substantial sums of...

money, whereas the staff who were working class blue collar people, if they went out and took a job on a Saturday, they would make a fraction of what the ministers made. And this was sometimes reflected in the cars that various classes of people drove on campus.

Even though it was the actual salaries that were paid out every month were equal, the side jobs were vastly different in their ability to enrich the ministerial class as opposed to the working class of that institution. There's another aspect too and I keep you, people my family is probably going to think I dislike my grandfather which isn't true but he's my example right because I was there, I saw it all. There's also the issue of how the money comes in. My grandfather was very forthcoming with his church about where how much he was paid the money, you know where the money went etc. He got a salary from the church

and it was a meager salary. It wasn't that much. And then the bulk of the money that was donated in, he would collect the optithes and offering twice and there were two services. So every Sunday morning there's two sets of baskets that went and people contributed in both which was odd.

But he would tell the people, you know, I get X number of dollars and the rest of it goes quote to the organization which is the brand of organization right and that was supposed to be for missionary work. I legally am not going to talk about that right now but there were some things going on. I'll just say it like that. But what was odd about it is my grandfather would preach these pre we listened to recordings of William Brannum from 1947 to 1965. Before the tape was played, Grandpa would preach this miniature sermonette about the tape. And sometimes he would

talk about the money and talk about tithing and stress the importance of tithing but he would make these random statements like the tithes should go to the pastor. And everybody's putting the money in the place right. Well I've been to his house when large sums of money were given to the pastor and that was outside of the salary off of the record books and Grandpa had wads of cash like you would not believe. And when I looked at the courthouse as records of his estate when I saw how much was there, my mind was blown. Even seeing the amount of cash that flowed into my

grandfather's hands had no idea it could accumulate to that level. So there was a lot of money but all this to say there are many ministers in Pentecostalism. who are paid a meager salary, but there's this fine line between, they say tithes and offering.

There's this fine line between, where does your tithing go, and where does the offering go? Yes, yes, yes. I've got one observation on this topic, which shocked me at the time, and it's related to other issues, but I graduated from that Bible college where we lived, and when I got out of high school, I spent three years at that Bible college on a ministerial track.

And so, in the final semester of your senior year, if you were on a ministerial track, you had to go intern with a minister somewhere for a week, and you went left the college campus, went and lived with the minister, and learned what a week in the life of a penicostal minister was.

Now, almost, now you may correct me, you may know more about the laterane than I do, but for the most part, the laterane was a white penicostal movement. It didn't extend very deeply into black penicostalism, probably for a lot of different reasons, but anyway, during that, there was an the Ellen Bible Institute where my family lived and where I went to Bible college. It was a white, clearly a white institution. In all the years, I lived there, there's a handful of North American non-whites who ever showed up on campus. But one of those people was a black penicostal minister

from Rochester, New York, whose grandfather founded a black penicostal denomination called the Church of God and True Holiness, and somehow he got connected up to the Bible Institute. And he was fairly close friends with my father. And so I don't know how I ended up being a sign to him when I had to do my week's internship, but I went, his name was Paul Garnton, he's dead now. And so I went and spent a week with him. And what totally shocked me so this would have been 1977, the spring of 1974. The way his congregation paid him was they

gave him a credit card and they told him, use this credit card for whatever you want. And so

he just had unlimited access to that credit card. And I'd never heard of such a thing. I didn't own a credit card at the time. Credit cards were not as widespread as they are nowadays.

And it really set me back. But it's probably a difference between black and white Pentecostals, right? Black Pentecostal ministers usually drove a fairly nice Cadillac or a Lincoln or something like that. And so black Pentecostal denominations wanted to show off their pastor and show off his wealth.

And he eventually ended up getting into trouble with the IRS. I presume over the use of that credit card, because the IRS probably wouldn't look kindly on. Well, this is the distinction between personal and church expenses.

They're all listed on this credit card. Much like AB Simpson's wife, right? Yeah, yes, yeah. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic, and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

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I have been studying exactly that. The latter reign movement did have people of color, but there weren't many. And if you look at the leadership in this, obviously, William Brannum had the ties to white supremacy, but beyond that, I'm finding Gordon Lindsay speaking at Christian identity conferences, and you have leaders out of the Sharon Orphanage and who had ties to Elam, who were preaching the racist versions of Christian identity, the more extreme, I should say, racist versions.

So I have to conclude that there were probably African-American people who were curious and wanted to get in it, but the moment they heard somebody mention the word mongrel, which was a common theme among the Christian identity people, I'm certain that they would have just laughed and said, no, this is not a good place.

Yeah, so it seems to me, and this may be far too broad in generalization, but my guess is that in the 1940s and 50s, most white Pentecostals were racists. Now I say that partly because of two things that I know, one is that I don't know if you're aware of this or not, that the assemblies of God refuse to ordain black men in the United States. They were ordaining them in Africa, but they wouldn't ordain black men in the United States. And there was a big hullabaloo in the Apostolic Church in the UK when the Apostolic

Church decided to ordain black apostles. And they had to do that because they had huge churches in Africa, Nigeria, Ghana. And so they needed leadership in those places. And so they needed to ordain black apostles. But when they did that, they had a clause that said if we ordain a black apostle, that apostle could have authority over black people, but not over white people, whereas white apostles could have authority over both white people and black people.

So that was in the early 50s. So I think the racism was probably fairly widespread. I did know fairly well Winston Noons who was connected with the latter reign movement. He was from Toronto.

And he was from Trinidad. I'm not sure if you'd say he was black, maybe of mixed race, definitely not white, but he was the only active participant in the latter reign that I knew of that was not obviously white. So that whole history of the connection between white and black Pentecostalism intrigues me because it started out as a fairly egalitarian movement in California.

There were blacks and whites together in California in the early 20th century at Azusa Street, but as soon as the movement moved back to the south and the assemblies of God and the Church of God and Christ started their denominations, I think that was in the late teens of the, you know, so 1918-1920 somewhere in that area. They were segregated denominations. There were no black leaders at the founding of the assemblies of God and they just all went with the Church of God. The black denomination was the Church of God and Christ. And you had people like Param who I won't use

the words that he used, but he frowned heavily upon the people with black skin mingling, I think he said, with the people with white skin and used some very derogatory terms in his assessment of Azusa Street. But you're right, when it came back, you had people like- F.F. Bosworth, who was Brannum's mentor in the in the doctrinal teachings of Dauy.

And he was from, you know, he had churches and throughout Texas. And, you know, I start, I'm trying to trace his history with mixed race churches. And it's really interesting because you find a lot of statements claiming that Bosworth was very pro-interracial churches.

But yet, he's speaking at places like the Ku Klux Klan headquarters, Kadel Tabernacle and Indianapolis, and a man who was for racial integration and equality doesn't go to the Klan headquarters and hold several revivals.

And, you know, the South, I think every state in the South had laws forbidding interracial marriage up until 1967 when the Supreme Court overruled those laws. So one would expect, then, that most of those Pentecostals in the South had some affinity for those laws, right? They thought that, and I know at the Bible College where Elon Bible Institute, there were people there in the late 1960s absolutely adamantly opposed to interracial marriage.

And there were, on occasion, a few black African Americans who showed up on campus. And I'm familiar with one case in which a white woman was dating the only black man on campus. And the administration took efforts to make sure that they were stopped. So, yes, racism, I think, runs throughout the mid-20th century later reign. I did know some of those people from the Sharon orphanage. Like, when I moved to that, that Bible college was in Lyman, New York, Milford Kirkpatrick lived there. And he was, he was from the Sharon orphanage. He was there when the

later reign revival broke out in the late 1940s. And he lived on the campus for probably three or four years. Probably he wasn't a staff member or a faculty member of the college. I think he lived there as kind of a base and he traveled as an evangelist. But he lived there, I think, because he had a couple of kids who needed to go to high school and they needed some place to, you know, have their high school. And so, his, at least his son was at the high school there. I don't know. I was not

aware of his racial ideas. It, it wouldn't surprise me if he, had white supremacist ideas, but I was not personally aware of those. In the way, the Christian identity movement embedded itself in laterane to the people who were indoctrinated with it, they would not have considered them to be racist ideas.

No, that's true. That's right. I was taught that interracial marriage was of the devil and that the offspring could not make it into the kingdom of heaven, all of this, you know, very, very racist things.

I would have considered myself a defender and fighter for racial equality while I was in it, thinking of this, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's a complicated matter, right, to try to sort out the extent, like if the majority of your society is racist, then trying to label some individual as particularly racist is difficult, right?

Because they're just reflecting what the general attitude is, the society around them. And it just shows the success of people like Brannem's mentor, Roy E. Davis, who is trying to sway American politics through religion.

It was a political cult, you know, pure plain and simple, it was a political cult. But they're trying to influence religion to match the white supremacist's racism as a quote unquote Christian organization, because that's how the clan and all these white supremacy organizations touted themselves as being pure American or true American and Christian.

So when they spread these ideas into religion, they swayed the religion and the politics. So that's a really interesting topic. The extent to which penicostalism was or is a political religion. I think it clearly is a political religion today.

Absolutely. So when penicostalism began, I would say it was an apolitical religion that it was a pacifist movement. And so lots of penicostals, maybe even the majority of penicostals, wreath males at least, refused to fight in World War I.

And lots of them were imprisoned, lots of them were killed for not being patriotic enough. And it was a surprise to me, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when I learned that the largest pacifist denomination in the United States up until the mid-1960s was the assemblies of God.

They were officially pacifists until 1967. leaders of that pacifism, one of this, probably, well, I'm not, I couldn't say that. Certainly, Stanley Fragham, who was the editor of the, I think it was called the Pentecostal Evangel, which was the Assemblies of God, Monthly magazine. He was an ardent pacifist, and he joined the Latter-Rain Movement, and I think he got kicked out of the Assemblies of God, and I knew him, he used to visit, in fact, he lived on campus for a while when I was in my teenage years, and so he was a prominent Pentecostal pacifist. So the reason I bring that up is it's relationship

in general to politics, that pacifism is not really just a view about whether or not you should fight in a war. It's a view about state violence and state coercion, and most early Pentecostals drew a sharp line of distinction between the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God, and the kingdom of this world was the state, and it used coercive force in, you know, regular day-to-day life, and it used more coercive force during war. So early Pentecostalism really didn't want to have much engagement with politics, because it implied that you were given yourself to the kingdom of this world. So that transition to a political religion

really intrigues me, and until you spoke a few minutes ago, it hadn't really struck me that perhaps that's connected with white supremacy and the rise of the civil rights movement in the, and it's not just white supremacy, it's white male supremacy, so it's connected as a response to the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement, which threatened those ideas. So more specifically, it's tied to the Christian identity movement, which is the subject for the book that I'm actually working on right now, the manuscript. Okay, all right. You're right, the early Pentecostals were not at all political. In fact, they would, like you said, the kingdom is

not of this world, this is not my home, and they even sang the song, the world is not my home when just passing through. If you line up the Pentecostal slash laterane timeline with the Christian identity timeline, recognizing that many of these men were cross-pollinating, such as Davis, such as William D. Upshaw, such as, you know, several other names, Gerald Winnrod.

was one of the fathers of Christian identity. As soon as William Jennings Brian spread his politics throughout the south, Christian fundamentalism, the notion that the church was being invaded by Catholicism, spreading evolution, there were many Pentecostals that this resonated with. And there came a point in time, and I still, I'm still researching to know exactly the point of the shift, but Christian identity rose up against Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and that led to the great sedition trial, many of the things we covered in our historical podcast. Well, by that point in time, there were many Christian fundamentalist religions,

Pentecostalism included, especially in the south, who were aligned with this theme and felt like politics of America had been invaded. Well, they created what was called this Jewish plot, that the Jews had invaded Washington, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was communist working with the commies. All of this shifted, and you even watched the white supremacy parties shift at that point in time. They all were unanimously against FDR.

Yeah, so I'm largely ignorant of the Christian identity movement, so I can't engage in much conversation about that topic, because it's not something, I mean, I'm an aware of it,

but it's not something I've read a lot about, or was personally familiar with, but I can certainly see where that would have happened, and certainly the Pentecostals that I grew up with were anti-communists. So it's kind of odd, so they had this global mess, like Russia was Gog or May Gog or something like that, they were being up. So they saw other countries as political agents about which they should have an opinion, but they weren't actively involved in local politics, state politics, national politics in the United States. It was very rare that I grown up in the letter rain. I heard any conversations

about political campaigns, their attention, and it's really because when they live in a world, I'd say the letter rain people, maybe Pentecostals in general, live in a fantasy world, that in the real world, the centers of power are London, New York, Washington, DC, Moscow, Beijing. Pentecostals think that God has a different power And those power centers are what Jeffersonville, Indiana, Springfield, Missouri, Lyma, New York.

And these are the places where God is moving. And the agents of that power are them. It's the apostles of the latter reign, who are the equivalent of presidents and ambassadors. And so they had like this multinational, theocratic imagination in which every day politics of a given country was largely irrelevant to the grand scheme of what was happening in the universe.

So they weren't the fact that today there are Pentecostal prophets prophesying a particularly later reign people. I'm probably on a weekly basis about Donald Trump is just mind-boggling in terms of transition. That's occurred since I would say 1965 until now that it has now become an almost completely national political religion.

Well that is the exact subject of my next book, how Christian identity transformed through the latter reign and many of these various other movements into what's called the new apostolic reformation, where they had a seven mountain mandate and other seven categories that they would take to mean an older politics being one of them.

And what struck me funny, I listened to this NPR program and this lady was talking about the seven mountain mandate and she said the most important mandate of the seven mountains is the finances because without it the whole rest of it falls apart.

That's probably true. Yes so that transition intrigues me and I think it's probably a reflection in many ways of the movement from Pentecostalism as a working class religion and the working class typically does not have a lot of political power into the business classes and the managerial classes of the United States.

One book about the history of Pentecostal my found to be really very very insightful is Robert Mates Anderson's I think it's called Vision of the Disinherited and he looks at the growth of Pentecostalism in the United States.

It was his doctoral dissertation probably in the early 60s maybe. One of the first sociologists maybe the first sociologist to take a close look at Pentecostalism in the United States and he argues that it was a religion.

of the dispossessed, the alienated, the poor, and I think he was largely correct, right? But, and I love that book, and I think it provides a lot of insight as to why the religion worked, because the people in those social classes feel powerless, they don't feel capable of manipulating the political system, they're at the bottom end, whereas if you think you're an agent of God, and all of a sudden now you're an apostle that's having some influence on the universe, this gives you an immense sense of self worth that's not available in the political system.

You're empowered, but yes, empowered, and I think that's really important to a person that explains a lot to me why people find it the movement attractive. But what Anderson did not analyze, and I'm guessing it's because he simply was unaware of it in the 1960s, was the movement of something like the Full Gospel Businessmen's Association International in Pentecostalism, which was a deliberate attempt to, in North America, initially, in the United States initially, to take Pentecostalism from the working classes and deliver it directly to the business owners and the managerial class in the United States.

Now, that's a different game altogether than what Pentecostalism was in its beginnings. When you look at that, you can understand why business people are far more active in the political system. They have a great, much, they have got more money to spend to aid their political candidates.

They have a larger voice in the system. And so once Pentecostalism starts building its influence in the managerial classes, then I think it immediately suggests that it's going to become a much more political religion.

But the other thing that happened, and I think this is directly related to the latter reign movement, is there were lots of Pentecostal ministers who got kicked out of their denominations as a result of embracing the latter reign.

And so they immediately had no market for their services, right? The assemblies of God would not let them preach in their churches. The apostolic church in the UK would not let them preach in their churches.

So they had to sell their wares elsewhere. And so they turned to traditional Protestant, mainline Protestant denominations where They thought they could introduce Pentecostalism. And my father spent much of his career preaching,

teaching to non-Pentecostals, Catholics, Episcopalians, who else, Presbyterians. And so those denominations were denominations, denominations not of the working class predominantly, but for the middle class or the upper class in the United States. So the latter reign by excluding a large set of ministers

from ministering to the working classes, push them to minister to the middle upper middle

and upper classes in the United States. So for instance, I would argue that I was just listening to this before we got together this morning. I was listening to the Supreme Court hearing about, it was about whether the law applied to January six rioters.

And Amy Comey Barrett was questioning the lawyers in that case. And I would say that she is the first latter reign Supreme Court justice because she was raised in the people of praise commune.

Now the people of praise commune is a Catholic charismatic commune that began in the 1970s as a result of the interaction between latter reign ministers and Catholic mostly lay people, some priests and those Catholic charismatic communes

are a direct result of those latter reign ministers looking for other places to introduce Pentecostalism. And so maybe you could say that John Ashworth was the first, he was the first Pentecostal attorney general in the United States, but the first latter reign of what national legal figure, I would say is probably Amy Comey Barrett who still belongs to that community of praise.

So you can see there the movement into the upper echelons of American, maybe not the upper echelons, but certainly the everyday echelons of American politics as a result of the latter reign movement. Yeah, I think you're right.

A lot of people are unfamiliar with the fact that the latter reign... and Catholicism in some cases merge, because it touted itself, the latter rain touted itself as an inter-denominational faith. And I know that's counterproductive to when you think Christian identity, they were against Catholicism, but remember the mission was to convert the Catholics.

So if they can assimilate the Catholics, then mission accomplished, right? So it's just so crazy interesting. You know, to your point earlier, you're talking about the difference in what Pentecostalism started and how it began.

I'm, I think people know I examine all of the critical information about Pentecostalism, and I get accused often of being a Pentecostal hater, but in the end, you know, what they had initially, even though some of it had some history that in my opinion was just smoking mirrors, the initial theme wasn't that bad.

If they had of, if they would have allowed for accountability, and well, basically what the Bible says, iron sharpening iron. You learn from people, you grow, you learn more, you grow, but iron and smoking mirrors can't sharpen each other.

And so you end up with this weird mess, right? So I, I had delve into the mess, and you know, where people stand, that's up to them. But, well, this has been incredibly fun.

And I think, I feel like we've just skimmed the surface. We haven't really gone that deep. So would you like to come back again and talk? I'll certainly, I'll come back. I enjoyed the conversation, and I hope someone else might find it interesting or useful somewhere.

Absolutely, I'm, I'm certain they will. So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org. For an overview of the historical research of William-Branum and the healing revivals, read preacher behind the white hoods, a critical examination of William-Branum and his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

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