Our Stories: Escaping the NAR - An Interview With Jonathon Sawyer

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 I have my very special guest, John Sawyer, former member of Robert Leardon Ministries and School.

John, it's so good to have you on here today to give your story. We've chatted a little bit through email, and we were connected by Dr. Steven Hasson and the work that he does.

I can tell you right now before we even get into this that we have so many people that are interested in hearing more about Robert Leardon and his fantasy book that is called God's Generals.

You know, I'm certain that we'll get on that topic because it fascinates me to how, you know, why would you do this? Why would you paint people that are many of them such criminals in such a light, but we'll get into that later.

So maybe if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, and a little bit about what you escaped. Yeah, and escape I did. John, it's wonderful to be here with you. I've listened to almost every one of your episodes, and I've been amazed at really almost how therapeutic your work on William-Brannum has been as I've made sense of my own journey.

Having been raised in the neocarysmatic and a gospel movement, then spent some time in the word of faith movements, and then the very early years of the New Apostolic Reformation, and a couple of groups that I was involved with from a young age.

I was part of the four square church. I know you've done some work into the some of the troubling aspects of Angela's temple in those early years, and then as I was emerging into my adolescence, I ended up gravitating toward the possibility of studying to be a minister and thinking through that.

And I had been raised on Robert Slard, who you mentioned earlier, had known of him and listened to his tapes from as early as eight or nine years old. So when he started... to gain some traction in the word of faith movements in the late 80s.

And so I ended up in my late adolescence through a series of events, forfitting a college education and going to his Bible college, which was a really formative experience for me where I experienced some real authoritarian dynamics.

As a person who was grappling with my own sense of identity through my late adolescence, as it pertains to what at the time, I would have called seamsextraction. Part of what I was desperately seeking at that time was to be healed of what I believed to be a demonic influence.

And Lairdyn was somebody who I believed had the spiritual power to deliver me from that.

There's a lot more we can talk about. I read God's Generals. He wrote this series of books where he highlighted Brannum and Charles Fox Parham and Catherine Coolman and Amy Simple McPherson and the rest of them.

And I remember reading those books and just being enthralled with these stories. The story about William Brannum and the car accident and him resurrecting from the dead of his wife, if I remember the story correctly or whatnot.

And just thinking this man was a powerful, was a prophet. And Robert's Lairdyn is connected to these people. And even though this God's Generals book was framed as why they succeeded and why some failed, as you alluded to earlier, much of it was a fairy tale.

And I don't think that's too strong language. Lairdyn, in fact, built his ministry upon a fairy tale. He wrote a book called I Saw Heaven where he claimed to be taken up into heaven when he was a boy and had a water fight with Jesus and the river of life, of life, and claimed to have seen this mansion where there were these body parts floating around that you could in the earth realm claim these body parts to be healed.

There's a little bit about my story. I'm leaving a whole lot out, but I guess the last thing I'll mention before we engage a bit more is the work that I do now in a doctoral program on the PhD candidate, and I study the intersection of religion and policy.

And I think a lot about adolescence, I think about education, and I think about how religion can be wielded as you've put it in ways that weaponize and harm others, and how... where education systems can foster that, particularly when they're infused with a radical forms of religion.

Yeah, it's a very much aligned with what I do. I, whenever I escaped what we came out of, it's funny because you're talking about reading and hearing Roberts Leard, and we had the same thing with Brannum, and though Brannumites didn't point you to other guys, because they wanted you to recognize the central figure of the cult of personality, we watched this video over, and I can remember crying like a baby watching this video where they go into his house and saw propaganda, now that I'll look back at it, but these two guys go into his house

and they talk about how this spiritual sign came and he gives one of the many, many conflicting versions of his life story in a brief setting with two guys, and I remember weeping like a baby because that's our prophet, and he's so filled with God, and then to find out what a scoundrel the man was, it's just really unbelievable.

But then after I left and realized that this was on a much broader scope, people like Leardin, he's not the only one doing it, it's as though they're taking, like I don't know, Hercules or Poseidon, and putting them onto this platform, and then taking all of the critical information out.

This was such this great deity, but we're not gonna tell you that we sacrifice their children to these people. You know, it's great. It's so, and you know, it's, when you really take a step back and look at it, there were people who were sacrificing their children to Dauy, and that's one of the guys is one of God's generals.

There were people who literally sacrificed their children to the belief set by denying the medicine, and they're not gonna tell you that in God's generals book, but the difference between, see, I enjoy the fantasy and the sci-fi, and I've got, as you can see, Millennium Falcon on my wall back here, I'm big into it, but the difference is, when I engage in fantasy, I know very clearly that it's fantasy, and they either tell you or you know up front that, hey, this is fiction and enjoy the fiction, but these guys don't do that, but where it gets interesting for me and you,

the synergy, after I was able to wipe out all of that out of my head, I began to realize that my worldview was so skewed towards the way that these men wanted to skew it.

They had weaponized the religion to change me into believing that their version of heaven and hell and sin and not sin was the correct way, and I should believe this, and even worse than that, things that were even in the Bible, they list some of these things as sin, they would make them hyper-sens, so this one sin is greater than the other sin.

and therefore you must abhor this person because he's that kind of center instead of your kind of center.

Yeah, and I would say for me, as I mentioned earlier, the fantasy element with Lairdon, and this is why I think education is important because I recognize today education is politicized and perhaps always has been in many ways.

And yet I think education is also a place where we can learn from others and discuss across differences and engage with different ideas and engage with individuals who hold different values from us, particularly in public education. But in some of these groups, for example, being raised on Lairdon from a young age, this was the authoritative truth. Lairdon's trip to heaven wasn't just framed as a vision or framed as a metaphorical story to teach something.

It was framed as this actually happened. And there was this strange thing, I don't know if this will resonate with you, but there were parts of Lairdon's story growing up that were so impactful to me as you mentioned some of the thing that experiences you had of weeping and whatnot. And I remember feeling the same way not being able to sleep because I was thinking about these stories that he was telling about visiting heaven. And I remember just earnestly desiring that I would have those same experiences and really seeking to be able to have Jesus walk

through the door and actually say hi to me. The way that Lairdon said Jesus walked through the door while he was watching Laverne and Shirley of all things and somehow had a conversation with him anointed him to be a prophet to the nations or whatnot. But then there was another part of this, you know, that part of it was appealing to me, but the other part was, as I would see it now,

really nefarious part where there was such an emphasis on demons, on demonology, on demons influencing everyone and everything and every feeling that I had that was quite frightening as a child. And as I emerged into my adolescence, you know, my first week at Robert's Lairdon's school, which was called Spirit Life Bible College, he orchestrated this week, which he called the Clean Out Week. So all the students would be gathered.

together in these sort of ecstatic worship experiences, where we're speaking in tongues, we're fighting the devil in tongues, we're doing spiritual warfare, you know, we've got people rolling on the ground and crying, and all of these translate experiences.

And without going into too many details, I write about this experience in an article that I recently published, and people can find it on my website. But I experienced a session of exorcism where Lairden knocked me to the ground, sat on my chest and tried to cast demons out of me.

And for a moment in time, I lost my breath, and it was a very traumatic experience where I was seeking to be delivered of what I thought at the time to be a homosexual demon.

And I played the role because I believed it. And then a few years later, while I was still part of Lairden's tribe, his church fell apart. It imploded because he was involved in a homosexual relationship, while at the same time being overtly hostile in his teachings and practices about, you know, what was referenced as homosexuality and those tribes.

So that was a really disheartening, staggering experience for me having been subjected to exorcisms, having been subjected to a lot of his really hostile rhetoric, then come to find out that this duplicitous life was being led.

And he's still out there, unfortunately, making really derogatory statements about the LGBTQ community. And it grieves me because I think that people of faith can hold differing views on gender and sexuality. And I think that's a constitutional right that should be protected.

I don't think that religion should be weaponized to harm people in the way that I experienced at that school, and that I fear too many other people are experiencing under the guise of religion.

Yeah, I can relate very much to the spiritual warfare that they instill into your head. It's so, again, it's a fantasy world, right? And I'm going to preface everything that I'm about to say with this.

I'm no minister. There are many different belief sets. If you're listening to this, don't be offended by what I have to say. Go to your pastor. He's going to tell you what your church should believe.

But what I recognize in my study, I work with people all over the globe at this point. And there's this distinct difference between Americanized Christianity and say Europe, for example. The belief sets didn't evolve in the same way, because in America, you had all of these weaponizations of religion that we're going through.

In Europe, it wasn't that much the case, you know, it developed in a different way. And what these movements... did. They wanted to instill a fear of this sense of urgency and this fear of invisible enemies that if you don't have this urgency, these invisible enemies are going to get you. And they use key passages from the Bible. Remember the fundamentalist movement was behind a lot of this.

So they took literal interpretations of the Bible and they did not allow critical thought. And so when they talk about the demons giving sicknesses or diseases in the Bible, well, there was no critical thought to think, well, in today's world, we know that that particular disease came from a bacteria and this little living creature in us and we can take an antibiotic and, you know, we can get rid of the bacteria. But they wanted to make you think that instead of something like this, there was this invisible enemy that you're fighting. And again, I'm no minister not to say that there aren't demons in the world. The Bible talks about demons

and angels. But not everything in the ancient worldview applies to today's worldview is the point I'm trying to make. And they took it a step further because they wanted to set a very rigid set of standards of what they perceived as the righteous way that the modern church should follow. And every church that didn't practice it their way, well, they too were the enemy.

But the difference is they were the enemy that you could see. And so they created this thing where it was literally severed in the body of Christ because they were creating other Christians as the visible enemy while these angels and demons were the invisible enemy.

Interesting. I've heard you talk about on your podcast as well the connections to the clan with William Brannon and with these early divine healing movements or at least the influences of, you know, clan ideologies. And one of the things that has been compelling to me is how, you know, we often think of the clan as exclusively an anti-black American movement.

And while that was certainly a huge part of it, there were also these ways that the clan ideology found ways to other folks, including Catholics, Jews, and anyone who didn't fit this definition of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and this idea of, you know, the Christian origins of the United States. And I'm wondering, you know, your thoughts because it's been tinkering through my brain a little bit with some of these recent movements such as the New Apostolic Reformation and their connection to...

do politics to their hyper rhetoric that demonizes certain folks in our community in the United States, even the LGBTQ community, and I wonder if there are similar things playing out as it pertains to them creating this heightened state of fear in the country under the banner of religion and perhaps flaming the fire of things that maybe aren't happening the way that they think they're happening.

Yeah, I would say on a broad scope, yes, but on a historical scope, it's nothing new. You know, when you think about the clan, you have a very Hollywood version of it in your head.

Like you said, it's the blacks versus the whites, and the reason for that is the clan when it grew into its climactic state. It was in the 60s when there were a lot of battles between blacks and whites integrating in the school system, and that's why, you know, that's why you see all of this mess.

But the clan was a much more complicated entity. It was a social movement as well as a political movement as well as a religious movement. It was a combination of all three mixed with pyramid scheme and mixed with secret society and a few other elements of, you know, that era, that was very popular.

Today we don't have Facebook, and I mean, back then we didn't have Facebook, you didn't have Twitter, you didn't have television, these communities were forming, and the clan promoted a sense of community in the United States, which was a good thing.

They were actually some really good things they did. They were a charitable organization, they helped in cases where there, you know, people desperately needed help. But it was blended with all of these ideologies, one of which the religious realm saw very compatible.

Before the 1915 clan had grown, British israelism had spread throughout the United States, and it was a religious and political movement, and it saw the nation of the United States and England as two of the lost tribes of Israel.

And so they saw themselves as the, you know, the children of Israel that were discussed in the Bible, and they began applying passages of the Bible to this and combining it with Doomsday predictions.

And so whenever some other country would rise up against the United States or Great Britain, they would reference passages from, say, Revelation and say, well, that's the enemy that we see in the Bible.

So they were mixing politics and religion. Well, some of that had to do with color of skin, but also there was the Jewish slash plot that they said was existing, which were the Catholics. So the clan was against all of this, and they saw themselves as a very compatible network to the British Israelism. So when those two began to merge, it rose into Christian identity. And it came out long before this podcast will, but just yesterday, I discovered that Gordon Lindsay, who was largely responsible for hundreds, if not thousands of religious cults from the voice of healing slash laterane movement, he was a key

integral part of the Christian identity movement, speaking at identity conferences in Canada and the United States. And this was predating his work with William Brannum, and many of the locations where he, where this group that he's in is speaking are the same exact locations that Brannum ascends to in his 1947 tour, which is very interesting if you put all these pieces together.

And we don't have all the pieces yet, but the point that I'm building up to is, yes, it was, it was weaponized for the political aspects, for the religious aspects, but whenever the fear of Doomsday was brought in through British Israelism and Pentecostalism, of which many Pentecostals were also British Israelites. When all of this combined, now you have, again, the sense of urgency, the sense of fear, the enemies rising up against you, and like today, you know, where they had the other churches where the visible enemy will back then, some of the other countries, and then in

the United States, the Catholics, for example, they were the visible enemy to this group because they must be part of this communist Jewish conspiracy to take over the United States. The clan rose up against it and became and many Pentecostal groups, the heroes.

Yeah, the way that the Doomsday rhetoric is used to advance the power of both religion and politics and the United States is something I've thought about as I grappled through my own childhood of believing that the rapture was imminent, and there are those associated fears, and I would even say legitimate psychological traumas that are that are dealt upon, especially young people that are exposed to these type of things, and that's the group of people that I think a lot about is you know, there's a difference between somebody who may be an adult, who Converts to a

Brand-o-type group or decides to join up with a layered in tribe versus a child who is Trying to make sense of their place in the world

Already moved by stories, but then being told that these fictional stories about

The end times global conspiracies I mean, I remember back in the 1980s hearing about the Illuminati and I'm hearing about different people who are pointed to as is being the anti-Christ and the false prophet and in all of those things

and It concerns me that In America today we see such Polarized rhetoric and I don't think one side is exempt from Advancing the polarization and advancing the us versus them Maintolities I will say however though that I do see on the far right this willingness to bring some of these Doomsday ideas Into more of a public awareness You know you hear people it it rallies of of Donald Trump who Employee some of the language that I heard in Laredin's group about demons and things like that and it And it concerns me because a there are thoughtful conservatives out there and there are thoughtful believers and there are people who

Who believe that this country Can do amazing things and that this country has been a force for good in in many respects But that gets eclipsed when you have a a a group that starts to demonize Other people in public discourse in the way that it's happening today and so as I'm doing my work As and I'll just throw my cards out on the table. I see myself More on the progressive if you will or liberal side of things But everything that I do is informed by my upbringing Where I have these tapes tickering through my brain about the end of the world these tapes tickering through my brain about

The the people out there who are out to destroy us all of these ideas and and I have To have to grapple with those and it's very emotionally Intensive at times it takes a lot of energy to To hear those tapes to recognize them and then to Come to my own own ideas and definitions of what I think and what I actually believe rather than what was just put into my brain to believe.

Yeah. You know, any time I mention the orange-haired guy, I get all kinds of backlash because of I'm sorry. No, it's okay. It's okay. There's so much division and, you know, each time I try to address it, it's ironic because I'm one of the fools who actually voted for the guy.

In my opinion, I was a fool because if I had known now what I knew then, I probably would not have. But then, who is my other choice? I, you know, I go back and forth.

I may have still done it, I don't know, but the problem that I see and the problem that I address is that there are religious groups that have for decades swayed politics. It was a weaponization of religion.

But whenever the appeal to the public wasn't working in the way that it should have, these guys actually set up communities and actually establish and start entire cults, that their sole purpose is to lobby against certain policies or lobby for certain policies and give undue benefits, we'll call it, to some of the leading figures in Washington.

You can watch the Netflix documentary, The Family and you can go on my website, type in Richard Nixon and you can see William Brannum doing it back in the 50s or 60s, I can't remember when.

But all this to say, there's a right way to do things and there's a wrong way to do things. I may agree with some of the policies that they're pushing in this underground lobbying conspiracy that they're doing.

I may actually agree with them, but it's the wrong way to do it because they're not appealing to the general public and they're not causing people to vote in the good ways that they think they should vote.

Instead let's bypass all of the, you know, politics in the United States and let's push our agenda in secret. The problem with that is you create an even further divide because the people that you should be appealing to to make the case that your way is the right way, they're not being appealed to.

You're doing it behind closed doors and and center just houses. I mean, it's, it's really bad what they're doing. And on the flip side, some of the policies that they push, some of them aren't good and they're not told to the public.

So all these people voting for, you know, pushing for this agenda and cheering the national prayer breakfast, well, they don't actually know everything that's being pushed and some of them may be very bad things that are being pushed.

So in my opinion, all of that needs to be eradicated and wiped out. But in the end, what you're left with is, like I said, it creates a bigger divide and you're putting the people of America against the people of America.

And like you just said, the There are some good people in that crowd who have no idea, they really haven't been able to critically think about the consequences of doing this. So they have no idea how bad it is what they're doing, yet they're good people, yet they believe that some of the agendas are good, and it creates an even bigger mess whenever I talk about how bad that is what they're doing.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started, or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org.

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

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On behalf of William-Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. I listened to your podcast recently where you were talking to a gentleman who was a psychologist and talking through issues of psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress and those kind of things.

In my own half out of Leridon's group and in my own quest to make sense of the world, since 2016, I have found myself pointing my fingers at the other side, and as aggressive a manor is that those fingers have once been pointed at me, and that's something that I, gratefully, recognizing and doing my very best to see when that happens and how to address that.

If we believe that there's any good in our constitution, if we believe that all people have the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, if we believe that people should both have their freedom of religion, but also have the religion not being meshed with government, especially radical thought-stopping forms of religions and what we've discussed, but it's going to take all sides, and so on.

I've done my very best, certainly not a saint at it by any means, but I've done my very best to recultivate relationships in ways that have healthy boundaries, but with people who think differently from me, with people who may have voted for the orange-haired guy, and to recognize the humanity of all of us, the majority of whom I think are just trying to make our way through what is sometimes a perplexing and hard world.

And my concern is with the leaders who gain power and wealth at the expense of the people. And I think we saw this, or at least I saw this, a microcosm of this in Lareden's Bible College and his school back in the late 90s, where our young, impressionable whole minds were molded and manipulated in a way that I think served primarily the interests of the leaders.

You know, this group was infused with the prosperity gospel, and so, you know, we students, many of us of whom did not have a lot of money were told that if we didn't give our money to God, who that was coded for the ministry, that we were being oppressed by a demon of poverty, you know, and those kind of things, and yet the Lareden at those times, he was a celebrity rising in the word of faith movement, was buying jet airplanes.

He invited the church to come out and, you know, tour around his new jet airplane that he was using to quote unquote spread the gospel, but it was really spreading the propaganda. And it was, and I don't see any of that as related to what I understand of the gospel, but I understand even as someone who's hesitant to put a definition behind what I believe now, I can say that the suffering servant that you read about in Isaiah, or the man of grief who reached out to those who are in their most vulnerable places, I don't see that

represented in what I experienced under Lareden, what I've heard about in, as it pertains to Branum. And that concerns me because there are legitimate beliefs and genuine people who whose faith is a source of good for themselves personally and also a source of good for society.

And I have to believe that, you know, if there is a Jesus who exemplifies the very best parts of what I remember, that he would look to me and say, well done for criticizing the leaders who are harming and violating people's dignity in his name.

I don't know where that came from, but it just felt relevant to our conversation. Well, it is very relevant. I mean, so I know people who have deconstructed from what they claim is the cult of the Ornshared guy. And they'll tell you that every single thing that I'm talking about in a religious cult, they experienced in the cult of the Ornshared guy. Again, I'm not getting into politics. If you like the Ornshared guy that's up to you, I no longer do. I don't like the other side either. So I'm in this weird place. But they will tell you that they experienced

all of the deconstruction that I talk about in my podcast. They went through every single stage of it, right down to experiencing the stages of grief when they deconstructed from this thing. And the the ironic thing, once they fully deconstructed, there's this problem that whether it's a cult or not, this problem does exist. The people and the religious entities that have joined with the people on that side of politics, they do not see the system as capable of governing itself. In other words, they see the democracy as has fallen apart and our public votes aren't changing politics. So therefore, let's go like I said outside of

the public vote and let's try to control politics behind closed doors. That's what's happening and that's bad. And so they see the voting process. Many of them don't even understand what this is. Like even if you were to take the president in a way and just leave the entire rest of the structure, it's not the president who's a dictator and makes the governing decisions. We have all of these bodies of checks and balances in place. And you've got groups of people that are voting for a common good. And so the system can correct itself, but they have manipulated the

mind such that the system cannot do it. So therefore, you need a central figure. And whether you believe that central figures on the left or the right, I'm not going to get into that, but they need a central figure to fix it, which is complete fantasy. And on the flip side, on the religious side, these groups have done the same thing, but instead with God, instead of the God of the Bible, that's all powerful to control even the thoughts of the heart, even the intents of the heart.

They believe that that God is so weak that we have to engage spiritual warfare to try to sway the overall trajectory of history towards what we see as this fantasy world of biblical good.

And so they, like the politics side, they have taken the God and made him powerless. And in my opinion, when people deconstruct from that, they've not actually deconstructed from God. They've deconstructed from this fantasy God that doesn't even exist.

The parallels of the type of authoritarian dynamics both politically and religiously are incredible. I think back to my experiences in this school and learned in school. And right now in education, for example, there is a strong push to privatize education to infuse taxpayer support of religious schools.

And what I'm concerned about is the more that the government is entangled with the type of extreme groups that we're talking about, the more that that will lead to democratic instability. And some of what I'm hearing you say is that there are actors who are saying that democracy, as we know it, is maybe not something that we should strive for.

And that is, that's a concern to me. It's a concern to me on both an individual level because I've lived in these, I like to think of it like I've lived in an authoritarian regime under religious leaders, especially in my youth.

And even if the time I thought I was the freest person on earth, and I thought I was the most blessed person on earth, and I thought I was, you could not have convinced me that I was doing the wrong thing or that I was not free.

But on the flip side of that, I've seen the damage and the things that I've had to work through personally, having lived under that authoritarian religious regime. And I'm worried that if we don't pull in the reins and start thinking about with all of our flaws in our nation's history and they are there.

But if we recognize that we... Do you have a constitution that was written in a way that was intentionally vague so that individuals from different backgrounds could come together to live in this democratic experiment, to live together with differences?

I mean, so much of the founders were responding to centuries of violence under the banner of religion. And as I have read some of the founding, what they call the founding fathers, there was a real understanding among many of them that religion can be wielded in a way that is quite dangerous.

And that religion can be wielded in a way that is quite positive. And so they said, let's try something else. Let's create a government where we have religion and the state separate, and we provide the ability to, for people to believe what they want, when they want, worship how they want, believe what they want.

And I don't think I'm being hyperbolic and please tell me if you think I am that what we're seeing right now is a willingness for people to say, none of that matters. What matters is this kind of Judeo-Christian law.

And they may say, no, we don't want a bureaucracy. But there's an idea that, theocracy meaning your governmental leaders are actually clerics or ministers, what not. They may say, no, we don't want that.

But they will say that a dominant form of religion should guide our laws and policies in a way that fundamentally remove the rights of others. They may not say that, but that's how I see it ultimately playing out.

For example, if the new apostolic reformation leaders, people like Lance Wallnow, and others who are in the orbit of the Ornshared Man, I'm sorry, I don't think that's good for a Christian believer or any other religious believer in the long term.

Well, the real problem is you have these authoritarian figures who are narcissists, and a narcissist rises above the rest of the people by putting people against people, polarizing them against themselves. That's how it works.

If you study, read Stephen Hasen's book, Combat and Cult Mind Control, you can kind of get a picture of this. That's how it works. You put people against people. And what these guys have done is they have polarized people in such a way that it defies human nature and defies Christian history.

I remember when I left the cult, I and studying just the ancient world. I wanted to know, as I'm reading the Bible now, I considered it reading for the first time, although I'd read it many times.

But without that cult lens, it's different. And so I began studying all of the ancient histories and I was fascinated when I got to, I think it was the King of Tyre, I think is the one that David was the King David was the close friends with.

So I began thinking, well, who's the King of Tyre? What is Tyre? And the King of Tyre itself was almost solely responsible for the blending of pagan religions from Greece and Rome. Greece and Rome have very similar gods.

And in between all of this realm and the ancient world was this port city where ships were going back and forth and they were telling each other, well, this is our religion. Well, that's very similar to our religion and there's this weird crossover where the two religions became one, but with different names.

Well, the King of Tyre was not serving the God of Israel, but David had no problem being with them. And that's just one example. You can go all through the Bible and you can find Christian or Jews who are friends with people who aren't of their belief set.

And the difference between that and the Christianity of today is these narcissists have polarized people where you can't engage in a friendship or collaboration or anything with people who don't believe not just in Christianity, but your specific flavor of Christianity.

And the issues become so polarized that good Christians fight good Christians because they don't have the same policies. And in America, all of that really stems from this weaponization of religion because from its inception, whenever the framework of all of this was being laid, it was a polarization of political policies that were perceived as religious policies because the two had blended together and that just progressed into what we see today.

You know, how do you see, and I'm curious with you're in, by the way, I really have appreciated your work on William Brandon. It is one of the reviewers in your podcast mentioned. It really helped them to make sense of their own upbringing and sort of independent charismatic movement.

And I would articulate. So for anybody who's listening that grew up in four square, grew up in the assemblies of God or grew up in these independent charismatic churches, you may not think of yourself as somebody who's part of the quote unquote New Apostolic Reformation, but if you believe in speaking in tongues and faith healing and even ecstatic forms of worship and all of those things.

And if you have been unsettled by that, I totally recommend John your podcast, because it's been so helpful. But how do you see,

be careful how I ask this, because one of the things that I have had to work through and I've had people tell me is like, why are you focusing on layered in? Like he is such a small person in this whole green scheme and I always come back with, I'm not focusing on him, I'm focusing on the movement and the networks that he was a part of and that he represents and that are still alive and well and thriving.

All of that was a very long way of asking you a question, John. So my question is, how do you see William Branham still alive today in his work influencing religion, politics? I'd just be curious about that.

Well, first off, you left the layered in movement and anything you say about it, you're gonna have people who are in that cult of personality who are attacking your work. That's just the way, that's the way this game plays out, right?

Yeah, but to, I'm gonna answer you in a very broad way. What you're doing is you're, it's not so much that you're attacking layered in. It's that you're putting in the pieces of history because the history makes sense of the present.

That's the good thing about history when you can understand the history in normal scenarios you learn from its history. In cult scenarios, they want to hide the history. So leared in for whatever reason chose to hide that John Alexander Dowey wasn't this great faith healer that they were actually contracts with the morgue so they would come take the bodies of the dead people out at night where nobody saw it.

And people were dying in the hundreds, you know, in the hundreds. There were people who, there were neighbors to Dowey's healing homes that were witnessing as Dowey would kick people out on the street who weren't getting healed.

Some of them needed crutches to walk away and they couldn't even walk away after Dowey threw them out onto the road. And so the neighbors were actually helping the people away. Leared in for whatever reason, maybe he didn't know, but somehow it got covered up, that history was covered up.

All I did with Brannum was, I just started publishing the history that the Brannum cult did not tell their followers. And what I came to realize over time is that it's history. And if we had of known the history, the Brannum cult could have learned from the history and became a good movement instead of this weird thing it is today.

But then whenever I realized that what he did, the pattern that Brannum used to create his cult of personality is the same pattern that Dowey used to create his cult of personality. Well, now I start living there.

So you know, why is that? So now I write about that history. And history, like I say, it speaks for itself in relevance to today. If you understand the history, you understand the world we live in.

So all of these people who are coming to my website and they see, you know, whatever cult they were in, they look at this and say, well, wow, that's exactly like what I escaped.

What is? Because these men were either knowingly cloning the same patterns of unethical behaviors and sometimes criminal behaviors. And in a weird way, many of them were connected. So I think some of them was, some of it was learned.

Recently, I think it was just yesterday, I published that Herb Armstrong, one of the pioneers in radio and television, he was deeply connected to Christian identity. At the time, Christian identity was emerging as highly anti-Semitic and racist.

And also at the same time, because he was a pioneer in the media, he literally laid the groundwork for what became the NAR. And I got a, I got a tack for saying something like that, but you have to understand, it's not that he's a member of the NAR or even directly connected, all of these elements of history are building blocks to the present.

And if you understand how the building blocks stack or pull on one another, you can understand the world we live in.

Yeah, you know, at the end of an article that I had recently published, it's an academic article, but I weave in a lot of personal narratives of my experience at learned in school. And folks can find it at my website, johnsoyer.org.

But I end the article by saying that my concern, especially as I'm thinking about schools and I'm thinking about some of these radical, religious ideas, which some may call cultic ideas, influencing taxpayer-supported religious schools, for example, my concern is that the people who have been harmed or discriminated against become the ones who harm and discriminate against.

And that goes to this comment of people taking the lead of individuals like Dauy and others and modeling. And I really honed in on your word unknowingly. I think there is a knowing aspect of it.

And I think maybe as people get into the business of religion, this type of religion, where they're making money that maybe that's where the knowing part comes in more and more. In fact, I've even heard Laird and say that 90% of what he does is just manipulating the crop.

And then of course, he says that 10% is the Holy Spirit, but about 90% is manipulating. He said that like two years ago, and I went on it. It really triggered me to be quite honest because I was such a sincere believer in...

him and what I thought he represented when I was a child. But I also know that he was exposed to people like Leicester Summerall, who was a demon exercising preacher who went around talking about homosexual demons. And I know enough about Leridon's history. We don't have enough time to go into all of the details to know that, or for me to suspect that Leridon was subjected to likely some very traumatic things in his own upbringing, and then perpetuates that on others.

Sadly. Yeah, there's a lot of manipulation going on. I've mentioned, you know, it's ironic too. William Brannum's campaign manager in the 50s, which was Paul Cain's campaign manager. He was homosexual. Paul Cain, as you know, was, you know, he came out. Brannum's two scribes, the men who recorded all his sermons were and distributed and were both homosexual men. And I've, you know, I point this out because these, some of these are really bad, extremely bad cases.

They, um, you know, the things that they did to other men had they done them to other women. It would have been just as bad. So you can take, you know, you can take almost actually out of it. And they were manipulating people too. I've had, I've actually had three witnesses now tell me that Paul Cain would read stacks of phone books before he would go out and do his quote unquote discernment. Well, he was mentored under Brannum. So now I'm wondering, did, did Brannum do the same thing? I don't, I don't know. I know Brannum used prayer cards and

but anyway, all this to say, they manipulate the people and they put you in a mindset that creates a fictional worldview and that worldview is so skewed from reality and from ethics that it turns you into, uh, for me, it turned me into a monster and I'm glad I left because I now, every, every day I have to reevaluate something that I believed and try to make it more ethical and better because of this mass. But so after you've left, you know, you're, you're doing the work and people can go visit you on the website. I'll put it into the description. But what would you

say to all the people who were trapped in Leardin's group or similar? What would you say if you could give them some encouragement? Yeah, I've got chills. You asked me that question. Thank you.

I would say you're not alone. I would say you're not crazy. I would say you're, you're, you're probably a very good person who has been through some hard things. Um, I would say that you're courageous in whatever ways that you're making sense of what you went through and trying to enact an act a better world. And some of that may be public, but probably most of that isn't very, um, private ways that aren't seen by anybody.

You're not on podcasts talking about these things. And particularly if they're listeners who know Robert's Lairdon, who know the history of that, I'd love if you'd reach out to me. I'm not interested in just digging up dirt for the sake of digging up dirt, but I am interested in doing what I can to repair to repair the ways that I harmed others.

And if you want to join that movement to repair, I'd love to hear from you. Awesome. Well, I'll put the link to your website in the description. And if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at William-Branham.org. For an overview of the historical research of William Branham and the Healing Revivals, read preacher behind the white hoods, a critical examination of William Branham and his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

Drink, Drink, Drink, Drink, Drink.