The Political Agenda of the Pentecostals - With Dr. Kerry Edwards

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org, and with me I have my very special guest, Dr.

Kerry Edwards, former minister at the Philadelphia Church in Chicago. And together we're discussing the unusual mixture of religion and politics that birthed the laterane movement and eventually the new Apostolic Reformation. Kerry, it's been a few weeks since we have spoken, and we got to talking, you know, during the course of the last time we spoke and, you know, aired our stories to tell your story. And then since then, and even this morning I'm learning new things about you, then all of this come together and we just decided that it would be good to have you back again

because you're a wealth of knowledge on things that I have been digging into and you have sort of an inside view. And just today I learned that you were a former minister at the Philadelphia Church in Chicago. That is probably the strongest promoter of William Branham's ministry throughout the laterane movement and beyond. And a lot of people, even the historian that I talked to for laterane movement, I had a series of conversations with him. He had no idea that people like Joseph Mats and Bozey and Rasmussen and others were still promoting William Branham after the fall of

William Branham's ministry in the decline. And anyway, I thought it would be good to have you back on to go through that and more. And specifically, we have uncovered some information that is just fascinating with regards to the political themes that were embedded in this movement. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about the politics.

Yes, so the politics really interests me. A couple of comments about the Philadelphia Church. When I was there, I had no idea that William Branham had been promoted by that church and that Jim Jones had been ordained by Mats and Bozey. So it's kind of intriguing that that element, even though I grew up in a laterane Pentecostal denomination, and I ended up at that place, kind of accidentally after I graduated from Bible College, I was not aware of its history at the time.

was talking to my sister who has a friend who currently works at that church. And she was unaware of the history with William Brannum and Jim Jones. It took some convincing on my part to get them to acknowledge that fact.

But yes, and the political implications of this are very very important to me personally, right, that one of the reasons I'm not a part of that movement and the longer is because very early on after I graduated from Bible College, it became clear to me that there were very authoritarian components involved in lateral-rained penicostalism.

And I found it quite disturbing, even as a penicostle myself. So it doesn't surprise me today that it's ended up in the United States as a authoritarian movement. But yeah, so the political implications are quite disturbing.

Quite disturbing. I can't remember if last time we discussed anything about the politics of penicostalism in Latin America, but that's where I first became aware of its authoritarian event, if that's what you want to call it.

And I suppose I should have been growing up in it. I should have been much more aware that it has no real theory of democracy as fundamental to its point of view, right? It's all focused on obedience to God's will, as opposed to thinking critically about how we want to organize our lives together

in a society of some kind or another. Right, and it's really good that we're talking about this today because we are diving into the Christian identity routes of the movement. And it's a political issue.

It's not a real current political issue. And unfortunately, the news media today, when they mention the phrase Christian identity and they're tying it to one party or the other, usually one party, a lot of people don't understand what the significance of that, what that means.

And the news media doesn't really get into the history so that the people who are unfamiliar with that movement can even understand it. But what we're talking about when we say Christian identity and the podcast that we're doing, this was a movement that spawned off of British Israelism.

There was a notion that the peoples of the Isles and Great Britain and... the United States were the lost children of Israel, the lost two tribes of Israel, Manasseh and Ephraim, I believe. And as such, they deserved more royalty than they were getting.

And the peoples from other nations were somewhat, they weren't really, it wasn't really a racial element until Christian identity was birth, but they were seen as a lesser or inferior people. Because there was this notion developing in British Israelism, starting around late 1900s and a little bit into the 20s, that the lesser peoples, the ones who aren't the British Israelites, were developed from mud peoples.

And so that's why they had black skin. And this eventually emerged into the Christian identity themes where there was a lot of discrimination. And they viewed anybody with white skin as elite and those who had dark skin were not.

And that included not only African Americans, but also Jews and people in Latin America, because they had dark skin. So it's a really destructive movement. And whenever I began to understand what that was, I was digging into William Branum and understanding that he was working with supreme authority figures in the clan, in the Ku Klux Klan.

And at that time, I only knew he's working with the imperial wizard of multiple times. He was imperial. He's working with the imperial clod, which is the supreme religious chaplain of the clan, Caleb Ridley.

And other figures that he's working with. And I assumed that Gordon Lindsay and some of the others were unaware of Branum's racist views and the views that the man he's working with. However, we just discovered last week that Gordon Lindsay was actually a key speaker for British Israelism before it was starting to transition into the Christian identity movement.

And then after it had made the transition, he's speaking for two of the most critical movements that developed the notion of Christian identity. And he's speaking at their conferences during the time when they were Christian identity movements.

So he is an authority on the Christian identity movement and the British Israel movement, which makes it all the more fascinating when you consider that he is the one who most strongly promoted William Branum and others who were in this very racist component of American history.

So I have a question in regards to that. I'm fairly ignorant about this. Have you explored in any way the connections between political parties and the Christian identity movement? I'm assuming in the... out in the early part of the 20th century, that most of the racist white Pentecostals would have been Democrats at that point in time, so that there was a split between religion and politics in that the political parties were not united around racial themes, whereas the power of lettering Pentecostal politics nowadays, it seems to me could be explained partly by how the racial issues have become concentrated in one party as opposed to being split between

two parties in the early part, mid-20th century. Do you know anything about that? I have studied it extensively, and not because I'm interested in politics at all. I'm actually disinterested in modern politics. I think both parties should wipe the slate clean and bring in some new people. That's my opinion. But I have studied it historically because I have heard the argument that it used to be the Democrats and now it's the Republicans, which is partially true, but it doesn't tell the whole story. And it was really hard for me to grasp that concept, because like the Pentecostal movement, like the cult that I escaped, whenever you consider the

cult as I knew it, working with other groups that had a different religion, even though they were children, grandchildren of the movement, it was a different religion. You tend to think very black or white, and you tend to try to link the two groups together by their motive intent, which would be the religion. And so you see them as two disconnected entities, and you don't get the whole story. If you look beneath the surface of the cult that we escaped, it was a political cult that was disguised as a religious cult, and the political agendas can match between the

children, the grandchildren, all the way to the NAR, because religion wasn't the purpose. And with white supremacy in the United States, it's much the same. It's not that one party or the other owned the white supremacy. Whenever the 1915 clan was birthed, you have people like William Upshaw, for example. He was the clan's most outspoken person in Washington. He's literally the one who saved the clan, and the reason that the clan continues to exist. And enter Interestingly, he is also working with leaders who were in the, you know, the Laterane movement and he was a key figure in the Laterane movement.

So you have a, he was a Democrat, so you have a Democrat who's fighting for the white supremacy agenda, who's working in Laterane. And so you begin to think, well, okay, this must be a Democrat thing.

But then fast forward until the Indiana clan was reigning in power, it became the largest clan for its, its time period, its era, they invaded the Indianapolis government with the ambitions of taking over Washington and they did it under the Republican Party.

And so there was this shift at that time because they had planted a lot of Republican people, not just an Indianapolis, but also across the nation with the ambition to take over control of the White House using the Republican Party as a ticket.

That lasted for a long time because they had already infiltrated the Republican Party. And you have different shifts like this. The only thing that I can say that was a clear transition from one party to the next was whenever Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in office, you had all of the white supremacists who were rising up against him and they all changed parties because, again, it's separate from the politics, the agenda.

And at that point in time, the Christian identity cults had taken this fictional book called the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which was a conspiracy of a Jewish plot using communism to overthrow world governments.

And yes, I'm familiar with that book. Right. So they saw Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the fulfillment of the propaganda that was in that book and everybody rose up against Roosevelt and you saw this significant shift from one party to the other because of Roosevelt.

So there are different shifts in politics as you go through history and you can't say that it was the Democrats and now it's the Republicans or vice versa. It literally depended on who was in, who was running and what party they were affiliated with and who were they going to be against.

I think that's the better way to look at it. Okay. Yeah. So I'm not sure I totally agree with you about the difference between politics and religion that it being a political cult versus a religious cult.

They seems to me that they're pretty closely infused with each other and it's hard for me to see a sharp distinction between the two except in so far as early Pentecostals that it won as much to...

with politics, if anything at all, because they were interested in the kingdom of God and not the kingdom of this world. But by the mid 20th century, I would say that was starting to diminish.

But it seems to me that politics and religion are pretty closely aligned with each other throughout the whole movement. So I agree with you that it's a political cult, but it's also a religious cult. I can't draw that distinction quite precisely perhaps. I think the reason why I've come to that conclusion had to do with the anti-civil rights movement that developed in the 60s.

You had, see, I escaped the random cult, which was the central hub for all of this. And you had all of these different splinter groups of the laterane movement, some of which it may not look as deceptive as what the core was. But in the core, William Brannum, for example, he took the two-seed Christian identity doctrine of Wesley Swift, which was the most racist doctrine of the era.

And it was proposed as a pseudo-Christian doctrine. Wesley Swift was a Christian minister out of trained out of the Angiolis temple. And he was seen as not Pentecostal, but very closely affiliated with the Pentecostals. And it was the mixture of religion and politics, as you say.

So if you examine Wesley Swift, I would agree with you. Wesley Swift was this mixture of pseudo-Christianity and politics. But then on the flip side, you had William Brannum that was doing the same exact thing using Wesley Swift's two-seed doctrine, his version of it. But he introduced it into the laterane movements as a very deceptive, not racial doctrine. For example, Wesley Swift, he took the doctrine and he traced the lineage of what he said, where the lineage of the Black people, all the way back to a sexual union between the serpent and Eve to produce Cane and then

gave the progression all the way through the sons of one of the sons of Noah and the sin of him, he called it. And then on into the 1960s, whenever you had the whites versus Blacks in the school system was the issue at that time, William Brannum took that same exact theology. But he took out the words Jew and Black from Wesley Swift's doctrine and injected it in the laterane movement as what he called serpent seed. So people were accepting of Wesley Swift's doctrine, not knowing that it was racist. And then after that was established, William Brannum brought in what he

called the high-breeding doctrine. And the high breeding doctrine had the racist component. So whenever you took the foundation of serpent seed and added the high breeding doctrine on top of it, now you have the full and complete racial theology of Wesley Swift.

It was brought in very deceptively. And you know, at the same time you had people like who was at George Houghton who was publishing right from the inception of Laterane. He was bringing in doctrines where it was the Christian identity doctrine that the Jews with the black skin are coming to overthrow the world governments.

And that wasn't even made public until I think 1980 or something people come to find out that he's writing all this propaganda literature. So it was somewhat covert what they did. Okay. So I think I would agree with that, that you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be on the surface.

They can slip something in underneath. But I would still say that it's a, so that's a political doctrine in one sense. But it's also a religious idea. And so I don't think I would, I think again, I would be reluctant to make that sharp distinction.

But I do have a question in regards to this that given the fact that there, there are these strong racial components of in brand amism or the message. How do you account for the, it's spread in Africa?

Because that's where it seems to have a lot of adherents today, right? Yeah. That's where it gets really interesting because I actually work with people who have escaped the brand amism from Africa. Some of them are fully unaware that brand am had racist ideologies embedded in his theological nonsense.

And so they did not realize that these were very racial doctrines. Also in Africa, they're not familiar with American politics. Another example of the political movement disguised as religion, there are key moments in political history where William Brannum is taking the side of the racists.

And you can find that in, for example, the little rock, nine incident in civil rights timeline. Yes. William Brannum was taking the side of the people who were against the interracial school system in Little Rock.

Right. That's actually the point in time in which he releases this serpentsy doctrine. So he's releasing it in support of those people. You have people like James Meredith, who he wanted to attend a white college and there's this big uprising.

Well, William Bram just totally blasted those people who were siding with him. It's a political statement, and you can say that yes at that time in the South, that was religion and politics at the same time.

But the way it's presented to the people is very insidious. It's not openly declared as we are supportive of this political slash Christian ideology. Instead, it's brought in as deception as though the world has become evil because we're siding with people like James Meredith or Martin Luther King.

So that seems to me to be almost a universal component of Pentecostalism that the political side of things always is sliding in the back door, so to speak, that there's no overt political ideology in Pentecostalism.

It seems to always be a I'm not sure how like an undercurrent that is not explicitly developed anywhere, and that strikes me as being one of the problems of Pentecostalism because there's no direct forthright discussion of political principles.

Instead, everything is formulated in theological and religious terms, and so the fundamental issues of politics never get discussed openly. So that's why I think it explains to some degree my own naivete as I was growing up.

The politics of Pentecostalism was never an object of discussion around the kitchen tables, so to speak, right? Not just my personal kitchen table, but all Pentecostal kitchen tables. And so once you start bringing up those kinds of topics, then it turns out that Pentecostalism seems to be like overwhelmingly authoritarian in its approach.

Like I may have mentioned this the last time that we talked, that I did a tour around South America in 1975, and that's when I first became aware of this. I was discussing Argentinian politics with laterane Pentecostalism.

in Argentina, and at that point, Uruguay had just, yeah, Uruguay had recently become a dictatorship, and for some reason, the conversation turned from the Holy Spirit in some degree or another two politics, and all those missionaries were in support of a dictatorship, and I was shocked at that. It just blew me away that I guess I was deluded perhaps in thinking that the religion I had grown up when had some kind of serious commitment to the individual at some level, which it would seem on the surface that Pentecostal does that. Pentecostalism does that because God speaks to

each individual. That's one of the interesting features of the movement is that everyone has direct access to God, and Protestantism historically, then people say it's one of the roots of democracy because of that. But in actual practice, Pentecostalism has not functioned that way, right? It has been much more fascist in its orientation. I think for me, that's one of the reasons that sealed the opinion in my mind of the political underbelly being the framework from which all of this developed into a political cult, the skies as religious. If you take any of the small churches around the globe that were

Pentecostal, there's really good people in it who have no idea the political agenda, and you can ask any one of them, was this a political movement in the skies, and every one of them would say no, even in some of the bigger churches. Even in some of the bigger churches, you were in one of the larger ones, right? Well, even in those churches, there are leadership that are unaware that there is any agenda. But to my point, take Gordon Lindsay, for example, he is one of the strongest proponents for the spreading of this thing around the globe, and we've now proven he is in the

Christian identity movement at the time in which it is racist. And with that knowledge, you go back and you look at Lindsay, and he looks entirely different. If you weren't aware of that, Lindsay looks like he's promoting a non-political healing revival. That's all it looks like on the surface. But when you realize he's in Christian identity, open up any of the covers of his literature, and tell me the number of people with black skin.

and you see in any of them. And there are almost zero. In fact, I'm thinking my head, I'm trying to think of one and I can't think of one because he was controlling the movement's doctrine and he was controlling it from the white perspective.

It wasn't that he disallowed black people into the movement, there were hundreds, thousands of black people. But he controlled the doctrine from the standpoint of the views of those, which apparently were aligned with the Christian identity views.

And therefore, he is promoting the underbelly, which was the racist agenda. But there were groups of men, even black churches joining into this, that had no idea that that was the underbelly. Yes. Okay, yeah, so I could see that argument and I could see at your point about

look at the photos, like a couple of years ago, I looked through Charisma Magazine. I don't know if you're familiar with that publication, but it's probably the most widespread current Pentecostal magazine. And it's really an arm of the NAR.

And you look through there at its pictures and I wasn't actually looking for a black and white. And so maybe I need to redo that. But my sister happens to have a subscription to it.

I was at her house and there was a big giant pile of the magazines there and I could look through. And almost all the magazines, pictures, were of men. That virtually women were non-existent in the photos.

So you could make a similar kind of argument that current versions of Pentecostalism, while not as racist as maybe the 1950s are sexist, right? That it's a political movement that supports the interest of men, straight men mostly.

I mean, on the surface at least, because under the surface, obviously, they're not very straight. No, they're not.

So yes, but even that doesn't convince me totally that it's just a political movement. Because again, like I'm not sure how many,

so that the leaders themselves, I'm not sure the extent to which they themselves think I am promoting patriarchy. I'm not sure that crosses their mind even though that's what they're actually doing. So that's why I have this reluctance to make the sharp distinction between politics and religion.

Even though I think that... It is a political movement. I agree with you completely on that topic, you know, it's really a difference between the politics of yesteryear versus the politics of today. If we think of politics today, we're thinking build a wall or defund the police or, you know, there's these weird things, but if you turn the pages of time back to 1915 when the clan was born, Hollywood has skewed our minds of what the clan was. Anytime you think of the clan, they're showing you photos of the 60s where there are the race riots and it's always black versus white,

yes, but from the inception of the Ku Klux Klan and the rebirth in 1915, they were touting what they called Americanism. And Americanism was a political theme for the clan and for those who were in politics in that era, Americanism included Christianity. So in a sense, you could say that that was the mixture of politics and religion because it was, you know, touted as a Christian movement. In my opinion, what they were promoting wasn't Christianity, however, it was politics that they had dubbed Christianity because it also included the oppression and discrimination of the Jews, the Catholics, the people with black skin. And then it went far beyond that into political

themes. They would single out global leaders and they would say Mussolini, for example, because he's tied to Rome, this must be the world's greatest enemy, which was a political statement, but yet they used a pseudo religious claim against Mussolini. And even that developed into this weird thing in Christian identity where they were using the protocols of the learned elders of Zion as a theological handbook to say that Mussolini was the bad guy and FDR was the invasion of the United States. And so this was all widespread. They had touted it as Christian, but I've come to

realize when you study every single aspect of the things that they touted as quote unquote Christian, it wasn't really the clan had used the keyword Christianity to appeal to the Christians, and they called this political ideology a quote unquote Christian ideology. Fast forward, that is the same ideology that got embedded in Latter-Rain through William Brannum and the man who was second in charge and involved in the creation of the 1915 clan. So yes, it was a blend of quote unquote Christian ideas into the movement, but it wasn't really a Christian theme, it was more of a political thing. So I think I see perhaps where our disagreement is rooted.

I don't see Christianity as ever being non-political. Like from its very start, I see Christianity as a political slash religious movement. And so when I look at like Paul, for instance, who wrote much of the New Testament, right? So he is a Roman citizen, right? So that's his fundamental identity as a Roman. And so he's taken what was a Jewish sect and turning it into a religion which is compatible with the Roman Empire, right? Judaism was essentially an ethnic religion geographically limited to a certain part of what we now call Palestine, right?

Well, Paul turns that into Judaism for the Empire, let's say, and we call it Christianity. So it didn't take very long, right? What? A couple of hundred years before Armenia became,

Christianity became the official state religion of Armenia. So I see the combination of politics and religion going all the way back to the start. So that may be some place where we have disagreements about what Christianity is versus what politics is and how they fuse together with one another. Yeah, I can see that. I do see the two as blended in a sense. I just see because I've studied the clans so much and I've studied the history of the politics so much in that era.

There were good politics of the era and there were really, really bad politics. And on both sides, they said, this is a quote unquote Christian agenda that we're pushing because of that era. It's just which one do you choose and how do you label it? Can I really label the clans agenda as Christian? And I think that's for me where the disagreement lies. I don't see the plan as a Christian organization at all. Yeah, so I think I'm not unhappy to say the clans agenda was Christian.

It was racist Christian. It was still Christian. And so yes, so we'd have to think more about that general topic of how to separate out the two. The other thing that interests me about the whole development of penicostalism is its its rejection of what I would call the modern view of the world or some people would call it the modern scientific view of the world.

And I think that comes out with their strong emphasis on divine healing. And I think that the difference between, I don't know what you want to call them, supernaturalist, naturalist, something to that degree is a really distinguishing feature of literary and penicostalism and early penicostalism too.

But especially those healing revivals that started after World War II, although in the UK there were healers, faith healers in the penicostal movement, certainly prior to that. But it seems to me that that view of the world is a view that says something like the forces that govern the universe are personal forces.

There are invisible agents that control the world. And if you can contact these invisible agents and ask them to do something on your behalf, they will do it, right? That's the healing revival thing.

If you have some disease, I know the founder of the Bible College where I went and I lived for a few decades, he was converted to that version of penicostalism because he claimed that he was healed of typhoid fever and therefore became penicostal and eventually a penicostal minister.

So that view of the world seems to me to be in direct contrast with the general trend of modernity, which is that the forces that govern the universe are completely impersonal, that they don't really care about us.

That seems like an odd sentence to utter. But the idea that the things that happen in the universe are a result of gravity, electromagnetic forces, strong and weak nuclear forces, things over which no one has personal control is something which is at the core of the modern scientific establishment.

And it's the rejection of that, which I think lies at the heart of penicostalism. Absolutely. And interestingly, remember I said the clan was a complex organization. and the ties to the underbelly of all of this is also very complicated.

It's not something that in one single podcast, I could even relate to you, my full opinion, as to why I came to this conclusion. But I'm glad you brought it up because this is yet another reason why I say what I did. So, during the time in which the clan was transitioning, there was the fundamentalist movement in the United States, which was rising up in opposition to the liberal Christian movement. You're aware of that history, right?

It was a deeply tied to politics. William Jennings Bryan was the politician that was the champion for this fundamentalist movement. And when he died, many of the same leaders that I have mentioned in my research carried his torch. One of them was, well, William Upshah, who I just previously mentioned, he was one of the speakers at William Jennings Bryan's funeral because he's also carrying the torch. You have Gerald Burton-Winrod, who was one of the most notorious figures in the Christian identity movement. He carried the torch in ways that the others could not carry to the same extent. There was a slogan that Bryan's had that we are the defenders of the Christian

faith, we being the fundamentalists. And then Gerald Burton-Winrod formed the organization called the defenders of the Christian faith. And through this, he brought in various leaders that are deeply connected to the history leading into laterane beyond well into the NAR, such as Charles of the fuller theological seminary. He was a key figure in this movement.

Well, they were defending against what they perceived as anything that could be a threat to the literal word-for-word interpretation of the King James Bible. And the way that they were doing it was you had to step out by a leap of faith to believe something when all evidence might oppose or challenge your belief. In other words, instead of examining the other party's opinion and trying to find middle ground or even try to find what is the truth, instead mentally block it much like a cult would do. You cannot look at the opposing thought. We must control your minds. And that's the agenda that they took. That took an even further leap in

the healing revival because many of these ministers were coming with numerous countless claims of I had an angel. I had a vision. I spoke to God. I spoke to a demon. Kenneth Hagen said, I went into hell and I saw the demons in hell and came back. All these boisterous claims that can't be proven. Now they took it a step further. They said, we're going to make this ridiculous claim, and we're going to say it happened, but you have to shut off critical thought and believe that it happened. So the movement amplified what the fundamentalist slash liberal debate did

by forcing the members to shut off all critical thought and believe in the unbelievable. And when you try to apply any science or logic or anything that might challenge your view of the Christian Bible, the answer is just shut it off. Let's don't look at it.

Yeah, I think that's true. I would draw a fairly sharp line between the fundamentalist movement and

the Pentecostal movement. There was a lot of hostility between those two groups and probably justified hostility in my view. But if you look at like Bob Jones University, if you look at that as a fundamentalist school, and I don't think there would be much debate over that issue, right? And it was a fairly racist place for a long time. They still have a strong commitment to science that if you go and look at the curriculum of Bob Jones University, they have a fairly robust science department. Whereas if you go and look at Latter-Rain Pentecostal institutions, you'll see that science is virtually absent from their

curriculum. And so I think that the fundamentalists were able to retain respect for modern science by confining the miraculous to the New Testament period, right? They were happy to say there used to be miracles, but those happened in the apostolic age. We don't expect them to happen anymore. So we're going to behave scientifically in our everyday life because we think that was the thing in the past, right? And so it enables them to adopt certain features of modernity and ignore the supernatural in the present. Whereas Pentecostals, because they believe in the restoration of the apostolic age, they think all those miracles from New Testament times are

capable of happening today. And there's a certain logic to their position, I think. I mean, if God could perform miracles in the year 65, why can't God perform miracles in the year 2024? Right. So the fundamentalists have some way have a logical problem in their view.

of trying to exclude the miraculous from contemporary life. But so there are tensions there between the fundamentalists and the Pentecostals, probably less so today, but certainly there were in the 1950s, 60s. Yeah. And ironically, if you look at the history of Pentecostalism, there were also tensions between the Pentecostals and the Pentecostals.

Oh, yeah, that's the one irony of the way that this movement has progressed. You can't really take the theological or political position of any group and say that this represents Pentecostalism or fundamentalism or anything, because what happens is you get two heads that are budding against each other.

Well, they create a division, and now you've got polar opposite views on the same subject matter. Well, then those splinter and those splinter and you have children, grandchildren, to the extent many of the NAR apostles trace their lineage through latirine and through William Brannum, and they openly declare William Brannum as this great apostle who went astray or this great prophet who went astray.

But they take the polar opposite views on rapture theology, for example, which one of the most fundamental elements of latirine, and they most of them deny it, right? So I've learned to look beyond theological opinions when I evaluate the history of the group, because it changes and it evolves as time progresses and the politics and the theological understanding evolves.

Yeah, I agree that Pentecostalism's social movement needs to be analyzed in its political and social element. And I think that's why, for instance, I think that latirine Pentecostalism in the UK didn't develop in the same way that it has in the United States.

To my knowledge, it has virtually no political arm in the UK that all of the idea of apostolic authority never turned into a political movement in the UK.

And that surely has to be accounted for by the political and economic and cultural social differences between Pentecostalism as it existed in the United States and North America and how it existed over there.

But most of my Pentecostal friends who were associated with the UK roots of Pentecostalism

are horrified at the developments of the NAR and its current versions in the United States. it states. Like my mother-in-law and my mother, both of whom were really raised in the UK panacostalism, just can't believe, well, my mother's dead, but my mother-in-law is still alive, and she just can't believe what's going on. And she's a devout, pious panacostal. But that goes back to her British roots. And so I agree with you. I think you have to look at it in this cultural context. And the racism in the United States produces a quite different form of

panacostalism than what happened in the UK, partly because, of course, there were never the same,

I don't even know how many slaves there ever were in the UK. Certainly very small numbers, even though there were tens of thousands of slaves in the British Empire, slavery never infused British culture on the island itself in the same way that it infused culture in the United States, especially in the South. So that produces an entirely different dynamic for religion and politics, I think. You know, the difference between Americanized religion and Christianity in the UK, it's a subject that just fascinates me. I have friends from the UK, and it's so refreshing talking to them because their ability to think in the UK, as far as it relates to religion, politics,

worldview, is just so different to the United States. In the United States, the mindset is so constrained that they're afraid to think on certain subjects, but they're open to think on others, but there's this clear restrainment, right? And one of the best examples I'll give, there is a, you've probably heard the name, but there is one of the most notorious and infamous people who debates evangelicals, his name is Bart Irman. And he's the one of the world's most, I guess he would be considered the most famous agnostic person. And I discovered Irman through this book, The Text of the New Testament, and it fascinated me because this is a textbook,

it's pretty thick. It is written by one of the leading, you know, Christian theologians, Bruce Metzger, and he chose Bart Irman, who's the leading agnostic, but yet Irman was one of the foremost experts on the transmission of the New Testament and the lost, you know, the lost books of the

Dead Sea Scrolls, etc. So what you end up with is two men of opposing views, much like you and I, on this podcast. Yeah, yeah. But iron sharpens iron the both come together and they find a collaboration and this is I've read it a couple times now This is one of the most fascinating textbooks on New Testament history There are things in here that I'm shocked that ministers don't talk about because it might oppose the American critical thought However in Europe There are churches that they'll take the entire church to go listen to a Bart Irman debate and

In America, this would be seen as you know the devil has invaded your church, right? Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's so it's so weird, but In my opinion I was just gonna recommend another book if you're interested in Irman and New Testament studies I took a lot of courses in New Testament in my graduate student days and and But maybe it two years ago. I did something which I'd never done before and That is I read the New Testament in the order in which it was written. Yes, I've done the same And so this Marcus Bart has a

copy of the New Testament In which all the various writings are written in chrono. I mean are presented in chronological order and it is a An eye opener to read the New Testament in the way in which it was written in the sense that this is what people were thinking at a certain date and Actually, well, Marcus Bart used to teach a class where he did that But he found his students were too confused so stop doing it but I I think so one of the reasons why I'm not a Pentecostal anymore is because I studied the New Testament and

New test the New Testament is not what I was brought up to believe that it was It's certainly not a book written by eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus And so I think reading it chronologically is a is a great eye opener particularly if you ask yourself the question What did Paul know about Jesus when he wrote his letters and he knew Damn little about Jesus He knew he lived he ate a last meal He was killed and he resurrected and that's about all that Paul knows about Jesus's life And then you consider the fact that he's the one that really pushed Christianity out of its Jewish

Roots into the empires. It's a pretty astonishing fact that Took me a long time to kind of sort through the implications of that. But yeah, so I'd like to hear a month, yeah. Yeah.

You know, it's funny because I would say a majority of the listeners who are listening to this show will fully disagree with everything that you just said. Yeah. And interestingly. Oh, that's good. Yeah, I've done the same thing.

So interestingly, I'll just say it like this because I'm no preacher, you know. If you want to believe your version or what everybody who's listening to the show believes, that's for your pastor to answer.

But I will say this when you read them chronologically and you take out any preconceived notion of what it is that you're reading, the book changes. It's not the same Bible that you're, it does indeed.

Yeah, not at all. It's totally different. And I'll say this as well because this has been incredibly fun for me. Everybody who's listening to my podcast is aware I do not debate anybody. I'll walk away from a debate because I don't like arguments.

I was raised in such a way that, you know, I was raised in an authoritarian controlled cult where you couldn't argue. You had to suppress those thoughts and feelings and emotions. And it's very painful for me.

But I do enjoy, in fact, I love talking to people who don't have the same view as me because I can learn from them. They can learn from me and this has been incredible fun.

And I think this might be the first podcast that I've ever done that where people can actually see how I work, but this is how I work. I will talk to, I don't care who you are.

You know, you can be a staunch atheist and hate Christianity. I'm still gonna talk to you because I want to learn from you and I may not agree with you, but I'll learn anything.

So thanks for doing this. Oh yeah, I'm totally, like you, I was raised in an environment where you couldn't question, right? You had to suppress your doubts. And so I found that to be highly oppressive.

So the last thing I'd ever want to do is for anyone to think that they should believe like me, right? Because everyone around was, when I was growing up, was trying to get me to believe like them.

And that's not a good social environment whatsoever. But still, I think people ought to be honest, right? So when they disagree, they ought to be open and it shouldn't undermine any relationship or one would always hope that you can learn from the people that you disagree with.

And more of the point, you can be friends with them. I've got, you can see from my research, I am not at all pleased with the progression of Pentecostal history. But it doesn't mean that I don't like Pentecostals and we've even had a Pentecostal historian on the show, he...

He and I are not aligned on theology at all, but he's one of my best friends. In fact, I just actually got a message from him this morning asking me to research one of the NAR groups for him.

But I see this as a healthy thing, so like I say, I'm glad you did this with us today. All right. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at William-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.