Faith Assembly: The Legal Troubles Begin

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 co-host, minister, and friend, Chino Ross, the voice of the understanding scripture and truth by Chino D. Ross YouTube channel.

Together we're examining the history of Hobart Freeman, and today Chino we're getting into some of the legal aspects of what happened, and it is the problem that I have noticed that is just recurring throughout history of these guys that people put their trust in, and they abuse that trust with their power, and a lot of people, you know, they're getting sick, they're dying, they're losing their family fortunes, and there is really no law that the police can use to come and get these guys when this happens. So I've noted it with John Alexander Dowey, I have, you

know, going through the latter reign you can see it across, many of the ministries of these guys where they're just robbing the people blind and people are dying, and people still continue to put their faith in them, and I continued to witness to some extent that growing up in the church that I came from. So very glad we're bringing this topic to the surface because I think it is a problem with the legal system that should be changed. I don't even know, you need me John, you could just keep on talking. I learned as much from you about all of these shadowy figures from the 20th

century as you learned from me about Hobart Freeman, the Dowey, the Bosworths, Brannum, the hall guy from when he and Tennessee, I can't remember his first name.

Yes, yes, yes. All I could think of was Tom T. Hall, the country singer.

You know, Franklin Hall, I will give him this. There were probably a lot of skinny people in his cult, and we need more of that today, I think. It's just a sign of society. I don't know whether to bless you or curse you because ever since I've been on these podcasts, my life has become very busy, busier than it's supposed to be here in semi-retirement. I'm just so amazed 40 years death, that there is this much interest, and there are these many people too, John. They are everywhere. Faith assembly wasn't just a church and a cornfield and Wilma, Indiana,

and it wasn't just the satellite groups around that area. And it wasn't just the satellite groups in some foreign countries like Germany and Switzerland and Australia and Canada. There are just these little home groups that were following Hobart Freeman for years.

But what is so surprising to me is after his death, many of these people didn't even come into this message until a Hobart Freeman was long dead and gone. And you would think, now wait a minute, I'm listening to these faith and healing messages by this man that died of all these illnesses. Isn't there a contradiction somewhere in there? Evidently not. Not in their minds. I mean, they come right into it maybe in the 90s, 10 years after Hobart died, they come into it and they latch onto it like a dog on a bone, you know, like original people

there and they're not letting go. And you can't even seem to talk them out of it, but there are enough who have seen the light. And I have no idea how they find you in your podcast. But they do.

Yeah. You know, people have no idea what happens behind the scenes, but it is almost a full-time job managing the emails and phone calls. And I do video conferences sometimes with people who have escaped. And what I found is that there are a lot of people who thought they had escaped years ago from some of these things. But what they really did was they bottled it up and they needed therapy. They didn't go to see a therapist. And so forever in the back of their minds, they have this cult indoctrination that plagues them. And so they're fascinated by it. They keep a lot of them,

you know, even as support groups, they talk about this. They will go watch cult documentaries because in the back of their mind, they know what has happened to them. And they haven't really processed what happened to them. So there are people like one guy I was talking to over the phone.

He, in fact, he was a Hobart Freeman guy. He said he basically just monitors the web for anything new on Hobart Freeman. And when the alert comes up, he's watching the next YouTube. So I'm assuming he's watching everyone that we've made so far. Oh, I'm sure. And the ones that I have talked to several say that every six months, they'll just do a Google search. And maybe they go a year, and they'll do a Google search. Hobart.

or frame in faith assembly. And again, we're talking 40 years after Hobart's death, and 20 years, at least after the end of faith assembly, as a church, as an individual local church. They will do that Google search just to see, is there anything new that I can find?

I've mentioned this before, and I appreciate you showing it on your screen before, too, John, that there are these places online. Tomax 7, T-O-M-A-X-7, is just a fascinating site. It's been going on for 20 years.

I think a guy named Colin Baldwin put that up, started it back in the early 2000s. And it is a study. It's a sociological, historical, religious study in itself, to see the sense of the laws, and just floundering in life that these people are experiencing.

Many of them haven't even been able to go back to church. Or if they go back to church, I think you can testify to this. Something is said, a verse is used, or a phrase is used.

And it just triggers all of this stuff in their mind. I mean, I actually sat last night and read a few of them, and I've read them all before, where, as soon as the lady heard this, she just burst out crying, and had to leave church and wouldn't go back.

And there are some other Facebook groups. They are support groups. They are, let me share my experience. What was your experience? So, I mean, I'm 100% in tune and in belief with what you're doing.

And you and I talked about this on an earlier podcast, where we were just talking about some of the general things that you're going to find across subordinates, that it's fairly consistent across the board, which I don't think most of us, I didn't know.

I think you know more about this than I do, but I don't think the average person realizes how similar the things are. They just know what they came out of, and they just thought, wow, that was terrible.

How did I allow that to happen to me? And one of the general themes of these platforms is people beat themselves up and say, how could I have believed that? But, you know, hundreds and thousands of people have gone down the same path.

You know, we're human, you know, you catch us at a vulnerable time in our life. Maybe, you know, we're just too young, maybe we're going through a divorce, you know, who knows? You just catch people in a vulnerable time of their life, and the cults are very good at sucking you in into their will.

So, anyway, we were talking last time, John, about the series of newspaper articles. There was one that came out in the Fort Wayne News Center, to know. and another in the Times Union, Warsaw, Indiana, newspaper that really shown the spotlight on what was happening at Faith Assembly as far as the deaths were concerned.

And I just wanted to make one personal comment. And that is this that we're taking some big swings at Hobart Freeman and big swings at Faith Assembly. And it's not like we haven't all had our own mistakes and faults.

You know, I've been a public speaker my whole life. I've got more than twice as many messages that have preached. So you better believe you can find plenty of errors and misstatements and wrong facts and wrong infacies in my life.

My goal has always been to improve, to eliminate those. And the reason you don't hear about me and my mistakes is I'm a nobody. But whenever you're a big leader with a far-flung audience and a widespread influence, then those matters need to be addressed.

If there's some little guy preaching down here in the corner to 20 people and he's bundling out all the scriptures of who cares, you know, he's not really affecting anybody. But somebody like Dr. Freeman and the people that you have discussed in the past, you know, they are really, really affecting people and affecting people negatively.

So we have, we have, I make critical statements against Dr. Freeman and I think that they're warranted, you know, we talk some about, you know, these dreams and visions and prophecies and revelations that his ministry is based on this and based on that.

I want to just be clear and say, I do believe that the Holy Spirit does still move today. I do believe that the Holy Spirit can give a dream and can, and can give an impression or can give a vision.

It won't be anything that adds to anything that's in the written scripture. It'll just be one of those cases like where Paul, after he had been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to travel and evangelize in certain areas of Asia Minor, he ends up in Trois wondering, where do we go next?

What do we do next? Well, he gets a vision. There's a man in Macedonia saying, well, you come over and help us and that's exactly what Paul did. They didn't add anything to the Bible.

It's no doctrinal stuff or anything like that. So last time we were talking about that Fort Wayne series of articles that came out and that was early in the spring of 1983. And I got this little journal, this little photo album of my years in the ministry.

This is 1983. I put pictures of people and then I just kind of document some of the important things that were happening in our church during this time period. And listen to what I said on April the 22nd.

to the 24th. This was in our local church, and this does tie in to what's going on at Faith Assembly. And I said, the Holy Spirit came down in such a way that we spent this Friday and Sunday service on our faith before the Lord. The whole church went on a three-day fast beginning on April of the 24th. My next entry made a fourth due to the happenings at Faith Assembly. The news media contacted us and came out to do a report. So I'm not asking anybody, I don't expect anybody to believe what I just read, that we had, we had a moving of the

Holy Spirit in our church, not even a week prior to this news report, the television stations in the Twin Cities coming out and visiting us. We wouldn't have been prepared for that. We had no idea what was going on at Faith Assembly. And to have cameras and news reporters show up at our church door and say, hey, we'd like to comment on Faith Assembly and all in the newspaper articles. Like, what articles are you talking about? You know, I had to go get those after the fact. So, you know, my point is, I think the Lord does still speak and does still move.

And I'm not asking anybody, including you, and you're my friend. I'm not asking anybody to believe that. And the reason you can't ask anybody to believe anything, because of all the nonsense that goes on out there. But I'm thankful that the Holy Spirit can lead us. It's just, you know, whatever he, whatever you predict, it has to come to pass. That's number one. If it doesn't, we're throwing that out with yesterday's trash. It needs to point everybody to Jesus and not to ourselves. And that's the problem with Hobart's visions and dreams and revelations. They were all

about him. He was, he was talking himself up, up. I think William Bramham was talking himself up, if we've got some true revelations, they're not going to be talking us up. Yeah. You know, you're hitting on several points that I want to further emphasize, because there's a reason why I chose the structure that I chose for everything that I do on this podcast and on the website. And it's a common problem. There, there is a known problem for police investigators whenever they investigate a crime scene, and they interview the people that are there, because you'll have five different people who tell you five different stories. And it

isn't that they're, that any of them are lying. It's that they, that's the way that they perceived what happened. They, they tell the story as they saw it. So the way that you saw Freeman may not match the way that another person saw Freeman, complicate that fact by the way that a cult controls the information. So when I first began, all of this. I started telling my story and I got lambasted from all over the world. No, the brand of cult does not like this. Why was there? I witnessed many of these things, but it wasn't their perspective. And so I start publishing the history and it's really

shocking at that point because I may have one small piece of the puzzle and the cult leaders have hidden the vast majority of the rest of the pieces to the puzzle. So with this one piece tied to my experience, it looks one certain way and it isn't until I discover all those pieces that they're hiding from me that I can get the better picture. And so this is an evolving history. It's one that I tell what pieces that I have and then let it grow. And I've learned to limit what I tell because I mean, I have all the other pieces. That's right. The other aspect

of control. And I want to strongly emphasize this. You mentioned people struggling when they go into church. It isn't just that the cults control the information. They set this cult structure of the church such that the church is made and intended to control the people. Whereas in real Christianity, the church is made to help the people. It's for the people. It's a community.

But they have manipulated the minds to think falsely that they are there to serve the church instead of the church being there to serve them. And so they feel this need even though they're in pain going to church because they feel like they have to serve the church. They have to be there every Sunday. And it took me a long time to come to the terms with there's a point of time in which you need to heal. And sometimes that healing means that you do have to stay away from church.

You have to let your mind heal and then take small doses. Right. So when I started, when that came on to me, I would, I was actually, I was still going, but I would mentally tune it out while I was there. Every, I purposefully tuned it out, maybe five sermons in a row and then listen to the sixth one. I know that sounds crazy, but I was taking small doses of church that I could handle. And that's the way I got through it. Now, there came a point of time in which I realized that, you know, that that isn't a good way to do it. And I finally just, I would limit how much I

would go. And if the, if the topic that they were preaching, I would sometimes ask the pastor, what are you preaching on Nags? And if the topic was something that I knew is going to trigger me, I would either mentally check out or physically check out. And I think that if you've been in a cult, you need to rewire the way of thinking about church. The church is there to serve you, not you to serve the church. Absolutely. Well, I just think that these podcasts help in so many ways, the factual data is one thing, and the pastoral advice and just common sense education is

another. Once those two newspapers printed what they did, those are just relatively small-time north-eastern Indiana newspapers, but once both of them did, then it hit the big market. So it got to Chicago. It got to New York City.

New York City papers did it. Time magazine did an article. A charisma magazine did an article. Jamie Buckingham, who was a part of that shepherdship group down in the Florida, the Melbourne Florida area, he did an article on it.

Christianity today did an article. If I remember correctly, nightline that was hosted back in those days by Ted Coppel in August of 1983. Ted Coppel was the articulate guy with all the big puffy hair. I think in August of 1983, nightline did an article. But you've got to remember that people would say, well why didn't followers of Hobart Freeman and Faith Assembly read these articles and see what was going on? No, no, no, no. They're not allowed to read the newspaper.

Those are called filthy rags. They can't watch television. TV stands for trashy vision. Those things were outlawed. So we're back to what you said earlier. The input of information is being controlled by whom, by the leadership. And anytime, this is what people need to realize. Anytime anybody is lending your input, you know, the input of the outside world into your life, you need to kiss them goodbye. You know, we're all adults. We need to be able to read the information, sort through it ourselves, discern what we think is factual. Well, he think is not and make our own conclusions. So I mean, it just, it lit a

brush fire everywhere when the big market outlets got a hold of those local stories. And you know, it wasn't, we're talking about 1984. We're not long after Johnstown massacre. That was fresh in the memory of the American public. And, you know, Jim Jones had been on the same platform as you know with William Brannum. And was a colleague of Brannum. And Hobart was a follower of Brannum. So, I mean, you don't have to hop skip and jump very far. And I'm not saying Hobart Freeman was a Jim Jones. But I'm just saying what I'm saying, that Jim

Jones and Brannum were together and Hobart followed Brannum. And I don't think any of these leaders knew exactly how to extricate themselves from, you know, all of the wrong that they heard. But the problem that...

Indiana was facing was yes, deaths had happened. Now they are documented and the way those newspapers documented and if you look at those articles, they have not all a hundred because a lot of those were in other states.

They have most of them that were in those surrounding counties. Well, they just do an open records request and they get death certificates and they know who this person was, how well they were and when they died and how they died.

So you would say, well, why don't the police just go around these people up? Well, you can't because people have to break a law before they're criminally liable for that. There has to be a law in place to break and there wasn't.

That was the problem that Indiana had been dealing with in the last couple of years leading up to this. The federal play CDC, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta had done a study in the county surrounding the glory barn and the new building in Wilman.

And I think that would probably be Casiasco, Noble County, maybe Elkhart County. There were several counties in Northeastern Indiana that they did the CDC did a study on from 1975 to 1982 and they determined that the maternal death rate in those two or three counties was a double or triple.

It was a hundred times what it was in the rest of the state of Indiana. Now, I've got people who are still trying to follow frame and say, well, they're lying and they're statistics.

But that's just what cult people do. They absolutely refuse to listen to the facts. They don't believe their facts. They believe that the devil, the enemy is behind all of that. And he just trying to bring down God's people. But we're God's minister. We're right back to the fact that they're trying to control these people's source of information and we just need to be allowed to read it for yourself.

So what happened was the Indiana state legislature got involved. The district attorneys couldn't prosecute law enforcement, couldn't arrest people if there wasn't a law in place. And what was really interesting was the problem that the state of Indiana had was not unique to them. This was a problem nationwide because in 1974, 10 years prior to this, Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which read, no parent or guardian who in good faith is providing for a child's treatment solely by spiritual treatment.

things shall for that reason alone be considered to have neglected the child. That was a federal law in place as of 1974 and states that would try to buck that would not be eligible for federal funds.

And what is most interesting is to find out who the main lobbying group was before Congress to get that bill passed in 1974, and it was Mary Baker-Eddie's group, Christian Science. And what's so interesting about Christian Science is they have this similar belief to fake assembly that the sickness, the pain, the illness, the disease, it's more in your mind than it is in your body, they basically deny the reality.

I will say that Hobart's teachings deny the reality and doctrine, but in practice it absolutely did. People who were supposed to be on their insulin got off their insulin, and if they saw any worsening conditions, they just pled the blood of Jesus and rebuked in Jesus' name and said be gone and said I'm healed, and then what, then they died.

So there's not a lot of difference, I mean there might be an inch difference on a bridge between Christian Science and Hobart Freeman's teaching, but the states were kind of up against a wall because of this federal wall.

So they had to work with the federal government, and when the federal Center for Disease Control, you know, Saul, and was able to provide these statistics that the maternal death rate was 100 times in the fake assembly area as compared to what it was in the rest of Indiana, well, then they were ready to get involved and do something about it.

So on February 9, in Indiana, the state legislature of Bill was introduced to eliminate religious objections as a defense in a case where death resulted from a child being denied medical care. Now, this child still died, all that is doing is kicking the can down the road if you don't provide medical care if the child dies, if you end up in court.

Now you can no longer use this federal exemption of providing a spiritual aid to the child as your defense. Still doesn't help the child, you know, he's still dead, they still doesn't protect people in the future, but they were working their way towards protection.

Then on June 1, they passed another law where parents, with a religious objection to medical treatment for their children, if the child became ill in any serious way, they had to report it to child welfare officials.

So that at least it worded them to the fact that in this home... in this county, there's a child who is ill, whose parents do not plan to provide any medical treatment. And they went on to pass some other laws. So now, the stage is set for law enforcement whose hands have been tied prior to this, for the county attorneys whose hands have been tied prior to this, to deal with the next faith assembly death, where a child is involved and medicine has been with hell, and they didn't have to wait long. The first case happened on August 28 of 1984,

where Gary and Margaret Hall were convicted in the death of their child. On September the 24th, a month later of 1984, Gary Hall was sentenced to five years in prison, five years in prison for the death of this child. The judge in the case was willing to offer a suspended sentence to the wife, Margaret Hall. We're talking about a woman in her late 20s and a man in his early 30s, a young couple. The judge was willing to offer a suspended sentence if she would provide medical care for her remaining for her living children. In her response, I quote, based on my convictions and based on my

fear of God Almighty, I cannot provide medical care for myself or for my children. And the judge then subsequently sentenced her to five years in prison as well. So they were asked, are they going to appeal? They said no. Ten minutes later, they were back in court saying we changed our mind.

I can't imagine, John, young people like this up against the state and federal government, you know, you're way out of your league in a legal setting like that with no attorney. They were, they were taught by Hobart Freeman. You do not defend yourself. You do not hire an attorney.

You simply trust the Lord. Where's that in the Bible that you can't have an attorney to represent you in some case since we live in a land of laws, you know, called the United States America. And thank God that we do. I can't imagine the fear that those people had to have dealt with. That's why ten minutes later, they're back in court saying we're going to appeal it because if you appeal, then they're going to be released on their own recognizant and they can go on home until a sentencing day, you know, arrives. It's such a weird history, the legal. We,

in the random call, we were manipulated with the same thing. You don't take your brother to court. You don't take, and when they use the quote unquote brother, they meant anyone. You don't take anyone to court because these cult leaders, man, if they kill you.

If you follow the cult's manipulation and somebody who is in your family gets sick or dies, because you tried the faith healing instead of the medicine, well, they don't want you to sue them.

So obviously, they don't want you to take your brother to court. But what, where it gets really interesting is if you follow the pattern to back your history, there were people in northern Indiana who were in Dauy's cult of personality, who their children died because of the same medical neglect, and they were prosecuted. And Dauy, who had, in today's money, it was near half a billion dollars, if I remember right, it became this big battle between him and the legal system and the news. And Dauy set the precedent, which was followed all throughout latarine and beyond,

that if the news reported anything that was critical of the movement, the news was working with the devil. And so therefore, don't believe any critical information. Do your mind stopping thing, right? But if the news ever printed anything that was in favor, they would hold it up in front of the church and look, even the news says this. Well, then that got hypercharged with the birth of Christian identity because the Christian identity movement branded all news and television as being the quote unquote Jews. And the Jews were the bad guys, they were the false Jews. And so

you'll find that all throughout the latarine. And so it became further amplified. You can't watch television, which is, you mentioned that earlier, basically, they're controlling all information so that you don't sue them, so that if they become part of some sort of a civil suit or criminal suit, even, the witnesses have been tampered with. When they bring people of the cult to testify, the information they have has been tampered with. They're severely limited in what they know. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transition through the latarine, 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. You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William Brownham Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support.

Yeah, it's interesting you're talking about them protecting themselves from lawsuit because I've actually got what Hobart said, and I'm jumping the gun, we'll get to this in a later discussion, but Hobart ended up in court himself. He was being sued, he wasn't died, he was arrested, he was fingerprinted, and whenever it was his time to say what he believed, didn't believe, what he had taught and hadn't taught, he flat out, he flat out lied to protect his own skin, he had taught over and over, you don't go to doctors, doctors, but when it was, you know,

when Robert was getting ready to meet the road and those bars were going to slam behind him, I will give you the quote at a later time where he said, oh no, I never talked that. Well, it's only on hundreds of tapes, you know, it's only on hundreds of tapes, it's not like you've got a search Jerusalem with the lamp in order to find the one obscure time that he said that.

But back to the poor hall, so they're both going to go to prison, they're released, they're allowed to go about two days later, the presiding judge realized that he had made a mistake because Gary Hall had a felony, sodomy conviction on the record, and if you have that, then you're not, even if you're appealing, you're not allowed to go on your own, reconnaissance, you have to remain in jail. So two days later, they hunt Gary down, they arrest him, and they put him in jail for a prior felony, sodomy conviction.

If you listen to some of Hobart Freeman's tapes during this time, let me give you one example. It is entitled The Call That God Answers. It is Take M-376-3. In this message, what is so frustrating, and it makes you angry when you hear it, Hobart is stressing that many times there is a deeper purpose in our trial than simply escaping the present circumstances that were under.

And Hobart was a master at using a scripture, pulling it out of context, and applying it to himself, or to the current situation. So he went to Jeremiah 32, where Jeremiah, who was in prison for the right reason, because he was prophesying God's word against the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and he was put in prison, and he stayed there a while, eventually he did get out, but Hobart uses that as an example of sometimes it might not be God's will to get you out of prison. Sometimes you have to stay there. At the ten minute and sixteen second mark, I quote, there are worse

things than going to prison. I can't think of too many worse myself, by the way. There are worse things than going to prison. It happened all the time to the prophets and Paul and the apostles, and they just rejoiced into quote. Well, yeah, but they were in prison for the right reason. It wasn't a sodomy conviction, and it wasn't the death of an infant. They were always in there for preaching and prophesying the Word of God. And then later, towards a very, very end of this message, I quote, Lord, why don't you just run into

that jail and bring out brother hall like you did, Peter, end of quote, which is showing this happened after brother hall actually went to prison. But, you know, John, it's just such a, such a flippant, unconcerned approach, actually using, I mean, the way they take the circumstances and twist them to their own advantage. Like you said, don't read the newspaper. Oh, there's a favorable article about us. Let's bring that to church and show everyone. Oh, it's not favorable. Don't read it. Oh, it's favorable. Let's bring that to church.

Come on, guys. You know, let's be consistent. You've got to be consistent. And so how he takes this poor guy who's in prison and look, I'm going to say this and I stand to be corrected if anybody has the facts, but the facts wouldn't be somebody told you that somebody told you the facts would be the facts. But I dare say, John, that I doubt Dr. Freeman went visited brother hall in prison.

Now, maybe he did. I could be totally wrong. But, you know, you give me the long entrance for the visitors that day in the prison and you show me Dr. Freeman's signature and I will recant what I'm about to say. But I would suspect, no, you don't care about that guy. He's going to use him as a sermon illustration like and also to protect himself like God's probably not going to deliver him. He's probably going to stay there forever. So let's preach a sermon indoctrinating people getting people in the mindset of, yeah, some of you are going to prison

and don't expect God to get you out because sometimes being there is the trial of your faith and he has more he wants to teach you in jail than out of jail. I think he was just setting up the whole congregation for anybody who now is convicted under this new Indiana law and who's going to end up in jail or in prison. Guess what they're going to stay there. And what would any normal pastor do?

Well, you'd be down there the next day. That's what any normal pastor would do because a pastor is the shepherd of his people. He wants to protect them, he wants to comfort them, he wants to console them.

His, he doesn't only want to keep them from air and teach them the truth, that's like the only thing Hobart called a pastor was supposed to do is rescue everyone from the air of their ways and teach them my truth.

There are so many roles involved in being a leader of people. And chief among them has to be your spirit of love and service. And I would, I'm still gonna say until someone can prove me otherwise, I bet he didn't go visit the guy.

This is your pastor. You know, we read a letter earlier where the woman said, my sacrifice, a life for Hobart Freeman, and I don't think he even knew their name. Here's a guy who's sacrificed even more.

So he's gone to jail, that means you've lost your job. You know, you're probably gonna lose your home. Your wife is gonna end up your kids' destitute or depending on family and church members.

The most you could do is go and, you know, besiege the judge on his behalf, which Hobart wouldn't do, the least you could do. Let's go visit the man in prison and caring food and console him and, you know.

So that is always stuck in my crawl, obviously, that's bothered me when I hear him use Brother Hall's name on a tape like Poor Brother Hall is in prison. Thank God the rest of us are still here at Faith Assembly.

I'm preaching and you're listening. I just saw it was terrible. So that was the first big case. And then right out on the heels of that John on September 11th, David and Kathleen Bergman.

They were the next ones. They were sentenced on October the 29th of 1984 to 10 years in prison. The judge gave the wife the same opportunity. Mrs. Bergman as he had given Margaret Hall.

And she said, no, sir, your honor. I cannot go against the Lord. I have to stand by my husband. And as a picture of them coming out with a court appointed attorney and the sheriff's deputy, he's smiling.

She's not coming out of the courthouse building. What can I say? It's just these podcasts can be, in your heart, in your spirit, they can be a little depressing. Oh, yeah. You know, and I can't imagine how much you've had to deal with this.

But it is a little depressing because I just feel so sorry for these people who gave and sacrificed so much and received so little in return. It tugs at your emotions. One of the things that you mentioned, you know, talking about Hobart Freeman, using the sermon content to fit the situation to manipulate.

the minds. That goes back to something that we were discussing earlier, how sometimes it's triggering for people to go to their new church, and sometimes they don't even understand why. And it took me a while really to put this one together, but I feel like it's very common, especially among some of the ex cult members I've spoken with. There is a book called Propaganda by Edward Bernays, who is the nephew of Sigmund Freud. And I read it because oddly enough on a plane trip, I was recommended as an ex cult member. I needed to read this by

a psychologist who was sitting next to me on the trip. So I read it and all of a sudden my whole world comes apart because I realized that every technique of manipulating the minds that's in that book, I could identify with the religion that I escaped. But the concept that was difficult for me to understand was this. There is manipulation for evil purposes, and there is sometimes manipulation for good purposes that does not have an ill intent. And one of the examples of this was like a child trying to convince them to take their medicine. I think that's in that book,

or it's in one similar, but you give just a spoonful of honey makes this medicine go down kind of thing, right? It is manipulation, but it's for a good cause. Well, the problem is that when you're in these cults, it's not a good cause. And you can sense that something is wrong, but because you're manipulated under the control, you don't raise any critical thought. But then once you enter into a new church, you'll find that the sermon content suddenly starts matching the things that are happening in the church. And you feel that it's manipulation in some cases, but it may not

necessarily be bad. But you begin to associate that with what happened to you in the cult. And your world comes apart because you feel like what they're saying is for a purpose of driving your mind to go a certain direction, rather than just preaching from the Bible for reading chronologically and going through the Bible. And so there's this fine line that you have to walk between, well, is it a healthy manipulation or is it an unhealthy manipulation? Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is ex cult member 101, I guess, John. And they have heard, you know, these these false tenets have

just been pounded into them. And I don't want to say that then the reverse needs to happen that the truth needs to be pounded into them. There's not that it needs to be pounded, but it's almost as though, I mean, you don't you don't make an exit from a cult overnight. Even if you physically can remove yourself from from the actual premises of the place, you know, working with the mind is just a long, long-term process.

And as I have read the sad, sad stories of the people who have experienced a fallout of faith assembly, it is years and years. I just, you would just think. I mean, I'm showing my naivete by expressing how shocked I am over this. I'm obviously not a cult expert. But I would think, two or three years, or four years, or five years, or something be enough time. And maybe for some people it is, but, you know, I would say for the majority, no, it is, and does it ever really, totally, completely undo itself? I don't know. I mean, if you could get 90% or 98%,

that's probably enough to be happy with that. But I'm reading these people's comments, and I just see, wow, it's just so hard to extricate themselves from that. One person who had sent me a message said, you know, we're trying to interpret the Bible. And they really are. I believe in their group. They are honestly trying to interpret. And this person said, but when we arrive at our interpretation, we're not sure if we're right or wrong. And they said, I think it's because our whole problem is we don't know how to read the Bible. We don't know how to interpret it. It has

been done falsely in front of us and for us by our leadership for so many years. It's just, it says patchwork quilt of snatching things out of context and sewing them together and wrapping a rubber band around it and delivering it and saying, there, that's the gospel of Christ that, you know, people don't know how to interpret the Bible. And so if they hear a podcast like this, thankfully, I haven't gotten, have not received very much negative response. It's mostly been positive. But if they hear a podcast like this, you know, they want to attack the podcast because

we're attacking their leader. But that's what their leader tall them is make sure you defend me because I'm God's anointed. Touch my anointed and do my prophets know arm. Make sure you defend me at all calls. And that's not the name of the game. The name of the game, it should be truth. We should be truth seekers. We should be after the truth at all calls. And that would mean if I had to admit, I'm wrong. If you have to admit, you're wrong. If they have to admit, they're wrong. If we're all wrong. And we all are somewhere in our life. That's the only way we're going to arrive at the

truth. But look, once these articles came out, I was able to track this down. Once those articles came out in that northern Indiana news. paper. There was an Illinois satellite meeting, and I'm not going to name names on this one, the people that were a part of it will probably be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

But in that satellite meeting in Illinois, satellite of faith assembly on September the 30th of 1983, the minister of that group stood up and told his people about this brutal killing of a Fort Wayne Indiana newspaper editor and his entire family. Someone had come in the house, killed a man, killed his wife, killed the son. And remember that was the paper that did the first one that did the four-part series on faith assembly earlier that spring. And the minister said that's God's judgment, quote, or opposing the kingdom of God and his prophets. So mark it on your calendar.

End to quote. Can you imagine the fear in those people's minds when they heard the minister because he just quoted a statistic, you know, a fact, you know, this Fort Wayne Indiana newspaper editor, the same paper that a couple of months earlier in the spring of 83 had published a series of articles against the kingdom of God and God's prophets and look what he gets for opposing them. And then he said, mark it down on your calendar.

Well problem, the problem was some of us did mark it down on our calendar. And if you mark it down on your calendar, then you find out that that editor whose name was Dan Osborne had nothing to do with the articles written against faith assembly. So people say, oh, but he worked for the paper. Well, I guess God flowing his air at the wrong person, you know, he worked for the paper in general, but he's not the two reporters that did it or the editor responsible for that. He worked for the paper, right? No, he wasn't even hired by the Fort Wayne paper until after those articles were

put. Wow. That's incredible. It's this misinformation. It's lying to the people. It's deceiving the people. And to me, John, it's just absolutely disgusting. So even though sometimes I get depressed, I'm still happy to do these podcasts with you. You know, I've sat through sermons where they did something similar. Somebody in the church who had questioned the church and had left, they died.

And then they bring it up randomly. They'll be preaching and then venting and railing something or another and then say, and remember, brothers, so and so, who died after questioning this this message is how they termed it in the in the random cults. But in the back of your mind, that gets seared. And suddenly you have this fear to leave. And that's one of the tools of controlling manipulation.

And it is just so sad to watch that happen. You know, John, I remember when I was a young man in my 20s and began to see things wrong with faith assembly, you know, and I would kind of chip away at it.

But I can remember, you know, that's been 40 years ago. It's hard to remember. But I know there were times where I had some fear and trepidation in my life, because obviously I would think, who am I?

You know, I'm a 23, 26 year old nobody. You know, I'm not Dr. Howard Edward Freeman with all these degrees and all of this prestige. So, you know, I couldn't possibly be right. You know, I would, I would just by virtue of age difference and education and experience difference, I would have to be if anybody's wrong of two of us, it would have to be me.

And you know, I would assume that and then I'd read my Bible again and say, no, I don't think I am wrong. No, I don't think I am because I think I'm reading it for exactly what it says and I think he's twisting it.

And that was always my savior at the end of the day, thankfully, is what does the Bible actually say? You don't have to know Greek or Hebrew either. What does it actually say without trying to twist it and make it fit into any formula?

What does it actually say? And you know, that was my, that was my relief. If it actually said that, I thought, wow, I can't believe I'm getting ready to saw this limb off behind me that I'm perched on my connection to faith assembly.

I'm getting ready to saw the limb off and I'm on the end of the limb. But you know, it's what the Bible says and I'm just going to stay with it. Yeah, one of the things that hit me after I left the cult and just gobsmacked me was the fact that the way that the Bible was manipulated, like you said, you almost felt like you didn't know how to read it.

And all throughout the lettering movement, they had this phrase that they twisted out of context and reversed its meaning that said, the Bible is of no private interpretation. Which if you read that passage, it means literally that you hold no secret that anybody else can't read for themselves, right?

They twisted it so badly, but what the, what the British Israel movement did to religion, especially in the United States was because the people felt like they were one of the lost intribes of Israel, these geniuses, and I'm quoting that, quote unquote geniuses, believe that they could take certain passages and then marry them with other passages that may not even be in the same book and then apply it to the church today because they've made this new cocktail of scripture, right?

And I just got, you know, after I left this thing and I started thinking about how absurd that was, simply... it, you know, one of Paul's letters. It would be like, if I wrote you a letter, and I send it to you, I'm writing you a letter from start to finish, and you're going to read it start to finish, you're not going to go pull up the book of Job and say, look, I can understand John better because I've read this single verse from the book of Job. It would be like, if you were to read my book, and you were to also read it through the book of Dilbert,

you know, you can make it say whatever you want it to say. But that's what these guys are doing, and the problem is people have been manipulated into thinking that they can't understand it because it's so confusing. When simply, they could just open it up and read it. Well, I've got a couple of these ex ministers are wanting a meeting with me. I hope I come back alive. If I don't, come and bury my bones, okay? I'm getting headed into the lion's den. Although from the conversation, he was very cordial, very nice, very wonderful. I don't anticipate anything bad, but I mean, what

what a great journey my life has been, and I love every minute of it. Well, this will probably come out after your meeting, so we'll be able to tell by the next podcast whether, whether everything, I'm certain it'll turn out okay. I've, I've been confronted by quite a few people. I usually avoid the ones physically, and we'll have, you know, zone meetings or whatever. But anyway, this has been fun. There's much, much more. So we'll have to pick up where we left off. 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-Branum.org. For an overview of the

historical research of William-Branum in the healing revivals, read preacher behind the white hoods, a critical examination of William-Branum and his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.