Is That Group a CULT?

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 co-host, researcher, minister, and friend Charles Paisley, founder of ChristianGospelChurch.org, an author of Come Out Of Her, My People. And together we're examining the history and the intersections in history between William Brannum and other key figures that either influenced or were influenced by the post-World War II healing revivals.

Well, Charles, we have sort of a makeshift setup today, the storms that came through, and I guess they really battered Florida all the way up to South Carolina, have hit here and there is no internet, so I have set up and have an unusual setup. You should actually see all of the gadgets I've got going to make this happen, but we are attempting to record during the outages from the storm, and hopefully everybody that's listening is safe and did not get much damage.

But we were talking, we actually have been talking about this a few weeks now about the signs that you're in a cult, and for anybody who has looked at the comment feeds, you're probably aware, I get emails, I've got text messages, I see the comments, literally every platform I have, people ask the question, why is it a cult? And the interesting part is because I research so many different organizations, I've got multiple cults asking me why is it a cult? And you know, the funny part of it is, by definition, all of them are because it is cult itself, it's not really

such a bad word, but whenever I put a individual who has led a group of people in a certain direction on my website and just publish the information, the history as it was recorded, people assume that it is a destructive cult because it hits my website, which is also kind of funny because if you think about it, the group of people realize that they have been led in a certain direction, so that's why the question arises, but the question specifically should be, is it a destructive cult?

And so you and I were talking about it and we thought we would just use our examples of what we came from, which was clearly a destructive cult, and give some examples that we had in our cult, and everybody who's asking these questions can apply it to their specific cult of people.

Well, that's a great introduction, John. Yeah, we have, we certainly have experience with cults, don't we, John? Absolutely. You know, if we live to be old people, we will have spent the majority of our life in a cult.

So I think that certainly qualifies us to say what makes a cult and what doesn't. Yeah, you know, some people when they use the word cult, yeah, they kind of use it in that benign sort of way, where it just means a unique group of people with some unique belief, you know, it's just in a generic benign sense.

And there's a lot of people, especially in academic senses that use the word cult in that way. It's really not a bad word in that sense. You know, when I use it myself, I generally try to reserve it for what you call destructive cults, harmful cults, because I think in the popular imagination of people in the world we live in today, that tends to be what people think you mean when you use the word cult, you know, you're thinking of people drinking the Kool-Aid and people burning down Waco and things like that, you know, people starving to death in the forest, right?

Those are the kind of things that people tend to have in mind when you use the word cult. So I generally reserve the word cult for a group that is actually harmful and destructive when I tend to use it myself.

So you're right, John, you know, there are certain signs and red flags that can help someone understand they were in a cult and realize that the thing was harmful and destructive. And maybe we talked about a few of those things today.

Steve Hassan has created the bite model, which I think is a really great tool, John. I think you've interviewed Steve Hassan in the podcast before, haven't you? I believe he's been on your podcast.

Yeah. And the bite model is essentially a tool you can use to grade a group of people, or, you know, an organization, and you can determine how far they drift towards being destructive versus healthy or benign, right?

So, you know, you could look, you could take a generic cult, which is not necessarily a bad term. You can fit it into that model that he gave and you can figure out, are they on the harmful side?

On the very, very harmful extreme, or are they on the benign or healthy extreme? And so, when I think of cults, and what I think we're going to talk about today is groups that would fit more on the extreme side of his model, you know, the harmful side that are causing bad consequences in people's lives, that are contributing in a negative way to the world and society.

And I think that's definitely where we, what I tend to think of is that side of his model when I think of cults. Right, and I'm sure that most of the people who are listening whenever they hear the word cult, when I use it, common.

because it's really not a negative thing and in my head I've studied so many different groups but most of the listeners you write when the when the word cult is used they think the negative term they think Jim Jones and Jones Town or I can't remember the crazy guy who they thought the comment was taking them to heaven but all of these different groups that's what comes to mind when you hear the word cult and I never will forget I spent several hours in the car with Stephen Hassan when I had I was early out of the message it wasn't that long that I had escaped and we were talking about

his bite model and bite stands for behavioral control information control thought control and manipulation and emotional control and he was describing this and he was giving me examples and you know he's talking about Scientology and he's talking about the moonies and the examples that he gave were so extreme when I tried to apply it to a Pentecostal style cult like William Brannum's I was thinking you know that really it doesn't seem to fit I will I wonder if if it really is destructive or not and it took the better part of the few it was a few hours

right in the car it took the better part of a few hours for me to grasp the depth of what that model represented because even at its purest form the message cult of William Brannum and its splinter groups they all meet this model but they have divisively trained our minds to believe that it doesn't for example the the behavioral control there are many things that we did that they were controlling our behavior but not in the same way that say the moonies or Scientology did they the women for example the long hairs the long dresses well if you're in the cults you

think well they're not forcing that on us we just do that because we love Jesus and yes that may be true but the whole background for it the holiness background is a way in which you train people to behave a certain way and I'm not that statement doesn't you know if you're wearing long dresses that doesn't mean that that's wrong per se but it is a way in which they frame and us versus them in fact I heard several sermons where the minister would say see we go out into the stores and you can tell a Christian from a non-Christian by the way they dress and it was

I'm pretty sure it was that exact statement that when Hassan was describing that it finally clicked because the way that they dress or don't dress is not what makes a Christian but we were trained to believe this and that's a form of behavioral control and there are many Bible verses like God looks at the God does not look at the outward appearance for example that was a manipulation of behavioral control that was actually anti-biblical. God does not care how you dress. I mean, you've got picture going into a foreign nation where a developing nation where

the natives dress according to the native custom and you convert them to Christian, well, it's going to be years before they actually change their dress code and the way in which they dress doesn't affect the way that they accepted Christ or not accepted Christ. Yeah, when you look at all of the different kind of the different things we're going to talk about today and you kind of think come back to that bite model, not any single one of these things necessarily makes a group a destructive cult, but it's the you see where the dots start aligning, you know, in that model and as

you get more and more dots aligning on the harmful side of the model, that's when you start to say, okay, yeah, this is a harmful group. So we're going to talk about things that definitely help to align.

Let's see that a group aligns on a harmful side of the bite model and you're right, John, and us versus the mentality is one of the big things that is important to just, you know, putting you on the harmful side of the destructive side of being a cult or a group and that is something they do in order to, yeah, to build walls to separate people and you're right, it's not necessarily that any individual thing that they do is bad in and of itself, but the preponderance of it to create this whole system of us versus them to create a difference between us and, you know, the people living on

the other side of the street is to feed into that sense that we're good guys, they're bad guys, they want to destroy you, they want to harm you, they want to drag you to hell and you have got to, we have right here what's going to save you from those bad people over there and it's building that paradigm that is one of the pillars of creating a cult and you know, and there is legitimate things in the world where you say, yeah, you know, hey, those people over there are, you know, smoking some bad stuff stay away from them, you know, there's legitimate reasons to say, hey,

those are not good people to be around. And, but when you take that and you weaponize that just across the board into this total us versus them sort of a situation like we had in the cult, honestly, like we had in the message, you get to the point, John, like we had absolutely no relationships. I had zero relationships with a single person outside of the message, not, not one, not even my family that was not, I had no relationships outside of the movement, right? That's where it goes and it serves to start to build a wall of isolation, right?

You look different, you act different, you behave different, so the people on the outside think you're weird and they probably don't really want to be around you anyway. And then you think they are all possessed by the devil or the serpent seed or whatever else, and then you want to stay away from them.

So yes, that us versus them mentality is one of the key pillars to building a destructive cult. Absolutely. And one of the difficult parts for me, I get emails from various people asking is my group of cult and they ask me to research, but you know, I don't know every single church and every single group.

And there are thousands of different groups in the United States, but people say our pastor is doing this, is it a cult? It matches what you're saying. And the really difficult part is whenever a person escapes a movement like we had, which was clearly a destructive cult.

And then they enter into mainstream Christianity, they find that there are specific attributes of the bite model that we're talking about that have invaded the churches. And so they'll go to a mainstream church thinking it's a safe place to be.

And then they see these and it's complicated because you can't just openly say, well, every church is a destructive cult, which is not true. It would be an inaccurate statement for me to say that.

But the way that the Latter-Ain movement influenced Christianity as a whole, there are specific attributes from Latter-Ain that have even made its way into the Baptist church, or you know, various churches that we've experienced are like this.

And one of the things that the heaviest signs of destruction that have invaded the churches is the notion of the spiritual warfare, where everything in the world is out to get you and everything is demonic and I was talking actually two different people I was talking with about.

They were just simply going to like finding a parking space. The demons are fighting me so that I'm not getting a parking space close to the door. And if you magically get it, then thank God, let's bow our bow and pray that God has given this parking space to us.

I've been in the car when somebody has done this, Charles. And that level of angels and demons in the world is not, it's fictional. It's not really real. If you want that level of fiction, go watch Harry Potter or some fantasy movie because it's not real.

But the churches have widely adopted things like this. And I'm not saying that every church has even adopted that, but there are elements that came out of this Latter-Ain mess that did go into mainstream.

But like you said, it's not just one or two things that make it a destructive quote. You have to look at all of these things that Stephen Hasen's bite model pretty well sums it up for me, but you can go cult research institute or various places and you can find these lists of attributes that make the decision that are the major decision factorist of destructive or not. So that's another reason I wanted to do this because it's so complicated for people to understand. Yeah, when you look at the spiritual warfare, again, that's another thing that serves to build that us versus them mentality. Obviously, you go to Ephesians

chapter 5, I think it's chapter 5. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole section in there about spiritual warfare. But what these crazy groups do with it does not the least bit match what the text of the scripture actually says, you know, the spiritual warfare, when you read everything in context, you're fighting with grace, you know, you're fighting with faith, you're fighting.

It's actually all about spreading the gospel, right? And Paul, that spiritual warfare is Paul talking about the effort to spread the salvation gospel message and then people resisting the trying to insert other things that make people doubt their salvation, right? And you actually look at that in context, the spiritual warfare is on the side of the people who are doing the spiritual warfare are actually the people who are resisting and standing up against all these people who say you need all this other stuff besides Jesus to be saved, right? The people who combat and fight someone who says you need a last day revival to make it. See, the person fighting

against that is the one doing spiritual warfare, right? It's the people who are challenging the essential elements of the gospel that are actually the forces of evil in that set of scriptures in Ephesians chapter 5, right? We could talk so many times, so much about all of that stuff, John.

There, I mean, it's, it's huge how these movements, truthfully, the movements just take those passages and they flip them upside down, right? And they turn the people who are saying, Jesus is enough to save you into the bad guys, right? And they become the bad guys by piling all these other things and causing people to doubt their salvation, causing people to think faith in Jesus isn't enough to save, right? They flip it all up on its head and they hijack those verses and then they say, where are the spiritual warfare people? And you are the lowly Christians,

right? When the truth is, they are in a cult that has twisted the Bible and totally turned everything upside down. But anyways, again, that just serves all into the us versus them mentality. And that's a, that's a big, that's a big aspect of the way that you're really what makes these groups starts to make them harmful as that us versus them mentality. Now, the next thing I think we got to mention is they, these groups that become harmful and destructive, they almost always have an authoritarian leadership model. They have generally a singular or maybe a group, a small circle

of, of a leader at the top that has totally unchecked power. There's no check on his power at all when you analyze the system, when you see how, when you really understand how it works. There's nobody in that group that can hold that leader accountable. There's no mechanism in there that can get this person and stop him from...

I'm preaching and silence his mouth, right? Like you look at Mike Bickle, right? Oh, I'll just use throw one out there. There is nobody with the power of the ability to make him stop. Is there?

There's nobody, right? There is nothing you can do. And that is how a lot of these groups go. The man at the top has so much authority. There is no check on him. There is no way to shut them down when they do something bad.

That is an authoritarian leadership model, right? They have the ability to just keep plowing ahead, no matter what. And there is nothing that can stop or rest or slow them down. And in the movements that we come from, John, that model that created these authoritarian leaders with absolutely no real check on their power, that was actually created during the latter right movement. You're absolutely right.

And it was created by the healing revivalists of the deliverance movement, William Brannum, chief among them. And they created that model that eliminated all the checks on their power because when they started to do radical, inappropriate, misadventurous stuff during the healing revivals that killed people like Karel Ruth Struebler, right?

That killed people like Donnie Morton, right? That led to these deaths that caused all kinds of financial abuses. I mean, there was just a lot of really horrific things that happened during the early days of the deliverance movement, the healing revivals.

The denominational systems had structures in place to try and hold people accountable, right? And William Brannum got sanctioned and these other figures got sanctioned. He laws all of these guys, they get sanctions put on them and guess what? They didn't like it.

They did not like being checked. They didn't like it when these churches, you know, followed a biblical model and started to try and put the breaks on what they were doing. So they broke away and they created the non-denominational world that you see today where there is literally no ability to hold a lot of these people accountable.

They have eliminated the structures which make it possible to hold them accountable. And they can just run a mock and there's absolutely nothing that can be done about them within these movements. There's no ability to police to police the movements anymore because they eliminated all the structures and implemented this authoritarian model that exists today.

Exactly. You know, people have contacted me like I said, asking is this group a cult of, they will say things like our pastor is doing this and we recognize that it looks to be more authoritarian than we want to submit ourselves to.

And the real problem is whether it's a destructive cult or not, if your leader is becoming authoritarian, number one, it's not matching the biblical model for a pastor. The pastor is supposed to be a servant leader, you know, somebody who leads by helping you to become a leader.

So if these guys are doing this, number one is just an unhealthy church, but it edges very closely towards a destructive cult. showing authority in areas that aren't any of their business. I have seen ministers who will they'll start condemning different things that forms of entertainment, for example, that the members of the church are doing because they know specifically that they're doing them. They've had conversations with these people and they want to control what they can and cannot do.

And in many cases, you know, that can be a good thing if they're doing something that's dangerous or destructive or sinful. But they edge very closely towards we want to prevent you from having fun.

And they'll say, fun is if you're having fun, you're not serving God. I've heard quotes like this, Charles. Literally, they do not want you to have fun in some of these groups. And it's just a mechanism of control. One of the interesting thing you mentioned, Mike Bickel. So I've got to mention Paul Cain. So Paul Cain is more widely responsible for what we see today than I think many people realize. Cain was out of the laterane movement. He had some, you know, he had some personal issues that should have prevented him from being in leadership positions anyway.

But he was adopted by many different figures. I'm not going to list them all. But the problem is the figures adopted Cain's leadership model. And then whenever his sexual sins were made public, they said, okay, we're going to distance ourselves from him because he had this thing in his life.

Well, the problem is they put more emphasis on that than they did all of the other stuff that he brought into the church, the biggest of which, which in my opinion is, you know, to sexual things, I realize that there are victims and there's all of that. And that's bad. But when you really think about the level of destruction that this man caused, his authoritarian structure for the church is actually worse than that. And he was never denounced for his authoritarian control church model.

And the interesting thing is I'm getting people who are giving testimonies out of the UK. And they're asking me, is this an NAR church, the group that they're in? And you find out that no, it's actually not in the new apostolic reformation. It is a separate network that is not in the apostolic networks. But they were influenced by Paul Cain's leadership model. And so they're mimicking, and Paul Cain's leadership model was essentially the laterane leadership model. So they were in effect, you know, brought into this authoritarian, authoritarian structure through Paul Cain, influenced by the leadership model of laterane. And now they're spinning off

destructive cults as a result. Right. And in the way laterane did it, they implemented fivefold ministry, right? If you've heard a fivefold ministry, if you were anywhere in the world today, you hear the phrase fivefold ministry, you're told you're being your following fivefold ministry. That is the least leadership model that was created by Latter-Rain.

That is where that was developed. It was pioneered. The terms of what it all means is defined at. You don't find fivefold ministry being carried out before a Latter-Rain in any significant way. They took that, they popularized it.

And yeah, and the way that it shakes out is you generally end up with either a apostle or a prophet as the senior figure that nobody can question. And when you get multiple apostles, you end up with a chief apostle, right?

You always end up with a singular figure at the top that controls the pyramid that ends up having unquestioned power with no ability to check them. And when you look at Paul Cain, okay, how did Paul Cain get away with raping boys?

How did Paul Cain get away with the prostitution? How did Paul Cain get away with the drugs and the alcoholic binge? How did he get away with all of that, right? How did he get away with all that?

And hey, he lived out his days in peace in these movements, how did that happen? Because there really wasn't a way to really hold him accountable. And when they rejected him, did they also reject the model that enabled him to do all of that to begin with?

They didn't, right? And that's the problem, you know, they say, don't throw out the baby with the bath water, right? This authoritarian model of leadership is not the baby. This is what enables this abuse and gives you no ability to hold people accountable when they engage in it, right?

So, you know, you've got that. The authoritarian leadership model, that's another important thing that puts the, you know, a dot on the harmful side of things, right? And, you know, you can have an authoritarian leadership model that maybe is not harmful, right?

I mean, you look at the military, right? They have an authoritarian, there's ways that things can be that by itself don't necessarily mean it's terrible, right? But as you start to align more and more of these things over on the harmful side of things, it starts to paint a picture that this is a destructive, dangerous group.

So, the next kind of thing I think that's worth mentioning that is just, I think another sign that you're over on this harmful side is, if the group believes there's no acceptable reason to leave the group, if, in fact, you're not allowed to leave, that's a really big red flag that, yes, we're over here on this very harmful side of things.

I know the, the, the, the flagship church of the message sect I come from, John, where I was the associate pastor. I was, again, I think, you know, it, it's much to my shame, I was the second position from the top in my sect of the message, John.

I was the second, most senior figure in the second oldest and one of the largest international sects of the message, okay? So, I know a whole lot what I talk about, okay? I was there, I, you know, seen so much, John.

But there was no legitimate reason to leave if you left, you know, and that don't necessarily mean you've got people it locked up in cages in the back room and they can't get out, right?

But there is no acceptable reason to leave, right? There's no reason to leave. And if you try to leave, if you actually step out and you leave, they're going to come after you, they're going to harass you, they're going to say terrible things about you, they're going to attack you, they're going to do all kinds of terrible things, just to do, because you left, only because you left. And so when you're in a group, and there's no acceptable reason to leave, you know, hey, I got married and my wife lives over there, and I'm going to live with her, that's not an acceptable reason to leave. Hey, I got a job offer in another state that's really good. And I'm going to, that's not an acceptable reason to leave. There is no acceptable reason to exit the group or move on, because there's not a belief that there really is another church out there that you can go.

To and make it, right? They really have in their mind, this is the only place that you can make it from. And so even when you walk away very quietly from these groups, I know this was my own experience, and I think this is what probably the number one thing that woke me up to start to realize I was in a cold, when you leave very quietly, right? I left quietly, I didn't, I told some people in leadership, right? I didn't tell anybody else, I just left quietly.

And they start, they harass me, they attack me, they damage my prop, they did all kinds of nonstop for a year of harassment, John. And I was quiet that I didn't make a peep the whole time.

And when you experience that sort of treatment on your way out, when you just are leaving quietly, right? That starts to wake, oh my goodness, something is seriously wrong here, right? Because there's no acceptable reason to leave a group like that. And so I think that's part of the reason also that I encourage people to leave as quietly as possible from the message, John, and from these calls.

Just if you can slip quietly out the back door, do it, run, you know, run for the hill, slip out quietly, you don't need to make a scene. But then when you turn back and if you have left quietly, peacefully causing no problems, and they come after you, you know, like you're the devil, that is a huge sign, right? There was something very wrong there, very wrong there.

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On behalf of William Brannem Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. You know, for me, this one goes far beyond just simply destructive cult or not. Whenever a leader manipulates the people into thinking that when they leave, they're leaving Christianity as a whole, they are manipulating people to believe that the only pathway to God is through that church.

And especially for the reasons that you've mentioned, anybody should be able to leave for these reasons. That, you know, it doesn't even make logical sense. But what it tells me is that these leaders have set themselves up as the mediator between God and man.

And whenever they consider the fact that you've left this church to go to a different Christian church, for example, and that when you do this, you're leaving Christianity, it tells me that for them, Christianity means something entirely different.

For me, pure plain and simple, it means that this group is a group that practices idolatry. They believe that their God is different from the Christian God. And then when you leave, you're leaving the Christian God.

And so for me, this one, it goes so far beyond just simply whether it's a destructive cult or not, this means that this group is worshipping something else. Right. You know, when you look at the most extreme cults like Jim Jones, right?

Yeah, they were literally in the jungle and you were held at gunpoint if you wanted to leave, right? You couldn't, like, there were physical barriers. And when you get to the really extreme end, you know, that, that's, there's that, right?

And so in the groups we come from, though, it's not generally that extreme. Well, I mean, there are some groups that actually are in walled compounds, John. There are message groups in walled compounds that don't let the people out, right?

So I mean, we, we can't, let's say the message is not fully like that because there are message groups where they do physically keep the people trapped. But the average message group is not that way.

Most of them, they'll even say, hey, there's the door. You can leave, right? It's not that they physically restrain you. And so it's more in the ideological sense. There is no valid reason to leave this group.

And if you do, you're dead to us. You're dead to God. You know, there, there's, you know, it's, you can't leave. And that, like you mentioned, John, really ties into the next, I think the next important thing, which is maybe a bit more of identifying them as a theological call.

Another sign that you might be in a, in a, in a cult closely related what we've been talking about is that they generally have distorted the true gospel message. They've generally distorted the gospel message.

the gospel. They've monkeyed with the formula for salvation. That was presented by Jesus Christ in the apostles. You know, you know, the, you know, the, you look at the Bible, the Bible tells us that faith alone and Christ alone is enough to save a person, right? I mean, it's plain as day in the Bible. Faith in Christ will save you fully to the utmost, right? You don't need to add anything else to it. You know, Jesus said, whosoever believes on me has passed from death into life.

I mean, it's straightforward, right? The apostle Paul said, if you confess with the mouth, believe from the heart, you will be saved. I mean, it don't get any, you know, simpler, right? I mean, it's very direct. If you believe Jesus is your savior, you are saved. I mean, that's, that's the gospel 101, right? But these groups monkey with that. They monkey with that.

Um, cults have to undermine and twist those basics of the gospel in order to empower themselves. They have to demote Jesus from being a full savior to maybe being a half savior, not even a savior at all, right? And if you look at all of these groups, 100% of the cults end up doing this.

They end up demoting Jesus from being a full savior. And when you get down to the very root of it, you know, whether you look at Jim Jones, whether you look at Waco, whether you look at the message, whether you look at any of these other groups, right? In an ideological sense, there is an underlying belief in them that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and faith in Him as a savior is not actually enough to save you, right? That lies at the root of like the thinking of why there's no valid reason to leave, right? And you don't have to analyze message beliefs, for example, very long to find out that we

had all kinds of things in our formula for salvation besides faith in Jesus, right? To be saved in the message, you have to be part of the special group, right? That belief in particular underlies why there's no legitimate reason to leave, right? They believe the only way you can get salvation is when you're in their group because that's the only place to find it, right? They believe somehow, they are part of the formula for salvation. You can't go find Jesus outside of them. You can't find salvation apart from them, right, in their mind and in their thinking. And so they tend to put

themselves into the role of savior, either they're putting their group or their leader or something in their actions or their beliefs into the role of savior rather than Jesus Himself. And so I think that's another thing to recognize. And I suspect that all of these people from all these groups, if you will step back and you will start to analyze your belief system, you will discover that there are things in your belief system where you thought you needed something you could only get from this group in order to make it, right? And that was part of that group monkeying with the plan of

selby. They'll come up. Well, you need a special last day revival. You're only going to get here. You need special mysteries that only our elite leaders can teach you, right? You need these special rules that we know they're not in the Bible, but you've got to follow them, right?

And so they play that sort of a game, right? Where they add all of these things into salvation. They are departing away from faith and Christ is enough to save you, right? And ultimately, they're demoting Jesus as the full Savior, and they're inserting themselves and their ideas into the formula for salvation. The message did this. All of these groups do that very thing. And the interesting part for this one, Charles, is that it is so difficult for a person who's under that level of mind control to even grasp that they're under it. You take any of the groups

we've studied, and you know, we've got countless people who are giving their testimonies from those groups. Whenever they try to leave, it's difficult for them to even take that first step out. They think that this is the only place where I can access God. So I'm not, for example, I'm not going to go try a Methodist or a Baptist or any of these other churches, because this is my access to the in-time revival or whatever is the indoctrination that they have. And at the same time, the leaders aren't putting up any physical barriers. You can leave anytime, but they have manipulated

the people to think that they can't leave. And that is for me, if you take Dr. Hassan's bite model, it actually meets every one of the criteria. They're controlling your behavior, or you could leave and go to another church for a while, visit, you know, spend a year there, come back, and there would be no reason to stop you from doing this. I can join the same, you know, it's Christianity, I can go be a Christian here, I can be a Christian there. They're controlling your information, because they have informed you to think that you have to go to this church. They're controlling

your thoughts, because if you leave, you're always thinking, well, wait a minute, what if I'm leaving God whenever I leave this? What if God was in that church instead of this other church? And the biggest one for me is they prey upon your emotions while they're preaching, to manipulate you into those thoughts. So they actually meet the entire criteria. If you feel that you can't go to the church down the street and fellowship with them for a while, and then come back and be just as welcome as before you left, you're probably in a destructive cult.

I know, and when you think about that in terms of the Bible, you know, Priscilla and Aquila is a great example, right? Like, you read the book of Acts, I mean, they were moving all over the place, what in the world? You know, we would have thrown them out of the message, how dare they move from church to church to church? I mean, what is wrong with them, right? But they've got Priscilla and Aquila, I mean, they went to the church at Rome, and then they went to the church at Ephesus, you know, then they go back to Rome or the people at Rome,

Oh, I'm didn't, you know, oh, Priscilla and Aquila are full of the devil. How dare they leave us and go to the church and you know, and then vice versa. But that's how it is in the message, right?

If you left the church and roll and you went over to the church and emphasis, God have mercy. What is wrong? How dare you? How dare you come out the covering of this leader?

How dare you go up there? You need to stay. You need to grow where you were planted. You got to stay, you know, there's all kinds of stuff where they will just demonize people for leaving, right?

For leaving, you know, like when I left the message, I didn't tell anybody, I didn't go around to help people, hey, I'm leaving the message because I don't believe it anymore. So here's the thing, when I left my church, I still believe the message, John.

I really did. But they come after you. I mean, the things they will do to you, it is crazy and it's ultimately because they believe at the end of the day, then their minds, the gospel message has become so twisted that they have added things to salvation.

They've demoted Jesus from Savior and they think you can not, there's no legitimate reason to leave. There's no other, there is no church in Ephesus. You're not going to the church in Ephesus, you're just going to hell.

You think you're going to Ephesus, but you're going to hell, you know, they don't, they don't think there is a legitimate place that you can go and still be saved, right? It's, it's terrible.

And so another thing that these cults tend to do, right? Their sign you might be in a cult is, these cults tend to make good people do bad things, right? That's another something I noticed a lot when I was in there because there's a lot of good people in these groups, there really are.

There's lots of good people in there that are kind and have good nature, they're sincere, they are genuine believers in what's happening, you know, I think a lot of times, and I notice this sometimes in our comment feeds, there seems to be the impression that when we say certain things that we're taking a, we don't believe the people are genuine, but no, you are genuine.

You are sincere when you were in these, I sincerely believe the message. I genuinely believe, I would die for it, and I know and understand that the other people in these other groups, you're the same way, they, they do genuinely believe in what they're doing, right?

They do genuinely sincerely believe these things that they're in. But what happens though is, is they able, the leaders are able to hijack really that genuineness, that sincerity, and they're able to take good and decent people and hijack their lives and get them to do bad things and harmful things, right?

And the way that a lot of the leaders do this is by inserting themselves into the role of the Holy Spirit, right? A lot of the leaders, they don't truly honor the concept of people having a personal relationship with God, right?

The leader, the leader ends up becoming the voice of God speaking to you, right? Or these special people who might have a special advance gift, they end up becoming the voice of God to you.

And if what you feel in your heart... You know, if what you're sensing from the Holy Spirit doesn't match what they say, guess what? You got to obey them. They take priority, right? Because they are, they are taking that role of the Holy Spirit and denying you the ability to have your own sort of a direct relationship with the Lord. And through that, they can get people to do all kinds of things that are bad or wrong.

That's how they get people to break up their families, right? They can use that to have people marry. They can use that to have people divorced. They can use that to separate children from parents, parents from children, break up homes, shun each other, right? They will use that power when they put themselves in the role of the Holy Spirit to convince you that there's all these things you got to do and it's God telling you to do it, you know, in a very specific sense. A lot of these groups, some of them will use fake words of prophecy, fake prophetic words, fake words of knowledge,

and they use those things to manipulate and control people. And some of the people doing it do genuinely, absolutely genuinely believe that they're hearing voices in their head and they're following something divine and holy, but the truth is they're not, they are full of the devil.

They're full of anything, you know, because the, you know, God don't tell you to make terrible life decisions, right? So if they're telling you to make a terrible life decision, it's not the spirit of God telling them to do that stuff, right? But they'll do that in order to manipulate people to do things that are not in their best interest, things that are harmful. They can manipulate who you marry, big life decisions, jobs you take, what you do with your finances, you know, from, from the biggest down to the smallest thing, they will manipulate and control all kinds of aspects

of your life and even push you to do things that you can know on the inside when they're telling you, this isn't right, this doesn't feel right, but I got to do it because it's the voice of God in these people telling it to me, right? They completely take over the role of the Holy Spirit a lot of times within these cults and people in these movements, like I said, they do tend to be genuine hearted. They do genuinely believe that it's God speaking to them through their leaders, right? And that is what really at the end of the day is what allows the leaders to control them

and end up forcing them to do things that are harmful to themselves and harmful to others. Yeah, this one is really problematic for me because not only does it make it meet the criteria of a destructive cult, it ties in very closely to the notion that it's a non-Christian group, but even worse than that, for me, it brings it to a level where it's just not a good group of people that you should even associate yourselves with. We had, I don't know if you remember this Charles, there was a series of tornadoes that came through here years ago. I was, I had actually

just escaped the random cult, but at that point in time, I still had a few connections. People did not yet call me Judas and all of the stuff that they do now, but The tornado came through, it destroyed several homes, there were people who died.

And the brand name called put on their website, not a single Christian had any significant loss of life or injury. Well, there were several Christians in this area, some who died, some who had injuries from the tornadoes, houses were collapsing, it was a bad thing.

I can't remember the exact verbiage of how they worded it on the website, but it was such that they considered themselves to be the only Christians who were affected by this tornado, which wasn't the case.

And then the cult, which had, at that point in time, we just discovered they had over $100 million in access assets. They, the people who were in the cult who had damage to their houses, they're coming and helping them repair it, which is a good thing, don't get me wrong.

The people, you know, had destruction to the house, they needed, they needed some help. But what about the neighbor right next to them that also lost their house and their possessions? They were treating, they were basically giving the people who were in the cult priority over all of the other Christians in the area while calling the other ones non-Christian, whether they were or not.

And imagine yourself being one of the Christians in the home next to them. You're wanting the help, you're needy, and suddenly this happens. Well, here recently, with the storm that's causing us to have this makeshift recording, people sent me images of churches within the NAR doing the same exact thing.

The devastation from this storm reached from Florida all the way up, I mean, I don't know how far it went. I watched last night until I saw it was tearing up through South Carolina.

It was horrific, the damage that it caused. And one of the NAR churches said, our city was spared, God, because of, I don't think they said specifically because of this church, but they implied that because our church is here, it just went around our city.

Well, what about all the other cities, all the way up the coast? I mean, this was terrible damage. And these are not Christianity aside. If somebody is acting like that, I don't even want to associate myself with them.

These are not good people. Right, these groups never miss an opportunity to try and say, hey, we're special. And here, look at this proof that we're special. And half the time they're lying, you're telling me there's not a NAR church that was affected by this hurricane.

Yeah, right, you have a bunch of liars, right? And the same with the tornadoes. I know, for a fact, the homes of multiple message believers were harmed and destroyed. There was even people in the homes when the tornado hit it that were in the message when this stuff happened.

I mean, they're just liars, John. They're just liars, they're all liars, you know, you can't, and they'll spin all this stuff in order to try and make them feel special and convince the people, look how the hand of God protects us.

Next time you see a tornado. It'll come, and guess what? Just stand in front of it. You're gonna be fine, right? God's gonna, I mean, it's basically, that's the sort of dumb stuff they set up in people's mind.

Ladies and gentlemen, if a tornado comes in, you're in the message, you better get in your basement, right? Cause you don't got no more special protection than any other, you know, methadist or baptist that lives on the same street.

Go to the basement, right? You're just, you're silly, right? And that's part of the cult brainwashing, right? And that actually goes to the next item on my list, John. The message has thought control.

Cults tend to have some floor to thought control. There's some mechanism that allows them to short circuit critical thinking in the minds of their followers and basically prevent them from being able to realize they're in a cult.

Like everything we've set up to hear, someone in a cult, well, no, no, that applies to us, right? Even if it does, no, no, that applies to us. We don't have an authoritarian leader.

People can leave, you know, they'll say, none of this applies, right? And it's because of this thing right here that they can't see it. There is a mechanism of thought control on their mind that basically prevents them from being able to realize they're in a cult.

And it's usually the thought control techniques that actually do the most to trap the people in the cult. And I would say, you know, if you've recently left one of these groups, identifying how they have manipulated your thinking and overcoming that is a really important big first step to actually being able to break free from that group and then being able to go in a healthy direction.

You've got to analyze and figure out how did they manage to keep you in that system of thought without critically thinking for so long? Because, you know, if you stop and you step and you look back and you realize you really look at it, you'll realize, hey, wait, there were red flags for years and years and years of red flags, but something in my mind prevented me from processing all of those red flags and waking up.

I can do that, John. I'm sure you can do it too. You can go back probably on this side and think back 10 and 20 years, 30 years into the past, into the cult and say, oh, they were something that should have woke me up.

There's something that should have been a red flag, but it wasn't. And so you've got to figure out what that thing was that they used to suppress your critical thought. Now, in the message and in a lot of charismatic Christianity that has also developed some of these beliefs, John, there were two key pillars in our thought control in the message and then with the way I analyze it, I actually covered these fair bit in my book.

There's one of the key pillars is positive confession, positive confession. They essentially weaponized positive thinking in order to blind people to danger. And the more radical aspects of the positive passion, they'll teach you even to actually believe lies.

And so they turn through positive confession through these positive thinking teachings, they turn believing lies into something holy. Really, when you get down to the base of it, that is what they're doing. They're teaching you that believing something that is not true is holy.

In fact, believing something that is not true is faith itself, you know? That's what they do. And, you know, we talked about positive confession a lot in terms of healing, right? You know, in these groups that practice positive confession with healing, if you're sick, you have to say, I am healed and you have to claim your healing.

And you have to do that regardless of all the symptoms you experience, regardless of how you feel. No matter what's going on, you have to continue to say, I am healed, you have to continue to claim your healing.

And you're not allowed to admit or say, I'm still sick. You're not allowed to say, I'm unwell, right? You have to continually, positively confess. I am healed. I am claiming healing. And you do that up to the moment you die, right?

That's positive confession in terms of divine healing. But that can be applied to literally anything. And in fact, in these groups, they do. They weaponize it and the leaders use that and target it to anything, not just healing, right?

And they'll use that to target your positive thinking in such a way that you are no longer able to recognize there are bad things going on here, right? I know in the places where we come from, they totally, ultimately, the teachings prohibit you from having any sort of a negative thought about anything.

If you have a negative thought about your neighbor or you have a negative thought about the sermon you heard last week or you have a negative thought about the preacher, anything like that, you have unbelief.

You are already on the path to the unbeatable sin, my friend, right? You do not have enough faith to make it. You're a problem to the body of Christ because you're sitting in that pew and you've allowed a negative thought about that last sermon to enter your mind, right?

You are now holding the entire body of Christ back from the rapturing faith and the thunders and the unity that we need to say. You're not allowed to have any sort of a negative thought in your mind about anything that's going on in the program around you.

You just have to positively think about everything, no matter what, no matter what you say, no matter what happens, positively think about it because a negative thought in your mind about it is going to hold not only you but everyone around you back to.

This is interesting because the one thing that I notice about this aspect of a destructive cult is that whenever people try to analyze the groups this is the area that gets widely miscategorized. You have a lot of people who say that which is partly true, they say that this is spiritual abuse and they don't really categorize it as thought control.

manipulation. It's true because to enforce this type of religion, these leaders will misrepresent what the Bible says to take control of your minds, to put you under thought control. They will abuse scriptures. So therefore, technically, it is spiritual abuse. But by miscategorizing as this, you don't understand that it has taken people and made them become something that they are not. Inwardly, their inner self, their authentic self, wants to be a good person, wants to be far better than this. But they have been manipulated in their mind to become something that they are not, which is thought control, thought manipulation.

And the problem is, when you escape this, if you try to find a good counselor, especially from the people who have escaped, who told me they tried Christian counseling, a Christian counselor's first response is that was spiritual abuse, which is correct. But not many Christian counselors are trained adequately in what is mind control. Some of them are, and if you find one, that's a good one. But not many of them are. And on the flip side, some of the non-Christian counseling, they have no idea that this even exists, unless they have studied it too. So finding someone who fully understands how mind control works when

you leave one of these groups is highly critical, because it takes years for somebody to recognize that their thoughts were manipulated. For me, it borders the same way if you have a mental health disorder. One of the first steps of counseling is to try to get you to understand first that you even have it. And your family members, sometimes it comes down to an intervention where they're taking you and say, no, you're not behaving like you, like other people would, they try to convince you first to understand that you have something wrong with the way your

brain is working. When a member leaves a cult, they have the same exact thing. Their brain isn't functioning like other humans do, because they've been under thought manipulation and control. Which, like I said, it is so far beyond what is just simply spiritual abuse.

The science fiction kind of thoughts about all this isn't real, right? There's not someone with a mind ray controlling your mind, you know, manipulating, you know, that's not real. The way this thing works in reality is they do and say things that cause you to control your own thoughts, that cause you to close off doors of critical thinking yourselves, right?

And that positive thinking that comes with positive confession is one of the, I know where we come from, one of the main ways in which they do that and they blind you. You are not allowed to have a negative thought, because that negative thought about anything about this program is going to hold us all...

back. And it doesn't matter, things like huge things that ought to just slap you in the face awake can be dismissed like that. I'll give you just a real quick example. The church I come from, the senior pastor found out how to long history of exposing his private parts to children, John.

Now, if a normal person hears that, that's going to start firing critical thoughts, right? Oh, well, what does that mean? What is it? And they're going to start connecting dots, right? That's going to lead them down a path to realize something really bad is happening here, right? But in the group I come from, no, it does, that don't happen, right? Immediately that thinking goes, no, that can't be real. That can't be true. This has to be a lie about the leader.

This is a negative thought. This is a lie. It doesn't, you know, the people who say this can't be telling the truth. And I am not even going to entertain that thought in my mind for more than a split second because it is unbelief. And it's going to harm the group, right? You don't even allow your mind to let that thought linger from more than the split second that it enters, right? You immediately force it out and you do not even consider or think about it, right? So obviously, if you do, it's going to leave you down a path of critical thought that's going to lead you to

the realization that there's something seriously wrong with the group that you're in. But this, that is how they trap these people in thinking and the groups that I come from. And the way it works is, so that's just one pillar, the positive confession, positive thinking, that is just one pillar of it. And William Brannum's quintessential sermon on this topic is his sermon entitled, The Greatest Battle Ever Fought. That is William Brannum's quintessential thought control sermon.

And in that sermon, William Brannum essentially teaches the entire cult to suppress all critical thinking and to think positively about the leaders and about the message and about the things going on, no matter what, no matter what happens, no matter what occurs, no matter what, what happens before your eyes, what enters your ears, no matter what, you think positively about the leaders, you think positively about the message, you think positively about what's going on. And if you don't do those three things, guess what? You have unbelief. And that then comes to the second big pillar

of message thought control, John. I think that this is one of the most important things about message thought control. The message believes that unbelief is sin. And then in fact, they believe unbelief is the root of all sin, and that unbelief is the unforgivable sin, right? And so when you think about that, if unbelief, which basically unbelief turns out to be critical thought, okay? Unbelief, critical thought about what's happening is the ultimate unforgivable sin. And if you have thought that unbelief, you have committed the unforgivable sin, giveable, sin. And that is why they will not allow that to exist in their mind for more

than a split second, because to even dwell on it, just for just for a just for a few seconds and to allow the cog of their mind to turn on it. Just for a little bit, they in their mind will have they believe, oh no, I'm committing the unpardonable sin of unbelief.

And that is, I think, one of the main keys to shutting off critical thinking in the mind of the cult where we come from. It's funny, too, Charles, because whenever I left, that was so indoctrinated in my head, unbelief as sin. That was one of the things that lasted for years after leaving. I fully believed it. I fully believed that anybody who taught anything otherwise was actually teaching anti-biblical scripture. And it took years for me to understand that that's actually flipped upside down. It's not that unbelief is sin. Look at the believers in Berea. They did not believe, and yet they became Christian, which means if you study that

scripture out to its logical conclusion, this was a group of people who were critically thinking, and they decided we're going to critically examine this, and then they move forward. But in that model, that biblical model, in the message cult and many of its plenary groups, when a group tries to do this, their chastise to begin with, you did not believe, therefore, go out from among us. And what's interesting, I don't know if you caught it, but I did publish recently some research on the Azusa Street Revival, and the way that the people who were critically examining the Azusa Street Revival, when they came in, and they

just wanted to see what was happening, and see, was this truly a move by God, those people were chastised by William Joseph Seymour. Within, I want to say the newspaper, if I remember the date correctly, it was within two weeks of the Revival's beginning. They were kicking out anybody who was critical about the movement, rather than trying to convert them, persuade them that this is the quote unquote end time Revival that they thought it was to be, they were chastising the people who were questioning. You're right, John, and the way that the message combines, you know, the positive confession, positive thinking, with the belief that unbelief is the

ultimate unforgivable sin, is so powerful in trapping people's minds and implementing thought control. That is thought control, right? When I talk about thought control and the message, that is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the positive thinking, no matter what, and the idea that unbelief is a sin, and therefore I'm not going to think critically about what's happening, because it would be a sin to think about it. That is thought control, ladies and gentlemen. That is the very definition of thought control.

And you know when you when you step back and you look at and you realize what these things are, these structures are the trapped people It it's something else John. It really is crazy and sad and it don't matter which group you're in if you examine it You're going to find some structure of thought control on along these lines that Close the doors that prevented your mind from critically thinking about what was happening right and you know where we come from John Unbelief. Well, you're exactly right Unbelief is not the root of all sins. William Brownham was lying

He was lying to us when he told us all that. That's not true That is not what the Bible teaches is the root of all sin, right? And that is not what the overwhelming majority of Christians believe the root of all sin is we won't go into all that But unbelief is not the root of all sin that that is a false Heresy to say something like that I believe And furthermore unbelief is not a sin at all, right?

Yeah, I mean critical thinking is not a sin. I mean we're commanded by scriptures to try the spirits We're commanded by scriptures to prove all things right? We're commanded by the Bible to think critically about the things that are presented to us And understand does this actually make sense? Are they actually telling me the truth?

We are commanded by the Bible to critically examine the things that are presented to us and when you take unbelief is a sin and you use that to short-circuit critical thought reasoning rational thought, you know trying all things proving all things when you use unbelief is a sin to short-circuit that You're actually these people are actually the sinners, right?

You're sending against me by preventing me from actually obeying the Bible that says try all things prove all things You know these things and so Again, it's just totally outside the biblical model what they do and the purpose of it what what legitimate purpose Could be served by turning critical thought into a sin What legitimate purpose could be served by telling people that Questioning or unbelief and what your leaders are saying and doing is the ultimate sin what what could that possibly serve Except to empower them to protect them right and to give them an out

For whatever they do and to and to trap you in an ability it basically turns you into a sinner For analyzing what is going on around you and coming to the conclusion something is wrong here, you know And so I think that is that is just a terrible thing and I absolutely believe that thought control is what traps Probably the overwhelming majority of people in the message from engaging critical thought and waking up in escaping One thing to add to that The way that people think is different among the different personality type You have people that are highly analytical, you have people who are highly not analytical,

and the people who are like myself, I have an analytical mind. The way that I prove all things, which like you said is scriptural, I will take an idea and then I will look towards, assume that it is false and then try to prove it true.

That's the way my analytical mind works. So if somebody says that their car is faster than mine, for example, I will say, okay, I don't believe that, let's prove it's true, and let's go out and race.

That's what I did as a 16-year-old, I don't do that anymore. But almost every single thing that I try to prove, I assume the false and then I prove it true. In that way, you know beyond a shadow of doubt, it's true because I have taken that pathway.

There is no other explanation. It must be true. There are people who think the opposite of this, they will assume it's true and try to prove it false and when they can't, then they assume it is true.

So you've got two different widely polar opposite ways of thinking. These cults manipulate the people who have highly analytical minds even more because for you to take that pathway, it is the most sinful thing in the cult.

And when they realize that your mind works like this, they do not want you in the cult because you're one of the people who's going to suddenly expose the whole thing because you're actually going through the analytical process.

I would agree. And you know, I think when you really look at the biblical model, you look at the scriptures about this. The Bible actually commands us to approach these sort of things without giving them the benefit of the doubt.

The Bible does not permit you to give the benefit of the doubt, I don't believe, right? They do not have the benefit of the doubt when they come out with these things. William Brownham says, I got the king sword and I've got the revelation of the seals.

The Bible doesn't permit us to give him the benefit of the doubt that that's true. You can't do that. That is actually against the plain reading of the Bible to do that. There has to be something that establishes their authority to do these things that they do.

They do not get the benefit of the doubt. There has to be an accompanying evidence to prove they have the authority to do the things that they do, right? And so when they say unbelief is a sin and they just cut you off, no, you have to accept what I say no matter what, they are not following the biblical model of leadership.

They are really down a path that the Bible condemns and commands you to go against. So critical thinking about the things that are happening around you, right, is true biblical Christianity, right? And that's another thing that these cults have to short circuit as they implement thought control techniques.

So you're right, John. You know, we've said a lot. I think we're hour in. So, hey. I think we've given some pretty good tips to somebody who's in a call. Look for thought control techniques.

Look for an authoritarian leadership model. Have they monkeyed with the plan of salvation? Have they monkeyed with the formula for salvation? Especially inserting themselves into the role of savior? Have they taken to themselves the role of the Holy Spirit and now they're placing them in a position where they're manipulating and controlling your life?

Have they put in a huge us versus them mentality that drives a lot of stuff, right? These are things that, as a package, put you over on the harmful destructive side of the bite model of calls.

Absolutely. And just think of this, Charles. When the leaders of these groups pick the people who are critical thinkers and demonize them. What other purpose could they have for doing this unless they themselves realize that they're manipulating the heads of the people?

Otherwise, you would love to have critical thinkers to prove you right. Any normal preacher would love to have somebody who is verifying their claims and saying, yes, this guy is absolutely right. These cult leaders will single out the people who critically think and chastise them.

And that, for me, the bottom line is, when they're doing that, it is a destructive cult. Get out. There's no other explanation. 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 and ChristianGospelChurch.org. For more about the history of William Branham and the healing revivals, read, come out of where my people available on Amazon and Kindle. For more about the dark side of the new apostolic reformation, you can read, weaponize religion from Christian identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and soon, audible.

Thank you, thank you all. Enjoy yourselves.