Mike Bickle and the KCF Prophets: A Different Perspective - With Bob Scott - Detangling IHOPKC

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-brannum.org, and with me I have my very special guest, Bob Scott, former member of IHOPKC and author of Some Said They Blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Bickel, the Kansas City Prophets, and the International House of Prayer. Bob is good to have you on here. We've had a really good conversation leading up to this podcast and some good conversation beforehand, but I just wanted to say that I read your book.

I had a lot of trouble reading it because I would be reading it, and you and I have a sort of a different perspective from the rank and file members of these things. So as I'm reading it, my mind kept wandering back to my own time and situation and the perspectives that we have are so different from what people who just join this thing and can't see behind the curtains, you know? And the one phrase that stuck out to me the most out of the whole book, you were talking about how it was like a three-ring circus. And I know exactly what you're trying to

say with that because it's not just that it's a circus act, but these stage guys get up and even the most humble minister who has, you know, not even a bad person. When they get up into the presence of people, they put on this persona that's quite different from what you see behind the scenes.

And I remember this. So glad to have you on here. Glad to talk about your book. Well, thank you. Just one point of clarification. I'm a KCF guy, not an IHOP guy. I was never involved with IHOP. That was a whole other generation. So my roots are actually the roots of IHOP, right? Got it. So it's the whole KCF world. So one thing I find interesting and to your point, I think what may differ us from most people as our proximity to these situations, for most people, and I'm realizing this, especially in talking with the IHOPpers that the people

that I wrote about in the book, for them are sort of like mythological or biblical figures, right there. There's stories that Mike had told them about people, right? I lived it. These are my friends, right? These are people that I have emotional attachments with.

And so for me and for you, it's very visceral, right? So that's one perspective that we have that's different from most of the people sitting out in the pew or who may have read David Pitch's book, some said it thundered, right? They had this whole perspective that's really in my mind more of a fairy tale, right? It's an idealistic worldview, right? My world is broken clay vessels in the grace of God. Yeah, I'm glad you clarified that I had just interviewed a person from IHOPKC and in my little intro spill, I have it typed out and I had left that up there,

but in your book, I do remember you having the separation before that, but you're right, talking about, you know, the people who were in, I love some of the people, even some of the really bad people from the movement that I escaped. And, you know, my own grandfather was the pastor at Brandham Tabernacle. He, I love my grandfather. He was, you know, to me, he was a special person, but to the family whose father was a, you know, physically abusive to them and my grandfather who sided with the abuser over the victims, I'm sure to them they have a completely different

perspective of that man that I have. And I, I can respect that from reading what, what you have written because we, we had a connection to the people that other people didn't have, but we also saw a side of them that many of them did not see. In the book, you know, I, I talk about the three piece, right? Perception, perspective, paradigm, right? Our five senses see things will we accumulate information, right? But then where you are in your subculture takes that information and it frames it into a perspective. So one of the things that, and I've had to kind of learn

this because they deal a lot overseas and I went through a whole experience of losing friends over there. So I deal with a lot of racial reconciliation stuff. And one of the key points in that is you've got to be able to hear people who have very different perspectives about the same thing. You know, you see that in families, right? It's like you, you can tell a story about something that happened 30 years ago and depending on where you are in the birth order, you have a completely different perspective of what that event happened, right? So as we've talked about,

I'm enjoying, I've listened to a couple of your podcasts and I'm enjoying hearing your perspective because it's really different. Like I don't have what you have, right? So in fact, I was just thinking about this the other day because you had a guy on, I don't know when it was, but he was kind of animating, he made this statement, don't they understand that they're just repeating this? And I wanted to say to him, no. No, they don't. Nobody ever heard of this, right?

In other words, what's so normal to you? What's so a part of your world? None of us knew it, I had never heard of William Oranum, right? I didn't know anything about latter, right? None of this until I was struggling what was going on with Kansas City and started drilling down but the vast majority of Christians out there never heard of William Oranum. Yeah.

Right. It's like a, so you and I are similar in that we got to see some of both sides of the perspectives because you're in the room with all of the guys who are making the decisions, but you're also in the room with the other people who see the decisions after they're made.

I recall, I was reading your book, so many things come to mind. I'm probably going to go down all kinds of rabbit trails, but I recall there was a really, really good person. I mean, this, this was a good friend of mine. He was a really good person. It's very sincere, praying to God that God would give him some sort of a, I don't know, I think he was praying for a leadership position, but he was praying for something better, I guess, in the church, and I remember seeing his side of it because I was close to him. I also remember seeing the leadership

side and they just recognized that he was a person who was willing to help out, you know? And so two came together from the leadership side. They said, hey, yeah, this person looks like they, they may alleviate whatever stress or needs we have here. And then on this side, the guy is praying to God and he's thinking, some great miracle that just magically chose me. Well, when you see both sides of it, it's all working together, you know? It's not, you know, maybe that's part of God's plan and God is controlling both pieces, but my perspective is different because

I saw the, the ends that led to the means, if you know what I'm saying. Well, I think for me, one of the big challenges is, can I see God in all the brokenness?

You know, I mean, it's like one of the temptations for us because there's pain involved in it, right? Absolutely. There's destruction. I mean, Bob Jones destroyed my life, right? So when I write about him, you know, I'm having to do something which is uncomfortable, which is park my emotions, right? And step back and try to look at this objectively, which is really hard to do. So one of the, what's kind of interesting is that there's, I think with our age, one of the things that I'm getting a lot of feedback on is thank you for writing a book that's layered, nuanced, and not reactionary, because we're at that

point in life where we've seen a few things and we just really don't need more gossip, nor sensationalism, more hysteria. We're just trying to be somewhat analytical and unpacking this thing where some of the people that have just come out of the IHOP world in October, my meetings with them, they're in pain, they're hurting, their emotions are raw right now, and so I've had to be very careful in how I'm interacting with these groups, because they're both looking at the book from two very different perspectives, both absolutely valid, they're just different.

I got a little bit of trouble because some of the IHOPers wanted me to crucify these guys, right? It's like, send them to the gas chambers, and I'm like, yeah, but you don't understand, you know, there's good and evil going on here, this is way more complex than these, you know, that's why I have a real problem with cancel culture, right?

There's this whole kind of thing that's really in terms of human history, a relatively new concept, but suddenly now we're intellectually and somebody, because they did this one thing, and they've ever done his evil for me, I don't see the world like that.

Yeah, I don't need there. And you know, back to the circus example, it's like you're walking a tight rope, right? The people who have been preyed upon spiritually, they have been sold a false bill of goods that God inspired this whole thing, and that these were super, super humans in God's eyes, basically.

But like myself, you had a different side of these guys, you were friends with these guys, you watched as, you know, as people come together and work and collaborate, they often collaborate because there is a relationship there, sometimes a close friendship or a business opportunity, whatever it is. But there's a reason why these men came together, and then they pitched it as it was great, as if it was greater than this, but you see that behind the scenes, you see all of these people, you become friends with them, they, because they're humans, they can do human things,

and sometimes they're not so good, so they turn on you, I've had friends that I watched as they grew into the spiritual leadership under the different random organizations, and I watched them change, I watched them be really close friends, it just went straight to their head, I watched they go to their head, I watched them sever relationships.

So I get all of that and like I said, I'm reading your book and my mind's going through all these rabbit holes It literally took me days to get through it because I I would have to stop and reflect on my own experiences Well, one of the things I found interesting is that the average book Only 63% of people finish it Yeah, this particular book what I'm hearing from people is they couldn't put it down And they read it through really fast because they wanted to Like get through all the like what is he gonna say next right because it's just one kind of wow

Yeah, after another right then they come back and go now I'm actually reading it Very slowly I'll read it chapter. I need a few days. I think about it. I start, you know You know processing how did this impact me? Where was this positive? Where was this negative? So it's it's sort of It's doing what I had hoped to do when I I didn't really ever even want to do this book I mean, it's there's a whole story about how it actually happened But in the end the only reason I did it was if it could heal people like if

In me sharing my perspectives at the end of this journey reading this book people could go okay I have closure. I have understanding I can forgive I can heal and I can move On with my life and I'm no longer a prisoner of this You know of this moment right or this decade of my life or whatever so that's where I was that was my motive Yeah Absolutely and I had when I wrote my my big book on branamism It was the same people sent me pictures where the The covers are just all torn up where they've read it

Multiple times and kind of like you mentioned you a lot of them came as thrill seekers They're trying to quickly get through it and see what are the thrillers in the book and then they're like wait There's there's an actual substance here. I want to I missed it. Let's go back and I think for me that was As all of the things that I've looked from the Kansas City Fellowship through the Literally all of these movements. I can talk about whimber. I can talk about the Charismania I can talk about Bethel There's all they all tie back to this framework and like you said many people have never heard the name William branam and

I even though I call my website that it's not really so much that it's branam But there was a framework that was created before branam that Branam just simply used and reused and taught other people how to do it to get Paul Cain in this mix and Paul Cain is going around teaching all these other people and It's really you know It's a false bill of goods what they're selling but in the end There's they're really trying to bottle up and sell Christianity and for me that's the big problem. They found ways to capitalize, to monetize, and to bastardize Christianity.

Well, as I said in the book, it's a trillion dollar a year business in America. And one of the things that concerns me deeply is it's so ingrained in the American church. It's so normal to us, right, that we don't even think differently.

Like nobody actually stops and thinks about it. We just, you know, we're like pink Floyd. We're another brick in the wall, right? It's just, we all go to church on Sunday. There's this routine we do.

We never actually stop and critically think about it. At least the average person does. And it's like, well, that's what I'm supposed to do, right? It's what my friends are doing. And so that's one of the things I was hoping the book would do is just start people that maybe reevaluate, hey, we got a problem here.

And here's one of the things that talking about perspective. I've watched a few videos lately that have come out. And the phrase always is, we are having a clergy abuse. We're having a sexual abuse epidemic, right?

So it's framed as though this is something that's, you know, that's recent. It's happening now, you know, it's bigger than ever before. Well, that's because you haven't really done your homework. You haven't really done your historical research.

Just as a frame of reference here, I grew up in Milwaukee. When I was in high school, a group of deaf boys, well, now men come out and basically say, well, they were at St. John's School for the deaf.

Father Lawrence Murphy was abusing them. Nobody wanted to believe them, right? The papers wouldn't do it. The DA wouldn't look into it because no, that just doesn't happen, right? Well, long story short, it all comes out that Father Murphy abused 200 boys over two decades, right?

This wasn't like some fantasy in their mind, like some weird thing they'd made up because they wanted to be victims. This was a painful reality. Well, then of course, you know, for the next two decades, it's just the stories kept warning out, right?

Well, then what ended up happening is the Protestants got kind of arrogant, right? Oh, it's like, oh, it's those Catholics. You know, they're perverts. You know, it's because those priests aren't married, right? And I remember a few people who were like you were historical.

They were researchers. They'd actually studied things. And they were warning people like, be careful here because you're making an assumption only because it's news. Yeah. There's a whole protest inside of this that hasn't come out because of all the reasons we've talked about, you know, the leaders have created this whole shield around themselves using biblical verses saying, you can't slander, you can't gossip, you can't speak against the man of God, right?

And so people have been holding these secrets, but it's all there and it always has been, right? Yeah, it's almost like, and I don't want to make light of the sexual issues because that is a big deal, don't get me wrong, but it's almost like it has became a scapegoat because like you said, it's been going on for decades, it's in both the Catholic or the Protestant, but so one of the things that we experienced when we left the Brandham cult, we started trying denominational churches, we went to several different, I didn't go to all of them,

but I did try several of them, and I was a little bit shocked to find once we left, how similar it was in certain areas and how unsimilar it was in other areas, and some of the areas that really matched what we came out of were the destructive qualities.

For instance, I went, I'm not gonna name the denomination, but we went to a specific famous denomination, and we actually had a couple good years there, and then all of a sudden out of the blue, they wanted to institute this divine healing for the mental health issues.

They set up a facility, and literally started preaching that if you have mental health issues, it's because you have sin in your life, you need to submit to the authority of your pastor, we will wash the sin out of your head, and then you will be healed.

And I have family members with mental health issues, and some of them require, it's a chemical imbalance in some cases, it requires medicine, but they were preaching against the medicine, and I thought, good Lord, and they're gonna create a whole society of insane people who could be helped without their, if they had their medication.

But what you're saying is correct, because that framework has invaded the other churches, they put this urgency in it, and it's the same urgency that was at Kansas City Fellowship, that was in Laterane, and many of the movements that Laterane developed from, there was this sense of urgency, it's right now, and we're in the end time getting ourself hyped up in the spiritual state so that we can be the overcomers while the rest of the world suffers, while you're in that state of urgency, you are thinking about aligning yourself according to the doctrine closer to God,

but the problem is, once something like this happens, then suddenly you come to the realization, well I was in this hype, was the hype fake, well there was a sexual situation, it must be that that's wrong, and then they all point fingers at that, instead of looking at the framework that really enabled the whole mass to start with.

I agree with you, I totally concur with you. And that's why I didn't focus on the sexual stuff in the book, right? It's like let Tammy and Jane Doe tell their story, right? That's their story to tell, not mine.

Yeah. Mine was about the system. And one of the things that I've tried to get people to understand is that no matter if you're in the church world, if you're in the business world, if you're in the military, anywhere you have hierarchical institutionalism, you have abuse, right?

It's so this is not a uniquely church situation, right? I have this whole concept called the Joseph Company, where I move sort of seamlessly between the church world and the business world. Almost everything I see over here in the church world is also over here in the business world.

It's like there's very little difference other than terminology, right? But I see all the same dynamics, right? In fact, in the book, did you notice I put that whole thing in there about narcissism, right?

How in the business world, narcissism is considered an asset in fortune 500 companies in the CEOs, right? In a marriage relationship, it's like a death sentence, right? So again, different environments, different perspectives, you have a completely different point of view on the same concept.

Yeah. Like I said, my mind was just going a million places when I read this. So I was a businessman for, I've been a businessman for 25, 30 years. We're in my own consulting company.

I'm working with sea level employees and working with, working for sea level clients. And I read exactly what you're saying into what I experienced. Usually it is a person who has a narcissistic personality disorder who rises to the top of these things.

But then more than that, so my mind went even further. Think of just the normal operations of a church. And I'm not talking, you know, these little town churches in the middle of nowhere where the community gathers, that's a little bit different.

But take the bigger churches. For the bigger church to keep the lights on, they have to keep the revenue up. To keep the revenue up, they risk losing their tax status. So they have to have expenditures.

As a businessman, I know how all of this works. And I don't see it as problematic because I know how a business works. And a church, like it or not, a church is a business once you grow to a certain level.

You've got to keep the lights on, got to keep the people coming. Well, then once you get into that rhythm of running this business, well, now you have to maintain it. There's what in business we call it retention.

So you have to have retention. and so your sermons have to become more and more appealing and more fascinating. I'm reading through what you're saying with, you know, Bickel and the rest of these guys, and it is a three-ring circus to run a business.

Like it or not, if you just simply preach the simple gospel, sad to say half your crowd is going to disappear because most of the people who are growing into these mega churches, they're not there for the gospel. They're there to see the show, right?

And like it or not, that's the way it is. Well, I think these personalities feed on this, because they have to keep the doors open. Well, yeah, I actually, maybe it's two or three years ago, I actually did a podcast about the crisis of narcissism and our culture. And again, it was controversial, but I was actually, you know, deconstructed this whole thing back to A and Rand, her lover Nathaniel Brain, the whole self-help, right? And so in the 60s, right, we discovered this whole culture of self-help, self-this, self-that, right? Self-accus, actually, actually, I can't even say it.

Anyways, at which ended up then getting then taught to my kids' generation and my grand kids' generation, to now we have technology like Instagram where we're all taking pictures of ourselves, we're the star of our own show every day, right? It's like narcissism, like my grandparents will be rolling over in their grave if they saw Instagram, right? Because in their whole world, right, your value, your sense of belonging was your sacrifice for the greater good. That's why when World War II happened, two million young men, some as young as 15 and 16, all rushed down

to sign up to go fight in Germany and in the Pacific, right, for the sake of their country. That all got switched in the 60s, right? And it all became about me. That's why I've said to people, in my lifetime, the gospel went from, I exist for the purpose of God to God now exist for the purpose of me. The whole thing is switched when I wrote my first book, Savings and Bobway, about martyrdom, right? I went into a Christian book source to figure out where it was going to fit and I walk in and there's the 20 top-selling Christian books and they're all about how I get

something for God. And I'm like, oh my God, my book doesn't fit anywhere in the modern world of Christianity because it's all about what do I get, right? So to your point, now we have churches and what are they doing? They're selling services, right? They're, in other words, You know people go to these mega churches for what they get out of it So these what happens is is there's this cycle now where these churches and these superstars got to keep producing right We got to keep you know, we got to come up with another thing another angle

You know, there's so much pressure on these preachers to come up with a new way to say something You know, and so you get into this this very dangerous area where you start fabricating You're right. You start manipulating you're trying to right also we can keep everybody happy Yes You know a lot of the younger generation don't remember any of the things that you just said and what's interesting Some of the a large portion of the older generation they have been so coerced over time to forget many of the things that you've said and those of us who study history

We're appalled at the things that you said because the Instagram example. I call it They the rabbit's foot God because they have flipped God upside down to like you said It's a God for me not a me for a God But it's more than that. It's a rabbit's foot God you rub it and you get a healing you rub it you get a prophecy I've seen people try to rub it to get a parking space and it really has turned you know It's not a biblical God that they're they're pushing and when I talk about the framework that has been copied and

Over time and all of these various movements that I have these connections on the website I'm talking about specifically that they have turned the Christian model completely upside down exactly like you said and It in doing so Back to the Instagram example There is a there is a real problem with mental health for these people who are so caught up in their self They're worried about so they take the picture of themselves and they put it out for the world and they want the world to come see them Well, when people stop coming and their views go down or whatever I can't remember what it's called on Instagram

I'm actually not on there But there's a psychological problem they start feeling Depression and then that sets in and gets heavier they get burdened and counseling But you know you can read these reports the counseling Offices are overflowing with people because of the social networks Well now take that concept and apply it to a minister who probably from many of them had good intentions when they started They get up to the platform and they start growing this instant mega-church and they see all these people coming what's the same way for them?

They have to get the likes and they have to they're feeding on this as humans they feed on it So they build themselves up to a place where when they crash I don't care if it's the sexual thing that brings it down or many there's many other human problems that can topple it But it's going to topple once you get to that level Yeah, I think one thing we had to be careful love here. It's sort of like autism. We're talking about a spectrum here. It goes, we're kind of talking about the Pentecostal charismatic side. There's more of a circus environment

in those circles than there are and more of your evangelical things. I want to be careful here that we don't paint everybody with the same brush. We're talking about a spectrum here. But the show, the circus, is very much in the Pentecostal charismatic sort of world.

Now, I'm going to say something that's going to surprise some people. But again, understand my world. I have spent 40 years of my life behind the scenes working with most of the, not most, but many of these guys that are the superstars, guys that have fallen, whatever, that's my world, right? One of the things that I have come to realize, and again, it's my perspective.

I am surprised. The big surprise for me is how many men go into the ministry to get whole. It's not what people think. It's like they're aware of their inner demons. And what they're hoping for is if I can be more dedicated to God, if I can be more holy, if I can be more separate, and in order to do that, being in the ministry is the, you know, that's at the top of the food chain. That's where you have, you know, that's where you're the holyest and the most dedicated because my whole life now is focused on this thing. I'll get well. And so one of

the things that I've noticed in the ministry world is a lot of guys preach against their own demons. They're actually up there having a battle with themselves. Yeah. I've seen it so many times.

The number one sin that they harp on from behind the pulpit is usually the one that gets exposed. But, you know, back to your earlier comment about the Catholic, the issues in the Catholic church, and the Protestants, like you say, they point, they both point fingers at each other, which is kind of ironic, but it's a problem because you have many priests who enter the ministry because they're also suffering from their own internal conflicts, so they become a priest. Well, they're assuming that this is going to change them without them having to work for the change. And that's

not how it happens. So it ends up in a catastrophe. Well, it happens in the Protestant church. I'm certain it happens in all religions. If you have bad people who get in positions of leadership, where they can abuse their power is going to happen. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the Latter-Rain, Charismatic, and other friends?

movements into the new Apostolic Reformation, you can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others, with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book.

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Anything else, circle back on, we were talking about the sense of immediacy, that's characteristic a lot of these movements. There's another side of this, and I was really proud of Tammy Woods because she talked about this in her interviews, which was when Mike left St. Louis for Kansas City, the thing that she was overwhelmed with was I'm going to be left out.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Right? In other words, there's this move of God. It's going to be in time, hardcore, high level, apostolic. Those were the four words we used, right? In Kansas City, and I'm stuck over here in St. Louis, I'm going to be left out, right?

And that's another one of those really manipulative perspectives that these guys use all the time, and it's then, in business, we call it keeping a relationship sticky, right? In other words, you want to have a sticky relationship with your client and you want to get them so meeting you, right, that they don't really want to go anywhere else?

Well, that happens all the time in the ministry, right? They're creating this sticky thing, and there's various manipulations that they use. And one of them, I watch Mike do all the time, was this thing, well, if you leave, you're going to be left out, right?

So there was this fear that people had, right? If I go somewhere else, if I do something else, there's things going to happen, and I'm going to get left behind. And you talked about the Pensacosto Charismatic world and why they are the ones that most resemble the Three Wing Circus, well, if you trace the histories of those movements back, you can find that that false sense of urgency that they're pushing today, it's the same false sense of urgency that they pushed years back.

Charles and I, we haven't put it out yet, but he's compiled this list of ministers for decades, we're saying we don't have but five years left. That's it, five years, folks. Well, when you're pushing that kind of agenda, everybody's gonna feel like, I don't wanna be left out.

If there's only five years for my life to live, then I want to live it here with this guy, who's telling me there's five years left, which is the irony. But I've dated it back, I mean, as far back as you wanna go, 1600, you're gonna find predators who are saying the same exact thing.

I'm gonna be 60, 69. So I was, you know, I'm a middle of the boomer generation. But the book that was so seminal to our, even evangelical thing was the late great planet Earth, right?

Yeah. You know, the whole thing that came out of Calvary Chapel with Hal Lindsey, right? There was this thing that was going to happen, right? Within a few years and we all had to be ready for it, right?

I mean, that one book framed a whole generation of Jesus' people, right? And here we are now, we're either dying or we're at the end of our lives, and it never happened. Yeah, right?

And so what you, as a historian, what you're aware of is this has happened like you said. This isn't just something that happened in our lifetime. This is something that's happened, you know, over and over again, right?

There's every generation has some sort of a group of people that have this sort of apocalyptic end time worldview. And there's this immediacy that Christ is going to return any minute now. And so where this became a big concern for me and where it got really complicated was in the late 2000s, or late 1990s, early 2000s, all of the kids that had been raised at Kansas City Fellowship who had gone through Dominion Christian School, who were all programmed, right?

With this urgency, right? And this fear of being left behind suddenly came face to face with the reality, I gotta get a job. Like I got married, I produce kids. Like there's people over here depending on me, I have to go face the real world now and I don't have an education.

I don't have any marketable skill sets, right? I'm over here, I'm 10 years behind everyone else. And so I ended up getting this whole flood of 30 year olds, 30 old guys who are just going, Bob, how do I do this, right?

And so there's a terrible transition, I call it, the terrible transition from out of this sort of urgent worldview to having to face, I call normal people have to deal with every day because you didn't see yourself as normal, right?

You were in Mike's world extraordinary, everything had to be extraordinary, it couldn't be ordinary. Yeah. And it's so deeply ingrained into them. them that after they do escape and after they enter the quote unquote normal world, they're still looking to fulfill that urgency so much so that they many of them do not re-evaluate where they came from.

So all of these great things that were supposed to happen in the years gone by, many of the members who left those movements, they're still looking for something similar. It's like, I'm a Star Trek fan and I don't know if you're familiar with the Borg concept.

They try to keep plugging back into the hive and the problem is it creates a scenario where often they get assimilated into a different cult because they found a different hive to plug in with the same level of urgency.

Well, my experience is rooted in fear. So it's kind of interesting to me because even though there's a bit of disillusionment because it didn't happen, there's this residual fear in your soul, but what if it might?

Yeah. What if I missed it and it doesn't go away and that's what I was trying to do in this book. It sounds very mosaic but it was like, set my people free because so many people still have this little seed or this little place in their soul where they're fearful.

What if I got it wrong? You know what I mean? And there's still hung up and to your point, then what happens is when the next thing comes along, it's almost like they're prone to it.

It's like if you're an alcoholic and you go to a bar, I guess what's going to happen. Yeah. Right? So there's an addictive culture even in the church world. Yeah. I had this conversation just yesterday, I was recording podcasts, it probably come out after this one, but you know in the Bible, you read all of these examples of the parent child relationship with God.

God loves his children, that kind of thing and they preach it behind these pulpits. But unfortunately, that's not the God that they present, even while trying to preach that because the same people that are programmed with the level of fear that you're talking about, the fear and the urgency, that combination is disastrous.

So I'm a father and picture of my son who's coming to see me and suddenly he realizes he goes on a detour and he gets sidetracked, maybe he wants to stop him, McDonald's, get a hamburger, I don't know, but he gets detoured, he goes a different direction and he's on his pathway and then calls me up and says, hey dad, I meant to meet you for lunch, I'm sorry, I didn't make it.

Well, I'm not going to chastise him because he went down a different pathway. You know, in the end, I'm going to want to draw him back to my house because he's my son. But the God that they have presented isn't a God that even allows for this.

So if these people leave these movements and suddenly they get caught up in a different urgency, they're thinking, oh my gosh, I... I don't want to miss it. I don't want to, I have to keep this level of hype and this level of urgency because God's going to smite me dead with the rest of the world who is doomed to hell if I don't keep, you know, keep this thing that they've programmed in my head. It's a huge, huge problem.

In my experience, and again, this is kind of my perspective. I see con men as people who actually have great insight into the human soul. Meaning that they know exactly humanity's greatest fears. Right? It's like every comment that I know actually is a psychologist, you know, pseudo-psychologists, right? They understand, you know, like in the KCF world, if you want to add another piece of the fear and the urgency is what I talked about in the book, significance. Like every one of us is so desperate for God to say us, right? To know that God sees me, that God not only then sees me,

He sees me as valuable. Like I'm just not a commodity in the kingdom of God. I'm a son, I'm a daughter, right? I have this set, right? And so again, it's this whole thing where these guys come along and they go, well, guess what? I'm a special son, right? I have something unique, something, again, extraordinary. Like I'm at this elevated status here, right? And here's all my stories.

And in my case, he elevated all these broken men to the status of profit. So they would then reinforce his special status, right? Who then he would sell to people going, well, if you associate with me, you can be special too, right? Because I have a special colleague. I have a special purpose. There's this end time revival hanging with me. You're going to be in the forefront of this thing, right? Well, that's because he understood that there's this need. We all have. We all want this.

And so God men tell us exactly what we want. The capitalize on the fear, the capitalize on the egos, they want to sell it because they can make money from it. I know exactly what you're saying.

And the interesting part that I think you and I share this based off of what we've talked about and what I've read, I have seen good people because they're human because they have human problems.

I've seen really good people who take the same advantages with other people because they can use it to get themselves further ahead and whatever is their agenda. And they don't see it as evil because they they see the end. They're looking at the end game. They're not looking at here and now and manipulating people. Sometimes you can manipulate people for a good cause.

And so I have seen good people who do this, not even really realizing that they are. But then you take a con man who can use that same same exact framework, and then they can push it.

The two examples, interestingly for me, I've seen both examples end in the same place, a good man who's manipulating people gets to a destructive nature, or a con man who's manipulating people gets into the destructive nature.

So you can go down both pathways, and from reading your book, I'm thinking through all of these names that you're mentioning, and what it would have been like to be close to some of these people, and my mind is wandering, you know, I'm going back to my own past, and I knew some really good people who did some really bad things.

How do I reconcile this? Well, in the book, I use the phrase that end justifies the means, right? Which is, as you know, in your world, that's so prevalent in the thinking of a lot of ministers, right?

In the panic-costal world, we know that the thinking is, that faith unlocks the supernatural. So therefore, we have to get people into faith, because if we can do that, God's gonna move, right? So the end justifies the means, means, oh, we can fake it on the front end, because if we get people into faith, on the back end, God's gonna show up.

I know of a situation, I won't mention names, but if somebody who got caught, put in gold dust, in their Bible, the justification was,

well, I need to get them into a place of faith, right? So in her thinking, it was like, this is okay. I had this conversation at Nazim with Paul Kane. That was one of the reasons why he got out of the whole thing, was he saw this happen all the time, and he didn't like it, right?

But in my case, what concerned me was most of these men,

who never said they were prophets, that might needed them to be prophets, right? We're all very insecure, broken human beings, right? So you have this situation where you have somebody who's got a platform, right?

Who's got status and stuff, I call it, right? They've got platform, so they've got status, they've got an audience, whatever. And you're just this insecure human being who wants to be loved and valued in whatever, right?

And you've got this guy that comes along, right? Who's going to give you all the things you sort of dreamed of, you then also then become vulnerable, right? In other words, he understands all your weaknesses.

So one of the big conflicts that I had with Mike, that I mean, yeah, and this is what's hard about this book. People gotta understand, we were 18 and 19 year old teenagers when we met.

This was my best friend. This is not just some sort of historical figures. a story. This is very real. This is raw. This is my buddy, right? Who will we go on this journey together through all this stuff? And here we are in the 1980s and our world views are separating. It's painful. It's a divorce. I went through a divorce with Mike. And the one of the big points of our divorce was, Mike, you're going to destroy these guys.

And the phrase that kept going through my mind was a phrase that I got off a Saturday night live, which was not ready for prime time players. I remember that phrase. Yes. And so I said to Mike, I go, you will destroy these men. Wow. Because your need to be extraordinary is causing you to do an end justifies the means, elevating them to a status of almost mythological like you want to be seen as this extraordinary human being. And they will never be able to live up to this. That's why I wrote about in the book, when the event happened in Anaheim in

1989, and where the three-ring circus came from, I said to Mike, it's all downhill from here. And he got so upset with me because in his mind, he was thinking the sensationalism of this was going to be the catalyst for this revival. In other words, he's so focused on the end, which is causing this revival to happen that he doesn't see what's actually going on and how this is destroying these guys. Because none of them could live up to the image that he was creating because everybody sitting in the pew didn't know who they really were.

And it's history repeating itself again and again. When I left this thing, I started studying gnosticism because it really was so similar to what we came out of. It was something that wasn't Christianity blending with Christianity to make something new. And there was a gnostic group that believed that you could, it was okay to have lies for the sake of a holy end. And there was another, I can't remember the word that they used for that, but the word basically meant lies for the sake of a holy end. And I got back to thinking just in my past, all of the people that I knew the

stories that they were telling behind the pulpit. I knew exactly what happened. I knew I was there. Many times I saw it. And what they said was completely false. But it was told with a spiritual purpose so that the people would be coming to the altar, whatever it was at the occasion. But they saw the lie and saw the result which they thought was a salvation.

And maybe it was, I don't know. I can't say that the people weren't safe when they did come to the altar. But the men knowingly lied about it. I had huge problems with this.

And then I started studying all of the groups that spread from branemism. And I started seeing this pattern emerge. And the question that I had was, is this a trained thing, or is it just a human problem?

Because humans do this. Humans will tell things that aren't true. Which is it? And as I'm reading your book and I'm going through the things that you're talking about with your conversations with Mike Bickle, part of me thinks it's not trained.

Part of me think it's just the human condition. Yeah, well, again, one of my struggles in the whole war in this will get me in trouble is that I find particularly in penicostalism, but even more equally in some other areas, is that we have very tonal vision.

Like we just focus on the Bible, right? And we don't contextualize things, right? There's a whole, like, I've got this book. Oh, where is it? I love this book. The reason I love this book is because what it does, it tells you what else was going on in the world at any given point.

Yeah. In 1986, I had the opportunity to travel Israel with Dr. Israel Stockman, who is the leading anthropologist in the country, who basically gave me a whole cultural education on what was actually happening at the time that the Hebrews and the Israelites were going on, right?

There's a bigger picture here. There's a context. As an example, people don't stop and think this through. You know, it was 1,500 years after Jesus left this earth before humanity even knew there was a microorganism world of bugs, right?

So everything in the Bible is written from the perspective that it's a spirit. Yeah, I demon. Because they can't see it, right? So you know, you were talking earlier about mental illness. Nobody in the, at the time of Jesus would have ever thought somebody had a mental illness.

They had a spirit, right? So again, we got to be really careful here and contextualize a lot of this stuff. And so I end up finding myself struggling a little bit because even, you know, these stories in the Old Testament, the whole concept of profits, right?

Every time I hear people talk about profits, it's always in the context of the church. Not understanding that profits predate Christianity. They predate, you know, Israelite culture. Everybody and the whole of ancient civilization had profits.

Profits were, you know, in our American culture, the president has a cabinet. In the ancient culture, the king had his astrologers and his prophets and his susseers, right? Every culture had it. Every Greek ruler went to the oracles at Delphi before they went to war to get, right?

And the whole concept of false prophets and true prophets were based on, if you prophesied for Israel, you were a true prophet and you prophesied for another culture, you were a false prophet, right?

In the oracles of Delphi, they, they've dug up and they have found the methane gases that were made them high before the prophesied. They were high. Exactly. They were on P.O.D. You know, it's like, so that's what I'm saying.

There's a lot of stuff here that needs to get unpacked, right? There's things aren't contextualized, it's one of the things I do appreciate about you and this is typically how history works. The people, the first generation that experienced it, most of the time what they have is propaganda, right?

Because they're in the middle of it and they've got a worldview and a perspective and they got a message and they're, you know, they're propagandizing. The second generation is always caught between, right? Because they end up experiencing the fallout, right?

Yeah. Right? Where history, and what I mean by that, pure history doesn't get written until the third generation. Yeah. Because the third generation doesn't have a dog in the hunt, right? Yeah. They're looking at it objectively, right?

They're trying, they just look at the facts, you know, and so what I find interesting is you're kind of the third generation in your particular, you know, culture here, right? So you're doing exactly what has been going on since, you know, the beginning of history, which is you're now looking back without a real dog in the hunt, even though you were a part of this, but you're looking at it more objectively, you're analyzing the letters, you're looking at the videos, right?

You're pulling it together and you're, you're, you have a more objective point in view, but what happens is you run into the old timers, right? And they get upset. Yeah. You're right. I've become so disconnected from even the brand of movement, even though I came out of this.

It's so far in my past, I've kind of disconnected myself from it. And you'll see in the comment feeds every now and then a brand of my at all, suddenly discover my side and just go ballistic.

But like you said, I really don't have a dog in a fight. I'm just more trying to document what it was and document the parts that they aren't documenting because it's a severely imbalanced scale, especially now that you have the NAR people who, for example, NAR people.

People have painted Brannem as one of God's generals. They don't even talk about the fact that he's working with the second in command of the 1915 clan who rose up to become the Imperial Wizard.

I mean, they leave all of that out conveniently. So it's a balance scale and they've, they've tipped at this direction, so I just tip it back. Well, I noticed you've talked a lot about the whole issue of racism, you know, that was kind of at the roots of this.

And that's an interesting conversation that we can have because obviously with me in and out of Africa, me having to go through a racial massacre, tribal massacres, this is kind of something that's sort of on the forefront.

I don't know if you've even touched on this because I haven't had the opportunity to go back and look at some of the older stuff. But one of the things that I don't think people in the modern world understand is that the 1920s and 1930s concept of racism was based on science.

Yes. Not ethics. Yes. And I'm going to tell this story because I think it's important for people to understand how people in the 20s and 30s got programmed. Because see, today when we talk about it, we talk about it in the context of morality and ethics.

This was wrong, right? And we can't fathom the fact that anybody could think differently but they did significantly different, right? And so we can unpack this a little bit, but in ancient cultures, nobody thought in terms of race.

They thought in terms of culture or civilization, right? You were a Babylonian, you were a Syrian, you were an Egyptian, nobody in Egypt, even though you had a mixed culture of people from what's now Nigeria that were black, mixed with people that may have a more European Caucasian look, nobody talked about black Egyptians and white Egyptians.

That wasn't even a concept, right? They didn't care. They didn't care. Nobody cared about this. This only becomes an issue in the 1800s. And the root of this is Charles Darwin. Yeah. Right? So this is really interesting.

You know that on February 12th, 1809, two figures are born on the same day that would go on to impact our world. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Both born on the exact same day, February 12th.

The irony is unbelievable. Because it's a really bizarre. It's sort of when the same vein is Thomas Jefferson, right? It John Adams, dying on July 4th, exactly 50 years. after the declaration of independence. You sort of look at this and go, well, you know, it's like, what is that all about, right? Yeah. So anyways, the reason why this is so important and people that need to understand this is that Darwin, right before the Civil War sort of happens in the United States, comes up with this concept, right? Of the, what do we call that? What does he call it? The, you know, the origins of species, right? So suddenly Darwin,

who's a scientist? This is why this is important. He's considered this great scientist, right? So Darwin comes up with this concept, right? Of, you know, origin of species and natural selection, right? Meaning that those that were the more dominant, the stronger ended up surviving the weaker get eliminated. Well, Darwin has a cousin, half cousin actually whose name is Francis, Francis Gelton. And Francis Gelton takes Darwin's thing even a step further and says it's genetic, right? And it's racial, meaning that different races have different genetic makeups that make them superior to others, right? So the whole concept of superiority and racism is actually rooted in

these two guys and their view of science, right? Now here's where this gets crazy. What ends up happening is is Gelton becomes the father of what we call eugenics, right? Which is a con, we don't hear that word talked about, right? But in the 20s and 30s, this is a huge thing.

It's a big deal. It is, right? How big of a deal is it? Let me tell you, let me just give you a list of people who were proponents of eugenics, Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States, Alexander Graham Bell, father of the telephone. Here's one odd one, Helen Keller, yeah, right? Who's deaf and dumb? Winston Churchill, right? The big one, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, people don't understand that in her mind, she was being scientific by eliminating the weak gene pools, right? So this is how convoluted this gets, right? Now this one is going to blow people away. W. E. DeBose, one of the fathers of the civil rights movement,

a black man, yeah, believes in your, annex, right? It's why it's clear. It's Darrow, Bernard Shaw, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jock Estelle, one of the great figures in art, childhood, right? Yeah. All of these people have this concept, right? So that's why when you get to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, what you have here is you have a whole ideology that came through the Nazis, right? What's they think they're being scientific and they're going to prove to the world, right? That eugenics is a real thing, you know, that the whole theory of superior genes is a real thing and Jesse Owens

just upsets everything. Like people think of it as just a sporting event. They don't realize that what was actually going on was there was a massive collision, right? Because Jesse Owens should not have been able to beat everyone based on the whole eugenics thing. Yeah. So guys like Branum, right? The clan, right? They're not thinking this is a moral ethical issue. They're thinking they're on the side of science. Oh, absolutely. Right? Now, again, it gets all convoluted, right? Because we have people driven by selfish ambition and greed. And so now they can, you know, they can pursue their selfish ambition and greed under the justification of science.

But you have guys like Charles Limberg, right? Who are so caught up in this. He actually goes to Germany and ends up starting two families, right? Because he believes he's got superior genes. Yeah. Right? Nobody believed this until DNA came in and the kids that had claimed he was their dad who were left at for decades ended up actually being his kids. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's, you have to realize that a lot of these people got sucked up into this, this false science. Yeah. It wasn't just based on we don't like black people or we don't write. They were

actually being told by the scientists. This was a reality, right? Yeah. The irony is it became the DNA of the world. If you really think about what happened and you talk, you think through World War II and all of that. But it also became the DNA of the church in this book that I just released, weaponized religion from Christian identity to the NAR. I actually, I mentioned eugenics. I did not mention Darwin because I didn't want, when you mention the name, people go down a different path with their minds. Instead, I mentioned what was created from it. But British

is realism coming into the United States during this era mixed with the racism in the United States formed Christian identity. Like you said, it was a science eugenics. They thought they were on the side of science. It goes- embedded into the Angulous Temple. And from there, you've got Charles Fox Parham was into Christian identity, Father of Pentecostalism, Amy Semple McPherson into Christian identity.

First mega church, she funded the Sharon orphanage from which Laterane would birth. Trained in her school is Chuck Smith. Chuck Smith started the Jesus revolution. All of these guys. You know that Chuck Smith was Paul Cain's business manager.

Absolutely. I was shocked when he told me that. I was like, what? Yeah. Yeah. When he was young, he was my business manager. I was like, holy cow. A lot of people don't realize it. But the key, many of the key figures in what became the Jesus movement, either Cain or Brannum had a direct connection to all of them. It was very much a, it wasn't Laterane, obviously, but it was very much continuing many of the fundamental elements of it.

Well, we could continue that. I could talk to you for probably the next three hours, but maybe today we'll wrap it up. Yeah. Maybe today we'll wrap it up and maybe come back and do this again, because there's so much more talk about it. So thank you so much for doing this.

Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, we can drill down a little bit more on the individuals, you know, and we can, you know, we can go there. Again, I have a personal relationship. So therefore, I have a different perspective than most people do on those guys. Yeah. I'd love it. Let's, let's go.

Okay. Well, I have enjoyed it thoroughly. Yeah. I've enjoyed it too. So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-brannum.org.

From more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Soon, Audible.