Faith Assembly: A 1984 Dystopian Christian Faith

Hello, welcome to another episode, a filmeee. out today we're getting into the year 1984 and my frame of reference for 1984 is the book 1984 which I don't know if it's red or not but yeah so in the book you've got this dystopian world where everything's just kind of falling apart and then in the world of Hobart Freeman and the cult that he created it's kind of falling apart so the two parallel each other a good bit I love the

analogy yes John in the in the fall of 1984 I would say there were dark clouds on the horizon for faith assembly and for Hobart Freeman totally unbeknownst to them what was just around the corner and these dark clouds weren't due to pressure from the community around them it wasn't due from the state legislature which we have seen in some past interviews they had specifically targeted faith assembly because of the lack of ability for law enforcement in the court system to help protect these child neglect and death cases and so they had passed laws and that was presenting problems because now the legal system was involved now the local

law enforcement the courts the judges were involved people were going to prison for the death of their children but the the problems that faith assembly unlike what Hobart always said were not caused by the news media everything fell squarely on Hobart's shoulders the problems were caused by the needless senseless deaths of so many people and dr. Freeman just loved one of his favorite topics was maligning the news media just like they were maligning him and he would talk about that constantly and we would throw our hands up in the air I mean he would say don't you

realize that the media he gave this famous story and it was it was very cute and very humorous but the Ideas like a couple of blind men in a dark basement, looking for a black cat, and they found him.

Said, that's what the media is like. Well, we already know what the media is like. We know that the media that they are controlled by, you know, left of center organizations. And I would think my goodness, when we come to church, our purpose in coming here is to learn the Bible and learn about our Lord.

Please don't preach against the media again. But he just did it all the time. He is like a criticize your critics instead of, hey, let's identify, why is it? Why is it we are such a target of opposition?

They called it persecution, but it wasn't persecution. Persecution is what we see in the book of Acts. Persecution is when you are really suffering for the calls of Christ, for preaching his name, actually for divine healing and not for divine death.

That's what they were experiencing there. Nobody in the New Testament was suffering persecution because people died. They suffered persecution because they healed people and raised people from the dead. So I just always thought that they were looking to the wrong area and wondering what was going on around us rather than looking within.

The only reason that the media even bothered with faith assembly is because there was a story there. I mean, I don't have the media camping out on my front lawn because there's no story here in Central Kentucky.

It's pretty boring here. Their job is to find a story. And the story happened to be the completely senseless, needless deaths that faith assembly. There was a book, a recent one actually or fairly recent John, published by No Less than Oxford University Press.

It was published in 2008 and listened to the title of this book by this prestigious press, University Oxford University Press. When prayer fails, faith healing children and the law. And what they had done in this study was they were comparing, they were really looking at Christian science, that whole religious cult, which is headquartered in Boston.

And that's a religious pseudo-Christian group with hundreds of thousands of members. They did a comparison of what they call the number of neglect-related fatalities. So it's children and adults. But neglect-related fatalities. They did a st- study over a certain period of time. They had a starting point, they had a stopping point, and they were going to compare Christian science, which is a worldwide cult with guests who faith assembly. And over that little period of time that they decided, this is going to be our test sample. In Christian science, there were 28 neglect related fatalities.

In faith assembly, there were 64. We're talking about one little tiny group, and they almost tripled what a worldwide cult was producing and what they called neglect related fatalities. So why was the news media after them? They were after them because so many people were dying.

I never will forget whenever I began researching John Alexander Dowey, who in many ways Hobart Freeman resembled. Dowey had the same trouble with the newspapers. Newspapers report news. If there's not news, they're not going to report it. And if you are doing something that is unfavorable, they're going to paint you unfavorable. If you're doing something heroic, they paint you as heroic. And Dowey was killing people in the hundreds, man. They had Dowey actually had a deal with the undertaker. And at night, the undertaker would come and whisk the bodies away from his so-called healing homes that didn't get healed so that when people came in

the daylight and they saw people, they never saw the dead. And Dowey did the same thing. There's newspapers out to get me. They're working with the anti-Christ, all of that kind of thing. And I thought, when I first discovered, I thought, you know, how could somebody who is in the Dowey cult not notice that all of this is going on? Because any reasonable person can realize when somebody starts bashing the news that is reporting news that there's probably a problem here that we need to dig further. Now, you know, CNN is heavily liberal and, you

know, Fox is heavily republican. I get all that. But there comes a point whenever news that's being reported is accurate. And people who are trapped in the mindset can understand that, yeah, the news is actually reporting this bad thing that happened. But then it started to hit me. Once you're under the mental control and the group think, you start to ignore the logic that other people might understand. And so it all kind of makes sense to me now.

But I was a little bit shocked when I first discovered it. Yeah. So, but you got to also remember which you and I have said that they are in control of the input in your life. And they've already...

that you can't read outside sources. So, I mean, they just had you coming and going. That's what is so dangerous about these groups. I remember seeing John not long ago, a documentary on Adolf Hitler.

And it was about the last years of Hitler's life, really probably the last months. And we know the account of the Second World War that one of Hitler's biggest problems, maybe his biggest strategic problem from a military point of view, is he's trying to fight a battle on two fronts.

He's trying to bomb England to the west, but he had sent his troops so far into the Soviet Union to the east and it was the dead of winter. And, you know, his own troops were dying of starvation.

The supply lines had been cut off. And when you study what was going on, actually in Germany at the time, so much of the effort was a war effort production. Everything was going toward war effort to the point that even the people in Germany were beginning to starve to death.

Even Hitler's own citizens. And so some of the people closest to Adolf Hitler went to him and tried to reason with him. We've got to dial back this war effort. Or we're not even gonna exist to the end of the war.

Now, he wasn't out there fighting on the front lines. He was in his chateau in the mountains or he was in his bunker with Ava. That's where he spent all of his time. He wasn't having to experience what was going on.

And people were literally dying German citizens. Those were his own people. They were dying by the tens of thousands. And when I saw that documentary, it just reminded me of the lack of empathy, the lack of involvement in Hobart Freeman's life with what was going on with his church.

And he was just absolutely not in touch with reality. A normal minister or pastor would have been heartbroken over all of these people trying to the best of their ability to follow me and follow my teaching.

Hobart at that time was still alive. He hadn't suffered any permanent ill effects of his own teaching. But my goodness, the other people had, people have gone to prison, people have died. And you know, John, just since our last interview went online, I guess it was last week.

I mean, I can't tell you how many different people, these are all new people. I'm not talking to the same people. It's new people. And they're not even from the same state. They're from multiple states.

And what they're doing, they're telling me, my point is that people are still dying. People are. still dying and people have recently died. One woman whose mother died, it's been quite a while ago when she was 26, but this was long after Hobart had died.

These people are continuing to hold on to his doctrine. As soon as she brought up that account, because I asked, well, are your parents still alive? As soon as she mentioned her mother, I mean, she broke down over the phone and tears.

That's how raw that was to her. That's what this man did in people's lives. And I'm sorry, but that's not Christian. I'm sorry, but you can know the Bible from cover to cover. And that's not what any of the New Testament ministers did.

They don't have that on their track record. They don't have that on their resume, Paul or Peter or any of them. They don't have to look back and say, oh, it wasn't hundreds. It might have been thousands of people have died.

Remember the Jones Town? Jones Town happened in what, 1978? We're in the fall of 84. It's just six years after Jones Town. That is still fresh in the minds I have the American public.

And I don't remember the number. You probably remember John, but it was probably just shy of a thousand people, drank the Kool-Aid or were forced down there. And was it Jim Jones, a friend, a fellow minister, William Brannum?

I mean, aren't we talking about all the same thing in people? Yeah. And there was more recently in Kenya. There was a minister who convinced, I don't know how many, hundreds of people that they could hasten their departure from this earth into heaven by starving themselves to death.

And he's on trial right now in Kenya. And they found series of Brannum books in his cult compound as well. So this repeats itself again and again and again. Well, people have said the newspaper articles about faith assembly say only 100 or 120 died.

That's just what they could document. Most of those were actually at faith assembly or at least within Northern Indiana. A few of them were in surrounding states like Illinois and Michigan, Ohio. And there were a couple, several of the people I even know down in Kentucky.

They were a part of Tom Hamilton's Church in Shelbyville, Kentucky. But that didn't deal with the people in Canada, in Germany, in Switzerland, Australia, the satellite groups in Tennessee, and Casper Wyoming, and Massachusetts, and Virginia, and Alabama, and Florida.

And that doesn't count all the people that have died since those articles were written in the fall of 1983. That's when they came out. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. There are people, according to what I'm being told by ex-faith assembly people now, that are still believing for so long.

some healing. There have been people who haven't had their glasses on in 30 or 40 years waiting for their healing of their eyes to be manifested. And you know, as you age, it only gets worse.

It doesn't get better. And so they have foregone this whole period of time where they actually could see something clearly by following this man's beliefs. So yeah, maybe Hobart would not have brought a picture of Kool-Aid into the church. Although someone did tell me that in the Rockford Illinois meeting, that was a big satellite group where one of the tier one ministers traveled and spoke weekly. He joked and said he wasn't going to bring any Kool-Aid into the meeting. And that is a completely, that is a completely out of order joke.

You don't ever bring a statement like that into the church. You just don't. The one, the church up in Grand Rapids, which was another big Grand Rapids mission, another big satellite group. Someone told me here recently that he would joke all the time by saying, you know, we're accused of brainwashing you people. And that's exactly right. We brainwash you with the water of the word. Ha, ha, ha. Those are inappropriate comments. Those are unprofessional, inappropriate comments that don't have any place in a pulpit. But yeah, I like your comment to begin with. 1984. George Orwell's book, This Orwellian Society. Yeah, what a great

thing, John. I'm glad you brought that up because if I remember George Orwell's book 1984, probably the only thing he didn't include was a chapter on Hobart Freeman in Faith Assembly.

I mean, that was the book, that was the book, if I remember correctly, that gave us the big brother concept. And I think even the word big brother and the fault police, that's, and that was written when back in the 1930s or 1940s, I would say. And the only thing he didn't cover were modern day cults. You know, it's kind of funny. I had to look it up while you're talking. And the book 1984 was written in 1949, which is exactly after the, the assemblies of God had denounced the latter reign as being very cultish. You know, they had a series of more professional words

than that. But it was spawning off all of these cult leaders. And it was creating a dystopian society in religion. And Orwell came up with a concept for his book in 1948. So at the height of the latter reign is coming up with a concept. And you can't say that it's directly related. I'm certain that it's not. But the the latter reign movement and many of the things that were spinning up around that same time frame were.

result of the world events that were happening, and it was very dystopian. They were really looking towards a imminent World War III, and they thought everybody thought it was coming from religious extremists to probably even George Orwell, but similarities are, like you said, they're unbelievable whenever you really followed them out to their conclusions.

And I think the Orwellian society was one that was going to be dominated by government control. And Big Brother and the thought police, and so I think it's so similar to the mindset of a religious cult, where you do have Big Brother, or this is Big Pastor, Big Brother Freeman, and you do have the thought police. They control the input to all your information.

No, it's not on a governmental level, but maybe it's even worse when it's on a personal and religious level, because people follow a religious leader probably way more diligently than they would a political leader. I mean, they follow David Kuresh to his death. They follow Jim Jones to his death to their death. Many of them followed Hobart Freeman to their death.

So I think George Orwell was on to something. He just neglected a chapter on religious cults and then a post script on Hobart Freeman. So I've got an article here that I did not mention last time, John, that I will just quickly show the Warsaw Times Union on November the 11th, 1984.

Actually did a pretty big article covering the information they that their reporter had just received. And that was on Bruce Kenzie's exit from Faith Assembly. And I have said in our earlier discussions about Bruce, the thing that I always saw that made Bruce a little different and maybe put him in a position to do what he did is that he was a little older than some of the other young ministers. He had been a sergeant in the Marine Corps, did a tour of duty in Vietnam back in the late 1960s. So he had some street scents to him. He had some independence. He had a backbone.

The other minister just worshipped at Freeman's altar. And Bruce was cut from a little bit of a different cloth. And I think that's because of his background. But in any event, you know, things began to add up in Bruce's mind. And he decided, I don't think I can continue to follow this. And so he did exit the church. We talked about that before. There was a screaming match between he and Hobart. And people have asked, well, was he kicked out or was he put out? Well, it was probably 50, 50. I mean, let's be honest, Bruce is not going to continue to sit there and listen to stuff he doesn't

agree with and he's not going to sit there and have his father-in-law give another prophecy to him like we heard last time and prophesy to him from the pulpit and basically point him out and try to publicly shame him.

So Bruce is going to leave but at the same time, Hobart doesn't just want Bruce to leave and not be under some form of church discipline because Bruce may go out with some believability and then be able to take some people with him.

So he was excommunicated so you know you have both things going on, he has put out but he leaves of his own accord. You know it follows the pattern whenever when my family left my grandfather was the pastor and I did tell him that I was going to leave the church and go to another church.

We went to a local Baptist church as one of the first ones that we experienced afterwards and I'm not recommending anybody go to the Baptist church unless you want to but anyway I informed Grandpa that I was going to another church and in most churches that aren't a cult church they would be, well that sounds great, thank you, I hope you and you have a closer walk with the Lord or whatever your pastor might say to you but for me it was I'm going to come down very hard against you and your family John.

I need to send a few of the brethren to your house and we're going to talk to you. And no I'm not going to let him do this to me. I knew at that point this was a cult and they're trying to strong arm me and so my response was well you can come if you want but you're not going to be invited in the house.

And you know it was not an easy conversation I would admit that but they placed the equivalent of a South African hex on me and me and my family and condemned us to death and it really bothered my life and I told her you know they can chant curses all they want and it would have less effect on us than if they were to come and spray our windows with a water hose from the outside.

Yeah I'd rather they not do it but it's not going to affect us. And that's the way these cults are they they cannot let you go without having everybody know that you have fallen from grace because otherwise other people might wake up and say hey if they can leave I can too.

And it's part of the mental barriers that keep you in a cult there are no and many of these cults there are no physical walls but the walls are in your head and that's how they do it.

Yeah and have you ever heard of any other church that operates like this John except a cult church I mean if you want to leave that Baptist the one that you started to attend, I take it you don't attend there anymore.

Did anybody bother you when you decided to leave, you know? We were, because of that, our first cult experience, we were so terrified when we decided to leave the Baptist church. I thought they were gonna bring down the wrath of curses on us, on our heads.

I thought that's the way churches behave, right? And they didn't, and it was surprising. They were loving kind and, you know, go try out a few, and you're always welcome back. If you wanna come back, John, it was that kind of thing, you know, and many of the people who, in fact, I think my wife just met with one of the ladies maybe two nights ago, many of the people that we, the friends that we've made in that church, we're still friends with, and I still meet with, from time to time, whereas in the cult,

they will not meet you for nothing, man. They cut you off. All of the people that I grew up and I called my best friends, not a single one of them has ever reached out.

Yeah, you're exactly right. That is the mode of operation. The young ministers at Faith Assembly, years ago, and to this day, you know, I would reach out to them because I would want to continue to have a conversation.

Conversation, slash, debate, slash, argument, slash, defense, whatever you wanna call it. I'm not afraid to be involved in that. I've always said either I'll be proven right or proven wrong, and in both cases, I'm a winner.

If I'm proven right, that means I'm right. If I'm proven wrong, that means now I know it's right and I get to change, so in either way, you know, I'm proven to be a winner in that.

But boy, if you ever come against the leader, I mean, you are taboo. Your name goes literally on the black list. I think there was a TV program a while ago called the black list.

Your name definitely goes on the black list, and these people are, they're such weasels. They are such cowherts.

They don't even have the decency to even respond to you. It's like you people must have been raised in a barn by a pack of wolves that your parents taught you no more manners than when someone communicates, you reach out and say, look, thank you for the communication, but I choose not to respond.

They just go into this giant black hole where you can't find them. But the thing is, if you would ever say something positive, oh, they just rush back into your presence again. If I would ever call Hobart or write him a letter and say anything positive, oh, I'd get an immediate response.

If I had any question, any question at all, minor major in between, and definitely, if I had anything of a critical nature to say, no response, no response, and that just shows me there's basic...

to cowardice involved here. Yeah, you know, the Blacklist, it's one of my favorite shows of all time. I love that show. And it's kind of odd because it's like, if you're a Superman fan, it's like watching a show about Lex Luthor.

And he's the, you know, the main character in the show. But even in the Blacklist, these are hardened criminals, the worst criminals of the world, right? The world's top 100 worst criminals. But even among them, they have this code of morals where there is a level of respect between criminal and criminal and even somewhat between criminal and the law.

There's a, there's a level of respect there. In the cults, there is none. It's, it's hard to say it because the, I mean, these are not good people in the Blacklist, but they have more morals about them in many ways than the cult members.

And that was Megan, Megan Boone and who was the other star? I'm trying to think as you're talking about the Blacklist. Who was the male? It was James Spader. Oh, James Spader. Yeah, he's one of my favorite actors too.

There was a show called Stargate back in the, it might have also been the 80s or maybe early 90s, but he was in Stargate. And when I saw him on Blacklist, he's the only reason I watched the show and ended up really liking it.

Well, to your point about those hardened criminals in the Blacklist that I think all of us on any side of a theological or biblical or just plain intellectual issue should be able to converse over it.

You know, if you can't, if you've got this spooky, spooky mentality, which is definitely what they had, you know, you can't do anything, you might pick up a demon. Well, look, that's not how demons get in people.

You don't pick them up accidentally. You know, by having a conversation with someone, you know, can't pick up a spirit. That was a favorite phrase of theirs. You don't talk to him or don't go there.

Don't read that. You know, don't eat that. You might pick up a demon. Oh, come on, you know, that is, you know, dark age theology. That doesn't have anything to do with the Bible.

Yeah, we were branded also with the demon that you can accidentally pick up. And it suddenly struck me after having escaped for a few years, man. The God of the cult was so incredibly weak that he couldn't protect you from a demon from talking to somebody.

And, you know, it's just a different God. It's not the God of the Bible. Yeah, for sure. So whenever Bruce decided to make this leave, it's really interesting that Bruce and I were actually in communication with each other.

He had heard the no hunting thing. We looked at that before where on comfort for troubled times, taught on October the 17th, 1984, Hobart said, I believe, and I'm going to state my belief, but we don't have laws or rules that overcomers will get to the place where they won't want.

to kill anything. Overcomers was just his terminology for their little special group. He said, because you don't need to, I'm not talking about going fishing for fish tea, you'll have to put it all together. But I don't believe overcomers are going to have anything to do with weapons of death, whether guns or bows or errors or whatever, times too short for you to try to debate that.

That's a direct quote from that message. And if people wonder, people have asked me, how do you have these quotes? I mean, there it is typed up on a piece of paper from 40 years ago.

I didn't do any of this recently. When I heard these messages coming out back then, I was so shocked and stunned by it because I can remember 10 years previous to that. You know, Hobart's teachings did not go down these paths. He had enough of his issues for sure.

He was in air on multiple things, but there was, I mean, we've all been in air in our life. And there was a happiness to the air they were in. It was not life and death and you better obey me or else. And that's where we ended up in in 1984. But John, in this very statement, I'm going to state my belief, but we don't have laws or rules. I've said so many times, as soon as the cult leader states his belief, that becomes the law and the rule.

And they did have their laws and rules. They had a sheet of 10 requirements for fellowship at faith assembly. And some of those things in the 10 requirements where you had to hear certain tapes and read certain books of Hobart Freeman, how about just let's congregate around the truth of scripture?

And how is it that this was a group who was so opposed to denominationism and creeds and anything that was outside of the Bible? But I find this little group became its own denomination.

They had their own creed. They had their own pope. They had their own cardinals. They had their own bylaws. They had their own unspoken rules. But they actually had 10 things on their list of requirements to be in fellowship with faith assembly. And I just can't imagine any of the churches in the first century having their own list of what you must do before you can be a member here.

What the early Christians did is they just wanted to gather around their mutual love of God and love of scripture and progress forward and do the best that they can. But he said, oh, we don't have any laws or rules. But I'm going to state my belief that if you're going to be an overcomer, you're not going to want to kill anything. But as he sang that, you know, and we can all think, and you got to put yourself in the, this was brand, this was news. This was hot off the press to people sitting in those hard metal chairs at faith assembly that day. He had not said this before

and they're hearing this. And I mean, it's only a paragraph long and then he goes on, but it did become the law of the church. You know, if you say it's not a law or not a rule, what do you think would have happened a month later had a group of ministers got together and so let's go on a hunting trip and had that gotten back to Hobart Freeman?

You know, what do you think would have happened? So don't tell me this wasn't a law or a rule and that's exactly what cult members say. Well, Hobart never said that he most definitely did say this and he knew what he meant when he said it and he knew the outcome of it that it was gonna be a dividing line between people who were gonna continue to follow him and people that he was gonna consider as the chaff of the wind that he would be able to drive away.

And he knew Bruce was a hunter. He knew Bruce was a big time hunter. Bruce loved to hunt and fish. So this was gonna be one of those other things that would stick in the crawl of Bruce Kinsey that Bruce would, you know, just not be able to deal with.

But as Hobart is saying, no hunting, you know, I mean, I thought of this 40 years ago and his mind is flashing through his mind. Okay, what happened after Noah's flood? God gave dominion over the earth to mankind where they were now allowed to, you know, kill and eat and how many times were animals killed?

Killed hundreds of thousands sacrificed in the temple and killed for food. So that's going through his mind as he's saying this. I just know him. And so he's trying to think, well, in the New Testament, can I think of any Christian killing an animal?

Nobody I can think of a group of fishermen. So I better make an exception here where he then goes on to say, I'm not talking about going fishing for fish to eat. Well, is that killing an animal?

Is there anything more cruel than pulling a fish out of the water who has to breathe underwater and throwing me in a cooler on your boat and having him suffocate, you know, is, I mean, come on.

But I know the thought pattern of a cult leader, they try so hard to cover all their bases so no one can trip them up on anything. And he knew that post resurrection, Jesus in John 21 met the disciples on the shore of the sea of Galilee after they had fished all night and didn't catch a thing.

And what did he say? Just throw your net on the other side of the boat. And they brought back so many fish it about broke the net. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new Apostolic Reformation, you can learn this and more on William Brandham Historical Research's website, William-Brandham.org.

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You know, there are many things that we learned in the Baptist Church. Even though it's not a church that we still attend, and we've tried other churches after that that we have chosen not to attend.

We're actually going to a different one altogether. But you can learn something at all of them. And when we were in the cult, we were so legalistic that we literally had a religion where we thought we could save ourselves by the things that we do.

And if you understand the concepts of the New Testament, it's exactly backwards. It's not about what you can do to save yourself. It's about what Jesus did. One of the things that I learned in the Baptist Church that wasn't taught in the cults were was the concept of the covenants, which sounds odd to any Christian who's listening who's never been in this kind of thing.

But there wasn't really a clear ending of the old covenant and in entering into the new covenant. It was this blend, this weird mixture of both, where yes, Jesus died to save us, and we must do all of these rules, some of which were under the old covenant and others we ignore that were in the old covenant.

And if we didn't follow those rules, then Jesus, the salvation that he gave us when he died on the cross, is ineffective because we broke the rules. That's really in its essence, that's the way the cult operates.

And so I was discussing one day, all of the rules that we had with the ministers and they were laughing at me, man. Some of the things were just really, really stupid. And I got to thinking about, I ran all these support groups and I was asking other people if they had encountered ministers or friends who came in contact with some of the rules that they had and did they laugh.

And suddenly, I got this response, everybody's talking about rules that I didn't know were rules. And I thought, well, what is this? And come to find out because it is a religion where you save yourself by the works that you do.

Well, if you're not saving yourself, you add new works to it. And it grows and it... grows and it grows. And so the way that these churches and the cult were, the way that they were operating was if they couldn't get themselves to a higher spiritual plane by the same rules that the main sect did, the splinter group sects would go through all of the recordings and transcripts of Brannum and pick out additional rules that they found. And like you said with Hobart, they weren't really rules. They were opinions. I don't like this or this thing, I won't let my family

do this. There was all of opinions. And so one day I compiled this list. And if you go to my website and you type in rules, you'll get a good kick out of it because some of the things are very similar, like no watching television, no newspapers, that kind of thing, movies, but it gets into things like no blue suede shoes, no suede shoes in general, no suede shoes for the men because Elvis had blue suede shoes in there. He's going to condemn from suede shoes to booster bras to things that you just wouldn't have. There are also comments in here that he would condemn the women for their

washing machines because you know, back in my day, the women didn't need these fancy washing machines, but now they got to save time so that they can go out and get a job in any of the workplace.

He's just ranting, you know, and granted my family had a washing machine and I assume, I don't know, but I assume many of the women in the main sect wore the booster bras, but there were sects of the message that did not. And things, I mean, all the way down to you can't play basketball or you can't swim, this kind of thing. The rules are just ridiculous. And in the end, I go back to my previous comment, if the God is so powerless that he can't save you, if your women are wearing a booster bra, you're probably in the wrong religion, man. John, I know you haven't even listened to

Dr. Freeman's tapes and weren't a follower of his, but if Hobart Freeman's followers would just take all of what you just said and just run it through the Freeman filter, they come up with the identical same stuff. On one of Hobart's later messages, he outlawed competitive sports.

He said, all competitive sports are wrong. On another message, he outlawed using abbreviations, like you couldn't say Ag Department. He said, that is the hippie culture and he called it the hip culture, which actually is itself an abbreviation of the hippie culture. He kept saying that that's too hip and I'd say, well, that's an abbreviation, but you couldn't say, you know, you couldn't say the fair. You couldn't say a promo. This is a promo. You couldn't say a condo. You couldn't say, I went and bought me a condo. You had to say a condominium. Now, did he actually teach you couldn't

say those? Yes, he actually did. If you listen to the message and I can dig it out from these files, but I won't take the time to now. He said that Christians will not do that.

And I can feel in the rest of the sentence. So if you do them, what are you not? You're not a Christian. Yes, those exact same things in the Washington machine, he did not want box mix cakes.

He did not want anything instant. He wanted the women. He felt that the reason that women have smaller feet than men is so that they could stand up at the kitchen counter all day.

And he wanted the women in the kitchen, slaving away and making, they know he didn't want them out of the home working. I mean, he didn't really want anybody. Let's face it, John, to have any education because as soon as you have any education, you might get smart enough to challenge him.

So going back to this quote on hunting, I take things like this and I just dissect them sentence by sentence. And it's not reading between the lines. It's taking exactly what he said. I'm not talking about fishing for fish to eat.

Well, you just said you can't kill anything. And now you're going to allow a type of killing of an animal that has some kind of feeling. And you're going to suffocate that animal and that's worse than putting a high powered bullet through a deer's double lung.

Then he says, you see, you'll have to put it all together. You'll have to put it all. It's so confusing. He doesn't want to be liable for his statement. He doesn't want to be responsible.

What someone should ask him is, would you please now that you said no hunting and then you said, I'm not talking about fishing, would you please explain the difference? We need all of that analyze.

We need all of that explain. You can hunt, but you can go fishing. See, you'll have to put it all together. He's putting all the burden of his confusion up on the people. You know, he's putting the burden of his contradictory statements upon the people rather than saying, hey, I just made a pretty dumb couple of sentences in this paragraph.

And I need to try to dig myself out of the hole. Then he goes on to say, I don't believe overcomers are going to have anything to do with weapons of death, whether guns or bows or arrows or whatever, times too short for you to try to debate that.

That's a standard cult statement there. It's the shortness of the hour. Time is too short. You don't even have enough time. Well, we're 40 years later, Hobart. We've had 40 years to debate. We have plenty of time.

What they mean is they don't want you to come up there and question them because they don't have any answers. The people are going to say, give me chapter in verse. Hobart was always about chapter in verse.

Give me a proof text for that. Well, he doesn't have any. And he knows he doesn't have any. So he shields himself. Because he's a coward. He's an intellectual coward. He shields himself. He protects himself from anybody being able to come up and challenge him over that.

Yeah, and Branemism, it was the message of the hour, and I'm told that in International House of Prayer, it was the urgency of the hour. It's always something of the hour. It's always got to be worth the last minute.

One of the favorite quotes that I've heard from many of these guys is, the Bible says, no man knows the day or the hour, but it doesn't say anything about the minute. They'll try to twist things like that. But in the end, what it is, it's a message of fear. The message of the hour is a message of fear, and we want to put you in a fear that the world is about to end.

And we want to tell you that you are unprepared for it, because the God is too weak to save you. You have to go through me, your spiritual leader, to bring you closer to God so that you can make it otherwise you're doomed to hell.

And that's really in its essence. That's what these cults are doing. Yeah, you're right, John. This article on Bruce Leving just gave a list, even the reporter was able to get to the bottom of why Bruce was leaving.

And he just gave a list, and this is fairly accurate. He said, Kenzie left, because he did not believe that doctors are always the bad guy, that they're a part of a cult. He left because he disagreed with Hobart's teaching on demonic deliverance. They were going back years in their life, trying to find what's causing the problems in our lives and the problems in our church. They had not been able to solve why they were experiencing as many problems.

Rather than looking common sense areas, they look behind every bush and under every rock to try to find the demon and Bruce didn't think that was valid, neither did I. Women were not allowed to wear makeup or worldly quote unquote clothes.

And of course, what's worldly and what's not is all dependent on Hobart Freeman's definition of that. Women were not allowed to wear strapless dresses or bathing suits or pants. They were not allowed to wear a certain brand of tennis shoes.

In the marital relationship, there were no foreplay was allowed, no birth control was allowed. Hobart taught that the purpose of the act of marriage was procreation and that was it. And we're talking about an old guy who's way past his prime and I can't imagine the damage seriously John that was done in the marriages of the young people in their 20s and 30s in this church.

I just can't imagine the arguments in families, the questions, the husband retreating to one room and the wife to another room. Because this old fart whose way past his prime who is just a kill joy, you know He's a religious screw just what he really was he wasn't having any fun in life And he wanted to make sure nobody else was you know how they've always people have defined the Puritans that whole Puritan movement They said the the Puritan movement what a Puritan was with someone who was afraid someone might be having some fun Somewhere in their life

That's what a Puritan was and I see a lot of this in Hobart Freeman I mean, they so many things were outlawed John you just you just really had to spend your time listening and re-listing to his cassette messages praying fasting and there's so much more you should Leaving the tapes out of his you should pray you should fast you should go to church you should worship I mean those are all biblical things to do, but there is so much in addition to that That not only should we do but we're allowed by God to do look at the prophet Daniel

Who was one of the most holy most righteous most consecrated men in the Old Testament and he was also second-in-control of the government of Babylon Under King Nebuchadnezzar he had all kinds of responsibilities that were required of him and and those responsibilities and the the rest of his life We've got 24 hours all of us each day the rest of his life the rest of his day that he got to live Beyond what his government responsibilities were then he spent it in prayer and worship and When he wasn't in prayer and worship he was living the rest of his life. So I'm saying that to say

so many people were just robbed of I can a particular Educational path that they wanted to take and there was nothing sinful in it It could have been medicine. It could have been physics. It could have been astronomy Who knows it could have been an electronic theory and they were robbed of that because somehow That's secular or that's not pleasing to God or Jesus is coming back any day. Why do you need an education like that?

And some of the people that I talked to just in the last few days one of them in particular But moan the facts that we had we had no savings We weren't preparing for the future. This man told me we did not actually get to the point in our Marital life and journey to start being able to put money away so that we can retire until he was 55 years old He's older now and he said thank God by God's grace and mercy my wife and our both retired So even though we started late we had enough time

but they had they operated a more normal existence. They'd be multi millionaires now and getting to go to Israel and see the Holy Land every other year or twice every year. That's what these cults have done to people and it's just, it's why I continue to have this burden to talk against it and I hope, John, that you'll continue to have this burden.

Although I worry about you because you go at it non-stop. I'm afraid you're going to burn out, brother, before we saw all said and done. People have been telling me that for almost 10 years now.

You're going to burn out. Oh, that's good news. You know, so many things you mentioned, you're basically mentioning randomism, 2.0. There's so many stories, especially around the marital stuff. I'll never forget this one rather gruff man stood up after church and he was talking all the other guys and he says, I don't care what he says.

That preacher can stay out of my bedroom. He was not going to let all of that run but they impacted every aspect of our lives and I've got funny stories that, you know, all of these things, it's funny.

You can look back and you can laugh at it now but it's really sad when you sum all of the stories because like you said, they're people that don't prepare, they're people that miss out on just life in general.

The cult has robbed them of life and I know a lot of people, myself included, were way behind the eight ball and trying to prepare for the future because especially with the economy, the way it is, it's really hard to put back right now and when you haven't put back for, I was 39, 40 years old before I even began to have a dollar put back for retirement.

So that's the mentality of somebody who's in these doomsday cults. You don't prepare for the future because it's a 1984 future. There's not supposed to be a future and when you look at it from the outside looking in, all you see among all of these ministers that are doing this really is a bunch of thieves.

I agree, John. And I pray God blesses you and that you live long enough that you will have plenty and good health live long enough that you'll have plenty of money put away but you're right, I've heard people say it really took away their whole life, their normal existence of life and they have been fighting and struggling to get it back.

And so this fall of 1984 was a dark time. It was scary, it was oppressive. That for the people who really were at the mother church and Willment, the walls were closing in. and they were nervous, they were suspicious.

I even talked to Jeff Barnett, one of the big time ministers down there last year, Jeff Barnett and I had a conversation on the phone. I can't get Jeff to respond to me anymore.

Maybe it's because of these podcasts, but we were talking about the closing days of Freeman's life. And he said that they had lost a lot of people. He said, Jenna, we were down to about 1500 people in the big building and the big building.

I mean, I don't know what the what the high was of attendance in the low 2000s, 2200, 2300 on a good Sunday. Maybe I don't know, but they were down to 1500 people and hope aren't himself.

He was angry. You can hear it on the later tapes. He was bitter. He had a sour attitude to some of it. As Jerry Irving said, may have been due to the fact he simply wasn't feeling well.

He was sick. Bruce Leving didn't help any. I think he was frustrated over the number of people leaving. Some of the people saw the handwriting on the wall. Some of the people just realized, if I stay on what Hobart called the discipleship, he had this famous tape, a bandanship or discipleship.

And I think they realized if I stay on this stupid analogy that Hobart was talking about, stay on the discipleship, I'm going down with the ship. And you know, the ship went down. Hobart went down and the ship went down.

That whole message was talking about how we're on the discipleship and you better not jump off. You better not abandon ship. Because if you jump off, you'll just drown. But if you stay on the discipleship, we're gonna make it into port together.

That didn't happen. That ship sank with its captain on board. And people were deciding to jump off of the discipleship. And so when people decided to leave, and I'm sure you can attest to this, John, in your experience with your background, then what happens from the pulpit is the people that are leaving are mocked.

Hobart would mock the people. He would use phrases like, they're biting the hand that fed them. That was a favorite one. They are criticizing what they once praised. Well, yes, they are because one of two things, either you've changed your message, you definitely did that.

I've given examples or the people woke up. So do you have a right to criticize once you once praised? Of course you do. It's just saying you've come to your senses now or it's saying that the leader is now preaching something that he didn't preach before.

So but rather than deal with that, Hobart just criticized his critics. He never dealt with the issues. He did a series in Galatians called, I think it was called Gleening in Galatians. Hobart got real cute at the end of his life.

Rather than just give us a study of the Bible, it had to be this alliteration, preaching from the prophets, the judgments of Jude, gleanings from Galatians, exhortations from Exodus. Those were thought out, well-prepared, copious notes where Hobart had all of this stuff.

His jokes are written out, the statistics are written out. There is no quote, anointing unquote on any of that stuff. It was stuff well-fought out, he was trying to be cute, he had run out of things to say, and in his gleanings on Galatians, people remember this, he said, if you leave faith assembly, you can't be saved.

And is that any different in Roman Catholicism? I mean, you can't be saved if you leave the Catholic church. But can you be saved if you leave a normal church and go to another church?

Well, of course you can be. Being in that church, a church, any church, isn't what saves you. It's your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. But that was his way to keep people in fear.

And it's just abuse of power, this insidious abuse of power. If the people wanna go, just let them go and let them go with freedom and let them go with love and send them off with a blessing.

There's no way a cult leader is gonna do that. They're gonna track down any kind of rumor that someone might have said something against the pastor, someone might be in considering leaving. They're gonna track those rumors down and grill those people.

It's okay to differ in theory, but it's never okay to actually differ in practice. And then what he would do, if he, someone had come to him and said, brother Freeman, we think we're gonna leave, he would be rude to them.

Number one, most wouldn't even go to him. They would just leave. And he would hear about it second hand. And then he'd use the pulpit as public shame. And he would, he did it with Bruce.

You know, he prophesied to Bruce to shame him out of the church. A lady the other day told me the story of, she said one time, she said, I'll never forget this. Here we are, sitting in church, Hobart's preaching and all of a sudden, he looks over to his right.

And he points to this woman and he calls her a lesbian. He said, Lord has shown me that you're a lesbian and I want you out of this building. And that lady had to get up and leave.

Well, the interesting story about that lady is she was a fur coat dealer. She dealt with fur coats. And many of the minister's wives had bought owned a fur coat from this lady. So you know what they had to do with their fur coats.

Yeah. You had to burn it. You had to burn them. That's opening the door for demonic oppression or possession. So it's back to this bully pulpit thing. And I just can't imagine a minister standing up at a pulpit telling a woman that she's a lesbian and kicking her out. And then the repercussions of that because the other women had bought fur coats from her, then they had to go home and couldn't sell them, get some good money out of them. They had to go home and burn their fur coats.

Let me make one other comment that just is so glaring to my, in my mind, John, over that whole thing. When I go back, because we always want to trace things back to what did the New Testament teach? What did the Apostles teach? Here's what Paul taught on things like that. Paul, the Christian, the Apostle, who himself had been bound up in prior conversion days in all of the technicalities of the phariseic religion. He was well aware of all of the do's and don'ts. And Jesus had talked about it. He said, the Pharisees are willing to tie the ten seeds of this little spice or plant.

They'll bring one seed out. You'll tie, meant, and Anna's incumbent, but you will omit the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith. That's the way Jesus approached that. Paul was a free man. So when they would bring a piece of meat to Paul's plate, Paul didn't care where that came from. And there were other people that would say, don't you know that that came from an animal that was sacrificed to the goddess Aphrodite or Diana? Paul couldn't have cared less.

If Aphrodite doesn't want it, I want it. I'm hungry now. Paul knew there's no way to pick up a demon. And listen to what we're saying, John, this was meat. Paul said in 1 Corinthians that was actually had been sacrificed to a pagan idol. But Paul said an idol is nothing. Our God created the heavens in the earth. An idol is just a stone statue, a piece of wood. It means nothing to me. If the idol or the God or God is behind, it's not hungry enough to eat the food, I am. I'll take it.

If there's any way that you could pick up a demon quote unquote, I would say that would be the way you would pick up a demon. Wearing a fur coat that you bought from a woman who was or was not a lesbian, I don't know. Wearing a fur coat that you got from her, I mean, those ladies just lost a probably a really nice coat. But that's the way you, that's the way they roll in a religious call.

It really comes down to this. If you go to a real church, a non-cult church, they lift you up and they prepare you. And if you go to cult church, they pull you down and add all these weights to your shoulders and anything they can do to keep you burdened They want to keep you burdened and I went to when we went to our first new church. It was the Baptist church I remember walking out and they were the people were saying things like wow, I feel so refreshed today and I was shocked like I looked around

This is just really odd because in the cult churches. I actually remember a scene where we walked out of the church building This was down in the south and this man walked out and all the men kind of gathered over here and the women over there which was kind of odd But the one of the men walked out and he said man, we sure got a beaten in there today. Didn't we, brother?

And that's the difference between these things man. And once you experience the burdens being lifted, you'll never go back. That's just the way it is This is incredibly fun. We've covered a lot of things that are still we enter into these things that are so similar between the two religions You can tell that it was a splinter of the same trunk that kept splintering over and over and continues even still today to splinter But thank you for doing this. I enjoyed it as always. It's a lot of fun. If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web

You can find us at www.William-Branem.org For more about the dark side of the NAR, read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Soon Audible

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