Why People Join Cults: A Deep Dive Into Religious Indoctrination

Hello and welcome to another episode. I'm John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-Brandham.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer.

Speaking of prophecy and son of a prophecy, I know this will come out a little bit later, so it's old news to anybody who's listening, but the Super Bowl just happened and the Kansas City Chiefs didn't win.

I'm curious how that affects Kansas City prophecy. I don't know what you're talking about, because I have blocked that from... Here I was having a nice day, John, and now I got to remember.

No, but I definitely thought about that as much as I'm a huge Chiefs fan and I very much am, when right after Chiefs got beat and beat pretty terribly, I was like, I wonder what the symbolism is for this.

Do you just drop it? Do you only make prophecies about good victories? I don't know. And for anybody who's listening, oddly as it seems, this is tied to Kansas City International House of Prayer prophecy.

I'm a Chiefs fan too, and I have been a Chiefs fan since long before it was cool to be a Chiefs fan. Back with you, I'm with you on that. Back whenever, so what I experienced this weekend with a Chiefs game, and they've dubbed it the worst Super Bowl ever.

For me, it was just growing up. This was the average postseason game for the Kansas City Chiefs. They're going to go royally screw it up. Yeah, I was thinking about that too, where I was talking with my mom, and she was like, how are you doing, buddy?

How are you feeling? And I was like, we've won three of the last five Super Bowls. It's pretty greedy for me to be upset. And also, I grew up when the whole idea of just winning a playoff game was unthinkable.

During my entire lifetime, at least, maybe when I was a kid, four or five. I don't think we did, though, but I never saw the Chiefs win even a playoff game until I was in my late 20s.

So so losing, you know, hello darkness my old friend. I know you well. And people wonder why I am a chiefs fan they have for years and now that it became popular to be a chiefs fan. I don't get that question anymore, but I used to drive around and I had my chiefs hat and I had my chiefs shirt and anyway.

People asked me why I believed in the chiefs and now we're being asked why people believe in the cults and why why would people follow this kind of thing and we almost addressed it in the last questions and answers episode but yeah maybe we can spend a few minutes and say you know answer the question why do people follow this kind of weird mess that we're talking about.

Yeah, and I think that if you yeah, I think the applying it to the chiefs pre-2018 or whatever makes makes a lot of sense because it's like all it does is bring you suffering why you can be a chiefs fan because the Messiah might come and you know the promises there.

No, but no, this is I think that this is for individuals who are not in the charismatic world. This is the number one question that I get asked and this is actually probably the question that I most have engaged in thinking about and trying to address.

Because even back before all of the Mike Bickle scandal and before this last few years where it's really come out just how much of a cult the international hospital prayer was and you know my father's role in all of that and even before sort of this last reveal I have always kind of wrestled with this of what brought people into the cult world that I grew up in what brought people to places like Bethel or I went from international hospital prayer to why I'm and I was in why I'm for a while with which is another sort of similar charismatic community that's missions based if people don't know it.

And I especially when I was getting my masters in philosophy I was taught I would talk with a lot of different people who would ask me this question from a much more secular perspective and I actually made it my thesis dissertation or not.

I don't think it's called a dissertation when it's just a masters but my thesis was going to be about this topic and I never actually finished it because it got a bit overwhelming to me like it was very difficult a few years ago to address some of these topics because it felt like dancing around it felt like every time you go to a like if you're going to the hospital and you have some autoimmune disease and you can diagnose some of the symptoms but you don't know what's going on with the actual

your body and so you either have doctors who tell you it's not there or that they can't help you um I think like two three four years ago that's what it felt like when I would try to address the issues at the international house prayer is um and just my upbringing in general I felt like I was talking about um symptoms but I was never really addressing the disease and it was very frustrating because I'm trying to write this sort of analytical philosophical paper that delves into the depths of why people are drawn to these communities and what is going on within these

communities as far as ethics of belief go and I just couldn't I couldn't get my footing now that I know what's going on and I like now that everything has been sort of exposed it is so much easier to talk about it and address it because um even two three four years ago I had a hard time calling it a cult so if that gives you a tiny bit of empathy or any of the listeners a tiny bit of empathy going into this conversation um me who has been speaking quite clearly and outspokenly about the disasters of the international house prayer even three years ago

I struggled to feel like I wasn't that I was making things up when I called it a cult or I was I was making it more dramatic than it was because it just was so hard to criticism is so hard to latch on to in in these communities like healthy criticism is so they are built to negate the voice of any to negate the voice of the user to negate the voice of anybody who is questioning anybody who is criticizing anybody who is hurt um you know they frame them as bitter and there's just this way to make it almost impossible unless some dramatic thing happens as as it has happened

um impossible to really address um what was going on there I'm actually glad we're doing this because I get asked this question all the time and I don't know that I've ever really had a full podcast to address the question but it's one of the common questions everybody who's never been in it and the researching and they come across branemism and find how much of a spider web of connection between all these different movements, they all want to know why, why do they do this?

And if you read through the comments, it gets kind of funny because you have, there's always that one person that says, well, they got in it because they're stupid. And it's odd because the insults coming from the cult are part of the cult's chemistry.

But then you see the people who are outside looking in and some of the insults are about the same. So you have to take everything with the grain of salt. But it's quite the opposite.

Many of the people that I knew in the cult, some of them were incredibly smart. Now in the Brannemism, it wasn't so much an education that made them smart. A lot of the people were self-educated.

But honestly, some of the people that I knew I would put up against masters degree graduates because they had self-educated far beyond what you're even going to get in college. So it's not that people are,

it's not a problem of learning that causes people to avoid the cults. And honestly, I think part of the reason why that question even comes up, why would you do it? Is because of Hollywood, whenever you see the cults and the TV shows or the movies on Hollywood, they look like freaks, man.

You look at me and you think, you're on earth with stones. Yeah, on earth would you join this mess, right? But you have to remember, not every cult starts like this. There's always an origin.

And usually you can't make a bunch of people join into something that is disagreeable with their personalities. So initially, it had to have been something that as the movement was growing and spreading, people had to have been in agreement with.

Now, they may not have known all the dirty secrets, but at least the public perception of the movement was something that they could agree with. And I actually, I just had this conversation with Channel Ross.

I think that podcast will come up before this one, which is for anybody listening who is from the IHOP world, it's going to be an interesting intersection at some point because Channel Ross is talking about the Hobart Freeman cult, which was another splinter group of randomism.

He actually, as his religious foundations was being formed, it was not far from my house. I think it was like 10 miles from here. So he's in the vicinity where he's learning randomism. And many of the people in that highly destructive cult went to IHOP KC.

So there's going to be a point in time in which we go through the convergence of all of that. But we were talking about the programming and indoctrination schemes that you can, I can see it whenever I listen to any of the NAR people, almost every single one of them.

And in Brannemism, Brannem screamed like Hitler. And in fact, when we left my son, I just kind of tuned this guy out because he sounded like Hitler. But it's made me stop and think, why is that?

And I began to study the psychological strategies of the speeches. I don't even call them sermons anymore. I call them speeches. And the patterns between the similarities between what Brannem did, what Bickel did, what any of these NAR guys do in Hitler, it's a fascinating study if you learn it.

They, you know, Hitler had a Messianic complex. He presented a problem. He tried to oversimplify this complex problem. And so people could easily grasp it. And then he himself became the Messiah for the problem.

So the problem existed, and he started telling these allegories. So he would tell a familiar story, something that people could relate to, and make the enemy in that story rather than in the real world.

So then when people are thinking about things outside of his speeches, they start to compare it to his allegories, and then they became, you know, over time, they became coerced to do what they did.

It's kind of the same way with cult leaders. They have the same personality disorders, many of them that Hitler had, and their tactics are much the same. I don't know that it's a learned tactic, but they use the same strategies.

And in doing so, you can convince people from the smartest people in the city to the people who are challenged mentally. They all kind of come together under this. So you can't really say that it has anything to do with intelligence.

No, and I think that I totally agree that some of the smartest people that I've ever met, at least in the able to have very complicated reasoning and build out some very complex lines of thinking that stay relatively coherent.

I mean, I knew some incredibly intelligent, and just like knowing their depth of knowledge and the reading that they've done was, like you said, vastly superior to them, you know, what the average person would get at college or something, or even some of my professors at the different colleges that I went to, probably didn't strike me as intelligent and some of these people that I grew up with, you know, intelligence is so relative and whatnot.

But I think that there's two different things. So there's first, like, the hook, where... or getting involved in a community like this when you're not involved at all, I think that is where people kind of look at it and they're like, what happened?

And I think that there is some validity there of, no one just like joins the International House prayer on a whim and no one who's a non-believer just like walks into the prayer room and has this transcendent experience.

Usually like, I've heard a lot of testimonies of people who had things going on wrong in their life. They were, you know, had addictions, drug addictions or had lost family members or something like that.

I think that there's many different ways where someone can get hooked into the community. If you're not like me or like yourself, just born and raised in the community. And then it doesn't, there needs to be no hook if you're born and raised in the community because you're in there whether you want to be or not.

But for the people who choose to sort of, who are adults when they get grafted into these communities, usually it's just something small and they don't even have to believe in the larger, like you were saying, the larger specifics of the organization, there just has to be one or two things like with the prayer room, this idea of 24-7 prayer hooked a lot of people because it was this place where you could go at all times during the day or night that you could pray and intercede with God.

And if you believe in God already, you know, and there's this sort of idea and a lure that you could be able to go to this place where a lot of people are really contending where the veil between heaven and earth is is thin because of all of the warriors of the intercessors who are bringing God down and having heaven be earth there.

And this is also very spiritual language that's used at Bethel as well as this sort of like, if you believe in God, well, of course, you're gonna be a little bit drawn and at least interested in these communities that say that they speak with God or that they commune with God.

And you don't actually have to, I miss so many people who didn't take it hookline and sink her, but we're still had their toes in it a little bit. Like there was a lot of people who were big fans of my dad who they were like all of this other healing and stuff is ridiculous, but prophecy is real.

You know, you can kind of pick the parts that you want and then appeal to you. And all it takes is just a little bit of the hook before then,

it's so, once you get that hook, it's so difficult to remove it. I think the other question that goes here. hand in hand with this one is, why didn't you just leave? Whenever I see people asking, why did you join it?

Almost immediately, very next question they ask is why didn't you just leave? You could just pack up and leave. If it was a cult, there's no need to sit around spending time trying to help people out of it.

They can just leave, right? And it's not that simple, which probably we should cover that in a different podcast than this one. But it ties into something that you just said, you mentioned the addictions, the lost family members, specifically what you're describing is a need.

And much like Hitler, whenever he brainwashed an entire nation, he presented this problem as though it was something that the people needed and then offered himself as the solution to the problem, basically, and was able to do this.

Well, in religion, it's much the same. Maybe you're sick. And in the laterane movements, it was a divine healing cult. So I had attracted a large number of sick people, everything from people who had physical ailments to people who had mental health challenges.

They were also sick, they needed help. They became part of the movement. So now you've got a movement that has a bunch of people who are suffering and struggling, and some of the struggles are mental health struggles.

So that's to say, what happened with IHOPKC kind of built upon all of this. The Pentecostal cults shifted the mindsets of the people such that the religions itself in the more destructive groups had an end of day's focus.

And they were heavily, heavily focused on the end of days. It became more valuable to them to think about the end of the world than it did to think about the current world, which is a huge problem.

It's very destructive. And because there was so much money in doing it, many of the more deceptive leaders, they started creating this end of day's revival scheme. Because if you can get the people to band together for an end of day's revival, you can easily get their money because they're not going to need it very soon.

So people who had adopted those types of belief sets, the problem is, I experienced this with a friend. I helped a friend who came out of a cult. He had been given this false framework and mindset.

And I thought he was healthy. I thought he was great. And he started joining into one of this NAR cults. I'm not going to mention the name. It was one of the big ones.

But the problem is the framework of his belief set was so skewed that it was more compatible with that NAR destructive cult. So all of this to say, as IHOP KC was forming, And they were creating the problem that needed to be fixed.

And Bickle was the answer, the Kansas City Prophecy was the answer, think of the things that they're saying and how compatible it would have been to anybody who's apostolic in the area. They're all seeing this as, oh, this must be it.

This is the end of day's revival that our cult that we just escaped, they believe this too. But I believe that still. So I'm going to go and see if this is it. And so very smart people who were indoctrinated in other cults, just like the Hobart Freeman cult that I mentioned earlier, they all see this as a movement of God and they come thinking that God is there.

And they take people with them too, like the people going, thinking that it's a movement of God. You know, say you have a family member, a wife for a husband who gets hooked, they take you with them.

I saw so many different people be pulled sort of reluctantly into the world. And you know, of course, my experiences are very anecdotal because I was seeing a very specific slice of a very specific world.

But I will say that I met a lot of different people who were sort of mainline evangelical. And the middle or high school, like junior high, high school that I went to before I went to the International House of Prayer School, the Daniel Academy.

There was like, when I was in sixth, seventh, eighth grade, I went to a more mainline evangelical private school. And so I interacted with a lot of people who didn't believe in the gifts of the spirit whatsoever, who didn't believe in, you know, the more supernatural aspects of Christianity.

And I would see these conflicts arise between people who are just mainline Christian versus people who are more, I'm sorry, people who are more radical, you know, charismatic communities. And I would see some tension between the two, or I would see debates, or between the two worlds.

And I, again, anecdotal experience, I very frequently saw the charismatic swim in that situation because it's really easy. It's really easy to have this like, okay, we'll open up your Bible in the Bible.

You see all these things that are happening. Why do you think that we can't do those things too? Like the blind see the deaf hear the lame walk. You are you telling me that you don't want to be a part of the world in which those things happen?

So you're saying that you believe they happen one time, but they can't happen today. Prophecy. And then, you know, if it gets political, it's like... Do you think that the world is an okay place right now?

Do you think that we're not coming closer to the end of days and everybody always feels like the end of the world is just right around the corner. And so if you already believe in God, it's harder to like convince, I remember going and trying to preach to Buddhist monks in India, that was a harder sell.

They were not getting hooked by the things that I was saying because they didn't have any grade for it. And they didn't believe there was no like, there was very little shared belief that I could kind of grab onto.

There was larger principles of like peace and contentment and joy and all those different things that I could talk to them about that made the conversations with them like relatable. But in the Christian American mainline world, it's like, no, there's a lot of like, the charismatic world is built to radicalize Christians

to radicalize mainline Christians. I think I've talked about this before, but the goal of IHOP and Bethel is not to save lost souls. It's to radicalize other Christians. The Bethel doesn't fish from the agnostics well.

It doesn't fish from the Buddhist well or from the atheist well or from these, it fishes from the Christian well. It says, you Christians who you believe these things already here, take a bite, see that it could be more, it could be great, it could be beautiful and that God could speak to you.

And miracles can happen. And I know I've told this story once before, but it's worth repeating because it's absolutely a heartbreaking story. But I remember seeing this happen with a individual

who my father prophesied to, who so that the story goes, I father went to a church that he was new and this is when he was just starting prophesying doing his whole prophetic thing.

And I know that he was doing his same process where he would get information about the people in the church from other members of the church. I don't actually know in this specific situation how he got this information, but my father was speaking to a congregation and he gave a prophecy about a family.

And he was encouraging them, a lot of times he'll like pray a Bible verse. It's over a couple that he's praying over and trying to give them some sense of a word. bird that's more general. And then while he's doing it, he says that he gets this phrase and he tells the family she's still dancing. And it's hard to remember what actually happened versus the story because it's become a very grand story. So, but I know that the key is that he tells this family this simple phrase she's still dancing. Well, the couple had had a teenage daughter who had died a year and a half previously or something. Very

recently had recently passed away, she again, hit by a car. And she was a dancer and she was going to school for dance and or was planning on going to school for dance. And that's all she would do and she would dance in the church and everything like that. And so my dad gives this prophetic word of she's still dancing. And the couple breaks down like just absolutely fundamentally breaks down. And from what I remember of the story, the husband wasn't even a believer or he wasn't a he wasn't a charismatic believer. He might have been like mainline Christian believer, but he didn't believe in prophecy and give

stuff. Well, I'll tell you, he certainly did after that instance because he gets this prophetic word about his daughter still dancing in heaven from this man who doesn't know them, doesn't know anything about them, doesn't know about their daughter or at least that's what they thought.

And if you think about that and just use that as sort of a perspective of when you are there are people like my father and like Mike Bickle and Bob Jones who are so adept at finding the thing to say to you, finding the way to appeal to you and they're using their magic tricks like they're using their deception. Never would it probably have crossed the individual, the man who is in there, never would have crossed his mind that that something that extreme was going on that someone had told my father about their story, which is probably what

happened. I don't know for sure if that's what happened because this was before I really knew what my father was doing. So it just it just goes to show you I think like how compelling the hook can be at different times. People look at this and say oh it's it's dumb people who are getting sucked in. No it's vulnerable people and we're all vulnerable in some way and if if the community or these these magicians who are in the community are able to understand and identify.

where you are weak, it is really, really not that hard to get people hooked. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started, or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new Apostolic Reformation?

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

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

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

So I want to go back and focus on something that you said earlier. You mentioned just open up your Bible. You can see the current events happening here. That's part of the problem. When I mention the end of day's focus, these cults, they don't understand hermeneutics at all.

And more to the point, one of the things the Laterane did, which was horrific in the face of Christianity, was they manipulated people into believing that any sort of education of Bible study is wrong.

And they called it cold, formal religions. You're not supposed to understand the cultures that the Bible is talking about. You're not supposed to understand the types of genres that are in the Bible. You're not supposed to understand what this thing is that you hold in your hand.

We're going to be the ones to tell you this. That's how they pitched it. And the problem is exactly that. In the Brannum cults, remember this was happening during the Cold War as the Laterane was growing.

And you had to rush a fears, which ironically we have again today. You had all of these fears of turmoil. And because they had not taught the people proper hermeneutics, and more specifically, they had not taught them the covenants to understand the biblical covenants.

They would always go back to some prophecy from the Old Testament that literally said, because you Israel have done this thing, you've went into idolatry. And now this is the judgment of my wrath that I give upon you, Israel.

Has nothing to do with the Gentiles, the current events, Russia, China. These countries didn't even exist back then, right? But one of the things that actually Christian identity did this, one of the things that created a foundation for the belief system was that the Old Testament prophecies are twofold.

It was, for the actual thing that it was prophesied for in the Old Testament, it was a shadow of the things to be that are happening today. So an example of this that I'll always go to, in a huge laterane convention in Chicago, Brannum claimed that outer drive in Chicago was exactly what Nahum was prophesying about.

Nahum, his prophesying about Nineveh. And nobody stood up and said, hey, you idiot, that's not correct. Instead, people ran with it, one of the people being Jim Jones, who believed that there was going to be a sudden destruction, and he migrated his family to South America the first time, shortly after this.

They went back a second time to Guyana, where the people's temple met their end. But this type of hermeneutics created the foundation. And so whenever you have a person who has read their Bible who understands the culture, and they look from the outside in at these cults, they say, well, how can they believe any of this?

You have to understand, whenever you're talking about any passage or story in the Bible, usually the person who's in the cult doesn't even understand the words that you're saying to them because their foundation is entirely different.

I first came across this whenever, I was having some deep discussions after I left the cult, trying to learn more about the Bible. We were both talking about the same passage. We were both kind of even saying the same things, but I'm often left field because my foundation is so wrong.

And that's how it is whenever you're in these movements. So I took the time and it took years to try to study and wash that out of my head. Not everybody does that, so they get sucked in by other cults.

And it's part of the revictimization process. They've been so falsely trained that it's very easy to get sucked into another movement. Totally. And what's so funny is I was brought up as a preacher's kid, and someone who also ministered like I was put in front of the pulpit a lot in whether in front of children or even adults and whatnot to sort of preach.

So I had to develop my own little mini-sermons when I was kind of 15 and on up until mid-20s. And I remember having this sort of internal tension because I still remember my first like full sermon was...

Well, actually the first full sermon was on the Beatitudes and then my second full sermon was on Isaiah 60. Arise shine for your lightest calm in the glory of the Lord. has risen upon you. I'm going to butcher some of it, but it's this prophecy about how nations will be brought to you and kings to the brightness of your dawn. It's a great passage. It's very beautiful. But I first read that and I was taught this is how you read the Bible. I was taught that you just pop up in the Bible, feel inspired by the Holy Spirit, and then have God speak to you

by whatever passage that you go to. Like so many of that was like the method of so many people's morning Bible studies. It's just like let the Spirit lead you, open it up, read a passage, and take it in. It could be in the middle of a chapter. It could be at the end of the chapter. It's just, you know, whatever thought God is expressing to you, maybe sometimes even whatever specific sentences, you know, you just pull up. And so I had a very like spiritual experience with this Isaiah 60 of like a Rai shine for your light has come. And the you in that I thought was me,

right? Because Isaiah said, you know, yeah, I'm just reading it. And it says a Rai shine. That's to me. That's talent. It's just speaking directly to me. For years, I preached on it. I

this was like my core sort of ministry. And then at one point, I was like, this isn't about me, is it? This is about either the Messiah or Israel. And I actually don't even remember what it's about, whether it's about Israel or whether it's about the Messiah specifically. But I was like, I am not the main character in this story. And I think that it's fun. I think a lot of people will read the Bible in a particular way. Like I'm not interested in telling people how they ought to read the Bible or not. But I think that it showed me sort of the like lack of discipline that was in

this world that like you built out ministries. And because I kept being like, I talked with, I remember talking about Frazier, I remember talking with my dad about like, can I not preach on this? Because I'm not really giving like, I think I need to study what this passage is really about in like the specific context. And I don't think that it's fair to like say it over me. And both of them were like, oh, no, you're doing great, bud. Keep going. You know, like they didn't they didn't could care less about whether or not I was taking the Bible out of context.

And I just think that it gets so dangerous because then what is created in these worlds are

the sort of like fast food and the fast food by where it's just, you can pick it up and you can have it in what you want to have it your way, to have it your way, you know, like it's just so quick and easy and it satisfies you in the moment, but you don't sort of delve in deeper and there's like a epidemic, I think that this would be a great different whole podcast, but there's an epidemic of people who are, who'd never went to Bible school, never studied, never put in the hard work to really understand it, and the idea

behind it was like, well, we shouldn't limit who got it speaking through, the Holy Spirit should be able to speak through anyone. And it's like, yeah, but like, can some of the leaders be a little grounded in at least like a philosophical discipline and religious discipline and not just make the Bible be whatever they want it to be, and I think that's what you see is that it just, it opened up and I totally get how like a Jim Jones sees that gets so excited about it because he's like, I don't, I'm interested in these particular ideas is the Bible something that I can use to support ideas

and use these and of course they're like, have nothing to do with Christianity. I mean, Jim Jones built a religion that worshiped him and probably a little bit more explicitly than some of these other individuals who also did the same thing. And if the if the Bible is fungible and can just be turned into whatever you want and you can just kind of use these passages at a context and there's no sort of discipline around it, then it really is compelling to in the moment. It's you can really get sucked in because whatever you want in that

moment, the Bible can give you. And if you have people who know the Bible enough to be able to to give you what you want in the moment, like I remember people being like using it like, oh, the poor will always be with us. You know, if you're feeling anxiety because you saw someone who is homeless on the corner and you're like, I feel like I should help them. And God has told me to like, if I have two coats, I should give it to them. And then you have someone who comes by and it's like, the poor will always be with you and it's, you know,

you can just use these sort of like popcorn bits to be like, oh, okay, I don't have to, I don't have to feel that uncomfy feeling of being like, I should take care of the widow and orphan and the homeless person who want to order because I can take whatever I want from the Bible, apply it to me. And there we go. So I, yeah, I think it's so astute to recognize that as a central sort of tactic in the way that people get drawn in, because it is, yeah, it's the have it your way gospel.

So I'm going to go a little bit out of the norm for our podcast, usually whenever I'm going to say something that angers a lot of people, I usually save that for the podcast that I'm doing with Bob, because he's going to do it anyway, and I can throw my stuff in there at the same time, right?

But you mentioned the other religions, well, so there is a huge problem that exists. And it's not just with the cults, but it's more so in the cults. And that is the ministers who are preaching.

I hate to use the term, they get full of themselves. I'll just say it like that. That's probably the nicest way for me to say it. And they get up on the soapbox against everybody, everything, and they start saying things about other cultures, other religions, other faiths, even the Bible.

They start saying things that aren't true as long as it fits their agendas. And so the problem is that many of the people listening aren't that knowledgeable about history and culture. And so whatever the minister says, they take it as proven fact.

And I started, once I started studying the ancient cultures and I began reading the Bible, a lot of the things that you read make a heck of a lot more sense than just reading it in the Queen's English from the 1600s, like we did in King James Version.

And even that, some of the language has changed. There are words in the old King James Bible, it will even in the New King James Bible, that mean differently today what it meant when it was written.

So understanding all of this, it takes a lot of work. When we left the cult, the same problem existed. I'm studying all of these things and I'm sitting in the sermon and this guy at this church got up on his soapbox and started blasting whatever it was.

And he started describing the Bible, speaking against whatever was his soapbox and totally missed the context. And I'm just shaking my head like, do you not even study before you preach, man? Well, the problem is that in the cults, because there is such an agenda in the cults, they've all gathered together, that's how that's the reason why a cult forms.

They gather together under some common agenda, something that everybody sees as a good thing. But they use, they misuse the Bible to get there. And they rip things out of context and they start saying things that aren't true.

So whenever you're going to the Buddhist and you're trying to convince them that you should be concerned, the end of the world is here, the end of the world is not. You're speaking to a people who are trying to promote peace, love and, you know, the Buddhist ways of life, the Buddhist philosophy.

That's not something that's going to appeal to them at all. Right. And I have been both. in the cult and out of the cult, I've set through sermons, completely trying to describe what a Buddhist is and totally missing it like they had no clue what Buddhism even is.

So I realized that I needed to take a step back. I want to learn more about the world I live in. So I began studying the different philosophies, I'm no expert at by no means, but I at least know what they are.

And I think the problem is because, because those soap boxes exist and because people are so easily swayed and because they haven't studied, they are more susceptible to the agendas of the cult. I'll just say it like that.

Whereas if people were to truly take the time to understand history, understand culture, understand, at least, you know, if you're gonna read the Bible, it's if it is your primary book for your religion, if it's your whole entire worldview, at least know what's in it and at least know the cultures that it's describing whenever you read it.

I'll never understand why people don't do this, but not everybody takes the time to do it. Well, and so there are two different things because I think that this is, I'm with you 100%.

I think that on the pastoral level, you don't want your congregation to be asking questions about and learning more information, even if you think that it's like, well, it's Bible studying, we're studying more about this.

The dogmatism and epistemic curiosity or just like dogmatism and knowledge don't work together. If you study the Bible,

even if you really go to the same conclusions, you're gonna do it with a lot of like, well, I'm pretty sure. And pretty sure is not a good way to preach a gospel if you're wanting to save as many souls, so to speak, as possible in the briefest amount of time.

You don't want to go there and be like, I'm pretty convinced that it might have been revelations might have been already fulfilled and it might have been in reference to Nero and the Roman Empire, but like, I'm pretty sure that it actually refers to the end times that might be coming around the corner, but scholars debate it.

That's not a good sermon, right? You want to be able to say dogmatically, this is what is happening. This is what this Bible verse means. This is how it applies to me. And if you can't actually do the research, if you want to do that, the same thing with me.

Like, my sermon about Isaiah 60 got considerably worse when I got more, when I started questioning whether or not it was relevant to me, you know? It became... it became a much blander, much more tepid, reserved gospel because I was like, well, I don't actually, I don't know if kings are going to be brought to the brightness of my dawn. I think that I can use that as sort of inspiring language for the things that I'm supposed to do, but I think that the literal metaphor was, or the literal prophecy was for Israel. Like, that's just, it's not as convincing

of a gospel. So I totally understand where, or at least not as immediately convincing, it's not as immediately like drawing as this sort of more dogmatic, convinced gospel that people preach. And then I think on the other end, if we're not talking about the people who are preaching it, and if we're talking about the people who are listening, I don't really think a whole lot of individuals have even the social capital to be able to question what their pastors are teaching.

Like, I genuinely, and this is, this is a lot of what my entire thesis was about is that I, it takes a certain amount of power to even be able to have the agency to question what is going on. Because if your entire social circle is going to this church, where this pastor is dogmatically saving these statements, and then you're like, I don't know, this just, I don't, Pastor Jim, today, was really hammering on this verse. And like, that's not what the verse means. And I've read some apologetics. If you don't have a certain measure of social capital in your community,

you will almost certainly be punished or isolated because of those beliefs. Like, maybe you can get away with it once or twice. But if you say that a lot, you're going to stop being invited to church.

You're going to stop being invited to Bible study. You're going to not be able to commune with the rest of the group because you are now in opposition to the group just by asking questions.

Right? This is, this is something that I felt so deeply growing up of being like asking like bad questions, good questions, just being like, this doesn't make sense to me. As a good question, I should be wrestling through the details of all of this. And it's like, you're, it's, and I remember always being told it's good to ask questions. And I was like, no, practically, it's not. Like, practically, it has not helped me one bit. There's many times, there's an instance in which I asked a question about like the, the whole question of like, okay, Paul has all of these

gospels or all of these letters. They're not written to us. Why are we always having this, like, sort of literal? Why are we taking these things and then applying it to it like he's speaking to our church?

That doesn't even make sense. It's letters. It's not like, you know, sermons even like the Beatitudes or something where Jesus was up on a hilltop speaking to a wide variety of individuals. Like this is a letter for a specific individual to read about a specific church, and I remember asking that question.

And I think that I've told this story too, but I got like immediately excommunicated where I was going to be speaking at a conference, and I got, I was there at the conference. I like went up on stage.

It was supposed to be my turn. And Bob Frazier, the person who I was doing ministry with just like totally skipped over me because I was asking these questions about Paul and like being like, this doesn't make sense.

And the practical applications of like, hey, we're kind of having a pretty misogynistic community here, and people are taking some of these verses out of context to really bash on women and make it so that women can't have a place to speak in this community.

And because I said that, like I immediately, that was the last time I ever spoke for that religious organization, the Joseph Company, that like I helped as a kid. Like I helped build. Like I was there.

I was doing it. Like most of my teens, I was helping with the ministry. I would go on mission strips with them or or conference trips. I would do the videos and I would ask the questions and I would ask my dad questions to help because my dad was a minister for the Joseph, like I poured my heart and soul into this ministry that I immediately immediately got excommunicated from because I asked a single question.

Then you are told by others, no, it's good to ask questions. No, it's not. No, it's not. It just isn't. Because like, if you ask questions of these dogmatic principles, you will get excommunicated from the group.

And it's terrifying when that happens. I know I've been going, but just one last thought that I have to is, you know, and I think this now spills into the conversation of not why people get drawn in, but why people stay once they are in.

And this just goes to like, when you are a part of a group where most of your social sphere, if not entirely your social sphere, believes a certain thing. For you to not believe that thing is is nearly impossible.

I have a friend of mine who's an author and in a passage, he's a, his name is Nick Casey and he narrates some great, he's written some several excellent books and one of his books.

character kind of talking about this notion of insanity. And I just want to pull this one quote that he says, the rubric for sanity isn't rationality. It's sociability. The unsocial and the insane are synonymous far as I can tell.

And once I read that that quote has spoken to me so much

because it's not about sanity. Sorry, sorry, it's not about rationality. So many people are like, why didn't you leave? And they're asking from a rational perspective. It's not a rational question. It's a social question.

Do I have the freedom to be able to say, I do not believe and not lose everyone I love and care about? That's the topic. It's not a matter of like this A plus B equals C.

It's not a rational question. It just isn't. That's not how humans work. Like the ash conformity experiments, there's these psychological experiments where they get, they got a group of people together around, around table.

And they have various lines that are on a board. One is like, you have A here, B here. Oh, I'm going to be out of frame C here. And it's clear that like, let's say for example, let's say that is pretty clear with by the naked eye that B is the longest line.

A is kind of close and then C is half the size of B. And you get, I think that it's called, you have one person who's being tested and then you have like 10 other people who are, I think it's called Confederates, but individuals who are like plants in the room.

And so there's 11 people or so who are in the room. And only one of them is actually being tested. But they think everyone else is being tested. And the question is which of these lines is the longest.

And they can clearly see it's B. But the person in front of them says A. And then the person before that says A as well. And then A at A. And then it gets to them.

And I think it's something like 75% of people in this situation said A rather than B. It's not everyone, but almost everyone or the majority of people in those situations would just say what the other individuals were saying because that's that it's not about rationality.

It's not about like this looks bigger. They like, whether they're gaslighting themselves to be like, god damn, all of these other individuals are saying this. So maybe I'm just, maybe I need to get glasses or something like that.

Or maybe they're not even thinking about it. Maybe it's like, it's clearly B. But I'm not going to be the one to disrupt this whole thing. So I'll say A, whether they are conscious or not of the...

sort of shift that they take, whether they know what they're doing is irrational, I'm not totally sure. But it's been pretty proven and studied that people will conform to their social group.

Even when they don't know the social group, purely because that's like that, even at the expense of like very obvious rationality, because that's just what we do. We're social creatures, like that's how we've evolved or were created depending on how you see it.

Like that is what humans do. And so the question of like, why did you stay there? Everybody in my life said that I should stay and everybody in my life said that the line A was the biggest, even when I saw it was B.

And I tortured myself every night for five years. Knowing that there was a discrepancy there, but because I knew that I would lose the people that I loved, if I stepped out, I never stepped out.

And that was true of my story for probably a decade or so and until I finally was able to. And honestly, the only reason, not the only reason, but what made it significantly easier for me to sort of start questioning and stepping out and being like, I don't believe this, is that my sisters were two.

And my mom was asking questions like, I knew that my family members and my friend Nick who wrote that passage. I remember having conversations with him and others where we sort of, behind closed doors, there's this really weird phenomenon where it feels like you're doing something wrong and you're like, I remember Nick and I would go up on the rooftop and we would be away because we were leading a house church at the time and we would have these questions and it just felt like, like at the time web was illegal in Missouri.

Now it's not, but we would like smoke weed and ask questions on the end of it and it felt like we were doing criminal and I was way more worried about the questions that I was asking rather than the like illegally smoking weed.

Like it's just, it felt criminal what we were doing to be able to ask these questions and had I not had that one person who's like, no, I've seen the line and I think it's B.

You know, then it opens up and makes it way easier but if you don't have that it's almost impossible to leave a community rational or irrational. It just, it pulls on your very sanity.

Yeah, I've seen that study that you're talking about with the group think. And in fact, I watched it as a larger, broader study of mind control and how mind control works. And basically, one in four people can't be.

controlled and manipulated like this, which means three-fourths of the people out there can be manipulated like this very easily. But so what's funny is you actually beat me to my main point and you did it much better than I probably could have done it.

So I'm just going to reaffirm what you just said and I want to go back though. One of the things you're talking about was the Paul's letters. I have mentioned this also in the podcast with Bob, but one of the defining moments in my learning to understand my worldview. I came to that same point where I realized, wait a minute, these are letters written to another culture for problems that don't even exist today. And I began to think about the way in which they're being taught and it's not just in the cult churches. Some of the mainstream churches have also done this, but

the problem historically, if you understand what Jesus says when he's talking about the Pharisees and the law, a lot of people don't take the time to understand what that means, but he was condemning those who followed the letter of the law instead of its intent. And the law was the books of Moses, the old covenant. And what's interesting about all of this in one of Paul's letters to Corinthians, he says the letter of the law leads the soul to death. But people have taken the mail that Paul wrote to other people and they're trying to turn it into the letter of the

law instead of understanding its intent. And I heard sermon after sermon after sermon, preaching those things, doing exactly what Jesus condemned the Pharisees for doing. And I was explaining this problem to a pastor and out to lunch one day and he says, yeah, whenever I start preaching from those, I usually say, now, once you're all to understand, I am about to read somebody else's mail. And so I went to one of his servants, he actually did this. That's what he said. But the main point I was going to hit, which you did, is questioning the pastor. That is one of the

paradigms that has, it's not just in the cult churches, this far expands beyond just the cults. But these guys get up on the soapbox where they think that they are the authority. And you're not allowed to question. And if you do, it breaks the religious norms. You're not allowed to do this.

And what it does, it creates an unhealthy environment. Because if you're a child, you have a questioning mind. And you haven't yet been taught the cultural rules for what's right and what's right or wrong in the religious world. So if you're a child and you're questioning religion altogether, and you go to your parents and you say, Dad, I think I'm an atheist, well, suddenly you get branded by the parents. Oh, No, don't say that.

Don't let anybody hear you say that. In the same way that they would if somebody were to say, Dad, I'm almost actual. Don't say that. We'll be shunned. We'll be kicked out of the church.

They've made the church an unhealthy place, instead of being that way where you push people out and you scorn them. Well, if the child has questions that need answer, just answer the questions, man.

That's all the child wants, right? But they create this unhealthy place where you cannot question. And then that leads to the next problem because that environment exists. Now you really can't question the pastor because you're in this cultural environment where I'm not allowed to question.

And if I question the pastor, I'm going to get chastised. And I mentioned a few things now with you that I've not mentioned in public. But one of the many churches that we tried after leaving the cult, this became a problem for me because I had, I was filled with questions.

Nothing the pastor said matched what I had been taught. And so I sat through a sermon where I got chastised from behind the pulpit in a non-cultural church because I asked a question and actually going back at, you know, I knew where I stood with my questions, but the pastor said something that was quite contrary to what the text that he preached said.

Yeah. That problem exists, but you hit the nail in the head. That is the root of the problem. If people were in a religion where they were taught, it's okay to question the pastor.

And the pastor wants the people to give him feedback because if I'm a speaker and I make a mistake, I want to know it. I don't want to repeat that mistake. But if that were the case, then I think it would be very difficult to create the cults that we have.

Totally, especially if there's an appreciation for a variety of answers to the question, you know, like if it's, because that was another problem too, I remember when I, there's times where I was engaged

at one point and I was with my partner and she was wanting us to go to church

and to be a part of these communities. And she was like, it's okay to have questions, ask these questions to the individual. And I remember asking one of the pastors that we were potentially going to go to their church.

And I asked them, I can't remember what it was about. I think it might have been about wealth accumulation and, you know, the eye of the needle thing and just the discrepancy between like, why isn't this being, that's a whole different topic.

But like, me just being like, I don't, it's dissatisfying that the amount that we really don't preach against wealth accumulation in the church if we want to live like a radical gospel. And in his answer, he was like, he had the Mark Driscoll answer to the eye of the needle.

And he was like, oh, Jesus was joking when he talked about like that. It was like a joke. And it was supposed to be like tongue and cheek. And I remember being like, yeah, that's a really dissatisfying answer. And it got to that point where it was like, you can have questions, but you have to accept the answer. And it's like, okay, but that's a really dissatisfying answer. Like that's just not, I don't even understand that answer. Like when was Jesus not joke? And that's the like, oh, you see the humor of Jesus.

And I was like, what? I don't, I don't understand that at all. And so it's not you know, people will have this sort because they allow people to ask questions in a sort of

what's a good word for that? A performative way. Like there's places where you're allowed to ask questions in a performative sense where it's like, you can come to me. If you have a question about this, my dad was like this too, where he's like, if you have any question about anything that I say you can come to me. And truthfully, no, I couldn't because if I asked some questions about some things, it would send them off. But even if he was like, oh, that's a good question, here's the answer. And then if I don't, if I'm not satisfied with that answer,

there's no space for any other like, no, you have to believe this answer. And it was like, I don't just have questions. I have questions that are not being answered in any satisfying way.

And and that's that's probably, you know, in a dogmatic co-community, you cannot have that. You cannot have multiple people having multiple answers to a question. And you certainly can't have, I don't know, as they answer. You can't have people be like, hmm, even even like your your friend who the pastor who is like, well, I'm going to be reading someone's mail, you know, it's probably a small church because that's not a good mega church thing to say. You shouldn't undercut your you shouldn't undercut your message if you want it to like, if you ever have to start your message

by qualifying it and being like, well, you know, this is in context, you know, people are going to get tired and walk away. And because they don't they don't want to hear that. They want to hear or the community doesn't want to hear that. The community wants to hear conviction. The community rallies around conviction. I'm struggling. I'm laughing because I'm trying to picture myself.

I have this sense of humor like nobody has what I have with a sense of humor. I can't make it stop. And if somebody had have said something like this to me, I don't insult them back. I don't insult them. Instead I say, oh, that So out of the entire New Testament, Jesus was serious in every single statement, except for one he told a joke.

Right. Right. The one that particularly applies to you and the other rich Christian individuals. Like, oh, you're calling all of us to sacrifice everything, but you and your seven houses, like you don't know.

Oh, Jesus was joking when he said to give your second coat to the poor, you know. Well, I think we could go on for an hour. It looks like we've already gone over. So we'll have to stop and we'll answer the rest of the questions next time.

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-Branham.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 Audible. Available on Amazon, Kindle. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.