Heresy Hunters: Are They Saving the Church or Tearing It Apart? - With Bob Scott

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host 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 Bob Scott, former co-founder of the Kansas City Fellowship and the author of three books, the latest of which is some say they blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Bickel, the Kansas City prophets, and the international house of prayer. Bob it's good to be back and to talk about all things mess and chaotic in our religious society. You pitched an idea

this morning and we're going through it and it's you know most of these podcasts I just do off the cuff because I find that people enjoy them more if both sides are impromptu and you hear literally raw and uncut what is coming from the heads of both people. The problem is you and I our heads are so scrambled I'm not certain that people pick it up but it is what it is right but today we're diving into the world of heresy hunters and this is a topic that I'm actually glad you brought this up because it not only does it fascinates me that this thing exists and we live in a strange

world where people are becoming famous as heresy hunters but on the flip side the church is in such a mess that you have to have those to balance the scale but in doing so where does the perfection lie because on both sides you have this kind of extreme so I wanted to talk through the extremes with you. Well that's good. I'm going to do a little sidebar here but I just wanted our audience to know that I have become more engaged in the comments on our podcast and I want to tell you all I really

appreciate seeing these comments and how many people are engaged in what we're talking about that's always encouraging because you know we're talking about things that matter to us and you're always wondering does this matter to other people well what I'm realizing and listening I shouldn't say listening and reading the comments you guys are tracking with us so I really appreciate it and always remember John and I are explorers so when we do these podcasts we're asking questions on a journey we don't have all the answers because we don't even assume that we have all the answers.

We kind of see ourselves as two guys that started out like all of you, we were told where to look, what to see and how to interpret it. And then we lived our lives and discovered, well, not everything that we were told is true.

And so now we're trying to unpack all this and try to figure out what do we have here? Like what's real and what's not real? Which in reading all your comments, I'm realizing you're all on the same journey as well.

So I appreciate you going on the ride with us. So let's get into our topic that we were gonna talk about. I was telling John that I've been feeling something in my soul and it's not always easy to articulate, but I have noticed over the last year, well, maybe more 18 months, it'd probably be more accurate.

That the social media world is abuzz with a group of people who seem to be focused on their podcast about pointing out who's wrong.

And I certainly don't want to say that that's not important because it is. But it's almost like they're building their whole audience and reputation about being, as you'd call it, a heresy hunter. And what's concerning me is we keep talking about who's wrong, but what we're not doing is drilling down as to what's wrong.

In other words, these various scandals, these various men who have fallen, I guess is the word we're all using, came up through a system.

They were the same thing that I talked about earlier. They were told where to look, what to see, and how to interpret it. And they're sort of a product of a system, right? And what's wrong is the environment in which who's wrong has been incubated.

And we don't ever talk about that. In other words, what created these guys? What was the incubator that they were born in? I mean, once you understand the soil in which the ministry world is planted, you're less surprised by the bad fruit they bear.

In other words, if you understand the system, right, that they came up through, you're less shocked by the bad fruit. If you understood that in the beginning, you'd know where this was gonna end up.

And when I was younger, people always thought I was prophetic, right, because I would. You know, I would sort of say I have a bad feeling about this and I think this is going to end up over here and it always did, right?

Well, the fact of the matter is I'm just curious. And I know some of you guys are going to laugh because you've all pointed it out in the comments. I started asking why? That little three letter word that haunts me all the time.

Why? Why am I observing things that are causing me to feel this for boating feeling? Why am I... Why do I have a sense of yuck in my soul? I know that's a terribly sophisticated word.

But I think you guys understand what I'm talking about. You're sitting in church and there's something in you that's going yucky. This is yucky. And you don't always know why, right? And you feel like I need to go home and take a shower because it's slimy.

Yeah. No, it's funny because this is a podcast about perspectives and my perspective based off of just the limited knowledge that I have of what's in your head. My perspective is a little bit different than yours.

And I come at this from my own example of my own changes in how I view the world and the religion, etc. So whenever I'm doing my podcast, if I'm exploring William Brannum and I'm documenting history, much of that history has been covered up to the people who are in the Brannumite called.

And so to them, I'm a heresy hunter because I'm exposing the heresies and the nastiness, right? But to everyone who's not a Brannumite, I try to do what I do in a very balanced way.

Here's the history you can make of it what you will. To them, I don't come across like that. It's funny. I'll get emails. Why didn't you just come down hard against such and such?

Well, that's not me. I'm not my personality. I could never be a heresy hunter. I just couldn't do it. But the point I'm trying to make here is to the groups that are being exposed.

I come across that way. Anything that I document about history of John Wember, for example, anything. Here what it is, I can find 10 different very respectable authors that give the same histories in their book.

But if I present it to the Wember crowd, I'm heresy hunter against Wember. Why are you doing this, John? Wember apologized for that in his last years. You can't say this. But it's not that way, man.

I'm just, here's the history. I don't care what you think of it, right? But now take that to the flip side. Let's say that I were a heresy hunter. The issue that I have is that when I was in that type of religion, I had the same mindset.

I'm always right. I don't care. Whatever you say, I'm right. I have that mentality. I'm always right. Because... I know the cult that I grew up in and whenever I left the cult, that mindset stayed with me for a long time.

I came across that way and the problem is when you have that mindset, you're not open to learn. And so I was very close-minded. I didn't learn. I didn't grow. And it wasn't until, gosh, I'll bet I was out of the cult for five years before.

It finally dawned on me that I know nothing in this world, man. Absolutely nothing. And I started fresh from nothing and I just started adding to it with an open mind that everything that I know, say, or do could be wrong, right?

And so there's that learning aspect. Now, from a business standpoint, I run teams of developers and for years, many of the contracts that I would engage in, you would have a team of developers and if you approach the development team such that you knew everything and they knew nothing, which was the mindset I was programmed to have, ironically, what happened was you constrained them from learning.

If they didn't make their own mistakes, they couldn't learn and grow. And if you don't control them to that level, the end result is actually better. You get a better product if you let people make mistakes and learn from their mistakes.

There's a phrase that we use in the IT world, fail fast, fail hard. So failure is not a problem in the IT world. You fail, you fix it, you move on, and then you evaluate what did I learn from that mistake that I just failed in, right?

Interestingly, in the Hairsi Hunter world, it is an all right, all wrong, very black or white mentality in most cases. I'm not going to say that everyone who's labeled that, that has that mentality, but in most cases that I've seen, they have what is their core doctrine that they believe and it's all right, all wrong.

And interestingly, if you take a step back and just rise above all of that, rise above the actual problems they're pointing out in the church and the people who are pointing them out. The reason why we have so many denominations in Christianity is because some of the core doctrines that one crowd or the other deems Hairsi, they are heretical, they will draw a line in the sand and say, no, we're forming our denomination on this side or this other side.

And so you can't really coexist in this world. So we have a Christian world where you can't coexist in a black or white mentality. But then within that realm, you have people that say, no, it is black or white.

Otherwise, you're in Hairsi. And what happens is, where do you point the finger? Well, one of the things I've observed about you, what I don't think the Christian community quite grasps. It's sort of interesting.

historian. Now, it's in the religious context, but as a historian, when you're doing your research and you're writing the book, you're telling the story, right? You're doing your research and you're telling your story. Good, batter ugly. You're trying to be honest, right? You're trying to tell an honest story. I mean, I got to be careful here because I don't want to pull us into the political specter, but we're observing this right now, right? With these books that are coming out about Joe Biden's mental capacity, right? And you see it in the political world. The historian people are going, well, this is an honest evaluation of what was actually happening.

But then the diehards are going, you betrayed us. You know, that's not true, right? And so you see, the ones that are trying to protect the system are fighting the historians, right? So one of the things we always have to ask ourselves when we're listening to somebody talk is what's their perspective like what's why are they doing this? And there are some people who are just dog loyal and will go down with the ship protecting the system. It has nothing to do with the facts are, it has to do with this thing as God. Therefore, you know, we have to protect it at all cost and they

don't really have the capacity to step back and be objective. They're too emotionally engaged in the whole thing. So I think if people understand that in our discussion, it's two guys who are pseudo historians. I mean, we don't have degrees, you know, in history, but then even the people who have degrees in history these days are just pretty weak in there. It's not like the older historians, right? But look at Abraham Lincoln. I mean, people that write about Abraham Lincoln, you know, when he was a sitting president and he's until this day has the least popular rating of any sitting

president took a hundred years for his reputation to change. If you would have written about Lincoln in 1870, half the country hated him. A hundred years later, he's a hero. Now he's on our money. We have a memorial to him and he's considered one of the greatest presidents ever. Why? Because historians went back in there and separated out the emotional perspective from the facts. And one of the reasons that I got attracted to you is as I was watching some of your podcasts, you were peeling the historical onion. You were going down, I watched you through your, you know, your various podcasts

and it's like you get pealing. heirs off, right? Because you were trying to get to the heart of the matter, like, what's the real truth there? And you were telling stories going, well, no, the fact is this didn't really happen.

And this was hype, and this was actually authentic. You see what I mean? Because, and that's what historians do. So if people could sort of get outside of their Christian snobby-ness, or their prejudices, their emotional prejudices, and realize, sometimes you just got to be a historian, and go back and tell the story.

Exactly. You know, I was going to leave politics out of this, but when you think about today's world, and you think about Christianity, sadly, you really can't avoid politics, because they have merged, and they're one and the same.

But one of the things that you said made me really think about today's politics, which I'm still going to do my best to avoid, but what has become popular? And I don't know really why this is, but it has become popular to have witch hunts.

And in this world that we live in today, you have Christianity is a good, prime example of how a culture and society can influence something to become far beyond what it should be. And so we have elements of entertainment mixed with our Christianity.

We have elements of politics. We have all of these different things that are making it. And what's happening is there are people, sadly, who are Christian, who don't read their Bibles. In fact, I've read some statistics, and majority of Christians have never read their Bible, which is really odd to me, man.

If this is the book that is the foundation for your worldview, why in the world would you not read the thing, right? But they don't under, because they haven't read it, they don't understand that these political themes have nothing to do with Christianity, or these witch hunt themes have nothing to do with Christianity.

All they hear are the elements that connect the dots, given to them by pastors, and so they think it is part of Christianity. But we've created this world of witch hunts, and people are trying to find fault.

But now, I like to balance things. So take the other side of that scale. If you're of that mindset where there's a witch hunt, there must be a witch hunter. And so as I'm writing the history, and I'm presenting the history, and like you say, I'm peeling little slayers of this onion to try to get to the core and see what is this mess, what's funny that I have found, and it comes directly from the political influence?

I can peel an onion, and people know what is under the next layer, because often I will peel so slowly that I dissect it properly, and I can evaluate everything. So I'll publish one thing, and you'll have this crowd of people that know, well, he just found this, the very next thing, he's going to find is this other thing which he didn't yet say and so what happens is in the comment feed you can watch people who start fighting over the thing that I did not yet say because that's how in this weird world that we're living in today that's

how you're trained to do you're trained there's a witch hunt so therefore there must be witch hunters and therefore we must fight them and let's head them off at the pass like the old cowboy like the old cowboys used to say in the military.

I was very shocked years ago and I saw George Barnes research on who reads their Bible. It's really rather mind-boggling what this is please don't be insulted when I say this but you need to hear my heart here.

The vast majority of Christians are echoes not voices and what I mean by that is is there so few people that actually read their Bible or do their own research and so when you hear them comment all they're doing is echoing something that some Christian leader told them and you find out when you push them a little bit and drill down on why they have the perspective they do they can't actually tell you where they discovered this truth they're just echoing it and that's created a huge problem.

One of the things that I've observed is that we all assume that our church culture is normal like the way we're doing church right now nobody in America well I shouldn't say nobody very few people in America challenge our models or how we do church we just all kind of assume that the American way is God's way and we never think about it we don't really think about what's gone on how did we get here is where we are right now really the Christianity that Jesus taught

or do we have an Americanized version of this and I know these are big questions but you get there when you've gone through I think what most of the people that follow our broadcast do which is go through seasons of disillusionment it's like I think a lot of our audience at least the ones that are commenting have gone through similar journeys that we have and they've gone through disillusionment and so they've sort of taken a step back a little bit and and everything's on the table as it were it's like all of the assumptions that they had were

they knew the truth and they died on the hill of the truth I mean, I've had more conversations than the last year of people going, like, I am completely going back to kindergarten in my faith. Like, I am challenging everything, and I think that's healthy.

Ernest Hemingway, everybody knows Ernest Hemingway, famous author. In 1926, he wrote this novel called The Sun Also Rises. And there's this interesting interaction between two of the main characters, and one of them asks the other, how did you go bankrupt? And the guy answers in two ways, gradually, and then suddenly. And the reason I point this out is because the mess we're in, because I don't think any of us can deny. We're in a mess right now.

I mean, we know some of the more hot profile situations that are showing up on social media, particularly in the Pentecostal and Charismatic World. But I can tell you as someone who moves between all of these various denominations and sects, the other groups have all the same problems.

They're just handled them differently. And the reason is they have systems in place, and they handle it behind the scenes where in the Charismatic Pentecostal world, because we have this man of God model, where we have the superstar entertainer guy that we're all following, who isn't connected to anything. We end up in these more sensational situations. So one of the things that I think people will identify about this phrase, gradually, then suddenly, think about things that are not in the church world, companies, Kodak. Remember how Kodak, from the early 1900s, all the way to about 20 years ago, you didn't take a picture,

you took a Kodak, is gone. And then suddenly, it's gone. They went from gradually to suddenly, how about Xerox? You didn't make a copy, you Xeroxed. Gone. Blackbuster. Remember how Blackbuster was like this massive video franchise, and I mean, they thought they had a sustainable model, until online streaming happened, right? Woolworth's, radio shack. I mean, these are secular things. Well, how about in the Christian world, P.T.L. and Jim Baker?

All right? How about Willow Creek and Bill Heibos? How about Mike Beckle and I have, or keys three- in the last days, right? In other words, this gradual and then these suddenly moments are happening not just in the secular world, they're happening in the church world.

So what are the questions I ask? What are the gradually dangerous subtle dynamics in play that we see currently affecting American culture?

That's impacting the church. Here's a hard truth. And this is one of these things we've got to be honest about. The Christian community initially was established by Jesus to impact the cultures that it existed in.

In other words, Jesus saw his message as transformative. In one of my books out of this line, the transformation of the soul is the soul of transformation. In other words, Jesus saw transformed human beings will transform societies.

And that happened. I mean, Christianity had a huge impact on transforming pagan cultures.

But something's happened in our lifetime. And what's happened is, is the secular world is now impacting the church world. It's like there's been a reverse polarity. And these are things I'd like to talk about.

So as I was telling John, I have three topics and we may end up discovering more that it'll probably take us more than this session to discuss. But the three, I think, gradually suddenly problems that we're dealing with is one, we've adopted a culture of narcissism.

We are, we don't realize it because it's happened so slowly over such a long period of time, but we live in a world right now that's very narcissistic. And I'm gonna explain how that happened.

And it's impacted the church world. Second thing is, is we've adopted a culture of entertainment. This is critical because this is totally shifted in my lifetime from, and the reason this is also significant

and we'll develop this more is that the cult, when a culture of entertainment impacts a society or a group like it did in the Romans, you know you're on the road to this thing ending.

The culture of entertainment, so impacted Rome that it ended up deteriorating the morals, ethics and values of the whole culture. And then the third thing that we can address at some point, right here is the urbanization of the church.

As we were talking about earlier, before World War II, 65% of the population lived in rural America, which has a very traditional communal experience. And then after World War II, we've grown these massive cities and now we have mega churches, right?

We have massive institutions of 10,000 people showing up in massive arenas all ready to be entertained,

like we're going to a rock concert. And we think it's so normal and we don't realize that this is a dramatic shift. So anyways, that's the kind of stuff I'd like to unpack if we can do it.

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 Brannum Historical Research's website William-Brannum.org.

On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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One of the things that you said that I want to go back and hone in on, you were talking about the way in which people think and how they become, people basically, sadly, many of them parrots and they're parroting what they hear.

And if you study the ancient mythologies in the ancient world, what's interesting is, you find that the world that we have sadly created today, very much mimics what we had in the ancient world.

And some of the ancient cultures, for example, whenever a king or pharaoh died, there were large numbers of people, sometimes the, I don't know if it's the entire population, but a large section of the population would die with them to go be with them in the afterlife.

They're taking their kingdom with them into the afterlife. Well, what about that one person who questioned and said, wait a minute, don't really need to die to go do this, can't I just die later and join them later, is there a static timeline?

You know, the person who's critically thinking would have died anyway, because as soon as they asked the questions, they're dead. That's the way it worked. And so carry that forward into today's world. They like.

suppress questions. And I have seen it, you know, in the cults, obviously, they suppress the questions. But even in some of the mainstream churches we've attended, I have seen this, not to the same degree, but I have seen it. They like questions and they encourage you to ask questions until those questions challenge core beliefs. And I go back to what I said about developers. You know, there are times when I see a developer, he's going to go down the wrong path and do something that I know is a mistake. But often, unless you let them

make that mistake and learn from it, they don't learn why it's wrong to do this. So if you want a powerful developer, you let them make the mistake, you, you know, protect them, make sure that they can learn and grow from it. Well, what happens in the churches today?

Because that theme exists, you can't ask questions if it's going to challenge core beliefs. People aren't growing and learning in the same way. And what happens as a result is that people don't really ask the questions that they need to. And worse yet, because of the heresy hunting mindset that we have today, powerful questions are suppressed. For example, when I started doing what I'm doing, I was strongly encouraged by several people in the apologetics community. I received all kinds of emails. And I made a name for myself apparently by challenging some of this because as they were encouraging me, they were trying

to also control and corral the way that I presented it. Because I had a genders. As, as one person who's rather famous, put it, and I won't say who it was, John, it's great what you're doing. But you need this other thing that I'm going to force you to do. Because if you don't let them do that, they'll ask the questions about what you're presenting. And then they may ask the bigger question, is there a God? And this is the big problem, right? They, some of the people who are involved in these heresy hunting things, they don't want people to ask

the basic questions. And they see this, oh my gosh, they're asking, does God exist? That must mean they're going to be an atheist. And my question always in response is, well, which God do you serve?

The God that's powerful enough to control the pathways of people who ask the questions and take their journey to their faith, or the God who's powerless and requires people like you to corral them.

Because I can't believe in a God that's that limited, that that's powerless, right? And those basic questions need to be asked. I think every child who's growing up should ask the question, does God exist? Well, why? Because along with some of the questions in religion, there are questions that can be answered. And those questions are the ones that many in the heresy hunting crowds will allow. But at the same time, there are a large number of questions that can never be answered in this life.

And those are the ones that they try to suppress or discourage. And if you allow a person to, I'm using the word loosely, grow. If you allow a person to grow without asking the questions that can't be answered, are they really converts or are they just simply going through the motions of becoming parrots?

Yeah. That's a good point. You know, I've run into that criticism, but it's a little different in that people have said to me, well, if you're pointing out what's wrong with the church world, you're causing non-Christians to not want to become Christians.

And the reason why that's so interesting to me is because one of, I think, and then we'll get into some of this as we keep talking, is that there's this attitude that's more perspective that's seeped into the church is that we got to look good, so God looks good.

Yeah. Right? And so, and the reason why this is so insidious and away or so dark is that that's what's created the facade of religiosity, right? The ferric cycleness of our lives, which the non-Christian community sees right through.

So this is so interesting to me because it's like people get real upset, you know, and they'll say, blah, blah, you're causing the Christians to stumble. And at my responses, no, you're causing the Christians to stumble because you're not being authentic.

My response is, is it actually stumbling or like I've been pointing out, do they learn and do they grow and do they become stronger for it? Exactly. But I think, I mean, you know, I think I've mentioned this to you before.

If you really want to find Christians that have sort of had enough of the church role, just go to bars. I learned this my years in the music business, you know, as we were traveling.

I couldn't, I was so shocked by that because I was so naive, right? I didn't realize what would happen. But then when we got into those situations and we were honest about our spirituality, well, they suddenly all came forward and we're telling their stories.

But the common thing I realized after a decade was the one thing that everybody was looking for was authenticness. Like, they didn't care if you weren't perfect, they didn't care if you made mistakes.

They just wanted you to be honest and they're the big offense for so many people as or not, we have this need to look good. And I think on a previous episode, I talked about in spiritual experience, I had at KCF where I realized that everybody that walked through the door put on a character.

They had a Sunday spiritual character. They went into character. Like the minute you walk through the door, you go into character, right? And you project a spirituality because you want everybody to respect you and like you and think you're important and all that.

But it's facade. And so I think that's one of our great weaknesses. And second thing that I've noticed about my peers in the ministry is to admit you don't know is like the worst thing you can do.

You know what I mean? Have you noticed this? It's like, somehow if you're in the ministry, you have to know everything. And you haven't answered everything. Like you can't just go, you know, I don't know.

I'm still trying to figure that one out myself. Again, what does it create? It creates this facade. Well, two things. It creates pressure on all the guys in the ministry to be know-it-alls, right?

And it creates, again, another facade. And then you have this gradually and suddenly in the guy falls.

And the reasoning falls is because you never honest with you about the fact that he was actually struggling with all kinds of things. And how do I know this? I have spent 40 years of my life picking up the pieces of guys who fell.

I know this story up close in personal. I could tell you story after story, but one of the things that causes this disillusionment in them and why they go off the rails is because they don't know.

And they've never really admitted that they don't know. And they get to a place where they don't know it becomes too much. And then they go off the rails. And I've seen it over and over and over again.

Right. Because they can't, the expectation of the audience is, well, Pastor knows everything.

He's the answer man, right? That pressure on guys in the ministry is overwhelming. And one of the roots of why we have this mess we're in right now. Right, it's one of the things that I mentioned earlier.

Christianity is no longer just Christianity. It's this Heinz 57 blend of other things. And only one component is Christianity, the rest are all these other things added to it. and business. So Christianity has become big business. Like it or not, if you go to a church, there is a bigger small. You can take a small church and it is a business. They have to run it like a business because they have to keep the lights on, sometimes rant, et cetera. Well, business has marketing and they have to make Christianity look pretty. You have to fill those seats because if you

don't have people who are paying either tithes or sometimes just cheerful giving, you can't keep the lights on. So you have to make it look pretty. And often what happens, I don't know if you've seen these, they do some documentaries and things on what they actually go through to create an image that is appealing enough for you to buy fast food. And sometimes what you're looking at is like Elmer's glue to make it look shiny. I mean, there's some really weird things they do. Well, what I have seen is churches try to do the same thing with

Christianity. They pretty it up and they make it look like this glamorous thing, especially if you're in a mega church. But Christianity has never been this absolutely pretty thing. It is a religion of taking the lowest people who are just there at they're at the bottom and God lifts them up.

I have a colleague, we've had friends for 40 years and I remember he's it was in the mergers and acquisition world, you know, where they buy distress companies and reform them. And then resell them and make millions of dollars. And we were sitting in this hop tub in Phoenix and he, you know, it was like 10 o'clock at night and he looks at me and goes, you know, it's all the perception game. And it was funny because it was just a casual comment. But everyone's around, you know, I have one of those things that just

goes, zing like it went, I went, oh my gosh, that's the church world. Yeah, it's a giant perception game. And I know it's terrible. I would never say that to anyone because I probably would insult every ministry guy out there. So I'll skip it to myself. But I realized over the course of many years in that world that it's true. It's a perception game. And so yeah, that's that's why I just think it's important that we need to go back and sort of look at how do we get where we are now? To your point, if you think

about early Christianity, this is kind of wild. To become a Christian was a death sentence. You know, there was this whole idea of looking good for God. This whole idea of, you know, I mean, bright and shiny, you know, and I'll put lipstick on a pig or whatever you want to call the terminal. It didn't exist for 300 years. To become a Christian meant it was a death.

sentence. You were isolated. You know, there's a reason why we have underground cities in Cappadocia, Turkey that housed 20,000 people underground. So what happened? See, these are the why questions I asked myself. If this was in a Christianity in the beginning, how did we get now 2,000 years later to where like you're saying it's a business, it's a show, it's entertainment, like how do we get there? And here's what's even crazier for me. Why do we all think this is normal?

Right? In other words, nobody stops and goes, wait a minute. Are we, you know, is this expression of Christianity that we have have normal? Like is this God's heart? And this is the terrible thing to say, but how's driving with the friend we were on the road for a couple of days. And I said to him, I go, this is terrible, but so many Christians in America think God looks like Uncle Sam. That's their version of God.

And I go, that really is bothering me because right now we're in this really patriotic moment. But it's like, I'm like, oh my God, people think that Uncle Sam is God. And it's like, how do we get here? Right? So that's the stuff I like that really kind of unpack with you and go, what happened here? Where did we go to where you go back? I mean, if you go back, this is a hard thing to say. But if you go back and you read the Sermon on the Mount, it's almost antithical to most

most people's American view. Right? In other words, our whole drivenness towards accumulation of wealth, achievement of status, right? The status and the stuff. That's the two words I used in my book, the, you know, climbing the social ladder to get status and accumulating stuff. And you go back and you read Jesus teachings and they're the exact opposite of that. We're not even on the same page here. We're not even in the same universe. He's telling everybody, there's no greater love than to lay your life down for another. He's telling everybody, if you've got two, give one away.

He's telling everybody, when you go to the feast, sit in the back. Don't sit there. Right? I mean, it's all the opposite. And so this is where I have these collisions in my soul going, what happened here? And maybe that's the real reason why we're not impacting our civilization.

Our civilization is impacting us. Something happened where we are no longer transforming anything.

It's transforming us. What's funny is I've come complete circle. So here's where I'll give some credence to the hairsty hunters and like you, I'm learning, I'm growing, I'm unpacking some of these things as I go.

In the Christian world, there are two camps of people. There are people who still strongly believe that today is filled with spirits and demons and there are others who don't view it in the same way.

They think that according to the Bible, these things did exist, but the way in which they exist today are different. So there's two camps of people. Historically speaking, if you go back to the early Christians, so you mentioned Christianity was a death sentence.

You believe Christianity you're gonna die. Well, that wasn't always the case. The earliest Christians that were in polytheistic religions and they didn't care who you worship. You could worship any of the many God, you could worship the unknown God, right?

You could worship any God. But what happens is whenever famine hits a town and a bunch of people die or war their town is pillage, whatever it is, they start looking around, okay, who of you serves the weaker God?

And here is Christianity who is recently birth. Well, this is a brand new religion. That must be the weaker God. And yet the early Christians weren't integrated into the politics because it was an early religion.

There was no church and state with Christianity for the early Christians. Well, once they started to figure out that this must be the quote unquote weaker God, now is when you started to bring in the martyrs and all the early Christians were persecuted and that continued for centuries.

But Christianity until it mixed with Rome did not become a union between church and state. And even when it did, there were people who rose an opposition to it and especially when Protestantism come.

So now fast forward this into the modern world. The spiritual, the spiritualist craze that hit the United States in the early 1900s swept through the nation and it brought this thing that was the polar opposite of Christianity.

It was basically researching all of the pagan ideas, the occult, all of these different things that was the complete antithesis of Christianity. The Laterane Movement took the more popular elements of that mixed it together and called it Christianity.

So it blended all of these pagan and occult practices into the move. And we see very clear examples of this. You can go read, don't take my word, you can go read any historian whose skeptical and critical of the latter reign will openly declare this mass.

So it brought in all of the occult, but what the occult brought the lights, clamor, fashion, the entertainment, because that's how the spiritualist movement grew to such craze in the United States and abroad.

It was mixing in elements of the entertainment system. So historically speaking, they created this thing that wasn't Christianity and it spread throughout the globe and wasn't Christianity, but did have elements that if you listened to it, you could hear the gospel in some of the ministers, maybe not all, but some of them would preach the gospel and this other thing and this pagan thing.

So they're doing both and that became commonplace as that became commonplace and started to emerge into the other movements. Now the current NAR today traces its lineage through this. So the God's generals, for example, they're going back through this lineage of this mass, this thing that wasn't Christianity.

So if you ask, how did this happen, how did this grow today? If you're in the camp that spirits and demons still exist, well here's clear evidence that we have that the occult has a mix with Christianity.

If you're in the other camp, you see something that's not Christian making something Christian. So in either camp, you can see how this happened. Well, I get one of my concerns right now as if you go back and study church history.

So for the first 300 years, Christianity was subversive, meaning that it did have political power. It didn't have any of the cultural leverage to influence from the top down. It influenced from the bottom up and it was relational, right?

People, you know, you don't read anywhere where somebody went to a Colosseum and held a revival meeting, right? And thousands of people got saved. There's none of that happens, right? It's a very modern kind of thing.

I mean, in fact, people would, that would have never happened, right? Because the civil authorities would have never allowed it to happen. So there was never any, Christianity didn't grow, you know, by big meetings.

It grew by your neighbors and your influence, right? It was, it traveled relationally. There that shifts is with Constantine. Because once Constantine, who was then the Emperor of Rome, embraces Christianity, he began to...

to Use his political power To stop the resistance against it and opens the door for it to become a key part of Roman culture two emperors later they suddenly make Christianity the state religion Right, so suddenly now it's no longer well, I shouldn't say no longer, but it's less about Relationships from the bottom up and it becomes more about political power Coming down and the reason why this is important is if you go back and you study how Christianity quote Christianity At least the name Christianity spreads it's because

certain religious leaders went to a king Converted the king and then the king sent an edict out that everybody in his realm Converged the Christianity So it was never about an in you know where the early Christians were so called baptized in the Holy Spirit in other words They had a spiritual experience and their their ins they were changed from the inside out their Morals values and ethics their motivations everything Transport from the inside out now that we're imposing a religious expression on people That's driven by people with an ulterior motive because they're wanting to unify their realm

Right and what you end up with of course is the utter corruption of the Catholic Church. I mean by 700 AD it's complete mess You know, then we have the Reformation, but even in the Reformation it was about transforming institutions

Right and who joined Luther all the German rulers Again, what's driving all this and and and so we've gone through all that and there's been these different reform movements, but again We don't ask a lot of questions because we have all these models right now that are so normal to us that we don't stop and go wait a minute You know and the reason it concerns me and I said this to somebody the other day I go in business When you have a problem that keeps recurring what do you do?

You get everybody in a room you have a post-mortem, right you tear that thing apart and You keep tearing it apart or peeling the onion as we like to say until you get to the root cause

In your programming world, it's a piece of code that didn't get coded right, but it's way down it's all right So you got to keep going through layers and layers and layers to you get. Oh my god. We just we coded this wrong

Right and business it could be you know, we have a product family I mean, it's like we got this thing made in China and they didn't do it the spec and oh my god We got a mess on our hands, right? There's all kinds of read but in the church old. We don't want to do that You know, that's largely why what I have exists because my entire website, video, podcast, everything is a post-mortem It's a post-mortem to what I came out of right, but you're right. That's that's the thing and whenever you're in this

Heresy hunting world, it really I Hate to say it because I have friends who are in that world But it limits the the way in which you can have post mortems if you totally offend the other party If I'm in a group of developers and they've they've made a mess and like I said we have the philosophy fail fast fail hard Well say one of them just had a failure whatever it was and I just totally pounce on them and say you did this and It's wrong you know, I just totally condemned the guy Well next time he's gonna be afraid to learn and grow

Because I have just totally destroyed his world his world view so That's why you know, it's really hard to do what I do in a balanced way But I try to just tell the history as it is and you can learn from the history and you can learn from your mistakes That's why I presented in the way that I do I Have friends who are in the Heresy hunter world that that do this Interestingly the ones that do it have the provocative thumbnails that look like they're going They're going to be bouncing on somebody But you have both sides you have some that do it in a very nice structured way. Hey look

This might be wrong what you guys are doing and here's why and then you've got the other side that are just condemning them to hell for doing it I'm fat. I mean, I guess what fascinates me operating both in the secular and sacred worlds Is it's like all these things that we do in sports or business or whatever where we do the post mortems And and we just have these painfully honest Discussions right because we want to solve the problem That's the mission solve the problem so we can do better then you just flip over and I get over

You know, I I go over the boundary and get into the word religious world and suddenly now Oh, you have the spirit of accusation brother Right, it's like it's like suddenly the dynamics completely shift and you're not allowed to have a post mortem Yeah And I'm and of course me. I'm going well, why not like who made that rule Right? I do this in every other area of my life, and I get over here, and suddenly now I'm out of bounds, I'm an accuser of the brethren, I'm just gruntled, ex-something, you know what I'm saying? It's like all these things get thrown at you, and yet, everywhere else we do this, so what are we so afraid of?

Like, why are we so afraid to have honest conversations and peel this onion back and get some of these root things? I know in the sports world, right? We have situations where, okay, this particular player, we need to replace that, right? Which is what I'm seeing in the church world right now. It's like, okay, that player failed, so we're going to kick him off the team.

But what you discover quite often is that it's the system, that's the problem. There are certain sports franchises that can never seem to get over the hump, and the reason is it's because the way they're run, the way that it's the system, it's what's behind the scenes, that's the problem, it's the same thing in business.

I mean, I've watched all kinds of companies fail, and you see all the same issues, but nobody wants to have that. So, anyways, that's kind of my frustration, that's why I know we don't have time today to go into this, but so we'll do it next time. But I want to really unpack this whole thing about narcissism in the church, because I, just to give you a preview of where my brain is, is that if you look at, okay, then I'm talking about our age group, so we're boomers, but if you look back at the generation, each generation has a characteristic, has characteristics that define that, that generation, right? So our dads are all called the greatest generation, and our dads live through a depression, and the second world war, but what's so interesting to me about that generation is when evil,

presented itself, they all ran as fast as they could, down to the Army, Navy, Marines, whatever, to sign up. In fact, they lied about their age, and why? Because in their generation, your value, your status, your manliness was based on your sacrifice for the whole.

That was an intrinsic value in my dad's generation. They saw themselves as their role was to die on behalf of everyone else. That was like normal of them, right, which is so interesting because it's sort of Christianity.

Well, what happened? Because there is a enormous shift that happened between our dad's generation and our generation. And I'd like to unpack that because once you get to that root, and I'll explain what happened, I think you guys will find it very interesting.

Because we went from we and ours to me and mine. There's a distinct shift in how we viewed ourselves, how we viewed society, and all of that has impacted the church. To we're now over here thinking that we're living in normal. And because it happens gradually, and then suddenly, we don't even realize where we are. And how far we've traveled, you know, in 60 or seven years. So anyways, I'll unpack that more. But it's very distinct what happened and who influenced too and how it got there. And why we're here now thinking it's all about us. Well, there's so much there to unpack and it's

going to be incredibly fun, right? Right. 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-Brandom.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR. And for more about Mike Bickel and IHOPKC, you can read some say they blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Bickel, Kansas City Prophets, and the International House of Prayer.

Thank you.