Inside Japan’s Cult Crisis: Why Authoritarian Religion Spreads - Jon Dugan

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my very special guest, John Dugan, cult expert and former member of Bethany Fellowship. John is good to connect with you and finally to tell your story on the podcast. We were chatting right before this and you have a fascinating story and live in a fascinating environment so I'll let you tell that story but I a lot of people don't realize this about me because

I'm such a sci-fi fan. I am an old western fan of mention that but one of my other interests is I love old Japanese movies and one of my favorites is Zato Ichi, the blind samurai who could walk into a I don't know what they're called in Japan but it's like a saloon in America but walks in, can't see a thing and then you see all of the guys running or you know he's taken out the whole crowd while he's walking in their blind. Fascinating stuff, I'll let you tell your story but thank you for coming. Yeah thanks for having me. It's interesting that Americans

often when they refer to Japanese old movies they think of the seven samurai. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. I am. That was probably one of the most famous older films. I remember when I was studying Japanese at the University of Minnesota. They had movie night and they would they would air old black and white Japanese films and because I was working on the language I remember watching some of those. Arriving in Japan though however of course things move on and it's very modern culture and now everything is manga so a lot

of people that are fascinated with Japan they come and see the manga. I arrived on August 29th 1985 exactly 40 years after World War II ended and just at that point in time as I mentioned to you personally they there were many survivors of the war. Of course anybody who was 50 years or older would remember the war and I remember one day a lady came up to me and she said you killed my friend. Your country killed my friend because she and her friend were coming home from school and apparently some American fighters had

strafe to that area and her friend had gotten shot and died. That was you don't really know what to say when somebody says that yeah. I married my wife my wife is Japanese she's from here.

Okinawa and as I mentioned her father during the war was I believe is a captain In the what they would call the special forces the Air Force branch was called Kamikaze or as American say Kamakaze It's Kamikaze But he was in the Navy branch and he was a suicide torpedo pilot Fortunately the war ended before he was used But they would they would put them in this little carpet a torpedo that was kind of improvised to be like a small submarine and you know The bulk of the thing was was a bomb and they'd they'd bolt them in so that they couldn't get out and they would be

Shot towards Allied ships and then either they hit the ship and exploded or they sunk to the bottom the ocean. They were as fixated and died Fortunately the war ended before he had to be used so I was able to talk to my father-in-law in fact in his later years When he was in his 80s he'd had a couple strokes and I was visiting Okinawa and I Held his hand and I said thank you for raising he told me and he started to tear up and he started to weep and that was shortly before he died

so To me the war was very the idea that I would be living in Japan as a child You know it was I'd never even thought of that in fact I remember one of the first books I read was I think it was called five minutes over Tokyo and was about to do the little raids And I was in third grade at the time and I was laying in my bed and with the night light And I was reading this book about Japan and I think back to that quite often because Who would have ever known that I would have spent two thirds of my life?

It's been 40 years now since I've been in Japan. Wow. Anyway arriving. I came originally I am a missionary and I came as a missionary And shortly after arriving I discovered that Japan is a country that is filled with cults It's probably I don't know on comparing it with other countries worldwide, but it is There are hundreds if not thousands of cults in Japan and Japanese are extremely susceptible to cults now And I say cults I often distinguish between heresy and cults because heresy is a doctrinal issue And when we think of anti-Trainitarian or You know in the Christian you know people works righteousness or additional revelation beyond the Bible or things like that

I differentiate between heresy and cults cults is more of a method a way of doing things and The cult the cult world is a spectrum and so I've been dealing with cults for over 35 years in Japan and M.A I hate to use the term, but in Japan. I'm an expert You know if people call me in fact just about eight hours ago. I got a call from a lady in Okinawa who came out of a cult and she's very distressed and wants my help.

And that kind of communication and that kind of inquiry happens on a regular basis. In the 1990s, the early 2000s, I want to say maybe two times a week. I get calls and sometimes people would talk, you know, three, four hours.

In the 1990s, one of the major cults in Japan was the Jehovah's Witnesses. They took off right after the war. There were about 49 Jehovah's Witnesses and by the year 2000, there were 220,000.

So there's a lot of reasons why I won't get into the weeds on that, but that particular cult fit the Japanese culture and psyche and hit Japan at a time when the family was changing rapidly.

Post-war, there was massive urbanization and so Japanese were leaving the countryside where they were living three, four generations together. They were moving into the cities. They were taking a residence in small apartments and men were working in incredibly long hours.

And so women were cut off from their family unit and they were kind of isolated because their father, their husband was working all the time. So they didn't know how to raise children and the Jehovah's Witnesses would come to the door and say, you know, we'll help you raise children.

And so that was how they got their foot in the door. And gradually they started to, you know, basically mind control. And I'm sure you've done a lot of investigation on that. I know you've talked to Stephen Hassan.

Stephen Hassan was in Japan and I was with him when he did a seminar at a cult called Tendi. There's a cult called Tendi in Japan that invited Stephen Hassan to come and do a seminar on cults.

And I remember in an intermission time, you know, everybody else around where Japanese and they put him up in this in their headquarters in a five-star hotel and I remember I was walking with him to his room and he looked at me and he said, do you think that this group is a cult?

And I said, yeah, they are a cult. So here he was doing a seminar on cults at a cult. And it was kind of like if the Mormons, the Salt Lake City invited him to come and do a seminar because the Mormons were losing their believers to the monies or to the Jehovah's Witnesses.

And that's kind of what's happened here in Japan. The Tendi cult was losing a lot of their believers to the Monies, the Unification Church or the Jehovah's Witnesses and more recent. Secondly, there's another group called Setsudy, which in America, I think is called Providence.

And it's an offshoot of the moonies. So that was an interesting episode. And he talks about the bite model. Right. If you read books, you talk about the five control mechanisms, behavior control, emotional control.

I also known as love bombing, fought control, environmental control, and information control. And these five work together to get people in a place where they refuse to listen to contradictory information. And I know talking to you, you've already experienced that on a personal level.

Of course, the ultimate cult spectrum runs from soft, soft, cultic groups to extreme cultic groups. The extreme would cover, I don't know if you are familiar with Omashindi, Supreme Truth. Do you remember the nerve gas attack that took place in 1995, March 20, 1995?

Yes. So I was already involved in counter-cult work at that time. And then I remember one morning we were going to go as a family to camp out, turned on the TV. I think it was a Monday morning.

And saw all these emergency vehicles outside the metro, the subway in Tokyo, and then found out that Omu, we call it Omu. I believe in America they call it the Supreme Truth. And its Omashindi kill is the name in English.

There was a guy, his name. His religious name is Asahara. His real name is Matsumoto. And he had Jindapal, his believers, they all wore these white or saffron kind of clothes. And at the peak, there were 10,000 believers.

And he created, as cults of the United States, create us a Satan in his group, the politics and the police were the Satan that he created. And so he started to kill off people who were in opposition, which meant, for example, lawyer and other people who oppose him.

And then the ultimate one was to put his men. It kind of ties in with my father-in-law, who was a suicide-perpetal pilot. And it's the same thing. It's this mindset that you're giving your life for the sake of, in the World War II case, for the sake of the emperor.

For them, you're giving your life for the sake of truth. And they had a term that they used. It's a Sanskrit term called Poah. And Poah was their term that they used for releasing people from their body.

Basically killing people. And so that justified the put in the seren gas, the... added in the liquid form and they put it in like baggies, sealed baggies, and then they got on the trains and then right before they got off the use day umbrella and they poke a hole in it.

And then the liquid would turn into gas and basically I think they killed, they directly killed about 17 people and something like 6,000 people were had nerve damage. So that, when that happened in 1995, so I'd been, you know, by that point in time, I'd been working, taking family consultations and helping rescue people for about five years.

That's that hit and my phone started ringing off the hook because people started to connect the dots and whether it was a Buddhist cult or a Bible based cult, a cult is a cult.

And so the families were desperate to get people out and so I got extremely busy from 95 up to the mid 2000s. At first it was mostly Jehovah's Witnesses and then it kind of expanded to cultic churches and then also a Korean cult.

There's a lot of Korean cults in Japan. The most famous, of course, being the monies or the Unification Church. So anyway, that's kind of how I cut my teeth on it. And in the background of all this was, I was starting to analyze the way I was raised and I don't want to use a broad brush and say,

you know, I just presented an extreme example. The place I was raised was not an extreme example like that. But there are operating system. There are similarities in the operating system. And so maybe I can get into that but perhaps you have some questions about it.

It's so fascinating. Everything that you have just said, and we went a few different directions there, it repeats conversations for podcasts that I have recorded that are about to come out. One of the things that Bob Scott and I talked about is the big shift that happened about the same time in the United States where rural areas were diminishing and people were becoming urbanites and that shift and transition open the door for all kinds of different change and religion, many of which turned into destructive cults.

And like you said, there's this widespread term. The word cult isn't necessarily bad but it has gained a notoriety based off of what happened at Jonestown, basically that was the shift and change. But the term I use is destructive cult.

Is it a cult and are they just people who are, it's maybe benign, they have an agenda or is it destructive cult and are they ruining lives? That's the shift and change that seems to happen.

It's very interesting that it's happening in Japan though at the same time. At the same time, the United States is exploding. Right. Did you, and you mentioned Jehovah's Witness, did you notice any other similar forms of Pentecostal cults or charismatic cults?

Right, so if you want to, yes, the Korean component is pretty huge here. Korean Japan have a very stressed relationship, but the Korean influence in Japan is quite large, in part because the Korean population is large.

There are more than a million Korean, in Japan who still maintain Korean citizenship, plus there's probably an equal number or twice as many that have naturalized and become Japanese. So, and Korea, people in Christian circles, they hear about large churches in Korea and they think everything is rosy.

Well, it's not. A lot of the Korean churches, they, one guy who I met on the bullet train one time, he was not a Christian, but he had lived in Korea a long time.

I said, what do you think about Christians in Korea? And he kind of chuckled and he said, yeah, well, you scratch a Korean Christian, and underneath there's a Taoist and a Buddhist, you know?

So, it's a mixed bag, and I don't mean that all Korean, certainly there are many solid Korean Christians, they don't mean it to be too disparaging, but the fact of the matter is the operating system, which is very authoritarian.

And that's what they share with Japan. Authoritarianism is something that's part and parcel of the culture. And so, when you have an absolute, you know, person that's the authority, people buy into that and they don't have the, the American, you know, resistance to that, where we would say, you know, we live in a democracy, well, Japan is a democracy kind of a name only.

I actually, they're very wired to be very authoritarian. And so, that sets it up, you know? I mean, when I talk about, I teach in a Japanese, I've been teaching a Japanese Bible School for 23 years and I teach in apologetics, and I talk a lot about cults.

And I always say, if you wanna make a cult, what do you need for ingredients? You need an absolute, you know, a person or individual who has the absolute truth. And I talk about the truth pyramid.

And I say everybody in a religion, you know, the first level is we are right. The second level is we are more right than other people. The third level is we are the most right.

And the tip is we are the only right. And a lot of people in groups, maybe they don't think about it, but they're on the more right or the most right. And the most right is, you know, whatever we speak in time, are we don't speak in tongues? We have miracles, we don't have miracles. We're growing or we're not growing. We study the Bible more than other groups. You know, there's all kinds of reasons why people, they use that because people want to be special and they want to feel like they're part of this, this special group. And so I, when I talk about cults, I, when people families

for consultations and the first thing we do is we do motivation assessment. Like why is the person involved? We don't talk about the what do they believe? I mean, cults, you know, it's just like people, my wife's Japanese and there's, there's people with darker skin and there's people with wider skin and all, but if you peel off the skin, everybody's the same underneath.

And in the same way, you have all these variety of cults, but if you peel off the surface, really, the structure is the same. Absolutely. When I began my website, I started focusing on the doctrine and the heresy and what I realized is that I hit a brick wall because for many people who are in the cults and I was focusing then only on the random cult. You hit this brick wall because it doesn't matter if you can find and prove your doctrine according to the Bible.

If a person at the top of that pyramid, the central figure has said something different, they will choose the central figure over the Bible. Eventually, I just, I started avoiding theology altogether and instead focusing on the history, the facts, the makeup, the structure, the architecture, and what I began to realize is that architecture, it's spread like a virus throughout the world, especially through the laterane movement. Yeah, that's exactly right. And getting back to the Nerf gas attack in 1995, in Japan, they have two calendars. They use the Western calendar, so it's the year right now is 2025, but they also use the Japanese calendar.

And the Japanese calendar runs according to the emperor. And our current emperor is called Daewa Emperor's Tenno, so it's a Daewa Tenno. And before, we are now in the seventh year of Daewa Tenno.

And before that was the Hase period, and the Hase period went for 31 years. And before that was the Showa, the Showa was what Americans know is Hito Hito, the emperor that was in charge during war. He was still the emperor when I came to Japan. So he died about four years later, but they had the Hase period, this Nerf gas attack happened during the Hase period, and they wanted to basically close the book on that before the end of the Hase, when they went into the Daewa period.

And so closing the book on it meant performing the execution of the 13 or so members of that group that had had a death sentence. They were sentenced to death and in Japan, they still hang people.

And so when after the nerve gas attack happened, the Japanese version of the FBI, it's called the colon, they started visiting me and they still do to this day. So I get about four visits from the Japanese FBI every year and they try to keep tabs on cults because they don't want to have another incident like that.

And so when they visited me at the end of the Hasey period, they told me that they were going to take these, I think it was 13, might have been 15 members that were on death row and they're going to spread them throughout Japan so they could execute them all on the same day.

And so they went to Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Sapporo, and so on and they spread them out and then bang on one day they executed all of them because they can only execute like three a day at one place or something.

And so they wanted to close the chapter on that so they could welcome in the new emperor without any of that carryover from the nerve gas attack. Wow, that's insane. I can't even imagine it and the level of risk that it must put you under if the FBI, the equivalent of the FBI is coming to visit you.

Now you're at risk because what if you were to expose one of the cults, well that cult in places you use public enemy number one, it makes, I go through risks too but it makes the risk that I have seen minimal compared to what you have.

Well, I face two potential lawsuits from the Watchdow organization because in the 90s we did a lot of, together with the family we did a lot of strategic interventions. And so the family would gather together and they'd have the son, the daughter, the wife or whatever and they would want them to listen to information because as you know, the biggest barrier to getting people out of a cult is information and that's why they shun people.

They cut them off because they don't want information from people left the group to make it to a back into the group so they have to shun people. And that's the commonality with all, you know, full blown cults, what it's always good and this is the moonies, the Mormons, the group that you were in, they shun.

And so in order to get information and the family has to come together and say, hey, we're really concerned about this, we're really concerned about you and we want to have a talk because we've tried and you always, you know, get up and leave or sometimes people would actually, they'll take paper and they'll roll it up and plug their ears and they'll go like this and they'll hum so they don't have to hear and I've had people that will like go into the bathroom and refuse to come out so they wouldn't have to hear.

Then you'd have runaways. I had a guy who jumped off the balcony of the third floor in order to run away because he didn't want to listen. So, I mean, there's, oh, that had, this is, it's almost humorous, but there was a guy who fully clothed went into the bathroom and filled up the bath with water and fully clothed.

He submerged himself in the bath water so that, so that covering his ears, they didn't have to listen. Wow. And that was his show of, that was his show of loyalty to Jehovah. And then I had a lady in her 40s who curled up underneath the sink and turned on the water so the water was running in the sink and started humming so that you wouldn't have to listen.

So people will go to great extremes to just avoid listening, which means the family, I mean, they have to get the family, you know, the family unit is super important in Jevan. And so I've had as many as 17 family members, parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and everybody getting together specifically with purpose of having this one individual listen to truth because they wouldn't, they wouldn't, they refuse to read anything, hear anything.

There was a lady, her husband was a company president, and they asked me to come and talk to her and when I went, this was in northern Japan in the 70th floor of a resort condominium.

And she refused to listen to me, so I said, well, your husband, you know, he has information he wants you to. So why don't you just listen to him, you know, I have to listen to me, you know, he's your husband.

And I said to the husband, so why are you so concerned about, you know, your wife's involvement and he pulled out a book. And it was a book written by a person whose wife was in that group and I handed her the book and I said, you just read the book, you don't have to listen to me.

I left, I came back the next day and she had stayed up all night tearing the book into small pieces of paper and she'd spread it all over the condominium. And it was her way of showing that she wasn't going to be involved with Satan.

It's so odd. I've been involved with these types of interventions and the way the cult mind works because they don't specifically teach you or train you that you need to shut everything off. But the way the mind works, they once you're indoctrinated, you want to shut it off. You don't want people to engage.

And there is the shunning whenever we, whenever I asked questions, my grandfather had this big ceremony in the church and he said, I wasn't there, but he said something to the effect. I'm told that referencing Janice and jambres of the Bible that these two have gone astray and he, he included my wife in this.

My wife had not even asked a question and my children were included in this. nobody from the church was to talk to us because we were deemed possessed right and that's that's quite common in the brand-um circles but you have the leadership that wants to cut you off so you can get the information but then you have the people that are manipulated to not want the information because it might challenge what's inside of them yeah that there's always witnesses you know they're they're very um study oriented and they have a lot of they trim back on their publications now for financial reasons but they they put out I mean

their their whole compared to other cults the the amount of literature was just off the charts I in my room my study room I have probably 500 pieces of literature that the watch star has produced I used to have more but it was taking up so much room I threw a bunch of it away um but uh they have this inter these internal ones that are for uh believers eyes only and in those ones they they connect uh critical information with pornography so listening they call it spiritual pornography and then they say that um if you listen to

opposers or critical people uh you will lose your life and they mean it's spiritual death so it it becomes a survival they switch into survival mode yeah we have this in the in the brand-um framework which that would have developed I'm assuming that that developed before laterane but it was called spiritual fornication if you age this you are committing spiritual fornication yeah there's certain buzzwords attention you said jannison jambry is that a common one yeah there's dathan and kora basically if they can find a bad guy in the bible here that bad guy right that the watch star they they uh eeves is her name and lots wife and of course uh

anony and sapira sapira yeah and and then you know for them the organization is Noah's arc they call Noah's arc the organization and so either in the arc or not in the arc i remember one time i was talking to a guy in his 20s who was uh by by anybody's measurement he was a really uh lousy to hopeless witness what he was doing his lifestyle his lack of involvement and so on and um his father was a higher up in a in a well-known japanese company if i mentioned the name you'd probably know it and his father was so busy with work that he didn't have time for his son

and his son had this strained relationship with his father and so he joined the joe's witness and his mother was kind of the quintessential doting uh overprotective mother and so the mother got a kind of an upscale place in Kyoto and asked me to come one summer and so It's been a week talking to her son, and the father showed up for about two hours.

And he treated it like a business meeting talking to his son, and the son was nervous, and you can see him sitting up, and then his father left, and the son relaxed. And the mother had a room, she was in one room in this resort, and I was in the room with her son, which is kind of unusual because I'm the counselor, and he's the counselor, you don't usually put him in the same room.

And I remember saying to the son, what's going to happen to me at Armageddon? He says, well, you're going to get destroyed. And I said, why? Well, because you're not in the truth. And I said, what's going to happen to you?

And he says, oh, I'm fine, I'll be fine, because I'm in the truth. But he said, absolutely lousy Jehovah's Witness, but the fact that he was in the group, then made him okay. And regardless of my lifestyle, or how much by will I knew I wasn't in the group, therefore, I was going to be destroyed.

So that's it, you know, it's loyalty to the group. 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?

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When you were talking about the us versus them mentality brought back so many memories, when you're in one of these groups, you don't realize that you're like this, but the way a destructive cult gradually moves you towards destruction, you, people who ordinarily wouldn't be, you know, think evil of others, they will gradually get to that level.

And the memory that really hit me the hardest, whenever we, when my wife and I left the cult, we're sitting in a restaurant. Same restaurant we had gone to forever, many years in the cult, but then one Sunday we went outside of the cult.

We just started a new church, we watched all the people coming in from their other churches, and we looked around and both of us had the same thought at the same time. We both said something to the effect.

You know, it's, It's like the kingdom of God has expanded by a million people because it was us versus them. We had always sat in that same restaurant and looked around at all the people coming in from the other churches and it was them.

They weren't of us. I can't remember the word that you used, but we used the term bride. We're the bride. They're not the bride. And what has been so interesting and fascinating to me about all of this as I'm expanding from Brannemism into these other cults, that framework exists among all of them.

It's always us versus them. And the people who are in it don't realize until after suddenly they come into contact with information that defies what they've believed. And then suddenly they realize, wait a minute, I'm in an us versus them mentality.

How do I get out of this? Yeah, I wrote a short essay, I sent you, I kind of expanded on it. That's 14 pages. I started writing it 10 years ago. And then I made an extended kind of a disjointed expanded version, 40 pages long.

And one of the things that I've always, from the beginning, it's always been in my mind not what people believe, but why do they believe? And I thought I'd call it motivation assessment. And it came up with about five or six motivations that drive people to be attached to a cult.

And the first one is everybody wants to be special. They want to feel like they're special. And then they want to sacrifice for something bigger than themselves. And they want to, I believe people have a desire to do penance.

And some people have a, they, they wallow in a low grade sense of guilt. And the cult always tells them that they're quite, not, not quite enough. They're not quite doing enough. And that us, that us, them mentality, I mean, that's part of the, we, we are the peerer.

We are the, the select group, the chosen ones, and they're not. And I don't, I don't, I use the, as I said at the beginning of this, this whole thing is us, it's a, it's a spectrum.

And there's, they're, they're very low grade cults, and then there's very intense cults. But I grew up in, I don't know if I would use the C word, but I grew up in a very unusual place.

I grew up in a commune, started in 1948. It was, it was birthed out of a small independent Lutheran church in Minneapolis. And every group, they have what they call, what I call a legend, like the story of why we began something that made us special.

And the legend in, in this group was the, the five families. And the five families were these people who did something exceptional. They quit their jobs. They sold other possessions and they lived. communally. And so they were kind of new testament-ish in that they were living like the early church.

There's a couple of dirty little secrets. One is it was actually six families to begin with, but one family backed out and so it became the five families.

You know, there's a little bit of revisionism going on there. And the five families, they did this for the sake of global missions. So they're in Minneapolis, they're in their 30s. I think the founder was maybe in his early 40s. And they quit their jobs and they sold their houses and they had everything in common. And they bought a large mansion in downtown Minneapolis and they lived there for a while. And the story goes that they did that because they wanted to become missionaries. But then no mission agency would accept them. Like surprise surprise. Here's

people in their 30s. They have no theological training. They're not part of any particular denomination and they present themselves to a mission and say send us and the mission is like, no, we won't do that. So then they had to change their vision and they changed their vision to we will now train and send out 100 missionaries. So they themselves originally wanted to be missionaries, but they didn't jump through the right hoops. And so now they feel like God is telling them to train and send out 100 mission. It's not never mind that none of them had never been

missionaries. They knew nothing about missions. And so they bought a tract of land in suburban, what became suburban Minneapolis at this time was farmland. And they started a commune basically. They never called it a commune. They called it the fellowship, but it was a commune. And it metastasized as time went on and became extremely controlling. So the legend was the five families and then there's another component I call it the sacred doctrine. Every group has a certain doctrine that they really emphasize. And in this group, the sacred doctrine was Wesleyan, crisis sanctification and Christian perfection. So the idea that you could come to a point where

you no longer send them. And in order to get there, you had to have a crisis sanctification experience. And so they took Romans 6, 7, and 8. And they worked this theology in Romans 6, 7, and 8. And Romans 7 was the unsanctified person. And Romans 8 was the, you know how in the NER, the Pentecostal branch of this, you have the second work of grace is you're filled with the spirit for power.

Well, the holiness branch is you're filled with the spirit for purification to become more like Christ. And so that became the central doctrine of the organization and that in the term was death to self.

So you need to die to self. And so here you were in this very controlled environment where children started working, I started working from third grade. Everybody worked, nobody got a salary. It was all unpaid labor.

And the roots of the five families was business and so they started, the idea was to start businesses to support sending support missionaries. It seemed like a good idea and it worked for a while.

And so they, you are probably familiar with some of the businesses. They made Bethany Camping Trailers. Yeah, it was later on sold and I don't know some company in Iowa, I think, continued it.

But it started, in fact, the early Bethany Camping Trail was designed by my father. And then they also made, they started printing and then they birthed the publishing house called Bethany House Publishers, which still exists.

Maybe you've heard of it. It's now a division of Baker Books because they sold it to Baker Books. So they had these businesses and the communal living setup was all the staff families and all the people who came to the Bible School worked for free for the Bible School of Students.

It was their way of working through school without having to pay tuition for the staff. You received a stipend when I was in high school, our family monthly stipend was $240. And everybody worked.

So dad worked, mom worked, any kid in from third grade on worked and then the working hours of time went on. And you were not allowed to make money. You couldn't have a sidekick and make money.

So my father was a preacher. He would ask to speak at other churches and if they gave him an honorarium, he'd have to turn that into the commune. And if I mold lawns at our neighbors, placing that $10, I'd walk out to the treasury and I'd hand it over to the treasurer and say, use this for missions.

So there's complete control over finances to the extent that it changed midway, but when my mother's mother died and she received inheritance, the inheritance had to be turned over to the commune. So basically there was zero financial autonomy.

And so when you're in the 20s and 30s and you're very ideologically driven, you think, wow, this is great. We're sacrificing for the greater cause of world missions, but as time goes on, basically you have no other options.

So my parents, they lived out their days in that group. My dad died at age 88, my mom 87, basically they had nothing when they died. My inheritance was $300. So anyway, that was the way it was, and that was extremely controversial, so that the terminology about if you ever had an opinion and you got assigned a job and you didn't like the job, if you didn't like the job, that was, you hadn't died to yourself, you know, the flesh was there and you were, you had this problem with pride.

And so there was always this constant phobia of being proud or not dead to self. And they would have the deeper life seminar and the founder would sit up there with it. In those days, it was an OHP and he'd have like the vine with the two sides and the deeds of the flesh and the fruit of the spirit, and he'd write it and then he'd say, well, which is you?

And if you were a sensitive soul, you'd say, well, I have anger and I have jealousy and I must still be flesh. I must not have died to self. And so there being alter-call and everybody go forward because I was a tender soul, so I would go forward multiple times, get prayed for that I might die to self.

And so you constantly were checking your motivations. If you said something or did something, it was always like, what were my motivations? Were they fleshly? Was it self-centered? And it kept you in a kind of hostage to, you know, there's no freedom there.

There was no grace. There was this sense of, I call it a low grade sense of guilt. And a feeling of, what's the word, lack of confidence. And there were no options when you were growing up.

There was a mantra that was said quite often that said, if God has called you to be a missionary, don't stoop and become a king. So in my case, I had very unique experience where I knew that I was supposed to be a missionary, but all of my kids that grew up with me, pretty much 95, 98% of them never became missionaries, so they carried this low grade guilt throughout their life that they had, you know, chosen a worldly path and they weren't missionaries.

I have been to many, many of those alter-calls in the Brannamite religion, it was, and like you said, there's levels of destruction. I went to some that were quite benign and others that were very destructive, but they would call it putting off the old man and taking on the new one.

And there would be these songs that you would sing about, I can't remember the lyrics, but if something to the effect of you're taking off your old clothes and you're putting on your new, holy clothes, I guess.

And so you'd have these alter-calls where every kid is going to have emotions. So every kid, every teenager's up front of the altar, that's the way this worked. Well, as I got older and we got married, we went to one of the more destructive ones and for a period of time, I had some sort of an issue with my knees and I couldn't bend my knees like other people.

So I literally couldn't bow down like... like they were doing. Well, they had an entire church forced alter call at this one destructive sack that I went to. I couldn't do it. So I was like the only person who's sitting in the pew, the whole rest of the building is on the floor. And then I got to listen to a 45-minute sermon about those who wouldn't go on the floor. Yeah, it wasn't. I mean, I think part of it was, you know, our group was a Midwestern. Everything was low-key. So there wasn't, it was very passive

aggressive. And because you lived in this, my sister always said, growing up in the fellowship, there were three sets of rules. There were God's rules. There were your parents' rules, and there were the fellowships' rules. And they weren't in that order. The fellowships' rules were took precedence over everything. Then God's rules and lastly, your parents' rules.

So very things like, for example, you weren't supposed to go to movies. My dad loved movies. But he had to relegate his preference to the fellowship rules. So when my sister at school, she got tickets to some Disney movies she couldn't go. And my dad was put in the position where he had to

enforce the fellowships' rules even though he didn't believe them. You know, he was forced to do that. Otherwise, it would create doubt in his children about the legitimacy of the group. We shared some of the same things. We were, by and large, most of the brand-of-the-might cults are not allowed television, some aren't allowed radio, some aren't allowed newspapers.

And some of the same thing, I sometimes wonder if it wasn't limiting the information from the outside getting in. Because when you watch TV, you see other cultures and you see, you can glean that something's wrong with the group that you're in. So I think, by and large, it was just blocking it entirely. But I did some studies which I won't go too deep into this.

But I did some studies and found that also this was a movement that was spawned during the height of the white supremacy groups and Christian identity. And there was this attack on movies and television at that time. So they were blocking a lot of the interracial culture, you know, things that were happening on TV. Such a big, wide array of manipulation, control, authoritarianism, and like you said, it's on the spectrum. So how do you bring it? How do you label it?

Right. Well, I think every group, every cult, has a Satan, as I mentioned earlier, you know, for the supreme truth, for the omu, it was the police, for the Jova's witnesses. It's Christendom, they called it, back in the day, Christendom is Satan, basically. You can't see Satan, so they have to put Satan in kind of a visible form. And for the, the monies in Japan, the Unification Church has now had a court decision where they have to disband.

And so, Because I don't know if you followed it, but three years ago former prime minister was assassinated and The person who assassinated his mother was a mooney and he was angry with the organization, and that's why I assassinated him and A lot has come to light in Japan about second-generation Cultists specifically the unification church in the Jehovah's Witnesses. There's a lot in the media about that and so Prior to that they they have The moonies have a teaching. I don't know Unfortunately, I've done most of my counterpart work in Japanese, so I know the Japanese terms real well

It's called Bumbitsafuki in Japan in Japanese, but it means Getting back all of

Gods all of God's material wealth. They have to get back from Satan and bring it back to God In the states basically this is the kingdom now theology the Danielism theology. Yes. Yes. That's what I was going to segue to that exactly It's the same mentality And so what the moonies would do is they they'd lie cheap and steal basically So they'd be selling these innocuous things that had supposedly special power and they'd sell them for five thousand ten thousand dollars And they were they were basically were scamming people And that was a huge problem and you know, they they used ancestors like your ancestors are suffering

And the way you can help them get out of suffering is to give X amount of money So they'll give five thousand ten thousand dollars and it will help their their ancestors who are suffering So there was always this um these court cases From just you know former members saying you know, basically give give give me back the money that you scam from me And so now that the court has said that they have to disband they lose their they lose their nonprofit organization religious organization status And so now what the moonies are doing is they're trying they got these shell companies and trying to get their money into different places

So that the government can clamp down on it But that all came to light came to a head three years ago when their assassination took place So they all have their Satan and I've run into the same thing in charismatic groups

And we had an experiment an incident or if I want to say it that way former teacher I'm also the head of an international small international school on the chairman of the board And we had a teacher former teacher who was disgruntled who was with a Charismatic group that if I said the name of it you'd know it right away And she came and she said that uh That Jesus has left the school and Satan now runs it So she made that pronouncement. It's interesting whenever you watch the charismatic groups Like one any any group you're gonna have a spectrum you're gonna have some that are benign some aren't

But the ones that are on the spectrum towards destructiveness, they are in the us versus them mentality. Those are the ones from which develop the Dominion Seven Mountains. Mandate, all of the things that are wanting to take back control and take control for the cult, basically.

Right. Yeah, the Bible School that I teach at is what I call low-key Pentecostal Bible School. And they have, they're pretty solid, but they do have, I would say, a weak immune system to heresy, to problems.

And they have me on staff partly to call that out. So a recent faculty meeting, they asked me to talk about the NAR. And some parts of the NAR are evident in some of the groups.

You're not completely, but some parts, like prophetic ministry or something. Like an overemphasis on healing. I believe in healing. I ask my students, how many have experienced a genuine healing? And then I ask them, what do you think the badding average is for prayer for healing?

I say it's about 5%. In baseball, if you're hitting 30%, you're doing well. I think in healing, if you pray for 20, if one person gets healed, that's pretty good. That's my take on it.

Nobody's badding 100. Regardless of what Kenneth Copeland or Kenneth Hagen would say. Nobody's badding 100. Come on. Everybody dies. Lazarus died for 56. And I always fail. All the big names claim that they've got miracles, galore, 100%.

And every time come forward and you'll get healed. You knew that Kenneth Hagen died of cancer. Yeah. Yeah. So we don't talk about that. So anyway, those things are there. And so this NAR teaching has gradually, it's creeping into Japan.

And especially because Japanese churches are small, weak. They have a kind of a minority complex. The average size of a Japanese church is about 28 people. The Christian population in Japan, they say 1%, it's more like half a 1%.

So there's a desperate, sincere desire for something to happen. And so they look for magic ways to make it happen. One thing that became popular for a while here was what they call spiritual mapping, where they go and they'd, you know, Japan is filled with temples and trines.

And so they would get a map. And they'd talk about power points, demonic power points. And then they draw lines. And then they go to where the lines intersect. And they break the power of Satan there.

As if Satan is somehow geographical. you know, that's going to do it. So they were literally people running all over Japan doing these what I call incantations, you know, declaring victory over Satan here and there and every player and nothing's changing, but they have a great sense of accomplishment that they've done it.

And that's that's part of that dominion, you know, kingdom theology. Yeah, the spiritual warfare. I remember reading about that and I got to thinking, you know, it's like the adult version of the Pokemon Go thing for your own people, the thing is because it's in the there's a group in Japan called Mahikari, which probably in English is the true light.

And their thing is called Takazashi where they put their hand out and they and they express some kind of a power from their hand. And so when they were aggressively proselytizing the weight outside of stations, when you came out of the train, they'd say, can I pray for you?

You know, just kind of cold calls. I mean, you know, out of out of nowhere, they come up and say, can I pray for you? And, you know, obviously I would say no, but people would say, yeah, you know, I've got a little backpainted.

So they do this Takazashi where they put, they put their hand out on your knees or your back, whatever. And they said there was some power coming out of it. And they borrowed heavily from the Bible.

They'd say, look at Jesus did this. Buddha did this. Basically, this is a method of bringing about healing or some kind of spiritual change. And it kind of segues with Scientology and the engrams, you know, Scientology has the engrams.

It's something that you can't see. And so you do it, but you're not, you don't know if you actually accomplished anything, but because you can't see it, you can tell yourself that you accomplished something.

And Pentecostals have the positive confession. I'm going to claim that it happened, even though I have every symptom that denies that it happened. Right. I'm healed in Jesus name. I had a, one of my best friend in high school, his parents got heavily involved with Kenneth Agan.

And he had a younger brother who had was born with some macrodened degeneration in his eyes. And when I visit the house, I'd say, so how's the Andy? And the, and the mother said, he's healed in Jesus name.

She did not say, you know, his eyes are getting worse or the doctor is saying this or that. It was the trigger reaction was always, he's healed in Jesus name. It's so sad. I know people who have died from the diseases that they were healed in Jesus name.

And I look back at their lives, the suffering was greater because that they, they went to their graves thinking that they were healed and they were not. So their suffering was intensified. And their relationships with people around them also struggled because everybody knew that they were sick.

Everybody knew it. And in some cases, they died. more quickly because they quit taking their medication. So I was raised in this group that started the way I mentioned and it was kind of this hodgepodge of teaching. There was the sacred doctrine of death to self but they also in the 1950s they had Brannum come.

In Brannum visited our group mid-50s and using the term that he brought the Holy Spirit and he was in the Minneapolis area and all the staff gathered together because they heard all these stories about his words of knowledge and so on and he said Terry and Tubal Holy Spirit comes and the first person in our in the commune to speak in tongues with my father and it was in direct connection with Brannum's visit and then there was a time they described the revival in the 50s where there were healings where amazing things happened and even in the 2000s they would always reference back to the 1950s and the revival that happened

and they kind of bask in the afterglow of that time. What do you think about that? The moment you mentioned Brannum obviously my ears started to perk up. I've traced his trail through Minneapolis a few times. There's a lot of recordings that aren't on they were definitely recorded but they're not in the collection that we're allowed to have or see and that's where it gets really interesting. We don't know what he said or what he was doing. I know that from the people who was working with I know that there may be some some words that were leaning towards white

supremacy etc but Minneapolis is one of the regions that I focused intently through the newspapers trying to find out what's he doing there and if I remember correctly it was in that same tour that he was going through Minneapolis where he started to say that he had the power to like a sorcerer. I could cast this man and he would fall down crippled if he opposed me or challenged me and that was one of the one of the beliefs that Brannum was basically this all powerful wizard. Well they didn't buy heavily into Brannum. It was a one off but what it

spoke to to me is I call that Bethany was an doctrinal omnivore and they would buy into what I would call a lot of fringe groups. So because it wasn't founded or based and you need denomination and because they started in such an unusual way they always had a penchant for being unique.

So I always wanted to be unique so you couldn't pin them down so people have asked me through the years like well what what denomination did you come from and I'm always baffled. I don't it wasn't Wesleyan although they were Armenian and they did believe in Christ's sanctification but it wasn't Lutheran even though they baptized babies and it wasn't penicure.

coastal, even though they believed in a lot of the same things as the Pentecostals, and so was this strange eclectic mix, and he got into the eschatology, got really weird. They had a guy come in who had an old, his own slant on what we would call pre-tribulation, rapture, dispensational teaching, but it was unique.

It wasn't Dallas Theological Seminary, it wasn't unique place. It was a guy's unique thing, and Bethany adopted that, and so what happened is, all through the years, I always said they had this compromised spiritually mutant system, where they were susceptible to a lot of movements.

Ever since I can remember, youth with a mission leaders would come through, and so they had youth with them. I sat under conferences with Lauren Cunningham or Joy Dawson. One of my most unpleasant memories of Joy Dawson was, she was invited for a conference, there were probably 600, 700 people in the auditorium, and the time came.

It was either 7 or 7 at night for the meeting, and the person was emceeing, it came out and said, you know, Joy Dawson is in back waiting for a word from God, and so the meeting didn't start, and so she made everybody wait about 30 minutes before she came out.

I mean, that is so manipulative, as if God doesn't know the time the meeting's supposed to start, and so then people who had drank the Kool-Aid, you know, they had this great anticipation, she's going to have a powerful word from God, now she's received the word from God.

And I remember even though I was like 19 or 20 years old, I remember thinking, this is a scam, and then people were like in the aisles kind of, you know, prostating themselves and praying and all that, and I was just like, this is ridiculous, I don't get out of here, and then they'd have YOM teachers that would come through, and they'd present a scripture, and then they'd sermonize it, make it say something that it didn't say.

The exegesis was non-existent, and my father was teaching at the Bible school there, so sometimes they would invite the speaker over, and I say, remember, here I am, you know, 20-ish, they invited the speaker over, he's talked about Amos and the snake that came out of the hole in the wall or whatever, and he'd made some, he'd made it say something that the Bible didn't say.

And I remember saying, you said this, but I read that passage, and it doesn't, how do you get that meaning out of that, and he was like, well, God revealed it to me. So we had, and then as the years went by, it got worse because they got in bed with IHOP, and they started traveling to IHOP, and somebody came back with the Tevernacle of David teaching.

you know the praise revival and basically that split the church and the church never survived you know the church split and it was always in a weakened state in this section of this half of the church that left they formed a group called the gathering and they got heavily into prophecy and it turned out that one of the prophetesses was a full-belon lesbian and they were they got weirder and weirder you know they were told to like dance with angels or give birth to spirit children or all and and people had enough common sense that they they basically left

and there was in the whole thing collapsed so the gathering became the scattering and then the church tried to regroup and then a few years back they started they started a branch group they moved to another city and the original church could no longer maintain so they basically disbanded so the church that I grew up in no longer exist and the branch that they started was in the news recently and I won't mention the name but it was the place where the guy who assassinated the Minnesota legislature was a member of so that took a turn that I did not expect when we first started talking I kind of wondered

if you were hinting at that we would get the connection to branemism to the group you came from but I had no idea it would go to vance belter yeah well I just think that I always call Bethany's theologist like a whale shark opens up small and kind of sucks in anything that seems spiritual so there was not not a lot of discernment here's another one that might surprise you do you know Ted Hager yeah right Ted Hager before he was outed with his meth and his male prostitute he had come as a special speaker to Bethany just a few months prior to that really wow

I mean to me you know maybe he was you know obviously a lot of he had the wool pulled over a lot of people's eyes so I don't know that our leaders those leaders at that time were particularly

you know lack of discernment but somebody couldn't see what was going on so he was a special speaker and a couple months later you know he's all over CNN and whatnot for his behavior so yeah I'm kind of glad that you brought all of this up because I've had many people ask me try to how do you explain the the spider web of all of these apostolic networks in the NAR and this is a great example you can't explain it because what happened is all of these groups kind of many of them just left mainstream theology and they they either turned into a very destructive cult or a benign cult but

they started taking in all these additional doctrines and people like Lauren Cunningham you mentioned All of these NAR groups are going in these apostolic circles and you can't put a label on any of it.

It's such a big spider web of mass. The thing that, I mean, if you want to talk about the systemic flaw, I've written a bit about this whole progression of missions in the organization I was with, but the major systemic flaw is lack of interaction with reality and no foundation of a network of churches.

Those where people are working nine to five jobs, they're interacting with the real world. So you have this humidically sealed commune, this group, and things get distorted. You lose, you know, equilibrium. You lose your balance because everything's in house.

And I remember when I went in, when I actually, I got married in my 23 and I left a work at a, um, and I was in the printing industry, so I worked at a printing shop in downtown Minneapolis, and it was so refreshing to be surrounded by what we would call normal sinners.

You know, there's people who were living, earning money, you know, paying bills, living there. That was just so refreshing for me after being in this commune for, I was born there. So from the time I was born until the time I got married, I was in this, this group and when I left, I left, I was actually in the Philippines in 1978, 1979, and I saw what, what we were supposedly, this wonderful work that we were doing as missions, and I saw it, and it was not really very stellar, and I can't have a wake up moment, and I thought,

wow, we were trained to think that we were the most, uh, sacrificial, most involved, most effective mission in the world, and it's just not true. And that's, that was my wake up moment, really.

It's such an interesting story. I mean, this, this one directions that I had no idea that it would take from Zatoichi all the way to Vance Belter, so it's, it's been crazy fun. Thank you so much for doing this.

Yep. Thanks for having me. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want to share your story, you can check us out on the web, you can find us at William-Branum.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion, from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.