THE DEAD CAN’T SIN: Bill Johnson, DNA Theology & Branhamism Exposed

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Will William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at Williamdashbranham.org. And with me, I have my co-host and friend, Laura Lynn Tyler Thompson, the host of Laura Lynn Live.

Laura, it's good to be back. And I'm still kind of reeling for the episode that came out earlier today with you and I. We were discussing one of the craziest stories in Branhamite history, but it actually is a foundational piece to charismatic NAR history.

And I was reading through the comments and somebody said that you and I are like the dynamic duo. So it is further confirmation that I, indeed, am Batman. You're Batman. I'm Robin, the female version.

It's awesome. And as I say every week, I'm so very, very grateful for what you are exposing. So many people just hold in such high regard and adulation over some of these folks that honestly, when you really do a deep dive, which is what you've done, and you've had to live and experience that revealed growing up right next to the Branhamites and your grandfather and all of that, the involvement, tremendous insight that you have, and you had to come free and clear.

And now you're showing the world how to be free and clear. And what the truth is, this is important work. And it's interesting how much of it comes together. I've had probably five different conversations on different podcasts that kind of merge back with what we're about to talk about today.

And it goes back to the statement that we made at the end of the last one. You were asking me about Jim Jones, whenever he finally condemned William Branham and walked away. Jim Jones, the mass murderer from the Jonestown massacre, was smart enough to walk away and realize that this is not a movement of God, yet look what he did.

And going through that history, it's a little bit ironic. But Adam, at short, and I were talking about another, an email that he received from Bethel Church. And I read through it, and honestly, how do I explain?

It's like, if you go to the dentist, and the dentist has that little high-pitched, shrill noise of a drill on your tooth, and it hurts your tooth really, really bad. When you walk away from there, any noise that has that high-pitched sound, you're tuned into it.

You know that that sound is there and the pain comes back. You feel it, even though the drill is not in you. Well, that's how it is whenever I hear these sermons by these ministers, I know because I have been so under the spiritual abuse of branemism, I know exactly what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how they're doing it.

And when I heard this sermon by Bill Johnson, honestly, when I read the email, I thought, no, this can't be. This can't be, he can't be doing the same thing branem was doing. And then whenever Adam Short started talking through it in our podcast, I started scratching my head and like, wait a minute, no, and I go look it up while he's talking.

I started reading through the sermon, I had heard parts of it, but I didn't hear the whole thing. And I got down through it and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is exactly like a sermon that I grew up with.

And he is basically taking branem's boiler template, which we'll get into that and we'll talk through that today. But ironically, what he's doing goes all the way back to the reason that Jim Jones left branem.

So in effect, if you really understand what he's doing, Jim Jones would have left Bill Johnson of Bethel and said, I don't want any part of this. Well, I want to hear about the Jim Jones fiasco and how this came to be.

But there's no one more equipped or experienced to be able to discuss some of the things that Bill Johnson is currently implementing that you would hear it, but the thing is others may not.

And by exposing the certain doctrines of branemism, you're able to show that to this day, Bill Johnson is using these template, as you say, boiler points and people might not recognize it because even pastors, if they have not studied this, if they have not really given themselves to understanding certain things, they wouldn't see it.

And that's why your voice is so important. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. And that's what's happened to me. The reason I've gotten so passionate about telling the truth about these leaders is because you're one of the people that showed me the history of it, which I did not know, you know, and how it ties in with my own history.

But when you think of someone like Jim Jones, well, I mean, so pretty shocking that he ties into all of this as well. Exactly. And it wasn't that many years in the past to our last discussion.

We were talking about Joel Osteen, his father being in the movement. It wasn't that many years prior that Jim Jones was in the same movement that Joel Osteen's father was in. But anyway, so I pull up the sermon by Bill Johnson, and I'm looking...

through the letter, reading through it as Adam is talking. And the title hits you. It hit Adam very quickly. The title is the dead can't sin. Bill Johnson gets into talking about, basically one of the key templates for a cult, which is the idea that you can become perfect.

Join our group. You too can become perfect. And essentially what he's saying, even in the title it says it, that Christians should become like corpses in a morgue. They're basically zombies. Because what he's trying to accomplish is the idea that once you are in Christ, you are not sinning, which that part is biblical.

But he goes a step beyond what's in the Bible. So what these guys do is they take a Bible concept, and they'll find passages and verses that have that Bible concept. And then they twist it just a little bit.

Where if you listen to it, you can kind of go both ways. Your head could go, oh, he's talking about the Bible verse. I'm reading the Bible verse. That must be what he means.

But it's twisted just slightly so that the people who are less familiar with the Bible, they might go a step further than what the Bible says. And that's really, if you understand how cults work and you understand Branemism, that was the way it worked.

You go, you twist it just a little bit and hope that people go to a conclusion that you really never said. Because if they do that, and then the whole group through group think takes that leap, will you enable a doctrine to come forward that you never really told them the doctrine, but then they start believing it.

And in the end, you end up with a bunch of zombies, which is ironic because his title is The Dead Can't Sin. It's kind of disturbing, actually. And I think I know what he is trying to say, but they use scripture, and this is what's so deceptive.

They use scripture so that there's a sense in the Christian. Well, this is from the Bible. So we're reading a scriptural reference. And then, as you say, twisting it, taking it to a next level, almost like, you know, smoke and mere sleight of hand.

And this is where the deception comes in. And it's so hard to actually see that pastors and leaders in this day and age revere these teachings of Bill Johnson. And yet, I mean, you can find all over the place that very well-seasoned Christian people are beginning to discern and stating such that Bill Johnson is not preaching a full gospel message as according to the word that there are additions.

And of course, we've seen how he gave his approval to a book on this mysticism and all kinds of nonsense. And what is he thinking? And then people call him out on it. He says, oh, yeah, I'm going to get that right.

moved, you know, my part from the, yeah, yeah, yeah, but he never does, like he, he just associates himself with stuff that's, you know, odd. And as you say, take scriptures and then builds in extra. And we are not to add to the word of God. That is a very specific requirement in the scriptures that we don't add or take away from the word. Exactly. And for those who are listening, maybe you're listening, you don't understand the difference between that and scripture.

The Bible does talk about, as a Christian, and because of the work on the cross, you're dead to sin's power. But you're not dead to its presence. And that's really the difference. That's how he's twisted it. He's trying to say that you're dead to the presence of sin.

And it all comes back to this idea of perfectionism. In branimism and many of the flavors of different religious cults that emerge before, prior to branimism, there was this idea that you could become perfect. And because in your perfection and the perfected state of the church, we would usher in the rapture. We the people, not Jesus Christ. So the power to save really came back to the people not to Jesus Christ. It was a, it was a different gospel, a different message. But really to unpack that, I'm going to kill two birds with one stone. Okay. To unpack that, you really have to understand

Christian identity and the themes of Christian identity that he is using in this specific sermon. And I say two birds with one stone because we have had commenters saying, can you please explain Christian identity a little bit more? I'll use the phrase and I don't understand it. Christian identity, to understand it, the phrase itself is not that bad. If you're a Christian, you want to identify as a Christian. But if you understand the implications of the Christian identity movement, it is quite a bit different. And their idea on how salvation comes and what you do with that

salvation with regards to dominion are completely different than what is normal Christianity.

And ironically, this ties back to what Jim Jones was leaving, which I'll get to that point later. There is a book by Michael Barkun that I recommend anybody who's wanting to learn more about it.

It explains Christian identity very thoroughly. It's called Religion and the Racist Right by Michael Barkun. We talked about this, I think, in the first episode you and I did. In the beginning, it was British Israelism. And British Israelism created the notion that the people, the British Isles and United States and Canada were the descendants of the lost 10 tribes of Israel.

That's not so bad. It's a little bit odd. It doesn't match history. But what it implies, if you flip it to the negative side, if we are the ones who are or identified as the chosen ones, then there must be some people who aren't the chosen ones.

Kind of like Bill Johnson does in the sermon, which I'll get to, you preach down the path that's slightly twisted, and then there will be people who take it the step further. They will go to the logical conclusion that you're laying down.

That happened with British Israelism. People started to, instead of focusing on the good guys, they begin to focus on, well, who are the bad guys? And they started putting labels on people. Usually the blacks and the Jews were the ones who were labeled, these are the bad guys.

And whenever the latter reign was breaking out at the Sharon Orphanage, this was a theme among the leaders. There were books published by founding members of the Sharon Orphanage that clearly stated, and I'm quoting, this is horrific, but I'm gonna say it, that blacks were made in God's wisdom to serve whites.

So that was the foundational, one of the foundational doctrines in this movement. How would this come about? They would tie it to the book of Revelation when it talks about mystery Babylon. They would associate that phrase with the blacks and the Jews.

This mystery Babylon was going to rise into power, and we need to conquer this, because we are the chosen ones. We are the ones who are descended from the lost 10 tribes of Israel.

So we need to claim dominion over this. That's essentially the background for everything that I'm saying. To get there, what they did, this doctrine emerged that before Adam and Eve, before Adam's race, there was a pre-Adamic race that was the mud people.

As weird as the sounds, it sounds like sci-fi from a very bad sci-fi movie. They taught literally that the mud people are the ones that made it with Keynes offspring and produced the black skin, because the mud is black.

The black skin turned black. So this was actually a prevalent idea in the early 20s, 30s and 40s. A lot of people in Christian identity started to associate with this. What they taught was that in the Garden of Eden, the sin was not what the Bible says, that Adam and Eve ate of the fruit and the serpent tricked them into eating it because they would have the power to know between good and evil.

Instead, they changed it to a sexual sin. Eve made it with the serpent. The serpent produced Keynes and Keynes lineage were the bad guys, while Abelus lineage were the good guys. So there were two races of people.

And whenever you associate this with salvation, salvation comes more to your DNA than it does what Jesus did on the cross. And that's where all of this really came... It unraveled for me when I was reading through and listening to parts of the sermon, Bill Johnson literally says that it is the DNA that changes whenever you become a Christian.

You have the DNA of Lord Jesus Himself, the resurrected one, in you.

You are qualified to live like Jesus in absolute power and absolute humility. So interesting. So you can see how like that you can tie in scripture, but then you begin to understand that that he ascribes to some of these teachings. And you know, it's funny because ironically I was watching some clips of Todd White that had been put together and Todd White is talking about how perfect he is that he has not sinned. He has not lusted in 17 years.

He has not had made it. He's basically perfect, you know. And of course the the podcaster was saying, you know, that is some kind of feat. It really is, you know, put that in a bottle somehow and sell it. And the thing is is that then Todd White's close associates came out saying, the guy is the worst liar, you know, of all time. I mean, these are some of the things that are being said about Sean Hoyt as well. Then he has a character problem that he exaggerates embellishes and downright lies. So this is what close people with Todd White say while he is

basically up there saying, I have reached that perfection. This perfectionism that is spoken of be perfect, you know, I've heard a clip from Joyce Meyer. And I tend to try to really love Joyce Meyer. I think on the whole she's not a prosperity teacher, even though she's gotten very wealthy. But she was saying she was talking about like this being perfect thing. And so, you know, we all do do our best to govern our actions and to present to God the best that we can to ask for forgiveness when we fail. But the human condition, I'm going to say it's pretty hard to say

you're perfect or that you ever like maybe you have a good day when you're in a coma and you don't sin. But, you know, how many times it's just little things a bad thought, you know, the way that we just can't stand someone or we're annoyed or we have unforgiveness for a certain thing that we're battling through. All of this is the human way that we have to like get through this life.

Absolutely. I grew up listening to countless sermons on themes such as, I can't remember all of the titles that they use, but things, it would be things like the mystical union of the bride of Christ. They like the word mystical or the mystery of, they would use these phrases.

And what they would do is they would take, like I said, they would take Bible passages twisted ever so slightly so that you could jump to a conclusion that wasn't in the Bible, because if they can get you out of the Bible, then they can take you down the path that they want.

This perfectionist doctrine is one of those doctrines. If they can get you out of the Bible, if you don't need Jesus to save you from the cross, if you can become perfect yourself, what it does, it takes away the need for Jesus and puts the power of salvation into the apostle or prophet or whoever is your governing body.

It's all part of the manifest of God, sons of God framework. There is a passage of Scripture, I think it is in, I think it's in 1 John, it says something to the effect that if we say that we don't have any sin, we deceive ourselves.

There it is. The next words after that I think we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. So these people who are lying are literally making this verse come to life. And the truth is not in them.

The truth is not in them. But see what they've done there, they've twisted it ever so slightly. One of the twistings, there are Bible passages about how you become a new creature in Christ.

And that's a good thing. If you understand what that means, you become a different person. The metaphors that were used in the Bible actually are used as weapons in the movement. They will say things like the new creature means we have a new DNA.

We're a different person metaphysically. We are a different person down into the atoms of our body. Which is exactly what Bill Johnson said here. He's saying that literally the Christian DNA is different than the people who are non-Christian.

So back to the Christian identity problem. British Israelism taught that there were two types of people. There were those who were the chosen, those who were not. People took that leap. Then they started to claim that there are people who are the descendants of the serpent and Eve and the mud people.

And people took the leap a step further. What they did to twist this was they would say that that new creature is different. If you understand the new creature, you get a different, you have a different DNA, you have a different, you are a different makeup, you cannot sin.

So that idea started to creep in that you cannot sin and bred the perfectionist doctrine. And they're countless, I'm not a theologian there, but they're countless problems if you just simply read it. It replaces all of the passages that are talking about how you need, how you are a sinner saved by grace for instance.

If you're a sinless creation and you're like a, like is where you're like a zombie in a morgue and cannot sin, well you don't need salvation. So come to our group, join our school of thought and you don't need Jesus, essentially is the path that you go down.

And it all goes back to this idea of perfectionism, which is a carrot on the stick because humanity will always have its flaws. Wow. So this is very complex and I think when you look at Bethel and its influence and all of the people that will still ascribe and speak so highly of Bill Johnson, it's that it's being lost in the difficulty of having to really pull it apart so that you can see where the error is. And so this is important work and it's not easy work because people get upset because they have their favorites, you know, and they don't like you putting down.

I've already had one pastor friend basically telling me that, you know, he's just so angry because I criticized Bill Johnson and I'm saying, well, do you ascribe to some of the things that he said, well, he doesn't even want to talk about it, you know? So then there's nowhere to go except to make sure that we're understanding the truth of these certain issues according to the word. So a few of our conversations with other podcasts have sort of laid a background for what we're talking about here that are really relevant. One of them is a conversation

that I had with Bob Scott recently. Bob Scott was a former founder of the Kansas City Fellowship. He was Mike Pickles brother-in-law. He and I were talking about the weird mixture of religion and politics today. And he said that really what we're seeing today goes back to the early years of the Seven Mountains mandate is that idea was being birthed. From its inception, the idea was that apostles would be the ones who were the heads of the top of those mountains.

Instead of having the governing body of politicians that we have today, the apostles and prophets would be the one to lead. And Bob Scott was like, no, no, no, we have seen in history how bad things get when religious leaders try to take dominion and try to claim governing bodies over people.

This never ends well throughout history. It never ends well. And if you understand the connection to the Christian identity movement in the way that they were also trying to claim dominion, trying to give the idea that there was a lesser form of human being out there, ones that did not share the same DNA. And it all comes back to exactly what Bill Johnson did here.

We have a different DNA. So anybody listening to that sermon who understands that if there is a good DNA, there must also be a bad DNA. So people are going to make that leap who are listening and Christian identity they did. We have people who have a bad DNA. So we need to stop this problem. How do we do it? We need to claim dominion and push these people out.

That was literally what was happening. with the Christian identity doctrine, but the other verbiage that was used, it's a little bit scary when you think about it. The email that was introducing the sermon was also advertising some sort of a revival that they had prior that was pushing for the idea of radical obedience.

So if you understand the concept of perfection and understand that there was this agenda behind the perfection, any time there is a religious movement that is pushing an agenda, you have to control the people because they may not agree with your agenda.

How is this control happening in cults? They create boundaries of fear surrounding the people, so they fear to think outside of this religion. They fear you have to be radically obedient. That really hit me if I could just interject.

That's the kind of thing, like that kind of terminology, it's very zealous, and I even remember that radical, the radical that's radically sold out and everything, which of course we want to be for the Lord Jesus Christ, but there's a measure here that is about control, I think.

It's absolutely about control. The fear is the way that you control people in a cult. Otherwise, why not just leave? There are no physical boundaries around you. Anybody who's in a cult can just walk away.

The problem, and most people who have escaped, we've talked to them in the support groups, and we've had them share our stories on Fridays, when people leave, the very first thing they have to conquer is the fear of leaving, and that fear is, it's powerful.

People fear they're going to lose their families, some of them lose their job, some of them lose their benefits, but more than that, because they've taken the fear into the spiritual realm, people who leave a cult to go to a different Christian church and to still be Christian in another group, they fear that they're losing their eternal salvation, so it's a fear greater than death that they're pushing.

All of that, really, the basics of what he's teaching in the sermon is exactly the boundaries of fear that I grew up with. I'm listening to him speak, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't believe he's doing this.

Could you hear it? John, as you were listening to him, could you hear the same phrases, the same sort of rhetoric, if I could put it that way, it sounded, it had the feeling of what you grew up listening to.

Absolutely. He did not use the same verbiage, but you could clearly tell that he had studied random, or he had been influenced by somebody else who did. One of the themes that I grew up in randomism was this fear that your mind...

mind might be leading you down a path that you might accidentally catch a demon. In Branemism, this was the idea that unbelief itself was sin. So if you don't believe that sin, that was a theme that was all throughout this sermon.

And if you really think about what that's doing, it's causing people to shut off critical thought because to think about something in a positive manner and you want to study whether it's true or false, you have to study the negative of the positive.

So critical thinking is, is this thing true? Well, let's examine everything that could make it possibly false. When you can't find anything to make it false, then it becomes true in your mind. So what they're saying essentially is, you can't do this, you can't think about it.

Unbelief is sin. And again, he didn't use the phrases that Branem uses or the verbiage, but it was the same exact thing. To believe this, Jesus died and raised for the dead, but not to believe this is to voluntarily embrace the Carnal Christian lifestyle because I'm living from an inferior reality.

I don't know if I'm forgiven, I just don't feel forgiven. Wow. So basically, it's like something that has seeped in, and I think in this time and era, what God is doing through your podcast and others who are looking at the little leaven that has leavened the whole loaf, that little leaven, that little bit of a twist, radical obedience.

And then you see, then there's like, if you don't agree with us, then you are shunned or you know, you begin to get the cold shoulder. And that's why I heard about parents being upset when their kids return from having gone to Bethel's school, that their kids had this kind of self-righteous way, and it was bringing a division between them and their parents.

And that's the subtlety, this pride, rather than, you know, teaching that were on a journey and that we need to listen to one another and above all respect to parents, there's a certain something that's taught.

So even kids, I heard this one story about kids that had, they try to go to heaven, you know, at the Bethel school and they would have, they would lie down all at the same time, and then they would try to make a trip to heaven.

So some people who have been in the occult would be very upset about that because there are these practices where you have out-of-body experiences and you induce them. So they would take this back to the church and of course the church started freaking out because they go to the young people's, you know, event and they're all, okay, let's try this everybody.

It's like, ah, no, no, no. And so these are the things that are being highlighted and, you know, and brought out. And when it's so subtle like this, that's why the work you're doing is so important to bring out that subtlety of the shift.

Absolutely. And it's insidious how they bring all of this about. It's not that they openly say the things that they want people to believe and understand, like this DNA thing that he's saying. When you listen to it, it's not that bad if you don't understand everything that he's saying in the rest of the sermon.

He's saying basically, like the Bible says, you can become a new creature, but he takes it all the way back to the DNA level. You can have a different DNA. So that alone, like I said, it's not that bad, but combine it with, say, the manifested sons of God, doctrine.

This is the idea that Jesus, what he did on the cross, wasn't sufficient. We need people who become a manifested son of God in the end time. We become essentially little gods and we're the ones to claim dominion so that we can create the scenario in which Jesus can come back.

It's not that Jesus is returning as he promised. It's that we have to take control. We have to take dominion. We have to bring this in power. To get there, what they did in Christian identity, what they did in Brannemism, and essentially what he's doing here in the sermon, they have to demote Jesus from divinity to become more like gods themselves.

In other words, I'll bring Jesus down in power so I can raise myself up in power. The way that Brannem did this was he said that Jesus, when he died on the cross, he was just a human.

He was just a man. He could not have been God when he died for our sins because you can't kill God with his verbiage. He said that Jesus was basically the greatest manifestation of the son of God up until that point in time, and then he went to heaven.

In the end, in the last days, there would be these manifested sons of God and they would have the power of Jesus. They would do greater works than Jesus. They would have more healings, more miracles, etc.

Because they would be the manifestation of Jesus. In other words, Jesus is coming back not as Jesus. He's coming back in the body of Christ, the people of the church, and we become little gods.

We're the ones to conquer the earth. And what this did was this created this weird division among the people. Some people actually thought that this was the only return of Jesus. I've actually talked with people who thought, you know, you can do whatever you want in this world.

We have seen Jesus already come back in William Brannem and the people that were with him. The end of days that it's talked about and the Bible has already happened. We're now living in the new millennium.

That kind of idea. again, to flourish because if you take what is scriptural and you twist it slightly, people will go every different direction because you've actually taken them outside of the Bible. And that's what this movement has done.

They've taken people outside of the Bible to become like gods. And like I said at the very beginning, if you go back to Genesis, the idea that the serpent was pushing on Eve was, you can become like God.

You can know good in evil. You can do this thing. That's exactly what they're saying here. You can become like God. You can have a different DNA. You can be a manifestation of the Son of God.

That entire theme of this sermon is exactly Branemism 101. 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 Branem Historical Research's website, William-Branem.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen McCummery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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

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

You know, recently, so a slightly different religion perspective that the Catholics, so I had a very esteemed guest on that was going to be talking about one aspect that we thought would be helpful, you know, and relevant to hear from them in light of world politics and religion.

And, you know, he's Catholic. So before the show gets started, you know, he had an opening and I said, well, do I need to announce, because in his bio, it basically had, you know, that, you know, his Catholic, I don't know, his, you know, the reasons that he's important in the Catholic Church.

So he had all these titles. And I said, would it be okay if we could just have discussions as people that believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and God and just maybe because I don't want to remove half the audience because they're like, oh, Catholics, I mean, Catholics don't have the right handle on this at all.

And would it be okay, you know, if we just kind of change this a bit? And he's like, well, sure, sure, you know, and he goes, you know, yeah, same Jesus, but, you know, you guys don't really honor Mary or something like that.

And so then it kind of brings it up. So we're not on air. So all right, I'll play a little bit and I said, well. You guys honor her as being like that she was not human, that she was in fact like divinity as well.

And I said, it doesn't say that in the Bible. And he says, well, she had to have been because she had Jesus. And I said, well, Jesus was fully God, fully man. And he goes, no, no, no, Jesus was God.

And she had to be, she couldn't just have God in her uterus because she is just a human being and that can't be, that just can't be. So we went down this little rabbit trail.

And so in the same way that people want to ascribe these things that the DNA changes or whatever, I mean, other religions are using it to make that Jesus never had a human component.

And so it gets all convoluted. And this is why we wrestle together. This is why we reason together. And at the end of the day, I said, well, let's not talk about it. For sure, though, it's not in our Bibles.

It does not say this. You have embraced this as a doctrinal kind of position of tradition that Mary is perfect. When in actual fact, no, where does it say that? So you're embracing, we can at least agree on that.

And then he's, okay, okay, let's be friends and let's get the interview done. You know, it was like that. But all of these things are things that are very important to wrestle with what the doctrines are so that error does not happen.

And the fact is, is that the error that Bill Johnson brings is very close to how it's infiltrated into all of our churches because people like Bethel, they like Bethel music, they like Bill Johnson.

I've heard he's extremely personable. You know, so many people seem to have met him and know him. And I always think, well, that's not actually the issue. The issue is, what are we being taught?

That's true or untrue in the word. Right. I've talked to people who were affiliated with Jim Jones and had, you know, in the early years, they would say that he was just a good Pentecostal minister.

He was a great guy to be around. And it really comes down to the fact that when you're in a cult, your mind has been changed so that you can't critically think. The doctrine becomes the agenda and you have to push the agenda.

People often ask me, why is it that whenever I ask a question about some of the doctrines of the different cults, the people always, they want to attack my person. They don't want to discuss the doctrines.

They want to attack me personally. Why is that? It's just a cult. Well, the problem is, you're not discussing the religion with them, you're discussing their agenda with them. They have an agenda, they want to push it upon you.

If you do not accept the agenda, then you become a problem. You're an obstacle in their way. And so they'll do anything to remove that. obstacle. And the problem is, like I said, you take something scriptural, you twist it just slightly, people who are listening, because they're not allowed to critically think, their minds will go the direction that you push them more easily than people say in a normal Christian church. And we've seen like the Christian identity idea, the problem that existed in the 1960s. When everybody was turning against the races, you'd see these big signs, people holding the sign saying

that the blacks and the whites can't marry. They're trying to keep the race pure. And this was a Christian identity Christian, pseudo Christian, I should say notion that by keeping the bloodlines pure by keeping the DNA pure, you are furthering the kingdom of God.

If you allow these races to mix, you don't, William Brannum would say that if a black person were to mate with a white person, the offspring, he used the word mongrel, which is offensive. But he would say that they can't enter into the kingdom for generations because that blood, that DNA had to be wiped out. The problem is people listening, who take that into the wrong direction, there are, I think I gave this example in the book, but there was a case where a father believed this idea that his DNA was good. Same thing Bill Johnson was pushing, but he took the opposite side of this.

Okay, if my DNA is good, there must be a bad DNA. And he started believing that his children had the bad DNA. This man actually killed his children to wipe out their DNA. His name, you can look it up on the internet, it's Matthew Taylor Coleman that confessed to this. This was the premise behind Q, this serpent DNA thing.

It's the exact same thing that was being taught in Christian identity, the serpent DNA that emerged from the sexual union between Eve and the serpent. That was the serpent DNA. So, John, do you, do you think he's talking about actual DNA? Like, I mean, if anybody looks at your DNA, it's going to be the same, you know, tomorrow as it is today. So is he, is he metaphorically speaking of this? Would you say, see, that's how insidious this is.

If you listen to that phrase alone, like I'll play that clip and I'll get people from Bethel say, no, that's not what he meant. But the way that it is pushed into the context of the overall sermon, that's where it becomes problematic. This is a sermon about how even in the title, you become this, you become this dead person who cannot sin. You become, you become more than human, essentially. You become a human that cannot sin, which is not something that's biblical.

To get there, you have to have a different DNA. You can't be human. So his entire premise of this sermon is that when you truly believe, when you cast out all your unbelief, you're going to come to the next level and that next level in the manifested sons of God, here, you're going to become more like God.

You're going to have God's DNA. And by default, if you follow that to its logical conclusion, those who don't go there with you do not have God's DNA, they have a different DNA. And this all ties into their thoughts on the end times and having superpowers and super apostles and prophets and then there's the elite, you know, and you have to follow them.

Right. They all become superhuman. And again, this is problematic. This is something that Jim Jones, I mentioned at the beginning of this, Jim Jones caught on to this, Jones was in his early years as a Pentecostal minister.

He worked in the poor section of Indianapolis. Many of his congregants were black congregants. And so he was very sympathetic to the needs of the black communities and became actually quite famous for this.

The people's temple movement began to spread into other states because of the work that he was doing with the blacks. There were even when William Brannum was advertised to come speak with Jim Jones, the black newspapers of the city were the ones who advertised it first.

And so this meeting among who they thought was coming in as a leader in the movement that Jim Jones was spearheading in Indianapolis, they thought he would be one of the good guys basically.

Somewhere along the line, Jim Jones came into contact with the idea that Brannum had been working with either white supremacy or Christian identity. And long story short, everybody in the convention learned that Brannum was starting to teach the serpent C doctrine, which is the serpent's DNA doctrine.

Brannum says something to the effect of 300 ministers rose up against him in one meeting. If you piece that timeline together, you'll find that many of the people, A.A. Allen was one of them who rose against William Brannum, Jones.

There were several different ones who came up and said, we want no part of this. This is Christian identity. This is white supremacy. I don't think that they yet had connected Brannum to the Ku Klux Klan, but they had come in contact with his doctrines and realized that his doctrines was had to done that path.

Whenever they approached him, however, Brannum defended the white supremacy doctrine and this had everyone up in arms. So there are testimonies out there of... several people who prophesied that William Brannum would die after this was exposed, which becomes really interesting when you think about the NAR today.

Many of them who build upon Brannum's ministry, they say that Brannum was really good and then in his later years he fell astray. So if you think about that and you think about it in the form of a timeline, this was probably the point that they could say that this is where he went astray.

This was, it was the year 1957. Everybody rose up against him, we started prophesying that he would die and he died. They usually say that. But what they don't tell you is that it was almost a decade later, it was 1963.

He was working with Joel Osteen's father and all of the ministers in the full gospel businessman, all these people are working with Brannum after they learned this Christian identity thing. So you have to ask the question, what was it that actually caused them to think that Brannum had gone astray?

If it wasn't this, because they were clearly working with him after they learned, he was a white supremacist. And he did die a strange death, right? He did. He died a horrifically tragic death in a head-on collision in Texas.

And I'll quote Jim Jones, Jim Jones was one of the people who prophesied against him. And he got the last name incorrect, but he's talking about an event where William Brannum was there. He says, Billy Graham came to us and he later changes this.

And Archie, Ims, Jack Arnold, Beam, and me in the Claypool Hotel. And he's referring to William Brannum. He says, I don't believe in a thing in that Bible hardly, but it's the only way to make a living.

And he says, Billy Graham, who prophesied his death, and then he corrects himself, I mean, Billy Brannum, rather. I said he'd lose his head and his head was chopped off in Texas. So here's Jim Jones talking about William Brannum saying that he doesn't believe the things that are in the Bible.

And he says, Jones goes on to say, this is basically the greatest money train that these guys have ever been on. And that's when Jones left the movement. He left the latter reign and he started going down other pathways.

This was the point in which many people started to split away. The irony of this split, which we probably can get to in a later podcast, they tried to go without Brannum for a period of time.

Christ for the Nation's Institute was founded by Gordon Lindsay, who is Brannum's campaign manager, who managed Brannum's magazine, The Voice of Healing. There's a period of time for a few years where even that changed his name and Brannum was fully excluded from anything in that publication.

But what happened was the money started to slow down. The money wasn't coming in. and the subscriptions were falling. Eventually, the entire movement realized that without Brannum, we can't keep going. And so, the name was changed back to the voice of healing.

Brannum was invited back again, and all of this is playing out between the years that Jim Jones had left him, and the years in which Joe Osteen's father, John Osteen, was working with him in Texas.

So, there was a period of time where they thought, well, he went astray. The irony is that they came back because, apparently, there's more money if you have him in it. And there it is, you know.

So, could I just clarify? So, Jim Jones was saying that Brannum, and he called him Billy Brannum, is that right? That Billy Brannum had said that I don't barely believe anything in this book?

Yes, that is exactly what Jim Jones was saying. And I've wrestled with that quite a bit. In fact, all of this that I'm talking through, I've actually had one on my screen. I'm working with the Johnstown Foundation.

And if you go to johnstown.sdsu.edu and just type in my name, John Collins, you can find all of these articles. The one that I'm referring to is called Enemy in the Camp, the inside story behind Jim Jones' 1957 prophecy of death. So, John says this, and I've wrestled with this.

I've worked with the foundation trying to unravel all of this history. I've worked with other religious researchers trying to unpack that. And when they read that, they scratch their heads and think, wait a minute.

Many of the things that Brannum taught wasn't in the Bible. And Jim Jones, who was being groomed to become a leader in Brannumism, he's working with the key, basically when Gordon Lindsay backed away, Jones and Mats and Boze, Joseph Mats and Boze from Chicago became the strongest promoter of William Brannum. So, the one who is within the inner circle of Brannumism is saying that Brannum doesn't believe the Bible. How can this be? And I go back and forth. Did he? Did he not? Was he atheist? I do know that if you are a Christian, there are certain things that you can't do.

And one of them is you cannot deny the deity of God. And yet, what we see in this sermon, and I'll play the clip for people who want to hear it, but he's essentially denying that Jesus Christ was divine. And I don't know of any Christian who can do this. This is also fascinating.

And you know, again, John, I'm so very grateful for your ministry and for your courage, because this is deep stuff that you gotta dig, you gotta talk to certain people who new certain people who have documents and can kind of piece the puzzle of history together to understand what really happened.

And this is the deep work that you do. And I'm so grateful for that because it is quite shocking actually. You know, it just causes you to just pause and say, that's why we need the truth.

That's why we need to understand, you know, what really happened? What was really said? What do people really mean when they say radical obedience? So those words, what does that exactly mean to you?

It's a lot of work. And it's a lot of work to try to detangle enough to explain for the audience who can't see what we're doing behind the scenes. There are times when I'll start rambling because there's a thousand different ideas you have to understand before you can really understand the concept.

I'll start talking and then I'll stop and I'll say, well, let's start that over because it's not really clear. This is multifaceted. This is a huge mess of something that isn't biblical at all.

I'm like spaghetti in so many ways, yeah. It's worse than spaghetti. Right, you're pulling the pieces out to see, you know what we're saying? You know that Jim Jones is a bad guy, but what we're kind of figuring out is that Jim Jones knew that Brandon was a bad guy, you know?

Like so. Absolutely. It's interesting. It is. I talk to a person here locally. This is where Brandon's hometown is. My grandfather was the pastor at the Tabernacle, which I can ride to it with a bike.

It's that close to me. I talked to a lady who escaped. Her and her husband escaped back in the, think it was the 70s. And she remembered Jim Jones in this movement. And she worked, I guess I better not say where she worked, but she worked in a capacity to know that when the book The Raven was published, which is the strongest, most thorough examination of Jim Jones' life, when that book was published, it mentioned the connection between Brandon and how Brandon lifted Jones into power.

When the book was published, the local cult, my grandfather would have been included in this, fought to keep it out of the libraries in this area so that the local cult community was not aware that William Branham had started Jim Jones.

And she's, her words to me, she did not know that that's why he prophesied his death. But she said the reason we left wasn't even Jim Jones. When we learned that he was teaching this serpents DNA thing, we realized that if you got it wrong in the first part of the Bible, how can we trust anything he says in the rest of the Bible?

And that's for me really the easiest way to explain this. If you have it that wrong in the beginning, how are you gonna get it right at the end? Wow, that makes so much sense.

And... You know, so grateful, John, that you piece this all together to make it make sense to someone like myself and to those that are listening. I'm getting great feedback on the work that you're doing and what we're putting out together.

This is so important. We have to do it. We have to just examine and pull it apart. It's important to understand the foundation. What was good, what was bad, and how, you know, once you get some bad stuff and then you see it decades later in our current churches, this is where it's important to have eyes of clarity.

For those who will see, let them see and some won't see, but for those who will have eyes to see, we need to bring it forward. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for doing this. I hope I was able to explain it in a way that made sense.

And for the audience who are asking about Christian identity, I know I just skimmed the surface of this. Go read the book from Michael Barkun, Christian identity in the racist right. You'll have more information than you possibly want to know about Christian identity.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on your show again. It was fun. Well, 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 and Laura Lynn Live. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponize Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon Kindle Inaudible.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much.