Miracles, Manipulation, & the Myth of Faith Healing

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 co-host and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a false prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer. Jed, this is a subject that I think is going to be very touchy for me having grown up in a divine healing cult. I know that you know to some extent there is crossover but my entire life was wrapped up on the idea that there can be a miracle and we can

see a miracle in today's New Apostolic Reformation world. The miracles are quite different. They're in fact they're more entertaining. I guess I would say and not all of them real but in the same way not all of them were real for the latarane divine healing type religions and when it really comes down to it the prosperity gospel that exists today is literally an extension of the health prosperity from the cult, from the Branhamism cult and one of the things that really began to hit me after I left is the fact that there are so many, I don't

know what you call it, generated miracles or faked miracles to produce the level of hype and excitement that people start to claim real miracles and that's something that I think it's a little touchy subject so I'll have to handle that delicately but the thought that hit me which hits almost everybody who's never been involved with this is that if you have this person who can heal the masses and they're bringing tens of thousands of people into the cities and into the auditoriums and they've got these photographs well why doesn't that crowd just go to the local hospital and empty it and the answer given by

all of the faith healing cult members or to some extent carousamatics have this too I've talked to carousamatics they don't do it because the argument is that the people in the hospital can't be emptied like this because they don't have faith you have to have faith and the problem that bothered me is where is that faith pointed because usually it's pointed at the minister who's on the platform instead of God because whenever I stop to really think about the consequences of that thought that argument well what about all of the Christian people who are in the hospital would not they have the faith could not

the healer go there and then all the Christian people in the hospital just suddenly be healed and walk out. So I began to realize that number one, this is an entertainment type of faith.

This is not a true faith in God. Number two, it is a faith that is targeting the persons on the platform, personal persons on the platform, not a faith that's actually in God. And number three, there is so much trickery that goes with it, which we'll get into some of that in the podcast.

And again, I'll tread lightly because I don't want to offend anybody. But there are so many tricks going on that the average person who's not expecting it and not aware of the tricks, they look at this and they think, wow, this is real amazing.

This is real. So this is going to be a little bit difficult for me to talk through without divulging too much information, but fun at the same time because it does fascinate me that this can even exist in today's world.

Yeah. One of the stories that pops into my head while you're talking, there was other ones that I was thinking of talking about today, but the one that popped in my head immediately was the wake up olive story.

Did we talk about, I know that I was just telling someone about this, but we didn't talk on this podcast about it, I don't think. I don't think we did. I know I have talked about it with somebody, but not, I don't think publicly yet.

So I'll tell it quickly in case people are already familiar with the story, but there was a situation, I think this was in like 2013, 2014 around that time. There was a couple at Bethel who had a baby and the baby's name was Olive and there was complications during the birth, or actually, no, I think that it was, the baby was only like two days old and then there was a sudden, like, I don't know if it was sudden infant death syndrome, but that's something that basically very quickly and suddenly the baby just was not responsive and they took it to the hospital and it was pronounced dead and these

young parents were obviously devastated by the fact that their child had just suddenly, I mean, that's something that like genuinely is hard for, it's so traumatic that people will just not be able to comprehend that and accept that that happened because you obviously just went through the labor and the pregnancy and everything and just for it to suddenly for their child to suddenly pass away is near impossible for them to comprehend.

And they are a part of Bethel and what is Bethel preached? Bethel preachers that people get raised... from the dead all the time. You know, there was Smith Wiggles' work through it and raised seven, eight people from the dead or there was all of these sort of heroes of the faith where it was happening in Uganda and Afghanistan and these stories of like, okay, well, this is something that has happened, maybe it doesn't happen very often in, I haven't seen it, but I have heard of this.

This is sort of the mentality that I imagine that the parents had because it was the mentality that I had around that same time or maybe a few years previously where it was like, I absolutely believed that God does raise people from the dead and I'd heard several testimonies of such.

I'd never seen it with my own eyes, but like I trusted the people who were up front who were proclaiming such things. And so what was it? It was a matter of faith like that, what is the thing that allows for someone to be raised

from the dead if you have enough faith that it's gonna happen? Like if you have enough faith, you can move mountains. So why not just raise this baby from the dead and clearly wasn't in God's plan for this baby to die?

So what happened is that the parents ended up actually posting on social media about how their baby had died and how it was going to be a situation in which she was gonna be raised from the dead and her testimony would be a testimony of God's divine power and this was gonna be a huge

sort of indication of revival that was going to come. And so they started holding prayer means and from what I understand is that the entire Bethel community and especially the online community because Bethel is primarily an online community.

There's the in person, but there are so many different churches and church communities that are sort of in Bethel's high arc year and people who pay attention to what's going on in Bethel. And so there was massive amount of people who were falling this and who were posting online and praying and there's this sort of momentum that she was going to be healed.

And the, I don't know if it was a hashtag, but people started using the phrase wake up olive at the same time, both Benny Johnson and Heidi Baker

were talking about angels and waking angels. So there's the whole wakey, wakey thing going on where they were like a waking slumbering angels in different places. So I think that that terminology sort of like and clicked or hooked on to this situation in which it was like use this waking, okay, wake up all of, wake up all of.

And so I think three days go by and there was a post by the mother that I was like, this is the third day, this is the day, this is a good day for a resurrection.

And then third day goes and passes and they are holding the baby basically, keeping the baby in the morgue for several days. And then eventually I think it gets to four or five days and eventually they have to accept the reality that their baby is not being raised from the dead and they have to go and do the funeral and everything like that.

And from what I've read and apparently Bethel was very like deleted posts about all of and had it very quietly.

They didn't announce it to their larger community, what had happened. It was sort of this like larger Bethel community was paying attention to what was going on and then all of a sudden radio silence with it.

There was, I think that there was like an email or at least among like Bethel staff or like the direct Bethel community but there was no sort of announcements and nothing happened, you know.

And I have always just felt so terrible for the parents in that situation because yes, I think that they've been criticized by people like a lot of the secular world because this got some attention from like the secular world and some news articles.

And a lot of the news articles are like really critical of the parents because why would you put your child and your dead child on social media like that and have this as a sort of gain social media following and I genuinely do not think that that's what was happening.

I think what was happening is there was parents who their child died and they could not come to terms with the fact that their child died and they lived in a community in which testimonies of people being raised from the dead were happening on a near day to day basis and the only thing that the only ingredient that is needed in order to raise someone from the dead is faith and so how much more of a public act of faith can you get by just like screaming from the rooftops and posting it all over social media.

So I just feel so there's a sense in which like there's self deception that people believe you have that you're accountable for the- least that you have, but at the same time, I just can't believe how heartbreaking of a situation it was.

So in my opinion, which you can hate me for it, I'm certain that there are people that will hate me for it, there is one other ingredient for somebody to be raised from the dead.

And that is for somebody else to be either in on it or completely brainwashed to believe that it happened. So there's a reason why I say this. And again, I'm not trying to be offensive, but I know that there are people out there that are going to hate me, so I'm going to clarify it by this.

Can God raise somebody from the dead? The Bible says that He can. Can has it ever stopped? I don't see anywhere in the Bible that says it has stopped, it has ceased. God cannot raise somebody from the dead.

If you believe the Bible, you have to believe this. However, in these movements, Smith Wigglesworth included, there has yet to be one example, just one that is 100% proven to be the case. Every single one that I have examined and I have examined quite a few of these, everyone has enough room for doubt that if it were given to the test in a court of law, the jury would question whether or not the person testifying was a con artist or not.

That's how this works. Smith Wigglesworth, he has all of these hundreds of miracles associated with his name, go look up and try to find evidence of one of these. You can't find any of these.

And then William Brannum, he comes into this picture in the late 1940s. He is given Smith Wigglesworth mantle back before they called it the passing of the mantle. He comes in and what does he do?

Well, Smith Wigglesworth claims to raise the dead. William Brannum needs to do the same thing. So he starts claiming that he raised the dead in Canada. And that is what really sparked the hype of the laterane movement.

Those two things, A, he's got the mantle of Smith Wigglesworth, B, this man has raised the dead. How can he not be the reincarnation or the spirit of or however you want to look at Smith Wigglesworth?

The problem is this, the way this works, and you being as high up as you are, you probably will know exactly what I'm saying. You go to a revival, somebody's near death, they have something wrong with them, God does heal them, and you say he was at death's door.

You go to the next city, and this guy, he was at death's door. The death was calling, death was knocking at his door, and then you go to the next city, well the story kind of grows and evolves, until somebody misunderstands what you say, and he, that guy was dead, and he saved him.

And they're not meaning that he was literally dead, they're meaning that he would have died. Well then that rumor spreads, and by the time the rumor spreads, the rumor goes faster than the evangelist.

And so the evangelist goes to the next city and he as he gets off the train or gets off the bus or out of his car He's wow. Tell us more about that person you raised from the dead back in the last city Well, is he gonna say no that never happened?

Absolutely not there's more money in believing he's raised from the dead So he says yeah, it was great and spirit of God came down and this this brother was raised from the dead and And I can't say the chain of events that happened all I can say is that Brannum did make the claim You can even find it on recording and the newspaper articles the newspaper journalists who were following this movement as it was growing They got curious. Well good Lord if this guy raised somebody from the dead the world should know that he raised somebody from the dead, right?

So they go back to my homo Jeffers inville they right into the newspaper editors and newspaper editors are like what? Absolutely, we've never heard this it had something like that happened in the city we would have heard it and The actual claim if you go look it up Brannum says I saved him from the morgue So they contact the morgue there was never this person in the morgue like the whole thing was a lie, right?

And you can if you go to my website and you type in raised a man from the dead you can read this chain of events But in the end what happened was he lied. Yeah, but that didn't matter because he lied The hype grew bigger than the evangelist right and there is this weird thing whether you are Christian or not if you If you get so positive in your way of thinking that you start to believe that your symptoms are decreasing Your positive outlook will make you feel better whether you're better or not Combined that with this positive confession thing. I'm confessing that I'm healed

Yet at the same time the way this works is you have to confess your healed before you're healed or you don't get your healing So I have this thing that's dreadfully wrong with me. I now have this positive outlook I suddenly mentally I feel better. I start claiming that I'm better and I'm claiming that I'm healed even though I'm not healed Well the excitement of hearing somebody raised from the dead will boost the spirits of everybody in here Those who are in the positive confession cults begin feeling better whether they're better or not The problem is they go back home and whenever that hype leaves them when that euphoria leaves them

They start to feel bad again and this happened time and time again The same group of journalists that were trying to figure out did will you brand them really do this are these people really getting healed?

They there's an article. I can't remember the name of the journal, but it is on the website They go to a man named Alfred Pol and you can read his testimony online and they're trying to find just one single person that's healed just one Out of the masses of people we're talking tens of thousands of people hundreds of thousands from all across Canada and the US, right?

Just one person, just one person that's healed. And Paul said, I nearly, in this he's talking long after this, he says, I nearly left the faith. Because I had to look at each one of these reporters that came to me and said, not only are the people not healed, not only are they not raised from the dread, all of these things that were claimed.

Many of them went home believing they were healed, confessing they were healed and died. And then I, as a minister, had to explain to their loved ones how they were healed by God and yet still died.

And he said, it really broke me. I have been, so here in Jeffersonville, there were also claims of people being raised from the dead. If you're in this movement that's divine healing and you don't have a raise from the dead, it's not a real movement, man, because you're supposed to claim all of the things of the Bible.

And a doctor pronounced them raised from the dead, right there in the service. The problem with it is, I have spoken since with other doctors and described all of the chain of events that happened in the meeting, person fell down dead, a medical professional came, pronounced them dead, and then they raised up.

The problem is, the way that they were examined is not actually proof of death, according to the experts that I have spoken with. And there are many things that cause exactly what we saw, one of which is, people get too hot in those suits and ties that you had to wear in the Pentecostal garb, and they're constantly standing, sitting, standing, sitting, or when you're standing, if you don't stand right, if your knees are locked, you can pass out.

There's a number of things that can cause you to pass out, especially if you're kind of sick anyway, you're coming for healing. And so the way that the paltz was taken, I said, you may not have even felt a paltz, but they could have still been alive, they could have just passed out and not had enough blood flow for the paltz.

So it's not a medically, it's not a standard medical pronunciation of death, and it would have never passed, had this person, had this person actually went back to whatever was his medical facility, and his other doctors that were working with them found out that he did this, he might have even lost his license, because this is not how you pronounce death.

Although since it was not written on a certificate, it wasn't a official pronunciation of death anyway. All of this to say, I have yet, and I have looked at many, there are a number of proclaimed raising from the dead, from the beginning of the origins of Pentecostalism and its precursors all the way through the latter reign, all the way to here in Jeffersonville, as I'm an adult in Jeffersonville, Indiana, you can find all of these, not a single one can be proven, and there's enough argument that can be made in every case that a...

looked at, that it's not just skepticism. It's just simply questioning whether or not this whole thing is true, whether or not these people are actually being truthful. And the question that I have is how much of it, I don't believe that they were raised from the dead.

How much of it is deception versus how much of it is people in the cult mindset who are just believing it because they're trying to find something to prove their faith. Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on head of how much it is just outright deception.

And we can testify of the, like I have first and experience

of individuals who outright lied about more than just my own father, like many different individuals. I saw the sort of evolution of their stories or sometimes they would tell stories that were so fantastical that it clearly was not true to begin with, I have a good story to tell you in a second here about that.

But I have a testimony too of like a, I think that I've shared a little bit of it before on this, but there was a young girl who was a part of the community that we were, the school that I went to, she was a good friend of my little sisters, like this is someone who was directly like sort of connected with, who had some sort of mysterious autoimmune disease that plagued her for her entire life when she was just a child, you know?

And so a young teenager, she suffered that and then she went to the Lakeland Revival with what's his name, the tattooed Todd Bentley. Todd Bentley, I was thinking Todd White, they all got the same names.

It's all Bob's and Todd's and Mike's and anyway. She went there and she got like miraculous, she had this miraculous healing experience and she came back and she's like, I'm all better, I'm healed and she did like for like four months, she was acting way different, she was going to classes, she was able to sort of like function and I was like, oh my goodness, this is a legitimate testimony of healing.

And then I think it was only like six months after that, she, the autoimmune condition came back with a vengeance and she ended up dying and she passed away because of this. And so like those were the testimonies that I have.

That was, would have been the greatest testimony of faith that I had seen but instead was a testimony of what we're talking about and sort of the wake up all of the situation where it's like, oh my goodness, no, these are really horrific testimonies, not positive testimonies.

And one thought that I have, so you were talking about whether or not it ever happens. And I am with you 100%, I agree. I do not think that this is, there has been a single instance of someone being raised from the dead.

Now, that's impossible to prove. You know, a single instance, at least in the panogostal movement or in the movement that I have been a part of, because if there was, there would have been so much fanfare about that, that I would have heard of it.

And so none of these testimonies that I have ever heard, I do not believe a single one of them is real. But even if it was, even if there was one in 10 million of these testimonies that actually are true, that someone was miraculously and divinely raised from the dead.

Building your faith off of that one in 10 million miracle is like building your retirement portfolio off of winning the lottery. You know, like this idea that one day you're gonna win the lottery.

It's just like it's not, we don't know if it does happen. It's miraculous to a point of like, truly not being able to comprehend where the way Bethel or IHOP or Todd White with a kingdom now, or I can't remember what his ministry is called, but the way that they frame it is that it's there, it's accessible, it's right around the corner, and if you only have faith, it'll happen.

And that makes it seem like it is accessible, that it is something that if you're

two day old daughter dies, that it is responsible and the right thing to do to spend a week trying to raise her from the dead because that is something that happens, even if you have a long shot on it.

And I think that this just builds the world in which the whole community is looking for something that doesn't exist. And therefore, when you have charlatans come in and say, oh, well, here it happened, everybody's ready to believe it.

Everyone wants to believe the thing that is about to happen. And so all these charlatans come in and there's just this sort of community that's ready to believe every single word they say. The deception is so complex to a people who are trained in a very black or white mindset that I even have to explain the deception of the deception before people can understand that there is even deception in the first place, which is really weird when you think about it.

But I understand this. So William Brannum made these false claims. Now he's getting negative publicity and this is early on in the laterane revivals. This is probably the year 1949. I'd have to go back and verify the dates, but it's early. It's early on in the ministry. And what does he do? There is a manipulation technique that goes with almost every one of these destructive cults. And it prays upon the people's fear. And there are actually various techniques that you can do. But the fear is the bind that really makes it happen. If you can

make the person fear and then issue any manipulation technique, it is stuck in their heads because they're fearful. So he started claiming that there were people trying to expose his ministry and they were they were they were sent by the evil spirit, right? So this guy comes in and the way Brandham did his gimmick. He had these, he called them prayer cards and he would have the people write exactly what it is that he would declare was wrong with them and he would discern that was wrong with him, he would say. And he's just he's literally saying the things that they wrote on

the back of their cards, right? The name, their address, what's wrong with them? Those are the three things he always said. So he claimed that somebody came into the meetings and had written something incorrect on the card just to test him. Now think about this. You've got this this gimmick, this ministry where you're claiming somebody's raised from the dead and isn't. Now you've got people with a question, a hint in their mind, was this really real or not? And you've got enough people like me and you who would put that to the test, right? If I was there, that's the

first thing I would do. I would write something just see is this real? That's the way that works, right? And so to put a stop to this, he said, and somebody wrote something incorrect on their card and they were struck down dead on the platform. And you can go to my website, you can type in the man from Windsor, a Windsor Ontario. And you can see this, but he goes to one town and he tells them the guy felt dead, he goes to another town, he told them that he ran screaming out of the building

because the fear of God was in him. Another one, he says he died six weeks later, he died a month later. The story is so ever changing that you can tell it was just pulled straight out of his butt. Yeah, it is not a real story. So that is one area of deception. But there's another area of deception, not many people think about. Whenever you're in this type of movement and you're claiming that God is raising people from the dead, all of this stuff, the claim, the actual claim, if you follow everything that they say out to its logical conclusion is that we as this group of

charismatic pentecostal whatever is the movement, we have an exclusivity on this type of divine healing miracle. And the others outside of our faith do not, the Baptist don't, the assurly, the atheist don't. of these. Every single other group doesn't, right? So I came in contact with this line of thinking and was a little bit shell-shocked because it changed my worldview. It really did. I had a friend who worked in the morgue. So this is a person who is witnessing actual people who are actually pronounced dead, who have actually gone through the test to see are they actually dead, right? And he is working directly with the hospitals, he's working

with the families, and he is aware of events where people have the near-near-death experiences. And so he, like they're not raising out of the casket by no means, but he is working with hospitals where people are, their life signs have gone to zilch. They have no life signs whatsoever. Person has actually died. They have not yet been pronounced dead, I think, but they do come back to life. And they tell about what they saw on the other side. Now, when you're in the Pentecostal Charismatic type religions, this only can happen to us.

This doesn't happen outside of us. But he's seeing Muslims, he's seeing Buddhists, atheists, everybody is having the same types of experiences. And these are people who are literally being raised from the dead. Their life signs are not the existent, and they come back from the dead.

I know people who have done this. I know people who have actually died and came back. I have one friend that I think the number is like seven times he died, and he is still alive today. He came back, though seven times we're in the course of a week, and it wasn't, it was one event that kind of spread out. But I know people who have done this. So this is a person who is working in a morgue, working with people, and he he's aware of all of this. And he is an atheist because he in his words, he watched this happen to so many different people of so many different faiths

that he realized that the worldview he had, which was a Pentecostal worldview, we had no exclusivity on God. Can I even trust any of it? So, so this type of way of thinking actually led him to become an atheist. I have another friend who is a licensed medical professional who also is aware of near death experience. He's a Christian, and he has seen these things, and he has seen these things in Catholicism, which the Pentecostal world, the charismatic world would just roll over in their graves. No, this is not going to happen. But you don't have exclusivity to God. Yeah,

yeah. That's, this goes back to what I said earlier about emptying a hospital. The claim that is being made is we don't go to the hospitals as faith healers because they can't have enough faith. Right. In other words, it is the responsibility of the person sick to cure themselves. If you really follow it out to its logical conclusion, it's not God.

And it also comes down to their faith, which includes world view and all of these other things. What they're really saying is there aren't enough Pentecostal people in this hospital for me to heal, so that's why I didn't go to the hospital.

But yet in the same hospital, you're seeing these people who are literally dying and coming back. The odd curious thing about this is if you take the statistics on the people who have actually died and came back who are in these hospitals, I would say a small number of them when you compare all of the different varieties of faiths and religions and atheism or not, I would say the ones who are Pentecostal or charismatic are actually few in number compared to all of the others.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org.

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

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On behalf of William-Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. That is the other side of the shoe that people don't talk about, too, of like, okay, you got to connect the miracle with the miracle workers, too, like for it to be genuine. I thought about this, too, when I was living in India with the show, when I was with Wyam, I was 18, 19 years old, and I went to live in India.

And I remember hearing someone talk about Buddhist miracles, there was like a young Tibetan, basically he would have been our version of like a Christian agnostic or atheist where he was like, he was heavily entrenched in Buddhism, and he wasn't really like a Buddhist believer, but he was, well, I shouldn't say atheist, but that's sort of like agnostic, like, I don't know, this is the community I grew up in, so if anything is true, then it's this, but I don't even think of that's true. But anyway, I remember talking with him, and he was talking about

these different like priests, Buddhist priests who like levitated and did all of these things, and I remember. being like, this is so ridiculous. And like rolling my eyes. And then at some point, I was literally, I still can remember where I was at because there was this big long walk that we had to take up to the sort of apartment that we were staying at.

I had been getting coffee with him at the sort of square, main square in the town we were in.

And I remember like I was talking with him and I didn't try to diminish or belittle his belief. I was like, oh, okay. And I was hearing his story, but on the inside, I was like, this is a bunch of baloney.

And then I was walking up and I was like, I literally am the son of a prophet. I remember seeing, like I remember what I was seeing, like I remember where, because I had to stop and be like, it was one of those moments, actually ironically, in that moment, I was like, well, maybe I should take his, instead of being like, well, maybe my beliefs are ridiculous too.

I was like, well, maybe I need to take his belief seriously too because I take mine seriously and I take the testimonies of what Bill Johnson says and what my dad says very seriously.

So how can I not take his seriously too? And I do think that that's the tension that you have to get, I think the miracle workers exist in the very specific world in which you isolate your community from all other sort of conversations with other genres of charlatans or faithealers or it's not, Christians aren't the only ones who have this sort of very specific genre of charlatans.

So yeah, I think that that's, I think it's fascinating to look at. It's such a problematic belief system in the way that it is lived out and the way that the consequences, like it's not a free belief.

There's some beliefs that you can have that don't cost you anything and if it's wrong, who cares? But having this sort of exclusive miracle worker

that it is these heroes of faith, it's the Wigglesworth, it's the Brannum, it's the Bob Jones and Paul Keynes and these different prophets, these are the only divinely inspired, these are the only divinely anointed and it is only within our community and that we can find healing and prophecy and whatnot.

There's a cost to that and maybe some people at least some people like the parents of all of pay it more, where like their belief system cause an incredible amount of trauma in their own lives because of these beliefs that they had adopted. So I don't think that people view it as... I don't think that people come to terms with how costly that belief is. And okay, so sorry, one... I want to tell this story too, because this was probably germane to what we were talking about a little bit previously, but one thing that happened that was really funny was my father about six years ago had a heart attack,

or he had heart failure. It wasn't a full on heart attack, but he had like an aortic valve that was not opening, and so he went into heart failure, and he was playing racquetball during the time.

And there were two people he was playing with. One was my cousin, and one was this guy named Tommy, who is a IHOP enthusiast, like to the core. I mean, one of those individuals who is like lives and dies according to the beliefs of the international houseperer.

So my dad drops to the ground and starts going purple, clearly having some sort of cardiac arrest. And my cousin runs out of the room to go call the hospital and like even see within. I don't I think that at like a lot of times gyms have like a defibrillator there, but they call...

He calls like an ambulance, and meanwhile Tommy goes and starts like proclaiming that my dad would be healed and like hits his chest, but not in like a trying to do any sort of

what's it called, chest compressions or anything like that. He just was trying to like wiggle his worth it where it's like I'm gonna strike the sickness out of you. And my dad told this story, and I never really I never really thought about how ironic it was, but my dad afterwards because he was not fully unconscious during this time. He was sort of conscious and he was like trying to push Tommy away during this situation and he was trying to like get him to go get help. Unfortunately, my cousin did and the emergency team ended up getting

him and he and he was fine. He had to have open heart surgery later. to fix the valve. But I remember my dad talking about it and he was just so dismissive towards Tommy and just like, it was a joke.

It was just like this guy's like hitting my pounding on my chest. I'm dying here and this guy's pounding on my chest and it's like, well, that's what you believe, man. Like that's the world that you're a part of.

And I of course didn't believe that. So when my dad told me and was treating this man who tried to raise him from the dead or save his life spiritually, when my dad was just so dismissive of it, I didn't think about how significant that is, that like the leaders of the community, when they are in peril, are not wanting, they were wanting to go to a hospital, they're not wanting to go to a faith healer.

And that makes all the sense in the world because they don't actually buy what they're selling. And later, my dad has actually talked a few times about how he died, how he was dead and how he doesn't give credit to Tommy but how he's like, oh, I was near it, that they actually said that I was dead for three minutes and it's like no one said that.

No, you were having a heart attack, no one, you were never dead, you didn't even have a full heart attack, his heart was like still active during that entire time but he just wasn't getting like blood flow through.

But anyway, it's just, it's so, it's so one-sided, it's such a thing that people are selling, it's a story that people are selling and like I said earlier, there is a cost to buying it, not just the financial cost of and devotion cost of like believing in these people but the way that it actually affects how you interact with the world and how you live your life really matters.

I remember with Jack Coe, this was a thing too, where like Jack Coe was this faith healer and he preached against going to hospitals and eventually he had to go to the hospital because he was dying and he went to the hospital and died there and Coe's extended family blamed Jack Coe's wife for bringing him to the hospital because of her lack of faith and of course like maybe if he had gone to the hospital or earlier he could have survived.

So it's sort of like the belief system itself is really corrosive and I think generally it sort of corrodes away at your view of the world but then in times of crisis and the times of disease.

faster. It renders you useless during those times because you are trying to call upon a power that just doesn't exist or at least does not exist in the way that you think it does.

There's something else that you said in there that I want to explore a bit because I've been thinking about this recently. The way that the movement claims ownership and exclusivity on God and miracles doesn't fit once you understand the world around you. In my field, in the IT field, I work with lots of different people of different religions and faiths and worldviews, etc.

I have work with Catholics and Buddhists and Hindus and many others. If you talk to those people the ones who are devout in their faith, you can tell very quickly the ones that have the, I don't know what you call this, but the equivalent to our Pentecostal hype and their type of religion. I know Hindus who have the same kind of miracles. Now, the interesting part of this is if you talk to people who are in the Pentecostal charismatic side, they will outright reject the Hindu miracles. They'll say, but you can't prove this. If you go examine any one of these, you can't

prove it. And they give you the criteria by which they examine the so-called false miracles. But by those same criteria, their own miracles would have failed. That's the interesting part. It's this circular reasoning. We're going to examine those because they're not our God, but we can't use that same criteria whenever our Pentecostal God is being tested.

So I came into contact of this world through a Hindu. Interesting. I think I've mentioned this up maybe even to you, but this guy knew his Bible inside and out. I was a little bit surprised.

He was a Hindu Christian. And I said to him, what does that mean, man? How can you be a Hindu Christian? And he said, oh, you can serve many gods. I just chose Christ as one of my gods.

And I'm like, I just kind of let it go. This doesn't make sense to me, right? But we were in a coffee shop and he was on fire for Jesus. He was preaching to me. He was telling about the miracles. Sounded, if you were to sit him next to a Pentecostal or charismatic, those two would have bonded immediately if they didn't know each other's what to use.

Like they would have them instantly. This guy speaking our language, right?

And I'm trying to take it all in and try to understand. And I'm still confused. How can you have Jesus in these other gods? And I want to say the other one was like the elephant god.

And I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. This doesn't make sense to me, right? But the point I'm trying to make is you can be on fire for something. And that's something might be having the name Jesus, but does that really mean that it is even Christianity?

I would not consider a person who's worshiping Jesus and worshiping an elephant would not really consider this a biblical Christian. That doesn't make sense to me, right? but it is oddly compatible with this type of faith. If you put your faith in the miracles and and you don't know the world view of the other people having the miracles, you are instantly compatible. They're one of you. They're one of our people, right?

And yet that person is believing in the elephant God. When I remember I was at a bookstore in this is in New Delhi and a lot of there's a lot of English speakers in India and so there was a lot of English books in there and I I was thumbing through a few different ones and I found one that basically it traced the genealogy or not sorry not the genealogy that like history of Christ and his life and it said basically everything that's in the Bible or in the uh gospels happened and then after he

ascended he actually came to India. It wasn't that he went to heaven. He went over to India before his sort of ascent or maybe it was maybe it was in between or I can't remember exactly but they basically had this whole like chronology of the time in which Jesus went and performed miracles in India and um and I don't know if it was like I didn't read a lot of it because again I was like this is ridiculous um but so I don't know if they tie it with a very specific historical figure that overlap during that same period of time or something but

I want to say that this guy that I was talking to I want to say he tried to tell me that same thing and I think that's sort of the conventional but in in a very specific sect that's going to be

the the the the view of Christianity is that that Jesus was then sent to um India and it is it is bizarre it is absurd um but I the overlap between like okay but like this this person believes with full conviction this thing that they're talking about and I believe with full conviction the things that I'm talking about and a lot of a lot of what I believe and frankly like a lot of what the specifically the latter reign stream of panacostalism is So different than orthodox Christianity.

And because it is entirely, I mean, we have our own prophets. We have our own mythologies. We have our own readings of the Bible that is completely tip the whole idea of like the rapture and the tribulation is so extrabiblical.

I'm not saying, I know that there's people who are going to probably be upset by saying that, because there can be some extrabiblical stuff that is true. I'm not, I'm just saying. It's entirely like disconnected.

Like in so far as I think that someone in the early, you know, 300 AD church met this person in India and met this person in Independence, Missouri who talks about the Elijah's and Brannum and Mike Bickel and the end times that is happening in the final generation.

I think both would feel just as foreign because it's built so much. We've allowed so many charlatans to come in to the community and tell their own miraculous stories that have to change your worldview.

Like I think this goes back to just sort of tie it in to these discussions of like the raising people from the dead. If you have a leader, a religious leader of your community, talk about how he raised someone from the dead.

You can't put that as like a side thing in your belief system. That is like a central aspect. So the same way that when I was talking to this Buddhist, young man in India, his sort of like faith was really centrally rotating around, whether or not these Buddhist monks were able to like levitate and were able to like meditate without eating food or water for 40 days at a time.

Like that was a really important part of his sort of spiritual beliefs or lack of belief was oriented around that. And so too, it is the case that individuals like me who grew up in a Pentecostal community, who grew up in a ladder rank community, I really want to know, I need to know whether or not these people are lying about raising people from the dead because that completely changes what I view about Christianity.

And there's been people who have been upset with me because they're like, oh, you can't throw the baby out with the bath water when you're sort of rejecting at different times than what I've had in beliefs of like rejecting Christianity as a whole.

And I totally understand that, but my Christianity was, always defined by these insane miracles that were being told to me. They were being defined by these insane prophecies that were being told to me. My very much, my faith was like centrally like rotating around the idea of whether or not Pat Bickel was going to race from the dead or he was going to be healed. And the paraplegic brother of Mike Bickel, what is he going to walk again? That was a central aspect of my faith. And we've allowed these charlatans to come in and make their own story and their own grift a part of the actual fundamentals of the belief system.

And we're seeing the consequences of it. We're seeing people be abused and exploited by these con artists and you're seeing people, young people like me and my generation who are leaving the faith entirely because of how much it has been corrupted by charlatans and by individuals who just come in and say whatever story they want and know that no one's going to speak up and say something against them because they don't want to get struck dead or they don't want William to tell people that they were struck dead and they don't want that narrative around them.

And you might not get struck dead, you're definitely going to be excommunicated from the community if your character is going to be attacked. We've of course seen it. If you speak up against these things, there's all sorts of consequences that you have to face.

You know, I talked earlier about the gimmicks used to build the hype and whenever you hear the New Apostolic Reformation, Reformation preachers talking about the faith healing movement, they seldom mention the gimmicks that were used. They'll just mention the miracles but they won't go back to the gimmicks. And it's out there, you can research this and talk, you can find information about it. But one of the gimmicks was the person would hold their hand over the person who's being prayed for and vibrate their hand, right? And anybody can do it. You just flex your muscle, you just watch me do it. It's an easy trick. I mean, you can do this kind of thing

yourself, even if you're a kid. The vibrating hand was supposed to be detecting a miracle. And in the days gone by where people weren't just actively doing silly stuff like I just did, they probably didn't know that you could vibrate your own hand. They probably didn't know that flexing your muscle could cause a tremor. And so they see somebody on stage doing this. They're like, oh, wow, that's the power of God. But in today's world, many of the gimmicks that they use just wouldn't fly. You'd have kids walking up to the stage doing the same thing. Look, I'm a

I'm a miracle worker too preacher and I look back at some of these things and it's just it's incredible. One of them though and I've mentioned this before but I've not gone too deep with it.

One of the gimmicks, Branum had this and I'm trying to remember I think I saw another person that had it but the hand, the vibrating hand kind of caught on or Roberts did it. I think Jim Jones did it. There are different ones that did this. Branum invented or came up with a new gimmick and I think others were doing it too. Where the hand could change color and that's actually that's actually a pretty good trick. How do you change color of your hand and there are it's it did become somewhat widespread enough that somewhere I found an article on this but it's a trick that

anybody can do. Whenever you cut your own circulation if you squeeze your wrist long enough, you can watch your hand kind of turn red or purple. What you could do is have a rock up here in your underarm. You squeeze your underarm and it hits that main blood vessel and then your whole arm kind of changes color. Branum was changing color but there was he used that for actually specific purpose. He still used the vibrating hand but what he would do is if a person came through the line that had something that he knew they were going to die. He would do the discernment

thing and if his hand turned a certain color they were beyond God's healing. You can find this in the newspapers somewhere. I think you can even search my website on purple hands and find it but what he's doing essentially is he is cutting his losses because anybody who goes home after being healed. Suddenly the crowds would just turn away from him but he had a gimmick that would cause them not to accuse him. They also had a pamphlet that they were handing out that if something entitled something to the effect how to keep your healing or something like this. He

and FF Bosworth did this because both he and Bosworth had public scandals regarding failed healings both Branum and Bosworth. So they published this paper that said basically you go home and if you don't believe it's on your it's your fault that you die. Right. Right. Sick. Right. So fast forward to today's world. One of the things I've not talked about this much. You and I talked a little bit before we recorded this but I'm trying to think how cautiously to say this because of the parties involved but there was a serious serious life threatening situation with

a family member and family was desperate to get help, desperate to get help. The person had a five percent chance of living I believe. News of this kind of thing spreads if you're in a divine healing cult because now they're all kind of curious.

the power of God going to actually back up my faith, right? So news is spreading that this is happening. The family tried to contact the leaders of the Brannum movement and they simply would not respond.

Now, my family is pretty well connected to the Brannum family, like my grandfather set on the platform right next to the Brannum Sons. So it's not like we were some low-level rank and file member that they just wouldn't respond to.

But instantly, whenever the crisis came, they did not answer. They wouldn't pick up the phone and screening the calls. And I've thought about that moment a lot, especially a flight because they had to have known that instantly the everybody who's in the call is going to find out, well, oh my gosh, this is a healing that could have happened and didn't.

I'm questioning the whole thing. I'm questioning does this even, is this even real? And the way, the way that you stop all of this is you simply don't participate. Right. And it goes back to the very same thing I said earlier, they don't go to the hospitals for that exact same reason.

I don't care what they say. They may say that the hospitals doesn't have enough faith. If you really understand the concept of what they're, what it is, they're preaching and follow it to its logical conclusion, it's more about the minister than it is God.

So if that minister was to hold his revival in the hospital, that hospital would be cleared. But it's for the same reason that that they don't do this in the in these miracle working ministries, it's the same reason why the leaders of the cult wouldn't respond to my family.

Oral Roberts, they built that that entire medical facility on sort of a promise that people that oral Roberts and his son, I'm forgetting what oral Roberts son is named, but that they would come and they would heal people within the sort of, it would be the sort of merge of the medical field and the sort of divine healing.

It was this sort of place in which we were going to both pray for you and we're going to do these healing for you and people went. And then of course, they were like, well, where is oral Roberts?

Like, why am I not getting prayed for? And there was this whole lawsuit that was brought against them for deceiving sort of people into thinking that they were going to get prayed over. But of course, oral Roberts couldn't do that.

He couldn't do that because then the gig would be up. If you're going around and you're praying over each one of these individuals,

you're going to have a lot of people who pass away in the hospital. And when it's in the hospital, like the hospital itself, is people pass away like that it's not pretending to have this like faith healing power.

You go to the hospital and it's like, we will do everything that we can for you and then people pass away. But when there's this sort of authority, this sort of God anointed authority that is going on, you're gonna lure a lot of people in.

And there's one particular, if I remember the last year correctly, this woman was even like had surgeries that she didn't necessarily want to have, but she felt like it was because she was being like spiritually manipulated to get these surgeries.

And then of course that medical facility, they raised like millions of dollars for it. It was up for five years and then now it's a business center. It was like entirely turned into this multi-megaplex business center instead of the medical facility.

So they just dropped all ideas of this holy sort of union between the medical field and the mystical sort of Christianity because it wasn't profitable and it wasn't successful. It wasn't working. And instead they turned it into office buildings.

And I think that that's just such a good representation of like you got like subsidized office buildings by getting millions of people to donate millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of people to donate millions, literally like 20 million dollars to this cause that ended up existing for only like four years, didn't really do anything and then was turned into office space.

Like that's just so emblematic of this entire movement. And the last thing I'll bring up and this one is also a little bit difficult for me. I'm diabetic. So this makes it a little bit challenging but I have seen it not just in myself but with members of the support groups.

They like to weaponize it. So if you leave and there's anything that could have had a miracle, you'll find the family members attacking the former members, you'll find the ministers from behind the pulpit attacking them.

Look, they left and they could have been healed. I might not be diabetic if I'm still part of the call. And it's circular reasoning because while you're in it, my father was diabetic, my grandmother, my uncle, my grandmother, like it clearly runs in my family.

And then outside of my family, you can just go down the list of chronic diseases, you've got dehabilitating diseases, cripples, you've got, there was a guy in a wheelchair that actually lived long after William Brandham died, clinging to the hope that Brandham gave him the false hope that one day he would say, quote, say the right thing and rise up out of that wheelchair.

And he died decades. After Branham did, still a wheelchair in the lid, such a sad situation, but they had he left, the family would have attacked him and said, look, he could have walked, he could have got out of it.

But it's a circular reasoning because if you look within these miracle ministries, there are so many people who are suffering. And in fact, if you compare the miracle ministries to the just typical mainstream churches, there's actually a larger number of people who have conditions in the miracle ministries.

And that's what brought them there. That's literally the reason why they're there. And yet, many of them don't get healed. And I know people are going to say John doesn't believe in divine healing all of this stuff.

My father was healed in one of these ministries. My father was healed by William Branham. And my family has the evidence that I said that wrong. My family was not, my father was not healed by William Branham.

My father would have been healed by God while William Branham was on the platform. I should. Sure. I say that because that's embedded in my head. That's the way they say it. They say he was healed by William Branham.

How can you leave this? Your own father. Yeah. So when you're in these types of ministries, it's all about the man on the platform. It's not about God. And there's always a circular reasoning for why you must stay in it.

And it makes it really difficult for people that leave. So I'm glad my family was able to escape this and I hope others can leave this behind them. Yeah. Because I'm with you, too, of like you could look and be like, oh, maybe this person got healed.

I can look at my family and be like, all right, well, there is chronic issues of stress and anxiety and depression and mental health issues that like had we not grown up in a cult community.

I think that maybe we would not have those things. So it was causing a lot much, much more physical trauma than it was ever healing or whether placebo effect or whether genuine miracles. The fruit of that tree was not health.

Just and questioning that and telling people, hey, this is not the fruit of this tree is not good health, it's where we're seeing all of these sort of things. Then it became back to faith and lack of faith and lack of belief or being a cynic or a scoffer.

And yeah, I'm glad to be out of that situation. I know we talk about this all the time, but every once in a while I'm just like, wow, man. That's because I think even now, like I have a hard time going to the hospital or a doctor in general, because like every health issue that I have, I could be eating better, I could be exercising more, I could be like, you know, for my own mental health.

mental health, there could be things that I could be doing and it's really, it's really hard for me like I sometimes want to not tell my own doctor the symptoms of some health issues that I'm struggling with because I associate it with me not being healthy.

And there's some truth to that of me like there are healthier things that I could be doing but there's so much internalized shame having to do with my own health that absolutely is tied up with the world that I grew up in and me wanting to hide the fact that I was not feeling well or not doing well because I didn't want it to betray that I was not faithful or I was not doing XYZ or you know and so even now 10 years after well being out of the sort of community I think that I still deal with some of the symptoms in that

space. Well this has been interesting and challenging all at the same time. I held back quite a bit there's a lot that I have to say but I'm still processing a lot of that myself and trying to find ways to say that don't offend people who were in that mindset because there are good aspects of the mindset and I grew up like like I said my own father was one person who can claim he was healed in this type of ministry but at the same time there's a lot of challenges that go with that healing that I maybe one day

I'll get into but for today this has been good enough thanks for doing this. If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information you can check us out on the web you can find us at William-Brandom.org.

For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation you can re-weaponize religion from Christian identity to the NAR available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

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