Divine Healing or Deadly Control? The Line Between Trust and Harm

Music Hello, welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-brandham.org, and with me I have my co-host, minister, and friend, Channel Ross, pastor and the voice of the Understanding Scripture and Truth by Channel D. Ross YouTube channel.

Channel it's good to be back and to talk about Hobart Freeman and the death thing, which it just blows your mind when you stop and think about all of the things that he has said in his doctrine regarding healing and then for all of these tragic events to happen.

And I'm not laughing that they happened. It's just the irony of the situation. It's enough really that you actually see comedy movies about this kind of things. And whenever I think of what you're saying with Hobart Freeman, I hate to say it, but I'm actually thinking of Steve Martin and some of the figures in Hollywood because it would make a great movie.

And I think Steve Martin might actually fit the bill, but anyway, all of that aside, I'm trying to put myself in your shoes as somebody who was in the movement, suddenly discovered that it's wrong, and then tried to warn people about it because that fits what I did and that fits the scenario I have.

And just yesterday, I don't know if you probably didn't see it in the comment feeds, yesterday, somebody came across an excerpt of my research that I was doing with Charles where we were talking about the very clear, definite, undeniable ties between this movement and the white supremacy movements, specifically William Brannum and his mentor and all of the details there.

And this was a person who's obviously in the Brannum cult or at least affected by the Brannum cult and saying that, no, your research is wrong. And even if I respond with the link here, no, here's the actual documentation, this is actual proof, they want to instead attack the character.

And I learned a long time ago that I just kind of ignored that kind of thing because if you attack the character and you ignore the substance, it shows the kind of person that you are, and I realized that I'm just going to rise above that.

So I just let him go, and you know, I did give the information out there. If anybody wanted to see, my response was calm, gentle. I just, I let him know, well, you, I said something to the fact, I'm sorry, friend, but I was in the same mind.

I said and here's where you can go and find the information and just let it go at that. But I'm trying to put myself in your shoes. It's even though what I had was significant, that's the white supremacy organization we're talking about the clan, the indoctrination wasn't revolving around that.

So it's just like the side story that exists. But what you're finding with Hobart Freeman, it's actually the main story and the main story contradicts the overall objective of the movement. So in fact, what you have undermines the whole movement.

So I can't even imagine what was going on, what would go through the minds of the people as you're trying to explain this. But anyway, we're getting into the heart of the moment where now he's suffering, he's got the feet issues, he died of heart attack, there are different things that happen.

So all of this rejects the entire notion of the movement. And I think this, we might say that this is the climax, this episode here. Or we might not, you know, I am long-winded if you can't already tell.

And there are just so many interesting details to all of this, John. I wish it was as easy as, you know, just someone was living in great health and then fell over dead of a heart attack.

But the way you just introduced all of this, I would have to say that you are wise beyond your years. And I think you told me today is your birthday, the 30th, I think you told me today you turned 30.

That's amazing. That is amazing that you are wise beyond your 30 years that you have lived so far or whatever your birthday number is. And brings back a whole lot of memories of, you know, when I first heard Dr. Freeman, I thought that I had found the days of the apostles, that we were just going to experience just what they had experienced in the book of Acts, because that's what I was promised.

That's what I was told by him and by that movement in general. There wasn't a single thing he believed that I didn't believe, you know, he was the mentor. He was the maestro of the movement.

And I don't think I really heard, I did not hear early on the threats of judgment. I don't know how that passed by me, but I was just happy. I was just happy in my life.

I was 17 years old to begin with through my late teens, 18, 19, I was just happy with what I heard. And they're definitely loaded statements and veil threats just throughout. You can go back and hear them now, but I was oblivious to those because I wouldn't go and criticize him anyway, you know, I believe this.

So I didn't have anything to fear from touching God's anointed. I had no plan to do it. because I agreed with everything. But as I have shared on many of these podcasts, by the time I'm in my early 20s, I'm teaching myself, I'm a minister, I'm still believing what Hobart said, but I'm just saying things that are not right, that are either contradictory and or just don't line up with what the Bible says.

And then I just, it's a process that you work through. It was not a lightning strike from heaven that this man is 100% wrong. And I need to flee from him and or expose him or whatever.

You know, here I am. People probably hear some confidence in what I say now, and that's what 50 years of living will do. But you would not have heard this confidence 50 years ago.

There was a lot of, well, I'm willing to give that up, but maybe this is still true. Well, what about this? And it just takes, takes you time. Any, I don't know of anyone who has escaped other than this, there probably are, and they're just a lot, they are a lot smarter, better person than I am.

If they can go to bed Monday night, believing it and wake up Tuesday morning, not believing any of it, you're a better person than me, because it simply took me time to navigate this.

But what I noticed after Dr. Freeman's death, and we will talk some more about the things that led up to his death later in this podcast, as well as in some future ones. But let's just say post-death, his followers, the ministers, especially, but the people as well, began to deny that Hobart said what he did, because I was trying to ask people, well, how can this be true that Hobart said because of this?

Hobart didn't say that. He didn't teach that. That's not what he said. You took him out of context. Oh, that's what the ministers under him, they took Hobart's teaching and then made it more extreme than he ever intended it to be.

I heard every possible excuse. I even remember reading one newspaper article, either from the Warsaw or from the Fort Wayne paper, where they had interviewed a woman who was trying to explain what had taken place.

And she said, she accused Bruce Kinsey of all people, and then she accused through him, all the ministers. And I don't think her accusation was true. So I'm defending Bruce in this regard. I'm defending all the other ministers under Hobart in this regard.

She said, oh, Hobart never taught me those things. It was his lieutenants in order to work their way up the pulpit responsibility chain. more faithful you could be to an extreme message. Hopefully Hobart would notice you and that would put you in his good graces.

So Hobart didn't actually teach these things, but it was his lieutenants who grabbed what Hobart taught, you know, a little bit on faith, a little bit on healing and then ran with it and turned it into something extreme.

That's, you know, I had seen that newspaper report, but that is simply not true at all. Hobart was the top dog in the movement and had any minister taught anything that was not biblical.

Hobart would have immediately brought that under the rule of his authority. The one who was responsible for all of the teaching, the one from whom everyone learned was Dr. Freeman himself and even after he passed away, the within a couple of years of that, you know, they were trying to and we'll talk about this if the Lord wills and future podcast.

They went through, you know, all kinds of transition on, well, what are we gonna do? You know, now that Moses is dead, now that Elijah is gone, what are we gonna do? And that was a big struggle for the church.

They eventually ended up having Bill Garner, very nice man who had been an older man. They eventually had him as pastor. Well, he didn't last long. They removed him, do you know why? Because he began to soften Freeman's message and say, wait a minute, we can't have all of this death by no divine healing.

We need to have more love. Well, the authorities of the church, even though he was the pastor, the other people, you know, ganged up on him and removed him. So I'll say all that to say this, John.

That's why we have played so many excerpts. This isn't somebody's opinion, mine yours or anyone else's that Hobart taught this, believed it, said it. This is exactly what was said. And that is why we have worked, especially you, so hard to play these excerpts from these particular messages.

And I know someone even said the other day, well, wow, you guys are actually naming the message and you're playing the start point and the stop point. So it's kind of hard to dispute that.

It's not hard to dispute it. It's really impossible too, because these are his own recordings. You know, so the person, whomever that was, that made all of these messages available on YouTube, I'm sure they meant to do that to spread treatmentism.

Thankfully, it has also helped researchers and fact checkers to actually go and look themselves and find out you know. That's exactly what he said. He reminds me and it's kind of funny. There's in the Brannum history.

There was a gentleman who, like me, he was a tech guy and he wondered why after all of these years, do we not have the transcriptions of Brannum where people can just simply read them?

Because if we had the transcriptions, then we could send them to interpreters and they could easily transcribe them in multiple languages. And nobody really stopped to think that the organization, the headquarters, which is distributing all of this material, has had 50 years to transcribe and translate all of these sermons and all of the different languages and even have a staff of interpreters.

And in 50 years, they weren't able to transcribe the sermons and translate them. So what happened was he created, he did, I guess, OCR and scraped all of the texts, cleaned it up and put it into a database where it was searchable.

And this has many problems when you're dealing with a cult leader who is not quite honest. People who aren't honest can't keep track of their own lies. So you'd hear a sermon where one doctrine is being said to one group of people and another doctrine to another group of people.

Well, headquarters got very upset. You're not supposed to do this. We're the ones to control it. And they tried to block the whole thing. And in essence, what they were trying to do was just really spread the idea that we can't, we can't let the world know what our prophet said.

And yet it was supposed to be a prophet for the last day, prophet for the end time. And I thought mistakenly that this was a unique thing that people, we in Brannemism, we just had this weird audity where we had a cult leader who couldn't tell the truth.

But what I began to understand as I started going through all of the different cults that not only spun off from this, but other cults as well that are completely unrelated, it seems to be a mentally unstable person who rises to the top.

And you have a group of people who are under the control and manipulation of somebody who is a little bit unstable. And I hate to say it. There's not really a good way to say this.

I was included, so this is not against everybody else and not me, I was unstable while I was in this because I can clearly remember a doctrine that went down this direction and encountering somebody who had heard, William Brannem say the doctrine that went down the other direction, which was a polar opposite doctrine.

And I started, after I left, I started going through each of the things that I believed. And I came to realize that he preached both sides of almost everything. And as I started looking at some of the other cults, Hobart Freeman included, I found that maybe not everything, but you can find many things where they will contradict themselves.

But yet the people are trained to... leave that is it is a static 100% perfect from breathe by God doctrine that can't have internal conflicts. So what happens is psychologically through cognitive dissonance, you try to take the polar opposite things and merge them and make something new. It is neither A nor B, you have now made C. Well, what happens when you start trying to work with people who are indoctrinated like this, you'll talk to one and you'll explain that, no, this thing that being said is not quite right.

Well, they're completely unaware that the cult leader said the other thing. And so you have this argument and they're correct. He did say whatever is the doctrine that they heard and believe and has been implanted in their head, but they don't recognize that both things exist and both things can create a problem. More than that, having been indoctrinated, they can't see the problem even if you present it to them. That's really the key. So once I learned this and learned that this was a common thing, I started going through trying to help other cult scenarios where you've

got a group of people and you got one person who has now discovered the knowledge. And I found that the problem that I was facing was replicated in almost every one of the cults. Very much the same as what we're going through here with Hobart Freeman. And yet at the same time with Freeman, it gets a little bit worse because again, the problem that he's facing with his own health, his failing health, contradict the very doctrine for the reason that the whole thing was established.

So the cognitive dissonance for this group is actually just a little bit stronger than the ones that I've dealt with in other cases. I'm not surprised to hear that. So each item that we have addressed, Sean, we have tried to document the win. And where? Because I guess we're all human beings. We're all guilty of this. We hear what we want to hear. And we tend to... I mean, that's why you either watch Fox News or CNN. You don't watch both. You choose one of the other because you want to believe what you want to believe. You want to hear what you want to hear. And we're all guilty

of that to some degree or the other. And it's difficult to really... I guess if you've been a part of a group like Hobart Freeman's to acknowledge, yeah, those things were actually said and done.

And so we don't like having to admit that what we all have to admit, yes, we were gullible. I was talking with someone the other day and they said, you know, this has just been very painful because you're telling me that I was deluded and I said, but that's a wonderful thing to ever find out that you once were in the past. It would be horrible. It would be horrible to go down to and did, and never acknowledge all of your delusions. I said, you know, I look back on some of my earlier things and I go, what an idiot I was. And whether you're willing to call yourself an

idiot, I'm willing to call myself. That does mean no harm. All it does is free you. You know, if you're never willing to admit how dumb was I? But we know we're really not poking fun at anybody's maturity or masculinity or anything, the a religious cult with its constant repetition and its mind control is simply a powerful thing that people outside of it who have always been in just a normal, balanced, Baptist Methodist, Pentecostal Church don't understand where you, when you can leave one church and happily go to another and everyone still loves everyone, that's not the case with something like faith assembly. So something we've mentioned in the past,

but I want to play a clip here because it just covers it from every angle and that concerning concerns the wearing of eye glasses. That was not something that came late in Hobart's teaching ministry. He spoke about glasses regularly. I can find and show people the exact tapes where he's saying, well, tomorrow, you know, I've got to go renew my driver's license and I'm confessing by faith, I'll pass the eye exam. There's multiple times over different years whenever you had to go renew your driver's license. So that's something he talked about and he told so many stories.

You know, I want people to understand before something is actually outlawed or even if something is never formally written up in a document signed by Hobart saying this is outlawed, simply by the telling of all of the stories of people who threw away their glasses and God blessed them are in the people who didn't get rid of their glasses and God cursed them. That's all you have to do is tell stories like that and you've already made your message in your point very clear.

So he had tell stories of people who threw away glasses and he tells some some hilarious ones of someone up on Strawberry Lake in Minnesota who threw their glasses away. He was going to trust God and said, blowing the holes of fishermen, an angler accidentally hooked the glasses, brought them out of the water. They had his name and address. They mailed them to him and everyone's laughing. That's the devil tempting you to put your glasses back on. So when we heard Hobart tell all these stories, we all caught the hint. I didn't wear glasses in so it wasn't something I had to deal with.

but so many other people did wear glasses and it was something for them to deal with. I still dealt with it in this way after I heard all of these messages about glasses stories, you know. It just becomes a part of you and I would literally, John, I could go into a church or pick up a religious periodical that had photographs in it and I would look, if any of those people had glasses on, those were the ones that didn't have any faith. You know, you just have that crit, I mean, that was just part of it. You're just critical. You're anybody who had a pair of glasses on

and you know, we don't know their life or heart. That could be the most godly of the people in the photograph and the one without the glasses, the biggest sinner in the group, but all we could see was what was on the outside. So we have a, an excerpt from a message entitled Three Steps to Receive Your Healing. I've talked about the naming of his messages. Everything is, you know, four steps to do this, you know, eight conditions for this, three steps for that. And you know, living the Christian life is not the same as baking a cake. It's not you've got to put so much

of this ingredient, carefully measure it, pour it in there and get this ingredient. It's just live your Christian life. Just love the Lord Jesus. Love your neighbor as yourself. Read his word and live the life of discipleship and seek first God's kingdom. As soon, and this took me, obviously, a while to understand this, as soon as I came to understand what the gospel was all about and what Christianity is all about. Then I was able in hindsight to go back and say the three steps to receive your healing. Who's to say there aren't four or two or five or none? You know, who's to say

that there are three? That's just the way these ministers did it. So without further ado, three steps to receive your healing 54 minutes, 31 seconds to 56 minute and 22 seconds. He, the healed right where you're standing, you're sitting. You can come here and receive the laying on the hands. If you will accept the promise, the terms and the conditions. Now, if you come and we pray to you, sometimes you have and people will hand me their glasses and say, but I don't see any better than they're looking like they want them back. I don't want them to give

to give them to me in the first place. I always give them back to them as soon as they hand them to me. But if you say, I don't see any better than it means you haven't come often enough to learn all the conditions. Don't take your glasses off until you're willing to break them. Don't throw them in the lake. Somebody will mail them to you. Christ them. Walk on.

Do like don't do like the woman did she well do like she did all of them She said I heard the faith teaching been on pills all over life through them in the waste basket Oh, but she said I knew that wouldn't work because I knew where they were so she said I just went in the next day Got the waste basket and took them out the dump and burned

I mean if it's only belief friends don't leave a little door open so that you can get in I still think a lot of reason one of the reasons why eyes are not manifested in the center in the arts too easy to put them back on and God just wants to see if you're talking words or if you mean business Because you know always go down and get a prescription She's not like a cancer it's not you know God or failure with glasses So that's why we recommend don't take them off until you're ready to take them off and destroy them

We're not going to criticize you if you wear them that isn't what we're saying but I just don't have a whole lot of appreciation for all these people taking glasses off six months later they got them back on Now what said do the testimony faith So again you hear the humor of Dr. Freeman of when you take your glasses off don't hand them to me break them and Crush them and destroy them. So let's anyone say John who might never taught you couldn't wear glasses. Yes, Hobart absolutely did teach that Anything that we have covered so far and I've referenced it as a as a

Doctrine or belief of Dr. Freeman's We have referenced it with respect to a particular clip from one of his messages. Yes, he most definitely taught that When we were talking in our last podcast John we played a clip I can't even remember What it was from but I resisted the temptation to chase a rabbit because on that same tape he used a word that later was Forbidden in the church and that was a word pregnant By the time you got to the end of faith assembly you had all these young couples standing up wanting to announce that the wife is pregnant

So you'd have these women or these husbands excited that go to a communal microphone There were many of them hanging from the ceiling at the new building at the faith assembly And they would say we just want to praise the Lord and give him all the glory and just announce the fact that my wife is pregnant Well, bless those poor people's heart Hobart came out after that and said Cowls and horses get pregnant women don't they become with child Well, I have tapes where Hobart uses a word pregnant you know earlier in his ministry So somewhere between the two he got the truth on that but never explained the people how all of that came about

So here's another example on a message done in 1975 I've entitled seven channels to faith or doubt. 31 minutes and 15 seconds to 34 minutes and six seconds. Let me just introduce that a little bit first of all.

He's talking about why is it that the ungodly get to live a long, healthy life and sometimes die, go to the grave and peace and good health. Then he brings out this story of Dr. John G. Lake.

No germ could live on his body. He went in places where the bubonic plague was. They would take the spittum from a corpse, look at it under a microscope. It's forming with germs, put it on the back of his hand, then put it back under the microscope.

All those germs were dead. He had the spirit of the law, the life of liberty of Christ Jesus in his body and nothing could touch him. You should read the sermons of Dr. John G. Lake.

Then he goes on to talk about Kenneth Hagen, has lived in divine health, hasn't been sick for 30 years. And then he says, I've had no personal medication going on nine years in my life.

No sick calls, I've never get called to a sick member of the church's house. Isn't this great? Isn't this wonderful? They were believing almost to the point of you can't die message because how would you die?

If you're never gonna die of some kind of sickness or illness, of course, that's a goal of everyone to go to sleep one night peacefully and not wake up the next morning on this earth.

That would be wonderful. And that happens occasionally, but not that often. So if you can now, John, play that. So people can hear seven channels to faith or doubt in it with that whole context.

Where you're never in bed. I've never been in bed fast in all these years. I've never doctrine the door of a doctor, the hospital accept to visit somebody else. And not members of our church.

That's right, that's gonna have to be true because I tell that everywhere I go, I said, what do you think it'd be like to be pastor of a church where you never make a sick call?

Never, never, never make a sick call. Thank you. How are we doing?

People wonder why it concentrates so much on this faith message, friends. It delivers me to be able to do other things. To make mature disciples. Why they walk broken legs and broken arms out here, just like it was mosquito bite.

Almost literally that is true. Praise the Lord. But as I say, people can't talk anything but doubt and fear and unbelief and the negative. And you see, if you listen to much of that, you listen to man like Grubb, and you read his writings, you're going to absorb or assimilate some of that unbelief.

And I've already mentioned this. Authentic article in the Logos and New Wine magazine, Faith are presumption written by a professor at ORU. We have to call Black, Black, White, White, or it won't help you and you can't help others when they start printing that sort of stuff and when they allow professors to teach what he taught there.

And it's killing the faith of people. It just renders a man in a state of indecision to believe that there's some distinction with regard to Logos and Horema that you have to wait for a definite revelation that some promise that you're claiming applies to you or you can't appropriate it.

We can never lay hands on anybody and say, in the name of Jesus we know you're healed, that's presumption, the article, faith or presumption you see. And so they cite one or two examples of some people who didn't have the faith or if you knew all the details you could see where they missed it and say they almost died and all that kind of business after they were prayed for.

It's strange thing that never point to the tens of thousands who get healed. I would invite the brother up here to this barn to listen to some of your testimonies before he writes his next article.

But that's not the sad part. The sad part is this article. And here's influencing people who are on the fence who can't appropriate the teaching apparently of faith or who don't get enough of it to know how to appropriate and listen to this man.

He says, I thank you very much for the article, faith or presumption because there are times when knowing the word, claiming the word, confessing the word, believing the word is not enough, you still don't get an answer.

And then if we can do one final one and we won't play anymore excerpts on our podcast today, but this gets us right into the last stages, the last year of Dr. Freeman's life.

And the tone of those early messages, I think people will notice is pretty happy and friendly. Although he still holds his beliefs and they're pretty strong, but by the end, the tone actually begins to change.

And so in a message entitled, avoiding an unsettled mind part two, done in February of 1984, the same year where Hobart will die later from 27 minute, 13 seconds to 29 minute and 51 seconds.

Are you as some have been even in this church involved in any way with medical science? You've had all of the teaching just tape after tape, message after message, the faith book about the dangers of getting involved with medical science and drugs.

We don't have to rehash all of that again, but are you giving medical drugs to someone you're caring for? We dealt with that last week, the person died as a result because they admitted that they were sending against the light the head.

You see, dear friends, why do we have to tell you or should we have to tell you, that's the same as you taking it yourself, and with the lights you've got about divine healing and medical science, well, you can expect, you know, the chastisement to come.

Are you involved in any way with handling medical supplies or medical equipment? And yet we hear of people in faith assembly, and been here, I don't know how long, years many times, and still we'll see the inconsistency of ministers who claim to be teaching divine healing and then go to the doctors at the first symptom themselves.

And yet they're involved in it. If you don't know the answer, if you've got an old mother or a father or relative that needs medicine, if you don't know the answer to that, you better get in the word and get alone with the Lord and find out what you should do in a situation like that.

First of all, you shouldn't get involved in situations like that. I'll just tell you ahead. Their answers that I'm not going to supply them all to you, but if the choice for me would be giving medicine to a relative or putting them in a nursing home since they want the medicine, then the choice is clear to me.

I'm not going to give them that. I'm not going to be charged with them dying on my hands in my house. You can figure these things out, friends. If you bring old people into your house relatives or whatever, they have to come.

You should know that already on your terms. This is a house of faith. And if you get sick, we're not calling the doctor for you. We'll pray for you if you'll believe it. And so on.

You have to saddle those things beforehand. And yet they're people in this assembly who are paying people to nurse their mothers and give them drugs and so forth. Friends, it's only a question of time.

You can have time till the boom falls on you. You've heard the teaching over the years. You have to make the choices. But why do you want in faith assembly where it's such a hard walk?

If you're not going to walk that narrow way in that hard walk, why don't you just, well, find an easier road and easier path because you're sitting against the light. This is just a dreadful but famous message where, as we have just heard, he has already outlawed medication.

Everyone realizes, you know, no medication, no glasses, no doctors for yourself. But then he just begins to add to the drama and the bondage in the lives of these poor people, no working in any kind of company that produces any kind of medical equipment, the whole medical supply field.

Even if you are working on the conveyor belt at the very back of the factory that has some tube or something that might find its way... into medical practice that was outlawed, then he even goes further. Not only are you the authority and are you the one who have control in your own life or you're not allowed to take medicine, you're not allowed to give medicine to someone else. I mean, that's their life. That's their business. I think we played last week a clip where Hobart said, or I think it was the time before where he said he won't die of a heart attack, and then he yells that if you don't agree with

me over the fact I won't die of a heart attack, you have no place in this church. Not only does he reserve the right to live his own life and believe, but he wants you to believe what he believes about himself. And if you don't then you're not welcome in the church.

So in avoiding an unsettled mind, no giving medication to others, no taking any people into your home that might require anyone else even to give them medication. And he even mentions your elderly mother or father. He said, you can't take your elderly mother. He said, if they want medicine, if they think they need medicine, he said they want us to pray for them, they can come in our home. We'll just pray for them. I wouldn't want faith assembly to pray for me. Look at all the people that died after they got prayed for there. But he said, if they want medicine, they need to go

to the nursing home. So did he teach that if your elderly parents were going to be in need of medication that you were not allowed to have them in your home, you needed to send them to a nursing home. Absolutely. 100%. That's what he taught. And you know how he ended it? He said, because if you don't obey what I'm telling you, God's going to lower the boom on you. There's a kind of threat that you're going to get if you don't obey what Hobart is saying.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the New Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book. You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute

to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top. And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the- audio or video version that you're listening to or watching.

On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. When I began researching the cult that I came out of and how it had progressed after William Brannum died, there's something psychologically interesting about what I was finding.

There were some of the things that were taught, which were fully adopted by the group whenever Brannum was alive, that he was repeating over and over and over and over again, that some of the things just didn't make any sense, whether it was biblically sound biblical doctrine, or just simply things that were his opinions that he was introducing into the religion that didn't make any sense.

And what happened over time after he had died and he couldn't defend those and reinforce those opinions, some of the movements began to develop away from whatever is the thing that they cast out.

I could give examples, but it's irrelevant to this conversation. The point I'm trying to make is, whenever you create a mythology that isn't really based off of the Christian Bible, but based off of the things that you're adding to it.

As long as the person is alive and can enforce it and can rip verses out of context and try to apply it and make people believe it, there is a group of people that will believe it and accept it.

There's this other category of people that they may have encountered the doctrine and they said, no, we're not going to accept this and they just walk away. Well, what is interesting to me is those people, the ones that walk away who did hear it, who could have accepted it and did not, they're long forgotten.

And those are the people who stood up and said, no, we're not going to take any part of this. But what happens is as the mythology continues, the mythology actually grows bigger than the cult leader, whenever the cult leader was alive, because through cognitive dissonance, like I said before, they're trying to reconcile things that are just fully incompatible.

And again, I'll keep saying this because it fascinates me with the Hobart Freeman called. Faith assembly took a person whose entire doctrine was that you don't need medicine, you can heal yourself. And then all of his body just fell apart.

And you look at the end of the in scenario of this, there is not a stitch of doctrine that was the foundation that you can really say was truthful because he died of the very things that he said he could conquer.

He suffered with the very things that he said he could conquer. And like the point you made about Kenneth Hagen, not needing a doctor and him not needing a doctor, well, how can you say that?

You're actually lying when you say this if you have a prosthetic foot. So in the end, you're trying to contain something that isn't true. You're trying to convince people to believe something that isn't true.

And then you die. Well, after you die, that turns into a mythology. And part of the reason I'm so fascinated with studying the ancient mythologies, if you ancient Egypt, for example, depending on the time period, you can find a different version of each of the gods in their backstories.

Why is that? It's because the same exact thing. You've got this group of people that is enforcing the idea, the people are indoctrinated, well those people die out, and the next group of people says, well, that just didn't make sense.

Let's invent this new story. And so the story continues to grow until the mythology actually grows far bigger than what it was to begin with. And a lot of what you see with the ancient mythologies, I'm seeing with the Hobart Freeman's faith assembly cult.

This thing has grown, and then they come a point whenever now you've got cult members who are denying themselves medicine, and the people are starting to die out. So in a way, what happened with Hobart Freeman that was his destruction, it starts to become the destruction of the whole group because they're adopting the same practices, and yet the group still continues.

So you've got on the one side of the people who are staying in this, you've got another group of people who are leaving it, and here's where it gets weird. There's this group of people who are in between.

They're kind of caught in limbo between, do I believe it? I can't believe everything, do I not believe it? I can't drop everything. And that's really, for me, that's the reason why we do this.

I feel so sorry for the people who are caught in limbo. You're so right, John, the people in the middle have rejected certain aspects of Dr. Freeman's teaching, but they haven't been able to understand that the whole warp and woof of his ministry and his message was just not a godly ministry or message.

But you know, my naivete was revealed in the fact that whenever things began to go south, I was, you know, I loved those people, and I thought we were all together, you know, we were the end time body.

And I thought they would be open to discussion and pointing out, wait a minute, Hobart said this, and this didn't, and of course when he died, that's the huge, that's the biggest thing. The dude is dead.

That goes contrary to every single thing he ever taught, surely we can have a conversation now. And that's what I desperately tried to do. But and I beat my head against the wall for a few years, and then I just walked away from it and been happy ever since until today when, you know, I'm back to beating my head against it.

But you know, the standard cult member behavior seems to be, John, to protect that leader at all cost. Even though we played all these clips. Even though people have said, well, you guys have actually time stamping the clips, so there's not any way we can dispute these claims against Hobart Freeman.

And again, all thanks to the people responsible for putting the messages online. Hope they don't feel like they have shot themselves in the foot, but it's been a great resource for everyone to go listen to themselves and look, if you still love and trust and believe Dr. Freeman, you know, that's your decision in life.

And thankfully, someone has made messages available, all of them for you to listen to. But for those who don't agree or want to follow, then the resources are there. So it's almost to me, as I try to process, how is this, what is going on?

The cult members want to protect the leader at all calls, he's gone, you know, he's dead, he can't protect himself, they want to protect him. And I think when you've been in an abusive relationship for so many years, I guess, and I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, but I guess it's just a mindset to be willing to take the fall for the leader.

He's no longer here, but I want to argue against everything you guys are saying about Dr. Freeman. So in conclusion, with what we have left today, I want to return back to Dr. Freeman's feet, because I thought we kind of felt a little bit rushed at the end of the last one.

You know, he told us himself, and we've played, I gave all of the evidence for this, the problems that he had with both of his feet. He had polio as a young child, which unfortunately affected his right foot.

He was run over by a big factory truck that affected his left. He had gotten Mark 1124 in the summer of 1966 when he went to a conference, a deliverance meeting in conference that was kind of spearheaded by Gordon Lindsay.

And we have a lot, we probably have almost all of the documentation about that, and we will address that in the future. So the people truly interested in the historical background, where did Freeman get this stuff?

Where does Anna Schrader come into the picture? Where does the manifestation of the sons of God, where do matured sons ideas come into it? Well, we'll get to that God willing later. But at this meeting, Kenneth Hagen was one of the keynote speakers, and if anybody knows Kenneth Hagen, Kenneth Hagen was on the scene long before Hobart Freeman was in the charismatic movement.

And Kenneth Hagen's verse was Mark 1124. That's where Hobart got his teaching on, you pray, you claim, you believe, you receive it then. And then whenever it's manifested, it could be a moment, a month, it might be a millennium who knows, but you have it regardless.

And yet, as I, John, you know, and I believe that again, I've said this over and over on these podcasts, I believe these things when I first heard them because that's what I was taught.

But over the process of the next few years, I didn't have to do anything, but listen to his messages. I didn't have to read my Bible. I could have left my Bible totally closed. And I listened to his messages and I thought, wait a minute, you're telling everyone to throw away their classes, no medicine, no crutches, no canes, no wheelchairs, if you have received your healing, go act like it.

And yet, I'm finding out from your own lips, I didn't have to do any investigative research for this one, that you're not practicing that, that you have something wrong at that time I thought was with only one of the feet I didn't realize because we didn't know more details until later messages that he had something wrong with both of them.

And you are carrying a new pair of shoes around in the trunk of your Cadillac while you wait for the manifestation of your feet. I thought that's a real curious exception. How is it? Everyone else is required to discard stuff, but the leader isn't.

And I don't know, John, how I first dealt with that, it probably just goes over your head, probably as a 18 or 19 year old, I probably heard that when I was 17, probably goes over your head.

I mean, you're just so excited about all the positive promises of the word of God, you're not, you're not even thinking about or looking for any inconsistencies in the leader. But as you go on and as he goes on to continue to elevate himself saying, I'm the only one that God has given the entire end time message to, then I go, whoa, well, if you are the only one, then we have some serious problems here in your, in your past life.

He was absolutely opposed to any kind of other, I don't know, mechanical aids or mechanical devices, and yet he had it himself. So I needed to be able to make sense with that in my mind, in my 20s, and I was having a hard time doing that.

And so when I would raise a question, even previous to Dr. Freeman's death, when I would raise a question, absolutely immediately shunned black bald and labeled. And I just thought, and I think to this day, that was so unfair, because I think I had a valid question, and I wasn't angry or mad at anyone.

I'm not angry or mad at anyone to this. day. I just had a valid question. My mind has just ticked in that way. How can it be that I can't wear glasses, but you can wear an orthopedic shoe? I didn't understand. Somebody explained to me what the difference. And I actually have heard a few attempts to explain that. But again, they're just justifying the leader. Everyone wants to preserve the reputation of the and the and the mystique. They want to preserve that for the leader at all calls when they're willing to take the fall from him for that. But what my mind, John, said

is, wait a minute, you quoted this Jeremiah 17.5, cursed it is a man that trusted the man and make it flesh is arm. You quoted that a thousand times and you've interpreted that to mean that the arm of the flesh, one of their favorite phrases, is anything besides just prayer. Anything besides simply prayer and faith in God is the arm of the flesh. So no medicines, no crutches, no canes, no wheelchairs. Someone has told me there were plenty of people I've heard from. They wore glasses until they got to the parking lot and they stuck

them in their glove compartment because they didn't want to go in and be in a house of faith wearing glasses knowing that everyone's going to be staring at them. Even the people that couldn't see because they didn't have glasses would be staring at them. And I've heard that people who needed a wheelchair, you weren't about to roll a wheelchair down an aisle at faith assembly. They would pick up a person out of their car, bring him in, carry him and set him down. What difference does it make? It was just so rapidly measuring on the miners. You know, who cares? Get the, let the person come in on their crutches

or cane or wheelchair. Jesus let those people come around him like that and then guess what? He just healed them. Faith assembly didn't have, Dr. Freeman didn't have any power to do that. That's why you don't want those people in there. Jesus didn't mind the lepers around him, the blind, the people with withered hands, the people with withered legs. He didn't mind those people around him at all. Bring him to his church because when they came to Jesus church or the church of the apostles, they just healed those people. So I saw this wearing of the orthopedic

shoes as a leaning to the arm of the flesh by heath's definition, not by my definition. I mean, if you can't walk, find out a way to walk by any means. I'm not opposed to orthopedic shoes at all. I'm saying by heath's definition, leaning to the arm of the flesh, that was contradicted by the shoes that were being worn. He says you've got to act your faith. Act your faith means get rid of that everything. So he is...

acting contrary to his confession again by his own definition. And so what happened was he had to get these orthopedic shoes. The company that he had bought them from in Chicago went out of business. He had to find orthopedic shoes from another source. He bought those. They were in proper fit. He continued to wear them, wearing them led to a blister. The blister led to a boil. The boil led to an open wound. The open wound led to a hole in his left ankle. The hole in the ankle led to gangrene and the gangrene led to death. And so even on the coroner's verdict, which is a

legal document, not a medical document, and we gave John last time, you know, there's all kinds of statutes for every state pursuant to Indiana code 36-2-14-18. And I have talked to an attorney. I have an attorney in Indiana who's been able to answer questions for me regarding the legality of certain things. There are basic pieces of information that are simply required to be made public.

Especially if the person is of a noteworthy historical nature. I mean, if you can't go get information on your next-door neighbor when they pass away, but someone who is of historical importance and, you know, there are different laws that apply there that even on the coroner's report, the calls of death, I'm not going to read all of this, save some of it for later, severe cardiovascular disease, contributory factors, gangrene, neck, crosses of the left foot. And actually, then there are a lot of different medical documents, but what he actually had was called gas gangrene. And here's what that is. Gas gangrene is a rare

life-threatening bacterial infection that destroys muscle tissue, causing severe pain, rapid swelling, foul smelling discharge, skin discoloration, and gas bubbles under the skin. It's caused by deep wounds or trauma where bacteria thrives in low oxygen. Treatment demands immediate surgery, including amputation, high doses of antibiotics like penicillin, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy to prevent the rapid spread, shock, and death of this person.

What poor Dr. Freeman was going through was terrible. And I don't like to see anybody suffer. I don't want to see an animal suffer, let alone the human being suffer, whether I agree with her doctor, and I don't want to see an animal suffer, I don't want to see an animal suffer.

or not. Me disagreeing with her doctrine has nothing to do with my feeling toward a fellow human being. I would not want to see anyone. I wouldn't want to see my worst enemy have to have to go through what Dr. Freeman probably had to go through.

So I just wanted to make sure that we underscored well enough. The fact that there was a contradiction between his teaching and his practice. And we all have had that in our life, myself included.

That's not the end of the day or the story. The problem is he was causing so much death and discomfort and pain in everybody's life by making them discard their devices, but he wasn't doing it himself.

And it's just almost ironic that by him not doing that himself, it led to all of this personal suffering and it was a contributing factor in his own death. Here's the problem that I have with it.

And it goes far beyond Freeman. Freeman is just one person and a long line of people doing the same thing. If I'm teaching my children something and I want them to learn, it's usually something that they don't really have to do, but I want to teach them a new skill.

So if I'm teaching maybe, I don't know, hanging studs in a house with a hammer. And I'm teaching them how to use a hammer. Well, if they smack their hand and hurt it real bad and injure themselves, I'm not going to make them continue this.

I'm going to say, you said off to the side until you learn how to do it properly. Have another son, I was teaching him to be a mechanic and I was having him work on his car.

I watched him jack up the car and I saw him start to crawl under it without putting a jack stand in. And I said, son, you got to protect yourself before you do something dangerous.

You have to have a jack stand so the car doesn't fall on you and crush you. That's me, a showing that I want to teach my children something, but I want to protect them while I'm teaching them and I don't want them to put themselves into a position of risk while I'm teaching them with this type of ministry.

And again, Hobart is just one and a long line of people that did the same exact thing. They did the opposite. They wanted to put people at risk when people started dying and they did in almost every, actually every chain of cult that proceeded, that goes back through time that developed into Hobart Freemans cult.

Every one of them had people that died because of their doctrine. And much like me with my children, these are doctrines that even if they're true, they're not core to Christianity. There's something that you can learn that is in addition to Christianity, but what they did is they tried to say that the additions are more important.

You could debate whether those additions are biblical, whether they're not. For me, that's irrelevant. The idea that the core of Christianity should have been the focus. They focused on the thing that wasn't the core and then put people at risk and gladly watch them suffer and die because of that risk.

And when I say I'm going through the history, you can read my books and read through this, but Frank Sanford, I went back in time through individuals leading up to this and found some of the worst cases, but there are thousands of these people.

But Frank Sanford, who was one of the two pillars that evolved into Pentecostalism, was teaching people that they could believe in God and God would provide for them. God won a ship and went to prophesy the world and God did not provide food for the passengers who were on the board.

He ate all of the food himself and he walked out flush like he had been eating well while the rest. The newspapers described him as ghost with skin just wrapping the bones. So the people had suffered and starved while he was eating because he did not care.

He was teaching them this doctrine that God would provide if you have enough faith to do it, even without food. And he was living well while they suffered. On the other side, you had John Dowie.

Dowie was teaching basically the precursor to what became Hobart Freeman's call. We've talked about him many times. I've not gone deep. You can read my book on Dowie, but in those healing homes, it was practically a death sentence.

He had these healing homes established. The families would pay lots of money to get their family members into the home where he would heal them. Well, if you had a case that he couldn't heal, he would forcibly, physically eject you out into the streets at night.

And the neighbors were picking up the people who were just invalid, some of them broke and bone, some of them couldn't walk, and nursing them back to health or taking them to the hospital, unless they had died.

And the undertaker was coming under the cover of night and taking hundreds of dead bodies from these healing homes, all while he's telling people that you can be healed in this movement. Out of that came FF Bosworth, who we talked about, Christ the healer.

He mentored Brannum in the healing revivals. He's teaching the same exact things and people are dying in his ministries. I've got it documented and much like all of them in that same line, the person who dies, well, they didn't have enough faith.

They didn't believe it well enough or simply I wasn't talking that they would actually be healed. I just meant that they could be healed. There's all these excuses, right? But in the end, they could care less about the people.

It's more about themselves and quite frankly, it's more about, Bob Scott calls it power and stuff. I can't say that he had the stuff. but I can say that he had put himself into a position where he's above everybody else.

He fed on that power, that elitism. They rise up to that position and they don't care about the people who are dying. They don't care about the people who are suffering. And again, say it's a true doctrine, say that you believe that their version of divine healing is true, which I have strong questions about. If you really believe that, you wouldn't expect people to die for it.

You would try to train them until they could do it without dying. But the problem that I have with this type of movement is they don't care about the people. They only care about themselves.

They're not focusing on core Christianity. They're trying to take something that is extra and put the focus on it. And in the end, if you really follow that out to its logical conclusion, it is a full distraction from the gospel. Yes, it may be part of the Bible. Yes, it may be. I'm not going to argue that it is or isn't. But it is a distraction for the gospel. John, there's nothing I could add to what you just said. That's exactly the way over the years that I processed it. I tried as best I could to even separate. And we've done it on these podcasts,

the biblical arguments. I said, we can argue until the cows come home over this first. Let's just forget about that for the moment. And let's just go look at the facts. And the facts are, it didn't work. And the facts are in the New Testament. It did work. So somebody's got something wrong.

Somebody has something wrong. So I really can't improve on what you just said.

Well, for once, I've got Chino Tuntide. Well, this has been fun. There's so much more to talk about. And like I said, I just want to help the people. And there's a lot of people who have been misled into thinking that it's okay for family members to have died. And I just strongly say, that is not the case. This is not a movement by God. So thank you so much for doing this.

Yeah, thanks for having me, John. 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-Branum.org. From more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian identity to the NAR, available in Amazon, Kindle, and Horrible.