Youth With A Mission or Youth Indoctrination? Deconstructing YWAM’s Racial Ideology

Hello, 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, Jenny McGrath, founder of In Well Movement. Jenny, it's good to be back and to talk about some very interesting subject matter. Today, this is one of my passions. I study this history because it relates so much to my upbringing, even though I was not in this mindset. I didn't realize that I was really in any of this, but you mentioned a few times

hinting at white supremacy and its effect abroad, which is significant. And, you know, people just simply don't realize how significant that it is. I grew up in a world where my religion actually would not have existed, had it not been for white supremacy. And I know you and I have never had this conversation, so this would be the first time you're hearing some of this information. However, it was so deeply rooted in white supremacy that when I started to begin to understand what it was that we were in, I thought it was a religious cult, and I came to

realize after digging for several years, almost a decade of research, I started to realize that this was not a religious cult that we were in. We were actually in a political cult, but it was re, it was using religion as the vehicle. So when I began publishing some of the heaviest of the information, it was so shocking that even the people who were critical of the Brannum movement, at that time I was publishing the Brannum information. Even the people who were critical of that movement were against me publishing it because they just thought it was propaganda. And I had to, I learned that I had to start

introducing this information very slowly in bite-sized digestible pieces, or people just simply would not believe it. It's just that bad. So after almost a decade of researching, going through archives of newspapers and court houses from federal documents, et cetera, I started publishing all of the information that the movement I was in was directly related and directly linked to the clan directly to the second in command of the 1915 clan. So this was a big deal, but you've hinted at white supremacy a few times and I wanted to talk through that a bit as it relates to youth with a mission.

see how much of it is similar, how much of it was borrowed from what we had in our history and just from a broader sense, you know, try to discuss how this through youth with a mission, how this impacts the world today. Absolutely. I am so grateful to have this conversation with you.

I think it's so important and can be shocking. And for me, I think what's important to understand is that when I say white supremacy, people might hear, I think they hate people of color.

And that's that's actually not what I mean. That could be part of it. But I actually think that the work of Isabel Wolkerson in the book Cast is really helpful in understanding the structure of white supremacy. And that it is so ingrained in the way we've been conditioned to see the world.

And I think it so deeply affects our psychology and the way that we see ourselves and each other that we don't often understand. We have been steeped in this culture that says those with less melanin should be in positions of power. And those with more melanin should be in labor positions. And I think that it is deeply important to talk about our specific organizations and the world that we lived in. And I think that it's almost like I wouldn't want why we have to become a scapegoat because I think why we are is actually a system of the broader

culture. And so one of the things that I think is important to understand is more mainstream evangelicalism and fundamentalism and how this might feel really shocking to say, I see that the country of the US has a cult of politics that uses religion as a means to an end. And one of the ways that we can see this is that there was a giant backlash to the 1960s civil rights movement that worked to desegregate and worked for equal rights and anti-discrimination. The very fundamentalist Christian Bob Jones University didn't allow black students until they were forced to. And then

even when they did, they only allowed black students that were already married so that there was no interracial relationships or marriages. That's what they were trying to prevent. And so the IRS actually went to go revoke Bob Jones University's tax status which led into a decade-long struggle.

between Bob Jones University and the IRS, which ended up actually being a huge part of what got Reagan elected and created the formation of the moral majority. Bob Jones University claimed that they had, it was their religious liberty essentially to be able to racially discriminate and keep the Christian institutions in the way that they wanted them to.

And so we see that from Reagan, the Christian evangelicals in the United States have been pretty much the strongest voting block. And there have been different wedge issues that have been discussed, but Randall Balmer does a really good job talking about the birthplace of where this huge division happened in the first place.

And I think that it's really necessary that we look at how the struggle for white bodies to maintain those levers of power is what creates these conditions for other organizations like Y-Wayam to be so successful in this country.

So if you haven't read it yet, my book, Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, this will sum up the next few thoughts that I'm going to give you, which you haven't read this, so you haven't yet encountered this.

But you're talking about the white supremacy of the 60s and how it affected the movement, the religious movement, the political movement, et cetera. All of that is covered in the book, but there was a deeply rooted idea that the people of the UK and United States and Canada

were the descendants of the lost 10 tribes of Israel. I think I did mention that part with you recently. They built upon that when they added religion to that theology or that weird ideology, when they added religion to it, they started to bring in other ideas and it hit America at the most opportunistic time for white supremacy to invade that idea.

So the merging of these two created what is called Christian identity and that phrase, when you hear it, you identify as a Christian that sounds like a great thing, but what they did was so insidious, they wrapped the identity of a Christian with the identity of race.

And they were trying to say that we, because we are the descendants, we are the true seed of Abraham, that kind of thing. Well, in America at that time, you had after desegregation, you had a lot of people, especially in the South, who were starting to see the white skin as a separation or division of people.

And they started to say, well, they can't be of the true seed of Abraham. We got the people with black skin from Africa, the blacks from Africa. So this ideology started to take a very racist form on the heels of all of the...

that. And I, this book kind of walks you through all of the many connections, like you mentioned Bob John's University, right before we started recording, I had a conversation with you about Baron William T. Freire von Blumberg, who was William Brandham's campaign manager, who was on the director of the family and was also, he was a, he was a director in the family and he was on the board at Bob, Bob John's University. So all of this is linked in ways that you can't fathom. It is all interconnected. It's very, very weird. It's connected to Nazism, to white supremacy, to anti-Semitism. Well, as this is growing and becoming

a religious pseudo-religious ideology, it's like you said, it wasn't so much that they hated blacks. They were against the mixture of races because of this true seat of Abraham. If you have a true seat of Abraham and it is a blood lineage, you can't mix that blood or otherwise you have a no longer seat of Abraham. It's a mixture. So we started to introduce ideas that were trying to establish boundaries that separated the races, especially as it related to marriages. And Brandham was one of the most outspoken people about mixed race marriages. And he was preaching the two-seed, the very racist two-seed theology wherein Eve

made it with the serpent in the Garden of Eden to produce two different bloodlines. And there's two separate bloodlines. If you have white skin, you're the good guys. If you have blacks near the bad guys. So all of this was spreading as William Brandham's mentor and the person who ordained him, Roy E. Davis, who was the second and command of the clan, he starts the third wave of the clan right about the time that this laterane thing is being birthed. So you have clan, you have anti-Semitism, you have politics, you have just this whole conglomeration of different

ideologies merging into the religious platform. And I won't go too far with it. You can read the book to find out. But what happened next is it bred a religion that, like I said, it's so insidious in what it created. I'm going to open up a little bit more with you than I usually do because I try to out of respect for my family not go too far. But you mentioned it isn't just against people of color. That is correct. I have my grandmother who is now deceased. She and my grandfather would enjoy time with people of color. And my grandfather would often ask a black man

who set up front to pray for the closing prayer of the services. Whenever you see the public view of this, you don't think of these people as racist. These are people who are telling you that if a black person marries a white person and they produce children that are mixed race, those children can't go to heaven. That was one of the doctrines we had.

My grandmother, when we would go to a restaurant, my grandmother, if the server was black and served us, she would actually vomit in her mouth, swallow it, and not eat her food because of the person with black skin.

But again, to the public because they did not appear to be racist from the public eye. Nobody knew any of this was going on. I did because I was at the restaurant, right? So I saw these things, and I grew up not knowing that I was a racist, but was. But you're right, it isn't just against people of color.

The movement, it was an ideology. It was about the true seat of Abraham, the British Israel doctrine. It was also about not allowing the Catholic system, the Catholic religion to spread. They were very anti-Catholic. They were, they viewed Jews in the same way that they viewed blacks. They did not want the mixed race.

And all of this is, if you look at the fundamental elements of Christian identity, that's simply what it was. It was Christian identity and ideology. But what they did was they would tie religious doctrines and biblical passages from the Bible to those ideologies to make it sound like religion. So that's what I grew up with.

You know, these ideas are so entrenched and so ingrained that I had in high school, I had the DC talk voice of the martyrs devotional. And it was one of these books that I was engaging because I thought I would be martyred by the time I was 23 and looked forward to that.

And I recently found it. And one of the questions was, who are the people that are hardest for you to love? And I filled this out when I was 14 or 15 and I wrote Mexicans. And I did not even personally know a Mexican at 14 or 15 years old.

It was all the xenophobic rhetoric I had heard growing up of quote unquote illegals coming into our country and how enraged people were that there were Spanish signs in Walmart on the Isles and how this was America and we should speak English.

All while being so supportive of me going to Tijuana on a missions trip during Christmas break. And that's why I think thinking of it as cast is so important because it is this sense of it's okay to go over there and help them over there.

But we actually don't want to disrupt the system that questions, why are those in the global south or in these other countries or in our country struggling because of the history of exploitation and capitalism?

And what I think is really important is that white supremacy wouldn't actually exist without Christian supremacy, that slavery was justified by saying that the only people God ordained to own people and properties originally were, quote, unquote, Christians.

And then when enslaved black people started converting to Christianity, there became this conundrum. Well, we actually didn't mean that black people could own people and property. So it wasn't until the 1600s that you actually started to see the word white in legal documents that it used to be Christian, but they actually transformed it to say white Christian people were ordained by God because it was always the sense of, again, those with less melanin were, quote unquote, ordained or called or chosen or fill in the blank to be on top.

And I think that that's why missions is tricky and organizations like, why am I tricky? Because you could look at someone like me and say, well, Jenny's going to live in Africa. So of course she loves people of color or she doesn't have a problem with black people, but I was still staying within the racial and gendered expectations of purity culture.

And I was still preaching in front of hundreds of people in Uganda when I sure, well, knew I would not be allowed to preach in front of hundreds of people in the United States if they were white.

And so this part of me, even if I didn't consciously know it, I was already enacting the white supremacy in my body that said, I have a problem with Mexicans for whatever reason. And I have no problem assuming positions of authority in communities that I know I wouldn't have that authority of if they were white communities.

And that's been a battle throughout Pentecostalism. You can look back at the histories. There are different groups that splintered off Pentecostalism that because they did not want black people to be preaching to white people, they would create a separate sect and that sect would grow predominantly black.

As some ways of God was created, I believe, for the white people to be in charge. And it's well into the 2000s that some of these denominations still maintain that same order of white supremacy.

If you look through the magazines that are published as the movement is developing into what would become the charismatic movement, it's pretty... dominantly white. You look at the different missionaries that are going overseas. They're almost all white. And then if you look at the people that they choose for the photo ops who are on the other side, it's usually the white guys who are in leadership. And they may do a photo opportunity with somebody who's really poor, who has black skin, either they're black or Jew or whatever they are. They're generally just a photo op. That's

all they are. And when I began to notice this, also noticing that, you know, from my history, this is a very racist ideology that's coming forward. This has had no idea that I was in a movement that was created literally by the Ku Klux Klan. I was, my mind was blown.

But then to watch all the, look at all this photos and watch the videos and start to see it's almost all white people. This doesn't make any sense. Why is it like this? Because I've heard the argument, well, there's just simply more white people in leadership. And that's simply not true. If you go back through the history and you look at the numbers, that is not true. It's just that they had pushed the black people aside and we're a different movement there in their own movement. Now, culturally, I've studied this too. I've studied things to no end because there's just so much to understand with regards to culture, politics,

religion, etc. In the South, there were laws that existed well past whenever you would believe that churches would become integrated where the laws actually prevented gatherings with so many people that are black and so many people that are white. You had actual statistics of the population, how much could come together? It's got really weird in some states and some regions. So in the South, there were limitations on having ministries that had a black person who is over a body of white people. When those laws begin to disappear, however, because this movement had developed with the racial background, many of them continued

it because they did not want to offend the other people who were truly racist. In other words, the movement was developing, it developed out of the years of racism where racism should have stopped, but they were tailoring to the racist views of people in the movement. So as this thing continued, now we're going into the 60s, 70s, you're still seeing predominantly white people behind the movement. There are just a handful of names that I can think of that were black as the movement was developing. I can't think of one single Jew, but Jewish people are of the Jewish religion, Jewish faith. So they're also separated from this. So as

this thing is developing and spreading, it is spreading predominantly white. Those missionaries go out to other countries and it's really odd because you've made this point and I want to stress it in this podcast.

When you're white and you go to a developing nation that is mostly black, when they see a white person come, they see something different. Visually you can see something different. They see somebody who's coming, who's wealthy, who has plenty of food, who has a way of teaching them how to grow food, how to survive. They see somebody who is superior. Here's where this podcast interests me as it relates to youth with a mission. I can understand as an adult, this is problematic. You come and you start to see this thing happening where people are starting to respect you just simply for your

skin color. To an adult, you see it and you're a little bit aghast. I don't want to be thought of this way. This is really, this is offensive. But to a child, how do you separate this? Because a child doesn't understand all of these things. They don't know the background of history, culture, etc. How did that affect the children whenever you're in youth with a mission?

Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think, you know, I was thinking as you were talking through, I spent the better part of seven years involved and on staff with YWAM in various states and countries a lot over Africa. And I think I can think of maybe one base leader that was a person of color. And other than that, even in Uganda and even in other countries, it was always white bodies from England or America, usually, that moved there to take on those mantles of power.

And I think it often went unquestioned and I think it often created, there's this phrase third culture kit where there's a lot of confusion for kids who grow up on the mission field where it's actually not their, their culture by heritage, but it's the culture they live. And so there's always this feeling of displacement and a feeling of like, I don't belong, but also I'm in a position of power. And I think that in itself tends to then breed these isolations. And it becomes this funnel as we've been talking about where it becomes harder and harder to leave these

insular worlds because you sense that nobody outside will understand you. And I think it also further is traumatizing and confusing when we talk about spiritual warfare. And I think about it like if you've had glasses that are like a certain color and you put it on and the worlds all that color. So like if we imagine putting on our white supremacy glasses and being like, let's just see how we actually see the world. If we look at it through this lens, so much of the spiritual warfare language is nations that are dark and it's all

seems to be correlated with melanin, and the places that are the most dark tend to be nations that have people of color. And Jesus is this white, bright, pure person. And so there's always this internalized fear of darkness, of other, of these things that are really different from how people have lived with nature and seasons and not living in duality in many parts of the world, but it really creates this binary of this system. And what I think that does for folks who grew up in white bodies in these world is similar to what we were talking about last time, I think it produces

chronic shame. Because you are from the beginning set up as a trope, you are the good one because you're white, you are called by God, you are holy. So you better not throw a temper tantrum, you better not, you know, have these things that normal kids or normal humans have. And if we don't live in an environment where our true authentic self can be seen and validated and empathized with, we will inevitably develop a really strong sense of shame. There is something so wrong with me, and we will split off those parts of ourselves that we have learned our quote unquote dark or bad

or sinful. And so we'll either kind of project ourselves into these better bigger than life versions where we're like the superstar missionary or and both maybe we implode into systems of into cycles of self-harm because we feel so bad about just our very existence and who we are.

I think it's incredibly damaging for children. You just mentioned something that I've been trying to put into words and have not yet been able to. I think you did a fabulous job at it.

But there are things that exist in the religious world today, especially the charismatic world, that only exist because of this racist history. And it isn't that the people who are doing it are racist. It isn't that they are targeting black people or there's no hate behind it.

It's just simply part of the development of the religion as it related to the ideology. And exactly what you said, you go into Africa, that's where the demons lie. We would hear, I listened to recordings of Branham growing up. He had recorded sermons from 1947 to 1965.

Church for us as we would go into a building and the minister would say, okay brother, Harold, play the tape, whoever Harold is. And they'd play the tape and then we would all sit and listen to this sermon that was during the years of all of these racist demonstrators.

of the 50s and 60s. So we're hearing things that are politics, we don't even understand, and we don't even really recognize the events until you start to put it together to a timeline. Here's the sermon, here's what was happening in politics in the world.

We start to see all of this if you put it into a timeline. But I began to have that same exact thought. They would often talk about, Brandon would say, that there are these witch doctors in Africa, and that's where the demons are, and so you get this mental image of everybody worshipping demons in Africa, which isn't the case. I have friends from Africa.

And you get also the idea that everybody's primitive, it's a primitive culture, which is partially true, especially during the years he was preaching, but it wasn't as true as it was made out to be while he was preaching.

But the thought hit me. If you were to, like you said, if you were to have some glasses that just took color away from everything, watch how differently this looks. What about the Native Americans?

Is that would not the same spiritual warfare apply here, but these people go on this, like you put with a mission. They're going on the mission because that's where the demons lie. Where is use with the mission going into treat the demons that are in the Native American cultures, right?

It should be the same thing, but we view Africa is entirely different because of this ideology. And it's planting into the children's minds, the idea, there's association that happens there. So I'm using the word children purposefully.

Whenever I started to learn history, I was in high school, I'm learning history, and I'm understanding the basics of culture. It wasn't until really my thirties that I really began to understand and see the bigger picture, because you start to see it brought a worldview.

So in the minds of what I would consider children to me, 20s and up to early thirties, you're still molding what is your identity and what you view as the historical background to the world.

You're building your worldview. And you're seeing the worldview where if I go to Africa, that's where the evil spirits are. And you begin to associate that with the color of the skin naturally because you're in Africa and there's predominantly black people.

So for me, when I see this whole setup, like the youth with a mission, the entire establishment doesn't make sense to me. Why are there not the same missions happening here in the United States?

I know of one YWAM base, there may be more that is on a reservation in Montana, but it doesn't get the same air time that going to the 1040 window or Africa does certainly.

To me, my understanding of that is that that is because, unfortunately, in the membrane of the U.S., historically we have done such a good job segregating indigenous people, that they are not, quote-unquote, a threat in the same way that black people during desegregation became. And so there was this, there was more overt forms of racism against black bodies, but of course with indigenous residential schools and the murder and removal of indigenous people from their lands since the inception of the United States. That has existed, but it's taken on a different form. And I think it is because of that, that sense of keeping the bloodlines pure.

And this is why I think focusing on purity culture, that's why I do so much of that in my work, in that it is often around the trope of protecting young white women. And really what that is is a signal for keeping the races pure. You know, the 1915 clan movement had the momentum that it did because the very first Hollywood movie, The Birth of a Nation, showed white men in black face, sexually assaulting a white woman. And there became this frenzy and this stereotype of the oversexual black man. And often it was used as justification for burning down entire towns like

Rosewood, that were, in quote-unquote, the defense of the innocence of a white woman. And so I think it plays out differently because it really is in this world who is considered a threat to white bodies staying on top and being superior. And I think part of the reason that so many missionaries are sent to places like Africa now is it's this soft power of empire setting up businesses. So so so many missionaries end up creating businesses where they hire Ugandan women for very little money to make jewelry and then come back to the United States and sell that

jewelry for hundreds of dollars or various things that you see that that continue to keep this this cast in place of who gets to have access to the levers of power and who doesn't.

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On behalf of William Branum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. The other thing that goes with this, whenever the laddering movement was spreading and it turned into the worldwide, they called it the worldwide revival. They would often go into countries like this because the photo opportunities were significant. If you were to go into one of these nations and say, well, we're going to have dinner on the ground. We're going to have free food come. You would have people by the bus loads coming.

I mean, that's the way it is in a developing nation or a poor country. So whenever you see these massive crowds, you're seeing the result of what led to the marketing that drew those crowds.

You're not seeing the actuality of what was going on behind the scenes. And a lot of that has to do just simply with the overall wealth of the nation that they're going into. But the photo opportunities were really what drove the movement. If you can get a large gathering of people and say that you're healing them and maybe some people did get healed, but we've examined many cases where they would claim that it happened and it didn't. But the photo opportunity brought enough people together that you can post it on magazines. Now you can start printing and just

distributing it. People have started seeing this as this is the spreading of the gospel, the gospel is going out to the entire world. And then the end of days happens. So along with this association of race and culture and the demons that are hiding under the skin color, you also have this association to it with the end of days theology. That also when you combine all of this with your ideology as you're forming an ideology, you're starting to associate the darker skin with the end of days, which is also problematic. I did this to a limited extent. I was not aware of how racist

I was supposed to be when I was in the religion had no idea of many of the things. In fact, in high school, many of my close friends, closest friends were black people. I just had no idea. But to a person who is starting to associate those things in their mind with their ideology, you can't help but draw links like this, draw conclusions like this. And honestly, if you study the history of how this ideology began to grow and spread, it was mostly because of that exact fact.

started to see the separation of, it's a visual difference, right? You're starting to see the separation because of skin color. So having people who are younger, who are going on these missions, and not having the proper grounding in history and culture, not having leadership that is very experienced on how to deal with this, for me, I see this is a huge, huge problem.

Absolutely, yeah. I, as you're saying that, I remember, it was a conscious thought for me, often when I was preaching in Uganda, where I would be like, what if this is the last group to have never heard of Jesus?

And like me preaching this is going to make him come back. And it was one just really grandiose thinking. And also, you know, Jesus has existed in Uganda for centuries. Ugandids don't need people to tell them who Jesus is.

But the, you know, in many times similar to healing, it was like, oh, these 500 people got saved. And then you come back the next week and those same 500 people get saved. And it really pulls into question the issue of consent.

You know, because of centuries of the underdevelopment of Africa, there is a necessity for the missionary industrial complex or these various ways in which nonprofits bring things that are necessary because of the problem that our country's created in the first place.

And so if you're going to say, hey, we're going to have a meal, but you have to come and get saved. Of course, people are going to choose to come, get saved and have a meal.

And then the cycle just has to continue. It's just, it's a snake that just begins to eat its own tail and around and around it goes. And I think, if I can add one more thing, this is a little tangent, but I keep thinking about, as you shared, like I didn't know how racist I was supposed to be, you're like, these people might not know the history.

I think that that's so important because I, for me personally, I grew up most of my life I was homeschooled. And if you would have asked my parents is that so that Jenny didn't spend time around black kids, they would have said no.

But if you look at the history of the homeschool movement in evangelical Christianity, it was a direct outbirth of desegregation. And as soon as white and black students started coming together, there was the birth of the homeschool movement and training your children up and parental rights.

And that is why I'm so passionate about this history because it's like once we put those glasses on, once we start to see it, it's so much harder to unsee. But if this is our first time looking at it, of course there's a reaction, because we want to be- Like I'm not racist, and that in itself is part of, I think, how we've been socialized, like we have to be the good white person.

And if I start to admit that I am not perfect or all good or all pure, then that disrupts how whiteness has actually been really constraining for me. Like it's given me privilege, but whiteness also harms white bodies too.

It's not that it's like this loving, like embodied thing for white bodies, it actually does a lot of damage for everybody that is trying to move in that way through these systems. It does.

And it's funny because you use the glasses analogy, which I've used before. If you had glasses where everybody looks the same and try to put all of this religion and this ideology into play, it really doesn't work.

You simply can't do it. For me, I had the opposite realization. Like I said, I grew up not knowing I was supposed to be like this. When I suddenly learned that I was, I pretended to have the glasses that I didn't have.

I started to literally see black people or white people, even though I could visually see them all my life, I never thought of it like that, except for the marriage doctrine that we had.

You were taught not to marry, but I didn't even see that as racist so much as we were taught that how did he put it? He said something like God made big mountains and little mountains, green valleys and brown valleys.

And he was trying to say that God's creation needs to say exactly the same. And I never really thought back to, oh, how does that work? If Adam and Eve were the mother and father of all living, it's all the same.

It should be all the same. It wasn't until I was doing the revival history series with Charles, which I mentioned this also in the book. Whenever white supremacy mixed with British Israel, and British Israelism and created Christian identity, the two bloodline doctrine, it had this element that through the lineage of ham came the black bloodline.

That was a popular doctrine in the 50s and 60s. And the way that they would trace the lineage, if you read the Bible and you trace the good guys and bad guys, they would always trace the bad lineage through that direction, through the dark skin.

So people were taking that doctrine and running with it in different ways it was just really offensive now that I think about it. To the extent we have, and I think you mentioned that you had encountered this too, we had churches in Africa where the black minister would preach that they were cursed because they were black and that white people should rule over them.

I mean, literally they were preaching this, but that's the ideology, that's what was being spread. And whenever you look at the evangelical culture as it is developing through the laterane years, through the charismatic years, the early form of the charismatic, Or I should say, the ideology itself was spreading and that was the mission.

That was why you needed to go and spread the gospel. You need to literally spread the gospel that you shouldn't marry people who have different skin than you. And I'm not saying that everybody in it was racist, but there was a lot of that going on in the movement.

So that ideology is clearly spreading the fact that you're seeing it, the fact that we have ministers like this. And some of this, you can go into other cults that have emerged from Laterane and they also have the same kind of ideology.

Yeah, I'm thinking of James Dobson said that marrying across races was being unequally yoked. And I think there's just so many different verses and justifications that are twisted and used for maintaining segregation and division.

And I really love Rick Steves. And he says, it's hard to hate up close. And I think it's really hard if you have lived in these insular worlds, or even if you've interacted with people that are different, but every time you've interacted with them, it's as a ministry.

You're seeing them as a project. You're seeing them as something that is needing something from you or you're needing something from, when there's not a mutuality and a shared respect and understanding, it becomes a breeding ground for stereotypes and me as a 14 year old saying that I have a really hard time loving Mexicans, even though I don't have any in my life.

That's such a poignant example, I think, of these worlds that we're talking about. So fast forward to the birth of what is called the New Apostolic Reformation. If it can even be called a birth, I think it literally just put a brand name on something that was already established.

C. Peter Wagner was strongly behind that. Youth with the Mission definitely is a component to the New Apostolic Reformation. Wagner wrote a book called Our Kind of People, which is one of the most racist things that you've ever read, but basically it's describing how the civil rights movement affected the black churches negatively because it was destroying the culture that separated the blacks from the whites.

If you read the book and summarize it, literally that is the summary of this book. He says, and I'll read a quote, he says, the civil rights movement called it is caused a distinct change in attitude of American blacks towards their own cultural values in general and toward their churches in particular, what happened to black churches during the 60s was not unlike the process of indigination that occurred in scores of cultures around the world where Christianity has been introduced.

So this is coming from a person who's literally, some people consider him the father of the New Apostolic Reformation, even though he simply coined the term, but he's very... be fundamental in what would develop into the New Apostolic Reformation, especially his work with John Wember, and as that began to spread and explode into Carysmania.

This was fundamental, and this was his viewpoint. He was literally trying to support the idea that black people needed their own culture, they needed to have their own churches, and that the 60s was tearing all of this down because of the people who are trying to fight for civil rights.

I look back to the history of what we had. We were taught the doctrine that Martin Luther King was communist inspired, and that he was leading to what would cause a holy race war.

We were looking for a coming race war. That's how bad this was. And this ideology was so deeply rooted in the movement that people like Wagner are carrying it forward. And what's interesting about that is, if you were to read through any biography or history, even the critical histories of Wagner, most people would not consider him to be racist. But what he's building upon is this ideology that was created long before him that did have a racist component, and he himself has adopted it even though he doesn't understand that it's very racist. So back to youth with a mission, when you have youth who are in this

development process, they're trying to develop what is their ideology. And they're given this type of background to some of their some of their mission. You start to wonder how much of it, how much of it really came from this racist ideology, and how much of it, how much of the mission would even exist if this ideology itself had not existed.

Absolutely. I think about Tema Okun has come up with various things that she calls white supremacy cultural norms. And one of which it's sort of like when you're used to swimming through these water, is it's just what you think everything is. And then again, you start to see it where one is paternalism. And just like the very idea that as an 18, 17, 20 year old, you should go tell people who live in a completely different context, speak a completely different language, how you think they should live, or what you think they should do. That is coming from a place

of superiority. That is coming from a sense of, I know more than you. And so I'm going to raise thousands of dollars and go across the ocean and step into your community and tell you the message that I think God has for you. And I think that will inevitably breed that sense of grandiosity that says you should go to part this message to God to these people. They can't hear from the voice of God themselves. Apparently they need you to do this. I think absolutely.

And I think it almost, whether it is conscious or not, the economics of it often becomes so self-choosing, because it is primarily white communities that know people they can call and say, hey, I wanna go on a mission strip, can you send me a thousand dollars?

The wealth disparity in the United States has made it so that generally speaking, that's gonna be a lot harder in communities of color. So then you just are going to naturally have more and more white people that are taking up these missional spaces and bringing these paternalistic messages to other communities.

And you just hit the nail on the head that I was driving at. Can't hear the voice of God for themselves. So Christianity has spread all across the globe. And it did long before the Pentecostal movement existed.

And Christianity was in the nations that they claim that they're going to do all the spiritual warfare. So if you believe that the Holy Spirit is the one in charge and not the humans, would you not then also believe that if the Holy Spirit is in the developing nations already through ministers that are preaching, that it could not be powerful enough to grow and spread the gospel within that nation.

The ideology is such that no, the Holy Spirit is not in control, God is not in control. We as humans must be in control. And because they're in a developing nation, yes, they may have Christian ministers, but the Christian ministers aren't powerful enough to convert the entire nation.

We must do it. We must go there because we're white. We can go over and have more dominance over the people. I mean, literally that's what it comes down to. And you start to build this idea that God is not in control.

We have to do it. We have to do something that God can't do. When I look at youth with a mission when I first encountered it, I first off, I was asking the question, is this a cult?

Because, you know, I'm seeing this thing and it's so similarly problematic to many of the things that I grew up with. I was asking the question as a cult, but then that question didn't disturb me so badly is what are they doing to the minds of the children?

How are their minds going to develop when they're given this crippling set of problematic doctrines that they're trying to, this ideology that they have to go do this. None of it makes any sense.

Not a single aspect of it makes any sense. I can understand a Christian missionary who is trying to do maybe go into a country that is poor and the people are starving and they need food, organize a mission to get them food.

I can understand this. I can understand any kind of humanitarian aid, but to try to overtake a country that already has Christianity in it and try to say that we need to... forcibly go convert them. How is that different from the Spanish Inquisition? None of it makes any sense.

It doesn't know. And it becomes these, it's often not embedded in the community. There's, there are y-wing bases in Uganda that are acres and acres and acres and they have a high ropes course and they have their own garden and they have all of these things all for the base.

And, and it's, even my very first time in Uganda, I kept thinking like, why are people in Uganda if they don't actually want to spend time with Ugandans? Where there was so many like insular communities that became these like little satellites of I would consider imperialism and bringing the ideology that, you know, is, is so part of these rhetoric and these movements. And,

yeah, I don't, I don't see it as separate from the long, long, long history of Christian supremacy colonizing the nation. So you just hit the second nail on the head that I was trying to drive in.

So these youth go to these large camps. Sometimes they see people who are in the area who are Ugandans. Sometimes they don't. But mostly they see each other. And so they're mostly, I mean, there's no better way to say this. This sounds like a children's indoctrination camp. They're going so that they can be indoctrinated and they can come back. So the mission is actually for the children themselves, it's not so much about the outside world, which again doesn't make any sense because why do that overseas unless you're trying to get the children away from their parents. That's

where for me, this turns into a huge, huge problem. We have had, I've investigated some of the children's indoctrination camp for the Brannum cult and watching what happens when you can get a child away from their parent. And then you can be an authority over them. So they have no authority figure other than the person who's leading the camp. Suddenly you can make the kid do anything that you want them to do. Make them believe anything that you want them to believe because you've separated from their parent. They have no parental figure at that point.

How long are the missions and how would you would you agree that this sounds like indoctrination for the children? Definitely. I mean to be a part of Y-Wam to join staff or to do anything with Y-Wam, you are required to do what's called a discipleship training school, which is a minimum of five months. And there are three months of what's called a lecture phase and then two months of outreach give or take. And so during the three months of life, sure phase, it is week after week after week of indoctrination. And it is highly, highly

charismatic, pentecostal services. You usually have a different guest speaker flying in from a different Y-WAM base each week from all over the world and talking about that base and getting you excited about what that base is doing. And these weeks include hearing the voice of God and telling people, like training people, what the voice of God sounds like, or there's like father heart of God, which often comes with people divulging their deepest, darkest traumas or secrets and experiencing the love of God. And these hugely, emotionally charged weeks for three weeks. And then you go on outreach for two months. So I did my DTS discipleship training

school several months after I graduated high school. Like my parents had to help me fill out the forms saying, like, if I died on outreach, they were responsible for getting my body back because I was 17 when I was applying to go. And then my two months outreach one month was living in Thailand in the red light district going into bars at night trying to talk to women to get them to come work at a business where they could make jewelry where we no doubtedly caused more harm than we helped. And there were several women that were beaten for talking to us. We had no business being

there. It was incredibly traumatic for all of us. There was like, you know, a handful of 1819 year old men who are in a red light district being groped by women and reeling from that and trying to figure out what to do with that. And then our second month was in Malaysia, street proselytizing in a Muslim country where it is illegal to proselytize. And we could have been thrown in jail. And I was still 18 years old, months out of high school. And I absolutely consider it like this whole form of changing the way that you see the world, the way that you see yourself

in a very swift movement. And so by the time everyone comes back from their outreach, they're already talking about what next school they're going to do with Y William or where they're going to join staff. And it is it is very rare that people are like, yep, that was my five months. I'm going back to go do normal life. It is intentionally and brilliantly created to be this like mountain top experience that it's like, yes, this is where God is. I can step into these dangerous places and I have the protection of God. And so I'm going to keep doing this. And because of

seven mountains, mandate, why we have schools literally designed for all of the different spheres of society. So you would do a discipleship training school and then immediately before you finish that, you're thinking about or even applying to the next school. And it is this like salesperson tactic where your leaders are already like, are you going to come back on staff? You know, the DTS starts in a couple months, you could join, you could lead a one-on-one. And it's almost like this foot in the door where it's like, well, I've done a DTS. I guess this is what I'm going to do for the

next rest of my life. So for those who couldn't see me because the camera was on Jenny, I'm shaking my head and disbelief. I'm like shocked that all of everything that you said, I have no words. I have I have literally no words. And I'm looking back through the history of this movement. In fact, I was pulling up some of my research while you were talking. But when the laterane movement started to establish this idea of Joel's army, the focus was on the youth. And the passage from Joel, it says, your sons and daughters shall prophesy your old man shall dream dreams. Pentecostalism had

started to die out before 1947. It existed but not nearly so widespread and popular as it was whenever the Azusa Street revival was happening. So started to tame down. There was a lot of divisions and they saw this new thing as the ability to create Joel's army. And what was Joel's army?

The early Pentecostals looked at Joel's, Joel 2 and it set up, behold, I will pour my spirit out a point off flesh. That's how they were trying to say that this is the day of Pentecost is coming to us. Well, the third iteration of this, the second iteration of this, they were saying that your sons and daughters need to be the focus. We need to build this army of youth. And so Joel's army became established. Kansas City, IHOP KC, they're trying to do the same thing. They're trying to get the children to a hyped up emotionally charged religious frenzy so that they can fulfill

this passage. And now I'm looking at youth with a mission. It bears all of the similarities to this creation of Joel's army. They may not have taught it in doctrine. I think you and I have talked a little bit about this. Children may have no idea that that was even a doctrine fueling it.

But the idea was we need to create spiritual super soldiers. That was the idea behind Joel's army. And everything that you're telling me, I'm starting to understand and piece together. This was that. This was trying to create, it's literally a mission for the children themselves.

We need to supercharge spiritual warriors. They're going to grow up into adults to engage in spiritual warfare. This is the army. This is the This is literally training centers for the Army. Yeah, and I think another important part of it, based on some things we've talked about already, is that it's well known in almost any base, I think I went to, that Y-WAM, they say that the acronym really means young women after men.

And it is very rare that you will go through a five-month DTS and not have at least one marriage that will come out of it. And that is part of the system, is you are here to find a good godly mate.

I just like think all things holy, I did not get married in Y-WAM, that would have made this a lot more complicated for me. I think I was always a little bit to opinionate it, to fit into the Y-WAM wife model, but, and then it is like, okay, well now you're married, now you need to start having children.

And it is the sense of like, that's how you get so ingrained in it. And literally people would tell me, it's easier to fundraise when you have children. If you're having a hard time raising money to be a missionary, you should get married and have kids because people will be more likely to support you.

It's, I believe that, like I'm still, I'm in a state of shock, I can't believe that this even exists. This is dangerous. This is not, this is not something that's healthy. And I, so much more I want to ask you, and I want to probe your head, but it looks like we've already gone an hour.

I've, as we're getting into this topic because it is my passion, there's so many more things that I can say, but we'll split it out into another podcast. Thank you for doing this. Thank you so much.

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 and indwell-movement.com. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

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