How Charismatic Authority Replaces Christ: The Cult Leader Blueprint

Music Hello! Welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org, and with me I have my co-host, researcher and friend, John McKinnon, author of the Persuasive Preacher, the Gifted Profit, and the Noble Politician.

John is good to be back, and I know a lot of people were really excited to go through that last series that we did. We were talking about the sonship and many of the core doctrines that the New Apostolic Reformation was built upon.

And the topic that you've chosen next is one that honestly I've thought about doing. I've never really had anybody who came out and just wanted to do this. I'm a little bit glad that you're doing it.

But we're talking about basically how the authority gets relocated from Christ and Scripture to a living person. And that is, for me, that's fundamental and understanding not only what Brannum taught. I know that your basis is going to be Brannum and some of that foundation.

But look beyond this at what he created and how people used this to their advantage. And I'm saying that specifically to their advantage because that's really what it was. It's not that this type of doctrine or this type of foundation is intended in any way, shape, or form to help the individual listening.

To become stronger with Christ, to become more self-sufficient, to understand Scriptures for themselves. It's really to create a whole crowd of people who are fully dependent on the leader. Why is this? Well, in many of the examples I've given in the podcast and in my books, you'll see that many of these leaders want that dependency because there's an income and there's a revenue stream that comes with that dependence.

So I can't really say to Brannum what his motives and intentions were. But I can say that his daughter said that he died with a lot of money. And that's about as far as I'll go with that.

However, we're getting to the core root of the problem that exists today with all of these leadership figures who are claiming that they're either an apostle or a prophet or basically that they're God's gift to man.

And I remember whenever the thought hit me, I was raised like you and many other people who I've worked with. To believe that William Brannum was this humble figure who loved people who was bringing an entire message and it was so hard for him to do it, he struggled.

so much. And it wasn't until after I began to deprogram and examine some of the things that he said that I began to realize there is no humility in claiming that you are God's gift to mankind.

There is absolutely 0% humility in this. And yet, at the same time, he's working with an entire, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of ministers, evangelists, everything for everything in the fivefold ministry. And they're all joining into this platform and raising him up on a totem pole, as though he is the next thing since sliced bread. He's God's gift to mankind. And they're raising him up like this because he is creating a platform. He and Gordon Lindsay, and a handful of others, they're creating a platform that enables this kind of thing. And each person who joined into

this and then they went to their own congregations, their own audiences, they created much the same thing. So what we're talking about right here in this next series, it is the heart of the problem.

It is why we see the mess that we see today. So very glad to get into this with you. Hello again, John. I'm just glad we're back again and I've got another opportunity to start a new series of discussions. And this time it's going to be on how cults form or set another way, how someone could actually go about starting their own cult. The whole idea, you know, for this series that came about right now, it's sprang from a couple of times that William Brownham used very self-promoting language in some letters to fellow ministers, trying to persuade them to frame and promote his

ministry in a very specific way. So I want to do a little analysis of that because he wanted them to promote it as a very prophetic way, a prophet, a logotype figure. And so I wanted to use that in this series to show how people can begin their own cult if they wanted to start their own cult to pull personality and how this was definitely started and how these things form. But as I started thinking about it, I realized that while we never really fully understand the exact mindset of men that have started cults like William Brownham or Jim Jones or Joseph Smith and others,

they all seem to use basically the same techniques, you know, whether they were conscious of this or not or unconsciously doing it. But they use that to build their cult following and they all follow very similar patterns. You know, and that's just it. As I'm examining all of this history and I'm looking at many people, some of whom had really good intentions, some of whom had bad intentions.

I'm looking at each individual not for who they are because it's not that I want to assassinate any characters in history, especially when there's groups of people who are in some sort of cult following of that person, whether it's a destructive cult or even a non-destructive, just somewhat benign cult. There are people, bodies of people who are following these leaders.

and it isn't that I want to know their character. I could care less about the character really. It's more about understanding the repeatable structures that work using elements of human psychology to entrap people. And again, there are many people that I've examined that they're on the website and people think I'm attacking a certain individual in history, but it isn't really that.

Some of them don't even recognize what they're doing. When you focus on the patterns, you begin to see that it is a learned framework of leadership. They're learning how to pray on people without realizing, in many cases, that they are praying upon people. So when you stop focusing on the personalities and just take the personality completely out of the equation, like I said with William Brannum, everything that I was taught and everything that was in my head about Brannum, I had to just put it on off to the side and ignore it for a moment while I started

looking at what was he doing? What was he saying? What were the conclusions he was trying to lead people to? And when you do this, you begin to recognize that it isn't that the target that they're leading people to is God or the Holy Spirit in some cases, especially with Brannum. They're really focusing on themselves because they want the people to create that dependency that I talked about earlier. It's a dependency on the leader from the audience and whenever you understand that, it's, I mean, this is a huge problem. And many of these movements that emerge from this,

the reason why those movements are so beholden to the leadership, even though many times the man, usually it's male, usually the man, sometimes the female, they may be dead and gone for years, but the people are so beholden to them because of that exact aspect of this. The leadership has put themselves into a position where the crowd is dependent upon them. And most people who are indoctrinated like this, they would argue, no, I'm not like this. I've talked with many people in the Wimber crowd who they say we don't worship Wimber and that's probably true, but the fact that

he's venerated in such a way that he is, it tells you that there was at least a connection between the audience and the leader because his name is still being used. Think of all of the pastors before him. Think of Wimber's pastors and the churches he attended. You don't find anybody in the Wimber crowd and vineyard or any of the subsequent movements. You don't find them naming Wimber's pastors and yet Wimber's pastors are the ones that influence Wimber. And so when you begin to understand that it is more about the leadership and that this model that was

being created was being replicated and through time people began to recognize the power of that structure and they started using it. And sometimes you can see where the villains and there are truly villains, they creep into the crowd and then they use it to their advantage and it goes in an entirely really bad direction.

So understanding that model is very important. You know, most cults form under this way, form under the banner of restored Christianity, at least in the Western Hemisphere or so-called Christian Church. You know, they do tend to last a long time and sometimes indefinitely, you know, unless they do implode from within, and we've seen that happen in recent times, these things that have formed for the last couple of hundred years already.

And they're going to continue, you know, sometimes they even continue even with the facts coming out, disproving what they're claiming. But usually when they implode, it happens through a mass death amongst the members or scandals that erupt or illegal activity where the authorities have to come in and stop them, or simply just the death of the leader as John Dowie's empire, as it was already imploding from within due to financial schemes, the death of the leader really finally did that one in.

Very often when the leader dies, there's already someone waiting, you know, the fill in that vacuum and the step in. And John, that's really the core problem with cults, you know, they rely so heavily on the leader that when the leader does die and they eventually all do, you know, a massive void is left behind.

And they're dangerous because even if the original leader was a decent person, you know, the ones who follow may not be most are just power hungry, extreme control freaks perhaps are deeply narcissistic in their behavior.

You know, that vacuum exists because cults aren't built on the right foundation. You know, they're just a false version of Christianity if they're trying to promote themselves as the restored church. And I'd argue that almost every case, you know, their counterfeit as far as Christianity goes.

When we look at what we left behind in the message, for instance, you can see a wide spectrum, very wide. Their church is so far out in left field that they aren't really Christian at all and they're easily identified.

And then there's groups that only listen to tapes and hold the tapes as sacred. And one of those groups that just keep one pastor an absolute power over all the details of people's lives or even hold entire families and bondage, you know, generation after generation.

And they do this by succession. But they're successful because they do prevent education of their, you know, followers. They can also limit the employment to church owned businesses sometimes and even break up marriages where women would be unable to support themselves or their children, you know, outside of the group.

That's how power, you know, gets concentrated and then perpetuated. Then there are message groups that kind of in the middle, you know, they lean one way or the other and they try to make sense of it all of all the...

variations in Brandon's doctrine. They usually pick one course of study and one way he set things and stick only with those quotes that support their position while ignoring the rest. And you've pointed this out recently, and we've come through the Christmas season.

On one side, he condemned Christmas, on the other side, he celebrated Christmas. So whichever group you're in, they may be a condemner of Christmas and celebrating anything. And that's how the people would act, and they would feel condemned if they had a tree or exchange presence. And on the other side, you've got message believers that are forebone Christmas celebrators, having trees, exchanging gifts, having parties, all these things. So it's a very wide spectrum here. In their hearts, you know, they know Christ needs to be promoted if they're calling themselves a Christian church. But at every service, you know, in church

services, they still have to promote, you know, William Bram, even more than Christ, you know, just to maintain the message church label. And really, if you go back to where our brother Jeff Jenkins, you know, lost his congregation, you know, they complained to him that just he wasn't message enough. He was too much Bible. And then there are those churches that keep the message label, but they're the ones that recognize those problems and they quietly ignore, you know, most of the teachings that William Bram is spoused, except things which they would hold on to like baptism in Jesus name. They basically try to function

as a simple one, this Pentecostal church, you know, with the dress code, but they avoid the deep dives into Bram's teachings because he straights so far from scripture at times. It would become obvious that the Bible contradicts him. They don't talk about the message, you know, so much because they get tangled up and embarrass themselves really. Some pastors manage this fairly well and waiting through the ins and outs of the message, but if you listen long enough, you know, the message doctrine still slips out and the contradictions are still apparent, but they really just have to overlook those. And you have to be well

studied really to catch the differences, you know, and sadly, you know, most lay members just aren't, you know, they're just involved in the church. So a lot of people stay because of peer pressure, you know, psychological pressure at times or family pressures, and because it's all they've ever known, really. And their minds are just safety in the group. And that's, there's a psychological influence there that if they stay in the group, they're safe. And to be fair, there is a certain kind of of safety, you know, leaving those systems is disruptive to your life and can be very difficult, you know, in your life, if you're not prepared

for it. So I genuinely sympathize with people still in those congregations. And, you know, I'm hoping the best for them that want to come out and that they will find true support. And I know there's many support groups today and many churches that would offer support to these people, you know, after being in that environment, I was actually a little surprised at how...

much the church is support, the people who are newly fresh out of this type of thing. It isn't that they really hold meetings or seminars or gatherings or groups for people specifically who are indoctrinated in the cult.

What you see is actually better than that. They have different types of groups. Sometimes the church will call it a small group where people are gathering and learning from each other. They'll have Bible studies, community Bible studies, etc.

What they're doing is actually they're empowering the people and they're giving them knowledge of what the Bible says. Whenever these people are gathering together and learning what the Bible actually says, the dependency isn't on the leader.

It is directly upon what the Bible says. I've attended this type of thing in a few different mainstream and I believe one non-mainstream Christian religion. Whenever you're in this type of environment where you're actually learning and there is no focus on an individual, it is empowering.

You begin to go through, as I was doing it, at least this was what my experience. As you're going through this and you're learning what the passages say, what it means, we had some really good ones where they were even talking about the cultures that were involved with, if it was a letter from Paul, what was the culture like that he was writing to?

I'm learning all kinds of things that I never knew. That's really what excited me to, after I left the cult, to go further with learning about cultures and ancient civilizations. What this does is basically it takes the focus off of a human.

You're actually studying the history, you're studying the Bible, you're studying the culture, you're growing, you're learning, you're being empowered and there is no way in which a person in any of those situations I've described to rise up into a leadership role.

What you have in the cult environment, which is entirely different, you have all of the things that you just mentioned, from the peer pressure to the psychological pressure, often they'll do family pressure. The problem is, for some of these people like me, it's all they've ever known.

You build up this illusion of safety in the cult, where the leadership has created this dependence and then telling you that you are safe because you are dependent upon the leader. That's exactly what we had in Brannemism, I've talked with people out of International House of Prayer in Kansas City, that was their feeling.

You can almost go down group by group by group and you can see when there is a dependency formed upon the leader, that leader is usually giving them a safety net in being dependent on the leader.

It's this vicious cycle that never ends and in the end, it is an illusion of safety. That's why whenever you see some of these big leaders that are following, following to different sins from sexual, to financial, etc, the people are just totally shocked.

gosh, how could this happen? We were dependent on this leader. Well, it's because they have developed that dependency, that illusion of safety. And when that safety net's ripped out from under them, they are suddenly in a different world.

And I think that different world is key. You build up this mental environment that there is this realm that doesn't really exist. But yet, it's a projected as a safety net, the safety world, wherein the leader is giving you the safety he's creating in that for you.

And eventually, he becomes your spirit guide. And we'll get into it as we go further in the series. But understanding that the leadership in power is your spirit guide, rather than the Holy Spirit, you begin to understand that it's not really Christianity that you're in.

You're in something entirely different. You're exactly right, John. You know, what we're going to try to do here is just outline the mindset that develops in someone like William Brannum and others. Someone who wanted to be at the forefront, as the prophet to the age, that was his main concern.

The first thing a future cult leader has to do, though, is really create his character. And that's what this broadcast is all about, creating the character of the person. He has to determine, you know, how will he be known publicly?

How will he present himself? And what can he convince followers to believe about him? You know, whether it's true or not, you know, that really served to support his claims is what he's trying to do.

These leaders, you know, tend to make claims that their followers, they know their followers just can't verify, you know, back in the 20s and 30s, 40s and 50s, you know, the internet wasn't available.

And so they can make outlandish claims and it was hard to go back if you weren't in the immediate area to look at what the newspaper said about your meetings and they're just wanting a good way to research.

But what they didn't anticipate, John, is the internet coming along. And many of the archives now digital that you can readily get at the touch of the button and write it your fingertips, you know, to be able to prove or not prove these claims.

And they had no foresight being profits themselves. I really didn't have the foresight that one day all of this would be accessible and verifiable and that many of them would be exposed as liars.

But I guess what they probably knew is that they would be long gone by then. So we'll never truly know, you know, Brandon's hard or mindset and these things. It's really hard to explain what he was doing in prayer lines with discernment sometimes.

We don't know, we know it wasn't 100% accurate, you know, all the time. We know that he did, you know, miss it on some occasions. But we know the biblical standard and even the message standard for people claiming to have such, you know, gifts, is that it's got to be 100% right.

You know, or none of it's taken to be right. But for some reason, you know, that standard is just not applied to William Brownham. You know, they give him the pass. It's probably because they knew him so well.

In his early years, you know, you know, Brandon was like an ordinary minister to just, came up under his pastor, you know, Roy Davis at the time and helped him build the kingdom that Davis wanted.

Davis couldn't stay out of trouble though, legal trouble, so Bratum had to carry the torch after about 1935. But between 1929 and 1940, you know, Bratum had learned Pentecostalism. He had seen crowd dynamics through the revival services he was a part of.

He had seen how the meetings were structured. He understood music. He even played instruments themselves and promoted music in his own church to even have a band. And then how to end services with these supernatural displays.

You know, Davis was very specially skilled with music and promoting music all his life. He was a great singer, musician, and of course he taught Bratum these same techniques. But we can remember back when we talked about things in the 1930s, revivals that were held in Jeffersonville, where Davis held what was called a spook night, where he had claims of spiritualism that he was a converted spiritualist that now could do the tricks of the trade, the spiritualist tricks, he called them.

And they also held revivals, which were supernatural where, you know, they could go up to the platform and pretend maybe to drink poison. You know, Bratum even said that, he called it sulfuric acid.

So I would highly doubt you could drink sulfuric acid without some effect if you weren't supernaturally protected. So by the time, you know, Bratum hit the national stage then in 1947, if you fast forward from 1930 that night of the spook night in the spiritualist display, 1947, that's already 17 years later.

He would refine his craft by then. You know, the timing was just perfect too. You know, Pentecostalism was beginning to boom again in California, Los Angeles. All the older leaders, you know, you take Smith-Wigglesworth, Amy Simple McPherson, Charles Seymour, Charles Parham, and all the old leaders, John Dowey, all of them died off of the field.

And many had come up under Dowey. You know, you had, who else did you have? Maybe John G. Lake, even. He had all the men that had died on the field. And it still was wide open at the time.

And he was not new to this whole thing, you know, by the time he claimed an angel met him in 1946. You know, he had refined everything by then. He was ready to go national with it.

And it just happened at a strategic time. You know, California at the time, right at the time Bratum hit the scene was following Avak Hagopian. He would come over from Iran and to run.

And that was causing Pentecostalism to boom again, thinking they had brought a healer over. And thousands were gathering to be touched by him in Los Angeles and elsewhere up and down California. And, you know, then Avak started touring the United States.

And then he was asked to try to be deported back. And he fought that. tooth and nail for years and ended up starting his own religion that lasted for years. And so in those last 30 years, you know, the time was ripe for this ministry to come forth, you know, it was on the verge.

So that's what happened when Brannem hit the scene and the newspapers picked up on it and then from there it was just exploding in ministry. But early on, you know, when he was trying to create his character here, you know, Brannem presented himself as a person wearing expensive suits, you know, even $2,000 watches at the time were $2,000 and accepting, you know, new Cadillacs, the keys to Cadillacs, he quickly realized though I think that that image wouldn't resonate with most of the people.

So he shift himself to portray himself as a dirt poor, as uneducated, as humble, you know, matching how profits are basically portrayed in scripture, having nothing nowhere to lay your head and so forth.

Yet, we have photographs of him in expensive white suits, you know, posing with A.Vac Hagopian. Newspapers describing him as Natalie Dress, like a dapper Dan, accounts of suitcases full of money, you know, being taken out of services by large muscular men because they were so heavy.

And then photos of him receiving a new Cadillac, you know, he himself testified on a few occasions of wearing very expensive, vulcan, cricket watches and long-guines watches. And these were very luxury items in the 1950s.

He said they were given to him, but these watches cost around $2,000 back then. That's about $10,000 today. And really, that's something that I could never do and I'd like to think I make a decent salary.

I'd probably even make better than a minister's salary, but I wouldn't wear a $10,000 watch. And just a little thing about these watches, even in 1950, the cricket was advanced technology back then.

It was not an everyday watch. It was mainly associated with very high profile people that wore those. It was inflation. So to understand the value, we adjust for inflation and we end up at about $10,000.

It was a high-end, innovative alarm watch, really priced as a luxury item, not as a budget item. It was a prestigious gift and a purchase for the elite era, if you were one of the elites out of the era.

But all this tells us that he had money, despite claiming poverty in all those days. Even back in the 1920s, he took a trip out west. He talked about having a brand new Model T. I don't know if you're very dirt poor, how are you going to obtain a Model T Ford and take a trip out west?

It looks like he would jump on a train maybe and go out west because that would be cheaper. So where he got the brand new Model T Ford, I don't know, but there's photos of him posing with that.

And then multiple new cars after that, through the 1920s and 30s, to back this up. So he likely understood. reading scripture that Jesus downplayed riches and preached to the poor. So when he hit the national scene, he had to adjust that image to match the scripture in the audience because many of them were poor. And they just had come out of the depression, the wartime, and they wouldn't have supported it may be a visibly wealthy preacher at the time. So as we mentioned, he had over a decade to develop this ministry before launching nationally. He saw the money

potential, just as Roy Davis did, he understood the power of media, likely influenced by Amy Simple McPherson. So he understood the tape recordings were very important. And what people heard on the tapes was also equally important. So he was very careful to make sure the recordings said what he wanted to say. He was very, very good at that. By the time he arrived on the same, he knew exactly how this whole system worked. And he quickly set up that humble stage persona and so he could barely make a living. And he was called of God to take a gift to the world.

At that time, it was called the gift of healing. He realized that the power of media could take him where he needed to go because Davis always used the power of media to boost his ministry.

But he says, I can thank Lord as a little boy of reading Amy Simple McPherson. And the criticism that we would find in the papers sometimes and that they said she would claim to heal people.

How we found out how falsely that was. And we heard of the great ones, Dr. Price and FF Bosworth and great saints who lived before this day. They all look and prophesied of the great day coming when the church would receive its manifestation of the presence of its savior among them in greater ways than it was receiving it then. And that was in 1959, April 4th.

What is the works of God in that sermon there? So I was just reading what he quoted actually. So he had read these things in the papers. So he knew very well who these people were and how their ministries went. He had a pretty good knowledge of things as I work when he hit the scene there. Now we're going to explore more of what some of these mindsets of people who develop into these cult leader characteristics have here in a minute. And you can probably tell I'm bubbling over with excitement because this is something that fascinates me. I'm fascinated with psychology

and understanding how the mind works. After I left Brannemism and I began deprogramming and trying to understand all that had been put into my head. I also wanted to know because I had taken on the cult identity and I'd taken on the mindset of the cult. Well, that mindset was a direct imprint of Brannem himself. If you read Dr. Stephen Hassan's book, Combating Cult Mind Control, he explains this very clearly, but your authentic self is being suppressed while the cult identity is being implanted. And what is that cult identity? It is the mindset of the cult leader. And it's an array of ideas. It's more complex than I can explain in this

cast, read the book if you really want more, but it is your world view. Everything that the leader has projected in your mind as what he believes is the proper world view is now part of your identity. That's why whenever you question the world view of somebody who is in some certain cult and you begin to question, well, why do you believe this? That doesn't match the Bible.

They get offended as though you're attacking their person because their identity is very much built upon that world view, but it's more than just a world view. It is the full mindset. Often the opinions of the leader become implanted and your opinions, whether you chose those opinions or not, are part of your identity. For example, Brannum had this stage persona of this Kentucky hillbilly pumpkin that was raised in the hills of Kentucky, which you and I have fully debunked, Charles and I have fully debunked the government records, fully debunked this, but he projected this mindset that he was a hunter, fisher, trapper, and that he liked to live off the land, and

basically he painted the picture that everybody who watched the Western television shows of the era wanted to hear. That's exactly what he was doing. He wanted that Huckleberry Finn lifestyle, and so what ended up happening is everybody who took on his identity, they became hunters and fishers and trappers, which in a large group of people, everybody's going to have a potential to like those things. But I have watched people who should never have been out in the woods with a gun out there because that is exactly what they wanted. That's exactly what was imprinted inside

their being. So you have people who had no desire to do these things from a personal standpoint, but their authentic self was being suppressed, and that cult identity was being implanted, and you've got this whole array of people who are now hunters and fishers who maybe, maybe not.

I fell in that category, ironically, I'm a musician, I'm a tech guy, I'm the kind of guy who, if I'm sitting on the beach, I've usually got my laptop, and I'm the opposite of a hunter, but I've got a few rifles in the back, and I went through that same thing because that was part of my cult identity. It is the mindset of the leader when it's implanted into the person, those mindsets are learned, they're enforced, reinforced, and often they're rewarded inside of certain environments. Go back to the hunting thing, I remember whenever I was in the cult, and I was,

you know, doing this thing that was outside of my element, really was outside of my element. I remember if I were to talk about it, you would get all of this praise because is that's what the leader did.

And often you would hear things like, and I remember Brother Brandon saying, and they would go off and to tell some haunting story, because that's how it was. It was the mindset of the leader.

And that mindset is being implanted into the people. The people are taking it, and they're basically developing a different personality altogether. That's right, John. And we're going to continue on with this thought about how cult leaders develop and develop their character and what their mindset is.

So the first thing they have, you know, when they're putting their system together, is they've really got a Messiah displacement mindset. You know, at the core of the future cult leader is the mindset that, you know, internally he doesn't say this, but he cannot tolerate Christ with the Bible remaining the sole center of authority.

They put themselves in place of Christ, making him less than God, so they can point to some esoteric God out there in space and don't have to submit to the authority of Christ in the Bible.

They become the supreme authority and the living Christ on earth. And we found this in a transcript of Q612 from Johnstown.

It was prepared by a fielding McGee, if you want to look that up. And Jim Jones actually said, he said, you go back and trace the Bible, you'll see for yourself, I'm telling you the truth.

I'll close with this. The most, I've got a whole book full of the mistakes. The first part is the truth, the last part is thousands of errors. It'll show one chapter, we'll say one thing, turn right around and say another thing.

That's why you have to have a preacher, and if you don't have a preacher that is sent, you cannot hear. You are saved by the foolishness of preaching, not by Bible readers, not by scholars, not by Baptist training, not by Bible teaching courses, you are saved just like that sister yesterday.

He says, you need to get somebody that's got the goods, but all you got is a bunch of phony, loud mouths, balloons, sisters filled with hot air. All they got is a black book, they don't even believe what they preach.

They tell you Jesus is coming soon, but if they don't have a new cat like every year, they quit your church. We always know someone will speak for God, someone will set themselves in Messiah's chair and declare the unsearchable riches.

Jesus had died just a little while, and Mary and Martha were coming back from the tomb, were heavy-hearted, low in spirit. They walked by the wayside and the man came up to them. He said, be of good cheer.

He consoled them, but they didn't pay much attention to him. They said he was the gardener. But the own Bible King James didn't get out all the lies. Your Bible said it wasn't the gardener, all struck.

It was Jesus. It was God in another body talking to them. Now you say it was Jesus. Mary and Martha had been with Jesus for three years, almost three constant years. They cook, form, wash his feet, no person in the Christ, the hundredfold today, a hundredfold, you know, means four God, four God.

You can be full. God, Jesus said you could. He said, you are all gods. I have manifested full Godship. So as we see here, he said, he said, the same mind that was in Christ will be in somebody in every day. Now, if you don't know where it is, I won't tell you, but if you will get a revelation, if you will let the Spirit speak before you leave this room today, you'll know you'll know where he is. So see, this is one example of Jones setting himself up as a Messiah figure. It happened in Brandon's ministry just the same as he would declare

I'm God's voice to you, or Jesus Christ today is going to come in the form of a prophet. It's the same thing happening. And we saw in the last episode, as we did on the adoption, that you know, we in Brandon had to make Christ less than God in order to do that, because it had to be the Father God manifested Himself in different bodies throughout all the ages. So at this particular time, he was claiming that God, the Father was manifesting in Himself, William Bram, just as Jim Jones was doing the same way. They all had the same mindset. The cult leaders,

one cult eventually imploded, because William Bramber had gone off to scene when Jim Jones imploded, but it's the same thing. Who knows what would have happened in Bramber's ministry if he would have still lived. It doesn't begin as explicit rebellion either against Jesus. It appears like this. He said, Christ is supreme, but he works uniquely through me. Others preach Christ, but I reveal him correctly. The church has Christ, but not the full Christ. So the mindset here, it gradually shifts your attention from Christ's finished work on the cross to the leaders ongoing role in manifesting Christ. And we see that happening. And that's where this manifest

sons of God doctrine comes out of Christ is going from person to person, but as whoever the leaders declaring, I am Christ to you for this time. And that gives them extreme power. The key marker here is the leader becomes functionally necessary for access to truth, to safety, or even God's will for your life. And that's where people get into

controlling people's lives is because they look to the leader to dictate what they should do as being from God. So here's here's something on the one of the websites called the ntimemessage.org that I found that was quite peculiar because it just goes to show how confused we get when we don't even understand the gospel. You know, someone asked a question about the new birth and was trying to understand the new birth, what it was all about. And as I was reading the response here, I didn't find not one thing mentioned about repenting of your sins, having

faith towards Jesus and his work on the cross. And then turning from your sins and totally relying upon and trusting Jesus. I found you he opposite and I'll read it to you here real quick. He said to try to help you with your question on the new birth. He said any birth must first begin with a seed before it can come to a birth.

So right there they're in the doctrines that we just talked about recently where you had to be a seed in the mind of God to even be born again. He said there are many seeds and many births.

Corruptible seed is any teaching of scripture that's not the pure thought of God and would produce a false birth and he's referring to Baptist and Methodist and all the denominations. He said the logos is the thought or idea, the concept behind the spoken word or ramal, ramas the Greek word meaning word spoken, the logos thought produces the spoken word.

The Greek word logos is the concept or idea behind the spoken word. And there's where he refers back to John 11. He said any idea or thought is the unseen seed that produces something in the seen world, the things which we can't see, come from things we cannot see with our natural eyes. The pure thought seed a logos of God and your thinking will bring unity between you and God and produce a son of God because it God is the sum total of his thoughts just as we are the sum total of our thoughts. So he goes on and on about thoughts and

oneness with God and how sighting deceived Eve in the beginning and he said we must come into union agreement with the revealed word and that seed produces the new birth, the true word birth, not a false birth. Then he says the entire message has restored the thought of God by restoring the truth of scriptures without man's denominational thoughts being mixed in with it. This pure seed will bring true sons and daughters of God again for the manifestation of the sons of God.

The word has been fully restored, on and on he goes. And so all this in the very end he never mentions one thing about the new birth being about repentance and faith in Jesus because as far from that it has to be all this teaching about the seed of God and the mind of God and that you are born here on earth and then the revealed word of the hour comes across your path and that's what produces the new birth. Well John that's not the gospel and it's just another gospel and it does invite a curse because of that. So John what happens with these groups

including William Brannum's is they get so far away from the real foundation and they can no longer tell anyone their followers can't even tell people how to be saved except say him what the messenger says or stay in with the tapes no matter what else they hear. They've lost their sense of discernment they're just like little children or the blind leading the blind at that point and we see this clearly in Jim Jones's own words that we read just a minute ago where he dismissed scripture he elevated preaching over the Bible he openly claimed to save people himself and the pattern is

always the same you know somebody's got to sit in that Messiah's chair and it's always the leader at the proclaiming he is somebody and he's the one to sit in the Messiah's chair at the time.

And I can't stress enough how important that is. Whenever I left the brand of call, I remember thinking, in the back of your mind, you have this fear whenever you decide that you're going to leave, that you're going to lose all of your friends and all of your family, they're all going to hate you, they're all going to cut you off.

Even before it happened, I knew that that was gonna happen in the back of my mind. But I had this really mistaken thought that if I were to approach them individually and I did and tell them, I've decided that I no longer want to be in this church.

We're going to try some different churches. And I was very clear and concise with them. I'm not leaving Christianity. I still believe in Jesus. I went right down the line of my faith and explained everything that I believed.

I just simply said, but I no longer believe that Brannum is a prophet and I gave the reasons why and they were undeniable reasons why, which we've mentioned on the podcast several times. So I told the people exactly where I'm headed, told them the pathway, it's still according to the Christian religion, it's still a pathway of salvation.

However, even the people who I thought were not cultish and I knew, even in leaving, I knew that some people were very cultish and others, they seemed more normal than the rest of them.

Even the ones that seemed more normal cut me off. And instantly overnight, most of my friends, I want to say all of my friends, most of my family, I did have a couple of people who remained with me, but almost overnight I lost everyone.

And they deemed my leaving the cult and my disapproval of the central figure who had taken this Messiah role, they basically linked it with my salvation. And they instantly said, well, if you go down this pathway, John, you can't be saved, you can't go into heaven.

There were different ways that they said these things and they would often link other things that were part of the identity of the leader. If you go down this pathway, we have divine healing in our cult, your family's going to get sick and many of you may die.

I mean, it was that bad. We were being told all kinds of things. The reason why all of this happened is exactly what you said. The Messiah's role is now in the central figure.

Your salvation in Brannemism was being linked to Brannem. Brannem was the mediator between God and man, but more than that, he became what the Holy Spirit should have been in the lives of the Christians.

And I'm air quoting Christians because if you believe a human is the Messiah, then it is not Christianity. This is it's Brannemism, that's pure plain and simple. Fast forward after leaving. And learning that all of these different groups had the same exact framework that we've just described in this podcast.

Many of those groups had the same structure wherein the leadership had taken the Messiah's role. And in every single one of these groups, Brannemism included, you can ask them, are you a Christian? Yes. Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Yes.

Do you believe Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins? Yes. Do you believe that your plan of salvation is linked to Jesus? Yes. But here's where it gets into the gray area.

You could ask them, and I have actually done this. In many cases, they won't be honest with you. They'll outright lie. You could ask them, do you believe that if you separate yourself from the central figure, in my case, it was Brannem, do you believe that you can be saved?

And you can watch them squirm and wiggle because in the back of their mind, some of them have read the Bible. They know that it is pure heresy to say this. Some of them will outright lie and let's say, no, I don't believe this.

But then treat you as though you've lost your salvation. Others will just outright say, yes, you cannot be saved without the leader because the leader has taken the Messiah's role. And so the Messiah's role in the group doesn't disappear. It actually gets reassigned. You no longer is Jesus the focus or the central figure, the human is the central figure.

And the scripture, it's not always rejected outright. They will agree with you in some of the passages, especially anything that points to Jesus. They've been indoctrinated to link their salvation to the word Jesus. But in that word is something else entirely, especially in the manifested sons of God framework.

Jesus is not the Jesus that you're reading about in the Bible. Jesus was this human that became indude with power as a manifested son of God, just like the leader was. So when you're talking about Jesus and Brannemism, yes, Jesus was a historical figure, but he was a, he was not divine, which we've talked about that in the last series.

He is demoted from his deity so that the leader can be promoted in his deity. And so the leader becomes the interpreter of scripture, the mediator between God and man, there's, there's many different aspects of religion that the leadership takes on.

But in the end, it really becomes a replacement for the Holy Spirit. So if you're in Christianity and you believe that, you know, the, the plan of salvation that's missing in the gospel where Jesus died for your sins and he sent the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit will lead you and guide you into all truth, no longer does the Holy Spirit do this.

It is the man or woman on the platform who has taken the role of the Messiah and in doing so, they create a different religion entirely that is a mythology. It is no different than the ancient mythologies and in fact.

many of the ancient mythologies had this type of thing where there was a human that was the mediator between God and man and the human was usually creating a bunch of slaves. So in the end, if you look at what is happening here, it is slavery, but it is spiritual slavery. So John, I've really enjoyed today's broadcast. I've enjoyed getting into this subject where we've got several more episodes to go about it. There's a lot to cover and there's a lot of things that we're going to point out here, but I think it will become very clear to the listeners, you know, how cults form after this,

you know, they'll see, you know, what binds the people together, you know, how this Messiah figure creates himself and how he gets the people to attract it to them and emotionally attach to them to the point of where they look up to him for everything that they have need of. And instead of looking to Christ, they end up looking to the leader. So really excited about getting into this, we're going to hit part two, you know, next time and continue on with this creating the character of the person and what really motivates their ego and not to jump ahead too far. I've already

mentioned this on the podcast so I can mention it here, but after I left the cult, I read the Bible over and over and over and over and many times to just wash all of this out of my head. And when you do this exercise, you start to pick up on things that you really didn't catch was there.

If you're reading it for what it says and not for what you've been told that it says, one of the things that hit me the strongest and I've mentioned this a few times is that in the New Testament, the sin of pride is one of the most mentioned sins in the New Testament.

I was a little bit shocked when I found this because even by the, you know, the cult identity that had been implanted in in our beings in that within that identity was this sense of pride, you were proud to be part of this. You were proud to be part of the group. You were proud to have the secret mysteries. You were better than the other Christians who didn't have these secret mysteries. And they, as we mentioned in the last series, they had created this teared structure of Christianity. Well, we were up here in the tier and then the church down the street,

which has accepted Jesus, which believes in the Holy Spirit to lead them and guide them, who is claiming Christianity, claiming faith in Jesus for their salvation by faith, by grace or save through faith in Jesus Christ. All of those things we viewed them as a lesser Christian. Why? Because of pride. And when I began to understand that, I began to realize that the leadership, in our case, it was Brannemism, but even beyond that, in this teared architecture, there was the central figure, but then right below this were, I called them the enforcers, but in our case, there were simply the pastors and the cult leadership in the headquarters.

That tear were also very prideful. And many of the things that I grew up thinking was okay as part of a personality trait. Pride was included. And so for me to read the Bible and understand that pride was actually a sin, I had to do a lot of self-reflection because I was very much a prideful person.

And it took a long time for me to overcome that. I still struggle with that because for 37 years I was indoctrinated with pride. And with that pride also comes the insecurity because you know that you're wrong in doing this. If you're actually reading the Bible, you know in the back of your mind it's wrong. But at the same time, that's what everybody else is doing. It's a group think type of mentality. And so pride becomes part of your identity.

Insecurity is tucking you the other direction. The cult identity is linked to the control and the dependency upon the leader. And that leader is a very prideful person. So how did you break the cycle? So like I said, I'm excited to get into the next one. And as we go deeper with this, I think people will recognize it doesn't matter what group that you came out of. And if you're listening to this podcast, you're going to identify things that we're talking about that your group practice when you escaped. And it isn't that Brandon created all of this by no means.

This is something I think he learned too. But look who he's learning from. We've talked about that as well. There weren't very good. There were some very bad people involved. I'll just say like that. So so much more we could get into. We'll get into it next time. 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.

For more about Roy Davis and William Branum, you can read the persuasive preacher, the gifted prophet, and the noble politician. And for more about the dark side of the new apostolic reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR.

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