Mica Miller: When Marriage, Church, and Control Collide

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-Brandham.org and with me, I have my co-host and friend, Pia Hugo, form a member of the New Apostolic Reformation. Pia, it's good to be back and to see you on shore. I know that you're in the Philippines forever and now catching up to everybody who doesn't know. We had this long gap in the schedule but because we had recorded so many, nobody knows that we missed a beat. But anyway, things have

been very busy here. I'm certain busy with you and you wanted me to research for this episode, Micah Miller. And there's apparently a Netflix documentary that's making everybody go wild over the episode. It's a death of a pastor's wife, I think it's called. And if people knew how little time I have to watch TV, they would laugh at me because I actually didn't have time to watch it. But I did spend some time this afternoon going through and researching some of the history. So it's not that I'm unfamiliar. I do know some of the history but

anyway, I wanted to talk through your perspective of this because this is something that really, really involves the way that you are bringing all of this together in ways that make people understand what is going on in the New Apostolic Reformation Charismatic Movement. So let's talk death of a pastor's wife. Let's do that. So yeah, it's great to be back in the U.S.

of A. I'm in my living room so no more beach behind me. And it is good to be back here with you, John. I was supposed to talk about another topic. You know, it was supposed to be a continuation of where we were going. But then I watched this docu, docu, docu series. It's called death of a pastor's wife. And I just, I had to make an episode about it with you because like you said, you have many guests on your show. And I love watching it because you get different people's perspectives on different topics. I mean, there's so much to cover. I

feel like what I can bring to the able is my own personal experience, almost 40 years with NAR, and for the first 10 years as a wife who was domestically abused. So it's a hard topic and it is definitely something though near and dear to my heart.

So yeah, let's just dive in. So for those who may not know much about Micah Miller's story, this is how I'm going to, you know, preface our discussion. So Micah Miller was a teenager when she met her husband to be at that time, JP Miller.

And JP Miller was her pastor and he was in his 20s. I'm not sure how much older he was, but he was quite older and he was in a position of authority that just put it that way.

And she was babysitting his kids. I'm sorry, she was babysitting his kids. And then I also was a teenager when I met my husband to be. And even though he wasn't a pastor, he kind of tried to portray himself as being so much more spiritually mature and, you know, he definitely was older than me.

He was also in his 20s, late 20s. So that is already something that Micah and I had in common. The difference is that my pastor, who was also spiritually abusive, was my former brother and law, Che on, as most of your audience knows by now, the super apostle of NAR.

And Micah was 30 years old. She was finally done with all the emotional, mental, spiritual, and sexual, I don't know if she was actually physically abused, but, you know, it was just very, very toxic.

And so she needed to get out of there. And so at 30 years old, she left him, filed for divorce and filed for a restraining order. And coincidentally, I was also 30 years old when I finally decided to leave my husband.

I had filed for divorce. I had already filed for a restraining order at this point. The only difference, I guess, is that I had three kids with me and she didn't have kids with JP.

The biggest difference, of course, is that by God's grace, John, I made it out of life. Right? Here I am 30 years later. I'm living a good, happy life with my current husband. I now go wherever God takes me to talk about my story.

I now have a testimony that there is life after domestic abuse. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Unfortunately for Micah, two days after she served him divorce papers, she was found dead.

OK, so I'm going to give you some facts here. On April 27, 2024, 30-year-old Micah Miller was found dead in lumber rivers State Park in North Carolina. Authorities subsequently ruled her death as suicide.

But if you watch the whole docu-series, I've actually been following this story from the very beginning. I actually was in South Carolina a week after she died, you know, I'm from California. But my son was getting married in North Carolina.

I think I told you, he worked for a rich joiner. So he was with Morningstar Ministries back then. So he was getting married in North Carolina. So I was visiting and this whole story was just very explosive.

And of course, being somebody who's an advocate for DV, domestic violence, victims, I was very, very interested. So here we are two years later and because of the Netflix series, everybody's just talking about it.

And it is such an important story. When you think about just the podcasts that you and I have done on all of the different aspects of not only your personal life, but the new apostolic reformation, charismatic movement, and then think about this church.

This was a charismatic style. I'll say it like that a charismatic style, independent evangelical church. I've not dug into the history yet to know was it connected to Branemism. I put that off to the side because that's actually a different story than the one we're talking about here.

The story here is actually more important because we're talking about a person who is involved in a situation that matches so many stories that we have of people who are giving their testimonies every Friday talking about the things that the pastor is doing that should have raised a thousand red flags and every elder should have stood up and said, no, we've got to put a stop to this. The people should have walked back and said, no, you can't talk about those things from behind the pulpit. I'll get into some of those in a minute, but it is very, very important.

Now bring into it what you're what you're bringing and the connection that you have, the domestic of abuse. When you factor this in to the spiritual abuse, you have a person who feels trapped, and this is for me, this is the really worst case scenario. Whenever a human gets into a position where they can't find a way to move forward, it's really, really sad because some people can't survive that. I know there's some controversy over what happened with Micah Miller, but in the end, it really comes down to that for me. She was in a position where she was trapped in a corner

that she could not get out of. I think I mentioned this to you and one of the podcasts that I did. I know I've mentioned it in the podcast before. I left the Brannum movement, which was a high demand, high control group in 2012. Just a few months after that, I had somebody who contacted me in one of the forums, I believe it was, and this was a person who had attempted several times, and they said, I just want to thank you. I came across your research and I realized why I felt so trapped. At that time, I was glad that I helped the person, but I really didn't yet make that

connection that when you put a person into that position, it can actually be devastating to their life and it can, in fact, in their life. As the case we have here, this is a person who felt trapped, who's in a marital situation that was chaotic and chaotic at least I'll say, and this is the worst case scenario. I know people who have been trapped, who left the movement. In fact, I just went on a vacation and I came back. I found out that a very, very close friend of mine, he had left the movement, he felt trapped, and then sadly he also did not survive. When you, when you put somebody

into this position, you're actually putting their lives at risk. Now, here's the question that I'm driving at with all of this. We're talking about a Christian church. How is it the place for a Christian church to allow people to get to this position where it can actually not only destroy lives but also take lives? Where is God in this type of movement? Well, I'm so sorry to hear about your friend, John. That's, that's terrible. And that is again why I do these, you know, podcasts interviews. I mean, we could all just be enjoying the beaches of

Hawaii, right, or the beaches of the Philippines, and but but I am driven by this need to tell others who who feel trapped, whether it's a religious environment, religiously toxic environment, or in a marriage, right, where they feel trapped because they're in a coercively controlling marriage. I'll talk about what coercive control is later. And they just feel that there's no hope. So even if I reach one woman out there who is currently, maybe she's watched death of a pastor's wife and she's thinking, huh, maybe not to the extreme that JP Miller, you know, Micah's husband, has abused his wife, but I kind of feel like

I can relate to Micah. So if I can reach even just one woman who desperately wants to get out, that's why we're doing this, John. You know, we want to give them hope, right?

You want to make sure that people know there are options. You are never trapped. So yeah, so my question, very similar to what you just said, what happens when extreme coercive control or domestic abuse inside a marriage becomes intertwined with excessive spiritual abuse.

So in Micah's case, and in my case, we both dealt with that simultaneously. You know, it's like a second ugly dance that, you know, that we were in. We're dancing with a wolf who is our husband, but we're also, you know, the wolf that is our pastor is also cutting in and wanting to dance with us. And meanwhile, you know, we're just confused and we're just getting our critical thinking skills just diminished every time, right? Like over, for me, it was a slow process, but year after year after year, I just found myself not being able to think straight

anymore. So, so before I continue about what is coercive control, I wanted to bring up kind of a controversial term, but knowing your audience, it should be too controversial. So it's the term. I'm complementarianism versus egalitarianism.

So I know that you've probably done some work on these terms. What, how would you define those, those two things? I'm actually glad that you went there and just a little bit scared because we're gonna see this, this battle take place in the comment feeds that I'll be honest, I'm just gonna get some popcorn, I'm gonna eat and watch as it unfolds in the comment feeds.

But egalitarianism, men and women, they're equal, they hold the same roles. Basically, it's in both the man and the woman have the same rights and status. Complementarianism, on the other hand, the man is at the top, the women, you might say they're equal and worth, but they have different God-given roles.

And the fundamentalist churches choose this, their passages that I grew up with, that talk about this, the man is the head of the house and the women are subordinate, essentially. This is part of the problem, in my opinion.

And I know this is another subject for another day to talk and debate the two. Maybe you could do this with me, we could talk about these. But when you're in this type of mindset where it is being dictated to you that you are to be subordinate to the husband, think about this.

There are women who feel trapped because the person that they are subordinate to is not either not a good match for them or be is simply abusive to them. I know situations like this.

We were taught in branemism and remember branemism is what began the laterane movement, which is a huge milestone towards coming into the charismatic movement, New Apostolic Reformation. They were teaching the complementary in view, but they were teaching a very authoritarian model of this.

You had the prophet who's at the top, you had the pastor who's under the prophet, you had the husband who's in this chain, and then the husband was to be the king of the household and the woman were to be his servants.

We joked, and I'm embarrassed to say that we joked, that the women should be barefoot pregnant and chained to the stove. That's how bad this was. We had that mindset of that hierarchy. And yes, you can read one passage in Corinthians where it talks about the hierarchy, but it does not support all of the other passages of text in the Bible, which I'll get into that a little bit later.

But the point I'm trying to make here is when you have this diverse of an opinion, think about this, the situation that she was in, had she been in a household where things were equal, it might have saved her life because she could have said, no, you can't be like this to me.

And she may not have felt trapped. On the flip side, there are people who get in that authoritarian structure that I just described with her trapped, the trapped in their mirror. they're trapped in their religion, and again, it's okay if the person who you're being supported and it too is good, but what if they're not?

Yeah, so I tend to agree with you there about what complementarianism is, at least for most traditional churches, there is definitely not an equality, right? I mean, they're equal in the eyes of God, but they function differently.

And versus egalitarianism, which has more to do with, you know, you function in whatever gift God has given you. So if you're the wife, but you're the one with the financial background, like in my case, you know, I graduated with a degree in economics and finances.

So in my marriage, I pretty much hold the purse. I mean, he earns it, but you know what, I do the budget, I take care of the financial aspects of our marriage, and it works great.

But again, that's in a egalitarian type of marriage. Now I really don't, I wouldn't say I am totally against complementarianism, okay? I think if we were to actually take it in its purest form, I'm going to put it this way, in a healthy Christian complementarian marriage, Godly headship actually means sacrificial, like responsibility, not domination, right?

So the husband is, you know, just like it says in the Bible, sacrificing and laying his life down in servanthood towards his wife. So I can, you know, I can go with that. But unfortunately, that is not how many husbands understand complementarianism in many traditional churches.

Let's just put it that way. So this is what I wrote down, headship usually equals supreme authority, submission equals absolute obedience. This agreement, even questioning your husband is like tantamount to rebellion, right? Setting boundaries is like insubordination and seeking outside help equals betrayal.

But the worst I think is when you say that, oh, if you leave your marriage, if you leave your husband... and that's like leaving God, which going back to your point, that's what we're told in a cult.

You leave, you leave our, you know, of course, you're not calling themselves a cult. You're leaving your family, right? Your spiritual family. If you leave us, then you know what? We can't be responsible for what goes on outside these walls.

This is the only safe place. So you leave us, you leave God. So I think, you know, the greatest weapon, really, that these types of husbands and types of spiritual, spiritually abusive leaders have, the greatest weapon they have is the Bible.

And they're definitely not using it in the way it's supposed to be used. They're using it as a weapon. They're using it, you know, to like pound you, your head over, you know, with the Bible.

And they basically have to keep you in this very control. And I'm going to be getting into what is course of control, very controlled environment where they can just mold you and make you into the kind of godly wife and godly Christian member of the church.

So poor Micah, right? Like you said, she got it from both sides. One of the things that surprised me, and you know, I don't usually talk theology and I actually hesitated before I did this, but whenever we left, I was wrapped up in that mindset.

And it was interesting to me because I still struggle sometimes with the fact that there's a women's rights movement and women's rights are really powerful until you tell them, I'd like for you to change it all in my car too, because that's one of the jobs that we can both do and they'll say no.

And so in my head, I'm like, well, yes, but we're still separating it. I struggle with this for a long time. It's really hard for me. And it took years of reading the Bible, I've mentioned it to you, I read it over and over and over, and each time I was reading it through from a different perspective than I had before.

And then I got off into tangents, like I would read something that, I just never really thought of it that way, but when you read it in context, it sounds entirely different. One of the tangents that I got off into is, okay, what's the women's role in both the church and in the household?

I was very surprised to see how much equality the Bible actually does support for women. And I found this one website, I'll never find it again. So. Don't ask me in the comment feeds, but I found this one website that actually walked you through the Bible Talking about the powerful roles of the women where they actually did have authority all the way back to Deborah Who was a judge over all of Israel?

So Israel did not have this thing that we claimed that they had where the men were all powerful And it makes sense because they came out of Egypt and there were female pharaohs Which also shocked me. I had no idea until I got into the mythologies and ancient Egypt But you can find these studies online. I'm certain Bible gateway your Bible hub has something like this It was very surprising me to learn that and then when I did learn it it changed me in a way that hurt Because suddenly I had to do some self

Examination am I in the wrong and that's hard to do now whenever you're in a situation where it's a pastor and they're a little bit Headstrong and Micah's case and I'm I'm trying not to read too much into it because I don't know his personality I've actually not watched the series But coming from the lineage of a pastor my grandfather was the pastor and knowing how the men were in that hierarchy I can tell you that The things that I had to change. I'm certain that there were pastors who have to work on this who are in that does in that model that we're talking about

I'm gonna share with you a story about JP Miller and his father and this maybe will Give you more insight into his character. Can I do that? all right, so This is from a lawsuit JP Miller is right now facing two lawsuits from two young women that he That he sexually abused when they were teenagers Okay, so I'm I'm reading straight from the lawsuit For years JP Miller John Paul JP for short JP Miller and his father Reginald Wayne Miller have presented themselves as devout religious leaders They built the reputations in the Myrtle Beach community and beyond as men of faith

Dedicating to spreading God's word and training future church leaders, but this image was a lie Behind their religious facade JP Miller and Reginald Wayne Miller engaged in sexual abuse and Predatory conduct often targeting minors They use their positions of power to manipulate and exploit vulnerable victims while concealing their actions from the public So I hope YouTube doesn't Flag you down, but I'm I'm trying to keep it

PG Jane Doe number two, okay, so this is from the lawsuit there's two of them. So one is Jane Doe number one. This one is from Jane Doe number two. She was 14 years old at the time of the alleged assaults. And she said that it was when the Micah Miller case came out, right, when she died, that she started to remember the memories of these assaults against her, which occurred between 1999 and 2001. So at this point, he was, you know, JP Miller, I think, was in his early 20s. The plaintiff says she enrolled at Cathedral Hall Academy in the fall of 1999.

Her parents believed that the private Christian school in Myrtle Beach was the best education, best place for her education. The school was run by Pastor Wayne Miller. So that's the father of JP. JP was a teacher. So again, you know, they fooled the whole community. They opened up the school.

Now, this is how they described the school. We've had this discussion before. Remember, I'm a 23 year veteran of education, you know, I was a teacher. We run a school in the Philippines. So when I read this, I was just a guest. So this is how the school, you know, this is how they describe the school. It was a repurposed bowling alley. Their walls were incomplete. Their floors were slick and uneven. The staff were just members of the Miller's churches. They had no credentials.

How can you teach her that having any teaching credentials? They had no oversight. Basically, these teachers could just teach whatever they wanted. And in some cases, they had deeply questionable backgrounds. So what would have been a place of learning was actually a place of control, fear and unchecked abuse? Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started, or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page

of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Steven McGummery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions. of each book. You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top. And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching.

On behalf of William Bramham Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. The thing that really stands out to me as I listen to what you're saying, and I look at this document, is the unchecked abuse. That is such a huge significant thing. Think about every single story that we have on Friday of all of the people who come out of IHOP KC, Branemism, all of these different groups that we have on the podcast. There's one thing that they all have in common. Every single escapee, every single victim of the groups have this one thing in common. They were in an environment where they had unchecked abuse.

Now, it may not have all been sexual abuse, but sometimes it's unchecked spiritual abuse. Sometimes it's unchecked physical abuse, but they all have that in common. It is unchecked in abuse. Think of this. Whenever you're sitting in a group of people and the minister is ridiculing the crowd, I've had multiple people who have said this on the podcast. The minister stood from behind the pulpit and he pointed fingers at so-and-so, or he said something that everybody in the room, everybody in the congregation knew he's talking about that family. That's spiritual abuse. Pure plain and simple. Who stands up and says, you can't do this

pastor. We're not going to put up with this. Who's the one who checks that abuse? Because it is spiritual abuse. When you allow this, what you're doing is you're sending a message to the man behind the pulpit that that is okay. It's okay that you abuse the people. Yes, it's verbally, but what it does to a person who is unstable, has mental issues, or has something that they really, really need should not be a pastor because of the things that they have inward sin. When they're allowed to abuse people and they know that the congregation

don't care, well, what happens when they go to the next level? For me, that's the problem here. When you allow somebody to stand up and have their way with your minds in the congregation, what about the bodies? That's where this becomes problematic. In this case, you can see it's clearly documented by the court case. This is what is happening. J. Doe number two says one day in the fall of 1999. I'm not going to go into the whole story, but J. P. Miller is a musician, so he was stinkering in the piano. He said, hey, do you want to learn how to play piano? She comes

over. She's very innocent. She's 14 years old, and he basically touched her inappropriately at that point. So she was in shock, so she goes and tells a teacher, another teacher at the school, and guess what this other teacher tells her?

To do, go to the principal's office. Well, who's the principal is JP's father, right? Wayne Miller. So when she arrived at the office, Reginald Wayne, the principal, demanded that she repeat her accusations while the son was standing right there.

So it's some picture of this. It's the father and the son who's the principal and the teacher and this poor 14 year old who's traumatized, right? So she has to repeat the story and Reginald shouted at her saying, you will not lie about my son.

And he punished her. Do you want to know what the punishment is? He made her write out 5,000 times. I will not lie about John Paul Miller, 5,000 times. So not only is this poor girl sexually traumatized, now she's being re-traumatized, right?

By this father and the son, of course, who was there. And I want to pause right there because this is significant and this is something that Jed and I talked about frequently when we were doing the podcast together.

It's not just that you have one single individual behind the pulpit who's spiritually abusing the people and in this case, sexually abusing the people. It's not just one person. If it was one person, it would be very easy for everybody to rise up and say, no, you can't do this.

But when you have a support tier underneath that one person who does not care, who is not holding them accountable. In other words, you have a church, you have a pastor, you have a board of elders that is not holding the pastor accountable.

Well, the pastor is unchecked. And things like this are going to happen. Jed mentioned several cases that he knew of that this kind of thing happen. I mentioned several things that in my past, I watched ministers who just abused the crowd because the elders didn't hold them accountable for what they said or did.

This is a problem and this is what it leads to. Whenever you do not have accountability in your church, you're going to have problems because somebody's going to spin out of control. So the lawsuit states, the horrors of cathedral hall academy, were not just physical and sexual.

They were psychological. Now, this is the part where I am sharing the story with you because of this part. Jay don't number two says she brought a Harry Potter book to school. She was called into the office.

Again, she was berated. and she was called a servant of Satan and she was told that if she continued down this path, she would be raped by demons just because she's reading Harry Potter. Then right in front of her, he sets the book on fire. He sets the book on fire and then they literally beat her with a Bible. I was joking about reading somebody a wife with the Bible over her head but they actually did it and then they poured water over her head and at this point she was 16 years old. I mean,

why is she even stayed after the molestation? I don't know why. I'll remind people who are new to the podcast and haven't heard the entire series years ago, long before even this YouTube channel existed, it was actually my original was taken down by the cult. I had a series of episodes that I did on what we called quote unquote the park and back in letter rain, whenever you think of all of this that you see today in the charismatic movement, new apostolic reformation, when you read God's generals and they're talking about William Branham, well, it wasn't just William Branham. Branham had a campaign team and all of these

figures like Benny Han who's referencing William Branham, he's also referencing their campaign because they went from city to city to city and you can find pictures of these guys. They're all on the platform with them. You've got famous figure Jim Jones of people's temple. The infamous Jim Jones was on the platform with William Branham. You have very, very key figures in Pentecostal charismatic, word of faith, the prosperity gospel. You've got all of these figures who were with these people who were with William Branham, well, with William Branham traveled his scribes, is how you'd call it in biblical terms. They were, Branham called him them his tape boys and what

these guys did was they would record the message that William Branham sermons because that was the spoken word for the day or Kenneth Hagen would call it the reima. Kenneth Hagen is also a part of this if you study all of this history. Well, these two guys, they were in a religion that was unchecked and like I said about, you know, the tear below the guy at the top, these guys were in that tear and they were supporting Branham and all of the things that he said that was literally spiritual abuse to the people. Well, they realized that they can do it too. So these two guys move out to

Prescott, Arizona. Interesting side story. This is where Paul Kane went and hit out for a period of time in Prescott, Arizona. Also interesting. This is where Chuck Smith had his church in Prescott, Arizona. You can find that these guys, you can read actually the California Supreme Court has a court record of this. These guys, they were unchecked as well and they were doing things Like you're describing here and they even went further.

They talked about the abuse, both spiritual, sexual, physical abuse. They were doing, they were using fire. You can read that in the story. I'm not gonna go too deep because YouTube actually would block this.

There were men who were going far above and beyond in abusing the child to keep them in line. I'll just say it like that. You can go look it up. There's a book out there and I did two podcasts with Deborah Tibido.

You can go back in the series and you can find this. It's horrific what these guys did. It's all because they were unchecked. And while the Harry Potter references is funny to me, the entire thing makes me angry because these people are abusing in the name of God, in the church, where people are shutting off critical thinking because they think they're coming to be fed mana from God.

Well, what they're getting instead is a dangerous wolf who's not only destroying lives, but in this case, taking lives. Yeah, no, it made me so mad. I mean, like I said, I've been following the case since 2024 when it first happened, but watching the Netflix series and then doing additional research.

I just can't believe that this guy continued to preach afterwards. I mean, it's shut down now. But there were still some members of his church that continued to be loyal to him. I mean, I don't know if you heard this, but the day after she died, he did a whole sermon before seeing kind of like, by the way, my husband, I mean, my wife died yesterday of suicide.

And of course, he blamed mental health, but you know, some people reject that notion.

So we're not going to get into that. Well, in this case, that's both an excuse and a confession. Think about that whenever you are a leader and you're spiritual abusing the people, you're taking people who might otherwise live happy, healthy lives, and you're abusing them spiritually, you're mentally wreaking havoc in their minds.

So their minds actually go into a mental place where some of them, they struggle for decades to come out of it. You're actually giving them mental health issues. This is a problem. And this is not just a problem in this church.

This is, I know this is an extreme example. Don't get me wrong, but this is a problem that is widespread throughout the movement. And I have to ask again, where is God in that?

If you are in a movement, there's abusing your people. And think about this, the accountability thing. I know I'm hounding on that, but think about that. You're in a movement that has built a framework that allows for...

lack of accountability. How can you keep going like this? I understand this is an independent charismatic style church. They're not part of, as far as I know, they're not part of the charismatic movement, Pentecostal movement. But they're mimicking those that are. If you look at the structure of their church, pretty well, everything that you've described in that document, I have experienced in one way, shape, or form in other churches that I have came through as my family migrated throughout the country. I've had other people you can listen to the podcast on Friday. They have the same issue. They're experiencing

the very same things. Why? This looks so similar because there is a lack of accountability. And it's back to, I hate to throw the Chuck Smith name out in this, but this is the Moses model that got Chuck Smith into trouble. You can go back and look at some of that history.

When you have a Moses model where the pastor is your untouchable leader and they're spiritually abusing people, this is a problem. You need accountability. I'm glad that these two young women have now stepped forward and he's facing these lawsuits. So I just want to talk about complementarianism again, just in general. So like I said, I'm not a theologian. I cannot tell you what's right and what's wrong, where I lean. That would just be my opinion.

All I can tell you is that complementarianism can go seriously wrong in a coercively controlling marriage. So let me just define that for you. So coercive control isn't just one isolated act. It's a pattern of domination. Okay. So it's a pattern of behaviors where the husband progressively, like I said, it's it's slowly like it like that frog in hot water, right?

Husband progressively restricts his wife's autonomy, controlling the finances, her friendships, her communication with others, her movement, her sexuality, her parenting decisions, her employment, clothing, social media, access to outside help, etc, etc. So you've you have this this husband, this JP Miller doing that to his wife. And then you put that husband over her spiritually as her pastor, that poor girl didn't stand a chance. You know, I mean, she was just surrounded by a coercively controlling environment in the house and in the church. Quite similar to mine and in others, I'm sure many of So I wanted to end by seeing that there is a good thing that has come out and the divorce

lawyer of Micah Miller, her name is Regina Ward, and she is fighting for this thing called Micah's Law. And Micah's Law is going to make coercive control a crime. And you know, you don't have to have physical like bruises all over your body to charge your husband for abuse. Because here is a truth about domestic violence. This is what I wrote. It doesn't happen when a husband doesn't just happen when a husband hits his wife. It doesn't happen when the husband takes a gun to his wife's head, right? Violence can start when the weapon of shame and humiliation is used,

right? Like calling her fat and she should, she should lose weight. Otherwise, it's not his fault if he starts looking at other women, right? Or there's also that weapon of financial dependency, you know, where he controls the person, the purse, and she has asked him for an allowance.

The weapon of sexual gratification, which we've been talking about, right? Like you gotta, you live to satisfy his needs. And the weapon of isolation, brainwashing her into believing that he is the only safe person, you know, their home is the only safe place. You can't trust anybody out there. And like I said, the worst weapon is the Bible. And that's why I titled the books, Weaponized Religion because that's truly what this is. They have weaponized the religion, they have weaponized the Bible against the people. And sadly, there are many people in the movement that have just been defeated. And when you get defeated and you're trapped in a corner and you

can't get out, you feel like you can't break free because everything is stacked against you. Everybody has joined into this weapon that has charged against you. You feel defeated and there's no place to go. Well, there are people who just simply can't bear that burden. And that's what, you know, I know there's some controversy over what happened. I did read through that. But in the end, it didn't, it doesn't matter. Even if there, if there was no controversy here, I know people who are in the same situation. In fact, I have a cousin who is in the same

situation and he's no longer with us because the web, this religion has been weaponized against him in such a way. He had no escape. He had no way out. It saddened me to think through the people that felt like that they had no way out. And simply, all you have to do is open up the Bible and realize this, this is not a weapon in the way that they're using it and they don't even know how this thing. In fact, I don't think many of them have actually read it, because in the way that they're abusing the people with it, you can't really find any substance that

gives them the power that they have in the Bible. You have to go outside of the Bible, and sadly, if you've studied the ancient mythologies, what they're matching is actually the ancient mythologies, the false gods, rather than the God that's in the Bible. How can you do this?

How can you allow people to do this if you're sitting in the pews? You need accountability. I can't stress it enough. You need accountability. You know, I'm glad that Regina Ward is pushing for this law, Micah's law. I hope it gets established in all 50 states, because women really need to have something that they can use to protect themselves, to protect their kids, and to keep themselves safe, not just like getting away. That's the only part of it. Micah tried to get away, and JP Miller just continued to harass her and go after her. The last thing I'm going to say, if again,

you're listening to this and you're a woman who feels trapped, there is help. There is help. They can go to my website. I know you always say what my website is at the end. There's a lot of places now where they can take you in. No questions asked. If you're a pastor, and a woman goes to you and says, hey, I am inferior for my life. My husband is abusive.

The question should not be, how can we preserve your marriage? How can we bring about reconciliation? How can I help you forgive your husband? Those should not be the questions. The two questions should be, are you safe, and how can we help?

I'd like to say this too. Those of you who have shared your stories on the podcast, you're aware because I share with you some of the feedback that I get from people who are truly getting help. When you share a story, you're empowering somebody else to come out of that trap space that they're in. I would invite anybody who's willing and able to come share their story on the podcast, their story of overcoming the things that we're talking about here, spiritual abuse, sexual abuse, all of the abuse from a weaponized religion from men who don't know how to handle the Bible but are behind the pulpit, sadly. Share

your story, empower somebody else to overcome this because there are people once they get to the pulpit. of being trapped and they can't get out there are people that you actually could save their lives just simply by sharing your story.

So thanks for allowing me to stand up my little soapbox. I hope that for at least one person out there it's been helpful. Absolutely. Thank you so much for doing this. You're welcome. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information or to share your story you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at www.William-brandom.org and www.PiaHugoMinistries.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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