Franklin Hall
Franklin Hall was a Pentecostal healing evangelist whose 1946 book Atomic Power with God through Fasting and Prayer became one of the major catalysts for the Latter Rain and Voice of Healing revivals, promoting fasting as a source of supernatural power, healing, resurrection faith, and end-time victory; while his teachings influenced figures such as William Branham and other revivalists during the movement's rise, Hall's fasting theology grew increasingly extreme, producing reports of physical and mental harm among followers, alienating other evangelists, and eventually leading him to form the Deliverance Foundation, where his gospel of fasting, child-preacher spectacle, and body-centered salvation claims continued in a more isolated cultic form.
Franklin Hall (1909-1994) was a Pentecostal "faith healing" evangelist best known for his emphasis on prayer and fasting. In 1946, he published a book entitled "Atomic Power with God through Fasting and Prayer", which provided detailed information on the methods and benefits of fasting. Many of the "faith healing" revivalists in the Latter Rain Revival and Voice of Healing Revival used Hall's fasting methods in their meetings until they became more extreme. Hall wrote several books and tracts about fasting, including Glorified Fasting (1961), The Fasting Prayer (1947), The Body-Felt Salvation (1968), Formula for Raising the Dead (1960), and Our Divine Healing Obligation (nd).[1]
During the time William Branham toured with Little David Walker, Franklin Hall joined in the "faith healing" campaigns. His fasting method, along with William Branham's extremist doctrines, were the catalysts for the creation of the Latter Rain movement. Hall recognized the massive amount of money flowing through the revivals, and even jokingly talked about it before the meetings started on live microphones.
Franklin Hall: What are you going to start it with?
William Branham: I'm going to start it…
Franklin Hall: Some money, huh?
William Branham: Some money
Franklin Hall: All right good, I will help you start it
William Branham: All right, sir; that's fine. God bless you.[2]
Franklin Hall's religious views on fasting grew more extreme, however, and many evangelists in the revivals did not want to participate in starving themselves. When the Latter Rain began to die out in the 1950s, Hall blamed them for their lack of fasting.[3] Hall began claiming that participants in the revivals should have a "body-felt salvation", implying that if they weren't starving themselves, they weren't really saved. The hunger pangs, according to Hall, would eliminate sickness, tiredness, and body odors. As a result of Hall's extremism, his audience quickly faded. By January of 1956, William Branham had parted ways. According to Branham, people attempting the extreme fasting were going insane. Others were losing teeth, their eyes were sunken and they were very ill. When Branham mentioned Hall and Atomic Power With God Through Fasting and Prayer, he avoided using Halls' name.
But here not long ago, a man wrote a book on fasting. My, women come into the meeting, and men, who'd went on those fasts that were insane. They went just because the book said to fast forty days. Some of them with false plates, and their teeth would drop out. And their eyes would sink back. And mothers-to-be to...women to be mothers, their little ones as you understand, they would completely go mentally out, and be taken to the institutions. Many, many of them, come in that condition. I believe in fasting. Certainly. But when you fast, you don't hunger. Jesus after He had got through fasting, the Bible said, He was hungry. God puts a fast on you. You don't put it on yourself. He certainly captured the women, the man did that wrote the book, when he said, put a picture of a woman there, she looked twenty years younger, said, after the fast. You ought to seen her then, just about a year later what she looked like, after that. See?[4]
That same year, Hall founded the Deliverance Foundation, a new cult formed around his "gospel of fasting". By 1970 it reported thirty-two affiliated churches and two thousand members. He also introduced new "Little-David"-style child preachers to his stage act, such as "Little Joey".[5]