- 2 days ago
John and Jed unpack a strange incident involving Sean Feucht’s claim that a protester “firebombed” a church event—only to reveal it was a pink smoke bomb. They use this moment to launch into a powerful discussion on how modern charismatic groups use persecution narratives to elevate their public image and deflect criticism. Drawing from personal experiences, they reflect on how these narratives shape identity and insulate movements like the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), Branhamism, and IHOP from accountability. Jed shares vivid memories from his childhood, including Y2K fears and being taught to prepare for martyrdom, setting the emotional tone for understanding how these ideologies take root.
The conversation then moves into the historical lineage of this persecution complex, tracing it from British Israelism and the Christian Identity movement through Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to more recent revivalist figures. John lays out the disturbing ideological overlap between early Pentecostal figures, extremist political movements, and Jim Jones—explaining how Jones was influenced by Branham and Latter Rain doctrine. As the discussion unfolds, they reveal how contemporary revivalist leaders appropriate past trauma to fuel modern political crusades, using martyrdom language to justify both personal abuse and institutional aggression. Through humor, scholarship, and haunting real-world connections, the conversation reveals how these groups manipulate suffering—both real and imagined—for spiritual and financial power.
00:00 Introduction
00:31 Smoke Bombs and Sean Feucht’s Martyr Complex
06:05 Martyr Narratives in Cults and Christian Identity Origins
10:28 Martyr Books, Roman Catholicism, and Latter Rain Roots
12:10 Jonestown Massacre and Branham’s Doomsday Influence
17:21 How Jim Jones Was Introduced Through the Message Movement
20:07 Apocalyptic Fear, Prophecy, and Brandham’s Doom Narrative
22:02 IHOP, Dominionism, and the Shift from Doom to Power
24:25 Y2K Panic: Personal Stories of Cult-Driven Fear
30:22 Missouri’s Role as a Hotbed of Extremism
35:00 Villainizing Outsiders to Excuse Abuse Within
39:02 Economic Anxiety, Spiritual Warfare, and Blaming Outsiders
42:02 Gerald Winrod, Anti-Semitism, and the Gold Standard
44:04 Christian Zionism and Appropriating Jewish Oppression
47:09 DC Talk, Abuse Allegations, and Weaponized Martyrdom
50:27 One-Sided Martyrdom and the Manifested Sons of God
53:36 Theological Shifts: From Branham to NAR
55:01 Evangelism by Fire: Revivalists and Manufactured Danger
57:44 Feucht’s Judgmental Gospel and Performative Victimhood
1:02:14 Gospel of War vs. Gospel of Grace
1:05:02 Profiteering, Landlords, and Hitting the Pocketbooks
1:08:48 Ending with a Jim Jones Quote
______________________
Weaponized Religion: From Christian Identity to the NAR:
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735160962
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGZX3K
______________________
– Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/branham
– Subscrib
The conversation then moves into the historical lineage of this persecution complex, tracing it from British Israelism and the Christian Identity movement through Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to more recent revivalist figures. John lays out the disturbing ideological overlap between early Pentecostal figures, extremist political movements, and Jim Jones—explaining how Jones was influenced by Branham and Latter Rain doctrine. As the discussion unfolds, they reveal how contemporary revivalist leaders appropriate past trauma to fuel modern political crusades, using martyrdom language to justify both personal abuse and institutional aggression. Through humor, scholarship, and haunting real-world connections, the conversation reveals how these groups manipulate suffering—both real and imagined—for spiritual and financial power.
00:00 Introduction
00:31 Smoke Bombs and Sean Feucht’s Martyr Complex
06:05 Martyr Narratives in Cults and Christian Identity Origins
10:28 Martyr Books, Roman Catholicism, and Latter Rain Roots
12:10 Jonestown Massacre and Branham’s Doomsday Influence
17:21 How Jim Jones Was Introduced Through the Message Movement
20:07 Apocalyptic Fear, Prophecy, and Brandham’s Doom Narrative
22:02 IHOP, Dominionism, and the Shift from Doom to Power
24:25 Y2K Panic: Personal Stories of Cult-Driven Fear
30:22 Missouri’s Role as a Hotbed of Extremism
35:00 Villainizing Outsiders to Excuse Abuse Within
39:02 Economic Anxiety, Spiritual Warfare, and Blaming Outsiders
42:02 Gerald Winrod, Anti-Semitism, and the Gold Standard
44:04 Christian Zionism and Appropriating Jewish Oppression
47:09 DC Talk, Abuse Allegations, and Weaponized Martyrdom
50:27 One-Sided Martyrdom and the Manifested Sons of God
53:36 Theological Shifts: From Branham to NAR
55:01 Evangelism by Fire: Revivalists and Manufactured Danger
57:44 Feucht’s Judgmental Gospel and Performative Victimhood
1:02:14 Gospel of War vs. Gospel of Grace
1:05:02 Profiteering, Landlords, and Hitting the Pocketbooks
1:08:48 Ending with a Jim Jones Quote
______________________
Weaponized Religion: From Christian Identity to the NAR:
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735160962
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGZX3K
______________________
– Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/branham
– Subscrib
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00:30Hello, and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast.
00:00:36I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research
00:00:41at william-branham.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Jed Hartley, son of
00:00:47a false prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer.
00:00:51Jed, it's good to be back, and if you had told me years ago when I was a kid that I
00:00:58would have a podcast about one of these little smoke bomb toys that I used to grow up and
00:01:03throw on the sidewalk and watch the smoke billow up, I would have laughed at you.
00:01:08What in the world could you talk about?
00:01:10And the fact that we're having to sit here as adult men and talk about this as an actual
00:01:16situation that is happening in churches, it's beyond me.
00:01:20But I have to say, out of all of the things that I have talked about on the podcast, this
00:01:25is weird, but there's a line of weird things that we can talk about, and this isn't the
00:01:31weirdest, but it is very strange.
00:01:34Jared Yeah, yeah.
00:01:35Yeah.
00:01:36I think that there's nothing as disconnected between my perception of Christian persecution
00:01:44when I was a kid versus these manifestations of so-called Christian persecution that we're
00:01:52seeing today.
00:01:53I mean, I really thought the world was going to end in fiery, and that people were going
00:01:59to come with guns to kill me for being Christian, and instead we have smoke bombs, which for
00:02:06people who do not know what we're referencing, recently Sean Foyt had a, and we've talked
00:02:17about Sean Foyt several times on this podcast, but Sean Foyt had a crusade campaign that was
00:02:27up north in Canada, and he was speaking at several different churches and holding different
00:02:35worship events, and the long and short of it is that the Canadian government, the local
00:02:42governments, there was a lot of protests and a lot of backlash towards having him host these
00:02:53events, and a lot of his events were canceled, he lost like permits to do these certain events
00:03:00and had to scramble, and then in one of the events that he did end up holding, because
00:03:07he was able to find different venues last minute, someone released a smoke bomb that's like the
00:03:16gender reveal smoke bombs that are all pink or blue, but then in this case that it was pink and
00:03:24protesting him and protesting his sort of dominionist Christianity, specifically his sort of like
00:03:34right wing anti LGBTQ and just Christian dominionism in general. And so there was a lot of protests that
00:03:43were being held. And there was a tweet that he sent out about basically him being persecuted in the church
00:03:51that he was performing at was firebombed was the that was that was the term that he used for it was
00:04:00firebombed. When instead, it was a gender reveal smoke bomb, and he took like a picture of it. He was like
00:04:09holding the smoke bomb in his hands and stuff. So it's just, it's, it's so silly. There's people who
00:04:17are, I understand people are like similar people to me and individuals who have sort of spoken up against
00:04:26like Christian dominionists like Sean Foy in the past and and New Apostolic Reformation. Pastors like
00:04:35Foy, um, are being like, Oh, look, he lied. It wasn't a firebomb. It was just a smoke bomb. But part of me is also
00:04:44like, yeah, this is just what they do. Like, this is just this is just par for the course is this idea of any
00:04:52sort of type of persecution. And you know, someone did release a smoke bomb and disrupting his worship service. And of
00:05:01course, he was going to just absolutely eat all of that up. Because any sense in which you can write a
00:05:11narrative in which Foy is not the aggressor is not the part of the sort of dominion class that is that is
00:05:20taking control and domination over individuals and instead is the persecuting the the persecute anytime
00:05:29they can kind of like flip that narrative, you better believe that that's going to happen. So I thought that that was was just a
00:05:36wonderful foray into a topic that is very prevalent in
00:05:43right wing Christianity, which is this martyr complex of this belief that, you know, we all all Christians are being
00:05:53persecuted presently and to be a Christian, you must be persecuted. And so I thought we could dive into
00:06:00that today. I'm actually glad you did, because I don't think this is something that I have brought up
00:06:04much on the podcast, the ties of martyrdom to cults. It's not unique to randomism or IHOP or NAR, you can
00:06:16look back as far as you want, any group of people who rise up and are oppressing and manipulating their people. Whenever
00:06:24anybody in opposition to the oppression comes forward, they act as though they're a martyr. And the sad truth of it is,
00:06:32whenever that happens, the people who are inside, even though they, the people trying to help them are pushing for their
00:06:40release, the fact that they're being presented as martyrs, that solidifies their involvement in whatever
00:06:47is the sect, they believe, okay, this is the outside. Cult leaders will often say that we have a coming, the
00:06:54great persecution that's coming, though, they'll basically manipulate people to believe that in the mess in the
00:07:01Branham message, we called it the squeeze, the squeeze is coming, the government's going to close in on us,
00:07:07they're going to shut our doors. Every cult has this type of theme. And what it does is it prepares
00:07:14the individual who's being manipulated to expect that there will be outside opposition to them being
00:07:20in a destructive cult, because without question, there always will be. However, if you trace the
00:07:27lineage back from the NAR, as we have done through various figures like Mike Bickle, like Bill Johnson,
00:07:35all the way back to the latter reign and its ideology, a lot of people miss this, because
00:07:42when you go all the way back as far as Christian identity, you find that there was one book that
00:07:46was heavily used, and that was the anti-Semitic protocols of the learned elders of Zion, which
00:07:54we've mentioned. Oh, right. Yeah. Henry Ford was publishing this through his Dearborn Independent.
00:07:59You have people like Gerald Burton Winrod, who was distributing it all throughout fundamentalist
00:08:06religion. He was working closely with people like Charles Fuller, Fuller Foundation,
00:08:13the same exact Fuller Theological Seminary that C. Peter Wagner came from. They're all pushing this
00:08:21anti-Semitic book, but there's another book they're pushing too. The Christian Identity Movement,
00:08:27if you understand the concept behind it, it's built on British Israelism. It's the idea that
00:08:33United States and Great Britain are the direct descendants of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel.
00:08:39Well, with this comes the notion that the Americas and Great Britain are destined, predetermined,
00:08:49to be some sort of a spiritual elite realm that, you know, it basically is the kingdom, right? That's why
00:08:57they're pushing for the kingdom. And the idea of Christian Identity was that the false Jews were
00:09:03coming in to take it, but they were coming in with the idea that it was the false Jews working with
00:09:09Roman Catholicism. That's why you see they were vastly, strongly against Roman Catholicism. And so, what
00:09:16did they do? They chose the other book, which is widely – we talked about it in Branham. In fact,
00:09:22I think if you bought the Branham Collection of Literature, it came packaged in that, if I remember
00:09:27correctly. And that's Falk's Book of the Martyrs, which if you read this and you understand what it is,
00:09:35yes, it has some historical fact, but it is heavily, heavily swayed against Catholicism.
00:09:42In the lineage of martyrs that they list, they ignore every Catholic martyr that is in the history,
00:09:49because they want to make the argument in the book that all of the martyrs were against Roman
00:09:54Catholicism and that Roman Catholicism developed as this separate entity. And because of that separation
00:10:02and because of that ignorance of history, you find that all of the white supremacy groups, the Christian
00:10:07identity groups, Branham, Branhamism, Latter Rain, they all go back to this book as a, here's a history
00:10:14of our martyrdom. And we today are being presented as martyrs for all of the political opposition that
00:10:21is happening in the United States.
00:10:23I was just looking at this up right now because it's so, I had a sort of canonical text in my,
00:10:31a canonical martyr text that I read and that people in IHOP read. It was huge within our sort of
00:10:43circle, especially the young, like, I remember this was one of the first books that I myself
00:10:50read, sort of prompted, other than the Bible and some books by Ted Decker, a Christian author,
00:11:03was the Jesus Freak book by DC Talk that had, it was a book of a historical account of martyrs and
00:11:13people who had been martyred for the sake of Christianity. And I remember it being like there was a lot of
00:11:19of martyrs at the hands of Roman Catholics. And so, I, when you were talking about the
00:11:25Fox Book of Martyr, I tried to look it up real quick. I don't know if there's, I'm sure if I had
00:11:29those two books that there would be a lot of overlap in between the narratives that they were talking
00:11:35about. I'm sure that the Jesus Freak book was heavily influenced by that. But that, that's really
00:11:44interesting that that has remained a theme of like the sort of latter reign communities, that there are
00:11:51these canonical texts about martyrdom. And when you were talking about how this is true of all,
00:12:03a lot of cults, and not just sort of the New Apostolic Reformation cults,
00:12:09um, I was thinking of, um, I always forget that, but the Jim, uh, the Jonestown, I was thinking of
00:12:16the Jonestown and, and, um, have you ever listened to the, the audio from the Jonestown before? Um,
00:12:25you could probably put this more into context than me. So fill in and help me correct the story if I'm
00:12:31wrong, but there's a sort of audio recording of, um, a lot of the leaders of Jonestown and, um,
00:12:40Jim Jones, like talking right before they commit suicide, um, mass suicide. And they have like,
00:12:49forcibly have the children drink, um, uh, the Kool-Aid where they, I, I might be mixing up stories,
00:12:57so please correct me if I'm wrong. But, um, one thing that I remember is there's this,
00:13:02just this sort of idea, you have this sort of martyr complex that's being like the police are
00:13:08coming after, or like they, the other is coming to like take us away and attack us and because of
00:13:15the things that we believe. And it's so interesting because in that situation, if you were a cult member
00:13:22within the Jonestown community and you had not, you know, sexually assaulted someone, there was
00:13:28obviously a lot of like, um, criminal activity that was going on in there, but if you were just
00:13:33a member of that, the only thing that you were should have been afraid of was your own community
00:13:41and Jim Jones and the community members. I mean, the individuals who are telling these stories
00:13:47were the ones who they themselves were what was threatening. I mean, it's sort of the self
00:13:53inflicted wound and it shows, it gives like an example of like who killed the Jonestown people,
00:13:59the Jonestown people. Like that's, that was what the threat was, but yet this, I think the martyrdom
00:14:07mentality in cult, uh, cults allow people to, or it keeps people insulated within these cults
00:14:17because there's this perceived reality that some of the oppression that they feel and
00:14:26oppression that doesn't exist is like being perpetrated against them or would be perpetrated
00:14:31against them or is going to be perpetrated against them. And so now there's this sort of like us versus
00:14:38them and it further works to, uh, insulate a community and terrify them. Um, and it's sort of
00:14:47the like, well, if, if, if my life is going to be taken anyway, I might more freely give it. And I think
00:14:56that the Jonestown massacre is like, is a great example of this, that they were so afraid of the
00:15:03persecution coming externally that they killed themselves. Like what a great representation
00:15:10and a horrific representation of the ultimate end of some of this martyr mentality.
00:15:14I don't think we've ever talked about this. You and I, I know that we've talked about it, um,
00:15:19in the revival history series with Charles, but you actually hit one of the main points I wanted to
00:15:25get to before I was going to get to it. I'll, I'll go there now, but the Jonestown massacre was more
00:15:32related to this than you might think. And there is a connection. Everybody pretty much now is aware
00:15:38of the connection to Branhamism, but they're not aware of why the Jonestown massacre. I have listened
00:15:44to the, they're called the death tapes. I've listened to the death tapes. I'm actually working
00:15:49with the Jonestown foundation because we're piecing together all of the history that all of these
00:15:54organizations have covered up as it relates to Jim Jones and Jonestown. So let's go there. Let's give
00:16:01a brief history because the martyrdom there is very closely tied to the martyrdom foundation
00:16:08that Sean Foyt's religion is built on. So what happened was the Lateran movement caused this
00:16:15great schism in Pentecostalism. The, the assemblies of God's first, I believe they were first,
00:16:23began to realize that this hierarchical structure of the, what's called the five-fold ministry,
00:16:30what they did was they took the biblical terms for apostle, prophet, teacher, etc.,
00:16:37and they created it as a hierarchy doctrine, not in the biblical way. So whenever you hear these
00:16:43people saying, but the five-fold ministry is in the Bible, yes, but not in the way Lateran
00:16:48presented it. It wasn't a hierarchy with an apostle at the top. They created that structure.
00:16:53Assemblies of God saw that this was not only heretical, but it was enabling people to come
00:17:00into the ministry who had no theological backing or sound or sound doctrine or history. Basically,
00:17:07the laying on of hands could introduce a new minister who might be a predator. And so they said,
00:17:13we don't want this. We're disconnecting ourselves completely from this heresy called the New Order
00:17:19of the Lateran. Well, that caused the schism right down Pentecostalism. And interestingly,
00:17:26right down the middle of Jim Jones, the church he was attending and he was becoming a pastor in.
00:17:32Oh, okay.
00:17:32Oh, okay.
00:17:44James Grant who joined the Church of the Assemblies on the Assemblies side of the split,
00:17:47but also being at the church in the public, he served as the Assemblies of God in Congress.
00:17:50And as the church of the Assemblies started as a House of the Assemblies,
00:17:52that was the Assemblies of God, the Church of the Assemblies were either in the Church of the
00:17:57Assemblies oriva of the Assemblies, but the stature were the traditional church of God,
00:17:58sectioning it. Jones, because of this, he joined what became known as the Independent
00:18:06Assemblies of God. It was the faction that broke off, and that faction had leadership
00:18:12in Chicago, Illinois. His name was Joseph Mattson-Bose. He was one of Branham's many
00:18:19partners. Mattson-Bose ordained him into the Independent Assemblies, and Joseph Mattson-Bose
00:18:25sent letters, you can find them on our website, connecting and introducing Branham to Jones,
00:18:30Jones to Branham, and essentially setting up Jones to be a new leader after this faction
00:18:36had split off because they needed new leadership. So Jones was becoming a leader in what is called
00:18:43the message, right? Well, Jones starts hosting Branham in multiple states, these big organized
00:18:50campaigns and conventions, etc. One of them is in Chicago. And Branham, rattling off his fear and
00:18:58doom and gloom, doomsday concepts, he uses the British Israelism doctrine, which allowed ministers
00:19:07to take passages from the Old Testament and say it is taught in shadow in the Old Testament
00:19:13and it applies to us today. And he says the Book of Nahum is describing the destruction that
00:19:21is coming to Nineveh, but also it is directly describing Outer Drive in Chicago. We've talked
00:19:26about this. So Jones began to fear that there was this impending doom, this basically everybody
00:19:33who's in this area is going to become martyrs. And Branham started saying what would happen
00:19:38is there would be atomic bombs that would go from Chicago all the way to Indiana. Well,
00:19:43that's where Jones is at, right? He's right, People's Temple is right there in Indianapolis.
00:19:49So early on, Jones goes to, what was it? I think it was Argentina, first seeking to escape all of this.
00:19:59And then after a few years, he realized, well, the atomic bomb hasn't hit. So he comes back
00:20:03and goes back a second time. And that's what sets up the scenario that you're talking about.
00:20:08But it was the doomsday, the coming martyrdom that Branham had predicted. And Jones himself began
00:20:15insanely predicting some of these things. This martyrdom is what drove them into South America.
00:20:21And eventually it became overtly political. You may not know this, but they had this like
00:20:27radio station where Jones is talking about the current news and the impending doom, gloom,
00:20:33all of the – basically what he's doing is he believes he is watching Branham's prophecies
00:20:39come to fulfillment right there in South America where the communists are invading everything
00:20:44Branham was saying. And the reason why all of this is important is because early in my research,
00:20:51in fact, what drove me to a large portion of my research, as I was listening to the death
00:20:56tapes and listening to the sermons of Jones, I began to hear Branhamism in it.
00:21:01And that's what connected it all together for me.
00:21:04That makes a lot of sense. It's also fun because I'll be talking about this with you
00:21:08and I forget that I'm talking to one of the best historians who has studied all of this.
00:21:15So it is really nice to have that sort of concrete background behind what I kind of – because
00:21:28I had also listened to the death tapes and had picked up similar on that like, man, these – because
00:21:34I remember listening to the death tapes before I even stumbled into your research.
00:21:40I listened to it a long time ago. And I found certain phrases and just like some of the rhetoric
00:21:51was very eerily similar to some of the IHOP stuff, especially some of the like Bob Jones IHOP
00:22:00stuff. And some of that early 80s and 90s rhetoric where it was like – like there's the sort of
00:22:10dominionism Christianity that is a little bit more like – I don't want to say positive because it
00:22:20obviously is very dangerous and scary, but it's more optimistic because it's like – like the Bethel
00:22:28is all kingdom here and now. And it's like, this is our domain and we are going to bring it in.
00:22:33And so it's less like doom and gloom and the world is going to end because it's like we are going to
00:22:39take control of it. I think Foyt is a good example of like playing both sides of that. He both is like
00:22:45the dominionist of like we're going to take it over and make this our world. But then on the other end,
00:22:53he also is like, but the woke left commies are going to take every child and turn them
00:23:02transgender or whatever. Like whatever the fear mongering is or like depending on what – but I will
00:23:15say that it does feel a little bit different now because now it's more grounded in like – at least
00:23:23for the sort of IHOP community – it's more grounded in like contemporary politics where in the 80s and
00:23:3290s, it was more eschatological like end times apocalyptic. Like this is going to the end of all
00:23:43humankind and civilization. And I remember hearing – I mean it was so many of my like early memories
00:23:50of Bob Jones and of this community was formed by this sort of impending doom that we – that was being
00:24:01sort of embraced within our community in a way that was like we really believe – now I don't know
00:24:11some of the people who are like they talk about impending doom and stuff like that, but they don't – I don't
00:24:18know if they believe it or they don't believe it, but like we believed it. We had – I don't know if
00:24:24I've told this story before, but have I told the story of what happened during Y2K with me and my
00:24:31family? No. Okay. So, you know, Y2K is coming up and I'm – so I was born in 91, so I was eight
00:24:43when this was – or I had just turned nine or something. And I remember there was this sort
00:24:54of really impending – because there was the only time that there was sort of overlap between the
00:25:02apocalyptic rhetoric of the community that I was in and sort of apocalyptic rhetoric of
00:25:09the larger community. Like it wasn't just the Christian community that was like, hey,
00:25:16the world's going to end. It was also, you know, news organizations were talking about like, oh,
00:25:23this – this – everything might shut down. And like we were stocking up on barrels of water and we
00:25:32had food that was, you know, non-perishable food that was shelf-stable for 10 years and that we were
00:25:39putting in our basements and all of which has gone to waste now, of course. But like it was – we also – my
00:25:50family with a couple other families bought a farm out in rural Missouri and it was sort of like
00:26:01cousins of cousins had owned the farm. So, it was sort of like within the family and we were going to
00:26:07like go out to this farm and this is where our sort of like doomsday – I don't know what we were
00:26:13thinking. It's not like my dad knew anything about farming or anything like that. Like there's zero
00:26:18sense in which we would have actually been prepared for the end of the world. But that was this sort of
00:26:23idea is that, okay, we got to be ready. And it wasn't necessarily that everyone was convinced that it
00:26:31was going to happen during Y2K because that wasn't really what the profits were saying in it. But it
00:26:37was just the sort of like, well, might as well be prepared. This is sort of a dry run at the very
00:26:42least for the end times. So, anyway, we got all – and I remember it being like – this is one of my early
00:26:50childhood memories or a period of time that I think that sticks in my head where it was just like,
00:26:57I really thought that we were going to face the end of the world. But I was also a deeply
00:27:04unserious child. And so, on the night of the Y2K, I was with my friend Sam Salier. And I think that
00:27:13we were either at the farm or we were – I can't remember whose house we were at, but we were all
00:27:18together. Like several families had gotten together and we were in the same house. And the kids,
00:27:25of course, went to bed before midnight. But I snuck out of bed with my friend Sam and we went
00:27:35downstairs in the basement where the breaker was. I might have told this story before, but – and we
00:27:43could hear people and they were like counting down to midnight. And it was always this idea like
00:27:50when midnight strikes, is all the electricity and everything going to shut down? So, the – you
00:27:57know, adults are upstairs counting down and when they get to zero, we flipped all of the breakers
00:28:02in the house off. And I heard them screaming and everything like that. And we waited like 30 seconds
00:28:09and then flipped them all back on and ran upstairs. And like for decades, my parents never knew what had
00:28:18happened. They thought there was some spiritual – something had happened. They had no idea that it
00:28:23was us. But anyway, one of my very formative memories. But this idea, this idea, like throughout my entire
00:28:32childhood, there was like – we were always preparing for an impending doom. And it very much painted
00:28:42my understanding of Christianity and just my understanding of the world in general. And I
00:28:48always felt this sense of like, I felt other in the world. I felt because of my religion,
00:28:56I was different than the rest of the world. Only to like grow up and be like, what is it? 80% of all
00:29:04Americans are Christian in the United States? Like, I was a part of the vast majority of
00:29:12religion within it. But like, that wasn't the way that I felt and perceived the world around me.
00:29:20Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started? Or how the progression of
00:29:25modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements
00:29:31into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Branham Historical Research's
00:29:37website, william-branham.org. On the books page of the website, you can find the compiled research of
00:29:45John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others, with links to the paper,
00:29:52audio, and digital versions of each book. You can also find resources and documentation on various people
00:29:59and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the
00:30:05podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top. And as always, be sure to like and subscribe
00:30:11to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William Branham Historical
00:30:16Research, we want to thank you for your support. So I've never told my Y2K story publicly either,
00:30:23and I'll tell it right now. So early in my years, this was before I had my IT business,
00:30:29I was doing hardware and networking IT, and we had clients that were in legal systems, medical systems.
00:30:37Some of the paralegals worked out of their house, and so I had to go to this house. And whenever the
00:30:44paralegal called us, she said, now you've got to be careful. When you go, come to our house. You have
00:30:49to enter in through the back door. You'll have to go through a gate. But we have a dog, and don't go near
00:30:55the fence, which is kind of odd, right? So I walk up, I'm with my partner, and we're walking in.
00:31:02And as we walk through the fence, she walks us through, or not she, but her husband walked us
00:31:08through. He, as we're walking past these great big old dogs that look like grizzly bears, he smacks
00:31:17them in the face, right in the face with a newspaper or a board or something. And the dog's just lunging,
00:31:24like I can see the chains tightening as they're lunging at our faces. And I said, what's that
00:31:29for? And he said, well, you know what's fixing to happen, right? Y2K is about to happen, and I need
00:31:36these here because it's going to be every man for himself. I was like, really? So walk a little bit
00:31:42further. We go around the house. The dude literally has a sniper's position in one of the trees. And I
00:31:48look up there and I said, you're not deer hunting in this neighborhood. We're right in the middle of a
00:31:53city neighborhood. You're not deer hunting here. No, that's for whenever it happens, when Y2K,
00:31:58the moment it happens, I'm going to be up there in my sniper's position, and I'll be able to pick
00:32:02them off from there. I'm like, really? So the kicker was, we walked into the basement.
00:32:09They had, at one point they had a remodeled basement, but they apparently built shelves around
00:32:17the entire perimeter of their basement, and floor to ceiling were canned goods.
00:32:23And I said, you guys sure like canned food, right? I already knew at this point.
00:32:27Darrell Bock Right. You were playing dumb on purpose.
00:32:29Y2K So I get into the office of the paralegal,
00:32:33and I can't tell you how many times we were there and this was the case.
00:32:36Darrell Bock Daystar TV is up on her screen as she's working continually, man. Daystar TV
00:32:43all day long. And see, I was in the cult, so I didn't connect all of this at that point.
00:32:49But there are so many branching connections. Like, part of the reason I zoned out as you were
00:32:56talking about Missouri, Missouri is a hotbed for this stuff, man. Rural Missouri.
00:33:01Darrell Bock I mentioned this, I think, in my latest book,
00:33:05From Christian Identity to the NAR. But there was a National States Rights Party,
00:33:11which was breaking off to try to overcome, overtake Washington. The PO Box for the headquarters
00:33:19just happened to be in Jeffersonville, Indiana, where William Branham lived, where I live now.
00:33:25Not many people know this. One of the leaders was,
00:33:28I mentioned Gerald Wynrod earlier. His son Gordon was one of the directors of this organization.
00:33:35Gordon went down to, this is either Missouri or Arkansas, and there's this big
00:33:41Christian identity standoff right there. But the other key figure, there was in, not in Missouri,
00:33:47but right across the state lines in, oh, what's the name of that city? There's a big, it's called,
00:33:53no, it's called Christ of the Ozarks. There's this big Jesus statue. Oh, got it.
00:33:58Darrell Bock Oh, got it. Oh, yeah.
00:33:59Darrell Bock That was planted by Gerald L.K. Smith,
00:34:01who was a leader in this and connected to Roy Davis, who was Branham's mentor. All of this is
00:34:07connected. And especially if you go back to Missouri, you're going to find it was like,
00:34:11Missouri and Arkansas was a hotbed for all of this. So the fact that IHOPKC developed from this,
00:34:17it's not surprising, the fact that Bob Jones is so tied to this. He may not have been directly even
00:34:22tied to Branhamism. I don't know yet. We don't know his past, but he's right there in the hotbed.
00:34:27So he was indirectly, at minimum, influenced by Branhamism. So all of this is connected and they all
00:34:35were, this was a very militant thing. They were all preparing for the coming war,
00:34:39the coming war because they were martyrs.
00:34:42Darrell Bock Yeah. And it's, I mean, so like,
00:34:46especially when you have roots in Christian identity movement and like a lot of the rhetoric
00:34:52that led to sort of the fascism in Germany and this, you know, it's so, to be the aggressors,
00:35:02to be, or be, have a lot of the rhetoric behind, because it wasn't, wasn't Winrod was the Jayhawk
00:35:11Nazi, right? And so, and the KKK, like a lot of it, you know, it's some of the fuel behind
00:35:24some of the most evil things that were going on in the world at the time.
00:35:35And yet this pervasive sense of they're coming for us, which I think it makes a little bit of sense
00:35:43because I think that you have to have this sort of cognitive dissonance where you believe
00:35:54that you are being persecuted to validate the persecution that your community is doing
00:36:01unto other individuals. And like this, I think that that's a common trope with, with sort of
00:36:11any time you have individuals who are on these sort of persecution crusades where they're harming
00:36:18and literally, you know, genocidal movements in the past have had this sort of same validation of
00:36:29like, it's actually us who are being oppressed and it's because of this that we must do X, Y, and Z.
00:36:35But yeah, like I, it makes a lot of sense how that was sort of birthed and it also makes a lot of sense
00:36:44how that was what was really festering within the community at the International House of Prayer.
00:36:54And I, one thing that I think with this is when you are able to construct, when you're in a community,
00:37:05that is a cult community, um, that is where the members of the community have a boogeyman, um,
00:37:16whether that's one individual or whether that's a community, whether it's, uh, the Jews or whether
00:37:22it's the whoever, like whatever is being villainized, um, whatever group is becoming the villain.
00:37:29Um, it provides a way to disconnect the legitimate abuse and persecution that you might be feeling
00:37:45from the very leadership of the community that you're a part of. And it, it sort of takes the
00:37:53villain hat and it moves it to somewhere else and it diminishes the abuse and the villainy that's going
00:37:59on within your own community. And I, like, I've seen this in, in, um, in family structures too.
00:38:07There's this sort of like external scapegoat that is used to
00:38:14displace the discontent of the group towards something else.
00:38:19So that those who are actually perpetrating abuse within the community or within the family
00:38:26or whatever structure it might be are not held accountable for the abuse that they're doing.
00:38:32So Mike Bickle and Bob Jones are not going to be held accountable for the abusive behaviors that they
00:38:40are doing because their abuse. They contextualize it as just so trivial in the grand scheme of everything
00:38:50else that's going on. And I, and I also think too, like, I remember being an IHOP and feeling like the
00:38:57world was going to end and feeling like, oh man, there's so much anguish. There's so much discontent.
00:39:04And I, and I myself felt like, like, if you had asked me, is the world in a good place right now?
00:39:10I would have been like, no. Well, a lot of my own discontent was because I had an abusive father
00:39:16and I had a, uh, abusive sort of community that I was raised growing up in and I wasn't getting
00:39:24proper education. And there was like, there was a lot of symptoms of the central disease of, of,
00:39:30of growing up in a, uh, cult community that I was feeling. But instead of having the language
00:39:38and understanding of knowing where the source of that discontent comes from, I had to displace it
00:39:45on like, it must be outside. And I think that's, this is what is happening in not having not just cult
00:39:52communities in, but just sort of mainline Christianity too, is like, I think there's a lot of,
00:39:57a lot of discontent in like, you know, it's getting harder for, for the poor, um,
00:40:06the lower class to, to find jobs and to own houses. And there, there's sort of a lot of,
00:40:15a lot of real genuine, like, Hey, uh, turmoil that is growing, like the buying power of,
00:40:23of salary to homeowners. I'm going on a tiny bit of a tangent, but I will, I will stop after a second,
00:40:30but the, uh, you know, in the last 20 years is like the, the, the median salary versus the median
00:40:37home. Um, the disparity between that has like grown pretty exponentially over the last 20 years.
00:40:45And I think that there's a lot of other things where it's just like, you know, healthcare and
00:40:50different things. There's a lot of issues that are plaguing the American people that are
00:40:56problematic, but instead of addressing the symptoms of it, it's turned into this sort of
00:41:02spiritual warfare, at least within the communities that I grew up in that externalizes it and talks
00:41:08about other forces and these sort of boogeyman. There's all these sort of boogeymen that are,
00:41:13are placed in there where it keeps from like addressing the actual problem. Like, okay, we have,
00:41:20people within our community who are sexually abusing young women in the community, but yet
00:41:25that's not going to be addressed within the community because there's the boogeyman that we
00:41:32have to face that are outside of it. Exactly. And it's a boogeyman of conspiracy theories, basically.
00:41:38Right. You, so you mentioned and asked the question was Gerald Burton, when Rod, the Nazi guy,
00:41:44he was widely infamous as the Jayhawk Nazi or the Kansas Hitler because he had gone to Germany and
00:41:51had council with Hitler and comes back with a ton of money and begins after this distributing this
00:41:57protocol of the learned elders of Zion. Well, one of the most interesting points of history,
00:42:03as it intersects with Pentecostalism, is that the Sunday after the Night of the Broken Glass,
00:42:10the crystal knot in Germany, when all the Jews were persecuted, the windows burst out,
00:42:16you know, taken to the streets, etc. The Sunday after this, Amy Simple McPherson let
00:42:23Winrod speak at her church, and it's significant because the whole world is watching as this is
00:42:30happening and she is making a public statement. We support this. Winrod was one of the strongest
00:42:37defenders against, or one of the strongest in opposition against the gold standard. So in today's
00:42:44world, we would laugh if we thought we were going to get rid of the gold standard, because that's how
00:42:49we standardize, that's how we measure how much money is worth. Well, before the gold standard,
00:42:54he was creating this conspiracy theory that this was an attempt by the false Jews to take over the
00:43:00economy of our country. And that was widely popular among the fundamentalists. So he's spreading
00:43:08the conspiracy theories, he's spreading this idea that we're about to be martyred by the Jews and
00:43:15the false Jews, he would say, and the Catholics who are Christian coming in and taking over our
00:43:24churches, our politics, our family structures, basically our seven mountains. He said our seven
00:43:31mountains are being threatened. He didn't use that phrase, but that's what he was saying. It became
00:43:37very popular among all of the early Pentecostals because of the connection to Amy Simple McPherson.
00:43:43So this began to develop and latter rain was really, if you look at the doctrinal positions and the
00:43:52reasons why of those doctrines, it was basically a highly politicized version of the birth of
00:43:58Pentecostalism, rebirthed as a political movement. And it's crazy now too, because so much of
00:44:06of IHOP's contemporary and over the last two decades, a lot of this sort of victim mentality
00:44:18comes from appropriation of Jewish oppression during the Holocaust.
00:44:28Like, I mean, this is a whole different subject, so I won't, you know, maybe this is a topic of
00:44:37on its own day, but so much of this, the end times is coming, and so much of it was rooted in
00:44:50Christian Zionism, um, Christian Zionism in, specifically in context with like Harry Truman,
00:44:57like Bob, Bob Jones and Mike Bickle, so much of the, the prophecies and rhetoric that fueled the
00:45:05International House of Prayer were this sort of like, it was just basically rooted in, in like, look how,
00:45:13how, um, the, the people of Israel were persecuted and the Jewish people were persecuted in, um, the, uh,
00:45:22Holocaust and during, during, um, the 30s, 40s, 50s, and, um,
00:45:30really was the sort of appropriation of that pain as if it was like us too, like, like the Christians
00:45:37were also persecuted in the Holocaust. And so, like, while not recognizing that the direct lineage
00:45:45of the sort of Pentecostal community that birthed, um, or the offshoot of Pentecostal and the latter
00:45:52reign community that birthed the IHOP movement was like, some threads of it was directly involved in,
00:45:59in stirring up, um, uh, anti-Semitic rhetoric within the United States. And this disconnect,
00:46:09this, I, I always thought it was so weird because, you know, the, the roots were not,
00:46:16not in this very, like, let's appreciate the Jewish people and let's appreciate, you know,
00:46:22like the persecution that they have experienced. It was, we too, so as the, like, Jews were persecuted,
00:46:29during the Holocaust, like, so too, we as Christians were, are going to be persecuted and continue to
00:46:36be persecuted, never mind the ways in which Christianity was used to perpetuate that persecution.
00:46:44Um, that, that is a whole different topic, but it, it's the sort, this whole idea of flipping the
00:46:52sort of abuser and abused in order to have this martyr complex, um, to excuse and validate
00:47:02the most, like, radical ideals that you can, um,
00:47:09fabricate, like the most radical beliefs that you can come up with.
00:47:13The, the, the, it's just using the genuine persecution, the same, same with that martyr book,
00:47:20you know, like the, the DC talk one, um, which is, it's, it's funny in a very bleak sense. Do you know
00:47:28about Michael Tate and what's been going on with him? Yeah. Um, for, yeah. And so for people who don't
00:47:35know, and I don't know much about it, but the, the, um, one of the lead vocalists of, of DC talk,
00:47:42um, has now come forward and there's a lot of sexual abuse, um, allegations. Um, I think there's
00:47:49eight different men, um, who have come forward with abuse allegations against Michael Tate and Michael
00:47:55Tate even confessed to several of them. And, you know, I, to, to what extent all of that is, is I,
00:48:02I, I haven't really done a whole lot of research on it, but, um, but he was perpetuating a lot of this
00:48:09abuse and it, it just, it's a sort of tragic and bitter irony and, and bleakness to the fact that
00:48:23like this book that I was reading about the persecution of Christians was really just
00:48:28appropriating a lot of the like historical context in which Christians very genuinely were persecuted
00:48:35and were killed for being Christian. Um, and it's taking all of those stories and sort of
00:48:44making it a present day reality and acting as if that is the contemporary politics. Like I,
00:48:52I remember thinking that it was going to be a thing, two things that I thought that I was going
00:48:57to have to encounter in my life, um, growing up were quicksand. Like I thought that that was going
00:49:03to be a big deal that I was going to just suddenly be swallowed by quicksand just because of watching
00:49:09Princess Bride or something like that. And the other thing was that I thought that like there was
00:49:14going to be shooters that came to schools and were like, tell me if you're a Christian. And if I said,
00:49:21I love Jesus, they would shoot me like, and I, and I mentally prepared myself to be able to have the
00:49:26courage and bravery to tell them, tell them that I was a Christian because I like, I thought that
00:49:31that was happening on a daily basis in the world that I grew up in. Um, and it's just such a, uh,
00:49:39bitter and bleak irony that the, I mean, he wasn't the author of the book, but the way that it was sort of
00:49:47sold in this, um, marketed as like this DC talk, Jesus freak book was actively abusing and sexually
00:49:57abusing, um, individuals. And it just, it shows this sort of like appropriating the, the, the pain
00:50:04and suffering of, of people groups and, and peoples of the past, um, as if it is the identity of the
00:50:11president, um, in order to sort of excuse extreme ideology and, um, to excuse sort of some of this,
00:50:21or minimize some of the abusive behavior that these leaders were doing.
00:50:25Well, and it's a one-sided martyrdom, right? They don't. So in the Christian circles,
00:50:30they're often opposed to science, especially if the science disagrees with whatever is the doctrine.
00:50:37You've got the flat earthers out there who disagree with many of the scientists that they can prove
00:50:42otherwise, right? People like, um, uh, Galileo. Galileo was persecuted. I think he was, if I remember
00:50:50right, he was condemned to life and imprisoned in his house, house arrest. Um, and it's not limited to
00:50:57just the, a lot of these names might be mentioned in the anti-Catholic circles, but you have, um,
00:51:05what's a good example? Michael Servaitis. Michael Servaitis, who was put to death, executed by John
00:51:10Calvin. Servaitis was a physician, a theologian, and there, there's a lot, that's a very complicated
00:51:18execution, but his, his medical discoveries, you know, is not the primary reason he was executed,
00:51:25but the fact that he was a man of science kind of opposed this whole thing. So if you go down the
00:51:30path of who is a martyr, that door opens up everybody. You could find Hindu martyrs. If
00:51:35you want to look hard enough, you can find Buddhist monks who were martyred, right?
00:51:40The claim to martyrdom is not unique, but what is unique for this foundation is the fact that
00:51:47if you trace it all the way back down to his lineage, Sean Foyt included, trace it all the way back
00:51:53to, to this Christian identity, where you end up is that they believe that the Catholics and the,
00:52:01the false Jews were invading, and they were teaching this manifested sons of God theology.
00:52:06God is going to rise up this Joel's army. We've talked about this. That was deeply rooted in all of
00:52:12this. And Sean Foyt, oh, what's the name of his book? He's got a book that he wrote with Andy Byrd,
00:52:19I think. It's called The Culture of Revival. He says something to the effect, there's a new breed of
00:52:25Jesus lovers on the earth. They will be the manifested sons of God. If you study Foyt's theology,
00:52:32Bethel's theology, IHOP's theology, how they have shifted and separated, you've mentioned that it's no
00:52:38longer the impending doomsday, it's more about the dominionism. And, and I've had this conversation
00:52:44with the John Wimber people too. There's a progression, layers upon layers shifting away
00:52:51from Branhamism towards this. But what, where you end up is that Branham taught this apocalyptic
00:52:58pre-tribulation raptured doomsday theology. But towards the end of his life, many people deified Branham.
00:53:06People like T.L. Osborne said that William Branham was Jesus tabernacled in the flesh,
00:53:11or I can't remember his exact words. He even went so far as to say at Branham's memorial service,
00:53:17you're going to think I'm sacrilegious for saying this, but this was God coming again through Branham.
00:53:22Well, through cognitive dissonance, Branham's teaching rapture theology, and he's Jesus Christ,
00:53:28and or his message is Jesus Christ, which is what was widely believed by this movement,
00:53:34and then you have, he dies. Well, how does this work? How do all these prophecies work?
00:53:40So through cognitive dissonance, they make them both merge. So two different opposing theologies
00:53:46begin to merge. Over time, it shifted to the kingdom theology, which Wimber taught,
00:53:51kingdom now theology, then it developed into the NAR's version. It's all the same roots though,
00:53:57because if you trace manifested sons of God through all of these layers, you can find it
00:54:01everywhere. It's just the way that they represent these manifested sons of God, and that theology
00:54:07differs from layer to layer. But where it ends up, people like Sean Foyt, who you can't really even
00:54:13say that he's definitely not directly influenced by Branhamism. He's got that same foundation that
00:54:19everything that he believes is built upon.
00:54:21You brought up the Culture of Revival book that Foyt wrote, and it peaked something in my memory,
00:54:31and I had to Google it to make sure. So the authors of that are Bryant Brent, Sean Foyt,
00:54:41by Andy Byrd. Do you remember the... I've told it a couple of different times, but there was that
00:54:49metaphor that was preached to me at one point about the apartment being on fire. You know that
00:54:58metaphor of just like, okay, if your apartment's on fire, you're not going to knock on your neighbor's
00:55:03door. You're going to bust it down and bring them out, even if they're kicking and screaming,
00:55:07because like, it's on fire. And that was sort of the image that was given to me as a sort of a tool
00:55:15of evangelism. That was Brian Brent and Andy Byrd. Like that, this is, this is like just, I'm just
00:55:27coming to, I'm just remembering who it was that spoke it because that, uh, Andy Byrd was there in,
00:55:35um, uh, Kona Hawaii when, um, I was in Kona Hawaii. And I, and that was his sort of message. And,
00:55:49uh, it's just, it's just like sort of clicking for me of this sort of that, that analogy of this sort of
00:55:58like, let's bust down the doors and it's, it's the fire. Like the, this is the idea. It's more of the
00:56:04martyrdom complex of like someone has lit the fire too. It's not, the fire isn't just, uh, amorphous,
00:56:14you know, and times it's sort of like culture community. Like the fire can be different things
00:56:20at different times, what it is. And it evolves via prophecy during this time, but it's this sort
00:56:26of zeal and radicalism that is like, we're not just doing this because we want to save people.
00:56:33We're not just doing this because, um, we have the good news to share. It's not just good news.
00:56:40It's, we are in danger. There's, and everyone else is in danger. And if we don't, if we don't,
00:56:50even if we're cracking noses and, you know, having, putting people in headlocks and, and abusing
00:56:59people physically to sort of get them out of this, it's because there's a greater sort of danger
00:57:06that's coming. And I think that that's just such a perfect metaphor for what they're doing,
00:57:14except the fire isn't, except they're making up the fires. Like it's not real. It's, it's,
00:57:19so the, the bigger that you can make the fire, the bigger that you can pretend and the more dangerous
00:57:25it is, the more life threatening, the more you get to excuse the abusive behaviors that you have.
00:57:31Um, and the, the way that you, um, can the tactics that you use to save these different peoples,
00:57:43because this is the same thing with Foy is like, there's this crazy, I really don't understand
00:57:50even how it works. Like, I mean, I guess it's cognitive dissonance and that's it. But like,
00:57:56there's this big idea of like, I'm just an innocent, I'm just trying to share the love of God as if he
00:58:03wasn't like crusading and campaigning against all these different ideas and ideologies, whether it's,
00:58:12you know, Islamophobia, whether it's, um, just xenophobia in general, whether it's, you know,
00:58:19about, um, demonizing the, the immigrants, like, like he's explicitly, you know, on this sort of get
00:58:27the, the, the illegal immigrants, get the, all these illegals out of here. And so, and let's not
00:58:32even get started about the LGBTQ community and how much they like demonize the LGBTQ community.
00:58:40And I just don't understand, even for people, like, I know that there's people who listen to this,
00:58:44who are, are against some of those things and are like, Oh, I want the legals out of my country.
00:58:51And I want, you know, LGBTQ to be criminalized or something of whatever, maybe not criminalized,
00:58:58but you know, that you can't marry or whatever it is. But like, you can't be against people.
00:59:07You can't continue to be antagonistic. You can't have one of the most judgmental gospels.
00:59:14Um, that is being preached and then have this sort of like, what did I do? Oh, I'm just innocent.
00:59:19You know, like I, I am, Oh, these people are coming after me. Of course, because you are like,
00:59:26waging war with identity of 90% of the population. Like, because like, um, Foyt has like explicitly said
00:59:36that, uh, Democrats don't go to heaven. Like he, he is explicitly stated that where like everybody is
00:59:43going to die and be tortured for all of eternity besides his like small group of people.
00:59:50And this is what I, I just don't understand the same as I got the same rhetoric from, um,
00:59:57Chris Fallatin where it was this sort of like, we're just trying to, you know, why, why us? Why is,
01:00:04why is there so much attention towards us and what we're doing? And like, why are you coming at,
01:00:10we're just trying to preach the love of God. And it's like, you have the most judgmental gospel
01:00:15of any, any group of Christians in the United States. Like I, it is, is apocalyptic. It is, um,
01:00:25um, exclusive. It is political. It is judgmental. Like, like, like it is harsh, you know, sinners in
01:00:35the hands of an angry God type of, of, um, justice or, uh, uh, punishment that deals with like those who
01:00:46don't, who are not saved. You can't preach that gospel and not be hated by people because like,
01:00:53it's a hateful gospel. It, it, it, it, it, it has, um, so much judgment towards everybody who's
01:01:02different than you. And I, I hate this rhetoric and I hate that it works. I, this is another thing
01:01:09too, of like, it's so silly. The foight holding up the smoke bomb and being like, we were firebombed in
01:01:18it's because it's just like you, you were not in danger. Okay. Yeah. Your worship surface was
01:01:26disrupted, but it's going to work. Like he's going to build, like, he's going to get more money
01:01:31because of it. And, and this is where I'm like, I don't know if it's the best strategy. I don't know
01:01:37how you combat sort of these things because any sort of resistance against these people and these,
01:01:44these, um, uh, individuals, uh, kind of plays into their narrative of like, I'm being attacked.
01:01:54And this is, this is the whole thing of like, you know, this as well as I do, I'm trying to talk
01:01:59about Mike Bickle and how he abused people. And of course, oh, this is a demonic attack against the,
01:02:06the end times prayer movement. And that, I think at some point it doesn't work as well when it's
01:02:15like, no, you guys are, are abusers. And I think so, like, I think with foight and with Bickle and
01:02:21like, no one, I think that the rhetoric should always be like, do not hear all of the instances
01:02:28of abuse within their own community. And like, these are the things that they are doing and,
01:02:33and continually people should be like reminding individuals about that. That is like my strategy
01:02:41of, of dealing with these individuals. Um, but it's, it is really, really hard to combat some
01:02:48of this because it just plays into their narrative of persecution.
01:02:53I literally just had this conversation with a theologian we met for coffee. He's wanting to
01:02:58help people in the cult escape, had the same exact conversation with him. The problem
01:03:03is not just the foundation that was laid. The, it's the fact that the way that the gospel
01:03:10was presented, while all other Christians see it as a gospel, this is what Jesus did for
01:03:17you. It's not what you do for him. That argument goes completely away with this type of religion
01:03:23we're talking about. It's instead a gospel of war. There is a war coming. We are the good
01:03:29people. We're the good guys. Everyone who's not part of our group is the bad guys. They're
01:03:34either working with the enemy or their support and innocent bystander who's doing nothing and
01:03:40therefore supporting the enemy. You have to, you, you get this us versus them mentality.
01:03:45So we need to conquer those mountains that those people are on. That's, that's the concept
01:03:49that was created. That concept goes all the way back to Christian identity. Before that it was
01:03:55the clan which this is also built upon. So all of these ideologies basically birthed this new
01:04:01thing that they called the gospel and it wasn't the same gospel that other Christians hear. So
01:04:06whenever they use these phrases like, you know, Jesus died on the cross for your sins and they,
01:04:11they have various pieces of the gospel. What they're teaching isn't the gospel and it's,
01:04:17it's very hard to distinguish. So even if you go and try to attack it from a theological standpoint,
01:04:22you hit a brick wall every time because the words that you're saying that are in the Bible,
01:04:26they have different meanings to the people who have been indoctrinated like this. So you hit this
01:04:31brick wall and how do you stop it? That's, that's the question we were discussing over coffee. It's
01:04:37very, very hard to stop when somebody has been literally brainwashed to believe something,
01:04:41two things are true at the same time, one of which is completely false.
01:04:45Yeah. And that's an, and any, any attack against their sort of belief just reaffirms the belief in
01:04:56general. Yeah. It becomes this very difficult, impossible situation. I will say, yeah, and this
01:05:02just as a sort of final thought, the one thing that I, I know the best way to combat the new apostolic
01:05:09reformation leaders is to, um, attack their pocketbooks because a lot of like, I do not think
01:05:17that Foyt would be in it if he was not making millions of dollars because, you know, he has his
01:05:24sort of his, um, it's so crazy how it's all the same build your sort of ministry, get this sort of
01:05:33fame and infamy, continue to build it and then buy a bunch of properties and be a landlord. Like
01:05:39that it's, it's, it's crazy how that's the arc of all of these different, um, like that Sean Foyt,
01:05:47Sean Bowles, my dad, this is, this is just use your ministry to get a seed of money and then use that
01:05:54money to buy property and be a landlord. Like that's just the, the, the game, the, the playbook for them.
01:06:01Um, and I, as soon as it stops being profitable, as soon as they're not like, if they're having to
01:06:08just live off of 30 grand a year while traveling around and, uh, speaking these things like that,
01:06:15the juice is not worth squeeze. And this was, this is something that happened with Foyt was that,
01:06:20um, he was invited. So all of these churches and venues were canceled on him. And then someone else was
01:06:27like, Oh, you can come here and come to our place. And he was like, just as long as give us some bed
01:06:33to sleep on and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. He shows up and the accommodations were not to his liking.
01:06:40And so he cancels on this group that, um, and this just happened. People should look at,
01:06:46you know, um, I, I, this probably will come out, uh, in a little bit, but, um, it's just so funny
01:06:54because it's like, make the bed uncomfortable, make it, make it a little bit difficult. And these
01:07:02men are like, nah, I don't want to do this. I saw this with my dad too. It's like, you know,
01:07:06as soon as they have to actually suffer for the sake of their gospel, um, they're out of there.
01:07:12And so as like, if you truly think that it's, it is true, you know, then you should be, if, if,
01:07:23if, uh, Foyt really believed in his gospel, he should be able to do it, um, without profiting
01:07:29off of it. And, um, yeah. So, and the way to, uh, attacking, so, so the way to attack pocketbooks
01:07:38is to go after donors. And like, I think people should blast, uh, individuals who are, are donating
01:07:47to these groups. Like, I think that's a much more effective way is to be like, Hey, here are these
01:07:52people who are donating to this. Um, here's the businesses that they run. Here's the sort of things.
01:07:58Like, I think that that's a much more, like if people felt like they were going to be held
01:08:03accountable for funding these individuals, you would see that funding dry up. This is what happened
01:08:09at IHOP too, is like, it became a liability. And so the only time you've seen sort of some measure of
01:08:16like accountability in this world was with Mike Bickle, which again, it's not nearly enough. Um, and I
01:08:23hope, hopefully there are going to be lawsuits, um, and civil suits that, that, uh, taken for all of
01:08:30his worth, um, financially. Um, but that really is the way to fight back because it genuinely is,
01:08:37is a money-making scheme, even for the, those who are in it for the love of the game in some respects,
01:08:43like, and love the power. It's still about money for them.
01:08:47I've been thinking, how do I end this? And honestly, I think the best way is I'm going to
01:08:53quote Jim Jones as the end of this. This is Jim Jones before he left this movement. He said,
01:09:00they won't tell you the truth because the black book is the easiest gravy train they've ever been
01:09:06on. And with that, thank you for doing this. Thanks. Thanks for having me, John.
01:09:12If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.
01:09:16You can find us at william-branham.org. For more about the dark side of the new apostolic
01:09:20reformation, you can read weaponized religion from Christian identity to the NAR available on Amazon,
01:09:27Kindle, and audible.
01:09:59Bye-bye.
01:10:04Bye.
01:10:06We'll see you next time.