00:00You
00:30Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham historical research podcast
00:36I'm your host John Collins the author and founder of William Branham historical research at
00:42William dash Branham org and with me I have my very special guest. Dr
00:46Carrie Edwards former minister at the Philadelphia Church in Chicago and together
00:52We're discussing the unusual mixture of religion and politics
00:56That birthed the latter rain movement and eventually the new apostolic Reformation
01:02carry, it's been a few weeks since we have spoken and
01:05We got to talking, you know during the course of the last time we spoke and you know aired the our stories to tell
01:13Your story and and then since then and even even this morning. I'm learning new things about you and
01:19all of this come together and we just decided that it would be good to have you back again because
01:24You're a wealth of knowledge on things that I have been digging into and you have sort of an inside view and
01:32Just today. I learned that you were a
01:35former minister at the Philadelphia Church in Chicago
01:38that is the probably the strongest promoter of William Branham's ministry throughout the latter rain movement and beyond and
01:46a lot of people even the
01:49Historian that I talked to for the latter rain movement. I I had a series of conversations with him
01:55he had no idea that people like Joseph Mattson Bose 80 and
02:00Rasmussen and others were still promoting William Branham after the fall of William Branham's ministry in the decline and
02:09Anyway, I thought it'd be good to have you back on to go through that and more and
02:14specifically
02:16We have uncovered some information that is just fascinating with regards to the political
02:22Themes that were embedded in this movement, and I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about the politics
02:29Yes, so yeah, the politics really interest me a couple of comments about the Philadelphia Church when I was there
02:35I had no idea that William Branham had been promoted by that church and that Jim Jones had been ordained by
02:43Mattson Bose
02:45So it's it's kind of intriguing that that element even though I grew up in a latter rain
02:51Pentecostal denomination and I ended up at that place kind of accidentally after I graduated from Bible College
02:58I was not aware of its history at the time and
03:01Even recently I was talking to my sister who who has a friend who currently works at that church
03:08And she was unaware of the history with William Branham and Jim Jones
03:14It took some convincing on my part to get them to
03:20Acknowledge that fact, but yes, and the political implications of this are
03:29Very important to me personally right that
03:35one of the reasons I'm not a part of that movement any
03:39Longer is because very early on after I graduated from Bible College
03:45It became clear to me that there were very authoritarian
03:50components
03:52Involved in
03:53Latter rain Pentecostal ism, and I found it quite disturbing even as a Pentecostal myself
04:01so it doesn't surprise me today that it's ended up in the United States as
04:09a
04:10authoritarian movement
04:12but
04:15Yeah, so the political implications are
04:18Quite disturbing. I can't remember if last time we discussed
04:22Anything about the politics of Pentecostal ism in Latin America, but that's where I first
04:28became aware of its
04:31authoritarian
04:33Obent if that's what you want to call it
04:36And I suppose I should have been
04:40Growing up in it. I should have been much more aware that it has no real theory of democracy as
04:48Fundamental to his point of view right it's all
04:52focused on obedience to God's will as opposed to
04:56Thinking critically about how we want to organize our lives together
05:01In a society of some kind or another
05:04Right, and it's really good that we're talking about this today because we are
05:08diving into the Christian identity roots of the movement and
05:13You know, it's a it's a political issue
05:16It's not a real current political issue. And unfortunately the news media today
05:22When they mention the phrase Christian identity and they're tying it to one party or the other
05:28A lot of people don't understand what that the significance of that what that means and the news media doesn't really get into the history
05:35So that the people who are unfamiliar with that movement can even understand it
05:41But what we're talking about when we say Christian identity and the podcast that we're doing
05:47This was a movement that spawned off of British Israelism
05:51There was a notion that the
05:53Isles and Great Britain and the United States were the lost
05:58Children of Israel the lost two tribes of Israel Manasseh and Ephraim, I believe
06:03and as such they deserved more royalty than
06:07Than they were getting and the peoples from other nations
06:12were
06:13Somewhat they weren't really it wasn't really a big deal. It was a big deal
06:18But it wasn't a big deal. It was a big deal
06:21Somewhat they weren't really it wasn't really a racial element until Christian identity was birthed
06:26But they were seen as a lesser or inferior people
06:30Because there was this notion developing in British Israelism
06:35starting about the around late 19 early 1900s and a little bit into the 20s
06:42that they're
06:43the lesser peoples the ones who aren't the British Israelites were
06:48Developed from mud peoples and so that's why they had black skin
06:52and this
06:54You know eventually emerged into the Christian identity
06:58themes where there was a lot of discrimination and
07:01They viewed anybody with white skin as elite and those who had dark skin
07:06Were not and that included not only people
07:10African-americans, but also jews and people in latin america because they had dark skin
07:15So it's a really
07:17destructive movement
07:19and
07:20Whenever I began to understand what that was
07:23I was digging into William Branham and understanding that he was working with
07:28supreme authority figures in the clan in the Ku Klux Klan
07:33And at that time I only knew you know, he's working with the imperial wizard of you know, multiple times
07:40He was imperial
07:41He's working with the imperial clud, which is the supreme religious chaplain of the clan caleb ridley
07:47and you know other figures that he's working with and I assumed that gordon lindsey and some of the others were unaware of
07:56Branham's racist views and the views of the men he's working with
08:00However, we just discovered last week that gordon lindsey was actually a key speaker for
08:08British israelism
08:10Before it was starting to transition into the christian identity movement
08:14And then after it had made the transition
08:17He's speaking for two of the most
08:20critical movements
08:21That developed the notion of christian identity and he's speaking at their conferences during the time when they were
08:29christian identity movements
08:30So he is an authority on the christian identity movement and the british israel movement
08:36Which makes it all the more fascinating when you consider that he is the one who most strongly promoted william branham
08:42And others who were in this
08:45this uh, very racist component of american history, so I have a question in regards to that and i'm
08:52fairly
08:53ignorant about this
08:55Have you explored in any way the connections between political parties and the christian identity movement?
09:02I'm assuming in the south in the early part of the 20th century
09:06that most of
09:09the racist
09:12White pentecostals would have been democrats at that point in time
09:17and that part of the so that
09:21There was a split
09:24between
09:26Uh
09:29Religion and politics in that the political parties were not united around
09:37racial
09:38themes
09:40whereas the power of
09:43Lateran pentecostal politics nowadays
09:48It seems to me could be explained partly by how
09:52uh
09:53the racial issues have become concentrated in one party as opposed to
10:00Being split between two parties in the early part mid
10:0420th century. Do you know anything about that? I have studied it extensively
10:11And not because i'm interested in politics at all i'm actually disinterested in
10:15Modern politics, I think both parties should just they should wipe the slate clean and bring in some new people. That's that's my opinion
10:23but I have studied it historically because I have heard the argument that
10:27It was it used to be the democrats and now it's the republicans
10:31Which is partially true, but it doesn't tell the whole story
10:35and
10:35it was really hard for me to grasp that concept because
10:41Like the pentecostal movement and like the cult that I escaped
10:45Whenever you consider the cult as I knew it working with other groups that had a different
10:53religion
10:54Even though they were
10:55You know children grandchildren of the movement. It was a different religion
11:00You tend to think very black or white and you tend to try to link the two groups together
11:06by
11:07Their mode of intent which would be the religion and so you see them as two disconnected entities
11:13And you don't get the whole story
11:15If you look beneath the surface of the cult that we escaped
11:18It was a political cult that was disguised as a religious cult and the political agendas
11:24Can match between the children the grandchildren all the way to the nar?
11:29Because religion wasn't the purpose
11:32and
11:33with white supremacy in the united states
11:36It's much the same
11:38It's not that one party or the other owned the white supremacy
11:43Whenever the 1915 clan was birthed you have people like william upshaw, for example
11:51He was the clan's
11:53most
11:54outspoken person in washington
11:57He's literally the one who saved the clan and the reason that the clan continues to exist
12:02and interestingly, he is also working with leaders who were in the
12:08You know the latter rain movement and he was a key figure in the latter rain movement
12:11So you have a he was a democrat. So you have a democrat
12:15Who's fighting for the white supremacy agenda who's working in latter rain?
12:20and so
12:21You begin to think well, okay. This must be a democrat thing
12:25But then fast forward until the indiana clan was reigning in power. It became the largest
12:31clan for its its time period its era
12:35they
12:36invaded the
12:38Indianapolis government with the ambitions of taking over washington and they did it under the republican party
12:46And so there was this shift at that time because they had planted a lot of republican people
12:51Not just in indianapolis, but also across the nation with the ambition to take over control of the white house
12:59Using the republican party as a ticket
13:02that lasted for
13:04A long time because they had already infiltrated the republican party
13:09and
13:10you have different shifts like this the only thing that I can say that
13:15Was a clear transition from one party to the next
13:19Was whenever franklin delano roosevelt was in office
13:22You had all of the white supremacists who were rising up against him and they all changed parties
13:28because
13:29again, it's
13:31It's separate from the politics the agenda and
13:34at that point in time the christian identity cults
13:38had taken the
13:40uh, this fictional book called the protocols of the learned elders of zion, which was a
13:47Conspiracy of a jewish plot using communism to overthrow world governments
13:52And yes, i'm familiar with i'm familiar with that book. Yes, right
13:56so they saw franklin delano roosevelt as the fulfillment of
14:01The propaganda that was in that book and everybody rose up against roosevelt and you saw this significant shift from
14:08One party to the other because of roosevelt
14:11So there are there are different shifts in politics as you go through history
14:15And you can't say that it was the democrats and now it's the republicans or vice versa
14:20It literally depended on who was in who was running and what party they were affiliated with
14:26And who were they going to be against I think that's the better way to look at it
14:31Okay. Yeah, so I i'm not sure I totally agree with you about the difference between politics and religion that it being a political
14:39cult
14:40versus a religious cult
14:42They seems to me that they're pretty closely infused with each other
14:48and it's hard for me to see
14:51a sharp distinction between the two
14:54Except insofar as early pentecostals
15:01Didn't want as much to do with politics if anything at all
15:06Because they were interested in the kingdom of god and not the kingdom of this world
15:10But by the mid 20th century, I would say that was starting to diminish
15:17Um, but it seems to me that politics and religion are pretty closely
15:22Aligned with each other throughout the whole movement
15:26so I agree with you that it's a
15:28political
15:29Cult, but it's also a religious cult and I can't draw that distinction quite
15:36right
15:37Precisely perhaps. I think the reason why i've come to that conclusion
15:42Had to do with the anti-civil rights movement that developed in the 60s
15:47You had see I I escaped the branham cult
15:51Which was the central hub for all of this and you had all of these different splinter groups of the latter rain movement
15:59some of which
16:00It may not look as deceptive as what the core was
16:05But in the core william branham, for example
16:08He took the two-seed christian identity doctrine of wesley swift, which was the most racist
16:15Doctrine of the era and it was proposed as a
16:20You know pseudo-christian doctrine
16:23Wesley swift was a christian minister out of trained out of the angeles temple
16:27And he was seen as not pentecostal but very closely affiliated with the pentecostals
16:33And it was the mixture of religion and politics as you say
16:37so if you examine wesley swift, I would agree with you wesley swift was this mixture of
16:42Pseudo-christianity and politics
16:45But then on the flip side you had william branham that was doing the same exact thing using wesley swift's
16:51You know two-seed doctrine his version of it, but he introduced it into the latter rain movements as um
16:59as a very deceptive
17:01not racial doctrine
17:04for example, he wesley swift he took the doctrine and he
17:08Traced the lineage of what he said were the lineage of the black people all the way back to a second
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