Cultish - William Branham, Roy E. Davis & "The Message"

A sinner's a sinner. Don't try to reform him. He's a sinner to begin with. He's a pig to begin with. He don't know no different. Sinner to begin with.

The Cultish Series Returns to William Branham’s Origins

All right. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Cultish, Entering the Kingdom of the Cults. My name is Jeremiah Roberts. I'm one of the co-hosts here. I'm here with Andrew, the super sleuth of the show.

It's been a fun time watching you sleuth around and talk about this very interesting historical origin story on William Branham. What do you think so far?

Man, I feel like it would, like you said, this would be an amazing series, right? But there's no better story than the stories of people's lives, right? Especially the true, actual, historical accounts of someone's lives.

There's the stage persona, the cult information of this hero-esque William Branham. But I don't find that anywhere near as interesting as this actual.

Historical upbringing, right? Right. And there's been something, too, where there have been a lot of people, and I think we've gotten messages or even comments when we've talked about William Branham, a lot of people who kind of grew up believing in him as the prophet, and they started finding out some of these things that we're talking about and just referencing a movie.

You have that infamous scene from The Matrix where Morpheus holds out the battery, and there's that moment of shock and cognitive dissonance and disbelief. So it's definitely been a fascinating series so far.

This is part two, talking into the historical origins of William Branham. And we are here with John Collins. Good to have you back,.

My friend. It's good to be back.

Branham’s Anti-Gospel View of Sinners

Good. So I just got to say right off the get-go, we just played a very interesting clip that you forwarded to us, because we are transitioning into when William Branham became a minister, or got into ministry, and here he is calling sinners pigs and hogs, I believe is what he was saying.

That seemed very peculiar. What sticks out to you about that clip, as a historian and someone who—this was part—yeah, what do you think about that?

Well, I think I'll speak more at a personal level. This clip is a good representation of what I used to be and what I am no longer. I'm sure you guys both are aware just how deeply wrong this clip is.

Growing up, we were taught that this is the way that it is. You basically—there was no grace whatsoever. If you are a sinner, you are a hog. He says it very clearly in this clip. There are almost 1 ,500 sermons that we had in our collection that we listened to.

If you listen to the substance of each one of those sermons, not just glazing over and listening to the stories that he tells, or the—he has a lot of self-promotion, but if you actually look at the substance of what he's saying, he's saying exactly what this one clip sums up.

That basically, if you are a member of the cult, you have a chance at going to heaven. If you fail in any way, you're cut off. If you're a sinner and you want those things that are outside of the cult doctrine—he mentions, I think, movies and ball games—if you want to do these things, then you're a hog.

That's how I grew up. For the first 37 years of my life, I actually had never heard the actual gospel of Jesus Christ. It wasn't until after we left that we started attending another church. I heard it for the first time, and I was shocked.

This is simple, man. Why would anybody not want this, and why would you want this thing where you're calling people hogs? I think we mentioned it some in the last episode how I was driven to find out what made William Branham convert to Christianity, what made him become a minister.

And the reason that I wanted you to hear this clip is because the preface to what I'm about to go into, you can tell very clearly from this clip that he has no clue what is Christianity. This is a man who claims to be a Christian, but he's not speaking in any way, shape, or form anything that even remotely resembles the Bible.

Right. In fact, the only reference, I think,.

To hogs and Jesus was in the Gospels where Jesus takes out the legion of demons and casts them into the Bay of Pigs, and they go over into the sea. So that's the only loose reference I can think when it comes to hogs and the ministry of Jesus, which is just, I don't know, it's just kind of peculiar.

Roy E. Davis, Texas White Supremacy, and the Klan

So jumping into the historical origins story, so we're talking just a little bit about, and this is really a, the last episode was just a very brief overview of William Branham's childhood, upbringing, some of the different aspects of around the 1920s, including Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, different notable characters like Johnny Dillinger, Al Capone, incredibly fascinating.

So one of the things we were going to talk about as he didn't, there wasn't really a lot of records about his religious influences growing up, but that's something he really became known for. So the connection to William Branham getting into ministry, when we read your book, and I think it's a fascinating book too, Roy E. Davis, this is the man that really, when he met William Branham, he was the catalyst for the message.

So start at the very beginning. What's the, where does the story of Roy Davis start?

Interestingly, the story of Roy Davis starts very near where William Branham's parents' story started. William Branham's mother was from right above Paris, Texas, and Roy E. Davis was in that county. And that county itself had some, the history of Paris, Texas, and the surrounding area, very high levels of white supremacy.

There were public lynchings of African Americans. And Roy Davis basically was a, he grew up with the same kind of influence, just in a different state. I don't know so much about the liquor influence, etc., but there definitely was the white supremacy aspect in what Davis would have had from an early life.

Davis himself became also in the ministry, but for much different reasons, I think, than many other ministers in Texas. Davis had a series of churches throughout Texas and some other states, which I'll get into in a little bit, but he became basically a traveling evangelist.

Yeah, I noticed too that in a, you said that, I think on one of the archives of your website, is that he was caught cheating, swindling people, people of Texas in 1917. Then he fled to Georgia as a traveling evangelist, which is just interesting too, because there have been a lot of Westerns that where they've depicted an evangelist like that, whether they have the typical, you go into a Western town, you have the typical, the snake oil salesman, selling their tonic, the cure-all tonic, or you think about the characters like Red Dead Redemption or something like that.

Very interesting. Yeah. So you have all these interesting Western characters, but a lot of times you'll either have the good reverend, or sometimes you'll have the corrupt reverend who's part of something that's there.

So that's the first thing that caught my attention, that he's there in the 1800s swindling people. That just kind of caught my attention.

Yeah, it's funny. So I grew up in the Branham cult, and growing up in this thing, you're not allowed to watch movies or television, or at least I wasn't in the version that I grew up in. Right. So most of my entertainment came from listening to these tapes of Branham, or reading, and I like to read Louis L 'Amour books.

Oh, me too. As a child, yeah, as a child, probably by age 14, I think I had read them all. And what stood out to me about Roy Davis, as I'm thinking kind of along the same lines as you, the snake oil salesman, et cetera, there is not a single villain in any of Louis L 'Amour's books that even comes close to being as evil and scandalous as Roy Davis.

And Roy Davis basically was a villain that is so complex, trying to even understand. I don't think Louis L 'Amour could have adequately explained or.

Described him. Wow, that's incredible. And so during this time, and help me understand this, just because also on your website, it talks about William Joseph Simmons. It says it was during the same time that William Joseph Simmons declared himself to be the imperial wizard of the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, reviving the white knights as a fraternal organization.

And then at that time, Georgia State Congressman William D. Upshaw was a close friend to Simmons and he described him as a knightly man that helped the Klan survive its first congressional investigation.

Davis helped write the constitution for the invisible empire, as well as their bylaws and rituals. Also during this time that under his real name of Reverend Roy E. Davis, he began holding lectures to promote the interests of the Ku Klux Klan.

And according to multiple newspapers, Davis was an official spokesman for the Ku Klux Klan, filling convention halls and collecting signup fees. Davis began asking followers to support his political agenda.

Davis claimed that the Klan were not as bad as the skeptics had made them to be. He said the Ku Klux Klan was not, and this quote, was not anti-Negro, Jewish or Catholic, and that the Klan favored white supremacy, but by lawful and peaceful means.

So the reason why I read that, I want to give people context, because you said this is one of the most crazy, notorious and really evil men of just all the things he was involved in. I kind of read that to kind of give a little bit of context.

So just from that section of what you wrote out, can you expand or elaborate that, give people a better understanding of what I just read?

Roy Davis, The Music Man, and a Traveling Evangelist Scam

Yeah. So are you guys familiar with the movie, The Music Man?

Yes. I actually, no, the very opening sequence of The Music Man when they're in the train, when I was in high school, we had a drama class and we re-enacted the opening scene to that. So you know what I'm talking about for the sake of time, look it up.

But yes, I'm familiar with The.

Music Man. So post-cult, now that I can watch movies, this is one of my favorite movies. I absolutely love this movie. It has a good ending and the guy turns out to be good, but this is a man who lives by the railways.

He's going from town to town, swindling people with music bands that, you know, selling music equipment that they never get, et cetera, training children. And it ends up to be a heartwarming story. Roy Davis is the same exact character, but doing it under the name of Christianity.

He's going from town to town and he's basically setting up churches while living by the railways. So he'll set up a church in one town and then grow it a little bit, get some people, get some money flowing in, tell them that he's got the call to go evangelize, goes to the next town, sets up another church, and then just creates this circuit.

Well, initially the circuit was in Texas, but he and his brothers robbed a bank and had to branch out further. So he went in through Oklahoma, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina. So he had this very big interstate circuit and he was going by aliases.

One alias that he used was Lon Davis. And just like the irony in The Music Man, you really can't make this stuff up, right? He was in Texas in one of the churches that he'd planted and he had been evangelizing in Georgia.

He's in Texas going by the name Roy Davis, his actual name, and he had visited Georgia and had a church there, had a second wife there, and people came to visit this church and his wife and had dinner on the grounds with the family, et cetera.

Well, a woman in Georgia just happened to visit a church that he managed in Texas, and she saw Lon Davis, but he's going by Roy, and he's got a different wife, and she would not let that still. So she basically just started reaching out to law enforcement and ended up getting the Texas Rangers after him.

And so this is basically how he got out of Texas into Georgia, but he came to Georgia right at the time that the Klan was being born and somehow managed to make his way into an audience with William Joseph Simmons, who basically helped rebirth the Ku Klux Klan in 1915.

And according to Davis, he was one of the men, one of the seven unknown men who met on Stone Mountain and signed their bylaws, their constitution, all of which I've read. And there's very much a religious aspect to what they're creating and founding here.

So you have this man from Texas who's evangelizing in Georgia, who came from a town heavily influenced by white supremacy, who gets an audience with William Joseph Simmons and helps create these pseudo-religious bylaws.

Just, you told me at the very beginning of the episode that someone, you said that you couldn't make a story, like you couldn't, if you had the writers of, you know, you think now you're allowed to watch movies.

One of my favorite film screenplay writers is, oh my gosh, Aaron Sorkin. He wrote the screenplay for Moneyball and he did the screenplay for The West Wing and just, you know, a bunch of other really well-known films.

But you think about all these complexities. I mean, you can't, I don't, you can't write this stuff. It's just so, it's just so fascinating. So one of the questions I have, and you can jump in as well too, is that you're talking about, you know, this, this guy who is going as a quote unquote minister is directly influenced by legitimate white supremacy, really from its origins in this particular case in the 1920s.

And he's jumping around from state to state and he's getting convicted of crimes in multiple states. And he's always sort of on the run. And also you think about the type of, the type of transportation that was around in, around this time is traveling from state to state.

It's a little harder. It takes a little more work than it does now. But as far as just theology and evangelistically in his revival meetings, do you know what his message was or what he preached? I mean, I'm sure he got somewhat of a following.

Do you know what his overall.

Message was or was there any records of that? There are some only because of the court trials. Davis was convicted of several things from swindling members of his congregation to taking women across the state lines for purposes of sex, which is called the violation of the man act.

And during the trials and in some of his literature, he describes his theology and his basically his stage persona. Roy Davis was also like William Branham. There are different versions of his stage persona.

When he was in Texas, he was a, just a normal Baptist minister. And whenever he was in Jeffersonville, he came claiming that it was missionary Baptist, which there's, there's some history behind that, which I'll get into later.

He also poses in several states pretending to be a Baptist minister who's interested in Pentecostalism. And during those versions of his stage persona, he is claiming to have had visions of peaches and just weird things that I honestly could look back at this, the stage personas of William Branham that I grew up with.

And I could see elements of, of Branham in what I'm reading in Roy Davis. So he was very much a prototype for Branham with no solid theology that I could tell, just basically whatever the wind, wherever the wind took him and whatever the most money could be made.

It's extremely fascinating. And with his ties to the Ku Klux Klan, what, since they have like an overarching thing of trying to get into, you know, government or local law, what other things did Davis have his hands in to try to, to what was the word I'm looking through to spread propaganda?

What else, what else was he doing during this time?

During the time that the Klan was being born, see, it was a pyramid scheme and there was a financial aspect to it. If you signed people up and you signed enough people up, you could actually make quite a good living at just signing people up for the Klan back then.

I want to say it was like seven to $15 a head. And in today's money, it was quite a good living. So what he was doing, apparently, was one of the churches that he set up in, I think it was Ackworth, Georgia.

He was preaching Baptist, you know, Baptist preaching during the day. And then at night, he was holding Klan meetings in the church and signing people up for the Klan. So he was not only collecting the tithe money, he was also collecting, you know, the head count for whoever he signed up.

And this became such a good business for him that he ended up starting a, either buying a newspaper printing company or starting a printing company and started printing white supremacistic propaganda while being a preacher.

He was doing this. And he eventually was able to wedge his way into the Klan enough to become the official spokesperson for William Joseph Simmons.

Wow. Wow. And just context-wise, again, so William Joseph Simmons,.

Could you elaborate just a little bit on him? William Joseph Simmons is the one who is credited for starting the 1915 Ku Klux Klan. When you think of the Klan today, you think of the version of the Klan that William Joseph Simmons started.

There was a Klan in Tennessee, I think it originated back in the 1800s. I think it was right after the Civil War, if my memory is correct. When 1915, after Birth of a Nation, Simmons saw a big opportunity and took it by creating this pyramid scheme where he's the central figure at the top.

And he created this structure that had everything from, he called himself the Imperial Grand Wizard. There were also a pyramid of men underneath him. Some of them were the Klan's official theologian or pastor, and you had all the way down to the rank-and-file members.

So he's the one who basically created the structure, organized the men, founded the Klan, started the Constitution, and basically swept the Klan across the United.

States. Man, it is so much to think about in terms of Roy Davis and how this man was constantly traveling. So we have in Tennessee where he's accused of being part of the pyramid scheme, he then goes to Kentucky where he's arrested for bringing a 17-year-old girl from Chattanooga, Tennessee over there.

And then from Kentucky, where does he go after that? How does he get back.

To Jeffersonville, Indiana? His trail, so he was in Georgia whenever the Klan was being birthed. He was still running from the law, from robbing the bank in Texas. I believe they found him in South Carolina.

He served a brief time in prison in Texas. I think he only lasted just for a few days and somehow managed to get out. But, see, during this time, the Klan was growing, and it was growing very quickly dangerous.

The government was starting to understand that these were militant forces that were invading the governments of small towns, sometimes large towns. And the government was basically trying to shut them down, and eventually was able to at least oust William Joseph Simmons.

And during that time, the Indiana Klan was rising, so they were gaining power. Simmons was out. Simmons and Roy Davis started another white supremacy group called the Knights of the Flaming Sword in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I think it was.

And they almost got in a little bit of trouble whenever they found out they were swindling the money from many of their members. So he was actually fleeing into Indiana from the Knights of the Flaming Sword.

It's a long, complex history. But when he arrived to Indiana, he was coming from Tennessee, running from multiple violations of the Mann Act. He had an underage woman that he had taken from, I believe, Tennessee into Louisville.

He had a wife and two children that he had abandoned in Texas, a church that he had swindled in, I think it was Savannah, Georgia. And a whole angry mob out to get him in Georgia whenever they found out that he was leading that church while he had another church and another wife.

So all of this was coming to light, and he was escaping all of this to come to Jeffersonville.

Jeffersonville, Roy Davis, and William Branham’s Alleged Conversion

That just, it blows my mind. So Jeffersonville is like this safe haven for him then. So he gets to Jeffersonville, and paint us a picture, what happens? What type of connections does he make.

There? Yeah, so this is really the scene that made me question the authenticity of William Branham's alleged conversion. Davis was in Louisville, Kentucky prior to coming to Jeffersonville. He started a church, he started a mission where he was swindling people all the way up to Cincinnati, Ohio.

Wow. And he was basically found out. They started investigating him, and he made news all across, it would have been big news in Jeffersonville, Louisville, Kentucky, and all of the surrounding area. You had this minister who's sleeping with a, I think she was 16 years old girl, that he had taken from another state.

He had abandoned his first wife and child. He had this huge criminal history, right? And all of it's being published almost daily in the newspapers. And he flees Louisville, Kentucky to Jeffersonville across the state lines, just to try to delay his going to prison.

And it's during this time that this alleged conversion happened. So he's joining forces with this man who's making very, very horrific public news. And he comes to Jeffersonville and that's where William Branham got.

His start. So what was the alleged conversion story of William Branham then, just to get all.

Of our listeners into that mindset? Would this be the stage persona of his conversion? Would that.

Be an accurate statement? It's one of his stage personas. It depends on which version of the stage persona that you subscribe to. But I use this one mostly because Roy Davis himself is the one who presented a statement of faith for William Branham.

And it was published in Branham's newsletter called The Voice of Healing. So Roy Davis during that time was Pentecostal. And he started a church in Jeffersonville called the Pentecostal Baptist Church.

And according to Davis, which is confirmed in some versions of the stage persona for Branham, Branham was ordained into the Pentecostal faith. And Davis basically is the one who taught him the Pentecostal gifts, etc.

Now, interestingly, that is not the version of the stage persona that I grew up believing. We believe that William Branham was a Baptist minister who was avoiding the Pentecostal call until much later in his ministry.

Pentecostalism, Performance, and Opportunism

Yeah. So, I mean, this is just, I think both of us are just soaking this in. I can only imagine what it must be like on your end. I mean, just on your end going through this, especially because you're saying all this.

I mean, we're hearing this for the first time, but you're saying this now in light of growing up and really believing this. So, I mean, it's just incredibly fascinating. So what do you think William Branham's given his upbringing of not really having a religious background and then coming meeting with Roy Davis and kind of learning about Pentecostalism and healing and kind of this performing on the stage, which has become part of his ministry.

Have you ever kind of put yourself in the mind of Branham and how that might have affected him sort of being shown that this, at least the vantage point of Pentecostalism taught from Roy Davis, which was very peculiar.

Obviously, I wouldn't put it on the category of Christian given his, he has a kind of a criminal history that would negate any real authenticity.

It's fraudulent.

Yes. But I don't know. What do you think about that? I mean, how do you think. William Branham.

Would perceive that upon meeting Roy Davis? It's, you know, I have tried to put myself into the mind of each of these people as a right, because really it's such a complicated history that if you even begin to understand it, you have to try to think like they do.

Why did they do what they did? And so I'll set the scene for you. Roy Davis comes to Jeffersonville. He holds this big convention or revival on the grounds wherein he's claiming that he used to be a spiritualist and he converted.

During that time, spiritualism was very, very dominant in the United States. There were a lot of people who were going to these seances and fortune tellers. It was a big business, right? So he comes to Jeffersonville.

He's presenting basically himself as a reformed spiritualist, and he embeds himself into one of the local churches, a guy named by the name of Ralph Rader's church, and essentially splits the congregation and steals his church or his church members.

So William Brownham is joining during this time. He's joining at a time whenever it's a obviously a very big public act. It's from a man who from all appearances that I can tell has a lot of money that he got illegally.

So this was a man who would have been flaunting his money. He's got an underage, quite beautiful woman from the pictures, and this in no way, shape, or form looks like Christianity, right? But from a person whose upbringing was the gambling casinos and alcohol, this might have been appealing.

I don't know. I have to put myself in his shoes and just kind of guess what was the motivation there. The only other thing that I can say that might lead me to believe that it was the motivation of the stage persona and the money, there are a few instances where William Brownham mentions traveling and holding conventions with Roy Davis, most interesting of which is one of the stories that he's telling of Davis, where Davis is standing in front of this crowd of people who are Pentecostals, and they're of the snake handling and drinking poison sect.

And Davis stands before all of them and basically, according to Brownham, drinks strychnine poisoning in front of the people. So he's with Davis performing the stage act of drinking the poison, which if this happened, I doubt it was poison.

But here's a man who's traveling and doing this. Again, it doesn't seem, at least from my opinion, doesn't seem to match Christianity, but it does match a stage act.

Pragmatism, Money, and a Klan-Driven Revival Circuit

Yeah, they seem like, to me, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like Roy Davis and William Brownham, they're both pragmatists. They're going for the most appealing opportunity. Especially Roy Davis, in terms of how he's living his life constantly on the run, he's got to look out for number one, numero uno, which is him.

And I think the best option for him was to go into this revival, this reformation. And then the easiest people to dupe would be, of course, the superstitious people that are more bent on emotion than using the logical sense of their brain.

So it's like pragmatism, essentially. You see an opportunity, you see a way to make.

Money, and you go for it. Well, and there's also, so you mentioned opportunity, there's also an opportunistic part of this. During this series of revivals is when Davis got arrested and taken back to be tried in Louisville, Kentucky.

Okay. So William Brownham was apparently with him at that time. And during the course of these meetings, the police come in, they arrest him right during the meeting and take him out. So now here's Branham in the midst of all of this, with a sudden opportunity to get a congregation.

I don't know if that motivated him or not, but if you base it off, if you base him off of Davis as his mentor, it would seem to fit. Oh, most definitely. Most.

Definitely. Yeah. One of the questions I had just too, because we're kind of, we're not just, we're walking through the story of Branham and the involvement of the message and now his relationship with Roy Davis.

And as it progresses, you're also seeing, we're also kind of walking through a timeline historically, something that people, experiences that people collectively shared during that era. So you think about now and everything that transpired in 2020.

I mean, March, 2020 is every single person, we all collectively shared that last year. So we can make jokes about, you know, the scavenging of toilet paper, the everything being crazy, people so uncertain about what the future held at that time.

There are also some very indicative, very unifying, very historical events that made a huge impact in the history of the world at that time, moving several years later. We were talking earlier about the origins of the Ku Klux Klan, the prohibition era and the different criminals involved with that.

But the Great Depression, you mentioned just a couple of things in your book and you can elaborate as saying that in the 1930s, Louisville, Kentucky was a big land, was a land of big opportunity. Even as the Great Depression was beginning to cripple the United States economy, workers could find employment in Louisville manufacturing.

The George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge would have made Jefferson Jeffersonville feel even more connected with Louisville, given hope during a time of crisis. And also you just mentioned that both rural Kentucky and Indiana were particularly hit hard during the Depression.

And also you also mentioned, too, obviously, this is a very historical moment in American history. And this is still studied today by economists. October 29th, 1929 was known as Black Tuesday, which is when the stock market crashed and all that entailed how would have the Great Depression affected that area in more detail?

And would that would have just made people more thinking about not thinking about the loss of we'll think about the loss of material things, thinking, trying to think about eternity or just a time of crisis, kind of looking for purpose and meaning during a time of uncertainty.

Would that role of the Great Depression play a significant role in the formulation of the message when Roy Davis and William.

Branham were beginning to collaborate? I think it could have for for a few reasons. So I was unfamiliar with a lot of that history. I knew that the Great Depression existed, but I wasn't really familiar with its impact and still until I started this research.

And again, I was trying to put myself into at that time into Roy Davis's shoes. Why is he doing what he's doing? Why is he here? I still that was early in my stages of research, and I thought William Branham was still somewhat motivated by some sort of religious conversion.

It wasn't until much later I realized that was not the case. But if I base if I were to base what I know of how this type of religion attracts people on what I remember hearing in William Branham sermons, every major political event that could be twisted to a negative way or any way that incites fear was used to capitalize to bring people in and, you know, eventually get people's money from from the way I can see that things worked.

But he was trying very, very hard to like the Cold War. If you study, study different timeline milestones in the timeline of the Cold War and compare them to the timeline of William Branham sermon, you're going to find him talking about bombs that are going to be dropped in in Jeffersonville or Louisville, trying to scare people into the religion.

So the Great Depression, if that was the strategy, which is hard to say without hearing what they said, but it would have been a good opportunity to try to attract people to the religion. Now, that's looking at it from Roy Davis's standpoint.

But if I look at it from William Branham standpoint, here's a man who his family had just only recently been destitute. Somehow he came into money and got a car and had left for a while and came back.

I don't know yet how or why he came back or the college or anything like that. But I do see that when the stock market crashed, I what I started doing was looking at newspaper articles on Black Tuesday and then started looking beyond.

And I still see people with jobs. I still people some hiring. It's not a lot. But I see that there is opportunity in Louisville. But in the vast majority of the country, there wasn't. So could the motivation have been that he saw an opportunity to survive both financially and whatever other motivation he had by joining into the religious aspect?

I don't know. But that's a question that I had. Very interesting. I got a question,.

Too, than Andrew. Any other questions you want to jump into as well, too? So as this movement is just beginning, Roy Davis has a significant history related to the Ku Klux Klan, deeply rooted in white supremacy.

And he had a huge influence on William Branham, kind of teaching some aspects of Pentecostalism, some spiritual gifts, some ideas of healing, just from his vantage point, at least on a performance level.

We were talking about sort of the stage name or the stage persona. But as far as the aspects of white supremacy, what would be some aspect? How did that affect, I mean, the theology and what was preached in that church and its origins?

I mean, that had a huge influence and key role. What would be some examples of how the influences of white supremacy really affected their initial message.

Of the message, I would say? That's something that's painful for me to talk about, simply because I was so blind to this. I had no idea that I was a racist. I have since leaving that tried to do my best to undo anything, any thought that I've had in this way.

But this was a very, very racist cult. One of the most obvious doctrines, which you'll find this, you know, a lot of people talk about this with regards to Branham, is his notion that in the Garden of Eden, Eve and the serpent had sex and produced cane, according to William Branham's theology.

That's a very common theology in white supremacy groups. You'll find it throughout. So I usually actually don't talk about that because that one's obvious. I go to the ones that most people don't talk about, such as whenever William Branham is referring to Jews, you'll find him talking about the Apostle Paul.

You'll find him talking about various biblical figures, and he's calling them hook-nosed Jews. And this is not a statement that you would commonly hear from a Christian minister. It's not something that I ever said, but I heard him, and I never really thought negatively that he said it.

So I try to go back and I try to wipe all of that out of my head. Why did I allow this man to say this thing and me not be horrified that he said it? I also did not know that these were racist terms until after leaving, but he would often refer to African-American women as Aunt Jemima, or he'd call them Auntie, which was a slur against African-Americans.

And this is a much deeper study, but if you look at some of the propaganda that has been published by white supremacy groups, you can actually find this stuff online. I think the big one that I found was called The Thunderbolt, but there's numerous publications of historical record of white supremacy groups.

And what they're trying to do, during the later years of William Branham's stage persona, he was very much aligned with Roy Davis in the stance against the integration of schools. And when you think about white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan and the civil rights movement, et cetera, most Americans just look at the surface and they think it's just about the African-Americans and the whites sharing the same building.