Jesus, John Wayne, William Branham, and Spiritual Abuse

Violent, Authoritarian Rhetoric from a Cult to a Church Near You

Jan 20, 2025

“If any Doctors of Divinity want to argue with me, then come on. I’ll hit you with my stick!’
— the pastor of my youth, brandishing the pointer stick he used for pointing at End Times charts.

“Someday I’ll be
Big enough so you can’t hit me,
And all you’re ever gonna be
Is mean
— Taylor Swift, “Mean”

Growing up, many of the sermons I heard were less directed to the congregation than to imaginary opponents who had never heard and would never hear about our pastor Raymond Jackson, the “end-time apostle” whom William Branham had mentored. These opponents included Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, liberals/communists/feminists, and most of all, unnamed “Doctors of Divinity.” Sometimes, the tirades ended with the threat of a country whipping, so it’s good that the Doctors of Divinity weren’t there.

In Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez discusses the idealization of rough men like John Wayne’s professionally crafted persona. This, the movement said, is what the church needs. It’s what pastors should be, what men should aspire to, and what women should swoon and submit to. Du Mez writes,

“Thrice married, twice divorced, Wayne also carried on several high-profile affairs. He was a chain-smoker and a hard drinker. Yet despite his rough edges, Wayne would capture the hearts and imaginations of American evangelicals. The affinity was based not on theology, but rather on a shared masculine ideal …. In the words of Baptist scholar Alan Bean, ‘The unspoken mantra of post-war evangelicalism was simple: Jesus can save your soul; but John Wayne will save your ass.’”1

William Branham may be a fringe character in twentieth-century American religion, but his outsized influence continues today. One area where Branham was way ahead of the game was the cultivation of his John Wayne persona. Branham was Wayne before Wayne was Wayne. Branham historian John Andrew Collins, who grew up in the cult and is the grandson of the man who led the “Branham Tabernacle” many years after Branham’s 1965 death, describes the highly suspect and ever-changing stories that Branham told about his childhood, many of which included tales of growing up in the Kentucky wilderness like a latter-day Davy Crocket. As an adult, he cultivated a cowboy persona filled with hiking adventures out west, big-game hunting excursions, and a macho, tough-talk preaching style that sometimes sounds eerily like current “tough guy” Mark Driscoll. Collins echoes my own experience when he writes:

“Boys growing up in the ‘Message’ [the name for the “end time revelation” of Branham and his disciples like Raymond Jackson] had an almost unnatural fondness for western belts, boots, and shirts; and they developed a love for hunting — even boys who would have under normal circumstances gravitated toward other hobbies and modern styles similar to their peers.”2

Raymond Jackson likewise wore cowboy hats, hunted, played fiddle, and spoke like a grizzled cowboy (I have no reason to believe Jackson wasn’t naturally inclined to these things. If so, it would partly explain Branham’s appeal and hold over him). I didn’t escape this predilection, although anyone who knows me understands that I am about as unlike an actual Old West hero as a man could be. In my teens and early twenties, my closet held many Western shirts and vests, cowboy hats and boots, and bolo ties, as the photo below attests. You’ll see I may have got the cowboy part right, but not the “tough” cowboy part. Oh well.

But Collins documents how Branham’s early adventures actually concerned the Ku Klux Klan (more on this in two weeks), moonshine, and prohibition-era gangsters more than western sheriffs and outlaws.3 Still, Branham was shaped by the violence around him, which carried into his preaching. This spirit, this “ideology,” dominates the ministries of many preachers, churches, movements, and denominations with radically different theology than Branham. Ideology eats theology for breakfast.

As Mike Cosper explores in The Church In Dark Times, “Each of us has an interpretive framework formed by the ideas (and ideologies) we encounter, our habits of reading and thinking, and an untold number of practices and experiences. So every text we encounter, biblical or otherwise, is read through that framework and whatever distorting effects it may have.”4 He recalls Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore’s example of angry churchgoers who treat those who preach Gospel messages like “turn the other cheek” and “love your neighbor” as if they are the ones abandoning the faith.

Anti-Jesus ideologies abound in many traditions and social groups, even those with “Christian” in their name. This is why understanding the forces behind the Branham movement might help you overcome the legacy of spiritual abuse, even if your abuser inhabited a different culture or believed different doctrines.

Richard Nixon kicked Branham’s tough-man, doomsday rhetoric into high gear in August 1954 when Nixon met with Branham and fellow Fundamentalists at the “Full Gospel Businessman’s Convention,” pleading with them to preach against communism. Charles Paisley shows that Branham immediately heeded the call, telling attendees of his “Latter Rain movement” evangelistic services in Chicago, Phoenix, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Charlotte that atomic bombs would destroy their cities. He prophesied the destruction of the West Coast to his Los Angeles audience. He told the tragically impressionable Jim Jones and Jones’s “People’s Temple” congregation,

“We are living under the shadows of the atomic bomb, and of an international destruction of God’s holy wrath and judgment to be poured out upon a disobedient world.”5

Jones would, of course, eventually make 900 of his followers kill themselves with poison fruit punch in the largest incident of intentional civilian death in American history until 9/11.

It took me a decade to leave my church, not only because my family and lifelong friends were there but because I was suffering the fear and shame of an abuse victim who has been programmed to obey an authority structure claiming to speak for God. In that last decade, I watched our pastor and his assistants grow angrier behind the pulpit, using more violent rhetoric and forcing more schisms with fellow Branham “Message” churches. In my final year, the increasing demands for members to shun people and sister churches led to breakups in over 100 families.6

Insulting, rough, and even violent speech is like a drug, especially when the speaker is rewarded with an attentive audience. Like any drug, you eventually have to chase the high with more and more stimulus. You’ll find the same mean-spirited, culture-warrior, patriarchal, authoritarian tough-guy talk in many denominations and movements. We saw this in Mark Driscoll through The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, typified in his infamous, guttural “How dare you?” scream and his quote,

“There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus, and by God's grace, it'll be a mountain by the time we're done. You either get on the bus, or you get run over by the bus.”

We see it in Doug Wilson, a Reformed evangelical apologist for slavery who also says things like, “the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”7 Imagine a burly, aggressive teenage boy being given this advice. What could go wrong? Wilson’s teaching is deconstructed in the Sons of Patriarchy podcast.

We see it in John MacArthur, who, when asked what he would say to Bible teacher Beth Moore during a Q&A at a conference, said, “Go home.” This was after MacArthur’s Master’s University and Seminary was placed on probation by accreditors for a “pervasive climate of fear, intimidation, bullying, and uncertainty.”8 MacArthur has since been exposed for creating church and counseling systems complicit in enabling physical and sexual abuse against women and children.

We see it in disgraced megachurch pastor and founding member of The Gospel Coalition James MacDonald. The author of Act Like Men was placed on sabbatical following an investigation that “uncovered patterns of bullying, angry outbursts, abusive speech, intimidation, and financial mismanagement.”9 Later, he was recorded threatening to plant child pornography on a reporter’s computer, alleged to have solicited someone to commit murder, and charged with the felony assault of a 59-year-old woman. She was hospitalized for twenty-one days.

We saw it over and again in Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, the two men who shaped a theological coup that turned the Southern Baptist Convention into what it is today, hailed as heroes for years but later discovered at the forefront of what former SBC leader Russell Moore called the “Southern Baptist Apocalypse,” a crisis of pastor-led sexual and spiritual abuse covered up by many SBC men in high places. Moore summed up the long, tawdry story when he wrote,

“One [Patterson] was fired after alleged mishandling a rape victim’s report in an institution he led after he was documented making public comments about the physical appearance of teenage girls and his counsel to women physically abused by their husbands. The other [Pressler} is now in civil proceedings about allegations of the rape of young men. We were told they wanted to conserve the old time religion. What they wanted was to conquer their enemies and to make stained-glass windows honoring themselves—no matter who was hurt along the way.”10

We see it when current evangelical online influencers urge churches and pastors to learn from violent misogynists like Andrew Tate so the church can appeal to young men who crave rough role models (some say Tate is sinning, but “sinning in the right direction). Tate, who has often bragged about assaulting women, leads us full circle to William Branham, a man with a different sexual ethic than Tate but with the same propensity towards domination and intimidation of women. Decades before Tate was born, Branham was saying things like:

“Any man that'll let his wife smoke cigarettes and wear them kind of clothes, shows what he's made out of …. He don't love her or he'd take a board and blister her with it.”11

This brings us to where we will begin next Monday, looking at the misogyny and sexism of William Branham and his splinter groups in relation to fundamentalist American evangelicalism. We’ll follow the Monday after with an exploration of racism and the week after that with the dangers caused by the underlying philosophy of faith-healing and the prosperity gospel that, as with these other things, has infiltrated a wider swath of contemporary culture than you may realize. Subscribe for free so you don’t miss it.

Nothing I’ve written is meant to disparage actual cowboys and cowgirls. I still enjoy Westerns. I like country music. I’m fascinated by the legends of the Wild American West. I admire anyone who can pull off the “hat look.” This is about the imputation of sensationalized, gritty, violent characteristics into Christian ministry and church culture. If drinking from the well of High Noon machismo is what passes for your worship community, know that you’re imbibing a little bit of poison with each sip.

We become like what we worship, and so do those in our community who are stronger than we are, whether physically, financially, legally, or through cultural agreement. Sitting under an abusive ministry makes some people the next abusers and some the next victims. Don’t want to be a cannibal or a crunchy snack? Run. Charles Paisley’s survey of people who left “Message” churches bears this out. Here is a tiny portion:

“Were you ever verbally abused by Message leaders?
— 100% yes
Were you ever sexually abused by a Message leader?
— 16.1% yes
Have you been threatened by Message leaders since leaving The Message?
— 93.5% yes”12

Christ does not command us to nail others to a cross but to take up our own, as he took up his cross in the ultimate act of nonviolent resistance. His sacrifice brought us God’s peace and the removal of the dividing wall of hostility between people (Ephesians 2:14). In God’s family, there is no more Jew, nor Greek, nor slave, nor free, nor male and female, for we are one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:28). Our unarmed savior “disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Colossians 2:15).

Jesus doesn’t need John Wayne, nor do we. Let’s just love God (Matt. 22:37), each other (John 13:34), our neighbors (Matt 22:39), and even those who claim to be our enemies (Matt. 5:43-44). It’s the only real way to pony up, pardner. Happy trails to you until we meet again.

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