Thank you, Julie! It is all very heavy, but it thrives in the shadows. If we bring it into the light, maybe more of our brothers and sisters will wake up to what has been happening in so many corners of Christendom.
This is so sad… Thank you for writing and sharing this. It seems so hard to process how gullible we can be. I wish I could say I would've walked away immediately from Branham’s sermons—packed with statements that today seem like obvious red flags. But human nature is complex, and there must be many blind spots in our sense of truth that will become apparent in decades to come.
P.S. I kept confusing "Branham" with "Brahman" as I read this—which Branham would probably not have enjoyed at all.
Branham and Brahman -- some much-needed humor amid a dark topic. Yeah, it is hard to understand why people don't walk away and what took me so long to walk away. The other piece I haven't covered is that the pastor I grew up under, who had been discipled by Branham, set his own date for the rapture. He said it would occur "around 2004 and a half." He got around the "no one knows the day or the hour" by saying he wasn't predicting the day or the hour, just "2004 and a half." But now we're in 2025, and people still attend that church. We can't just say, "They must be stupid." Many people I grew up with in that church were very smart. As you say, human nature is complex.
Thanks for your reply, Bobby! I remember reading (for the first time in the literary criticism book The Sense of Ending) about how people who believe in apocalyptic predictions simply take it in stride and rewire themselves for a new date when a prediction doesn't happen. I feel it rides on different psychological train tracks from intelligence, so this happens to smart people all the time too (this news article came to mind: https://abcnews.go.com/International/paul-frampton-court-argentina-convicts-unc-professor-drug/story?id=17799280). Thanks for opening all us up to these difficult experiences. It's all very hard to read, but eye-opening.
Thanks for your article I susspect that these who would consine women to a lesser role have not unstood the place of Debrah in the O.T nor Paul's acknowledgement of the female apostle Junia. Junia was an early convert and leading missionary whose story was "lost" when her name was masculinized to Junias in later centuries. I had a decon once who told me "Don't cofuse me with the facts my mind is already made up"!
This was painful to read but I’m grateful you continue to share.
Thank you, Julie! It is all very heavy, but it thrives in the shadows. If we bring it into the light, maybe more of our brothers and sisters will wake up to what has been happening in so many corners of Christendom.
May it be so.
This is so sad… Thank you for writing and sharing this. It seems so hard to process how gullible we can be. I wish I could say I would've walked away immediately from Branham’s sermons—packed with statements that today seem like obvious red flags. But human nature is complex, and there must be many blind spots in our sense of truth that will become apparent in decades to come.
P.S. I kept confusing "Branham" with "Brahman" as I read this—which Branham would probably not have enjoyed at all.
Branham and Brahman -- some much-needed humor amid a dark topic. Yeah, it is hard to understand why people don't walk away and what took me so long to walk away. The other piece I haven't covered is that the pastor I grew up under, who had been discipled by Branham, set his own date for the rapture. He said it would occur "around 2004 and a half." He got around the "no one knows the day or the hour" by saying he wasn't predicting the day or the hour, just "2004 and a half." But now we're in 2025, and people still attend that church. We can't just say, "They must be stupid." Many people I grew up with in that church were very smart. As you say, human nature is complex.
Thanks for your reply, Bobby! I remember reading (for the first time in the literary criticism book The Sense of Ending) about how people who believe in apocalyptic predictions simply take it in stride and rewire themselves for a new date when a prediction doesn't happen. I feel it rides on different psychological train tracks from intelligence, so this happens to smart people all the time too (this news article came to mind: https://abcnews.go.com/International/paul-frampton-court-argentina-convicts-unc-professor-drug/story?id=17799280). Thanks for opening all us up to these difficult experiences. It's all very hard to read, but eye-opening.
Thanks for your article I susspect that these who would consine women to a lesser role have not unstood the place of Debrah in the O.T nor Paul's acknowledgement of the female apostle Junia. Junia was an early convert and leading missionary whose story was "lost" when her name was masculinized to Junias in later centuries. I had a decon once who told me "Don't cofuse me with the facts my mind is already made up"!
It's amazing, isn't it? I was probably about 45 before I ever heard of Junia, and I had been going to churches my whole life.