Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the
Speaker 3: worst people in all of history that also hosts the eternal,
Speaker 3: unending battle between a man and his producer who wants
Speaker 3: him to send in the scripts of the episodes that
Speaker 3: they're reading. As usual, I'm winning this battle, and to
Speaker 3: celebrate the script, not the latest script, to celebrate my triumph, Matt.
Speaker 4: Leeb Northrop Grumman got me Northrop come in.
Speaker 2: That's right in my faith? What's up?
Speaker 3: That's right? That's right. We are advertising for drone delivered
Speaker 3: sex toys. Yeah, the same technology that takes out school
Speaker 3: buses and Yemen can make you say, yeah, man, what do.
Speaker 1: You have your soundboard? Matt?
Speaker 2: Do I have my soundboard? I think you know the
Speaker 2: answer to that. Yeah, I do.
Speaker 4: This week my soundboard is all just different weird noises
Speaker 4: that Snoop makes on the wire.
Speaker 2: Perfect.
Speaker 1: I feel so much joy.
Speaker 3: Speaking of joy, we have a special Oregon themed Behind
Speaker 3: the Bastards for you. As you're probably aware, my adopted
Speaker 3: home state is one of the USA's great cultural hubs
Speaker 3: for cult activity, and we are talking about an Oregon
Speaker 3: a classic Oregon cult today and part of what we're
Speaker 3: doing here is we are raising money for the Portland
Speaker 3: Children's Museum. Yeah yeah, there used to be like a
Speaker 3: Portland children's museum with like in a building and stuff.
Speaker 3: That had to close down in twenty twenty one. I
Speaker 3: think it was a pandemic casualty. But a group of
Speaker 3: parents in the metropolitan area have created a traveling children's museum,
Speaker 3: the FLIP Museum, which stands for Fun, Learning, Inspiration Play.
Speaker 3: It's a nonprofit. It goes around to different communities in
Speaker 3: the Portland area and provides kids there with like a
Speaker 3: you know, head visits them sort of children's museum experience.
Speaker 3: So we are helping them fund that this week. If
Speaker 3: you want to donate, they've set it up so that
Speaker 3: you can just text bastards to five oh one five five.
Speaker 3: So if you text bastards to five oh one five five,
Speaker 3: you'll get the information you need to donate to help
Speaker 3: the FLIP Portland's children Museum. So that's pretty cool.
Speaker 4: I also love that in order to donate, you have
Speaker 4: to write the word bastards to the Children's museum.
Speaker 3: It is it would be it is funny. It is funny.
Speaker 3: Although no one no one still uses the term bastard
Speaker 3: today bastards.
Speaker 2: I love children.
Speaker 3: You want to help some literal bastards.
Speaker 2: These little bastards get.
Speaker 3: Extras to five oh one five five.
Speaker 2: Living in sin.
Speaker 3: Yeah fuck wedlock.
Speaker 2: That's right now, Matt.
Speaker 3: How do you feel about sex cults?
Speaker 2: Oh? Love them pro I've always wanted to be in one.
Speaker 4: I got really close to being in that one in
Speaker 4: San Francisco. Ohe the one Taste thing. It was like
Speaker 4: the Gasmik meditation one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love
Speaker 4: yeah man.
Speaker 2: I was so close.
Speaker 4: I had a meeting with the like one of the
Speaker 4: ladies who like was recruiting, and I just spent the
Speaker 4: whole meeting being like, I don't have any money, but
Speaker 4: can I just go and watch yeah? Yeah, And they
Speaker 4: said no. She started asking me to have She's like
Speaker 4: it was like one hundred dollars too. It really was
Speaker 4: not that much money, but I was very poor at
Speaker 4: the time, and I was like, I don't have one
Speaker 4: hundred dollars. They're like, can you? She like emailed me later,
Speaker 4: how about this, ask your friends and family for one
Speaker 4: hundred dollars. I was like, Lady, I used to do
Speaker 4: a lot of heroin. If I start asking for one
Speaker 4: hundred dollars. They're gonna think I'm back on this stuff.
Speaker 2: Now I can't.
Speaker 3: It's for a sex cult, all right, would you consider
Speaker 3: getting back on the heroin then yeah.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I've always wanted to be in a sex cult.
Speaker 4: I just said I never you know, it was too
Speaker 4: much of a coward, Matt.
Speaker 3: I have. I believe in you. I just want to
Speaker 3: state that here, and I believe that all of us
Speaker 3: can benefit from the story of Oregon's first great sex
Speaker 3: cult leader, Edmund Creffield. Now I'm gonna guess you haven't
Speaker 3: heard of Edmund Kraff.
Speaker 2: No, but I love that. That's a great name. That's
Speaker 2: a guy who fucks.
Speaker 3: Name that, that is a guy who focks names. And
Speaker 3: that's also a guy who declares himself the second Coming
Speaker 3: of Christ.
Speaker 2: Name. Well yeah, I mean, oh yeah.
Speaker 3: This is one of those stories making yourself Jesus fucking
Speaker 3: a lot of people.
Speaker 2: Oh so great. What a what a grift.
Speaker 4: It's the most relatable grift too, Like I get it,
Speaker 4: like you do what you gotta do to get that piece.
Speaker 3: Mm hmmm, especially if it means declaring yourself the son
Speaker 3: of God. Which there's that great documentary series on Netflix
Speaker 3: about the Twin Flame Cult, which is like this mix
Speaker 3: of like kind of young millennial older gen z, like
Speaker 3: fucking pseudoscience about relationships mixed with also I this guy
Speaker 3: who is the only person who can determine if you've
Speaker 3: met your soulmate and Jesus, it's beautiful of it. It's
Speaker 3: very much descended because that guy spent some time in Oregon.
Speaker 3: From the cult we're talking about today, which is have
Speaker 3: you ever heard the phrase holy Roller?
Speaker 2: I have, but I don't know how this cult was.
Speaker 3: The Holy Rollers. This is where the term comes from,
Speaker 3: and it is a surprisingly literal term.
Speaker 1: There's a really popular song called Holy Roller that's probably
Speaker 1: you've heard it.
Speaker 3: It may may in fact based on this, yeh, that's
Speaker 3: my assumption. So if you live elsewhere in the United States,
Speaker 3: Portland probably has primarily come to you in the form
Speaker 3: of a mix of like riot footage in portlandyas sketches right.
Speaker 3: It had this reputation from like the end of the
Speaker 3: nineties to the early two thousands is like this kind
Speaker 3: of hip place where young artist types and intellectuals would congregate.
Speaker 3: And that's mainly because for a long time it was
Speaker 3: like this cheapest city on the West coast now again
Speaker 3: it's like riots and urban decay and drug use and
Speaker 3: shit that like Fox News focuses on. And one of
Speaker 3: the things that's weird when I got into studying this
Speaker 3: guy who was like an early nineteen hundreds, nineteen to
Speaker 3: three to nineteen oh six Oregon cult figure is you
Speaker 3: get all these like news stories about what happens with him,
Speaker 3: and they all portray Oregon the same way that like
Speaker 3: Fox does today, Like this is one hundred and something years.
Speaker 3: It's like this is the center of anarchy and violence
Speaker 3: and like these people are savage, feral monsters, which I
Speaker 3: guess is something to be proud.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 4: I love that Portland has never changed. Yeah, shaped the
Speaker 4: national media.
Speaker 5: It's always been the same place, like nineteen fucking thirteen
Speaker 5: and someone that everyone thinks you're so fucking cool with
Speaker 5: their beards topping down trees.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is funny. So we'll be talking about that today. So, yeah,
Speaker 3: we are chatting about a sex cult leader who declared
Speaker 3: himself Jesus Christ Edmund Creffield. His actual name probably was
Speaker 3: Franz Edmund Crefield. He is, yet again Matt a German.
Speaker 2: Hey, hey, I love it. I come on for the
Speaker 2: German episodes. Oh yeah, you love a German?
Speaker 3: No, we picked I picked a cult episode for you
Speaker 3: because I was like, we've done a lot of a
Speaker 3: lot of real horrible genocide guys in a war. I
Speaker 3: want something lighter, right, a little bit more fun. And
Speaker 3: then bam, he turns out to be a German. You
Speaker 3: just can't you can't miss him, You can't miss him.
Speaker 2: Finally, a German who doesn't kill people. He just likes
Speaker 2: to do sucky fucking yeah he is.
Speaker 3: This guy's really going to rehabilitate their image.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: This is one of those cases where we have basically
Speaker 3: nothing about this guy's early life. He was probably born
Speaker 3: in Germany. I think it's possible he was born like Austria,
Speaker 3: like somewhere around Germany, but like kind of unclear. We
Speaker 3: really don't know exactly when he was born. He was
Speaker 3: in probably in his thirties by the time the story starts,
Speaker 3: which would put his date of birth somewhere around the
Speaker 3: creation of Germany as a state eighteen seventy seventy one,
Speaker 3: But we don't really know. All we can tell for
Speaker 3: sure is that he immigrated to the United States, likely
Speaker 3: at some point in the eighteen eighties, probably as a
Speaker 3: teenager or a young adult. Some of his biographers postulate
Speaker 3: that he may have moved to the US to avoid
Speaker 3: serving in the Kaiser's army, because, like everyone had to write,
Speaker 3: like you had to do your compulsory service in the
Speaker 3: Kaiser's army. He may have like bounced to here because
Speaker 3: he didn't want to do that.
Speaker 2: I'm a lover, not a fighter.
Speaker 3: I guess he really was. It's also possible that, like
Speaker 3: his family was rich. Some biographers will suggest that given
Speaker 3: that he seems to have had a degree of education
Speaker 3: that would have been unlikely for him to have attained
Speaker 3: if he had grown up sort of like poor. But
Speaker 3: all of that sort of speculation. What we know for
Speaker 3: sure is that by eighteen ninety nine, he has made
Speaker 3: his way from wherever he landed in the US, probably
Speaker 3: somewhere on the East coast, to Portland, Oregon.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is the mecca of every German immigrant who
Speaker 4: wants to meet a nice hippie girl.
Speaker 3: Yeah, every weirdo. Yeah. From him to eventually Stalin's granddaughter, Yeah,
Speaker 3: to Portland calls.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I just found that out recently, and I followed her
Speaker 4: on Instagram. I'm like dash, she's cool.
Speaker 3: She's like, yeah, she's like a LARPer. It's kind of neat. Yeah,
Speaker 3: she seems fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I don't mean LARPer in the sense we usually
Speaker 3: use it on the show. I mean, like literally, I
Speaker 3: think she does like live action role playing stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So we know that Crefield was a deeply religious man.
Speaker 3: He felt called to witness for the Lord, and like
Speaker 3: many similar young men in his position, he found himself
Speaker 3: drawn on to the Salvation Army. Now do you know
Speaker 3: a whole lot, Matt, about the actual history of the
Speaker 3: Salvation Army.
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 4: I've only ever been to a brick and mortar place
Speaker 4: called the Salvation Army. And I bought some wooden golf clubs.
Speaker 3: Oh good, I didn't call you for a golf guy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well no I wasn't. I just was like there
Speaker 4: and I was like, oh, look at all this cheap stuff.
Speaker 4: It's like Goodwill but worse. And then there were some
Speaker 4: golf clubs and I bought them, and I was like,
Speaker 4: why did I do this? But yeah, I don't know
Speaker 4: anything about the Salvation Army. I've always just assumed that
Speaker 4: they were like a charitable organization of.
Speaker 3: Some sort of Yes, they are. They are Probably most
Speaker 3: people's primary contact with them is that during the holiday
Speaker 3: season they'll be out in front of shops and stuff
Speaker 3: with these like red buckets, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, last they'll have a Santa there, sometimes.
Speaker 3: Off on a Santa yeah, and people will point out it,
Speaker 3: like if you're on social media, usually about this time
Speaker 3: of year, people will be like, don't donate to the
Speaker 3: Salvation Army. They're problematic. There's a bunch of reasons for that.
Speaker 3: I'm not advocating for the Salvation Army, but we are
Speaker 3: talking about their early history, which is not entirely the
Speaker 3: same as the organization as it exists today.
Speaker 4: Are you about to tell me that they are an
Speaker 4: actual army and they got guns and stuff.
Speaker 3: They don't have guns. They are organized exactly like an army.
Speaker 3: Like that part they took very literally, so a lot
Speaker 3: of soap beatings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But.
Speaker 3: The Salvation Army was founded not long before Creffield's probable birth.
Speaker 3: It was formed in eighteen sixty five, right as the
Speaker 3: US Civil War is ending, by a pawnbroker who became
Speaker 3: a minister named William booth Over and over in England. Now,
Speaker 3: pawnbroker does not seem like a good person job to me, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't actually know what a pawnbroker is. A
Speaker 4: guy who owns a pawn shop.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a guy who takes your stuff if you're poor,
Speaker 3: and gives you some money for it and maybe you
Speaker 3: get it back later.
Speaker 2: But like, yeah, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3: You're not inherently bad, I guess, but it definitely like
Speaker 3: usually shady people wind up pawnbrokers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it doesn't seem like a nice thing to do,
Speaker 2: but I could see its usefulness.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've known like a nice pond guy, but I
Speaker 3: don't know. Maybe maybe we should be just shit talking pawnbrokers.
Speaker 3: But now I think nowadays because of how much like
Speaker 3: paid a loan, shit, it's gotten sketchy, right, So maybe
Speaker 3: it wasn't back then. Anyway, Booth actually does not seem
Speaker 3: to have been wildly sketchy. He was, however, super Christian,
Speaker 3: and his life ambition he wanted to like turn the
Speaker 3: poor of London, particularly like prostitutes and alcoholics and criminals
Speaker 3: into good Christians. Now, there's a lot of predatory religious
Speaker 3: figures in the last century and today you have a
Speaker 3: similar ambition. And what made Booth notable was his under
Speaker 3: he had this like thing he would say where he
Speaker 3: was like, no one ever became a Christian when they
Speaker 3: were starving, Right, So his attitude is, if you're going
Speaker 3: to try to convert people, the best way to do
Speaker 3: that is like doing nice things for them, right yeah,
Speaker 3: which is like not the worst way to be an evangelist, right.
Speaker 4: No, yeah, yeah, that works. I'm down for that, you know, yeah,
Speaker 4: like at least on the surface.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I didn't to a deep dive on Booth,
Speaker 3: but I haven't found any evidence that he was like
Speaker 3: within sort of the charitable figures of his day anything,
Speaker 3: but like a pretty reasonable example. So his focus was
Speaker 3: he wanted to spread the gospel by improving the lives
Speaker 3: of poor and suffering people. Now, at first he limited
Speaker 3: this to giving food and clothing and other kind of
Speaker 3: help to converts. But in eighteen seventy eight, like this
Speaker 3: is at least the organization's sort of story. Who knows
Speaker 3: if this is literally true, but the story goes that
Speaker 3: in eighteen seventy eight, he's sitting down and he's talking
Speaker 3: with his secretary and he uses the phrase as he's
Speaker 3: like dictating a piece of you know, propaganda. Basically, the
Speaker 3: Christian mission is a volunteer army. This was like what
Speaker 3: he wanted to use as their slogan. And his son
Speaker 3: heard him, and he's like, I'm not a volunteer. I'm
Speaker 3: a regular or nothing. Right, Like, I'm not a volunteer soldier,
Speaker 3: I'm like a career soldier in this Christian Army. And
Speaker 3: that convinces Booth to change the name of his nascent
Speaker 3: charitable organization to the Salvation Army and to adopt a
Speaker 3: military style structure with like military style uniforms and shit,
Speaker 3: and ranks. Like officers in the Salvation Army are called
Speaker 3: like lieutenant captain. Booth is the general, right, Like that's
Speaker 3: how they discuss talk about themselves. Now, that's like, I
Speaker 3: don't know whatever, that's not particularly problematic. What is problematic
Speaker 3: is that new converts are called captives, which I do
Speaker 3: consider a little concerning.
Speaker 2: That's captive is a weird thing.
Speaker 3: That's odd.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's I guess it's like maybe it's a
Speaker 4: critique of militarism where it's like, yeah, privates.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, it's it's odd. There is definitely a degree
Speaker 3: of like colonizer brain that is present within the Salvation
Speaker 3: but this is a this is England in the late eighteens,
Speaker 3: where the coolest people you could be the Salvation Army. Again,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of ugly things about the organization today
Speaker 3: that this is not. This episode is not about that
Speaker 3: at the time it's founding, though again it seems to
Speaker 3: have mostly been about like, yeah, making providing meals to
Speaker 3: like people in London slums and shit. In a history
Speaker 3: of the organization, Pam Mila Walker wrote, quote The Mission, however,
Speaker 3: differed from other home missions. The authority it granted women,
Speaker 3: its emphasis on holiness, theology and revivalist methods, it's growing independence,
Speaker 3: and its strict hierarchical structure were all features that sharply
Speaker 3: distinguished it from its contemporaries. The Christian Mission was created
Speaker 3: in the midst of the working class communities it aimed
Speaker 3: to transform, so there are some ways in which it's
Speaker 3: kind of less problematic with some of its peers. It
Speaker 3: gives a lot more sort of like power to women
Speaker 3: that are in the organization. It's generally comes out of
Speaker 3: communities as opposed to being imposed on them. That said,
Speaker 3: it is again colored by some problematic aspects of the time,
Speaker 3: including colonialism. In eighteen ninety booth In some of his
Speaker 3: colleagues wrote a manifesto, a book titled in Darkest England
Speaker 3: and the Way Out, And as you may have guessed
Speaker 3: from that title, they're basically just comparing living conditions of
Speaker 3: the urban poor and like Western cities like London to Africa. Quote,
Speaker 3: as there is a darkest Africa, is that not also
Speaker 3: a darkest England? Civilization which can breed its own Barbara,
Speaker 3: does it not also breed its own pigmies? May we
Speaker 3: not find a parallel on our own doors and discover
Speaker 3: within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar
Speaker 3: horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the
Speaker 3: Great Equatorial Forest.
Speaker 2: Hello, Chimney sweeps, She's all.
Speaker 3: That is basically this guy's belief system. And when he
Speaker 3: references Stanley, he's talking about Bastard's pod alumni, Henry Morton Stanley,
Speaker 3: who again machine gun natives in Africa repeatedly not a
Speaker 3: cool guy, but also very like popular. He writes a
Speaker 3: lot of books about his exploration and shit that are
Speaker 3: viral in this time. So you know, aspects of Boots
Speaker 3: writing do kind of flirt with class politics. There's he's
Speaker 3: he's got a lot of focus on inequality, but he
Speaker 3: doesn't see the root of inequality as like the structural
Speaker 3: factors inherent to the system that governs the British Empire.
Speaker 3: She seeds the root of inequality as like the fact
Speaker 3: that the poor don't have enough religion and discipline.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, they need they they need Jesus and they
Speaker 2: need Jesus. Yeah, that's all they needed.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The primary thing that like elevates him because that's
Speaker 3: not an uncommon view among Christian charitable types.
Speaker 2: In this period today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, even today. What does kind of elevate him is
Speaker 3: that there is this consistent focus on like and the
Speaker 3: way that you make them disciplined is by making sure
Speaker 3: they're not starving, first of all, which is like, no
Speaker 3: matter what else you're doing, not a bad thing that works.
Speaker 2: People do, in.
Speaker 3: Fact need food. The organization the Salvation Army spreads to
Speaker 3: the US in the late eighteen hundreds and they hold
Speaker 3: their first kettle fundraising drives. That's the start of them,
Speaker 3: like ringing bells outside of shops and shit. That all
Speaker 3: begins in San Francisco, and by eighteen ninety seven the
Speaker 3: Salvation Army is providing Christmas meals to more than one
Speaker 3: hundred thousand people in the United States. So that's about
Speaker 3: when Crefield joins. He's kind of important by eighteen ninety nine,
Speaker 3: we know is what the army then, So like right
Speaker 3: as it's sort of coming into prominence in the United
Speaker 3: States is when he gets involved, when it's sort of
Speaker 3: really snowballing as an organization. Now, whatever existed in Crefield's background,
Speaker 3: he was charismatic and self confident as an adult. He's
Speaker 3: really good at speaking, he's good at preaching, and his
Speaker 3: superiors in the Salvation Army decide this is a guy
Speaker 3: who might you know, be able to hold some rank here,
Speaker 3: and they send him to their officer candidate school. Once
Speaker 3: he's there and he's like under some scrutiny from leaders,
Speaker 3: they are like, oh my god, this man is out
Speaker 3: of his fucking mind.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: He cannot work with other people. He is incapable of
Speaker 3: listening to anyone else. He has his own ideas about
Speaker 3: the Bible, and if yours clashed with them, all he'll
Speaker 3: do is talk over you. He cannot have a conversation
Speaker 3: like yeah.
Speaker 2: Just like the worst type of guy to be in
Speaker 2: a school with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, sounds fucking awful, truly terrible.
Speaker 2: God wants you to fuck He fruitful, he says.
Speaker 3: And when he gets out, you know, on the street
Speaker 3: working for the army. One of the things they are
Speaker 3: also find is that like anywhere he's stationed, donations will
Speaker 3: drop because he loves ranting about his ideas, but he
Speaker 3: hates money. He doesn't like asking for it. And he
Speaker 3: started to believe that like the Salvation Army has been
Speaker 3: corrupted by this focus on donations, Like it's too money
Speaker 3: focused as opposed to being focused on spreading the gospel,
Speaker 3: specifically his very idiosyncratic ideas about the gospel, which, like
Speaker 3: he's not wrong. One of the valid, very valid criticisms
Speaker 3: of the Salvation Army is that, like it is really
Speaker 3: much about the money, you know, about getting in those donations.
Speaker 3: So he's not alone in finding that frustrating. But he's like,
Speaker 3: it's frustrating because what they should be doing is telling
Speaker 3: everyone what I believe about the bibe.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and have we found have we found out
Speaker 4: what he believes that's different from what they believe.
Speaker 3: Now, not yet we are about he's kind of forming
Speaker 3: those ideas right now, right definitely, one of his beliefs
Speaker 3: at this time is that like Christianity has been corrupted
Speaker 3: by modernity. Right, He's not a doesn't like electric lights,
Speaker 3: doesn't like all the fancy new clothes people are wearing,
Speaker 3: doesn't like you.
Speaker 4: Know, the bicycles with the big wheel in the bicycle
Speaker 4: at the bottom.
Speaker 3: Really not a bicycle fella. That is going to be
Speaker 3: a factor in the story, Matt, you've you've predicted it
Speaker 3: so well.
Speaker 2: It's a story about Portland, Oregon.
Speaker 3: Of course, the bicycles. So Creffield gets moved from Portland
Speaker 3: to the Dows, which is Oregon's second city with a
Speaker 3: name that sounds kind of like Dallas.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: And then he gets the other one being Dallas, Oregon.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: And then he has moved to McMinnville to Hepner and
Speaker 3: everywhere he goes donations just plummet. He is a horrible
Speaker 3: person to have on your team if you're a Salvation
Speaker 3: Army guy. Some sources I've read suggests he also has
Speaker 3: like a moral issue with taking money, but a big
Speaker 3: part of it seems to be that he knows the
Speaker 3: money is going not just he's it's going to feeding people.
Speaker 3: And when the Salvation Army like does these big like
Speaker 3: feeding people drives or whatever. When they have these big events,
Speaker 3: they're kind of secular, right, We wouldn't consider them secular.
Speaker 3: But Craffield considers them secular, right, right, And he says
Speaker 3: this in an interview with a reporter sometime after leaving
Speaker 3: the Salvation Army. Quote. While in the Salvation Army, I
Speaker 3: had the light, but I did not have the power.
Speaker 3: I was teaching his works, but was still in the darkness.
Speaker 3: I did not experience the fullness of His power until
Speaker 3: I had tarried long before God in prayer. Then the
Speaker 3: light came. The Holy Ghost told me that I should
Speaker 3: live a life of pure faith. I was to do
Speaker 3: everything by faith. I could no longer work for the
Speaker 3: Army because it's people are not entirely of God. I
Speaker 3: couldn't I take part in soliciting for funds. I was
Speaker 3: directed by the Holy ghosts not to solicit for money.
Speaker 3: It is not right to hold ice cream socials and
Speaker 3: other social gatherings where money is taken.
Speaker 2: Just knocking ice cream out of homeless people's hands. I
Speaker 2: need Yeah, No, God doesn't want it. He sounds fun, man,
Speaker 2: he sounds like it's gonna work out good for him.
Speaker 3: You know what God does want though, Matt Leeb, what
Speaker 3: does he want? He wants you to buy the products
Speaker 3: and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 2: Oh that's what I thought God wanted. Good thing. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna buy them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, check it out. Give God, you know, like thirty bucks.
Speaker 3: He needs it. God is hard up Now is it
Speaker 3: possible that God just wants to buy some molly and
Speaker 3: needs some cash?
Speaker 2: Sure? You know, I would say, but who are we
Speaker 2: to judge?
Speaker 3: Got he works hard? Why should he take molly this weekend?
Speaker 4: I have always said, God, you work hard, you gotta
Speaker 4: play hard. Yeah, get some Mollie, massage your friends, Suck
Speaker 4: on one of those pacifiers.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, go see V and V nation. God loves
Speaker 3: V being a being ancient and born before time itself.
Speaker 3: He's a big v V nation man. Here's ads. Ah,
Speaker 3: we're back. This is behind the Bastards and again we
Speaker 3: are this episode raising money for the Portland Children's Museum
Speaker 3: to donate text Bastards to five oh one five five
Speaker 3: and we're back to the store. Back to the tale.
Speaker 2: So let's get back into it talking about.
Speaker 3: God, talking about the g Man, not Gordon Liddy, but God.
Speaker 3: So Creffield gets tired of working for the Salvation Army
Speaker 3: and the Savation. Salvation Army. By the way, very tired
Speaker 3: of Edmund Craffield.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've had about enough of his shit.
Speaker 4: Anyways, He's not even good at the job, which is
Speaker 4: like literally just being guy with bell getting out the money.
Speaker 3: Can't do it, can't shut up long enough to do it.
Speaker 3: So he bounces and he joins the Pentecostal Mission and
Speaker 3: Training School in Salem, Oregon. This is the project of
Speaker 3: a guy named Martin Ryan, and it's it's basically it's
Speaker 3: a fundamentalist Christian like school, right like that, that's a
Speaker 3: way to look at it. In their book Holy Rollers,
Speaker 3: Teama Cracken and Robert Blodgett described the school this way.
Speaker 3: Ryan's group was part of a holiness movement that taught
Speaker 3: the Bible in its entirety from the first word of
Speaker 3: Genesis to the last word of Revelation. And if any
Speaker 3: man shall take away from the words of the Book
Speaker 3: of this Prophecy, God shall take away his part out
Speaker 3: of the Book of Life, which is Revelations twenty two nineteen. Basically,
Speaker 3: if you edit the Bible at all, or don't take
Speaker 3: it all literally, that's how they interpret it. If you
Speaker 3: don't take every word of the Bible literally, God will
Speaker 3: light you on fire, and shit, God, damn, it's so
Speaker 3: boring though it is, it's super boring. It's such it's.
Speaker 2: A long, boring book with too many fucking words.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, so many words more than there needed
Speaker 3: to be.
Speaker 2: And I don't care who begat who Just get to
Speaker 2: the fucking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna be gat my fist in your
Speaker 3: fucking face. If you don't get along with the good
Speaker 3: parts of this shit.
Speaker 2: I'm going to take out my big gat and just wow, nice, nice,
Speaker 2: I'm as good.
Speaker 3: So during his time with Ryan, Crefield becomes aware of
Speaker 3: a new doctrine, which is like a new sort of
Speaker 3: like set of religious teachings, and as a part of that,
Speaker 3: he becomes aware of the fact that God has chosen
Speaker 3: him specifically, he is the Lord's elect, his new prophet
Speaker 3: on earth. Now that's a great thing to learn about yourself.
Speaker 2: That's a real quick, real quick turnaround on this guy.
Speaker 4: I mean, I knew he was, like, you know, a
Speaker 4: little bit pedantic and maybe uh, confrontational, but now he's
Speaker 4: immediately like, you.
Speaker 2: Know what I am God prophet?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Okay, yeah, So you know, speaking of being God,
Speaker 3: the prophet I am. I don't know, Sophie. Are we
Speaker 3: allowed to keep doing the Jesus Christ of podcasting bits
Speaker 3: or did we get weird messages over those? No?
Speaker 1: But I hate it?
Speaker 3: Okay, well then we'll keep doing it.
Speaker 2: I don't know what it is, let's do it. You
Speaker 2: are the Jesus Christ of I.
Speaker 3: Am the Lord and Savior of podcasting. That's that's obviously.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm your dad, bitch, And that's where.
Speaker 3: I know, Sophie. I feel like you are the Holy
Speaker 3: Spirit because you're mysterious. Uh. And if there, if there
Speaker 3: is a father God, the father of podcasting, unfortunately it's
Speaker 3: Joe Rogan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course. You know what's.
Speaker 3: Gnostic about this. Joe Rogan is like the evil fake God.
Speaker 3: And yeah, that's that's right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're the You're the real
Speaker 4: demmy urge god. And again, I'm Mary Magdalen. I'm prostitute
Speaker 4: and I just want to rub oil on your feet.
Speaker 4: I'm more of a feat guy in the Bible. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so I'm just gonna if I could just do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, Robert speaking of feet, Nope, not speaking of feet, guys.
Speaker 3: So we're talking about Edmund Creffield, sorry, who has just
Speaker 3: had it revealed to him that he is God's elect
Speaker 3: And I found an interesting article by Sophie co submitted
Speaker 3: to the Young Historians twenty seventeen conference hosted by Portland
Speaker 3: State University that describes his next movements in this period.
Speaker 3: After separating from the Salvation Army, Crefield moved around to
Speaker 3: different cities preaching his radical take on Christianity, most of
Speaker 3: which were places he had previously worked as a soldier
Speaker 3: and had connections to people from cities like the Dows
Speaker 3: in McMinnville dismissed Craffield for being too extreme, leading to
Speaker 3: his eventual arrival in Corvallis in nineteen oh three. Although
Speaker 3: the population was fairly poor, the community was close knit
Speaker 3: and dominantly religious. These characteristics, as well as any connections
Speaker 3: he gained in the Salvation Army, likely prompted Creffield's faith
Speaker 3: in the people of Corvallis. Now, do you know anything
Speaker 3: about Corvallis.
Speaker 2: Matt Leeb Literally nothing, nobody.
Speaker 3: Does, Nobody fucking does. It is like one of the
Speaker 3: most boring towns in this whole state. This is the
Speaker 3: only thing that ever happened there. Very pretty it's in
Speaker 3: the western part of Oregon. It's kind of right in
Speaker 3: between Portland and Eugene. Yeah, and in this period. Today,
Speaker 3: I think Corvallis is like, you know, like many sort
Speaker 3: of less dense chunks of Oregon. But back then it
Speaker 3: is dirt poor. Right, everyone who lives there, almost everyone
Speaker 3: who lives there are these like subsistence farmers who lead
Speaker 3: very lean lives, full of hard work. Right, is a
Speaker 3: tight knit community. There are two newspapers, and since they are,
Speaker 3: it really lets you know, like the how much how
Speaker 3: similar newspapers were to like tweeting and TikTok in the
Speaker 3: era before those things. Because the newspapers in Corvallis they
Speaker 3: report absolutely everything that happens there. And I am talking
Speaker 3: about the most pedestrian shit imagine. Oh yeah, Blodgett McCracken
Speaker 3: ride quote. Everything was reported. Everything go out of town.
Speaker 3: It was reported a swift journey on a bicycle was
Speaker 3: made Saturday by Frank Hurt. He went from Corvallis to
Speaker 3: Oregon City in six hours. It is not likely that
Speaker 3: the trip was ever made by wheel in so short
Speaker 3: a time. That's from the Times. In nineteen oh one,
Speaker 3: a man rode a bicycle.
Speaker 4: I just love the journalism in a small town is
Speaker 4: just the most nosy neighbor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he has a printing press.
Speaker 3: I do want to do like a like a modern
Speaker 3: day like with like the same like Woodward and Bernstein level,
Speaker 3: like a skullduggery and like drama that you get from
Speaker 3: like Watergate era journalism movies, but about stuff like this,
Speaker 3: Like a guy gets a call in the night from
Speaker 3: like a shadowy figure. Man rode his bicycle from Corvallis
Speaker 3: to Oregon City today, pull the other thread. He gets
Speaker 3: car bombed trying to report on it.
Speaker 4: To meet with someone in an underground garage. He gives
Speaker 4: them a file and the file is just someone like.
Speaker 3: A grainy picture of a man on the giant bicycle.
Speaker 2: I think he's visiting family.
Speaker 3: Oh, I love so the problem you know, Crayfield picks
Speaker 3: Corvallis because it's the small town. Everyone's very religious. He's like,
Speaker 3: it's kind of isolated. You obviously want that as a
Speaker 3: cult leader, and like these people will believe anything, so
Speaker 3: like these are these are my ideal sort of provincial
Speaker 3: rubes to join the cult that I'm going to get.
Speaker 3: They'll buy what I'm saying about being the new prophet
Speaker 3: of Jesus Christ. The downside of this place for him,
Speaker 3: which he doesn't seem to realize at the time, is that, like,
Speaker 3: because it's such a titan at town, Corvalis is the
Speaker 3: kind of place where people are open to burying bodies
Speaker 3: for their neighbors, right, which presents a danger for coultreats. Right, Like,
Speaker 3: that's not necessarily the best place to start fucking around.
Speaker 3: You get kind of lost in a city, like you
Speaker 3: can't in Corvallis.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the idea that like this small town, literally everyone
Speaker 4: knows where the bodies are buried except for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not necessarily your safest bet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's kind of bad.
Speaker 3: So, like a lot of the other cult leaders we've studied,
Speaker 3: the Twelve Tribes, which we did earlier this year, comes
Speaker 3: to mind. Crefield starts out when he first moves to Corvallis,
Speaker 3: he's not giving the whole span of like what his
Speaker 3: beliefs have become. He starts preaching relatively popular Christian doctrine,
Speaker 3: and he's still he's identifying himself as a prophet, but
Speaker 3: he's basically saying, like I'm a messenger who's and God
Speaker 3: talked directly to me. But he's still he's like giving,
Speaker 3: he's respectful of like the local churches. He's not trying
Speaker 3: to get in their way. He's not trying to like
Speaker 3: out himself as somebody who's like running against all of
Speaker 3: the existing kind of religious infrastructure in the town.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: More of what he's saying is that, like, hey, I
Speaker 3: have this close connection to God, and if you listen
Speaker 3: to what I'm saying, I can help guide you to
Speaker 3: spiritual perfection. That's the term he uses a lot, And
Speaker 3: this is kind of his key innovation, right, which is
Speaker 3: that he's not just saying I am speaking with God,
Speaker 3: but I can teach you how to receive direct messages
Speaker 3: from God, right, Oh, which God, Yeah, it gives people
Speaker 3: a little bit more to aspire to rather than just
Speaker 3: listening to you, Like they get to get messages from God.
Speaker 3: And what it's also going to mean is that, like
Speaker 3: if Crefield's not around to talk to them, like if
Speaker 3: he's in prison and stuff, the cult can perpetuate because
Speaker 3: these people are also talking to God themselves.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So it's a smart it's a smart way to set
Speaker 3: this shit up. He begins to claim, you know, once
Speaker 3: he's got people following him, showing up every week to
Speaker 3: listen to him preach that once everyone's ready, like, once
Speaker 3: people have been following his guidance enough, they'll be added
Speaker 3: to a holy roll in heaven where God lists all
Speaker 3: of his best friends.
Speaker 2: Right, and this is oh, that's what the role is.
Speaker 3: One theory as to where that came from.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: The other theory is that it has something to do
Speaker 3: with the specific nature of how they are worshiping when
Speaker 3: he's holding these big preaching sessions. And I'm going to
Speaker 3: quit from Blodget McCracken again. For hours, Craffield kept his
Speaker 3: flock in a state of frenzied excitement. He had them rolling, praying, rolling, wailing, rolling, groaning, rolling, singing, rolling, clapping, rolling, stomping, rolling, tumbling,
Speaker 3: rolling and rolling and rolling for hours on end. He
Speaker 3: had them rolling twelve hours if it was a short service,
Speaker 3: twenty four hours if it was a typical service. All
Speaker 3: heads were spinning because they were glorying in heaven and.
Speaker 2: So what the fuck?
Speaker 3: Yeah, He's literally got them rolling around on the ground
Speaker 3: for twenty four hours at a stretch.
Speaker 2: And part of what's power? I get that, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: kind of want that.
Speaker 3: Who wouldn't want that?
Speaker 4: I would love to just make a bunch of piggies
Speaker 4: roll in front of me, Is that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Oh for god, I have to feel Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: probably what was going on in like Andy Kaufman's head
Speaker 3: when he made that audience like walk with him to
Speaker 3: get ice cream, where he's like, I could take this
Speaker 3: much further.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's unlimited power, just takes it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they occupy a police data.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think also what's going on here? You know,
Speaker 3: like little little little kids when they find out if
Speaker 3: they can like spin around, they get kind of dizzy.
Speaker 3: They yeah, a lot. It's like getting high at the
Speaker 3: first way.
Speaker 2: Totally is exactly what I was thinking, is like, is
Speaker 2: he getting these high rolling.
Speaker 3: Because like, yeah, they're They're like especially if you're not eating,
Speaker 3: you're starving yourself and rolling around a bunch, Yeah, you're
Speaker 3: gonna feel weird.
Speaker 2: You know, you're gonna become susceptible.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, and this kind of like some of this
Speaker 3: is classic cold shit, right, the whole starving people for
Speaker 3: periods of time. A lot of colts do this because
Speaker 3: it makes you worse a decision making. I haven't heard
Speaker 3: of anyone having people like roll around on the ground
Speaker 3: hours to get them all buzz. That's kind of.
Speaker 2: Cool, that's mk roltra.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's how we're gonna get you to fucking
Speaker 4: give us the goods.
Speaker 3: That's kind of a credible theory as to where the
Speaker 3: name Holy rollers comes from, too, is like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: I get why you would call about that. They're literally
Speaker 3: worshiping by rolling around on the ground.
Speaker 2: Yeah makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Now, this kind of all consuming worship is consistent
Speaker 3: with what Crefield was starting to claim about his God
Speaker 3: inspired take on Christianity. He believed, and he would argue,
Speaker 3: God had told him that true Christians should not have
Speaker 3: time for anything else in their lives but worship. Right,
Speaker 3: anything else you're doing farming, raising your kids, literally, anything
Speaker 3: but worship is a waste of time and of the devil. Right,
Speaker 3: So if you're you know, the upside of that is
Speaker 3: that it keeps everyone focused on him the whole time.
Speaker 3: The downside is that spending a full day or more
Speaker 3: rolling on the ground is not conducive to like growing
Speaker 3: the food you need to survive.
Speaker 4: Right right, Yeah, Subsistence farmers like they can only roll
Speaker 4: for a little bit and then they're Gonta get back
Speaker 4: to the farming.
Speaker 3: They don't have a lot of rolling time. But it's
Speaker 3: also the other thing we just noted, how starving yourself
Speaker 3: and rolling around a bunch gets you kind of in
Speaker 3: this altered state that makes you more suggestible. That's not
Speaker 3: the only thing going on. It's also fun, right his worship.
Speaker 3: They're not just rolling around. They're like rolling and dancing
Speaker 3: and like flinging their bodies around and like shrieking screaming.
Speaker 3: They are expressing themselves and their feelings both through like
Speaker 3: vocalization and through physical movements. And these are people not
Speaker 3: only are these all subsistence farmers, which is a difficult
Speaker 3: and often brutal way to exist, especially in nineteen oh three.
Speaker 3: This is a super strict Victorian prudish society that is
Speaker 3: anti women expressing themselves. That's anti many different facets of
Speaker 3: self expression we consider like normal today, and he's giving
Speaker 3: them an outlet like that's it's fun. People like being
Speaker 3: in Crefield's cult a lot better than they likely dying
Speaker 3: on a farm in rural lord Agon.
Speaker 2: You know, like yeah, this is like uh, you know,
Speaker 2: peloton classes or typo or something.
Speaker 3: There's a definite element of peloton type like that, that
Speaker 3: kind of ship here. And most of the people joining
Speaker 3: his cult are women, right, Yeah, some of them are poor,
Speaker 3: but all of them feel like they're missing something like
Speaker 3: in part what you get from all these people like
Speaker 3: they seem bored with their lives because their life fucking sucky.
Speaker 4: Seventeen Yeah, guy shows up, hot fucking German guy shows up,
Speaker 4: is like, hey, we're rolling this week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they're going to be like sure, yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't want.
Speaker 2: To go back. Yeah. This is a time when like
Speaker 2: a game was like having a wheel and a stick.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, closing your eyes and pretending your brother
Speaker 3: didn't die of consumption, you know, like that's a fun
Speaker 3: parlor game for us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, or reading one of two newspapers that are keeping
Speaker 4: tabs on your neighbors.
Speaker 3: You hear about this bi called shit.
Speaker 2: So uh.
Speaker 3: Prefield preached a sense of separation from the profane world,
Speaker 3: but he also utilized the tactics that he'd learned out
Speaker 3: in it, and chief among them was hypnotism. Right, we
Speaker 3: don't have as much to tail about this as I'd like,
Speaker 3: but it is theorized that he took classes in hypnotism.
Speaker 3: He's basically certain that he did because he's using a
Speaker 3: lot of like at the time, hypnotism is like a
Speaker 3: viral meme spreading through society. It's super hip, and a
Speaker 3: lot of what he's doing in his speeches is like
Speaker 3: kind of borders on hypnotism, right, Like, he seems to
Speaker 3: be very familiar with that and utilizing that as well,
Speaker 3: which helps is part of why he's got this popularity
Speaker 3: early on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so them roll around, I mean that shit is
Speaker 4: fucking you know that. Yeah, feels kind of hypnotic. Instead
Speaker 4: of a watch swinging back and forth, it's your head.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so you know this, Dozens and dozens flock
Speaker 3: to his banner, but you know, dozens hundreds more of
Speaker 3: people in Corvallis are angry.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: He's described in newspaper editorials as a hypnotist. They write
Speaker 3: that his followers are quote dead to all human sympathies.
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, I mean they're doing what I would if
Speaker 2: I saw this in the wild, I a modern person
Speaker 2: would say they're witches. Yeah, yes, so I could see
Speaker 2: like the rest.
Speaker 4: Of the town or the neighboring towns being like, what
Speaker 4: the fuck is happening here?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, this disturbs a lot of people. Sure, and
Speaker 3: it's also like the idea.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Part of why I'm not sure exactly how solid the
Speaker 3: hypnotism claims are is that the journalists at the time
Speaker 3: use this a lot, and a large reason why they
Speaker 3: describe him as a hypnotist is because they have to
Speaker 3: explain how all of these young women are drawn to
Speaker 3: him while in their opinion, he's ugly, right.
Speaker 2: He's not even that hot, and they all are all out.
Speaker 3: I'm going to quote from Sophie Coe's right up here quote.
Speaker 3: Edmund Craffield was described as being physically unattractive and homely,
Speaker 3: but very persuasive and attractive for other reasons. His personality
Speaker 3: was said to be magnetic. Many claimed that he had
Speaker 3: power overwhere others, especially women, that put them under a spell.
Speaker 3: Now those other reasons we will get into a little
Speaker 3: bit later, but not quite yet for now. The final
Speaker 3: piece of the Craffield puzzle, and the real bit of
Speaker 3: genius in his cult, was that he doesn't just promise
Speaker 3: conversations with God. He added a ticking clock. Right, you
Speaker 3: can connect directly with God. He can talk to you personally.
Speaker 3: But there's only so many names that we have space
Speaker 3: for on the holy role. Right, God's like one of
Speaker 3: those cell phone plans in the ninety NINETI where you
Speaker 3: got to like pick your five friends to text with
Speaker 3: for free. Like that's that's how speaking with God works.
Speaker 2: Yeah, God doesn't do roaming data like God. You have
Speaker 2: to be in the plan.
Speaker 4: God's plan is a very very cheap cell phone plays.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love.
Speaker 3: And you know who else offers cheap cell phone plans
Speaker 3: all the products and services at one of them? Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 3: at least one of them does in fact.
Speaker 2: Uh oh good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so at least one, at least one, sometimes two,
Speaker 3: sometimes multiple.
Speaker 4: Cell phone services fighting in the cell phone Yeah.
Speaker 6: Anyway, ah, we're back.
Speaker 3: Hey, we're talking about Eddie C. So many of the
Speaker 3: first members of Crefield's cult are Salvation Army volunteers who
Speaker 3: saw his personal and astatic relationship with God as much
Speaker 3: preferable to acting as foot soldiers for donations. Now, initially,
Speaker 3: he would allow you to kind of be in his
Speaker 3: flock and also stay a member of the Salvation Army
Speaker 3: or stay a member of one of the other churches
Speaker 3: that are in town in Corvallis. But soon he starts
Speaker 3: to warn his growing flock that other Christians are not trustworthy, right,
Speaker 3: and they have to start isolating themselves. He preached, quote,
Speaker 3: when you get him the Holy Ghost, you'll bring consternation
Speaker 3: wherever you go. Peace ceases when you make your appearance.
Speaker 3: The so called Christians of the modern churches of today
Speaker 3: rise up in arms against you and call you a
Speaker 3: disturber of the peace, charging you with the grime of
Speaker 3: breaking up their churches. And he absolutely went deliberately about
Speaker 3: breaking up churches.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: First, he uses his familiarity with the organization to pull
Speaker 3: in Salvation Army volunteers, and then he would like preach
Speaker 3: to people outside of churches when they were in the
Speaker 3: mood to receive God, and once they start getting interested
Speaker 3: in his idea of this direct converse connection with God.
Speaker 3: He introduced a question, right, if your old church, or
Speaker 3: if the Salvation Army was really holy, wouldn't you already
Speaker 3: be talking with God? Right, you've already accepted that this
Speaker 3: is the goal, and you're not, which means these must
Speaker 3: be false churches.
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, he makes a great point.
Speaker 3: He makes a solid point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, people got to go to church every sum They
Speaker 4: don't talk to God once, or God at least doesn't
Speaker 4: talk Now BacT.
Speaker 3: No, but you take mushrooms. Boom, you're right there, baby.
Speaker 4: Take mushrooms. Talk to the trees, dog bill, give you
Speaker 4: some life advice.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, So perhaps it says more about how boring
Speaker 3: Corvalis is than anything. But this pitch worked on quite
Speaker 3: a few people. The Gazette, a local paper, wrote this
Speaker 3: in December of nineteen oh two. The Salvation Armies people
Speaker 3: were not entirely of God, or so Crefield, God's elect
Speaker 3: had told them. So all of God's annointed deserted the army.
Speaker 3: The big drum of the Salvation Army is no longer
Speaker 3: in evidence about eight o'clock each evening, and tambourines are
Speaker 3: very cheap. The army has gone to its religious waterloo.
Speaker 3: It had met a body of divine healers, the Army
Speaker 3: of Holiness or something, and went over to the enemy.
Speaker 3: True religion of a respectable character, a religion that is reasonable,
Speaker 3: that commands at least the respect of the greatest thinkers
Speaker 3: and a better class of people, is the last thing
Speaker 3: on earth that should be treated in a contemptuous manner.
Speaker 3: But a holy show that is a burlesque on religion
Speaker 3: is a bad thing for any community, as it has
Speaker 3: not taken seria and consequently lays the foundation for the
Speaker 3: youth of the land to scoff at religion of any form.
Speaker 3: There should be reason and moderation in all things. There
Speaker 3: may be efficacy in prayer. Who can say there is not,
Speaker 3: But it must be the prayer of a sane mind
Speaker 3: and a reasonable being. The prayer of a religious fanatic
Speaker 3: cannot avail much. Sho you suck? Just that is by way.
Speaker 3: This story is not a story of like the good
Speaker 3: people of Corvallis and this evil cult leader. Everyone sucks
Speaker 3: in this story, right, Everyone is like, they're all pieces
Speaker 3: of shit. So is this reporter right being like our
Speaker 3: Victorian churches that teach you to hate your penis, you know,
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 2: They don't even punch their balls in that church.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they're not locking themselves inside a chastity belt.
Speaker 3: Listen to this not telling them that you can have fun?
Speaker 4: Yeah no, this is like it reminds me of what
Speaker 4: was that wild wild country where you like learn about
Speaker 4: the Rajniche and then they do interviews with the townsfolk and.
Speaker 2: I was like, I don't know if I like them either.
Speaker 3: Yes, I would have poisoned them too.
Speaker 2: Fuck.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I would have did some ground beavers in
Speaker 4: their water supply as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, why not? Why not? I do that anyway just
Speaker 3: for fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hilarious to those people don't get a life
Speaker 2: beavers in their water A beaver.
Speaker 3: Yeah, scientists recommend at least you drink three beavers per year.
Speaker 2: So right, yeah, that's a good science. Move on.
Speaker 3: So one of Craffield's first converts was a young woman
Speaker 3: named Maud Hurt, which is kind of a kind of
Speaker 3: a cool name, like if you were doing like a
Speaker 3: fucking Warren Ellis comic about like a badass female preacher
Speaker 3: who was like killing I don't know, gangsters in nineteen
Speaker 3: oh four, probably want to Hurt. Yeah, cool name, good stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So one of her friends told a journalist later that
Speaker 3: from an early age, Maud's chief aim had been quote
Speaker 3: to become nearly as perfect as a Christian could be,
Speaker 3: And for a time she practiced this by like she
Speaker 3: was always the person if like you were sick, she'd
Speaker 3: go over to your house, she'd watch you, she'd take
Speaker 3: care of your kids, if you had like a harvest
Speaker 3: and stuff. She's just a very nice, giving person.
Speaker 2: Now that's beginner level. Shit, yeah, let's get to the
Speaker 2: real Christian ship.
Speaker 3: Well, when she's fourteen, she decides to do that. She
Speaker 3: joins the Salvation Army, where she meets Creffield, and very
Speaker 3: soon thereafter is like, I'm out. You know, the Salvation
Speaker 3: Army is too focused on money. I want to meet
Speaker 3: this guy who is is kind of yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: like it. I'm getting in there.
Speaker 4: I'm picturing Willem Dafoe, but based on the way they're
Speaker 4: writing about him.
Speaker 3: Is just like for another reason too, Yes, he would
Speaker 3: be the thing. He'd be the right guy to play this,
Speaker 3: or at least Willem Dafoe like circa Boondock Saints, we
Speaker 3: have a great guy to play this. So you do
Speaker 3: get similar stories from other converts, as this passage from
Speaker 3: the Holy Rulers makes clear. One of Creffield's most ardent
Speaker 3: followers was Samson Levins. Samson, thirty five, the second youngest
Speaker 3: of nine children, had been a private in the Spanish
Speaker 3: American War and was now a logger. He had a
Speaker 3: deep interest in the Methodist Church, he said, but when
Speaker 3: it failed to meet his heart's desire, he joined Crefield's church.
Speaker 3: Some people think ours is a strange doctrine. But John
Speaker 3: Wesley was attacked by mobs when he founded the Methodist Church,
Speaker 3: Samson said, adding, of course the church now is not
Speaker 3: as he John Wesley left it, So he's like, I
Speaker 3: was already a part of this kind of fringe movement
Speaker 3: that was founded by a nut. And you know the
Speaker 3: fact that Crefield's is weird is just makes him seem
Speaker 3: more legitimate to me. Right, Yeah, well, the Methodist Church
Speaker 3: has gotten too normal. Now it's time to get weird again.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now we see this same pattern over and over again.
Speaker 3: A man or a woman of belief joins the church,
Speaker 3: but they don't feel spiritually sated. Right, Maud doesn't feel
Speaker 3: sated by the Salvation Army. This fucking dude Levins doesn't
Speaker 3: feel sated from the Methodist Church, and so they leave
Speaker 3: to find something more radical. And it's not just radical,
Speaker 3: but it's interesting. I cannot overemphasize how much the appeal
Speaker 3: of being in Crefield's cult is based on the fact
Speaker 3: that life is boring as shit outside of it.
Speaker 4: Right, you have to reckon with the fact with how
Speaker 4: much this place fucking fucked.
Speaker 3: Yes, that is a big sh So in mid nineteen
Speaker 3: o three, the city of Corvallis, officially forbade Criffield and
Speaker 3: the Holy Rollers from hosting meetings in Corvallis. Exiled, Edmund
Speaker 3: found an island a few miles outside of town. Oh yeah, man,
Speaker 3: we're doing it. We're doing it. We're getting doing island as.
Speaker 2: We get on the water. That's what gets weird.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's how you That's when colts get good.
Speaker 2: That's when colts really find themselves.
Speaker 3: Folks.
Speaker 2: There is an island in a place where to leave
Speaker 2: means to drown.
Speaker 3: There is an island right in the middle of Portland, Oregon.
Speaker 3: You know, it's right in the Willamette. If we buy
Speaker 3: that island, folks, if we raise money together and buy
Speaker 3: me that island, I promise I'll make this guy look
Speaker 3: like a fucking chump. Like, first off, going to get
Speaker 3: a lot of you killed, Like let's just be oh yeah,
Speaker 3: but it'll be a good Netflix documentary into.
Speaker 2: Well it's blood and blood out.
Speaker 4: But also you know where you're gonna learn about how
Speaker 4: to do like knive throwing, You're gonna learn how to
Speaker 4: time not You're gonna learn, you know, how to wash feet.
Speaker 3: Once they kill us. Taylor Lautner is gonna play me.
Speaker 3: It's gonna be great. Oh, it's gonna be so oh
Speaker 3: my god, thank you, thank you. You guys have a
Speaker 3: similar why why why because that, Sophie, Because.
Speaker 1: You didn't know I know, no, you did not get
Speaker 1: that the Taylor Lottner hat I wore like two months ago.
Speaker 1: You didn't get the reference, and that hurt my face.
Speaker 3: I have hat blindness, Sophie.
Speaker 2: Thank you for I read it out.
Speaker 1: I read it out loud to you, and then I.
Speaker 3: May see your blindness too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well listeners, Robert nor any member of the schools
Speaker 1: on media team. Not a single one of them knew
Speaker 1: my where the hell have you been? Loka hat? Not
Speaker 1: a single one of them. And then I made them
Speaker 1: all watch the clip twice on a team.
Speaker 2: Meeting, because is that Twilight?
Speaker 1: That's what? Thank you, Matt, Thank you Matt.
Speaker 2: Yeah, why yes, it is. Well, it's because it's Taylor
Speaker 2: Ltner is either that or Spy Kids.
Speaker 3: Spike Kids is my.
Speaker 4: He wasn't in Spy Kids, he wasn't Shark Boy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh gosh, same have.
Speaker 3: Shark Boy slash Spy Kids blindness too, so you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: it happens. You can't make fun of me. For it anyway.
Speaker 3: In mid nineteen oh that's who's gonna play you. In
Speaker 3: mid nineteen oh three, the city of Corvallis officially forbade
Speaker 3: Creffield and the Holy Rollers from hosting meetings in town.
Speaker 3: So he decides we're going to move to this island,
Speaker 3: Robinson's Island, and he described to his followers, He's like,
Speaker 3: this is literally the Garden of Eden. So biblical scholars
Speaker 3: out there if you're curious. The Garden of Eden, it
Speaker 3: turns out, was based right on the outskirts of Corvallis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you could take a ferry to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you could take a ferry there. So again, and
Speaker 3: it's you know, if you've been to a lot of
Speaker 3: these islands in Western Oregon, they are very pretty places.
Speaker 3: Like it's not a big stretch to be like this
Speaker 3: is paradise. Especially this is kind of like midsummer or
Speaker 3: so late summer, which is like, it's incredible and it's
Speaker 3: easy to see how you would enjoy living out in
Speaker 3: one of these islands. And like midsummer in Western Oregon.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's none of those snitch journalists out there, and
Speaker 4: now you can roll around on the ground rate time.
Speaker 2: No one's going to yell.
Speaker 3: At you are popping out because he's letting people know.
Speaker 3: At this point, you know, what's what is godly is
Speaker 3: not wearing these fancy, new fangled clothes.
Speaker 2: You know, that's the whole point of the Garden of Eden.
Speaker 3: Dog absolutely eve ate that.
Speaker 4: Apple like an idiot. Everyone just had their titties and
Speaker 4: it is pretty fun.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're doing a lot of rolling around. They're shrieking
Speaker 3: for hours or days at a time. They're not wearing
Speaker 3: much in the way of clothing. They don't have a
Speaker 3: lot of food, but there's a peach orchard nearby, so
Speaker 3: every day they just gorge themselves on stolen peaches and
Speaker 3: then they return to worshiping, which is not the worst
Speaker 3: life you can live in this period of time.
Speaker 2: Everything.
Speaker 4: Yes, you're describing what my sex cult fancy is. It's
Speaker 4: just like fucking gorging myself on peaches, roll around screaming too.
Speaker 3: What's what's not to like?
Speaker 2: I'm married and have a baby, but I could still.
Speaker 3: Jam That all does sound fun, But if you're keeping
Speaker 3: track on your cult bingo card Craffield has at this
Speaker 3: point convinced his followers to sever themselves from their friends
Speaker 3: and their community and work them into a state of
Speaker 3: constant exhaustion and starvation. And if you if you know
Speaker 3: your cults, you know what comes next. It's time to
Speaker 3: start fucking them right like that is that is what
Speaker 3: follows naturally, seeing nacturally the next step. So one fine day,
Speaker 3: Edmund Crefield gets up in front of his flock and
Speaker 3: he tells them that he and God have just gotten
Speaker 3: off the phone. And God, you just got off the
Speaker 3: horn with God. He's doing good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he says, Mike, com is holy.
Speaker 3: That is where this ends. He first says, God has
Speaker 3: told me I need to rename myself Joshua. Right, So
Speaker 3: now Edmond Craffield is Joshua Greffield. And it gets better
Speaker 3: because God has also told him that all of his
Speaker 3: female followers are now eligible to become brides of Christ. Right,
Speaker 3: and one of these brides of Christ is going to
Speaker 3: be chosen by God to give birth to the second Coming. Right,
Speaker 3: one of you is going to be the new Mary.
Speaker 3: But obviously God can't just pick one of you. We
Speaker 3: got to test you out. And guess who's testing you out?
Speaker 3: I got to audition you for God.
Speaker 4: Yeah, listen, God has not told me, he says, he
Speaker 4: needs to feel through my penis which holy vessel your
Speaker 4: pussy should receive the seed of the Lord or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that is basically almost exactly how this goes, Matt. Now,
Speaker 3: Joshua's male followers had a purpose too, of course, and
Speaker 3: their purpose was to provide him with the resources he
Speaker 3: needed to build his flock. Now, this is all he
Speaker 3: wants them doing, right. Early on, there were number of
Speaker 3: like couples who joined the Holy Rollers. Mad the Salvation
Speaker 3: Army veteran I mentioned earlier. She joined with her fiance,
Speaker 3: a guy named James Berry, who is like a local
Speaker 3: businessman and I think kind of the wealthiest guy in town.
Speaker 3: And so early on he's cool with this in part
Speaker 3: because he needs Barry's money, right, and Barry gives a
Speaker 3: couple of loans to the cult, but it's never quite enough.
Speaker 3: So one day when they're out on the island, James Berry,
Speaker 3: who's kind of like in and out right, he's not
Speaker 3: fully committed, but he's giving him money because his fiance
Speaker 3: is in it and he loves her. He arrives on
Speaker 3: the island to like check in on Maud and he
Speaker 3: finds the Holy Rollers even more excited than usual and
Speaker 3: He's like, why you guys also fucking amped up, and
Speaker 3: they're like, we're excited because God's going to build us
Speaker 3: a tabernacle. Right, He's going to start construction immediately. We're
Speaker 3: going to get our you know, we're living outside falls,
Speaker 3: getting closer. We really need a place. He's going to
Speaker 3: build it for us. And James is like, well, tabernacles
Speaker 3: ain't cheap. Where you guys getting the money to build it?
Speaker 3: And they're like, oh, you you're giving us the money.
Speaker 3: And it turns out Joshua had started preaching.
Speaker 2: Damn it, Joshua, I gotta get a second job. I
Speaker 2: gotta work for both newspapers.
Speaker 3: Now, what's really funny about this to me? So Joshua
Speaker 3: is like, we need even more money from James Berry
Speaker 3: to build a temple. Right, we need to get like
Speaker 3: all of his money as opposed to these loans he's
Speaker 3: given us. And what's the best way to do this?
Speaker 3: Should I like reach out to him, talk to him privately,
Speaker 3: be like, hey man, we need more money than you've
Speaker 3: been given us. We got to build this temple. He's
Speaker 3: like no, no, no, that he could say.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: The best thing to do is I'm gonna tell everyone
Speaker 3: that he's already agreed and then trust that that will
Speaker 3: like shame him into doing it right. Yes, this does
Speaker 3: not go over well. James like confronts the prophet and
Speaker 3: he's like, dude, I've already loaned you guys money and
Speaker 3: it's due, right, the loan is past due. And Crifield
Speaker 3: is like, I came here to pick it up. No, no, no,
Speaker 3: easy mistake to make, but it's not due. I just
Speaker 3: got off the phone with God. He said he canceled
Speaker 3: the debts, So actually, would you do me a favor
Speaker 3: in write a receipt letting me know that we don't
Speaker 3: have a debt anymore, because because God says it's canceled.
Speaker 2: I mean, like, this is pure pimps. This is like,
Speaker 2: this is such pimps. It's crazy.
Speaker 4: This guy is like, no, actually, you owe me money
Speaker 4: and I'm gonna fuck your fiance.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Oh that is exactly where this is headed. Of course,
Speaker 3: to talk about what comes next, I'm gonna quote again
Speaker 3: from Holy Rollers. God was now telling Craffield that James
Speaker 3: should quit work, sell his valuables, including his new automobile,
Speaker 3: and give the money to Craffield and devote himself to
Speaker 3: the church. The automobile, one of the first in Corvallis,
Speaker 3: was obviously something received from carnal hands. Either God or
Speaker 3: Creffield made a mistake. James said, telling God's anointed that
Speaker 3: he wasn't going to give Creffield another cent. God was
Speaker 3: mad now, or so said Craffield, who said that God
Speaker 3: would smite James for this, so he was not done.
Speaker 3: Craffield's not done with Barry. At the smiting, he decides
Speaker 3: that if this rich guy is going to stay devoted
Speaker 3: to his carnal possessions, then he certainly doesn't deserve to
Speaker 3: be married to a woman as godly as Maud, who,
Speaker 3: by coincidence, Crefield wants to have sex with.
Speaker 2: So he yeah, I mean he's known her since she
Speaker 2: was fourteen, I get.
Speaker 3: It, he tells, He tells, yeah, he tells Maud, the
Speaker 3: Lord told me that you have to break off your engagement,
Speaker 3: and she does. She does this immediately. So after this,
Speaker 3: he kind of gets high off of this, the fact
Speaker 3: that like this, he says, hey, leave your fiance. This
Speaker 3: one does it. And so he starts preaching hardcore about
Speaker 3: personal purity.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: He starts like discussing how he's got this this hatred
Speaker 3: of like the carnal He tells his followers flee fornication.
Speaker 3: Every sin that a man doeth is without the body.
Speaker 3: But he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.
Speaker 3: Are you still in bondage to your carnal nature? Is
Speaker 3: the old man still living in your heart? Have you
Speaker 3: still this man fearing spirit, this something which hinders you
Speaker 3: from becoming a visitor at all times? Do not be discouraged.
Speaker 3: God wants to use you to cleanse you, to purge
Speaker 3: you from your inbred sin, baptize you with fire, and
Speaker 3: enable you to come up to His commandments to live
Speaker 3: a holy life. Claim the promise, stand firm upon it,
Speaker 3: and the witness of the Spirit will come and will
Speaker 3: baptize you with his love and make you a holy man,
Speaker 3: Make you victorious over the world, the flesh and the devil.
Speaker 2: Hey, are you trying to funk my Why? I feel
Speaker 2: like guys, he's trying to.
Speaker 3: Fuck our why?
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, you can do it.
Speaker 3: That's what that is. That is how a lot of
Speaker 3: the men in his cult react at this point. This
Speaker 3: is when a lot of them start to Of course.
Speaker 4: They do, because every any man can see where this
Speaker 4: is exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, any man is going, I know what you're doing, dude.
Speaker 2: You're trying to fuck my wife.
Speaker 3: Now, that is happening. At the same time, what a
Speaker 3: lot of these women are doing is like, well, my
Speaker 3: husband's terrible at sex and Bet Crayfield fucks.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: That is the other half of this story, right, So yeah,
Speaker 3: the fact that this works so well seems to kind
Speaker 3: of have surprised Joshua, and so he immediately decides to
Speaker 3: double down. He tells another couple in his flock, Sophie
Speaker 3: Hartley and Lee Campbell, Hey, God wants you to end
Speaker 3: your engagement declaring, and he and he declares. He gives
Speaker 3: a speech where he's like, the relation of man to
Speaker 3: wife is unholy, and as support for this, he cites
Speaker 3: one Corinthians seven to one quote now concerning the things,
Speaker 3: whereof you wrote, unto me, it is good for a
Speaker 3: man not to touch a woman. And again he means
Speaker 3: the other men in his flock right.
Speaker 2: Right right now, different standards for him, bro.
Speaker 3: And the actual quote like context of that verse is
Speaker 3: basically from the point of the Bible where this is said,
Speaker 3: is like sexual immorality is any sex at all? But
Speaker 3: since it's inevitable men and women should get married and
Speaker 3: fulfill their marital duty right, which is not a great
Speaker 3: message either in my opinion, but it's not exactly how
Speaker 3: Graffield is portraying it. But Crayfield's theological argument is that
Speaker 3: his follower is going to get closer to God and
Speaker 3: be holy your people by issuing all sex except for
Speaker 3: the sex that he has to have in order to
Speaker 3: find the bride of Christ.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, the new Joshua isn't able to get this commandment
Speaker 3: out fast enough to stop all of his followers from
Speaker 3: getting married. Molly Sandal and Frank Hurt wed the night
Speaker 3: before God gets on the heavenly phone line with Joshua
Speaker 3: and luckily for them God, you know, because they're really
Speaker 3: concerned when they get married. And then he has this
Speaker 3: revelation like, oh my God, are we out of step
Speaker 3: with what God wants? And Joshua's like, don't worry. God
Speaker 3: told me a way that you can still receive the
Speaker 3: grace of love. Right, we just have to perform a
Speaker 3: I just have to perform a private ceremony with your
Speaker 3: wife to endower with the grace of love. So well, yeah,
Speaker 3: exactly what's happening about here. Yeah, it's not one hundred
Speaker 3: percent clear, but it's described and holy rollers is like
Speaker 3: they retire to his intent and engage in a long
Speaker 3: church service, right, and we know that afterwards he like
Speaker 3: kisses all of the women that he does this with, right,
Speaker 3: So you can put to in two together, right as
Speaker 3: to like what this service is. There are a few
Speaker 3: couples and a few people who refuse this new change
Speaker 3: for the cult, and he denounces them all as cardinal
Speaker 3: and of the devil. He makes his followers cut off
Speaker 3: contact with them normal cult leadership.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So there's also you know, if you kind of fall
Speaker 3: out of favor of Joshua and do something he calls cardinal,
Speaker 3: you don't have to leave. There is a way that
Speaker 3: you can atone and that is by letting him whip you.
Speaker 3: Right now, he does this to men and women, although
Speaker 3: I think he does it more to men than women.
Speaker 3: There's a local and contemporary news report that describes when
Speaker 3: one of Joshua's followers ed sharp like sneaks into the
Speaker 3: prophet's tint when he's like whipping another man, and he
Speaker 3: like sees the two of them, and they mistake him
Speaker 3: for the devil. Is what's written in the news article
Speaker 3: and beat the shit out.
Speaker 2: Of him with the man also, and they both beat the.
Speaker 3: Shit out of him, and then D's like, fuck this,
Speaker 3: I'm leaving the cult.
Speaker 4: Sorry, bro, we thought you were the devil. You snuck
Speaker 4: up on us while common mistake. I was whipping him
Speaker 4: and he was enjoying us.
Speaker 3: To all of us. So ed is fairly representative of
Speaker 3: a large number of male followers of Crefield, who increasingly
Speaker 3: leave the flock as time goes on and it grows
Speaker 3: clear that the primary goal of the prophet's teaching is
Speaker 3: to let him have sex with every woman in town.
Speaker 3: When some of his most stalwart male followers bulk, Crefield
Speaker 3: declares that all of the men in the camp save
Speaker 3: his three lieutenants are fake Christians and now have to
Speaker 3: be shunned by not like all non believers. Families are
Speaker 3: split up as a result of this. And if it's
Speaker 3: hard to believe that people would do this, you have
Speaker 3: to remember everyone's spending every waking hour it's been months
Speaker 3: now praying that the entire time they're awake, often for
Speaker 3: twenty four hours in a row. The only food they
Speaker 3: have is peaches, and now the only approved dick is Craffield.
Speaker 3: So like people are not in the most rational place, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: And this is the point in which the outside world, right,
Speaker 3: which includes the town of Corvallis, starts to get really concerned.
Speaker 3: The Salvation Army, concerned by declining donations and all these defections,
Speaker 3: sends one of their best soldiers out after the problem, Captain.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, this island's about to be invaded by the Salvation.
Speaker 3: They send him, Captain Charles Brooks, who has been he's
Speaker 3: been a Christian soldier for eleven years. He's recently met
Speaker 3: General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, to like talk
Speaker 3: this over, and so he.
Speaker 2: Like, this guy's got a tactical bell that he's.
Speaker 3: Gonna be like Mason of the Salvation Army, except as
Speaker 3: soon as he arrives something happens. Right within days of
Speaker 3: getting there. He like claims in a letter that he
Speaker 3: was as soon as he gets to the island, the
Speaker 3: devil approaches him. Who's and the Devil's covered in snakes,
Speaker 3: and he like sends a bunch of hideous reptiles that
Speaker 3: like swarm and cover Brooks and quote as a means
Speaker 3: of placating his devilish majesty Brooks tears off his Salvation
Speaker 3: Army uniform and throws it into the fire and then
Speaker 3: announce that he's also a prophet and joins Creffield's flock.
Speaker 4: Oh hell, yeah, this guy saw what was going on
Speaker 4: and he said like, oh, I'm down for this.
Speaker 3: Entirely possible. He's just like, this seems like more fun
Speaker 3: than the Salvation Army.
Speaker 2: Yes, he shows up at Titty Church and he's like,
Speaker 2: I prefer.
Speaker 3: Another theory too. So western Northwest Oregon is where like
Speaker 3: one of the densest places in the world for like
Speaker 3: the natural growth of magic mushrooms. You get a ship,
Speaker 3: I have a bunch of friends. People pick them all
Speaker 3: over the place here, and it's been known for a
Speaker 3: while that we have hallucinogenic mushrooms. I wouldn't be surprised
Speaker 3: if they were like the Salvation Army guys here. Let's
Speaker 3: let's give him some tea, you know, Yeah, I wouldn't
Speaker 3: be shocked if that were a factor in this. Oh yes,
Speaker 3: he also could have picked some accidentally and just made
Speaker 3: himself tripped. Not impossible. Who hated a lizard man? Thing
Speaker 3: makes me wonder, like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this hallucinated a lizard man and now I'm also
Speaker 4: talking to God that does say.
Speaker 3: Sounds a little bit like mushrooms. Yeah, So you know,
Speaker 3: it's important to note that everything we've been talking about
Speaker 3: here so far has occurred over the course of the
Speaker 3: summer of nineteen oh three. And if you haven't been here,
Speaker 3: Oregon has really mild, pleasant summers famously, right, that's something
Speaker 3: that we are infamous for, especially like western Oregon. But
Speaker 3: in the fall, it gets very wet, very fast, and
Speaker 3: also quite cold, right, and so living alone outside naked
Speaker 3: in an island not going to be a great call
Speaker 3: like come you know, September October, It's going to get
Speaker 3: markedly less pleasant, very quickly. So Maud this is able
Speaker 3: to thankfully invite her prophet and eighteen of his most
Speaker 3: devoted followers into her family home to like wade out
Speaker 3: the winter. So at this point, Crefield is now back
Speaker 3: in corballis and he has taken a significant chunk of
Speaker 3: the young men in town into his colt. He's broken
Speaker 3: up a bunch of marriages, and he has moved what
Speaker 3: resembles a harem into a family house in town. This
Speaker 3: is not popular, right, This is going to piss off
Speaker 3: a number of people, and I'm going to quote now
Speaker 3: from offbeat Oregon history author Finn JD.
Speaker 2: John.
Speaker 3: Their simple clothing consisted of a plain cloth wrapper, which
Speaker 3: one source recounts was similar to a bathrobe. The outsiders
Speaker 3: felt was inadequate to protect female modesty, and in any case,
Speaker 3: looked entirely too easy to take off. By itself. The
Speaker 3: communal living arrangement would have been bad enough, but Creffield's
Speaker 3: followers combine it with a mania for secrecy that all
Speaker 3: but invited other community members to fear the worst. Members
Speaker 3: vanished from their families lives into a locked house with
Speaker 3: barred windows, supervised only by the cult leader and his cronies.
Speaker 3: So you know, there's a lot of things small town
Speaker 3: Oregonians are willing to overlook in neighbors, but not stealing
Speaker 3: their sisters and wives, and to.
Speaker 2: Be entire yeah, and making them dress all slowly, to.
Speaker 3: Be entirely fair to Craffield. That's how these guys viewed it.
Speaker 3: The men in court Vallas, it's not clear to me
Speaker 3: that he's stealing anybody. Right. Most times when we talk
Speaker 3: about a sex cult, they're pretty profoundly abusive. But the
Speaker 3: culture is also very abusive to women in this period,
Speaker 3: and it's it seems like, based on the information we have,
Speaker 3: the women who join this cult much prefer it to
Speaker 3: their lives outside of the cult.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I gotta say from my you know, time
Speaker 2: visiting or like like Portland, not much as.
Speaker 3: Not much as yeah, you know, yeah.
Speaker 2: The women there, they still like to be free. You know,
Speaker 2: I've had brunch at multiple.
Speaker 3: Strip clubs there and and you know, I do think
Speaker 3: a lot of like the portrayal of like this cult
Speaker 3: is like him being this, he stole all these women,
Speaker 3: he's ruining the women in town is based on the
Speaker 3: fact that this is a deeply misogynistic society, and like,
Speaker 3: I think a lot of these women are making, potentially,
Speaker 3: I think it would be reasonable, to say, a perfectly
Speaker 3: rational decision to live a much more pleasant life with
Speaker 3: this guy than with their shitty.
Speaker 4: The guy talks good, he's hot, he's got a big hog,
Speaker 4: and he's like, yeah, do whatever you want.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's like, he's like he's manipulating them.
Speaker 3: He's absolutely abusive. It's just it's not clear to me
Speaker 3: that he is more abusive than the men in town.
Speaker 4: Right right, Yeah, it's it's the it's an abnormal type
Speaker 4: of abusive.
Speaker 3: But maybe it's just different, maybe not even lesser, But
Speaker 3: like I think it's not. It's not clear to me
Speaker 3: that these women are not making the most kind of
Speaker 3: informed decision they can be making, that this is better
Speaker 3: than their lives in town. Which doesn't mean he's not
Speaker 3: also abusive. It's just a bad time, right. So yeah,
Speaker 3: we're gonna talk about all of that and much more
Speaker 3: in part two. But before we get into part two,
Speaker 3: Matt leeb, you exist on the internet in a variety
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Speaker 3: So please text bastards to five oh one to five
Speaker 3: five if you're in the mood to donate, that's bastards
Speaker 3: to fine.
Speaker 4: And if you I don't know when this episode's going
Speaker 4: to come out, so I don't know if the tickets.
Speaker 1: Oh, next week, no, no, no, no, no no. The next
Speaker 1: week is Thanksgiving, so we're not We're not.
Speaker 3: Fuck next week. The hell with next week?
Speaker 1: Next week fire the last week of the last week
Speaker 1: of November.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, well the tickets won't necessarily be on sale,
Speaker 2: but I might as well just say March seventeenth, Sunday
Speaker 2: Punchline and Sacramento, myself and my wife Quarantine will.
Speaker 3: Be I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that at all.
Speaker 2: No, I always do it.
Speaker 4: We are going to be headlining the Punchline in Sacramento.
Speaker 4: That Sacramento, California, seven pm, Sunday.
Speaker 2: March seventeenth.
Speaker 4: If you can't get your tickets, then you know, just
Speaker 4: keep that date in mind and eventually the tickets will
Speaker 4: go on.
Speaker 3: Say yeah, so go to Hell. I Love you.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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