Speaker 1: You're about to listen to one of our favorite episodes
Speaker 1: of trust Me from July fourteenth, twenty twenty one, about
Speaker 1: Glenn Washington's experiences growing up in the apocalyptic religion the
Speaker 1: Worldwide Church of God. If you're new here, follow the
Speaker 1: show so you don't miss the July thirtieth return of
Speaker 1: trust Me on the Exactly Right Network. If you have
Speaker 1: your own story of being in a cult or a
Speaker 1: high control group, or if you've had an experience with
Speaker 1: manipulation or abuse of power you'd like to share, leave
Speaker 1: us a message on our hotline number at five one
Speaker 1: three nine hundred two nine five.
Speaker 2: Five, or shoot us an email at trust Me pod
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Speaker 3: Trust Me, trust Me.
Speaker 4: I'm like a swat person.
Speaker 3: I've never lived to you, and we never.
Speaker 4: Have a live.
Speaker 1: If you think that one person has all the answers,
Speaker 1: don't Welcome to trust Me, the podcast about Colts, extreme
Speaker 1: belief and the abusive power from two former members who've
Speaker 1: actually experienced it.
Speaker 5: I am Lola.
Speaker 6: Blanc and I am Megan Elizabeth.
Speaker 1: Today, our guest is Glenn Washington, whose voice you may
Speaker 1: have heard already because he hosts Public Radio's storytelling show
Speaker 1: Snap Judgment, which is so good as well as the
Speaker 1: podcasts Heaven's Gate and Spooked, and probably more so. Glenn
Speaker 1: is here with us today because he actually grew up
Speaker 1: in an apocalyptic religious cult called the Worldwide Church of God.
Speaker 1: He's going to tell us about what it was like
Speaker 1: believing that the world could end at any minute, the
Speaker 1: special trips members of the church would go on to
Speaker 1: intentionally blow a huge chunk of their income, and how
Speaker 1: thanks to the group's white supremacist ideologies, he wasn't allowed
Speaker 1: to date outside of his own race. He's also going
Speaker 1: to tell us about the book that began to change
Speaker 1: his thinking, the trip that solidified that change, and what
Speaker 1: he believes now. Very excited to get into that, but
Speaker 1: before we do, Dearest Megan, what is the cultiest thing
Speaker 1: that's happened to you?
Speaker 5: This week?
Speaker 2: My boyfriend's mom started selling a like skincare line. Okay,
Speaker 2: it's called Rodin and Fields or something. Everybody knows what
Speaker 2: I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: I'm sure, but I don't know what you're talking about,
Speaker 1: but I'm just going to act like I do.
Speaker 2: It's a skincare line and she was like, you should
Speaker 2: try it, and I was like, Okay, whatever, but I did, right,
Speaker 2: and people keep saying up, my skin looks good and saying,
Speaker 2: what are you using? And then I have to basically
Speaker 2: give them like a cult spiel back.
Speaker 5: Like a little little MLM.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm like, well, it's this thing. You order it online.
Speaker 2: You can get a discount if you'd pay the seventy
Speaker 2: five dollars and like all the shit, and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: I thought, this is so embarrassing.
Speaker 6: I need to just say I'm using like something else.
Speaker 5: Have you found them any customers yet?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 5: You have?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, the great Yeah that's great. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you're embedded in a pyramid scheme now exactly.
Speaker 5: So that's cool.
Speaker 2: That's pretty cool. Did anything as cult tea happen to
Speaker 2: you this week?
Speaker 1: Well, this week I have been dealing with the past
Speaker 1: couple of weeks. Actually, I've been dealing with some physical problems. Okay,
Speaker 1: health things, and they have to do with my bladder.
Speaker 1: Oh tmi, a'all love me some TMI.
Speaker 6: Why a flatter is sexy? They they touched the vaiba
Speaker 6: to me?
Speaker 1: Okay, oh my god, yes they do touch the vagina
Speaker 1: and it's a fucking nightmare. But as a result of
Speaker 1: these issues, and as a result of having terrible health insurance,
Speaker 1: I'm like, don't even get me started on the fucking
Speaker 1: stupid healthcare system in America. But I have been unable
Speaker 1: to see a competent doctor. And so now I'm like
Speaker 1: in a place where I am feeling rather desperate and
Speaker 1: I feel like I am one hundred percent vulnerable in
Speaker 1: this moment. I spoke to my friend's mom on the phone,
Speaker 1: who's like a homeopathic.
Speaker 5: Healer, which you know, is so.
Speaker 1: Not something that I do. And if someone came up
Speaker 1: to me and was like, Lola, I have the solution
Speaker 1: for your thing. All you need is this five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars program, I'd be like, I'm in.
Speaker 5: I'm sold. I will join. Just make it stop, Just
Speaker 5: someone make it stop.
Speaker 6: Please. Oh my god.
Speaker 5: That's where I'm at.
Speaker 2: My old roommate, I remember once I came home and
Speaker 2: she had all of these bottles of tequila and the
Speaker 2: nice tequila, those like white and.
Speaker 6: Blue bottle, weird bottles.
Speaker 2: You know, And I was like, are you having a party,
Speaker 2: And she was like, no, I went to a natural healer,
Speaker 2: and she said, to cure my bladder infection, I need
Speaker 2: to take a bath in tequila.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: And I was like, that can't be true. You have
Speaker 2: to not do it. But she did it and it
Speaker 2: didn't go away.
Speaker 1: So yeah, well that's I feel like generally what happens
Speaker 1: when you see someone who's not a doctor.
Speaker 5: Sometimes it's great.
Speaker 1: Even actual doctors don't know what the fuck they're talking
Speaker 1: about half of the time, which is what's especially maddening.
Speaker 2: This is the true cultiest thing of the week. If
Speaker 2: it was happening to men, there would be forty thousand cures.
Speaker 6: It's not.
Speaker 2: It's happening to women. So they're like, we don't know,
Speaker 2: it's weird. Figure it out.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know so many women who are struggling
Speaker 1: with recurring chronic mystery diseases that science is just like, oh,
Speaker 1: needs more research.
Speaker 2: You're imagining it probably stressed. Yeah, stop wiping from back
Speaker 2: to front.
Speaker 1: We're I'm like, oh, I am so fucking If another
Speaker 1: doctor tells me that, I will scream. I know to
Speaker 1: not I don't okay, not get disgusting, but we.
Speaker 5: Know not to do that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, we do.
Speaker 1: But anyway, it's it's rough life over here, y'all. I
Speaker 1: will survive. I'm a survivor. I'm gonna make it. I'm
Speaker 1: a survivor, keep on surviving.
Speaker 6: Beautiful.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful, right, beautiful Dusty's child lyrics.
Speaker 5: Okay, how about we start talking to Glenn.
Speaker 6: Now sounds good. Let's do it. Let's do it.
Speaker 5: Welcome Glenn Washington to the show.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me here today. I
Speaker 4: really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Ah, we really appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 1: I am such a big fan of you and your
Speaker 1: voice and your podcasts. You have such a soothing but
Speaker 1: also incredibly engaging audio presence.
Speaker 5: So I'm very excited.
Speaker 4: What go on? Go on?
Speaker 6: And now you can admire his face too.
Speaker 2: We can see his face so wow, full package, no
Speaker 2: make up, fill up.
Speaker 5: I would never have known.
Speaker 1: So. One thing that is a fun fact about you
Speaker 1: as the host of Snap Judgment and other shows including
Speaker 1: Heaven's Gates and Spooked, is that you yourself grew up
Speaker 1: in a cult.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm a cult baby, that's for sure.
Speaker 5: Cult baby gang.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you grew up in a group called the Worldwide
Speaker 1: Church of God now called Grace Communion International. It was
Speaker 1: founded by a man named Herbert w Armstrong, radio and
Speaker 1: televangelist who built his following through religious broadcasts in the thirties,
Speaker 1: forties and fifties. I actually listened to one this morning,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I found it very fascinating because it was
Speaker 1: like from nineteen forty one or something, and he was
Speaker 1: talking about how Hitler was evil, and I was like, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: if I heard that on the radio, I probably would
Speaker 1: find that appealing. You know, can you please tell us
Speaker 1: how your family came to be involved in this group.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's interesting you were listening to something from nineteen
Speaker 4: forty one, because I'm not sure if you listened to
Speaker 4: the whole thing, but he probably would have said that
Speaker 4: Hitler's wise foretold the end of the world and that
Speaker 4: Jesus was going to come soon. That was something he
Speaker 4: starts selling in the forties. He sold it again in
Speaker 4: the fifties every so often the world was coming to
Speaker 4: an end, and that he had a secret access to
Speaker 4: unlock the Bible that no one else knew but him.
Speaker 4: Herbert taught a very fundamentalist view of Christianity, and the
Speaker 4: big thing was he would always say, it's prove all things,
Speaker 4: go see it if it's in the Bible yourself, and
Speaker 4: growing up that's what we did. We studying the Bible
Speaker 4: In fact, as a kid, I spend a lot of
Speaker 4: time memorizing the Bible.
Speaker 3: That's something you can only do as a child.
Speaker 4: Adults can't really do that, but you can do another kid,
Speaker 4: memorize huge passes of the Bible.
Speaker 5: Like how much of the Bible are we talking here?
Speaker 3: Chapters and passages?
Speaker 4: So much? I can't so many, so much stuff. The
Speaker 4: church sponsored something called Bible Bowl. I'll just have y'all know.
Speaker 4: I was the Bible Bowl champion of Michigan.
Speaker 2: We are talking to the Bible Bowl champion.
Speaker 3: The Bible Ball champion.
Speaker 4: You better believe it. What passage? What did you say?
Speaker 4: Jeremih ten verse three? I know, I know what.
Speaker 2: It is so competitive about it.
Speaker 6: It is so funny too.
Speaker 4: Write competitive about not just reciting passes of the Bible.
Speaker 4: Everyone had to basically follow along with the Bible when
Speaker 4: you went to church. If the pastor says Zachariah is
Speaker 4: three six, if you take longer than ten seconds to
Speaker 4: turn there in your Bible, then that means you need
Speaker 4: to study more because you should be able to just
Speaker 4: flip to it right away.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 4: And I say all that because yes, it was a
Speaker 4: crazy cult.
Speaker 3: Yes it was absurd yes, it was all these things.
Speaker 4: But at the same time, there was that element where
Speaker 4: you had to go in and engulf yourself in this
Speaker 4: book that you supposedly believed. It's been my experience that
Speaker 4: since then, a lot of people claim to believe that
Speaker 4: book who've never read.
Speaker 6: It for sure, right, And.
Speaker 4: As crazy as that crazy cult was, and it was insanity,
Speaker 4: it was insanity squared, at least they read the book.
Speaker 5: Yeah, true.
Speaker 4: And I think in reading the book, at least in
Speaker 4: making that young generation that I was I grew up
Speaker 4: in the church and making us memorize it, it kind
Speaker 4: of sowed the scenes of their own destruction because later on,
Speaker 4: if you tell my group of teenagers that it says
Speaker 4: so and so and so in the Bible, I know it.
Speaker 6: Doesn't Yeah right, where right?
Speaker 4: I don't see you show me that way it says that,
Speaker 4: And you're digging the hole in your own ship if
Speaker 4: you do that. And that's what happened, And a lot
Speaker 4: of people it's like prove all things. That's good if
Speaker 4: you kind of have all a casual relationship with the book.
Speaker 4: But once you get past that in a mediary period,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of things that's going to be hard
Speaker 4: to prove.
Speaker 2: Right, were you memorizing the Old Testament and the New
Speaker 2: Testament or just the New Testament?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Old Testament and the New Testament. Okay, the Old
Speaker 4: Testament is quoted one hundred and thirty seven times in
Speaker 4: the New Testament. These books cannot be taken apart from
Speaker 4: each other.
Speaker 3: They are one in the holes was teaching, but it
Speaker 3: is true.
Speaker 4: And you know, I don't want to get too much
Speaker 4: into theology because I've left obviously. I would just tell
Speaker 4: you this when you start looking at the book, the
Speaker 4: Old Testament and the New Testament together are extraordinary documents.
Speaker 4: It's amazing that they were preserved and that you have them.
Speaker 4: And then you have this look into the past, and
Speaker 4: you have this idea of what people were thinking, what
Speaker 4: they were grappling with, what they're wrestling with from a
Speaker 4: theological from a political point of view, trying to create
Speaker 4: a type of early history, and a sense of identity,
Speaker 4: whatever you want to go on about. These are amazing books. Right.
Speaker 4: What my question was, where'd they come from? Who wrote them?
Speaker 4: Where did this thing come from? Wasn't I got past
Speaker 4: the point? Well, well God wrote it? Well how did
Speaker 4: that work? When I was on my way out. And
Speaker 4: I'll get you a little bit later on when I
Speaker 4: was on my way out from But when I was
Speaker 4: on my way out, I asked my pastor that question. So,
Speaker 4: who wrote these books? Where did they come from? And
Speaker 4: to his credit, he gave me a book. It was
Speaker 4: called Who Wrote the Bible? And this is when I
Speaker 4: was in my late teens. And I read that book,
Speaker 4: and I read it again and I was out, Wow,
Speaker 4: it was kind of one of those things, and I
Speaker 4: gotta I should explain.
Speaker 3: What I was out from.
Speaker 4: The Worldwide Church of God was an apocalyptic end of
Speaker 4: Day's Jesus cult, which white supremacy elements thrown in. The
Speaker 4: idea was that Herbert w Armstrong, who you mentioned, had
Speaker 4: been given revelations directly by God that gave him special
Speaker 4: understandings to unlock the kidden keys of the Bible, and
Speaker 4: those hidden keys to his way of thinking were mainly prophetic,
Speaker 4: and that he could tell that the end of days
Speaker 4: was nighe and he had special ability to read world
Speaker 4: events and pair them with the Bible and be able
Speaker 4: to come up with what's going about to happen. And
Speaker 4: you better get your act together now if you are
Speaker 4: again a casual believer of the Bible, and you watch
Speaker 4: world news and you hear somebody melding the two. That
Speaker 4: can be very persuasive to somebody. Sure it says, here,
Speaker 4: here's a beast power, and the beast power does this
Speaker 4: is in that and it's an Eastern Europe and boy
Speaker 4: that looks like Hitler, And this is what's going to
Speaker 4: happen because it's foretold in the Bible, and this, this
Speaker 4: and that, that's what we believe. But you go back further.
Speaker 4: Herbert came from the Seventh Day Adventist tradition and he
Speaker 4: also was an admin. Yes, right, he's an admin. So
Speaker 4: when he went through his own searching when he left,
Speaker 4: I think probably got kicked out of the Seventh Day
Speaker 4: in Venice organizations and he started searching and basically created
Speaker 4: his own situation. Christian based culture, you're generally going to
Speaker 4: have somebody praying overnight and sweating and wrestling with the
Speaker 4: truth or whatever it is before God speaks to him.
Speaker 4: He has his own story of that where he was
Speaker 4: filled with this type of enlightenment, almost a Joseph Smith
Speaker 4: type story.
Speaker 5: I was gonna say that, Yeah, this happens again.
Speaker 4: And again and again, but he was an admin.
Speaker 6: So yeah, do you think he believed it for real?
Speaker 6: Or do you think he was just an admin?
Speaker 4: It's such an interesting idea. A lot of the people
Speaker 4: who I grew up with, we go back and forth.
Speaker 4: Did he believe it for real? I still honestly don't know.
Speaker 4: It got to be such madness. I'll say this. He
Speaker 4: believed the money for real, right, He knew how to
Speaker 4: make a pitch for real. He lived high on the
Speaker 4: hog for real. He was one of the first sort
Speaker 4: of people to justify buying an airplane for real.
Speaker 1: An airplane, Wow, he had airplane money coming in. Well,
Speaker 1: he was charging people thirty percent tithing right at different.
Speaker 4: Oh oh yeah, the thirty That was an innovation. So
Speaker 4: but did he believe it? Did he believe it? I honestly,
Speaker 4: I think that some people really love to hear themselves talk.
Speaker 4: They can convince themselves of whatever it is. Sometimes it's
Speaker 4: stuff ended up being so contradictory and ridiculous it's hard
Speaker 4: to believe anyone believed it when you actually listen to
Speaker 4: the words. But I think that maybe he did believe it.
Speaker 4: I think he was one of those people who it
Speaker 4: didn't matter he would make himself believe anything, and that
Speaker 4: whatever he believed just happened to be for his own benefit, hery.
Speaker 6: He was an ad man and customer.
Speaker 4: Exactly, and if he needed to believe something else, we
Speaker 4: can believe that too, right, right, But yes, you mentioned
Speaker 4: the thirty percent. That was an innovation of the Worldwide
Speaker 4: Church of God. Lots of people know about tithing, but
Speaker 4: have you heard of the second time? We did not
Speaker 4: celebrate Christmas, Easter, all those types of holidays that most
Speaker 4: people who consider themselves in the Christian faith celebrate. We
Speaker 4: celebrated Passover, Pentecost, the Day of Atonement, which was a
Speaker 4: fasting day, which is essentially I'm kapoor. This is again
Speaker 4: like he was taken from a lot of religions. These
Speaker 4: are awesome, sometimes more associated with the Jewish faith, the
Speaker 4: Feast of Tabernacles, the Last Great Day. These are our
Speaker 4: holidays that nobody's ever heard of. And most of the
Speaker 4: people who were drawn to this organization, they didn't have
Speaker 4: a lot of money. I was in a rural community
Speaker 4: and no one had a lot of money. But you
Speaker 4: had number one. You had to tie. But because we
Speaker 4: didn't celebrate Christmas, treing like that, the deal was we
Speaker 4: had something different than Christmas, better than Christmas.
Speaker 3: Yeah better, I said.
Speaker 1: It, better than Christmas, better than Christmas.
Speaker 4: It was called the Feast of Tabernacles. And so the
Speaker 4: idea behind the Feast of Tabernacles is you saved ten
Speaker 4: percent of your income. In addition to the tie, save
Speaker 4: another ten percent of your income, and you keep it
Speaker 4: and you go every October on a seven day festival
Speaker 4: where you were commanded to blow it, to spend it
Speaker 4: buck hotels, fancy dinners, whatever it may be.
Speaker 3: Because the idea is that you are giving yourself a.
Speaker 4: Taste of the world tomorrow, a taste of heaven on earth.
Speaker 3: Wow, go and you blow it.
Speaker 4: So imagine a poor family like us now again, I'll
Speaker 4: put you in my position for a little bit. I'm poor.
Speaker 4: I live in the middle of nowhere, rural Michigan, and
Speaker 4: I'm in some religion that nobody understands. I feel very,
Speaker 4: very isolated, especially at school and stuff like that. We
Speaker 4: don't celebrate birthdays. I'm always talking weird stuff. I'm an
Speaker 4: outsider just by default on almost every single thing I do.
Speaker 4: Then they pulled me out of school in October because
Speaker 4: we're going to the feast of tabernacles, which means we
Speaker 4: load up our country squire station wagon and we get
Speaker 4: in we start driving to we call it the festival location,
Speaker 4: which is different sites all over the country. The closest
Speaker 4: one to where we are in Michigan was usually in
Speaker 4: Wisconsin westcontin Dell's area. There's a big place in Wisconsin,
Speaker 4: Dallas that's a resort community. So before you start driving,
Speaker 4: you have to put a green sticker on your car
Speaker 4: that comes directly from headquarters in Pasadena, California. That lets
Speaker 4: you know that you have all privileges to go to
Speaker 4: this festival or whatever it may be. You put that
Speaker 4: on your car and you start driving now again in
Speaker 4: the middle of nowhere, middle of nowhere, and start driving.
Speaker 4: Then you got ten percent of your entire income for
Speaker 4: the year in your pocket. My dad.
Speaker 3: Everybody's happy.
Speaker 4: Like nobody ever asked me if I want to stop
Speaker 4: them peck downald or something in the way that didn't
Speaker 4: come up now, Yeah, I want to stop. Yeah, get
Speaker 4: an extra fryn. Yeah, we're falling up in this piece.
Speaker 4: I want the cheese. Put some cheese on, some extra cheese.
Speaker 3: We start riding.
Speaker 4: We start riding, and you're riding down the street, down
Speaker 4: the road, down the highway, and it's like wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 4: you see it off in the distance. There's another car
Speaker 4: and you think you see they got a green stick
Speaker 4: on their car too, and you try to pull up
Speaker 4: beside them, and they got kids and you got kids.
Speaker 4: When you're honking and waving them, they're not alone anymore.
Speaker 4: There's another family with a green sticker. Now y'all going
Speaker 4: to ride together. In fact, you might even pull off
Speaker 4: the side and have kids go back and forth. And
Speaker 4: then y'all keep on rolling. And then you keep rolling
Speaker 4: some more, and you see another green sticker and another,
Speaker 4: and they're closer. You get to the feast site, you're
Speaker 4: seeing greensticker, greenstick of greenstick a green sticker. You're gone
Speaker 4: from being alone in the middle of the wilderness to
Speaker 4: being part of this excited, crazy, happy clan of people
Speaker 4: who have got more money than they know what to
Speaker 4: do with. And you get there.
Speaker 3: You can stay in a hotel. I never stay no hotel.
Speaker 4: You can stay in a hotel with a swimming pool,
Speaker 4: what what? And everybody there and you can only stay
Speaker 4: at select hotels that man deals with. So everybody you
Speaker 4: see that's at that hotel is part of your group.
Speaker 4: Every single person. You're not alone anymore. This is all
Speaker 4: the kids, audi adults. Everybody is part of your group. Now,
Speaker 4: go to Wisconsin Dells. They have a big facility. They
Speaker 4: could see ten thousand people in this facility. Everybody again
Speaker 4: is part of your thing. Now. Unfortunately you got to
Speaker 4: go to church twice a day during this time period,
Speaker 4: but the rest of the time is yours to go
Speaker 4: out and do your thing. Now it's off season too,
Speaker 4: so Wisconsin Dells, they're like thrilled in the middle of October.
Speaker 4: What all these people running around? That's great, which is
Speaker 4: good for us as well. Basically, if I saw somebody
Speaker 4: going into the Wax Museum, I see somebody getting some
Speaker 4: fudge there. Us. That's us, mus us. Everywhere I go,
Speaker 4: it's just us. That's how you spent that money. You
Speaker 4: spent that money for that time period. Now, of course
Speaker 4: when you're there, they had something called number one, the
Speaker 4: tithe of the tithe, so that ten percent you were
Speaker 4: supposed to put ten percent of that it goes to
Speaker 4: the church. And then they had something called you got
Speaker 4: to new Offerings, and then you had excess tie, which
Speaker 4: is like how much excess money have you ever had
Speaker 4: excess money, but if you did, you got to get
Speaker 4: out over there to them as well, put that in
Speaker 4: the basket and then bring your broke ass home.
Speaker 1: Wow. I mean, you did convince me that it's better
Speaker 1: than Christmas other than the part where you go home
Speaker 1: broke at the end.
Speaker 5: Two church things a day.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Well I will say this as well.
Speaker 4: This was technology like never before heard in the seventies
Speaker 4: and the eighties. I'm a little kid, and there's like,
Speaker 4: you know, seven to ten thousand people in this facility,
Speaker 4: which is crazy.
Speaker 3: And then they have these white coded.
Speaker 4: Scientists people come up and they got all this technology,
Speaker 4: and they got wires and cables and stuff. They would say, okay, everybody,
Speaker 4: get ready to turn out all the lights and they
Speaker 4: will project microwave transmission from Pasadena, California. So this is
Speaker 4: back in the day. And you would see the church
Speaker 4: in Pasadena, which is the headquarters thing. Like all good cults,
Speaker 4: by the way, are based in California. So you see
Speaker 4: the microwave transition. They're in Pasadena. And then they'll be like,
Speaker 4: all right, is London online? Is Florida online? Is Saskatchewan?
Speaker 4: You go around the world, you know, Tokyo Da and
Speaker 4: everybody would lose.
Speaker 3: Their shit because we're like.
Speaker 4: I can't emphasize it up. You always felt alone, but
Speaker 4: for this moment, you were part of a community and
Speaker 4: wasn't even just this ten thousand people you were with.
Speaker 4: It was people all around the world saying they can
Speaker 4: see the microwave transmission from Pasadena, California. And everybody was
Speaker 4: sing everybody was sing and you felt like you were
Speaker 4: singing with people all around the world.
Speaker 6: Wow, I mean you were. It's beautiful in a way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that must have been a powerful communeral moment and
Speaker 1: a beautiful reprieve from your general loneliness.
Speaker 5: I mean, I totally get the appeal of that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was that, and that was I just say
Speaker 4: out have to say that's where our second tithe went.
Speaker 4: The third time every three years, you were supposed to
Speaker 4: come up with another ten percent.
Speaker 3: Now again, this is ten percent of your gross Like.
Speaker 6: This is pre tax I know, I'm thinking, like, you.
Speaker 2: Guys get ten percent at the end of taxes and everything.
Speaker 2: I don't understand how anyone's supposed to live.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: Well, let's just say some people weren't exactly as exacting
Speaker 4: about throwing that in as they could have been. People were,
Speaker 4: A lot of people were. A lot of people were not.
Speaker 4: If we didn't do any tithing, we will still be broke.
Speaker 4: So I don't know how in the world that was
Speaker 4: gonna work for us.
Speaker 5: We're in Michigan. Did you grow because I also grew
Speaker 5: up in rural Michigan.
Speaker 4: Oh, I'm gonna do this right here, ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 4: I'm showing the hand Michigan. So the hand to each
Speaker 4: other to show them where they grew up. But I
Speaker 4: was born in Detroit. I lived there twice five until
Speaker 4: we moved to the Thumb of Michigan. I moved here,
Speaker 4: Oh the Thumb, Kingston Caro a near Bay City, this
Speaker 4: type of area. This is where I was a farmer, Marlette, Michigan. Okay,
Speaker 4: crazy story from there. Lived in the Midland area for
Speaker 4: a while Mount Pleasant, then went to high school in
Speaker 4: the Grand Rappert area before going to the University of Michigan.
Speaker 1: Oh As, I grew up an hour north of Grand
Speaker 1: Rapids in a little town called Newego.
Speaker 6: Do you know Grand Haven, Lola, Grand Haven? No, because
Speaker 6: that's where I grew up for a while.
Speaker 5: Wait, what a bunch of established this yeah, I was
Speaker 5: on a farm.
Speaker 6: Do you know where Grand Haven is?
Speaker 4: Glenn? Of course I know where Grand Haven is.
Speaker 6: Wow, okay, all right, Yeah you grew up in a farm.
Speaker 1: Blow up.
Speaker 5: I grew up on a farm. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Wow, Michigan unrelated to my CULTI experience. We just happened
Speaker 1: to be on a farm before my cult experience.
Speaker 5: But yeah, that's cool. Wow wow, look at us.
Speaker 4: Well then, Lolo, we got more than I thought in comment.
Speaker 4: Good Lord, Yeah, I know very well where you grew up.
Speaker 4: Our cult that we meet in every week was in
Speaker 4: Grand Rapids. It included your area.
Speaker 6: Oh so oh yeah, interesting.
Speaker 1: Because I was just a regular Mormon when I was
Speaker 1: living in Michigan before, like pre cult, when our church
Speaker 1: situation was weird, we had to go to Grand Rapids
Speaker 1: for our like Mormon church.
Speaker 6: So look at that. Curious.
Speaker 5: So there was this prophecy.
Speaker 1: About nineteen seventy five, but you keep saying late seventies,
Speaker 1: So did you join after this prophecy year was already done?
Speaker 4: I was like really tiny during then, so I missed
Speaker 4: that kind of situation. I mean, I think that nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy five things what drew my mother in for the
Speaker 4: first place, Like oh my god, nineteen seventy five, that's
Speaker 4: to be the end. But then when nineteen seventy five
Speaker 4: came and went, they stopped mentioning that. And so every
Speaker 4: church basically had a library of books that were written
Speaker 4: by Herbert w Armstrong that you can kind of check
Speaker 4: out or whatever, and some of those books would disappear,
Speaker 4: like it was very very hard in the eighties to
Speaker 4: find the nineteen seventy five in Prophecies books that'd be
Speaker 4: out of circulation, right, they took that out of circulations, right,
Speaker 4: But then somebody would find it at home or something
Speaker 4: like that, that in some back room or something like that,
Speaker 4: and they get to, you know, fussing at us about
Speaker 4: we got to do right because of prophecy and something
Speaker 4: like that, and they're like, what prophecy, huh, well this
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy five and prophecy, where did you get that?
Speaker 4: Where do you get that? That book? That's that why
Speaker 4: they don't update it. They updated of whatever, they had
Speaker 4: new revelations something I don't know, I don't remember exact terminology,
Speaker 4: but I remember they did not appreciate teenagers in the
Speaker 4: eighties taking out the nineteen seventy five book and prophecy
Speaker 4: and waving that around. I know that for sure.
Speaker 5: I am sure.
Speaker 1: So they're like, oh, JK, wasn't then, but it's going
Speaker 1: to happen soon.
Speaker 3: This is what's crazy about it.
Speaker 4: Like you mentioned that you heard something from nineteen forty one,
Speaker 4: they would call dates specifically the world's gonna end such
Speaker 4: and such and such and such, nineteen forty one, nineteen
Speaker 4: forty five, nineteen fifty six, nineteen this is the net.
Speaker 4: I think nineteen seventy four the Prophecy Book was they
Speaker 4: finally learned a lesson. It's said soon instead of calling
Speaker 4: specific dates.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I do remember this being in Midland, Michigan, which apparently
Speaker 4: all of us know when I was a little kid.
Speaker 4: And I'm saying, Bretherd, if you think we're gonna make
Speaker 4: it through the end of the eighties without seeing the
Speaker 4: return of the Lord Jesus Christ, well you got another
Speaker 4: thing coming. So that was an exact date. And I
Speaker 4: will say what's interesting as well. I was like, there
Speaker 4: were some people this was not technically supported by official
Speaker 4: church doctrine, but there were several respected brethren and lay
Speaker 4: ministers or whatever. I remember going to one person's house.
Speaker 4: I don't know I was trying to get out of this.
Speaker 4: I don't know how they caught me in this basement.
Speaker 4: I was one of my buddy's dads and he's got
Speaker 4: a chopboard and he's taken us through. Okay, it's nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty whatever. And you were divided that by the year
Speaker 4: of completion, which is six times the Tower of Babel
Speaker 4: and the sun spots, and you turn that upside down
Speaker 4: with the number of pages in the original King James
Speaker 4: version of Bible, and then you get to the end.
Speaker 4: Time is going to be June seventeenth, nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 4: something like that. We had the date. He said, okay,
Speaker 4: put that down, and it's like any question. And I
Speaker 4: was just like, man, you got to let me.
Speaker 3: About this piece. I don't know what's going on.
Speaker 4: Especially as young kids at the time, we thought that
Speaker 4: was mad crazy. I was told as a kid that
Speaker 4: I would not graduate high.
Speaker 6: School because you'd be gone to heaven.
Speaker 3: I'd be gone, Yeah, yeah, I'd be gone.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't be married, I wouldn't have a family, I
Speaker 4: wouldn't do any of that kind of stuff because that
Speaker 4: will just with in the card for me.
Speaker 1: And did you believe that, Like, how fervent of a
Speaker 1: believer were you as a kid?
Speaker 3: I believe the general idea.
Speaker 4: I had a lot of quibbles about specifics, and I
Speaker 4: had a lot of quibbles about the.
Speaker 3: Racial situation there.
Speaker 4: I thought that they were crazy racists, but I thought
Speaker 4: that the overall idea of the Bible that they had
Speaker 4: that they were doing was right.
Speaker 3: I did believe that.
Speaker 5: Did you know any other black families in this church? Reason?
Speaker 4: Only there were a couple. This is crazy.
Speaker 3: I'm going to tell you something.
Speaker 4: This is the deal. I'm a young man, you know,
Speaker 4: doing what young men do. The problem was like in
Speaker 4: our area there were no black girls, and the interracial dating.
Speaker 3: And fragnization like that was forbidden. It was evil or whatever.
Speaker 4: And I thought, you know, hey, I like sisters, just fine,
Speaker 4: but there aren't any of them over here. I don't
Speaker 4: know what y'all want me to do. It really sucked.
Speaker 4: It really really sucked. But there's a Lanting church, and
Speaker 4: that Lanting church they had one black girl there, and
Speaker 4: so I was supposed to, Oh, there's one for you, great.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 4: She was actually very cute, very cool. But she was
Speaker 4: in the same fix, right. But I think her father
Speaker 4: was white and it was by coming before they got
Speaker 4: into the church or something like that. And I didn't
Speaker 4: know any of that stuff. She was black. To me,
Speaker 4: I was like, cool, well, you know, I don't know leader.
Speaker 4: But she pulled a backstage past just what she did.
Speaker 4: So there was a secret policy for people who are
Speaker 4: They called it determined racial classification. And what you could
Speaker 4: do is they call it the look see administrative review,
Speaker 4: which meant that you would send a picture into headquarters
Speaker 4: the pastating of California and they would look and they
Speaker 4: would see her how to classify you're sorry, wow. And
Speaker 4: so what she did was she got a picture of her,
Speaker 4: put on a lot of extra flash in the picture,
Speaker 4: and she sent it into passing in California, and they
Speaker 4: came back and they said, for all privileges and rights,
Speaker 4: you are now Caucasian and this is not. And so
Speaker 4: the one black girl in the area she got reclassified
Speaker 4: by look see wow. I say all that to say,
Speaker 4: so I was out of love. I was out of luck.
Speaker 4: Right now, I say, I'll have to say this. I'll
Speaker 4: just fast forward little bit. We'll get back to it.
Speaker 4: But I fasted for a little bit. I left the organization.
Speaker 4: I lived in Japan, for a long time, lived in Malaysia,
Speaker 4: went to law school at University of Michigan, and my
Speaker 4: second year of law school, I was having a party
Speaker 4: for grad students of color at my place and it
Speaker 4: was just a dumb excuse to meet women, but it
Speaker 4: worked out great. So people start filing in their filing
Speaker 4: in and filing in, and I see this beautiful black girl.
Speaker 3: So I go over there. I started talking to her.
Speaker 4: And I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, Well I
Speaker 4: know you, and she said like, that is not a
Speaker 4: very good line.
Speaker 3: You know, you need to.
Speaker 4: Game a little bit.
Speaker 3: And I was like, I'm for real, I'm real.
Speaker 4: And then it hit me and then I sang a
Speaker 4: hymno from our church, Last and Happy.
Speaker 7: She looked at me and it was her this look,
Speaker 7: see no, Well yeah, my god.
Speaker 4: Now I might forget a name, but I don't forget
Speaker 4: a face.
Speaker 6: Did you guys talk about it?
Speaker 4: We did.
Speaker 3: We laughed ourselves silly that night.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And I told her how much I didn't appreciate those
Speaker 4: tricks she was pulling back in the day. And she's like, well,
Speaker 4: I don't want to relitigate the past, but.
Speaker 6: That's funny.
Speaker 4: It was hilarious.
Speaker 5: She gained the system.
Speaker 1: That's kind of great, But what a crazy premise like
Speaker 1: for you to even be in this group.
Speaker 5: I mean, like, yeah, what was that?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 5: How did you feel about that?
Speaker 4: I advise all the kids I see these days don't
Speaker 4: grow up in a coat.
Speaker 6: We do too, Yeah, a strong recognation that we have.
Speaker 5: Also, don't join one as an adult.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: That's also not.
Speaker 4: Great people coming the other way. Yeah, it was tough.
Speaker 4: It was difficult, especially the ramifications of a lot of it.
Speaker 4: We cut off my family, extended family, my cousins, and
Speaker 4: that really hurt, and it still hurts that I have
Speaker 4: a deeper golf with them than I should because of
Speaker 4: that cult stuff. I had to always avoid them or
Speaker 4: sometimes we would go for almost a year without having
Speaker 4: contact with them because the church said to.
Speaker 3: And that was just hurtfault.
Speaker 6: It sucks.
Speaker 1: Did that apply to you like at school as well?
Speaker 1: Were you're not supposed to like hang out with outsider
Speaker 1: kids or was this just a family thing?
Speaker 4: No, you could. I just had a bunch of rules
Speaker 4: that basically made it, and people didn't want to hang
Speaker 4: out with me.
Speaker 3: I mean it was hard to classify.
Speaker 4: I'm already in rule Michigan I'm black, I'm a crazy farmer.
Speaker 4: We're broke.
Speaker 6: You have the entire Bible memorized.
Speaker 4: I got to please. I'm memorizing the Bible. I'm telling
Speaker 4: kids the truth about Santa Claus.
Speaker 6: Oh me too, that's my problem too.
Speaker 4: But like if you have a birthday party, I can't participate.
Speaker 4: I got to go stand in the hall of what
Speaker 4: everybody's eating cake. You're creating a social outcast. Put just
Speaker 4: one of those things and you're gonna have trouble. Had
Speaker 4: a bunch of stuff going on. It was tough. It
Speaker 4: was just really really tough. But I did have friends
Speaker 4: at the church. We spent a lot of time together.
Speaker 4: It wasn't like we're in a compound situation, but because
Speaker 4: you meet so much, Like if you're meeting four five
Speaker 4: times a week, you might as well be in a compound, right,
Speaker 4: you know, that's kind of what you do. I went
Speaker 4: to regular school, but it was just a lot. It
Speaker 4: was a lot.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, man, being a kid is hard enough.
Speaker 1: Making friends is hard enough as it is, just like
Speaker 1: being someone who does fit in in theory.
Speaker 2: I added, and the special little thing of telling everybody
Speaker 2: I met who was wearing makeup or anything that they
Speaker 2: were going to hell.
Speaker 6: So that was a fun little.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 4: I would talk about how hot the fire was gonna be,
Speaker 4: you know that type of stuff.
Speaker 6: Man, Sam.
Speaker 1: Yeah, see, I just had those thoughts privately, not to
Speaker 1: alienate the children at school.
Speaker 6: For I wish I would have known.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So did you ever actually meet Herbert or No?
Speaker 4: I did A couple of times. He would come through
Speaker 4: and be a big deal and we kind of get
Speaker 4: in a line and we go and meet him and
Speaker 4: we kind of stand in the line. He wrote a
Speaker 4: book almost a year, whatever new book it was, and
Speaker 4: oftentimes he would fly around and hand out these books
Speaker 4: like prizes to the brethren. And I met him a
Speaker 4: couple times, Like I mean, when I think met him,
Speaker 4: I was in a line and I saw him.
Speaker 6: Or something like that, or shook his hand like a
Speaker 6: book signing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a book signing, that's right. It was a book signing.
Speaker 4: That's that what we called it.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it was something like that.
Speaker 5: Did he seem like special to you?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 5: What did you think I did me that?
Speaker 4: I was a very little kid when I saw him,
Speaker 4: and they were like, look, don't pull any of your tricks.
Speaker 4: We get up to meet this great man. You know,
Speaker 4: you stand up straight, you look them in the eye,
Speaker 4: and you're meeting an apostle. And this is a big deal.
Speaker 4: You're meeting an apostle, the.
Speaker 5: Last Apostle, right, that's what he would call him.
Speaker 3: The last Apostle.
Speaker 2: Yes, Wow, there's two witnesses that are left correct and
Speaker 2: he's one of them.
Speaker 4: Well, that was the whole deal that you know this stuff, man,
Speaker 4: this is what I'm talking about. So the Bible speaks
Speaker 4: of the end time being two witnesses that are going
Speaker 4: to preach until the final days. The old deal was
Speaker 4: that he would see that he was probably one of
Speaker 4: the witnesses, but we didn't know who the second one was.
Speaker 3: And that was my aspiration.
Speaker 4: I thought, if I got these Bible verses right, and
Speaker 4: I did the right thing and got right with Jesus,
Speaker 4: I would be the second witness because wow, he's old anyway,
Speaker 4: he was always old from from the fact that he's
Speaker 4: always been old as hell. So I thought, you know,
Speaker 4: maybe I could slide in. They're gonna need somebody younger
Speaker 4: and charismatic, and a brown wouldn't hurt, maybe, you know,
Speaker 4: to kind of help get that second witness.
Speaker 2: So you had that like kind of on your shoulders, like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm going to be the second.
Speaker 4: It was an aspiration, Yeah, it was an aspiration. I
Speaker 4: didn't see anybody else that seemed to fit the bill,
Speaker 4: so I thought maybe I could do it.
Speaker 1: I've heard you talk on other podcasts about how you
Speaker 1: you're dealing with all this stuff and all this isolation,
Speaker 1: but at the same time, you felt really special, And
Speaker 1: that's something that I can certainly relate to, because at
Speaker 1: one point in time I thought that my mom and
Speaker 1: I were the only two people on earth who knew
Speaker 1: about this prophet and this second coming that was happening.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 5: Yeah, can you talk about that special feeling?
Speaker 1: And I mean clearly you felt special if you thought
Speaker 1: you were going to be potentially the second Abustle.
Speaker 5: Or the second Witness.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Wow, I really did feel, like I guess said.
Speaker 4: I had a lot of issues with various things, but
Speaker 4: I thought that we were being revealed a special truth
Speaker 4: that no one else knew. Because in the Bible, the
Speaker 4: end Time talks about saving one hundred and forty four
Speaker 4: thousand people who would go and meet Jesus in the end,
Speaker 4: and one hundred and forty four thousand people isn't a
Speaker 4: lot of people.
Speaker 3: And you look around and you see.
Speaker 4: All these people. They're all gonna burn. They're all gonna
Speaker 4: burn in this tribulation that's coming. Our idea was we
Speaker 4: thought that this big war was imminent and that we
Speaker 4: were gonna be wisked off to a place of safety.
Speaker 4: That people speculated it was Petra, that we're gonna go
Speaker 4: to Petra for some reason and live in a cave
Speaker 4: for three and a half years and then Jesus was
Speaker 4: gonna come. As an aside, let me just just say this.
Speaker 4: When we were living in the Grand Rapids area at
Speaker 4: one point, this is rare. In my household, there was
Speaker 4: just nobody there. No one was at my house. And
Speaker 4: my little brother was in the bed taking a nap
Speaker 4: in the middle of the afternoon, like four in the
Speaker 4: afternoon something like that.
Speaker 3: And it was my big chance. He's a year younger
Speaker 3: than me.
Speaker 4: So I went downstairs and I started screaming, you got
Speaker 4: to go to seven eleven because everybody's going to the
Speaker 4: place of safety and you got to get there right now.
Speaker 4: And me to Jesus warriors, they're gonna take you to Petra.
Speaker 4: I'll meet you there, just waiting the parking lot is
Speaker 4: send eleven. So he wakes if out of the sleep
Speaker 4: and he takes his bike and he goes off to eleven.
Speaker 4: And it gets to be dinner time, and my mom
Speaker 4: and dad asked me, like, where's your brother at I
Speaker 4: don't know when he came back. He was hot.
Speaker 3: He was hot.
Speaker 6: That prank has every layer on it.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, just every single layer that a
Speaker 2: prank could hide.
Speaker 4: So mean crazy anyway, Yes, I felt special, I felt chosen.
Speaker 4: I felt sorry for people who didn't have the special knowledge.
Speaker 4: You know, I'm really did. And I remember too when
Speaker 4: I had left organization. When you first leave it, I
Speaker 4: still think that fire is going to rain down from
Speaker 4: heaven for me or what it may be. But I
Speaker 4: tried to escape, and I ended up getting this fellowship
Speaker 4: to go study in Asia.
Speaker 3: I was living in Japan.
Speaker 4: It's this area that had never seen any foreigners really,
Speaker 4: and my Japanese is at the time basically non existent.
Speaker 4: And I'm trying to ask me what I believed and
Speaker 4: what my religion was, and I'm trying to explain it
Speaker 4: in Japanese to them, and they.
Speaker 3: Would laugh and laugh and laugh.
Speaker 4: I remember me at bars and I'm listening to myself
Speaker 4: speak like a two year older about what my beliefs are,
Speaker 4: and I'm laughing at myself because it sounds so freaking stupid,
Speaker 4: but it was the truth. I will be forever grateful
Speaker 4: for that experience. I think that trying to explain what
Speaker 4: you really believe in a different language, it just gives
Speaker 4: you a slightly different perspective on what the words coming
Speaker 4: out of your mouth. What did I just say? That
Speaker 4: don't make any kind of sense?
Speaker 1: Did you tell them you thought that the end was
Speaker 1: coming at any more?
Speaker 4: I probably did, But we were near the end times,
Speaker 4: and this book had the prophecies that foretold what we're
Speaker 4: going through right now, and I probably said a lot
Speaker 4: of things that were baffling me, that were literally baffling
Speaker 4: me even as I came out of my mouth. Wow.
Speaker 3: But the crazy thing is that, yes, I felt special
Speaker 3: coming up.
Speaker 4: But even when I abandoned that belief system, I felt
Speaker 4: like I was Harry Potter and everybody else was a muggle, right,
Speaker 4: I really did. I felt like I had to force
Speaker 4: Even after I abandoned that belief system, that feeling didn't
Speaker 4: necessarily go away for good or ill. And my current
Speaker 4: sort of model of the world of the universe. That
Speaker 4: feeling makes no sense, It really doesn't. Yeah, but there it.
Speaker 5: Is, right, I mean, I relate to that so hard.
Speaker 1: Not to shout out my own writing, but I wrote
Speaker 1: about my cult experience five years ago or something, and
Speaker 1: it specifically talks about the feeling of being special and
Speaker 1: how once I no longer had those beliefs, I needed
Speaker 1: to find some other outlet for my feelings of specialness,
Speaker 1: and so I pursued music full time because I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm clearly special in some way and have to make
Speaker 1: my mark on the world, and if it's not because
Speaker 1: I'm chosen to save the world, it's going to be
Speaker 1: through my music or whatever.
Speaker 5: You know, totally totally get that.
Speaker 1: Do you have that, Megan, Yeah, for sure, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 6: In my mind, I think like.
Speaker 2: Everybody probably feels a little bit like that from some
Speaker 2: different way in childhood.
Speaker 6: They you know, like I'm the best at this, I'm this,
Speaker 6: I'm that.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but definitely we have an exaggerated version
Speaker 2: of that. I'm sure I feel very separate from the
Speaker 2: rest of the world, for sure.
Speaker 5: Yeah, No, it's true.
Speaker 1: Well, especially in la probably a lot of Yeah, I
Speaker 1: feel exactly special.
Speaker 6: That's probably my reference.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Well, Glenn, can you tell us about that
Speaker 1: process of leaving?
Speaker 5: So you read this book? Who wrote the Bible?
Speaker 1: And what were the revelations that you had and how
Speaker 1: long did that process take and what was going on?
Speaker 4: Yeah. I read the book and knew that this wasn't
Speaker 4: really for me, But the people I was still close
Speaker 4: to were my friends that were in that organization. Those
Speaker 4: are my people, and I didn't want to leave them.
Speaker 4: And more importantly, I guess in a different way, if
Speaker 4: you leave the church, everyone is obligated to this fellowship you,
Speaker 4: which means basically shun you and not talk to you
Speaker 4: and disassociate with you. I didn't want that to happen
Speaker 4: to me, but I really didn't necessarily wanted to happen
Speaker 4: to them. That process is just so hard and jarren
Speaker 4: and weird and crazy and hurtful, and a few of
Speaker 4: us in the past when we're oh, you don't talk
Speaker 4: to them anymore or something like that, we wouldn't do it.
Speaker 4: That's one of the things where we would try to
Speaker 4: not go along with the program on. But it's hard
Speaker 4: to say to someone that you've grown up with since
Speaker 4: the little kid. Now you're supposed to just fellowship me.
Speaker 4: I'm not not part of that thing anymore. It sounds
Speaker 4: weird because I was almost ready for it. But it's like,
Speaker 4: do you want to impose that on somebody else? Because
Speaker 4: when you leave, it's not just you leaving, and you
Speaker 4: do that to your family, and it's just a ramifications
Speaker 4: about that that happened at the age I was when
Speaker 4: it was happening, was in my late teens. You're supposed
Speaker 4: to get baptized. Everybody got baptized. I didn't do that,
Speaker 4: And I kept on asking me when I'm gonna be back. Oh,
Speaker 4: you know, don't think about that. That's interesting anyway, what's
Speaker 4: for lunch service situation? I go back again to that
Speaker 4: whole going to Japan thing. I had left again. It
Speaker 4: hurt people, and I remember I was sure. I was
Speaker 4: absolutely sure this is the right thing to do. But
Speaker 4: when I remember when I told people that I was
Speaker 4: doing it, I felt the sky was going to open
Speaker 4: up and rain down fire.
Speaker 5: Meaning leaving the church or leaving for Japan.
Speaker 3: Leaving the church, leaving the church.
Speaker 4: But then when I did go to Japan, I flew
Speaker 4: into Tokyo, got on a train, took a bus, another train,
Speaker 4: taxi got to my new place where there's a thunderstorm
Speaker 4: going on out there. I don't know the city I'm in.
Speaker 4: I've never been there before. I don't speak a word
Speaker 4: of the language. I don't even know how to use
Speaker 4: a phone in Japan. My parents don't know what city
Speaker 4: I'm in. But I go to my new apartment and
Speaker 4: the phone is ringing. The phone is ringing. I'll surprise
Speaker 4: somebody I picked up. I was like hello, and I'm
Speaker 4: back to someone to be surprised, the wrong number whatever.
Speaker 4: And they're like, hello, this is so and so from
Speaker 4: the Blobi Church of God, and we heard us in
Speaker 4: Japan right now. I want to know that. You know,
Speaker 4: we have meetings such and such down and such and such.
Speaker 4: I was like, there's a bad I can't really hear
Speaker 4: what y're saying. But click, yeah, that happened. How they
Speaker 4: got I couldn't do it. I don't know. Nobody knew
Speaker 4: where I was. I didn't know where I was.
Speaker 5: WHOA that is creepy.
Speaker 6: Yep, that's like stucking you.
Speaker 4: You got to get that money some kind of way.
Speaker 3: You gotta have the systems in place.
Speaker 1: How do you even do that before the Internet? It
Speaker 1: doesn't even compute in my brain.
Speaker 4: This is what I will say. Let me leave you
Speaker 4: with this. When I first started Snamp Judgment. If people
Speaker 4: don't know, Snamp Judgment is a public radio show, it's
Speaker 4: a stage show. We've done some television work. This is
Speaker 4: a decade ago. We want to be really The time
Speaker 4: award was multimedia want to be really crazy. Multimedia was
Speaker 4: built into the DNA of the launch. There was a magazine,
Speaker 4: which is really dumb. We didn't want anyone to see
Speaker 4: that part, but we had to do it for the
Speaker 4: grand all this stuff. But when I was initially pulling
Speaker 4: together the initial business plan for it, our initial funder
Speaker 4: was a corporation for public broadcasting, and somebody, wow, this
Speaker 4: is a lot of stuff. We wanted to do some
Speaker 4: work and see if there's any other people who've kind
Speaker 4: of combined the same sort of multimedia thing into one
Speaker 4: unit that you've done before. And somebody came and said, well,
Speaker 4: there's this guy, Herbert w.
Speaker 3: Or Armstrong who did something like this.
Speaker 4: I'm just like, as fast as you run, as far
Speaker 4: as you run, you end up right back where you started.
Speaker 4: I almost lost my mind, and someone came out here
Speaker 4: with just Herbert w Armstrong stuff. Have you ever heard
Speaker 4: of a Herbert w Armstrong? Yes, I heard him. I
Speaker 4: don't want to do that. What was interesting about leaving
Speaker 4: in the first place is when you do leave. I
Speaker 4: grew up in this crazy organization, and when I was leaving,
Speaker 4: I felt stupid, I felt tricked, I felt angry, I
Speaker 4: felt like I had wasted my youth, and I felt
Speaker 4: all those things. And I felt as well that the
Speaker 4: only thing I really knew anything about was how to
Speaker 4: run a cult, how to be in a cult. That's
Speaker 4: what I knew.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I didn't want to do that, but so why not?
Speaker 4: Yeah I didn't. There's enough cause I didn't want to
Speaker 4: do that. But that was where the whole storytelling evolved from.
Speaker 4: I realized I did learn something from those clowns. I
Speaker 4: was trying to find a positive takeaway from my time
Speaker 4: with them.
Speaker 3: The only thing that kept us in those seats all
Speaker 3: those many years listening to all that crazy stuff was
Speaker 3: a collective sense of story, a shared story, And so
Speaker 3: I know firsthand how important narrative is. A narrative can
Speaker 3: make you do the most ridiculous thing. A narrative can
Speaker 3: make you give away thirty percent of your income even
Speaker 3: though you're broke. A narrative can think you think that
Speaker 3: the world's gonna end next week. And a narrative can.
Speaker 4: Make you come back to a church even though they
Speaker 4: said Jesus is gonna be there last week and he
Speaker 4: didn't show up. We can make you come back again
Speaker 4: the next week after that and the next week after that.
Speaker 4: Narratives and a shared story is maybe the most powerful
Speaker 4: thing of all. And so I think that they really
Speaker 4: did give me something, like we're all in this line.
Speaker 4: People oftentimes think all those culties are crazy. I wouldn't
Speaker 4: join the colt. I wouldn't do that, and maybe you wouldn't.
Speaker 4: Maybe you would. But honestly, I don't see them as
Speaker 4: those others that oftentimes they're depicted up at the media
Speaker 4: or wherever. I know that they're regular people. Often sometimes
Speaker 4: they're really good people who have a desire to follow
Speaker 4: their convictions. And that's sometimes twisted in turn by a
Speaker 4: charlatan in a certain way. And it's a shame to
Speaker 4: see someone who with a good heart have that turn
Speaker 4: on them, have that very sense of search and seeking
Speaker 4: that they have turn on them, I gues it's a
Speaker 4: real evil thing to do to somebody. I think it's
Speaker 4: a real, a wondrous type of evil.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And instead.
Speaker 4: Of being I guess mad in the same way, I'm
Speaker 4: grateful my background is such that I don't have to
Speaker 4: other those people. And hopefully if you meet someone where
Speaker 4: they are, you can lead them away from some of
Speaker 4: this stuff.
Speaker 3: And at least that was my thought. I would just
Speaker 3: say this.
Speaker 4: People want to make fun of religious cults or whatever,
Speaker 4: but we just had a national cult, you know, wanted
Speaker 4: to desecrate the Capitol building, run around crazy doing the stuff.
Speaker 4: I would say that the cult I grew up in
Speaker 4: was far less pernicious than this national cult that we've
Speaker 4: just been experiencing. And nothing that we believed was anything
Speaker 4: more absurd than anything that came out of these people.
Speaker 4: As you said, tell somebody a climate change doesn't exist,
Speaker 4: and the immigrants all want to come and kill you,
Speaker 4: And this isette what's more pernicious and who's really in
Speaker 4: a cult?
Speaker 3: And it's scary to see the same techniques that were
Speaker 3: you use in their cult be used in our national
Speaker 3: political dialogue as well.
Speaker 4: Because I've been gone for so long, I thought I
Speaker 4: was in a small little thing off in the middle
Speaker 4: of nowhere. That's not how the world works. That's not
Speaker 4: how things really go down. Well guess what it is anyway,
Speaker 4: that's what I think about stuff.
Speaker 6: Damn, that's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we'll let you go soon. But where
Speaker 2: did you land on your beliefs? Can I ask you
Speaker 2: that I'm.
Speaker 4: A born again agnostic. We see so little of what
Speaker 4: is out there. I think it's so ridiculous for me
Speaker 4: to start saying how the universe is structured. Our galaxy
Speaker 4: is just a spect on aspect un aspect right, and
Speaker 4: I'm talking about the way the world works and what
Speaker 4: God did this, this and that. I'm gonna have to
Speaker 4: pass on all that and just say, can I treat
Speaker 4: people with respect when I'm here and hopefully have a
Speaker 4: positive impact. I know I got this, I got this life.
Speaker 4: I don't know about any all the rest of that stuff,
Speaker 4: and so I can only do the best I can
Speaker 4: with this. I didn't think that was enough when I
Speaker 4: was coming up, and now I know that it's more
Speaker 4: than enough. It's more than I can possibly do anything.
Speaker 4: I mean, God, everybody won't see themselves as a hero
Speaker 4: or this, this and that I fall short of my
Speaker 4: own idea of myself every single day. Yeah, so I
Speaker 4: got enough to do without sitting in a basement talking
Speaker 4: about the end times.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, we're sitting in a basement talking about what
Speaker 1: you know isn't true, because that can be equally religious, right, all.
Speaker 4: The smugness of the atheistics, who I probably caught myself
Speaker 4: more towards. I was very fortunate to live around the world,
Speaker 4: and I know this. What you believe is the least
Speaker 4: important thing about a person. What you do, that's what
Speaker 4: really people believe all kinds of stuff. Whatever you want
Speaker 4: to believe that, we're gonna you know, get it, the
Speaker 4: UFOs and all this kind of stuff. What are you doing?
Speaker 4: Whatever it is, you're compelled to improve this world. There
Speaker 4: is nothing that doesn't need to be done. You want
Speaker 4: to make more drinking water, we need that. You want
Speaker 4: to save cats, We need people to do that. Let kids,
Speaker 4: We need people to do that, whatever it is, and
Speaker 4: you will never run out of stuff to do that thing.
Speaker 4: So what are we arguing about?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Agreed, Yes, Yeah, I feel like I'm in church.
Speaker 6: You're in church, preach.
Speaker 4: Because you turn when your handles would be pleased to
Speaker 4: pay thirty three.
Speaker 6: Do we owe you all of our money?
Speaker 5: That's what I need coming right up.
Speaker 4: That's what it says. You can read it yourself rather
Speaker 4: you can really just I don't want to read it
Speaker 4: for you, but please.
Speaker 3: I like the time that jingles, but a lot of
Speaker 3: Courdent faults.
Speaker 2: Oh man, this has been such a pleasure.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you so much for talking to us, Glint.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having me on the show. I really
Speaker 4: appreciate it. I really appreciate by commune of cult teams.
Speaker 4: Whatever we can get together and share some laughs. I
Speaker 4: always appreciate it because we can speak in full speed
Speaker 4: to each other.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, that was great. I'm so happy we got him.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Glenn.
Speaker 6: He's so cool.
Speaker 1: So cool, Megan. So what do you think would you join?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, Glenn was born into it, so
Speaker 1: it's a bit of a different situation. Would you join
Speaker 1: the Worldwide Church of God?
Speaker 5: Do you think?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 6: I would not.
Speaker 2: It involves way too many things I don't like, like
Speaker 2: giving all my money to people that aren't me.
Speaker 1: And but don't all cults make you do that though?
Speaker 1: I feel like that's just sort of a built in.
Speaker 6: True But they think really took a lot.
Speaker 5: They did.
Speaker 1: Although look at Hoy, he gave them like four million
Speaker 1: dollars or what I know.
Speaker 2: I know, but Hoy had money, and Hoy was completely
Speaker 2: exploited and so unfair.
Speaker 6: But to be like a family on.
Speaker 2: A farm giving your like money away is a whole
Speaker 2: different beast in my mind. So I don't know that
Speaker 2: that's fucked up. And I would be so mad if
Speaker 2: I was a kid and my parents were like giving
Speaker 2: money that we needed to eat to this religion.
Speaker 1: Well, the caveat that I will offer to that is
Speaker 1: that many religions require a percentage of your income as tithing. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: Mormonism requires ten percent of your gross income as well
Speaker 1: as tithing. Such a strange setup to have ten percent
Speaker 1: of it be for your own like fun, That's something
Speaker 1: I've never heard of, like ever in theory. That's like
Speaker 1: kind of a fun idea, like, oh, you know, you
Speaker 1: should devote a certain percentage of your income or your
Speaker 1: life to like leisure and you know, self care or whatever.
Speaker 5: Like there's something interesting.
Speaker 1: In that idea, but as a requirement not so much.
Speaker 1: It's more like, oh, if you want to like carve
Speaker 1: out space in your life to make sure, it's not
Speaker 1: all about work, yep, you know, but struggling families living
Speaker 1: in poverty, very very different story.
Speaker 6: Completely. It made me really sad that they had to
Speaker 6: do that.
Speaker 2: And everybody, like you said, everybody we've talked to, has
Speaker 2: been exploited horrifically and it.
Speaker 6: Just breaks your heart.
Speaker 2: So no, didn't like it didn't involve like wigs and
Speaker 2: magic and all that stuff. So I'm out, no nudity,
Speaker 2: no right out the rituals exactly.
Speaker 6: So it's not for me. But what a story.
Speaker 1: Indeed, Well, I guess we'll just leave it at that
Speaker 1: for this week, don't you think.
Speaker 2: I think that might be all we can do. Thank
Speaker 2: you for listening to trust me, have a wonderful week,
Speaker 2: and remember to follow your gut, watch out for a flags, and.
Speaker 5: Never, never ever trust me. Bye bye