How this faith healer from the 1940s inspired cults across the world, including in Arizona

KJZZ Radio, Phoenix/December 12, 2024

By Lauren Gilger

The preacher William Branham died in Tucson in 1965, but millions of people around the world still follow his teachings to this day as part of a religious sect known as “The Message.” Thanks in large part to the more than 1,000 recordings of Branham that still exist today.

The recordings of his often hours long sermons are distributed around the world today by a company called Voice of God Recordings, which is run by the late preacher’s son. And, the sects he has inspired — including here in Arizona — have been called cults that have sometimes turned destructive.

Tim Steller, a columnist at the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, spent a year investigating The Message and joined The Show to discuss.

Full conversation
TIM STELLER: But I knew nothing about this, except that in late ‘22, I got an email that was sent to several journalists, a bunch of journalists in Arizona, by someone local here in Tucson who was trying to stir up interest in his investigation into the church he used to belong to here in Tucson. I arranged a meeting with this man and several of his confederates, and we're sitting there talking at this table and they keep making reference to this name, Branham.

And I finally had to stop and say, “wait, who is this, Branham you keep talking about?” And they said, “well, this is our prophet.” And I was like, “oh, you know, I had no idea about this.” So that's when I realized this one church was part of a much bigger world that had this man, William Branham, at the center of it.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. OK, OK. So let's talk about that. And I want to have you kind of explain this religion by painting a scene for us, that you paint in the story when you kind of walk into a South Phoenix church called the Jericho Tabernacle Church. And people are in the church like it looks normal, but then a recording starts to play, instead of a preacher getting up and talking and it's from a sermon from William Branham from, you know, decades ago.

STELLER: Right. This is something that churches do around the country. So, this was a very windy night in January in South Phoenix. I went to this church because I'd heard of it and asked if I could attend. I identified myself as a journalist and they said, yes, there's hardly anybody in the church that night, but the, the amazing thing was to be sitting in the church with the people listening to this crackling recording coming on, hearing the sounds of this busier church service coming on in Jeffersonville, Indiana, 50 to 60 years before. And the interaction between people in a church today with people in a church 60 years ago, responding to what was going on there.

GILGER: OK, OK. So, the teachings of William Branham, his sermons are distributed, it turns out, around the world, not just in churches like the one here in South Phoenix. And it's part of this religion called the message, right? So tell us about, about what that means and, and how far it seems to have spread in your reporting.

STELLER: So, the message is what William Branham's ministry turned into in the 1960s. He had been a faith healer of great renown across the United States in the '40s to the '50s. And gradually, he developed this kind of ideology or these ideas of own that were referred to as “The Message of the Hour” or “The Message,” and he also had the great sense to have people recording his sermons, starting in 1947, I believe.

So today, there are more than 1,200 sermons recorded. So there's this organization called “Voice of God Recordings.” It is the organization that dedicates itself to distributing and housing Branham's sermons. It's named Voice of God Recordings because Branham had once said, in a sermon, about his own gifts, “I am God's voice to you.”

So, they have all these recordings and over time they've developed the way they distribute them. So, now all the recordings are available online. You can download an app called “The Table.” You can do a keyword search. Look up, for example, “Sabino Canyon,” down here in Tucson. He had some supernatural experiences there, so I, several times, had to look up Sabino Canyon and pulled up sermons from the 60s where he talked about it. And also, Voice of God recordings sends out tablets around the world to different places where people view William Branham as their prophet

GILGER: As their prophet, right. OK. So this has been called a cult and there have been some really dark stories that have come out of some sects of this. Tell us about that.

STELLER: Yeah. So, our reporting concluded that one of the downsides, the big downsides of this ministry is that it delegates all the power in a church, in a congregation, to the pastor. That is, the pastor is considered somewhat infallible in many of these churches. And also because they are end times, churches that focus on the coming of, of the end times, there is a tendency for the pastors to become very powerful and in some cases become cults.

So, for example, we mentioned the Shaka Hola massacre, which occurred in Kenya in 2023, hundreds of people starve themselves to death. The pastor, Paul Mackenzie, was influenced by William Branham certainly. This goes back to Chile in the '60s to '90s. In Colonia Dignidad, a German man formed this German colony in Chile which was rigidly fenced off. And, in Arizona, perhaps the most troubling example of this was what's known as “The Park.”

It was a commune established by two of William Branham's closest associates. He let them spin off their own congregation, or really a commune, at a mobile home park in Prescott which became the site of just awful mistreatment and abuse of children as well as adults. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, terrible lashings, and this went on for around a decade from the 60s into the 70s and is really only now being exposed by some of the Arizona residents who, who lived through it as children.

GILGER: Wow, wow. So, all of this kind of connected back to this preacher. Talk a little bit about what the company has said now. His son runs a voice of God recordings company that you mentioned that distributes his father's recordings. What did they say about some of the awful examples in which this has really gone wrong?

STELLER: Well, in general, they say that these are not examples of the message, that they're perversions of what William Branham wanted. For example, the people in Kenya starved themselves to death, whereas William Branham, they say said, “if you're fasting, when you get hungry, it's time to end the fast.” So, they say these people just took some of the things that he talked about into crazy directions. I should mention Joseph Branham, who is the surviving son you mentioned, he is, I think you would him a sometime resident of Tucson, and is viewed by some people around the world as the new prophet.

GILGER: OK, let me ask you lastly, Tim about just what struck you most about this as you're reporting this for a year or more here. I mean, the tentacles of this go far and wide, but there's so much here in Arizona as well. What stands out to you?

STELLER: I guess what really jumps out at me is just the fact that there are these subcultures that are hidden but existing. For example, you know, Tucson Tabernacle, a church I've driven by dozens, if not hundreds of times, I didn't know that it began life in the '60s as the first William Branham message church in Tucson. But it's sitting there with the phrase “only believe,” which is one of Bran's key phrases, painted on the side, and it never struck me, you know, after 27 years of living here.

But, you know, another thing is just that people are, this is not news, but people are desperate for me for answers to the big questions. And, you know, if they can't find them one place, they'll find them another place, and sometimes it's not a healthy place. So, they will follow people who give them answers or give them a feeling of leadership and that's certainly what happened in many of these subsets of The Message.

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