Part One: The 12 Tribes: The Worst Cult You've Never Heard Of

billion dollars in damage. It is to date, the most devastating wildfire in Colorado history, although give Colorado some time, I'm sure they'll break that record very soon. The way things are going for everybody ari fires. So after eighteen months of investigation, state authorities concluded that the blaze had started, likely due to smoldering embers from the aforementioned trash fire, and it was like wood trash that was being burned. The fire had started on the communal living property owned

by a little known colt called the Twelve Tribes. This sparked renewed interest in the group and the investigations that followed what inspired these episodes. I should note here that Colorado authorities opted not to charge the cult or its members with the blaze. This may seem unjust, but the logic's actually pretty solid, Like this was a trash burn, the authority showed up, the fire department gave them the go ahead. It just was the driest it's ever been.

So I'm going to say the horrible fire this cult caused probably chalked down more to climate change than the cult, But we have to start there because it's kind of the biggest recent touchstone with this cult. It is weird.

the fire that they got famous for probably not their fault. Today, the twelve Tribes number about three thousand members somewhere around there, although we have no insight into their actual numbers because they are a very shady cult. We do know they own about thirty six million dollars in real estate in the United States, and they operate communes in twenty two states,

so there's a lot of these communities. And they also operate a lot of businesses, which we'll be talking about later, mostly like little cafes and restaurants and enormous construction companies. So one thing that interested me right away with this cult is that while it's got a charismatic founder who goes mad with power, it may have functioned in most of its history is in a less like centralized manner, right where the cult leader was kind of potentially usurped

at some point by his equally sketchy wife. It's kind of hard to say exactly because the life of the cult founder Eugene Spriggs is a little bit obscure. But we're going to do our best here to pull back the veil about this guy and what happens to him. So, Elbert Eugene Spriggs Junior gets born on May eighteenth, nineteen thirty seven to a devout Methodist family in East Ridge, Tennessee.

His childhood is mostly a mystery to us. I can tell you his dad was named Elbert Senior, which is ridiculous, and his mother wasn't Mabel, So he's like very thirties kid, right, Mabel and Albert, Like that's like you can only be grandparents, Like while you're I think you get like skipped over straight to their grandparents stage. If you've got old people names like that.

assume a handful of childhood head injuries. He graduated and moved to Chattanooga to attend the University of Tennessee, where he got a degree in psychology. Now. A paper I found on the Virginia Commonwealth University website describes his young life as unsettled in a number of ways, as he held a succession of jobs pretty wide variety, everything from like labor jobs and stuff to he was a high school guidance counselor. For a spell, he was the tour

director of a travel agency. He did a stint in the army, and he seemed to have unusual difficulties staying in relationships. This is a at this point fifties guy who gets divorced three times. Oh yeah, you don't run into that a lot. That means you're really running through like you got to be absolutely And it seems like he is leaving them right like he has one kid and wife takes it. I don't know it's a little

unclear to me what happened in each relationship. But that's not a common story in this period of time.

into the most sinful and debauched aspects of life. This is the only thing he says that I think is probably true, because I've known some carnies and they all report that love them. So he decides this is not what God has in mind for him, and so he follows a large percentage of his generation and fucks off to California. Now, the late sixties early seventies are famous in this country for having been the age of the Hippie movement and its disillusionment and collapse into what eventually

became the soulless corporatism of the Reagan era. Now, I think the fact that the hippie movement gets so much play in media in part because like the kind of people who made movies and shit were likely to be as kids, the kind of people who were into that social movement. There's this like belief among people that it was the generation that spawned that movement was much more radical than they were. The Boomers were always a very conservative generation.

And one of the things that kind of makes this point is that at the same time that the hippie movement, you know, is kind of winding down, another major cultural trend is happening that tends to get left out of popular histories of the era. Have you heard of the Jesus Movement?

back to the land. And the thing that kind of separates them from the hippies is that the Jesus Movement sees Christ as a counter culture hero, so they are kind of Jesus. Yeah, yeah, hippie. There is like a bit of that going on, but it's still it is, as we'll talk about, still quite conservative. Now.

But a lot of it's going to lead to the religious right, like it feeds directly because you have kind of Jesus movement is sort of late sixties through parts of the seventies and kind of that's also right around when you know, in the late seventies you get Jerry Folwell start to emerge, you get the religious right welded into this political coalition for the first time. Yeah, so the people who get swept up in this generally called either Jesus people or Jesus freaks. That is where the

term Jesus freak comes from. And yeah, it's a charismatic movement. It's cross denominational, So there are Catholics who like sects

of Catholics who are part of this Jesus movement. There's Protestants in it, and it's like a lot of different organizations, lots of different churches that you can just kind of like broadly call part of the Jesus movement, not because they're part of the same thing with each other, right, Like, if you have this sort of hardcore Protestant, you know church, that's Jesus movement, they're not the same thing as Catholics who might also be swept up in it, but the

similarity they have is that like they're all adopting this really like charismatic kind of countercultural attitude towards their religious worship.

Followers would often speak in tongues. That's a big part of like when that gets more popular in the United States, and there's generally a big focus on what's called the gifts of the Spirit, which is like restoring this kind of sense of a direct connection personal connection to God usually an a static connection, right, So this is part of why you get these like big tint revival worship ceremonies.

A really good documentary to watch if you want to understand the texture of this movement in time is Marjo M A. R. Joe. It's about this kid, Marjo Gortner, who was like the youngest priest in the country. It was kind of a carnival sideshow grift run by his parents, but he went back as an adult to film behind the scenes and it shows a lot of this period you can get Are you.

a cult. It's not like a one thing, right, It's like a bunch of different in some cases, very much like opposed different sort of religious organizations, traditions, communities. They're just kind of bound together by certain similarities as a

result of this cultural moment. Yeah, and it's also worth noting that, like a lot of people who get pulled into the Jesus movement, there's a big focus on this idea of like returning to the lifestyles of early Christians, which is part of what convinces them of Like why a lot of them do sort of the back to the land shit, right, Like that's a big thing for them. This helps them kind of blend in with the hippies, right, And often Jesus freaks are people who had been hippies a few years earlier.

were changing in the wrong direction. Some of this is tied to the Cold War as well, particularly fears of nuclear war and how that merges with Christian apocalyptic prophecy. One of the key books of the Jesus movement is how Lindsay's The Late Great Planet Earth. And if you if you grew up as an evangelical kid, you probably heard about that book. It is hugely influential to these people. We can't actually know if Spriggs had the vision he

claims he had in nineteen sixty nine. I kind of think he may have falsified that because it's an auspicious year for the counterculture. You know, if you're gonna talk about like, that's the year you do it. Part of why I suspect this is because some versions of the Spriggs story say that, you know, God came to him during his Carnie days in nineteen seventy, you know, a year later, whatever the case. After the late sixties, you know, as the nineteen seventies start, he does become very quickly

like a player. In the newly energized Christian fringe, write up by The Times Free Press notes, while in California, he devoted his life to creating a ministry. According to reporting at the time by the Chattanooga News Free Press. Spriggs said he wanted to reach young people who were not going to church, particularly those turned off of faith

from their parents. That's interesting to me, like he's very much focusing on young people who especially this kind of very staid, stolid Protestantism that's really turn of the century, these very quiet, austere churches that still have kind of some of these Victorian attitudes and worship is very much

like channeled through the pastor. A big part of what he's doing is like, no, we want like personal, astatic connections, and that's what will bring these young people back who kind of got burnt out of these very authoritarian churches of their youths. This is going to be ironic considering where Spriggs ends up.

The Jesus movement is appealing to disillusioned dropouts, to former war protesters and stuff like that, and Jean realizes early on that these people are the easiest converts to his church because like dropouts people with criminal records, they tend to be desperate, and so he offers them what they need if they'll attend his services, and he starts opening his house to worshippers right, being like, if you're coming to church here, you can live with me, you know,

like your food and whatnot will be taken care of. And so by nineteen seventy four there are between fifty and sixty people living with the Sprigses in their house, which must have smelled fascinating. That's too many people for one house. Perhaps because of this, they start asking their followers to pool their resources, and this is a limited

affair at first. They're kind of just asking for donations, right, you know, if you do have money, if you've got family money or something, or you have savings when you come here, maybe give us some of it so we can pay for these other people who who have nothing.

people show up because, like, you know, they're starving. Yeah, and when they're starving, that's a really good way to just kind of pull people into what is becoming a cult, right, you know, that's your little fishing lure.

kids all around, so it's easy to find one. Anyway.

is the Yellow Deli. And one local news article about the deli's opening, Spriggs said, when people ask us who our interior designer is, we tell them we have the same one Noah had, which is an interesting like basically saying like God helped us design the interior, which I think means they probably did not have fire escapes. Seems like I thing God would miss. Spriggs was not at this point, openly describing what he was doing as separate

from mainstream Christianity. In fact, he and his followers were careful to maintain regular attendance at a local church, First Presbyterian, because it's you know, like, even if you're doing an ostensibly Christian movement, there's nobody who's going to get pissed at you faster than like old conservative church goers. Right.

So if you're doing this weird thing, if you're living with dozens of people and like convincing all the dropouts and hippies to move in with you and buying up large amounts of real estate, you really want to allay their suspicions. When he is asked by a journalist during this period of time about his plans for the future, Spriggs says, this, can you imagine what a wonderful thing it would be to have Yellow Delis all over America, a restaurant with good food for everyone in the community.

But it would be a place to reach all the runaways who are passing through, or all the young people who are tired and mixed up. These people are not going to church. Sometimes they stop at shelters and guidance. People beat around the Bush. They don't tell it simple like it is, Jesus loves you. You can be happy. Let God run your life, you know.

on it. And I used to I used to work because like we had no internet for a long time in the trailer in the mountains that we lived in I used to have to go drive every day to this play I thing was called It's absolutely a part of this like fucking church thing all very like a lot of people having like evangelical conversations, like you know, pulling in someone from off the street, some trimmer or whatever and having very earnest talks with them about Jesus.

It was that's where I wrote a lot of what became the first season of It Could happen here. It's like sitting in this cafe with all of these like hardcore Christian right fanatics who were very very carefully trying to expand their little king them quite successfully.

mixed up. You know, this is the seventies. This is the fucking easy writer era, right these Like the fact that there's all these young people have kind of dropped out is a major like kind it's not really a culture war touchstone, but it's like a major concern, particularly for like older, more conservative Americans, And so this line plays well with them, you know, particularly well with people who might have been put off by the fact that

he's kind of created a commune in their town. But there are some signs from the beginning that Spriggs was heading in an settling direction. In that same interview, he expressed that another one of his goals was to reach people who had dropped out of Christianity because they didn't like the faith that their parents had expressed. And this line from him is really interesting. You can't fool a dog or a child can see the hypocrisy and the

phoniness in their parents' lives. Their parents take alcohol, tranquilizers, cigarettes, or they disobey speed laws, yet they want their children to stay off drugs and obey all laws. Which is not an inherently bad point, right that, like there's this very like conservative backlash era happening in the particularly in the seventies, but it's being kind of perpetrated by these people who are on what we now call some of the most dangerous benzos in the world. Right.

local kids who were disillusioned with mainstream society. Sometimes the cults sent members out into the world to find new members in places where they thought people struggling on the fringe would congregate. This culminated in them for years. They would send a bus to follow the Grateful Dead on concert tours, and hand picked members would offer first aid and food to fans coming up or down on the various substances. Yeah, I do kind of I have this this beautiful image in my head of like the this

cult bust crashing into the nitrous mafia's bus. I don't know who would have won that fight. So Jeene Spriggs promises all of his recruits, you know that if they work hard, he'll take care of them. You know, they won't have any unmet physical needs. All he needs is their yeah, their their labor, and their unyielding religious evoce. And he also promises you'll never be lonely again. Everyone lives communally in the cult, and they work communally too.

They start to call themselves the Light Brigade in this period of time. They're not going to stick with that name very long because it's a dog shit name and it's one of those things. You don't have any autonomy

when you're in the Light Brigade. But you also you're not exposed to capitalism, right, and that like you don't have to worry about winding up on the street, you don't have to worry about starving like that is a huge part of the appeal right especially again, this is a lot of these people are folks who had been swept up in the big social movements of the sixties.

And now they're kind of dealing with how a lot of that failed, how chaotic and scary the world seems in the seventies, the promise that like you can forget all of that and forget interfacing with a confusing and chaotic world. Like that's appealing, right, that is objectively, that is appealing, Like a lot of people. Why it's why, Like folks in our generation idolize this this kind of mythical idea of like living on a farm with your friends.

Everyone is aware of that, right, We're preaching to a large choir here, so.

how I was influenced by these people. I was twenty one years old and just got out of a three year abusive relationship, renting a room in a house in Saint Elmo, no direction and no family to turn to. They told me what I needed to hear. They loved me, and God loved me, and I could come live with them. When I became convinced, two members moved me out of

my little room at three am. I was driven to their commune in Dalton, Georgia, and like, yeah, I think that gets across, Like, yeah, it was in an abusive relationship. I got out. I've got no family, I've got this apart I can't afford it solves. They offer to solve all your problems as long as you want the Jesus. At first, the Light Brigade and the Weinhaus Church were augments to the local Christian culture, not a wild new

vision of worship. This changes in nineteen seventy five when First Presbyterian makes the decision to cancel a Sunday worship session so that their pastor can go watch the Super Bowl. Right, He's like, you know it, don't come in Sunday, Like we're all going to go to the game anyway. Right, this is kind of a cool thing to do if you're a seventies preacher. But this is like Gene finds this offensive. Right, you don't skip worship for any reason,

especially not this like profane worldly game. So he uses this as an excuse to break his flock away from the church entirely and start hosting Sunday services in a local park instead. This increases his hold over his flock, who now become They had been part of the community before. Right, you're going to church with everybody, you're somewhat tied to it from this point now they're only socializing and working with each other. Right, This is kind of he severed

this like cord that they had to everyone else. This also brings Spriggs his first real opposition, because once the cult kind of steps away from this church, locals start to be like, this does kind of seem like a problem, like this cult. So from seventy five to seventy eight, local churches register protests against the Light Brigade. When Spriggs is spotted performing public baptisms, local papers start running the

first articles accusing them of being a cult. Two local colleges ban their students from eating at the Yellow Deli after enough former students had dropped out to join the Spriggs cult, Like it's becomes such a problem of them like poaching college students. I'm guessing they're kids who were you know, you're in college, you find that you don't like your major as much as you thought, or you get stressed out during exams. You're poor, so you go to the Yellow Deli for a free meal, and they're

like boys, seems like college isn't making you happy. You know it'll make you happy.

to have an easier time, that's good. If you're doing it because you want them to like feel a sense of obligation to you so that you can rope them into your your cult, that's bad, right, Yeah, real estate scheme. Yeah, the key a big part of it. Whenever somebody is like showing up and handing out free food, is like, yeah, who's behind this. Is it just a bunch of people coming together to help out the community, or is they're

a guy. Is there like a dude and this is his thing, you know, then then maybe it's a cult. Then maybe you should get your cult mace out.

his head. I told him I found Jesus and these people loved me and were going to take care of me. So they have they build over the years, like a pretty steady process for like disenrolling kids from college when they when they convert them, like it's enough of a thing that like not only dose schools try to ban their students from going to this cafe, but like everyone who works their nose, like, oh shit, we lost another one to the fucking cult.

They shot a congressman. That's so wild. I imagine if that happened today.

is a very common thing. Now you might not think about it that way, but if you've ever seen, if you've been to one of these far right gatherings where there's like a lot of religious right people and someone will bring like a show far which is like a horn made out of like an animal horn that you blow into that's like comes from Jewish religious observances, right, that like some Christians have reincorporated back into Evangelicalism, I think because a chofar looks cool and they want But yeah,

he's like kind of the first guy to do this in a big way in the Christian right. And he's more extensive than this. He brings the show far in. He also brings back bar mitzvahs, like kids in his cults celebrate have their bar mitzvahs and bot mitzvahs, And this, you know, is interesting. It's certainly going to play into ways in which other far right like religious cults are

going to move in the future. But it makes them seem more alien to the normies of Chattanooga, who by this point are in kind of a full blown panic that the next jonestown might be in their backyard. Another thing that makes them seem ainly into the normies is that by the late seventies, Spriggs had decided that separation was the critical precondition for his cult to reach the potential that God had set for them. And I'm going

to quote from that write up by vcu here. Twelve Tribes has concluded that adherence to a natural law standard will not be sufficient to create the conditions for the return of the Messiah. Separation is critical for the Twelve Tribes because the absolute values of natural law are being lost in contemporary society. The Twelve Tribes opposed the rise of a multicultural global social order a single world government

in world religion. The former revitalizes values. The latter undermines and compromises the values of natural law and promotes rampant materialism and acquisitiveness, feminism, the devise of the traditional patriarchal family, and the legitimation of gay marriage. The return of the Messiah is contingent on the gathering of a faithful remnant

and the Church being restored in its original form. To pave the way for the millennium, the movement must expand from its present nine to twelve Tribes each of which must grow to at least twelve hundred members, thus creating one hundred and forty four thousand faithful who will be included in God's millennial kingdom. Now, a lot of that's very modern. Gene as a trailblazer in some of this stuff.

It's interesting. I've seen it claim that Gene's particular eschatology, he didn't just need one hundred and forty four thousand faithful to prepare for the way of the Messiah, but he had to build an army of one hundred and forty four thousand male virgins and tall order, yeah, tall, tall order. It is at this point I should also note that, according to the Church, Gene was a scout master at one point. They brag about this a lot. So you hear about a scout master trying to get

one hundred and forty four thousand male virgins together. That's not a happy story, right now, that's going to end bad. That is rough. Yeah. Yeah, Also too many male virgins, like nothing good can happen with all that, all that pentemic.

that they kind of skimmed. He also made the mistake of having the mission to Vermont led by one of his longest serving members, a guy named David Jones. David had joined the Twelve Tribes back in nineteen seventy three as a traumatized Vietnam veteran fresh from the war. He'd

become one of Jane's most trusted lieutenants. Unfortunately, his last name was Jones, and the provincial residence of Island Pond, Vermont, started like as soon as they hear a guy named Jones has moved here with his like weird religious congregation, They're like, he has to be related to Jim Jones.

they think this guy is related to Jim Jones. But they ought to be watching these people because there are absolutely good reasons to be monitoring the Twelve Tribes. They just have nothing to do with Jonestown.

Like right, This starts off as sort of this, you know, we're going back to the original Christianity, and over the first decade or so it exists, he kind of builds this religious philosophy where he decides the chief problems of the world are all caused by disobedience to God's law, and so the only way to correct that is to raise up a new generation of kids by absolutely beating the piss out of them. And that is going to be That is the Twelve Tribes, right. It is the

let's hit the shit out of kids cult. Terrible way to go to ads, but here they are. We're back now. By this point in the story, Gene has also taken a new name for himself and the tradition of most great cult leaders, Yonick, which Hebrew comes from the Bible. His followers called him an apostle, and there's debate from former members as to whether or not yon Neck was all powerful or just a major source of charismatic authority, but he certainly was not the only source of prophetic

revelations for the group. It does seem fair, though, to say that Yonick set the tone and focus for the church and that his primary concern was children. In the early days, Spriggs had claimed his goal was to bring kids on the fringe, counterculture types who had like dropped out of the Middle America Christianity of their parents back to God. But now in the mid to late seventies, late seventies, early eighties, he starts to claim having a different goal, which is to build a church that it

would be impossible for children to leave. Right like that is his He goes from I want to bring kids back to the church to I want to break their little minds in such a way that they never disobey their parents, that they never leave us. You know, now, part of how he does this is isolation. He starts mandating church kids are not even allowed to be born outside of the compounds. Right, you can't go to a hospital to have your kids. You certainly can't have them

educated in public schools. They're never going to work a job on their own. They'll be apprenticed within church businesses. We have created our own parallel society so that they can't escape and to make any kind of deviation impossible. Spriggs devoted his biblical knowledge to creating a protocol of rigorous abuse described in his brochure. When the spanking stopped, all hell broke loose.

a command. The tribes argue that progressive child bearing practices such as timeouts, are taking away treats or screen time, have resulted in a spike in juvenile violence and crime. The only way to reverse this trend, the tribes contends, is by using the proverbial rod early, often, and hard

enough to leave marx. According to former and current tribes leaders I spoke with, infants raised in the tribes are hit with balloon sticks, thin wooden rods used to keep balloons from floating away for offenses as minor as resisting a diaper change or throwing a bottle. Older children are whipped with bamboo canes. Children are driven by their natural innate nature to do what is wrong. The group's teaching state, it is better to go to heaven with welts than

go to hell without weltz. That's Gene Spriggs right there.

depending on the era and the geographic region. They seem to prefer using these balloon sticks or bamboo sticks, but they also for certain things prescribed whipping kids with resin tipped whips. I don't even know where you get those, like, probably have to get a whip and just tip it and resin yourself today. This is all described in detail in their three hundred and forty eight page Child Training Manual, all of which is based on Spriggs's teachings.

balloon stick is more humbling than harmful. There is no defense against it. The only way to stop the sting of the rod is to submit. That is exactly what the child will do, Submit to his parents' will and end his rebellion. Now that's fucked up and bad. It is responsible to acknowledge that like smacking kids around is not all that far from normal in the seventies, right, we are not talking about like that, I mean, it

still happens today. Obviously, a lot of parents some form of physical coercion with their kids, and it's even more common back then.

One ex member who grew up in the church during the eighties were called a practice called scourging, in which a child is stripped, naked and beaten with a rod over every inch of their body. Yeah. Adults would also regularly withhold meals from small children as punishment. Starvation is a really common punishment for them. In some cases, food

would be withheld for days at a time. Children were also locked alone in dark rooms for days at a time in response to crimes like stealing food from a refrigerator.

but it felt like it. I think it was for more than a day because we fasted every Friday, so I was used to starving, and it was longer than that, which is a gives you an idea of the bleakness of this, Like I was pretty used to starving, Like this was worse than normal starving. Now, one of the things that's interesting to me is Spriggs never has a kid. He does not have a child of his own in

the cult. Sorry, he does have one boy, with his first wife, but he leaves when the kid's young, which for the best in this case, that kid really dodged a bullet by not having his dad. Yeah, not always a win to have your dad in your life, especially when it's it's the how to hit children to guy.

with the violent tone that his faith had taken. His sister Joyce talked to the press and reported that, like you know, in the when he in the early seventies, when he starts ministering, when he starts like speaking to people doing these church services, I thought, well, maybe he started to figure his life out. This is like, you know, good for him, probably a positive turn. But by the end of the seventies, December of seventy nine, she was like,

I think he's gotten very negative. And she mentions this to him. She like goes to Eugene, She's like, I think the stuff you're talking about is like really aggressive and it's kind of scaring me. And he just says, you know, all I'm doing is following the scripture, right, Like, you can't argue with this. You can't argue with me because this is all the Bible. Now. We will talk more about this in part two, but it's worth noting that while the Twelve Tribes's attitude on child abuse is extreme,

it does not grow up in isolation. The Jesus Movement started out with serious countercultural elements, but it also fed directly into the birth of the religious right, which helped to unseat Jimmy Carter and became a major engine behind Reaganism and the revived cultural conservatism that followed. When I read about Spriggs's teachings here, I think about a book called To Train Up a Child, which is a nineteen ninety four parenting advice book self published by Mike and

Debbie Pearl. If you recall our episodes on the Duggers and the organization behind them. The Institute of Basic Life Principles the IBLP endorses this book. Right to Train Up a Child is common among homeschooling families. It was for years the standard book in the Christian far right about how to raise kids. I have multiple friends who were raised according to its teachings. If you knew any people who were like quiverful kids, this book was a presence

in their house and childhood. And one of the things, like, among other things, the book says that like you need to kind of as Spriggs taught, you have to be constantly using some form of negative physical reinforcement on your kids. And it includes like sadistic shit like spanking your kids like long enough to break their will. Right. It's not just like I'm not saying this is okay. But it's not just saying like, okay, you know you did a bad thing, so I'm going to, like, you know, spank

you five times in the butt or something. It's like you have to spank them until they stop being willful, you know.

stayed fringe, but his child beating tactics did not. Anyway, when you build a church around slapping, the absolute shit out of small kids. Eventually someone's going to spot your members slapping the shit out of small children. By nineteen seventy nine, several members had fled and taken stories to local Chattanooga papers. Allegations of abuse based on the fact that cult members absolutely were hitting kids had also gone

the old timey equivalent of viral. This problem followed the branch of the church, two hundred members strong, that had moved to Vermont. By all accounts, Spriggs maintained tight control of this breakaway segment, not breakaway, but of this like expansion of his church, writing regular letters to David Jones encouraging him to ensure that children on the new properties

were being beaten often enough. Quote, if one is overly concerned about his son receiving blue marks, you know that he hates his son and hates the word of God. Blue marks are Spriggs's turn for bruises, and he speaks of them as a positive thing. Right, Like, you're not being a good parent if your kids don't have blue marks. If you're not bruising them, you're not doing it hard enough, right, That's what he's saying here. He's just being a little bit more kind of biblical whimsy about it. This is

a frequent euphemism used by church leadership. A reporter for Pacific Standard magazine writes more on this topic based on interviews with former church members. I remember constant Weltz on my hands, thighs and butt. A woman who was raised and the tribes told me. Children are expected to obey on the first command without talking back or complaining. They are not allowed toys or bikes, and cannot engage in fantasy play. They read only the Bible in the group's dogma.

The former members I spoke to claimed most children were beaten multiple times a day for transgressions as an ocuus as forgetting to raise their hands at the dinner table, and dissipation, the group's term for horse play. Responding to these descriptions, a current leader of their California communities, Wade Skinner,

echoed the brochure I read in Blue Blinds. That wouldn't be how we portray our life, he said, But we do believe that if you love your child, you will be diligent to discipline them, and if you hate them, you will withhold the rod. Cool guys love to see it. The first serious trouble for the Twelve Tribes started in from in nineteen eighty three, when an elder named Eddie Wiseman whipped a child named Darlyn with a balloon stick from her shoulders to her ankles for kissing a boy.

Darlin was thirteen years old, and he whips her badly enough that she's like bleeding.

the Twelve Tribes had already been attracting concern for a while. Now. Investigating this cult is a really difficult job. The children who were believed to be victims were homeschooled, so they're not ever in front of teachers. They avoid modern medical care, so they're not ever in front of doctors. They very rarely leave cult property, which makes it pretty much impossible

to build a case. Right. You can't get a warrant when you don't know the number of children or their names when you're just like, there's children there and we think they're being a Like, that's that's a tough legal situation to be in if you're if you're the people trying to like do something about this, right like they because you have a lot of rights obviously, especially on

your own property. And yeah, it's it's tough, Like the actual like how to how to break into a situation like this is incredibly difficult when they have so successfully created an alternate world for themselves. It's it's rough.

family refuse to do this. They are jailed, but they're released in short orders three days later, though, an army of state troopers and social workers raids the Twelve Tribes's property with a mandate to do whatever is necessary to figure out how many kids are there and who they are. They find one hundred and twelve miners and they take them all away. It looks, you know, initially, as if maybe the authorities are going to do something to put

an end to this. That is not what happened. While the parents of these kids wait nearby, prosecutors failed to get a court order to examine the children for signs of abuse. The district judge in this case complains that their warrant is too broad, in part because it does not name the children they want to search. All one hundred and twelve miners are ordered released in very short order,

back to the waiting rods of their parents. David Jones gloated that this had all been the result of an unhinged small town mentality, claiming the furor had come to a head like a boil with no puss, which is a weird way to describe being, in his eyes, exonerated for child abuse. Like, yeah, we're just like one of those pusless boils. Yeah, Like what an odd what an odd turn of phrase. June twenty second the day the oil that you want, Yeah, yeah, where the boil you

want to have? There's not a yeah, it's plus less. June twenty second is the day that the raid gets aborted, and this becomes the first religious holiday that the Twelfth tribes celebrate all to themselves. They start calling it the day of Deliverance. They'll do passover style meals right like they call it. They kind of make it into their passover right because it's the day that God miraculously extended his protection to them against the grasping hands of the state.

Jene sprigs after this will only grow more convinced of the wisdom of his separation from society. Another thing that plays into this is what's happening at the same time as the AIDS crisis right is starting to kick off. This convinces him both that like of this kind of fallen nature of the modern world, that the only thing to do is separation, and it also convinces him that God's justice is being delivered against the unrighteous, even as

his hand shields believers. He writes, at this time, when rental authority is rebelled against it opens the door to come against all constituted authority, honoring those who are over you, those who are honorable, especially parents. Releases a special hormone from your brain permeating your body that gives long life. If you don't do this, that hormone dries up and your bones dry up. The disobedient don't live long. The lifespan of a homosexual is about forty years. That's not

because of aids. They die of a bad conscience, and like that's evil it is. I have to say, the idea that like obeying your parents releases a hormone that you die without is a pretty fun bit of pseudo science for a cult leader. That's a good one.