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Jim Willis's biography is going to sound a little familiar like myself. Jim is ordained in this case. Jim is ordained after having gone to andover Newton Theological Seminary, which is now part of Yale Divinity School, and he is the author of many books involving the intersection of I would say, faith and disaster in some cases. In this case it's American cults, cabal's corruption, and charismatic leaders.
Thank you Jim for giving us time.
Oh thank you Ian Before we start, man, I don't want to bury the lead. I have been kind of offline for the last couple of days, as I do from time to time, and I didn't know anything about what you just talked about. Kenya, could you get me up.
You will be hearing about it then, along with everybody else.
Let me just say before I do that, now, that Andover and Newton has become subsumed by Yale Divinity School. If you pretended to have lost your diploma and you write and wait, wait, and you write, and you say had like a new andover Newton, they'll probably send you one that says yale on it because that happened to a friend of mine. You get an upgrade if the school has been taken over by another school.
I'm telling you, I've been out here in the woods now for fifteen years and I haven't even looked at my.
All the more reason to say I lost it.
So Jim lives in the woods of South Carolina, where he went in pursuit of a natural faith, which I really enjoyed reading about, if only in part. So we'll return to your biography, but just to bring you up to Dayton, so I don't tease people along too far. We're talking about a new and this is not new in terms of the themes of it or even the events,
but it just happened. Kenya police, according to the BBC, are investigating the deaths of four people suspected to have starved to death on the orders of the leader of a controversial cult, pastor Mackenzie and Thingay, is alleged to have told his followers in the coastal area of Khalifi to starve themselves in the hope of getting to heaven more quickly.
Well, yeah, that'll do it.
Following a tip off, police found fifteen seriously ill people on Thursday. Only eleven made it to the hospital alive. And then the reports are, and these are verifiable reports, that there is a mass grave somewhere in this jungle where the people who didn't even make it this far
were buried by those who survived it up until yesterday. Wow, but doesn't that have a very familiar ring to it to a Milliner cult where the leader positions themselves as some sort of arbiter of salvation but would rather see his own followers or her followers, in very rare cases die than to have them see that he never had the power, never had the pipeline to God that he claimed he did.
Talk about Jim Jones.
Huh, well, yeah, exactly. I mean Jim Jones. Coming from a long line of Jim Jones's.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there was there was a time back in the seventies eighties. I guess it was when Jim Baker was having his trouble and Jim Jones was having his trouble, and Jimmy Swaggert was having his trouble, and I began to wonder about all these ministers called Jim.
Yeah, that's right, likely true. And when you think about it. Although Jim Jones is certainly the most notorious of that group, they all kind of follow a similar pattern of starting to believe their own publicity and that.
That is the case, you know, And the fact that this happened recently in Kenya brings out, you know something that's just when I started out to write this book, I was expecting to talk about all kinds of cults from all over the world, and it just got so big, I know, I couldn't do it, so I had to limit it at the request of the publisher, to American cults. But what's happening here is, you know, just because they are American cults doesn't mean it's not going on other places obviously.
So well, that's the long tradition of European cults. These we call the millenarian cults, cults that are trying to bring about the millennium for people who don't know. And and you know, there are many like that in the United States, but there were just literally hundreds of them in the Middle Ages, in every language, in every country, and many of the first founders that came to the United States came out of that same cult mentality, you.
Know, It's hard for us to think about in these terms because most of us have grown up in traditional classrooms and they take us back to the Pilgrims, for instance, and we talk about the Pilgrims and the history books, I'll talk about these fire seeing people who were looking to build a city on a hill and all this kind of thing. What we forget, though, is that where the Pilgrims came from, they were called separatists or the Puritans. Rather,
they were called separatists. And when they came here, they were not coming here just to build their mythical city on a hill. But they were coming here because they were leaving a persecution in the old country, and it was because they were called a cult. And when they came here. We would love to say they had a happy ending and everything was good, But the story of the Puritanism in New England, it seems as soon as they got here and got settled down and started forming
some big cities, they turned into a cult themselves. It was either our way of the highway. They drove out the Quakers, for instance, after you know, beating them and whipping them and driving him out of town on a rail. They basically arrested a lot of the women who are
living different kinds of lives and called them witches. And the Salem Witch Trials took place, and Cotton Mother, who was a you know, one of the foremost preachers of his day, one of the leaders of this exclusive cult called Puritanism, he went to the Salem Witch Trials and just sat there and watched and didn't open his mouth. Now,
they didn't stay that way. I mean, I belonged to a denomination which has its roots partially in New England Congregationalism, and it's called you know, I mean that it's a relatively liberal denomination now, but back then it was a perfectly good reason for calling the Purisans a cult. They acted like it, They imposed their own will, they drove out people who didn't believe as they did, and it kind of at our American DNA ever said well and they killed people.
Yeah, So I mean, let's I mean, let's just let's got it was. That was not an anomaly.
And we've done enough shows on the Salem Witch Trials on coast to coast am over the years to just kind of always remind people this was not this was not an offshoot. This wasn't a faction. This was the This is when the main stream theology of the Puritans became so twisted that it eventually began to eat its own tail.
Yeah, which is basically which is what happened.
And so whether it's in Salem or Salem Town and you know, the all sorts of I mean to take the tour up there is.
Illuminating.
But the idea who qualified as a wedge and then what they what that liberated them to do to that person, That's kind of the scariest thing. And and it's sort of part of what we still see carried through in the story of American cults here still.
To this day.
Yeah. Yeah. And the part that was so strange about that is is here was this this group that had the Spanish Inquisition, uh, and the the the you know, fresh in their minds. It was going on in Europe at the same time, and it carried on here when when the Conquistadors came into Mexico and later into into you know, Central American and all that. Here here they were a group claiming absolute power and just destroying people, destroying the books that didn't agree with them. The Mayan
texts were destroyed, people were killed and everything else. So here we.
Slaved, and mean they enslaved people who did not agree with them, which again is something we see common in a lot of cults, that idea of captivity, and we might say today we might refer to it almost as the kind of Stockholm syndrome. They deny them, protein keep them locked up until they agree to become one of us, and then that's okay. Then they start to enjoy privileges again.
Yeah, yeah, And that's absolute cultic behavior.
You know.
That's why I tend to try to not label organization's cults as a whole right because you know, let's face it, there were there were some really far seeing and and good puritan stock, you know, even though they were living in a culture that was opposed to what they did. And there were some fine people, some of the Friars who were in in may own country and everything else. They you know, you just can't label them all accoult.
But when a group begins to use what I like to call cultic methodologies, and when it begins to revolve around and kind of oh form around us, the centric the central methods of what cults do, and the methods that they use. Then you've got to say, you know, well, let's call it what it is, you know, and it's it's a dangerous it's a dangerous thing that is so common in American history.
Yeah, and we see it played out again as you're pointing out all over the world and again for this particular story. This comes from Kenya, which is which sees a lot of these and there's sort of semi Christian or you know, they adopt aspects of Christianity, particularly apocalyptic thinking, as sort of the capstone that gives them the right to determine who lives, who dies, who stays, who goes, and people seem willing to hand over their own fate,
their own future. The concept and we hold a deer, a kind of rugged American individualism for some reason goes out the window if we feel a little bit of a threat. Let me let me pause for one second though, to say again, we're talking with Jim Willis, who is author or dean minister and the man behind American cults, cobbles, corruption and charismatic leaders.
Here's what I want to avoid.
I don't want to avoid getting into the weeds of politics because and I know you'll you'll understand this.
You know this.
It's too soon for some people to get and it could be democratic, it could be liberal, there could be conservative issues. We're just not Let's let's avoid that so that I'm not answering those calls for the rest of the night. And uh and instead, I mean the broader brush, these bigger themes are are enough for us to tackle in the in the time that we'll have on the air.
Yes, what defines the.
Themes are the important thing, because you you will find them in religious organizations. But as you say, you'll also find them the same kind of ideas or methodology sometimes in politics.
Right.
I found them in academia. God, yes, professor, there were certain cults and certain things that had to be believed. I found them in in science.
When it's a really good point.
My book Hidden History, I talked a lot about scientists who were just basically kicked out of the club because you know, they didn't agree with the proper notion at the time, They.
Didn't please the gatekeepers.
They didn't the gatekeepers in science are just as egotistical as the gatekeepers in any other profession.
Yeah, and you just said the right word. I think that egotistical. One of the clear things that reveal what a cult is is, generally speaking, they either begin or still have as a founder a very charismatic leader who is very egotistical. It's not at all uncommon to find narcissists who feel entitled or are grandiose, and they are at the center not only at their own story, but
everyone else is. And you know, they usually lack any real empathy, and they display an unmistakable arrogance, and they're surprisingly normally in search of validation. But they might feel at least a small sense of shame when they do, because it's because they got caught and it undermines their self esteem. But how easy it is for a narcissist cult leader to go farther and actually become a psychopath. And the difference in terms of psychology between those two
is that psychopaths normally don't feel any shame. And that's most people don't realize it, but that's why psychopaths can all generally pass light detector tests. They honestly feel they can do no wrong, they're doing the right thing, and the reason they feel that way is because they're the ones performing the deeds, and if they do something, it's
obviously justified because they're the ones doing it. It's a it's a terrible path to come down, and people listening may have been associated with this same kind of people on a much smaller scale. You know, the friends who say, oh, I'm only saying this for your good right as if they're telling me or you always act this way, or if your integrity is questioned by means of oh, passive aggressive doc This is manipulation, and cult leaders do this instinctively.
They are master manipulators and use their ability to their advantage. But what we don't usually fall into is it's just not a manipulator. A manipulator has someone has to have someone to manipulate. And there are a lot of people who don't want to be leaders. They're confused, they may feel like they're not sure what the answers are, and so they will say to the cult leader, make it easy for me, put you know, tell me what to do. Put it on a bumper sticker, so it's easy to understand.
It's easier for me just to not worry about it. I'll do whatever you say, I'll follow along. And that's how cults are born.
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