What happens when someone believes at the very core of their soul that the end of the world is just a few days, weeks or years away, and that somehow they are lucky enough to be among a hundred people who will make it through the gates of heaven?
grew up in an evangelical christian cult that even other evangelical groups thought was a little too radical. A few years ago she escaped and started writing about her experiences re-entering the normal world—a place she still calls Sodom—on her substack Not a Mommy Blog.Her story reminds me a little bit about David Foster Wallace’s famous speech about a school of fish discussing the weather.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
For Breanna, the water was the true reality of immanent hellfire if she broke a single dictate of the Prophet. It was also the knowledge that she was special in a way that no one else could truly comprehend. Now that she’s out, the water is all mixed up with the reality of life on land. Following her blog is living that exchange through her eyes.
Another thing that I learned from this conversation was that though the people in her group followed a Biblical order, these evangelicals don’t consider themselves Christians.
As someone who grew up outside any organized religion, I always sort of assumed that Christians were people who, largely speaking, followed the writings of Christ as laid down in one of a few different versions of the New Testament. But I was amazed to learn that the wider evangelical movement that began in the 1940s doesn’t necessarily think the bible is all that important. Instead, they rely on the interpretations of the bible and the direct revelations of their various, much more contemporary, prophets. In Breanna’s case that meant following the visions of Rev William Branham and, for her specific group, another prophet named Terry Sproule.
Those men, her group believed, were the incarnations of God on earth.
In the case of Sproule, Breanna told me that his specific revelations closely mirrored the politics of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—which now seems to be on the way to becoming policy in the United States.
Anyone who wants to know more about cult psychology or the current state of politics will enjoy this interview.
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