When Mike Flynn posted a video on July 4, 2020 in which his family recited QAnon slogans, it cemented the disgraced former National Security Advisor and U.S. Army lieutenant general as a MAGA patriot super-hero. On September 17, just 14 short months later, Flynn took the stage, bathed in light at the Lord of Hosts Church in Omaha, Nebraska to lead a political prayer that was a fiery angelic call-to-arms. But, oops! It turns out that this prayer traces back to New Age doomsday cult leader, Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Now the Q-faithful have turned on their hero, accusing him of being in league with the Satanic cabal. We’ll ask today’s guest host, Sean Prophet—who happens to be the eldest son of that cult leader—how he got out, and how we got here.Show NotesThe Radical Secular podcast with Sean ProphetRelevant episodes:9: QAnon and Conspirituality: with Matthew Remski - 08.24.2016: Before Q, There Was CUT: with Joe Szimhart - 10.19.2022: Getting out of Cults and Harmful Religions - Bonus Episode54: Blavatsky, the I Am, and The Summit Lighthouse - 07.19.21Black Sun Journal » Happy Birthday, Mom!: 2006 Article by Sean Prophet on final interaction with Elizabeth Clare ProphetChurch Universal and Triumphant - Nightline - May 17th 1990 CUT/Summit Lighthouse on Oprah 5 with Streiker and Hassan QAnon Fall Out from Mike Flynn using I Am Prayer
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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But we'll be catching up with this episode on the edit and production side.
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Conspiratuality 81.
Praying for fire with Sean Proffitt.
When Mike Flynn posted a video on the 4th of July last year in which his family recited QAnon slogans, it cemented the disgraced former National Security Advisor and U.S.
Army Lieutenant General as a MAGA patriot superhero.
On September 17th, just 14 short months later, Flynn took the stage, bathed in light, at the Lord of the Hosts Church in Omaha, Nebraska, to lead a political prayer that was a fiery, angelic call to arms.
But oops!
It turns out that this prayer traces back to New Age doomsday cult leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet.
Now, the Q faithful have turned on their hero, accusing him of being in league with the satanic cabal.
Of course.
We are joined today by Sean Proffitt, co-host of the Radical Secular Podcast.
He's also the eldest son of spiritual teachers Mark Proffitt, founder of the Summit Lighthouse, and the more widely known Elizabeth Clare Proffitt, who later became the founder of the Church Universal and Triumphant.
Now, Sean grew up in this New Age church, which he now refers to as a doomsday cult.
Sean, welcome.
Thank you.
I'm so excited to be here.
Big fan of the show.
The organization had a very public profile in the 80s and the 90s due to Elizabeth's appearances on TV shows like Larry King Live and Donahue, as well as a 1990 Nightline episode in which Ted Koppel reported on what turned out to be the group's five-year project of building bomb shelters On their land in Corbin Springs, Montana, the largest of which apparently could house 700 people and had an entrance big enough to fit an 18 wheeler.
Now, Sean, I heard you estimate that that project probably cost around $25 million.
Is that right?
That's money that we actually spent in 1989, okay?
And that is just the materials and the delivery of materials to the site.
That doesn't include the design team who worked for, you know, about two years on the design of the project, which was about 15 engineers, and then 200 construction laborers who worked for Probably about another 12 to 18 months on the project.
Wow.
And so if you considered inflation and the cost of all that labor, it's probably closer to $100 million if you wanted to duplicate that facility today.
Now the church had also built a 12-foot-high observation tower and were stockpiling food and military-grade weapons in preparation for a coming nuclear war prophesied by your mom, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, also known as Guru Ma, Mother of the Flame.
You make a brief appearance in the Nightline piece, and you're identified there as a church official.
I believe you're around 25 years old there.
And you know, Sean, we have so much to talk about today.
And in a few minutes, I'm going to describe for our listeners how it is that current events bring you here.
It's a conspirituality.
But let's set that aside for a moment, because I just wanted to ask you.
What was that like?
You were such a young man.
You were the son of this controversial spiritual leader revered by thousands in the midst of this media storm involving such dramatic elements.
It was very strange in some ways like it's even stranger now looking back on it.
But at the time, you know, this is just this is just our family business, right?
I mean, I grew up there.
I kind of had left for a brief period, but I came back.
in 1987, just before the whole shelter project really got underway in earnest.
And I'd sort of returned to the fold.
I was ordained a minister and I was appointed the vice president of the church.
Wow.
One of, I believe, three vice presidents we had at the time.
Board of directors was about nine people.
I mean, that's a lot to be going through as such a young person.
And there's TV crews and there's talk of like, you know, the Soviets launching a nuclear strike.
I just can't imagine the pressure.
It was a lot of pressure.
And particularly when the story about the weapons broke, that really brought a lot of national attention because it sort of put us in the same league as some of these other violent groups that, you know, we had already been compared to Jonestown quite a lot since 1979.
Oh, wow.
This is, remember, this is before Waco.
I believe it was before Ruby Ridge, but we had seen Jonestown and we had, you know, there was always this sort of underbelly of America, which is these white supremacist groups in rural areas that were armed.
And that's something that has been going on really forever since the founding of this country.
And, but seeing us as a church, you know, we had a A church that was doing this was something new, I believe, and it really thrust us into the spotlight.
And yeah, I mean, being that young, I just didn't have any inkling as to how the world saw us.
This was just my family and what I'd always known.
How did the in-group narrative sort of deal with accusations of, you know, being compared to Jonestown or, I mean, we're going to look at the media coverage in a bit, but do you remember the internal stories that you were telling each other about these comparisons that were being made?
Yeah.
I think that during the seventies, prior to Jonestown, we had an explosive period of growth.
We were in Pasadena, California at the time and we had a large campus and it was a very actually it was a nice campus.
And it had room for hundreds of people to live and work and be a part of the Summit University there.
And so it really was, at the time, kind of an extension of the 1960s New Age peace and love sort of idea, although the masters and the background of the organization is very different, as we'll talk about.
But at the time, we kind of enjoyed a bit of a, you know, kind of charmed status that we were, there was opposition, don't get me wrong, but we weren't thought of as a cult.
And in 1979, that all changed.
And all groups who were new religious movements that were attracting young people and had a charismatic leader were then, after Jim Jones, were considered cults.
And we got lumped in with that and we were highly offended.
I mean, we considered that word to be a slur.
And we would, anytime anybody called us a cult, it's like, we're not a cult, you know?
And I think it's kind of funny when you look back on it, because Is there anybody that actually ever admits to being a cult?
Yeah, it's interesting too, Matthew.
I was thinking about this watching Derek on the Daily Show, that the anti-vaxxers, what's immediately when asked, are you anti?
No, we're not anti-vaxxers, right?
We're not an occult.
We're not anti-vaxxers.
We're not conspiracy theorists, right?
It's always this thing of like, you're putting a label on me that is an insult when actually I'm someone who has access to a higher truth.
I mean, we have a clip lined up of your mom responding to her critics on that Nightline report, and so let's take a listen to how she very calmly identifies her power of prophecy.
It's right here.
Now, people come here for prayer vigils, and they came and went during the months of March and April, which I did say were dangerous months.
We have prayer vigils here at least four or five times a year.
People come from all over the world, whether for five days or two weeks.
No one has to come and live with me to be a part of my church.
Far from that.
You actually said more than just that March and April were going to be dangerous months.
You predicted that on the 23rd of April there was going to be, what, some nuclear attack by the Soviet Union?
Absolutely not.
I've never predicted a nuclear attack for April 23rd.
Or for any other day, I'm simply saying there's a probability of nuclear war and confrontation between the superpowers anytime in the next 12 years, and that April 23rd, 1990 marks the final 12 years of the Ride of the Four Horsemen that were seen by John the Beloved recorded in Revelation.
That began in AD 2.
That's all I have said about that date.
When you talk of course it sounds much more dramatic to talk about the ride of the four horsemen of the apocalypse than it does to talk about those things with which the world has been dealing for the past several thousand years since the beginning of recorded history.
What is it about these 12 years in particular that's going to be so different about what's preceded it?
The cycles of returning karma, which is what they bring and have been bringing, intensify, and therefore personal and planetary challenges intensify, and I think indeed we are facing the greatest challenges in our nation's history, and in the history of these 2,000 years, whether it be the war on drugs, education, AIDS, cancer, the economy, and what is going to happen to nuclear weapons when they get in the hand of madmen, what's going to happen when many more nations have them,
I think we're living in a nuclear age and karma can become physical more quickly than any other time in this 2,000 year period.
Yeah, so all just perfectly normal, right?
Well, okay, so it's been a while since I've heard that clip, but what she was doing there, I mean, it's as close to lying as you can get that she was doing in terms of what she was saying to The group versus what she was saying to the nation on Nightline.
I mean, I remember when that interview happened.
I was there.
I was in the room and they had a satellite truck and you know, I helped set the whole thing up and and yeah, I mean she was really eliding.
what she had said and kind of making it seem as if oh this is just normal we just you know it's a dangerous world but she had given in fact specific dates and I want to talk about one thing that she said which is the April 23rd this idea of a dark cycle and this was a this is a core church teaching that went way back many many years and every year on April 23rd would be sort of this um
We would hold prayer vigils and we would do decrees, which is what our prayers were called.
We would do those furiously, sometimes all day and all night.
And not just on April 23rd either, but that was considered to be like a marking of the returning of planetary karma of, you know, the dark forces would be attacking on that day.
And just, I mean, I don't even know where she came up with that.
It was probably from a dictation somewhere.
Yeah, what amazes me is that it's this incredibly matter-of-fact calm, like, no, no, no, no, those people have got it all wrong.
Let me just tell you in very reasonable terms.
And like the reasonable version is so, it's so wild.
Were you at that time a true believer in the doctrine and in this notion that your mother was a messenger of God?
I would say that certainly throughout my younger years, I was very much of a true believer, but with doubts.
I mean, I was a kid, so everybody around me is reinforcing this sort of socially constructed narrative that we all believed in.
And I was very gung-ho.
Like, I can remember being, you know, five or six years old out in the yard raking leaves or doing chores or whatever and thinking that I was like, I'm serving the masters.
I'm doing this great thing.
And all these people were all working together.
And it's this community.
And I mean, even as a very young child, but then as I got into my teenage years, you know, a lot of things seemed To make less sense, I started seeing the contradictions, and particularly around what, you know, we as young people wanted to do in our lives.
I mean, this was not a friendly organization for teenagers.
You could take a typical Christian fundamentalist church where, you know, there would be prohibitions on everything from, you know, drinking, smoking, sex, you know, you name it, and then just Ramp it up even further.
Just very, very strict requirements.
You know, boys and girls sitting on opposite sides of the room.
People could be kicked out of school for even holding hands.
There was just a very, very strict fundamentalist idea about children.
And I think that the organization was already struggling to deal with Controlling adult behavior, right?
And so adults are coming in and they're supposedly coming in for this kind of monastic life where they're giving up and they're renouncing all of the things that they were doing, you know, quote, in the world.
And, but there are people who are on the staff and who are in the management of the organization who aren't following those rules.
And of course, when they got caught, some of them were, you know, were, were kicked out, embarrassed, exposed in front of the group, that sort of thing.
But then you have these teenagers coming up and the teenagers are, They've never lived in the world.
They've never done those things.
Or maybe some of them had, and some of them had come into the church and brought those ways with them.
And then, you know, we're all trying to see how much we can get away with as kids, right?
So then I start understanding that some of these teachings, which I know we're going to talk about the I Am Movement as well, came from the I Am, which was extremely strict.
And the I Am, in some cases, they had celibate marriages.
So and there was no meat allowed, no meat eating at all.
And so like growing up and all that as a child, it was just it was tough not to have questions.
I'm fascinated by this moment where your mom is being interviewed by Ted Koppel.
There's a satellite truck outside.
You're sitting in the room.
You've helped set up the room.
Are you aware that she is speaking out of the other side of her mouth as she speaks to the nation?
And is anybody in the room picking that up?
Well, you know, we had a sort of PR department, and my mother was very good at talking to the media, and in the same way that Republicans, you know, deny that they said what they actually said.
You know, this is the kind of thing that's going on there, right?
She clearly is on record in these dictations that went out to all of our membership.
There's tapes, there's written transcripts, there's all these things of her saying and giving these prophecies.
One of them was on October 2nd, 1987 that was given at a hotel in New York City where The dictation said in 24 months, if America doesn't have the ability to turn back incoming Soviet nuclear missiles, there shall be in the words are a confrontation and a reckoning if something is not done.
Now, you can say that's vague, you can say that's just general geopolitical speculation, but this is from a master who's supposed to be an immortal being who's overseeing Earth, right?
Something just occurred to me which I haven't really thought of before in these contexts, which is that if you have the extensive infrastructure to have a PR department that understands that there's a difference between the front-facing message of the group and what the group is saying internally, There's a way in which somebody's also cheering her on from behind the scenes when she is lying because they're being covered for too.
In a way, she's protecting everybody for buying into her beliefs.
Yeah.
I've never thought about it that way, actually.
Yeah, well, if you look at her press spokesman for a long time was a guy named Murray Steinman.
And Murray Steinman is a typical, he was a typical like 60s hippie who came into the community when he was very young.
And he also was sort of an intellectual and he understood a lot about world politics and things like that.
And he, he was also a researcher who worked on a lot of her lectures and things like that.
A lot of her political message would have been honed by Murray Steinman.
And, um, So I'm looking him up right now as we're talking about this.
He actually started a kind of lobbying firm in Bozeman called Flying Horse Communications after he left the church.
And he was doing a lot of work for the oil and gas industry.
And so it's kind of like, you know, People who do this kind of work, you know, always gravitate, they always go where the money is.
And I think that at a certain point, Murray Steinman was a true believer in the church.
But I also think that there is an agenda there.
I think that And if you're really good at it, it's really difficult to really ask this belief question, like, how much is the person actually buying into it?
I mean, we watched a lot of clips of your mom preaching, chanting, telling various stories.
And the affect is really consistent.
Like, she's really good at what she does.
She radiates.
She radiates through this, like, meticulous garb.
She's got great makeup.
She's got these perfect 1980s perms.
She speaks in full paragraphs, seemingly without having to ever pause or consider what's coming next.
It's like a real display of certainty.
Is that something that you saw her develop over time?
Well, certainly.
I, you know, I was in charge of the audiovisual department.
Oh, wow.
You do the filming and stuff?
I'm not, we had a team, you know, we had a team of probably 20 people and we had, you know, there was, you know, camera, there was, there were cameramen, you know, Audio people.
That's amazing.
That's where I really learned the TV business and of course that's what I went on to do as a career after I left the church was I was a video editor but I had had experience in the church with with the production and editing and distribution of of audio and video tapes and we also did kind of did an interesting thing before You know, now you can just put your stuff up on the internet, but at the time there was no way of getting videos really distributed unless a television station would put you on.
So what we did is we had all of our members go to their local public access station and we gave them prepackaged, you know, 30 minute and 60 minute shows that they could just have played on their public access station.
And that was a really successful strategy for us because, um, we, you know, we, We're on in almost every city.
I saw those shows the first year I lived in this country in 1990.
I would be flipping through public access and I was like, what is this?
And that's my first exposure to your stuff.
Yeah, that is way smarter than my second cult leader, Charles Anderson, who just had people making VHS tapes and mailing them randomly through to just whoever.
That was just not successful at all.
You have to watch this.
There's a real competency thing going on here.
Like she's really good.
I had a follow up.
So does that mean that you had enough of that kind of production savvy going on?
Was she producing and directing or were people giving her sort of their opinion about how to present herself?
Well, there were a couple, there were two different styles of communication for her.
There was just her coming out, well actually three.
She would come out and sometimes and just give extemporaneous remarks and then there were prepared lectures on a particular topic that would be Where she would work with Murray Steinman or other researchers to develop this material and she would have it on cards.
And I can remember we had a lot of fights about this because sometimes it looked like she was reading her lectures and I was like, you know, you've got to go direct to camera.
You've got to, you've got to, you can't.
Amazingness.
Oh my God.
No teleprompters though, right?
No teleprompters ever.
Oh, God!
But she had these 5x7 note cards where all the, you know, everything's just like any script would be laid out for her.
And she would work on those cards.
I mean, I would go backstage sometimes and see her, you know, while she's getting her hair and makeup done, she's writing notes to herself on these cards.
I mean, she was very involved in that part of it.
So that's the second style of communication.
The third is the dictation.
Where she literally went out there on her own with nothing and went on sometimes at an extremely high level of intensity for over an hour.
Just extemporizing and channeling in a way.
Yeah.
But the channeling wasn't like her, like she'd come out and just talk to you, right?
That would, that would be, that's like style one.
And then style two is these prepared lectures, but the dictations were something else again.
I mean, I still, to this day, don't really have an explanation as to how that worked because I think that anyone You know, even the most fiery preachers, right?
I mean, how do you go on for an hour like that without any sort of notes?
I think it feels wonderful.
There's a trance aspect to it that can't be stopped.
There's a great book called Traumatic Narcissism by Daniel Shaw that describes the feeling of that kind of extroversion as being something that the person has to continue because if they don't they will die, right?
If they don't actually keep filling up the space, they'll disappear, they'll be swallowed up or something like that.
And I wanted to ask you about this extroverted thing because, you know, it doesn't seem like this is a person who would ever pause and take another person in.
Although you're saying to us that she took feedback or you would argue with her about how she was being in front of the camera.
But I'm just wondering what that was like to have your parent be so public that way.
Well, I mean, this is what she did for a living, right?
I mean, again, from the time I was as young as I can possibly remember, four, five, six years old or whatever, this is what my parents did for a living.
Right.
So, I mean, it was just normal to me.
And then when I made that kind of transition to being her AV man, And then it got, and by the way, there were, there were other people that were, that were prominent.
I'm not saying that I did this all myself.
There was a, there was kind of a succession of people who took that responsibility for, you know, for handling the audio video communication.
But I, I did do that for probably a period of five to seven years.
Amazing.
Altogether.
Amazing.
It was interesting kind of having a professional relationship with her, you know, as well as having her be my mother.
I think it's, it's the same for anyone who is in a, in a sort of family business.
That's what it felt like.
And, and we butted heads sometimes, but it was, it was very clear that her word was law.
And, um, If, you know, if I could say something once and if she said no, then that was the end of the conversation.
Now, Julian mentioned that she went by many names and that, so in addition to also her being the sort of family boss and she's in control of communications and she's going to sort of direct health This goes, she's also carrying within her the burden and the wisdom of all of these reincarnations that she's talking about.
So, were you also sometimes taking direction from somebody else altogether?
Well, yeah.
I mean, this, again, the idea of her being the messenger and her having a direct line to God made her in, you know, sort of infallible in a way that most kids don't have to deal with with their parents.
Except Matthew's kids.
Not at all.
Well, from raising my own kids, I know that kids argue with you.
They don't treat you like God.
Absolutely.
And sometimes when they get to be teenagers, they treat you like shit.
So that was never an option for me because it wasn't just that I believed she spoke for God.
Everyone else around believed that too.
So there would be this reinforcement.
If you were in trouble, you were in trouble, not just with her, but with everyone.
And they would all sort of stand behind and reinforce her power.
Oh, wow.
It sounds like the, the claim of being the reincarnation of multiple sort of, uh, you know, auspicious characters, uh, is, is more of a, of a, uh, I mean, I can go into that a little bit.
I think this may have started in the IM.
would do in terms of like almost like a multiple personality thing.
I mean, I can go into that a little bit.
I think this may have started in the IM.
I'm not really sure the internal politics of that organization, but my dad, I know, was constantly telling people who they were in past lives.
And it was a way of sort of doling out favors and, you know, giving people more authority or more, just a larger than life role in the group.
He used to hold knighting ceremonies with a sword, you know, where he would knight people.
And there was a big connection also to the Arthurian legend.
Wow.
And, of course, my mom was supposed to have been Guinevere and, you know.
That's right.
Oh, did he actually dub her Guinevere?
Because I think I read or I saw her citing that as part of her own sort of reincarnation history.
But I suppose that Mark, your father, did he confer some of these identities upon her?
I mean, I think he set the tone for all of that stuff because I can remember him, you know, he had, he had a group of men that were around him also.
And you know, like somebody was supposed to be Sir Galahad and somebody was supposed to be this and that.
And I mean, I just don't remember, like it was all this sort of very, very much now that I look back on it, a part of establishing like the pecking order and the dominance in the group.
And I think she picked up on that and understood that as a tech, as a technique.
For kind of keeping the inner circle both loyal and and also above the you know the rest of the people who were less auspicious in their incarnations or their spiritual attainment or whatever it was.
I mean it was all and when you start to think about it all being kind of made up which it was not kind of it was totally made up.
You know, it just becomes sort of an exercise in group psychology.
Well, going back to this interview a bit, you know, 1990, it's fascinating to watch Ted Koppel, who seems to be holding his nose as he interviews your mom.
He even opens the segment by saying he doesn't know whether it's a story worth covering.
You know, this is kind of the story where maybe you would do it on a slow news day.
Why did you agree to be here?
He's a real asshole, actually, about it.
And the other guest who's there to fact check your mom is a journalist named Jim Robbins.
He's a freelancer who had been covering Church Universal Triumphant for the New York Times.
Now, why did your mom agree to go on the air?
Ted, you know, asked her this and she said, well, you know, we love to tell people about the church, but was there some kind of internal pressure where she needed to either validate or set people at ease or perhaps even did she think of it as a recruitment opportunity?
My mother was very good at publicity.
Yes, of course she wanted to, like the idea of getting on Nightline.
I mean, who wouldn't do that, right?
And yes, Ted was a complete asshole.
I remember being personally very stung by the fact that after this interview and all of, you know, the team that came out, they were all super nice.
They were all super supportive.
And then Ted gets on and he says, you know, it's kind of a slow news day.
Yeah, what was that?
If I remember correctly, this was after the story broke of the, of the gun, uh, the gun trafficking.
Right.
Which, which is what gave us the national relevance.
I mean, let's be honest, you know, the, the guns and then at the same time within two months of that, uh, there, the, the, the giant excavation that we, that we had done near Yellowstone Park, Became a matter of national, I mean, if anybody was doing that anywhere near a national park, we'd hear about it, right?
So we had two things that were really, you know, we became infamous for.
So I like I'm thinking about it.
And of course, she is trying to use it to gain more publicity.
And if I look back on it, I think she felt she was trying to save America.
Right.
Well, we're going to get to that.
I mean, Julian has this description of what your mother believed about about the imminent nuclear attack.
Right.
Yeah.
So it turned out that your mother not only believed that a nuclear attack was imminent, And that the church would need bomb shelters and guns and a lookout tower for the aftermath.
But it seems to me that she also believed that the church destiny was to create a new golden age after the nuclear holocaust.
And even perhaps that the Soviets were directly targeting the property as part of this kind of cosmic battle.
Is that is that right?
Yeah.
Well, so you have these public facing prophecies that were given for years before.
And then you have sort of the internal discussions Which came up as a result of our engineering design process, right?
Like, how long are we planning to stay underground?
How many years are we expecting for civilization to be destroyed so we have to have enough food that we won't starve?
So you start getting into these very physical kind of predictions, right?
And suddenly it gets a lot more serious because you're thinking of yourself, you know, trying to trying to survive in this world.
So then, of course, large underground fuel tanks.
Huge underground storage of grain.
You know, all of clothing for the kids going from like, you know, for babies all the way up to age 18.
You know, a lot of children in the community.
So we're thinking about that.
We're thinking about education.
So also in every department in the church is sort of getting together their projections for what this future is going to be like.
And at the same time, we're getting dictations that are telling us Yes, you are going to bring in the Golden Age.
You are going to remake the world in more of this divine image.
And this is why it's so important for you to survive.
This is not just to stay alive.
This is so that you can do God's work.
But when you think about it, it's such tunnel vision to not understand the sort of chaos that would follow any kind of nuclear exchange or even breakdown in society.
You don't even need nuclear weapons.
You just need a breakdown in law and order.
And now all of a sudden, you're not the only one trying to survive.
And so I'm kind of jumping around here because this all kind of became clear to me in retrospect that we as a civilization, you know, rise and fall together.
That the minute that bombs went off or that law and order broke down, we would have had a lot bigger problems than, you know, having food to eat.
I don't know if I can make this clear, but there seems to be something about all of the meticulous planning of the underground stores that seems to be, I don't know, cloaked in an excitement that makes I don't know, cloaked in an excitement that makes that the project itself.
It's like, yes, there's this sort of long-term projection that you're going to come out at the other end after the radiation has died down and you're going to give birth to the new master enlightened race or something like that.
But it sounds also that that project can't actually come to any kind of fruition without people actually being excited about living in a kind of heaven that's underground and completely isolated from the rest of the world and its opprobrium and its scrutiny and Ted Koppel asking asshole questions.
Yeah.
Like, you'll be safe there, not just from nuclear holocaust, but you'll be safe from the fact that other people are calling you a cult.
Yeah, well that's true too.
And that fits the standard definition of apocalypticism, right?
When you have a sort of world-controlling belief system, and then the world rejects you and calls you a kook and everything else like that, so then you sort of retreat And you reject the world, and then you kind of call down divine judgment on this world that has rejected you.
But if you represent God, then the world has rejected God.
And this is an old, old theme that has been repeated over and over again with these sort of world-rejecting groups.
But I wanted to pick up on what you said, Matthew, about the kind of excitement.
And yes, it was very exciting because once you kind of get over that hurdle of thinking, Oh my God, you know, the world is going to be destroyed.
And you start actually building things, buying things.
Right.
That becomes the new reality.
And it becomes exciting because you're like, okay, we are actually in control of what's happening here.
Right.
And, you know, if we just order more food and if we just order more supplies, we're going to be okay.
And so as it got toward the end, it consumed the entire organization.
We shut down our AV department.
We shut down our publishing.
And by the end, We were literally having everything moved out of all of our buildings all around the ranch and in Livingston and everywhere else and brought up to the shelter in big trucks.
We packed everything away as if we were moving somewhere else.
Wow.
Yeah, you had a date.
You know, I'm just thinking on the excitement level and, you know, creating stores and, you know, learning new skills.
You know, we had a very minor version of this when I was living in Vermont, in rural Vermont, in 1999, preparing for Y2K.
And I was like, we got the layman's catalog, and I figured out what a fucking kerosene mantle lamp was, and I figured out how to, you know, what non-gas powered appliances I would need to do my own firewood and stuff like that.
And I was just lit!
I was totally ready for the computers of the world to crash, and I was like, bring it on, I will be, I will survive, and I wasn't thinking about giving birth to a new world afterwards, but it is really exciting, actually, to be in even a mild apocalyptic mode.
Absolutely.
And you're bringing back memories because we did all kinds of stuff.
I mean, I, I bought like a book of chemical formulas, how to make soap, you know, how to like all of those sorts of things.
It's so cool, man.
You could do a podcast just on that shit.
Like you could, you could just the survivalism.
You take, you take all the metaphysics out of Church Universal Triumphant and just like, this is the stuff we learned how to do.
It was pretty cool.
Uh, that would be a great show.
We had we had wood stoves.
Oh, yeah.
All these things, you know, not that we were using, of course, because the shelters all ran on propane and diesel and like the shelters were high tech.
I mean, they were as modern and high tech as you can possibly imagine.
And everything was planned down to the smallest detail, you know, you know, including laundry at a place, you know, place to cut people's hair and like every possible thing that you can think of that would be needed to live in this environment for seven months.
It also, yeah, it must also give all of the people, and maybe your mom herself, this sense of agency.
Like, I can actually do this.
I can actually create and live in a completely separate world.
I can be God, actually.
Look how high-tech this bunker is.
Well, it was for me.
I mean, I, you know, I went to college for electrical engineering, so I was just fresh off that.
And we had, there were several other really gung-ho, brilliant, young civil engineers who were involved in the project.
And then we had our chief engineer, a guy named William Smith.
I mean, he's a dude who had designed nuclear power plants.
I mean, he was, he was a heavy hitter in terms of, of civil engineering.
And so these shelters were, were engineered probably to like government specs.
You know, we actually set up a fake construction company in Billings, uh, because we didn't want people to know that we were ordering, uh, all these supplies are coming in.
I mean, truckload after truckload after truckload of, of steel.
And it's mind boggling to think that we actually sort of pulled this off and it was exciting.
Just incredible.
You know, there was one thing I thought I would ask you about this period as well, because I got the sense that some of the equipment you were using was purchased from the Rajneesh Ashram.
Is that correct?
A lot of the construction equipment I think was just bought at auction.
We got like really cheap deals on that stuff.
But what came from Rajneesh Puram were a bunch of housing trailers.
Probably 50, 50 or 60 of these housing trailers that had three rooms.
There were triplexes where each room had its own little bathroom.
And so this was an easy way to get a lot of people housed quickly in Montana when we didn't have facilities.
So they went over again, they were, I think they were being sold at auction after Rajneesh Purim collapsed.
Yes.
So if they had collapsed, that means that all of the stuff around Antelope and Sheila appearing on, on television and, and the, the, you know, All of the drama around Rajneesh had probably happened fairly recently.
Yeah, I'd say that's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so that was part of the part of the concern that was happening in the media.
Like we've had Rajneesh and they all had like Kalashnikov rifles.
Right.
They were patrolling the grounds trying to poison the population and gain control of local government.
We've had Jones.
And now is this going to be the next one?
Definitely.
No question about it.
I mean, there was the the tension was at a fever pitch because it wasn't just It wasn't just suspicion, like also all this shelter building, a lot of local tradesmen, you know, electricians, plumbers, construction people.
At the end, when we got to where we were kind of behind the timeline, we started hiring these people to come in and do work.
And then a lot of people didn't pay their bills.
Like, there was all sorts of problems and lawsuits and things like that that happened after when the Holocaust did not occur, and now it's time to pay the bill.
And that was a huge mess as well.
So that's part of the hangover, and that's what I wanted to ask you next.
Like, what happens, and how does your mother explain it?
How do people in the church explain it when the prophecy fails?
Well, the dates kept slipping.
As they do.
First, it was October 2nd, and then there was January something, and then there was March 15th.
And I don't recall exactly what the last date of the final shelter drill was.
It might have been early April.
But whatever it was, at that point, we were in such hot water that we had to kind of promise the county commissioners that there weren't going to be any more drills.
There was all sorts of pressure.
There was immediately a fuel spill that happened.
And so we had everybody all the way on up to the Coast Guard.
We got a fine from the Coast Guard because they're responsible for all navigable waterways.
And the Yellowstone River is a navigable waterway and fuel that spilled from our shelters ended up in the Yellowstone River in noticeable quantities that could be measured.
So we fouled a strategic river, you know, with, with diesel fuel.
Oh my God.
Wow.
We were in such, such trouble.
I mean, it was, it was, it was, it couldn't be a worse disaster, I don't think.
But I, around June or July of 1990, I think, There was a dictation that came from Mother Mary, I believe, and it was called, You Have Won the Prize.
And this dictation was essentially saying, You know, well done.
Your prayers and your preparations have prevented this Holocaust, and you have won the prize.
You should be proud of yourself.
You should redouble your efforts to be spiritual and do everything that we've already told you to do, kind of thing.
I can't remember the exact text of it, but that's the gist.
Amazing.
You know, I wanted to stop or go back to one thing that you said, Sean, which was that you felt that or perhaps your mom felt that she was saving or preserving the American way of life.
I can't remember how you phrased it, but I mean, the Cold War is always in the backdrop of this and which is a very convenient kind of, you know, cosmic level I have to go back and give a little bit of background because my mom was, I believe, she started out her life very much as a political idealist.
She did get a degree in political science from Boston University.
And she had also been to Antioch College, and so she was very much in with a liberal crowd, and she went to work for the Christian Science Monitor at one point, and then she went to work for, I believe it was the Association of American Railroads, and then she went to work at the UN.
And she believed at that time in sort of Internationalism, international law, rule of law, those sorts of things, as a way that the world could solve its problems.
And she's very much of a student of history, very anti-communist.
At the time she was growing up, I believe there were, that was when there was the Czechoslovakia and Hungary had had their sort of revolutions that had been crushed by the Soviets and she was very outraged and outspoken about that.
And so, Coming into the United Nations, I think what she was very much an idealist and then she began to see what she considered to be like terrible behavior and terrible corruption on the part of diplomats, a lot of talking with no results.
And I think she became jaded about that.
And she also, she really just didn't I don't think she ever fit in with a sort of modern crowd of women.
I think she had a lot of sexual hang-ups.
I think she was unresolved in her own sexuality.
I think that may have played into how much she wanted people in the church to be celibate.
Um, I think she was, I don't think she ever resolved that conflict within herself because she certainly didn't, uh, ever forego any relationship that she wanted.
Let's put it that way.
I don't want to be too indelicate here, but that's, that's how it was.
And so, so coming in, so you have to also compare that to the backdrop of the IM organization and it's extreme, ideas about the sponsorship of America by Saint Germain.
Now, if you look at the I am movement, it was really about Saint Germain.
He was kind of the sponsoring master of the I am.
Our movement was sponsored by El Morya.
El Morya was the main kind of master who spoke through her and he's, he's from the theosophical tradition, right?
So, So, but Saint Germain was also revered by us as sort of the father, the spiritual father of America.
The rumor was that when the Declaration of Independence was under consideration that a lot of people didn't want to sign and supposedly Saint Germain had appeared in the room at that time and said, sign that document, you know, so he is the sort of this legendary, there's no record of that.
Later on, I looked to see if anybody had been, you know, recorded as having said, sign that document.
But that was legend when I was growing up, that Saint Germain had literally given the impetus to found the United States of America.
And so, take a political idealist and take the divine sponsorship of America, take her frustration with politics as usual, and you get her kind of political milieu.
And the legacy continues because, I mean, she died in 2009 and, you know, the church is going on.
But Julian, what happens this past September?
Well, you know, we've been talking about this kind of climactic moment, I think, in all of your lives in the church.
And then you guys were not really in the news much after that, but that is until this past September when erstwhile QAnon hero, Mike Flynn, who we talked about at the top, and many might remember, was pardoned by Trump after having made a plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller was pardoned by Trump after having made a plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller But he got up and recited a prayer at this Nebraska church that was lifted directly from your mother.
And the clip is too good.
We should credit Jim Stewartson on Twitter for putting the clip together side by side.
So it's going to start with your mother from a 1994 service and then cut back and forth with Flynn's recitation of the words.
Mighty I am presence, I am here, O God, and I am the instrument of those sevenfold rays and archangels.
We are your instrument of those sevenfold rays and all your archangels.
All of them.
And I will not retreat, I will take my stand, I will not fear to speak, and I will be the instrument of God's will, whatever it is.
We will not retreat.
We will not retreat.
We will stand our ground.
We will not fear to speak.
We will be the instrument of your will.
Whatever it is.
Here I am, so help me God, in the name of Archangel Michael and his legions, I am freeborn, and I shall remain freeborn, and I shall not be enslaved by any foe within or without.
In your name, and the name of your legions, we are freeborn, and we shall remain freeborn.
And we shall not be enslaved by any foe, within or without.
So help me God.
God bless you.
God bless America.
Thank you very much.
So that's pretty much just straight from her, although he did, he just changed one thing, right?
Yeah, he changed a couple of words, but, um, that, yeah, that was, um, it was really something else to see that clip and to realize I'd probably been there that day when that dictation was recorded.
Either sitting behind the camera or in the truck or whatever.
Okay, now Sean though, if you were giving Flynn coaching on how to do that chant better, what would you say?
Because I gotta feel bad for him, he's just not cutting it.
Sounds like he's reading off a cue card.
I don't think you'd have that.
What would you tell him?
He's definitely not charismatic.
His expertise is behind the scenes, let's just say.
But yeah, and he kind of mucked it up.
And it was also like it was very bad strategy on his part, because he should have known that the fundamentalists hated my mom, hated her.
And even though like if you look at the at the sort of Christian fundamentalist theocrats, And my parents and what their goals were for America, they weren't that different.
Yeah.
They were not that different.
But for some reason, you know, I think it's just a turf war, basically.
I don't think that the Christians wanted anybody honing in on their territory.
Yeah.
You know, they control their people through doctrine.
And if you've got somebody else who's coming along with another, you know, they just label it satanic.
It's satanic, right?
And it's...
I mean, I got no love for these Christians.
I mean, it was, you know, even growing up, we considered them to be charlatans and false prophets.
And, you know, of course, you know, we were as we were charlatans as well.
Will the real Charleston please stand up?
So, I mean, anyone who'd come across some of those images, right, of the seven-fold rays and the archangels and etc., there is this incredibly influential sort of power that those images have had on the New Age movement.
And I've heard those kinds of beliefs many, many times.
Some people might find it odd to hear them in this Christian nationalist setting.
Do you have hunches?
I mean, you've started hinting at this already as to why Flynn would have been drawn to use this specific prayer in that context.
Well, it's pretty clear that Church Universal and Triumphant or the Summit Lighthouse, that's their sort of main moniker now that they go by, which was the original name that my dad came up with early on before we became Church Universal and Triumph.
They've kind of gone back to their roots.
Okay.
But if you look at what they're doing, I mean, they recently had James Lindsay at one of their conferences.
I'm sure you know who he is.
Yeah.
He spoke this year at their July conference.
Those guys have bought Trumpism hook, line, and sinker.
And I want to say right now that my mother would have absolutely hated the idea of a Trump presidency, you know, and I think she considered him to be vulgar and crass and everything that she stood against.
She can, you know, she, again, would have, would have considered him to be a con artist and all of this stuff.
But I think what's happened, and this is the same turn that the fundamentalist Christians and the evangelicals have made is that they're about power.
They're about political power.
And even though Trump is most likely an atheist, he is willing to say the right words and appoint the right Supreme Court justices and implement the right policies and give the right tax breaks to enhance Christian power and to enhance theocracy so that they'll support him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so he's just a means to an end for them.
Yep.
But as such now he's been entered into their mythology.
You see these absurd pictures with Jesus, you know, embracing Trump or standing over Trump while he signs legislation and you see, you know, you see Trump, you know, on a horse or carrying a flag, all these absurd pieces of artwork.
valorizing and turning him into this hero of Christianity.
And it's just a marriage of convenience.
And I honestly think that the Summit Lighthouse is the same thing.
These people want to see an American theocracy and Trump is the vehicle.
There's something in there too that I've heard you talk about before in terms of an analysis of how sort of the metaphysics of how the divine forces are called to intervene in world Do you know what I'm getting at?
Yeah, well I did a lengthier section, about a half hour section, in the Radical Secular episode 66.
Incidentally, it's called The World's Most Destructive Organization, which was about Facebook.
We usually do two or three topics, and this was one of my topics, and I broke down this prayer and what it really means and why it's so sinister, and I don't know if you want me to go into all that detail here.
Yeah, go for it, actually, because I was in a cult where the leader went on and on about the seven rays.
I've got some ideas, too, but what's your memory of it?
Okay, well the seven Rays are obviously, not obviously to other people, but to you and me who grew up in it, they were the sort of outpicturing of the God qualities.
You know, power, wisdom, love, obedience, healing, you know, you can just list these qualities.
And then there was the misqualification of the Rays.
And this also kind of dovetailed with what she called cosmic astrology, the 12 lines of the clock, the seven rays, which, and then the five secret rays.
I don't know if you've heard of that.
Uh, yeah.
So there's this theology where the clock lines up with the rays and, and, and, and so the seven were the ones that we knew about and we knew what color they were.
We knew the masters who corresponded to each one of those rays and the five secret rays were colors that humans couldn't even see and masters whose names we This all goes back to the sort of design baroqueness of Helen Blavatsky and all of her recombinant imagery and her designs and all of the pictures that she marketed.
Lots and lots of designs and graphs and diagrams.
Family trees of metaphysical proportions.
That's not going to have a lot of meaning to a lot of people except to understand that we really did believe that Masters could intervene in the world, physically, to do things that we wanted to have done.
But the fly in the ointment, sort of, was that God gave humans free will.
And so, masters, God, can't intervene in human affairs unless we ask them to.
So we constantly were asking for certain things to be done in our prayers.
And we believed that, you know, the call compels the answer.
And there's a, there's a Bible passage that sort of talks about this and, you know, thou shalt decree a thing and it shall be established unto you.
Right?
So there's this idea that, that through human free will, we can command God to do certain things in the world and it will be done.
However, it's an infinite feedback loop because We're also pretending to be doing the will of God.
What is the will of God?
It's kind of this null thing, right?
Because you're following me like, humans have free will, but we're asking God to do what his will is.
So what is it actually that we're doing?
Sean, we're following you.
We're also seeing that your face is getting a little bit red as you're trying to, like, process what you actually remember about this shit.
Yeah.
No, we're not only with you, we empathize.
Totally.
It's because I feel so weird saying it.
It's preposterous.
Yeah.
People believe this.
They live this.
They base their lives on it.
They make decisions.
Life-changing decisions.
Things you can't take back.
Years of your life invested into this stuff.
And while you are preparing for another world or another life, you're missing out on the life that you have.
And so it's incredibly destructive.
And I just also think that this kind of circular reasoning of God's will, you know, versus human will, we're supposed to be the ones commanding God, but to do what He wants anyway.
So what that does is it just opens up And a tremendous opportunity for a cult leader to implant in people's minds what the will of God actually is.
And what I hear you saying, tell me if this is right, is that's Mike Flynn intuiting somehow that he can step into that role in that moment.
Well, yeah, I think that, and I've talked to Jim Stewartson about this a little bit.
And, and of course, you know, he has, he has some great things to say and everybody should follow him because he has, I think I was reading he's, he has over a hundred researchers now that are embedded in various levels of, of, of QAnon and, and, and other of these, of these awful psychological operations that are, that are taking place.
And, you know, these back channels and dark bowels of the internet.
Right.
And so he's, he's getting, you know, live, uh, uh, things that are happening, what's being said.
And, and he talks about it a lot.
And, um, you know, he was kind of saying that he thinks that Michael Flynn almost considers himself to be like Archangel Michael or, or to be a messenger of Archangel Michael.
Right.
And that he's doing God's will, that his sort of op that he's doing on America is the will of God.
And, uh, And recently, I don't know if you heard this, but Michael Flynn made the statement that, you know, of course we need to have one God and one religion and all of us cooperating.
And, and, you know, he's just an open call for American theocracy for, for getting rid of democracy, essentially.
I've had this intuition for many years that these kinds of beliefs that we're talking about, I've always sort of felt that they could only really be preached by people who were either knowingly con artists and didn't really believe any of it but had learned how to manipulate people or
Who had some kind of psychiatric or neurological condition that gave them access to incredibly intense experiences that would then form the basis of, you know, their belief systems or lead them to then find validation in various texts that were maybe written by others who had similar conditions or maybe like some combination of those things, right?
So, I was fascinated in preparing for today to learn that your mother was diagnosed with a form of epilepsy during what sounds like Was a pretty traumatic childhood for her, especially with her dad, which may account for altered state experiences that could have seemed very real and important to her.
And to me that it also sort of helps make sense of her level of charismatic certainty.
I think you're right on, on that.
And it's something that I've thought about quite a bit.
And because it's, it's very difficult for me.
I mean, I was there, you know, there were no hidden earpieces.
There were no teleprompters.
When she was delivering these dictations, they were absolutely from her brain.
And, you know, metaphysically there, there are all sorts of beliefs about the brain and about the mind and the mind being separate from the brain or being coming from some spiritual source or whatever.
If you're a scientific materialist, which I think is really the only kind of solid ground you can be on when you're talking about humanity and the human condition, we know this was coming from her brain.
There's just no other possibility, right?
I mean, when you start to get off into dualism and spirit realms and all this other kind of stuff, you're nowhere.
I mean, you're just making stuff up because it's not testable.
There's just no way to get your hands around it.
So I'm coming from the assumption that I think is the only reasonable assumption that these messages were all coming from her brain and they had to.
And so, and I also know that going back to some of her earliest dictations that she gave, they were very halting.
They were very, um, they were not charismatic in the beginning.
And she was like kind of in training from my dad who, who also his, Whose dictations were also very halting and non-charismatic when he first started.
Because we dug up some of the very, very first recordings of him giving a dictation, I believe it was 1957.
And I didn't know these recordings existed until we went and started to redo our audio archives.
So I came upon this, I'm like, holy crap, this is dad's first dictation, right?
So listening to this, and it sounded like he was having a business meeting.
It didn't sound at all like his later ones.
And the same thing for my mom.
I believe the first dictation she gave was from a master named Rex, who was from the IM books.
And again, it was very sort of timid and not charismatic.
And so to watch that evolution, Is to understand that this, this can be learned behavior.
Yeah.
Like, even though it was a, like her later, some of her later messages were stunning.
I mean, I can't explain them now, right?
I can't, I can't tell you what was going on now.
Stunning, Sean, stunning in terms of her affect or in terms of the content?
Well, the content was fairly, there were patterns.
Where all of these messages were the same.
Right.
They had sort of a form.
They started out the same way.
Beloved ones, precious ones.
And then going on into sometimes talking about world conditions or talking or admonishment like, you know, you're not doing what you're
You're not living up to your spiritual potential, you know, you need to do this, you need to stop doing that, and then sort of a conclusion that would end more in, you know, we love you, we are with you, we are watching over you, and you know, so that's kind of the standard form that all these messages took, but sometimes they would, in pitch and affect and speed and intensity, they would Almost go to inhuman levels.
And I think people who see these for the first time just don't know what to make of it.
And I have to conclude, like I said, this, these came from her brain.
So it's a form of, of trance state or performance art, whatever, whatever you want to call it.
I don't have an explanation.
In learning how to do that kind of performance, it would make perfect sense to me that someone who did have access to certain kinds of intense, non-ordinary experiences would be able to frame the learning of the performance art and of the formal structure of how this thing works, right?
You can easily frame it to yourself as being Becoming a more open channel, right?
Learning how to tap in more clearly, learning how to close the gap between what you're hearing and what you're speaking.
And I would imagine that can become the self-reinforcing thing at the level of the brain where you're able to really get it to the point that it's virtuosic.
And there's also this aspect of social contagion where she is rewarded for the fluency with which this is occurring and she's got to be responding to the charge in the room.
It's like this incredibly tragic thing that, in the hands of the Carnegie Hall musician, is just ecstatic.
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm thinking about Keith Jarrett playing the Kuhn concert or something like that, and he starts out with these themes where he knows where he's going.
And in 20 minutes he's in absolute ecstasy.
And so is everybody in the entire hall.
And he kind of knows where he's going.
He knows what key he's playing in.
He knows what the scales are.
He knows, you know, what the tenths and the Whatever he's doing, like, he knows what his materials are.
And he can feel, I'm sure, the crowd going into a kind of trance state with him.
And then we have this, like, transcendent piece of art that lasts for generations and generations.
And somehow it feels like, with the cult leader like your mother was, that the same thing is going on.
And I've seen it, I saw it in a minor way with Charles Anderson at Endeavor Academy.
Michael Roach does it to a certain extent, the first cult leader that I was with.
I think this is a not understood phenomenon of the tragedy of the cult leader is that they actually have this incredible skill that is socially weaponized against them.
The last thing that they need is the kind of feedback that they're getting that lets them expound on this virtuosity.
Wow, I have to say, I mean, this is the first time in my life that I've actually thought, Matthew, about what she was doing, like musical improvisation.
And I think that's profound.
I, uh, I think that's, that's spot on.
It's like, it's like jazz, right?
You have a framework and you just go.
And I think that's, that's, that is a lot of, of what was going on here.
And, um, and I think, I think that people who, it's like, if you're not a jazz musician, you can't even conceive of what they're doing.
You can't even, the, the, the, just the nuances of, of, and the accents and the, and the way that the, you know, you're, are you ahead of the beat?
Are you behind the beat?
Are you, you know, and, and all the, you know, the inversions.
Yeah, yeah, so I think that's profound, and I think that is what she was doing.
And I wanted to back up a little bit, though, and just give you a few little vignettes that I had with her, because there were times when I asked her about the dictations and how they worked, and how she did it and everything else like that.
And I think that she talked publicly a little bit about this, like, There were a few different modes of dictation and one was just was more was more maybe where she felt kind of overshadowed by a feeling or a message that she felt that a master wanted her to deliver.
And so she would get up and give that kind of a dictation.
And I'm not talking about the lectures now.
I'm talking about when she's formally addressing the group in the name of a master.
Right?
And then she described another mode where she could she would see letters.
She would see words and then like she's reading the words.
And then she described this ex cathedra mode of dictation where she was taken over and like her body and her vocal cords and everything are literally have been taken over by the master as she described it.
But then I remember another time when I asked her in a more probing way about the dictations and I said, you know, I'm just not understanding like, you know, where you come up, kind of come up with this stuff and, and, and how you do it so quickly.
And, and, and there was one point at which she got a bit angry and said, you know, that's personal.
That's that you're, that's too personal.
Like, I'm not going to share that with you.
Oh, that's so touching, man.
That is, yeah, that's, that's really revealing.
And there was another time when, or a number of times actually, when I heard her sort of express a fear that she wouldn't continue to be able to do it.
Like this whole organization, you can imagine, you know, these thousands of people, hundreds of staff members, all this money is depending on her performance.
And I think that she had some performance anxiety about that.
She did not ever sleep well.
And I think I've inherited some of that.
But she had trouble sleeping and sometimes it was related to this anxiety, I think, about being able to do what and to live up to her past performances.
So, Sean, there's another TV show that actually happened in 1989, a year before the Nightline Report that we've referenced.
Two of your sisters were on Oprah, along with other current and former members of the church, and someone who we've actually had on the podcast, cult expert Steve Hassan, it was great to see him at that young age.
And this was a multi-segment affair with panel discussions, they had montages about the Jim Jones Temple and the Rajneesh Ashram that we've touched on already.
And, you know, Oprah was really expressing concern, like what's going on with the church universal and triumphant and how bad could things end up here?
And your sisters at that time, they're quite young and they have radically opposing views of the church.
Moira has left and believes that it's dangerous and that you're kind of has a bad sort of take on your mom.
And Aaron is still very much involved and seems to be a senior.
official.
My sense at this point in your life is that the five of you are no longer involved with the church.
Can you share anything about what that's been like for you over the course of your lives?
Well, I want to say, I mean, the Oprah show was kind of a, I could say a lot about that show.
I I mean, I think your observations about it are correct.
I think that the show kind of devolved into this, you know, shouting match of, you know, is it a cult?
Is it not a cult?
Some of the people who were in the group defending it and then people like Steve Hassan saying, no, you know, this is dangerous and Moira saying, no, this is dangerous.
And a lot has changed since then, right?
The five of us are not all completely out.
I will say that at the very least, My younger sister Moira and Tatiana, you know, have have sympathies for the group at this point and Erin, you know, she recently got her PhD in sociology of religion.
And so she is she looks at it.
She's definitely not a part of the group anymore, but she looks at it from a kind of academic perspective.
I don't think she sees it as As dangerous as I do.
I think she sees the organization more in the Western esoteric tradition as sort of a benign thread that sort of has run through many different types of organizations and religions throughout history.
And I think she sees our parents as not an anomaly, as being something that, you know, Fairly normalized, in her view.
Yeah, I got the impression too that, just from looking a little bit, that Tsariana may be a Trump supporter.
Yeah, unfortunately.
I think she was in Washington on January 6th.
She wasn't actually at the Capitol, but when you're getting on a plane and going to Washington, You know, that's pretty hardcore.
What an amazing legacy.
I mean, that Oprah show was very hard for me to watch.
I found it really exploitative and with these short segments that prevent anything from really settling down and, oh, we're going to go to commercial break.
And you said, I think you said very generously that, Julian, that Oprah was expressing concern about the group going I didn't really hear a lot of that.
I think she was concerned to make sure that your sisters were able to get at each other with bare fists.
But there was this flat-out sensationalizing, too, going on in the opening quote-unquote report from the Oprah journalism team that reduced the whole dialogue down to whether or not your mom was going to give orders for everyone to die.
You know, that was a concern, but the heightened rhetoric, you know, around it didn't really allow for any clear questions and answers.
So I've got a clip of it because I also feel that this is kind of a key juncture in the media of cult reporting that we want to pay attention to because, you know, There's this exchange that comes up right at the end.
It's not as bad as like Maury Povich or Geraldo Rivera, but what we'll hear is there's a former member of Church Universal Triumphant challenging the panel expert, Lowell Stryker, who's captioned as an expert on religions.
And the challenge is for Stryker to call cut a cult.
Then an audience member asks Stryker to define what a cult is, and he does.
And then we hear your sister Erin in there, who at that time is a fully invested member, defending your mom.
Then there's another audience member who asks Hassan to define a cult, and he starts to, and then all hell breaks loose.
So here it is.
I'd like to resolve this and end this dialogue on cults once and for all with Mr. Stryker.
Elizabeth Proffitt herself has called it a cult.
She's called it the culture of the mother, I mean, and it involves total obedience and service to her.
What I'm saying is that the term cult, as it is used popularly, is a pejorative term.
I understand that.
It's a way of putting it down.
It's a way of putting down a group and then not having to deal with it.
What we need in this country is dialogue with our non-traditional and new religious movements.
I agree.
Because in that dialogue, their rough edges are inevitably going to get followed up.
That's fine.
I think the word cult is very valid, and I think it's up to the organization to prove whether they're negative or positive.
When she said it, she was trying, she was saying a positive sense because people had stuck us on it as a negative label.
Okay, somebody just said, what is a cult?
A destructive cult.
A destructive cult.
Dr. Stryker, how do you define a cult?
What is a cult?
I think cult refers to religious movement during the first generation of its history when the group is very small and there's direct contact between the founder of the group and every member of the group.
And when the leader dies or when the group grows sufficiently that it has to develop a structure, it's no longer appropriate to call it a cult.
And I think that a group like the Church Universal and Triumphant, which has been around now for a whole generation and has tens of thousands of members, it doesn't tell us anything to call it a cult.
So, yes, there are groups that, from a sociological point of view, I probably would call cults, but I certainly wouldn't call this one a cult, or most of the groups that are... I'd like to hear what Steve defines as a cult.
Right.
Well, yes, the term cult can be used as a pejorative label, and I am not interested in stirring up fear or paranoia of anyone.
I want a dialogue.
Yes, you are, but you said there are 3,000 cults in America.
You've got to speak one at a time or nobody gets heard.
One at a time or no one gets heard.
Destructive cults use deceptive recruiting so that people are not able to make an informed choice when they're getting involved.
They think it's something completely different than what it turns into being.
Well, let me stop you here, Steve, because I'm trying to understand why there's such disparity in what Kenneth says and what his brother says, what Maura says, what her sister says.
Oh, she stops him and he's trying to tell you, Oprah, what he actually means.
Anyway, Sean, did you know Stryker at the time?
Because he went on to become an anti-cult activist.
Isn't that right?
I did not know Stryker.
Again, I was sort of a behind-the-scenes guy.
My sister Erin and Murray Steinman and, you know, they were the PR sort of people.
And I wasn't really involved in any of the organization or planning for that Oprah show.
But I do have a couple things to say about not only that segment, but about Oprah in general.
I guess I'll start with the idea of cult and that term and what I think of it.
I think that Cult is basically how organized religions that are larger and older sort of defend their territory.
And I was talking earlier about how the fundamentalist Christians really didn't like us because they don't want the competition.
We have a long tradition in this country of religious freedom, and we came from Europe to escape religious persecution, etc.
And so, like it or not, religion has always been a huge part of American life.
And these organizations, the mainline Christian denominations, have Way too much power.
And they always have.
And I think that them labeling smaller organizations and newer organizations cults is a way of defending their own turf.
And I don't think that there's a lot of difference between the things that fundamentalist Christians believe and the things that cults believe.
They're just as weird.
And I've interviewed a number of religion experts.
on the topic and they pointed out something which is very true.
And this also came up in the Ballard case with the IM movement of the Supreme court.
You can't put someone's religious beliefs on trial.
And so it's the, the mainline religions get away with, with saying anything.
I mean, they think that, you know, they're eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ.
It's absurd, right?
And so, are they going to tell me that, you know, that Zinu or the stuff that we believed in in Cut, you know, is any worse than that?
It's not.
It's just as equally absurd.
And so, I think that's something that, um, this is all politics.
It's religious politics.
The idea of cult versus not cult.
Well, there's also like a disciplinary politics between, you know, scholars of religion and cult theorists that is on display here where Stryker opens with his definition of cult with a new religion in its first generation, which Which has nothing to do with what real cult literature says, where cults aren't defined by religious belief at all, but about methods of control.
And so I wanted to just ask, you know, to what extent you feel this religious apologetics take on cults has damaged our general ability to understand what they actually do.
Well, yeah, but I mean, I think that we have to look at cult dynamics as existing in, you know, far wider circles, okay?
Abusive relationships contain the seed of cult dynamics.
Right.
And so when you start bringing in more people, you've just, instead of having the abuser with one other person, you've got the abuser with a whole group of people.
But in a family system, some of that same kind of dynamic takes place.
Like if you have an abusive patriarch in a family, and say that patriarch has been having sex with daughter, cousin, whatever, you name whatever the abuse is or has been physically violent or whatever, and then you have other people in the family who are covering for that person, right?
It's not a lot different in cults.
I think that you have, that you're sort of putting together this, and cults play on this family dynamic too.
And they get people to reject their family of origin in favor of the cult family.
And it's like I was talking about earlier with my dad and his knighting of people and establishing this sort of hierarchy.
It really all comes down to establishing this double standard where the higher you are, all the way up to the main patriarch, And it is usually a man.
It was very much of an anomaly that my mother was female and the leader of this organization.
But it's hierarchy.
It's establishing this idea that what is said by the top dog cannot be questioned.
And, you know, going on down the line, and you know, you saw this with Rajneesh, with Ma Anand Sheela, and she was somebody who could not, she was the right hand person of Osho, but I mean, she also could not be questioned, and she was a pitbull, right?
And so, I don't, I just don't see the cult dynamic as being that special or different from these toxic relationships.
Speaking of toxic relationships, I think the last question I have for you, and maybe Julian has something else, is, you know, you Your father dies when you're very young, but he is the founder of a movement that presents dictations from above as authoritative truth.
Your mother is at the top of this authoritarian organization.
How did you find some kind of internal voice for yourself?
Like, I can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up with with the parental commands being so incredibly heavy?
How did you actually feel like you became a self? - Well, I had to start to understand, and I think I described this earlier, talking about coming into the teenage years, and hormones are raging, you wanna have fun with your friends, you wanna do all these things that you see other people doing, you want to participate in the popular culture, you wanna do all these things that you see other people doing, you want to So I had to come to terms with the fact that my parents were not only capable of making mistakes, but they were capable of being, you know, really, really downright mean and oppressive.
And so once kind of And then I think I tried to establish some separation between them as human beings versus them when they were speaking on behalf of the masters.
And there was a lot of fear.
If there was any argument or whatever, she would say, well, El Morya says you have to do X, right?
So she would kind of pull rank.
And so I knew that.
I wasn't just talking to my mother now, who I already was afraid of and already was larger than life, but now the Master was saying that this had to happen.
Me separating out from that involved me starting to understand that these were fallible people.
And I kind of put the masters on the shelf for a while.
Even when I left the group, I was like, well, maybe there still are masters and maybe my parents just were imperfect vessels.
Right.
And it took maybe four or five years after I left the group, I'm in LA, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm going to work.
I'm in some parking lot somewhere.
And I remember driving out of this parking lot onto, I think it was, uh, I dunno, Victory Boulevard or Olive or something like that in Burbank.
And there was a moment and it just clicked and I just went, you know, there are no masters.
This is all bullshit.
Like my whole life has been bullshit.
Up to this point, and I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing right now.
Nobody can tell anybody else how they should live.
Nobody can tell anyone else the meaning of life.
And I started, I felt at that point like I was whole, and I finally found my place in civilization, in society, as an individual, and it was making decisions for myself.
