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

Robert is joined by Alex Steed to discuss The 12 Tribes cult.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
All right, can we are we ready?

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Yes? Boss?

Speaker 1 (00:06):
That was to me because you that was to you?

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Huh, you could never be in charge? Yes, employee.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Wow? Wow, what's the president of this podcast? My Robert Sophie.
That's right, that's right, you admitted it.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Who is who is the dictator overlord of this podcast? Myself?

Speaker 1 (00:23):
I'm gonna be I'm gonna have Daniel cut that little
bit out where you where you introduced me as boss,
and then I'm gonna play that like.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
A I am introduced you as boss. I introduced myself
as boss.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
No, I'm going to get a little two little buttons,
one of them, one of them has you introducing me
as boss, and one of them has Garrison calling Reuter's routers.
And that's funny. That's gonna be all I need.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's very funny. One of one of the weird things
about being associated with iHeartRadio is that I have an
org chart that literally shows you as my as my employee.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
So wow, this is I have to ask Sophie of
a minute and a half ago, who's in charge? Because
I seem to recall what she said.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Anyway, this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast of Vicious
power struggles, where we occasionally talk about some of the
worst people in all of history. Our guest this week,
Alex stead of You are good the podcast and the
general concept.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
Yeah, both, and thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, Alex. Alex pointed out that the one time we
met in person was at Jamie Loft. This is thirtieth
birthday at medieval times, where we were both extremely intoxicated,
and I've never felt more endeared to a guest in my.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Life now, Alex. Yes, how do you feel about colts?

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Oh, colts? I find them fascinating. They're part of our
They're part of our national history.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
How do you, on a similar topic, feel about the
largest wildfire in Colorado State history?

Speaker 3 (02:01):
I have no feelings or knowledge, no feelings towards your
knowledge about pro wildfires.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Got it. I'm just taking notes too, you. Okay. So
we're going to be talking today about a cult that
I'm gonna guess most people. I had not really heard
of these guys until I started digging into them. But
it's it's a fascinating, real, real fascinating cult leader, real

(02:28):
terrible journey. We're just gonna hear a lot of awful
things this week, just deeply unpleasant. So are you are
you ready? Are you strapped in to just have a
very bad time?

Speaker 3 (02:38):
You know, I've listened to the show before. I know
we're in for and I'm eager for the journey.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, well, this one's it's been a while since we've
had a good cult episode. You know. That's our bread
and butter. So yeah, get ready for some bread and butter.
Get ready for like the carb equivalent of sorrow. I
don't know what that would be.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
I'm sorry, el.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Existential depression maybe.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
So.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
On December thirtieth, twenty twenty one, embers from an approved
trash fire caught dry vegetation on fire in the suburbs
between Denver and Boulder, and inferno followed, tearing through desiccated
grassland in the Rocky Mountain foothills. One hundred mile an
hour winds meant that for quite some time there was
no feasible manner of fighting what became known as the
Marshall Fire. It killed two people and did around two

(03:25):
billion dollars in damage. It is to date, the most
devastating wildfire in Colorado history, although give Colorado some time,
I'm sure they'll break that record very soon. The way
things are going for everybody ari fires. So after eighteen
months of investigation, state authorities concluded that the blaze had started,
likely due to smoldering embers from the aforementioned trash fire,

(03:46):
and it was like wood trash that was being burned.
The fire had started on the communal living property owned
by a little known colt called the Twelve Tribes. This
sparked renewed interest in the group and the investigations that
followed what inspired these episodes. I should note here that
Colorado authorities opted not to charge the cult or its
members with the blaze. This may seem unjust, but the

(04:07):
logic's actually pretty solid, Like this was a trash burn,
the authority showed up, the fire department gave them the
go ahead. It just was the driest it's ever been.
So I'm going to say the horrible fire this cult
caused probably chalked down more to climate change than the cult,
But we have to start there because it's kind of
the biggest recent touchstone with this cult. It is weird.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
If you're a cult, you don't want to remind people
that you exist.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
No, No, you really want to not start the largest
wildfire in state history because it might start a Denver
Post investigation. Indeed, it's pretty good, quite good. As a
basically fair man, I think it's important to acknowledge, even
as we dig into how the authorities have ignored decades
of allegations of child abuse committed by this cult, that
the fire that they got famous for probably not their fault. Today,

(04:54):
the twelve Tribes number about three thousand members somewhere around there,
although we have no insight into their actual numbers because
they are a very shady cult. We do know they
own about thirty six million dollars in real estate in
the United States, and they operate communes in twenty two states,
so there's a lot of these communities. And they also

(05:14):
operate a lot of businesses, which we'll be talking about later,
mostly like little cafes and restaurants and enormous construction companies.
So one thing that interested me right away with this
cult is that while it's got a charismatic founder who
goes mad with power, it may have functioned in most
of its history is in a less like centralized manner,
right where the cult leader was kind of potentially usurped

(05:37):
at some point by his equally sketchy wife. It's kind
of hard to say exactly because the life of the
cult founder Eugene Spriggs is a little bit obscure. But
we're going to do our best here to pull back
the veil about this guy and what happens to him. So,
Elbert Eugene Spriggs Junior gets born on May eighteenth, nineteen
thirty seven to a devout Methodist family in East Ridge, Tennessee.

(06:02):
His childhood is mostly a mystery to us. I can
tell you his dad was named Elbert Senior, which is ridiculous,
and his mother wasn't Mabel, So he's like very thirties kid, right,
Mabel and Albert, Like that's like you can only be grandparents,
Like while you're I think you get like skipped over
straight to their grandparents stage. If you've got old people

(06:22):
names like that.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, and they're out of they're out of Tennessee. This
is like a scene from Pearl Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
Try and also just like try to imagine an eighteen
year old Albert, Like it's impossible, you can't do it.
It can't like cannot be done.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
To Benjamin Button suation, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
I do. I want to. I'm never gonna have a kid,
but I want to, like try and start a movement
of like gen Z kids to bring back some of
these ridiculous old timey names like I want a bunch
of gin Alpha Mabels, like a lot of little baby
Mabel and Ethel's. Like wandering around.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
I did meet a very nice dog named Mabel once.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
She was we Yeah, but dog. She was a called
dog's anything.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
She was a Corgie. She was just doing she was sniffing,
and her name was Mabel and it worked so good.
Can we have a dog exception?

Speaker 1 (07:11):
There's always a dog exception.

Speaker 3 (07:13):
I know I knew a Mabel named after Maybel Carter
as a dog. So yeah, I guess that's a that's
a two of them.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
That's a popular dog, that's very popul Yeah, seems like
Mabel's the hot new dog name. Everybody's everybody's going with.
Why not name your kid Mabel? You know what, bring
it back. That's how we get back some of those
good thirties values, like smoking lots of cigarettes.

Speaker 3 (07:34):
And putting kids to work.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, because like Elbert's a cigarette name, Like Elbert's fucking
like smoking the way people just can't smoke today. Yeah,
that's what you know about him. So very religious family
like again, Hella Methodist. They went to church three times
a week on a pretty regular basis. Just a nightmare life.
One bio I found notes that Eugene Spriggs was a

(07:58):
football stand out at Central High School, so we can
assume a handful of childhood head injuries. He graduated and
moved to Chattanooga to attend the University of Tennessee, where
he got a degree in psychology. Now. A paper I
found on the Virginia Commonwealth University website describes his young
life as unsettled in a number of ways, as he

(08:18):
held a succession of jobs pretty wide variety, everything from
like labor jobs and stuff to he was a high
school guidance counselor. For a spell, he was the tour
director of a travel agency. He did a stint in
the army, and he seemed to have unusual difficulties staying
in relationships. This is a at this point fifties guy
who gets divorced three times. Oh yeah, you don't run

(08:41):
into that a lot. That means you're really running through
like you got to be absolutely And it seems like
he is leaving them right like he has one kid
and wife takes it. I don't know it's a little
unclear to me what happened in each relationship. But that's
not a common story in this period of time.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
No, not, Although it feels like a common story with
male cult leaders. It does at this at this time
that there's like a couple wives before you find one
who's like, let's I like your zany ideas, let's.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
Move on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and he does you
actually have predicted where this goes because wife number four
is going to be down to clown.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
This already sounds a lot like I forget the name
of the cult. But then Tony Alamo, Yeah, who makes
the like beaded jackets. This is almost exactly his story.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
Art well, it's also I mean it's not l Ron Hubbard,
like he did everything extra panache, but he gets is
divorced basically two or three times before he finds the
lady who's going to go to prison for him for
infiltrating the FBI.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
It's a high standard really to be like, will you
go to jail if it comes to it.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yeah. So anyway, listeners, what you should take from this
is that if you're looking to start your own cult,
get divorced a lot. I mean, I mean, because honestly,
unless you're able to, unless you've got real experience abandoning fan,
then you're not going to have the kind of emotional
distance that it takes to be a good cult leader.
It's just basic sense.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
You know.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
You can you can learn more about this in my
in my forty two hundred dollars weekend course Divorce Your
Way to Leadership Skills.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
Yeah. I think Robert has a free PDF about this.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Of course.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah, of course, Sophie, you're you're my dealer basically. So
by age yeah, by age thirty two, Spriggs is super divorce,
the most divorced man in the nineteen sixties and working
as a carnie in Chattanouga, which is so funny, like
he is living the most depressing divorced skill.

Speaker 3 (10:40):
Like if you were doing that today.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
It would be word oh yeah, yeah. So he's he's
a divorced Carney doing divorced Carni shit in fucking Chattanouga,
which is a rough place to be a divorced Carti.
And then he hears the voice of God ask him
a question, is this what I created you for? Hell?
Normally that's like you should go to the doctor. Experience, right,

(11:06):
Spriggs does not do that. In fairness, doctors didn't really
exist back then, so he would later claim that his
time as a carney had given him an intimate look
into the most sinful and debauched aspects of life. This
is the only thing he says that I think is
probably true, because I've known some carnies and they all
report that love them. So he decides this is not

(11:27):
what God has in mind for him, and so he
follows a large percentage of his generation and fucks off
to California. Now, the late sixties early seventies are famous
in this country for having been the age of the
Hippie movement and its disillusionment and collapse into what eventually
became the soulless corporatism of the Reagan era. Now, I
think the fact that the hippie movement gets so much

(11:50):
play in media in part because like the kind of
people who made movies and shit were likely to be
as kids, the kind of people who were into that
social movement. There's this like belief among people that it
was the generation that spawned that movement was much more
radical than they were. The Boomers were always a very
conservative generation.

Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah, the whole like hippies were the way people are.
Thing drives me nuts.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, it was not. I mean, hippies weren't the way
hippies are, like you talk to people like. For one thing,
it was still a very homophobic, very like most people
who were who would have called themselves hippies held to
some what we would call very traditional values about sexuality
and gender still. And it was also just like most
people like that, like the fringe, who were super progressive

(12:35):
anti war, hippies were not anything close to a majority.
And one of the things that kind of makes this
point is that at the same time that the hippie movement,
you know, is kind of winding down, another major cultural
trend is happening that tends to get left out of
popular histories of the era. Have you heard of the
Jesus Movement?

Speaker 3 (12:54):
No?

Speaker 1 (12:55):
Yeah, So these are kind of a mirror of the
hippies in that, like most of the Gjesis movement, people
who get swept up in this, they're like they've got
long hair, they're kind of unkemped. Most many of them
have dropped out of society. It is a lot of
the same kind of you know, living in buses, traveling
around doing like handcrafts. A lot of them people are
like pooling resources to you know, start farms and stuff together,

(13:17):
back to the land. And the thing that kind of
separates them from the hippies is that the Jesus Movement
sees Christ as a counter culture hero, so they are
kind of Jesus. Yeah, yeah, hippie. There is like a
bit of that going on, but it's still it is,
as we'll talk about, still quite conservative. Now.

Speaker 3 (13:33):
When I went to church as a kid, like this
is how they sold me on Jesus. Yeah, it was
like there were it was clearly people who got into
Jesus in one way or another from because I grew
up in Maine. There were a couple of different kinds
of back to the Landers. There were like the hippie hippies,
and there were religious hippies, and those were the ones
who sold Jesus as like a social justice figure.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, and this is because you get the Jesus Movement,
some of the what splinters out of it is going
to be kind of more progressive. Jesus, you know, was
fighting against these injustices that are still present with us today.
But a lot of it's going to lead to the
religious right, like it feeds directly because you have kind
of Jesus movement is sort of late sixties through parts

(14:14):
of the seventies and kind of that's also right around
when you know, in the late seventies you get Jerry
Folwell start to emerge, you get the religious right welded
into this political coalition for the first time. Yeah, so
the people who get swept up in this generally called
either Jesus people or Jesus freaks. That is where the
term Jesus freak comes from. And yeah, it's a charismatic movement.

(14:36):
It's cross denominational, So there are Catholics who like sects
of Catholics who are part of this Jesus movement. There's
Protestants in it, and it's like a lot of different organizations,
lots of different churches that you can just kind of
like broadly call part of the Jesus movement, not because
they're part of the same thing with each other, right, Like,
if you have this sort of hardcore Protestant, you know church,

(14:58):
that's Jesus movement, they're not the same thing as Catholics
who might also be swept up in it, but the
similarity they have is that like they're all adopting this
really like charismatic kind of countercultural attitude towards their religious worship.
Followers would often speak in tongues. That's a big part
of like when that gets more popular in the United States,
and there's generally a big focus on what's called the

(15:20):
gifts of the Spirit, which is like restoring this kind
of sense of a direct connection personal connection to God
usually an a static connection, right, So this is part
of why you get these like big tint revival worship ceremonies.
A really good documentary to watch if you want to
understand the texture of this movement in time is Marjo

(15:40):
M A. R. Joe. It's about this kid, Marjo Gortner,
who was like the youngest priest in the country. It
was kind of a carnival sideshow grift run by his parents,
but he went back as an adult to film behind
the scenes and it shows a lot of this period
you can get Are you.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
Aware of where this was happening, Like did it all
over spring out of one geopiece?

Speaker 2 (16:02):
No?

Speaker 1 (16:02):
So okay, all I think it does start in the
West Coast, Like I think that's where you sat, like California,
but it spreads everywhere. As we'll talk about these guys
are very much a Jesus movement. Story, Eugene Spriggs is
going to be a Jesus movement, like that's when he
kind of starts becoming a religious leader. And they do
embody to an extent a big wing of it. And again,

(16:23):
when we talk about the Jesus movement, it's not like
a cult. It's not like a one thing, right, It's
like a bunch of different in some cases, very much
like opposed different sort of religious organizations, traditions, communities. They're
just kind of bound together by certain similarities as a
result of this cultural moment. Yeah, and it's also worth
noting that, like a lot of people who get pulled

(16:45):
into the Jesus movement, there's a big focus on this
idea of like returning to the lifestyles of early Christians,
which is part of what convinces them of Like why
a lot of them do sort of the back to
the land shit, right, Like that's a big thing for them.
This helps them kind of blend in with the hippies, right,
And often Jesus freaks are people who had been hippies
a few years earlier.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
Yea.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
Their lives in a lot of cases collapse, they get
criminal chargers or something, or they have you know, they
burn out, you know, as a result of drug use
or whatever. And then there's this kind of movement that
has some aspects of values that are similar to the
thing that had brought them in that they can you
know that they wound up getting swept up in not
an uncommon story.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
Yes, it's super common. I mean I did a podcast
series a couple of years ago on Tony Alamo and
the in his religious cult, and this is it's almost
exactly beat for beat. Like they started in like sixty
nine in Hollywood, and they were attracting just burned like
hippies who are burned out on being hippies into Jesus.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
Yeah this makes sense. Yeah, yeah, and yeah, a lot
of Jesus freaks wound up living in communes practicing versions
of religious aestheticism. We see echoes of like modern trad
culture in this. A lot of it is this sort
of reaction to especially like feminism and stuff. There's this
attitude of like the necessity of returning to traditional roles
were changing in the wrong direction. Some of this is

(18:04):
tied to the Cold War as well, particularly fears of
nuclear war and how that merges with Christian apocalyptic prophecy.
One of the key books of the Jesus movement is
how Lindsay's The Late Great Planet Earth. And if you
if you grew up as an evangelical kid, you probably
heard about that book. It is hugely influential to these people.
We can't actually know if Spriggs had the vision he

(18:26):
claims he had in nineteen sixty nine. I kind of
think he may have falsified that because it's an auspicious
year for the counterculture. You know, if you're gonna talk
about like, that's the year you do it. Part of
why I suspect this is because some versions of the
Spriggs story say that, you know, God came to him
during his Carnie days in nineteen seventy, you know, a

(18:46):
year later, whatever the case. After the late sixties, you know,
as the nineteen seventies start, he does become very quickly
like a player. In the newly energized Christian fringe, write
up by The Times Free Press notes, while in California,
he devoted his life to creating a ministry. According to
reporting at the time by the Chattanooga News Free Press.
Spriggs said he wanted to reach young people who were

(19:07):
not going to church, particularly those turned off of faith
from their parents. That's interesting to me, like he's very
much focusing on young people who especially this kind of
very staid, stolid Protestantism that's really turn of the century,
these very quiet, austere churches that still have kind of
some of these Victorian attitudes and worship is very much

(19:28):
like channeled through the pastor. A big part of what
he's doing is like, no, we want like personal, astatic connections,
and that's what will bring these young people back who
kind of got burnt out of these very authoritarian churches
of their youths. This is going to be ironic considering
where Spriggs ends up.

Speaker 3 (19:45):
It often is, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In nineteen seventy two, he gets hitched
for the fourth time and what will be the final time,
to a woman named Marcia and Duval. By all accounts,
Marsia shares his spiritual obsession. The two move away from
these in full California coast and back to Chattanooga, where
they found a Bible study group for young people that
they call the Vine Christian community church named after their home,

(20:09):
the Vine House, and they bring some California people with them.
The Jesus movement is appealing to disillusioned dropouts, to former
war protesters and stuff like that, and Jean realizes early
on that these people are the easiest converts to his
church because like dropouts people with criminal records, they tend
to be desperate, and so he offers them what they
need if they'll attend his services, and he starts opening

(20:33):
his house to worshippers right, being like, if you're coming
to church here, you can live with me, you know,
like your food and whatnot will be taken care of.
And so by nineteen seventy four there are between fifty
and sixty people living with the Sprigses in their house,
which must have smelled fascinating. That's too many people for
one house. Perhaps because of this, they start asking their

(20:56):
followers to pool their resources, and this is a limited
affair at first. They're kind of just asking for donations, right,
you know, if you do have money, if you've got
family money or something, or you have savings when you
come here, maybe give us some of it so we
can pay for these other people who who have nothing.

Speaker 2 (21:11):
And this.

Speaker 1 (21:11):
They do well enough at this they're able to accrue
a decent amount of money, and they purchase three additional
homes in Chattanooga, and they buy a restaurant which they
call the Yellow Deli. This becomes known as a place
in town where if you're a runaway or a hitchhiker
you can get a free meal. So a lot of
people show up because, like, you know, they're starving. Yeah,
and when they're starving, that's a really good way to

(21:33):
just kind of pull people into what is becoming a cult, right,
you know, that's your little fishing lure.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
Any move like that. That's the tricky thing, is like
any movement usually starts with taking disillusion to people and
giving them a reason and giving them some resources or
making available some resources. But it gets it's usually just
like what happens after that step where you determine is
this going to be a cult or is this going
to be a social movement or is it going to
be a little of both?

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, that is that is exactly the kind of situation here,
and it's got to lean cult. Uh spoilers, because this
is the show that it is.

Speaker 3 (22:05):
Well, it's like, if you think about just the commonalities
of this and again Alamo and then just like Elijah
Muhammett was sending people five dollars bills in prison, like
it's it's a it's a great way to endear people
to you.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
Yeah, it's this. It's this thing that the uh the
wind friends and influence people like influencer grindset talk about
a lot, but it is a real factor, like the
reciprocity effect, right, where like if somebody gives you something,
you feel like a psychological need to give them something
to return the favor.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
Right.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
It's just the fact that just the fact that Manson
loved that book and in Dianetics just like makes all
this and that just explains it all for you.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
It is. It is like exactly the books. Like at
some point somebody is gonna feed those books to an
ai and we're gonna have a real fucking problem on
our heads because, like you, they're just going to create
l Ron Hubbard the fucking chat bot. Very much.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
Looking forward, that's such a good idea. Can I have
ten percent?

Speaker 1 (23:03):
Yeah? Absolutely I do. I am. I I am looking
forward to when a bunch of like weirdo online influencer
freaks like feed the right combination of books to a
chatbot and convince themselves they've created a god.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
But also, why has it scientology made an l Ron Hubbard?
AI like that, Oh they will, they will the lrih box,
Like why haven't they done that?

Speaker 1 (23:26):
Because I would you know what, I would pay them
money for that. I want that on my phone. I
want to run all of my life decisions by the
l Ron Hubbard.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Why haven't But I mean, obviously it's because they even
miscatches wouldn't have power, But like, why haven't they done
that in a strategic way? It doesn't make sense, like
you're still putting the clothes out, Like why why haven't
you done that?

Speaker 1 (23:44):
Well, I think they're probably don't.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
Take no scientologists, you're despicable, But.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
I feel like you gotta know, like what I would
like is a robot in my pocket that when I'm
like what should I do in this situation? Says you
should kidnap your own daughter and to Cuba because I've
been looking for an excuse to go have a nice
vacation there. You know, I've always wanted to see Cuba,
and I feel like this could make it easier for me.
So yeah, I'll kidnap somebody's daughter. Look, kids, you know

(24:12):
it's there. They're small. Yeah, there's all all sorts of
kids all around, so it's easy to find one. Anyway.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
It's not your fault if the scientology AI told you
to do.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
It exactly, That's exactly what I'm going to say in court.
And you know who else loves abduction?

Speaker 2 (24:31):
Where are you going with this?

Speaker 1 (24:33):
It's it's time for ads, So okay.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
But where are you going with this? Uh?

Speaker 1 (24:39):
To Cuba hopefully. Oh. We are just having a great
time here talking about the beautiful birth of what's going
to become quite a cult. So in one local news
article about the Yellow Darties, if you will, the spark, yeah,

(25:00):
and really the start of the like the little campfire
from which they're going to burn down all of Colorado
is the Yellow Deli. And one local news article about
the deli's opening, Spriggs said, when people ask us who
our interior designer is, we tell them we have the
same one Noah had, which is an interesting like basically
saying like God helped us design the interior, which I

(25:22):
think means they probably did not have fire escapes. Seems
like I thing God would miss. Spriggs was not at
this point, openly describing what he was doing as separate
from mainstream Christianity. In fact, he and his followers were
careful to maintain regular attendance at a local church, First Presbyterian,
because it's you know, like, even if you're doing an
ostensibly Christian movement, there's nobody who's going to get pissed

(25:44):
at you faster than like old conservative church goers. Right.
So if you're doing this weird thing, if you're living
with dozens of people and like convincing all the dropouts
and hippies to move in with you and buying up
large amounts of real estate, you really want to allay
their suspicions. When he is asked by a journalist during
this period of time about his plans for the future,

(26:04):
Spriggs says, this, can you imagine what a wonderful thing
it would be to have Yellow Delis all over America,
a restaurant with good food for everyone in the community.
But it would be a place to reach all the
runaways who are passing through, or all the young people
who are tired and mixed up. These people are not
going to church. Sometimes they stop at shelters and guidance.
People beat around the Bush. They don't tell it simple
like it is, Jesus loves you. You can be happy.

(26:26):
Let God run your life, you know.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
With God helping them build that. I really hope they
got flood insurance.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
Oh no, God does not believe in flood insurance. That's
not having enough faith in him, right.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Yeah, Heaven is the insurance, I guess.

Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, Heaven is your flood insurance.

Speaker 3 (26:44):
It's wild because this is the same time. I mean,
I know, I know how much is happening at this time,
but I never really think about all of the individual
pinpointed moments. Is this is also the same time that
they're opening the Source Family restaurant in La Is sixty nine,
and they're like that's their gateway into their cult. So yeah,
having like a branded hangout cafe spot was like the

(27:06):
way to go, you know.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
So Reading California, where I used to live off and
on for years, is run by a cult. Like there's
a big church in town that absolutely runs everything. The police,
politics like it and are increasingly like an iron grip
on it. And I used to I used to work
because like we had no internet for a long time
in the trailer in the mountains that we lived in

(27:29):
I used to have to go drive every day to
this play I thing was called It's absolutely a part
of this like fucking church thing all very like a
lot of people having like evangelical conversations, like you know,
pulling in someone from off the street, some trimmer or
whatever and having very earnest talks with them about Jesus.
It was that's where I wrote a lot of what
became the first season of It Could happen here. It's

(27:51):
like sitting in this cafe with all of these like
hardcore Christian right fanatics who were very very carefully trying
to expand their little king them quite successfully.

Speaker 3 (28:01):
You're like, in fact, it's happening right before.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
It is in fact happening right here. Yeah, fun town, Uh,
don't go there unarmed reading, So we're gonna have like
three reading listeners laughing a lot of times.

Speaker 3 (28:17):
Actually, my brother's college roommates from Reading, so I look
forward to asking him some follow up questions.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we may be covering them more
in the future since I don't have to go back
to that fucking town anymore. So the stuff that Spriggs
is saying about, like yeah, we want to use these
cafes to find these young people who are tired and
mixed up. You know, this is the seventies. This is
the fucking easy writer era, right these Like the fact
that there's all these young people have kind of dropped
out is a major like kind it's not really a

(28:43):
culture war touchstone, but it's like a major concern, particularly
for like older, more conservative Americans, And so this line
plays well with them, you know, particularly well with people
who might have been put off by the fact that
he's kind of created a commune in their town. But
there are some signs from the beginning that Spriggs was
heading in an settling direction. In that same interview, he
expressed that another one of his goals was to reach

(29:05):
people who had dropped out of Christianity because they didn't
like the faith that their parents had expressed. And this
line from him is really interesting. You can't fool a
dog or a child can see the hypocrisy and the
phoniness in their parents' lives. Their parents take alcohol, tranquilizers, cigarettes,
or they disobey speed laws, yet they want their children
to stay off drugs and obey all laws. Which is

(29:26):
not an inherently bad point, right that, like there's this
very like conservative backlash era happening in the particularly in
the seventies, but it's being kind of perpetrated by these
people who are on what we now call some of
the most dangerous benzos in the world. Right.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
He also, that's also like a very like cool youth
pastor thing to say. Yeah, and then you're like, you
know who else disobeyed laws?

Speaker 1 (29:53):
Yeah, exactly? Jesus. Well, I actually think Jesus would have
been a fucking well. Anyway, we can talk about what
drugs I think I may have bought from Jesus Christ,
but that's that's a separate story for another day. This
was such a suit. Yeah, this was such a success
that they next opened a coffeehouse and started ministering the

(30:13):
local kids who were disillusioned with mainstream society. Sometimes the
cults sent members out into the world to find new
members in places where they thought people struggling on the
fringe would congregate. This culminated in them for years. They
would send a bus to follow the Grateful Dead on
concert tours, and hand picked members would offer first aid
and food to fans coming up or down on the

(30:33):
various substances. Yeah, I do kind of I have this
this beautiful image in my head of like the this
cult bust crashing into the nitrous mafia's bus. I don't
know who would have won that fight. So Jeene Spriggs
promises all of his recruits, you know that if they
work hard, he'll take care of them. You know, they
won't have any unmet physical needs. All he needs is

(30:57):
their yeah, their their labor, and their unyielding religious evoce.
And he also promises you'll never be lonely again. Everyone
lives communally in the cult, and they work communally too.
They start to call themselves the Light Brigade in this
period of time. They're not going to stick with that
name very long because it's a dog shit name and
it's one of those things. You don't have any autonomy
when you're in the Light Brigade. But you also you're

(31:19):
not exposed to capitalism, right, and that like you don't
have to worry about winding up on the street, you
don't have to worry about starving like that is a
huge part of the appeal right especially again, this is
a lot of these people are folks who had been
swept up in the big social movements of the sixties.
And now they're kind of dealing with how a lot
of that failed, how chaotic and scary the world seems

(31:41):
in the seventies, the promise that like you can forget
all of that and forget interfacing with a confusing and
chaotic world. Like that's appealing, right, that is objectively, that
is appealing, Like a lot of people. Why it's why,
Like folks in our generation idolize this this kind of
mythical idea of like living on a farm with your friends.

Speaker 3 (32:00):
God, yeah, and then you live on a fucking farm.
Yeah that's the downside.

Speaker 1 (32:06):
Yeah, Like I live on a farm kind of it's
a small one, but we don't like there's no attempt
to like make a lifting or survive purely by that,
because that's like a huge amount of work.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Exactly. You get blake and no one eats for a year.
It's bad. It's a bad time.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
No, I think.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
I do think that like the real sign of maturity,
the eventual real sign of maturity is just like accepting
no orientation or situation is gonna be good and they're
all gonna suck a lot.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
Yeah. Yeah, there's there's like dog shit that you have
to deal with no matter what.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
You do, You're you're gonna eat shit somewhere somewhere on
the journey.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
The I think the appeal to something like that, it's
the it's the inherent appeal of dropping out right, of
like realizing how complex the problems are, and like, well,
I just want an option that means I don't have
to think about them, because then I can pretend it's
not happening. You know, maybe I can escape, maybe I
will be safe. And obviously the fact that all of
Canada burned down this year as evidence that no, you

(33:02):
can't be But we don't need to harp on that.
Everyone is aware of that, right, We're preaching to a
large choir here, so.

Speaker 3 (33:09):
And everyone has the vibe of people who know.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah. I wanted to provide some context from one of
the desperate young people lured in by Jean's cult, and
I found it. This is a later account from two
thousand and six, but I think it holds up. It's
from an issue of the local Chattanoogan paper, The Chattanoogan
titled I Escaped from the Yellow Deli quote. You would
have to understand my situation at the time to understand

(33:33):
how I was influenced by these people. I was twenty
one years old and just got out of a three
year abusive relationship, renting a room in a house in
Saint Elmo, no direction and no family to turn to.
They told me what I needed to hear. They loved me,
and God loved me, and I could come live with them.
When I became convinced, two members moved me out of
my little room at three am. I was driven to
their commune in Dalton, Georgia, and like, yeah, I think

(33:55):
that gets across, Like, yeah, it was in an abusive relationship.
I got out. I've got no family, I've got this
apart I can't afford it solves. They offer to solve
all your problems as long as you want the Jesus.
At first, the Light Brigade and the Weinhaus Church were
augments to the local Christian culture, not a wild new
vision of worship. This changes in nineteen seventy five when

(34:16):
First Presbyterian makes the decision to cancel a Sunday worship
session so that their pastor can go watch the Super Bowl. Right,
He's like, you know it, don't come in Sunday, Like
we're all going to go to the game anyway. Right,
this is kind of a cool thing to do if
you're a seventies preacher. But this is like Gene finds
this offensive. Right, you don't skip worship for any reason,

(34:36):
especially not this like profane worldly game. So he uses
this as an excuse to break his flock away from
the church entirely and start hosting Sunday services in a
local park instead. This increases his hold over his flock,
who now become They had been part of the community before. Right,
you're going to church with everybody, you're somewhat tied to
it from this point now they're only socializing and working

(34:59):
with each other. Right, This is kind of he severed
this like cord that they had to everyone else. This
also brings Spriggs his first real opposition, because once the
cult kind of steps away from this church, locals start
to be like, this does kind of seem like a problem,
like this cult. So from seventy five to seventy eight,
local churches register protests against the Light Brigade. When Spriggs

(35:22):
is spotted performing public baptisms, local papers start running the
first articles accusing them of being a cult. Two local
colleges ban their students from eating at the Yellow Deli
after enough former students had dropped out to join the
Spriggs cult, Like it's becomes such a problem of them
like poaching college students. I'm guessing they're kids who were
you know, you're in college, you find that you don't

(35:44):
like your major as much as you thought, or you
get stressed out during exams. You're poor, so you go
to the Yellow Deli for a free meal, and they're
like boys, seems like college isn't making you happy. You
know it'll make you happy.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
The difference in your where your life turns out could
just be like one free sandwich.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
Just there's so many times in my life where if
I got the free sandwich from the wrong place, I
would have been screwed.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
Yeah, I mean I know a lot of like former
punk kids who are anarchists because the food not bombs
people showed up and gave them sandwiches and.

Speaker 3 (36:13):
Bombs is how I same. It's how I turned from
a libertarian kid to a anarchist punk kid.

Speaker 1 (36:20):
Yeah. And this is always the case with colts, right
where like the things that let colts, I'm not going
food not bombs a cult. I'm saying that, like the
thing that colts use is something that also has a
good site. It's good to give people things, it's good
to take care of people who are desperate. If you're
doing that because you like people and you want them
to have an easier time, that's good. If you're doing
it because you want them to like feel a sense

(36:42):
of obligation to you so that you can rope them
into your your cult, that's bad, right, Yeah, real estate scheme. Yeah,
the key a big part of it. Whenever somebody is
like showing up and handing out free food, is like, yeah,
who's behind this. Is it just a bunch of people
coming together to help out the community, or is they're
a guy. Is there like a dude and this is

(37:03):
his thing, you know, then then maybe it's a cult.
Then maybe you should get your cult mace out.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
So, oh my god.

Speaker 1 (37:10):
I found one story from a student, actually the student
who was the author of that article in the Chattanooga
I quote earlier, who talks about like the process of
being like recruited and forced to drop out of college
by these people. Quote they believe that anything in the
outside world was evil, And they drove me to Chattanooga
State where I was attending to withdraw me. When I
told my counselor what I was doing, he just shook

(37:30):
his head. I told him I found Jesus and these
people loved me and were going to take care of me.
So they have they build over the years, like a
pretty steady process for like disenrolling kids from college when
they when they convert them, like it's enough of a
thing that like not only dose schools try to ban
their students from going to this cafe, but like everyone
who works their nose, like, oh shit, we lost another

(37:51):
one to the fucking cult.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
So in nineteen seventy eight things come to a head,
because that's the Jonestown year, right, Congress, when Leo Ryan
and several other people are gunned down in the jungle
by a cult. The cult then commits mass suicide. This
makes a lot of people very unhappy, really freaks out
the country.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
Yeah, it was the golden era to have a cult was,
you know, was like sixty seven to seventy eight.

Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah, yeah, exactly with.

Speaker 3 (38:18):
The little bit Yeah the Manson blit, but you could
still get away with a lot.

Speaker 1 (38:21):
In this effen Yeah. Yeah, this puts an end to that, right,
This launches what Spriggs would later call anti cult hysteria
in the United States. He says that, like it's a
bad thing. Yeah, I don't feel like it's hysteria. This
is like clear evidence, you know, Jonestown was clear evidence
of a problem. Yeah. So by this point, Jeans Spring Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(38:45):
I like one hundred and seventy was like a lot
of people are dead now, a little more than a scare.
They shot a congressman. That's so wild. I imagine if
that happened today.

Speaker 3 (38:56):
Yeah, they like ran, oh my god, helicopters, there was action.
It's yeah, like I cannot believe that that happened. Still, yeah,
I can, obviously, but it's yeah, it's it's so specific
and in a lot of ways, Jill's like destined to
be born of this country, even though it didn't happen here.

Speaker 1 (39:15):
Well, I mean, the most unbelievable thing about it is
that a congress person actually did something right, like heroically, Yeah,
pretty heroically. Yeah. So, by this point, Jean Spriggs had
developed a new name for his cult, the Twelve Tribes,
so named in honor of the fact that he was
one of the first guys in the Christian fringe to
start incorporating Judaism into his Christian cult right, and this

(39:38):
is a very common thing. Now you might not think
about it that way, but if you've ever seen, if
you've been to one of these far right gatherings where
there's like a lot of religious right people and someone
will bring like a show far which is like a
horn made out of like an animal horn that you
blow into that's like comes from Jewish religious observances, right,
that like some Christians have reincorporated back into Evangelicalism, I

(40:02):
think because a chofar looks cool and they want But yeah,
he's like kind of the first guy to do this
in a big way in the Christian right. And he's
more extensive than this. He brings the show far in.
He also brings back bar mitzvahs, like kids in his
cults celebrate have their bar mitzvahs and bot mitzvahs, And this,
you know, is interesting. It's certainly going to play into

(40:23):
ways in which other far right like religious cults are
going to move in the future. But it makes them
seem more alien to the normies of Chattanooga, who by
this point are in kind of a full blown panic
that the next jonestown might be in their backyard. Another
thing that makes them seem ainly into the normies is
that by the late seventies, Spriggs had decided that separation
was the critical precondition for his cult to reach the

(40:44):
potential that God had set for them. And I'm going
to quote from that write up by vcu here. Twelve
Tribes has concluded that adherence to a natural law standard
will not be sufficient to create the conditions for the
return of the Messiah. Separation is critical for the Twelve
Tribes because the absolute values of natural law are being
lost in contemporary society. The Twelve Tribes opposed the rise
of a multicultural global social order a single world government

(41:07):
in world religion. The former revitalizes values. The latter undermines
and compromises the values of natural law and promotes rampant
materialism and acquisitiveness, feminism, the devise of the traditional patriarchal family,
and the legitimation of gay marriage. The return of the
Messiah is contingent on the gathering of a faithful remnant
and the Church being restored in its original form. To
pave the way for the millennium, the movement must expand

(41:30):
from its present nine to twelve Tribes each of which
must grow to at least twelve hundred members, thus creating
one hundred and forty four thousand faithful who will be
included in God's millennial kingdom. Now, a lot of that's
very modern. Gene as a trailblazer in some of this stuff.
It's interesting. I've seen it claim that Gene's particular eschatology,
he didn't just need one hundred and forty four thousand

(41:51):
faithful to prepare for the way of the Messiah, but
he had to build an army of one hundred and
forty four thousand male virgins and tall order, yeah, tall,
tall order. It is at this point I should also
note that, according to the Church, Gene was a scout
master at one point. They brag about this a lot.
So you hear about a scout master trying to get

(42:12):
one hundred and forty four thousand male virgins together. That's
not a happy story, right now, that's going to end bad.
That is rough. Yeah. Yeah, Also too many male virgins,
like nothing good can happen with all that, all that pentemic.

Speaker 3 (42:28):
Then you need like one hundred and forty four thousand
male non virgins order to have.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
To counteract it. Yeah, So to stop it from exploding. Yeah,
so Jane decided it was probably wise if his cult
branched out and started picking up property and members in
another state where they might be more welcome. Right, this
is fine cult logic. It's the kind of savvy maneuvering
that made scientology great. But Spriggs underestimated the degree to
which small towns Americans get scared based on news stories

(42:55):
that they kind of skimmed. He also made the mistake
of having the mission to Vermont led by one of
his longest serving members, a guy named David Jones. David
had joined the Twelve Tribes back in nineteen seventy three
as a traumatized Vietnam veteran fresh from the war. He'd
become one of Jane's most trusted lieutenants. Unfortunately, his last
name was Jones, and the provincial residence of Island Pond, Vermont,

(43:17):
started like as soon as they hear a guy named
Jones has moved here with his like weird religious congregation,
They're like, he has to be related to Jim Jones.

Speaker 3 (43:24):
You can't google it. Yeah, it's like there's no You're
just gonna take it on. Take it on. Toys value
that he's not.

Speaker 1 (43:31):
It's like it is funny, Like it would be one
thing if he had like some very complicated, rare last name,
but being like they're both Joneses. Yeah, there's probably fucking
forty Joneses in town. What are you talking about, you
fucking small town maniacs. Like they're right to be concerned
about this people, but they're still there's still dummies. So
from the beginning, the Twelve Tribes attracted eyeballs in Vermont.

(43:54):
Now the reason for this is dumb obviously, like that
they think this guy is related to Jim Jones. But
they ought to be watching these people because there are
absolutely good reasons to be monitoring the Twelve Tribes. They
just have nothing to do with Jonestown.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
That's another just classic American story where it's like, you
have good reason to be concerned about this, and it
just so happens that the reason you are concerned is
not the right one.

Speaker 1 (44:16):
Yeah, you picked the wrong one. And the good reason
to do this is the fact that by the late seventies,
Jeane had built his entire religious philosophy. Philosophy this is
like the core of what he actually is teaching in
the Twelve Tribes now around beating the shit out of kids.
Like right, This starts off as sort of this, you know,
we're going back to the original Christianity, and over the

(44:37):
first decade or so it exists, he kind of builds
this religious philosophy where he decides the chief problems of
the world are all caused by disobedience to God's law,
and so the only way to correct that is to
raise up a new generation of kids by absolutely beating
the piss out of them. And that is going to
be That is the Twelve Tribes, right. It is the

(44:58):
let's hit the shit out of kids cult. Terrible way
to go to ads, but here they are. We're back now.
By this point in the story, Gene has also taken
a new name for himself and the tradition of most
great cult leaders, Yonick, which Hebrew comes from the Bible.

(45:21):
His followers called him an apostle, and there's debate from
former members as to whether or not yon Neck was
all powerful or just a major source of charismatic authority,
but he certainly was not the only source of prophetic
revelations for the group. It does seem fair, though, to
say that Yonick set the tone and focus for the
church and that his primary concern was children. In the

(45:42):
early days, Spriggs had claimed his goal was to bring
kids on the fringe, counterculture types who had like dropped
out of the Middle America Christianity of their parents back
to God. But now in the mid to late seventies,
late seventies, early eighties, he starts to claim having a
different goal, which is to build a church that it
would be impossible for children to leave. Right like that

(46:02):
is his He goes from I want to bring kids
back to the church to I want to break their
little minds in such a way that they never disobey
their parents, that they never leave us. You know, now,
part of how he does this is isolation. He starts
mandating church kids are not even allowed to be born
outside of the compounds. Right, you can't go to a
hospital to have your kids. You certainly can't have them

(46:23):
educated in public schools. They're never going to work a
job on their own. They'll be apprenticed within church businesses.
We have created our own parallel society so that they
can't escape and to make any kind of deviation impossible.
Spriggs devoted his biblical knowledge to creating a protocol of
rigorous abuse described in his brochure. When the spanking stopped,
all hell broke loose.

Speaker 3 (46:44):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, solid name there. Yeah.
I'm going to quote a description of this pamphlet from
an excellent article in Pacific Standard magazine. It cites Proverbs
thirteen twenty four. He who spares his rod hates his son,
but he who loves disciplines him promptly to make the
following argument. If you love your child, and you, if
you love your child, you will take up the rod

(47:07):
and discipline him when he's disobedient. It's not optional, it's
a command. The tribes argue that progressive child bearing practices
such as timeouts, are taking away treats or screen time,
have resulted in a spike in juvenile violence and crime.
The only way to reverse this trend, the tribes contends,
is by using the proverbial rod early, often, and hard
enough to leave marx. According to former and current tribes

(47:28):
leaders I spoke with, infants raised in the tribes are
hit with balloon sticks, thin wooden rods used to keep
balloons from floating away for offenses as minor as resisting
a diaper change or throwing a bottle. Older children are
whipped with bamboo canes. Children are driven by their natural
innate nature to do what is wrong. The group's teaching state,
it is better to go to heaven with welts than
go to hell without weltz. That's Gene Spriggs right there.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
My god, I can't yeah, like, I can't imagine how
they reconcile when kids eventually obviously leave the church, Like,
there must be there must be. I'm not mass defection,
but there must be defection.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
Yeah. Later on at this stage, again, it's all first
generation converts having kids, right, and the kids can't oh
hieve you know, sure, sure, sure, and they're trying. This
is largely being enforced so that that first generation of
kids raised within the cult can't leave, right, That's what
Springs wants to set up. Spanking is a technical endeavor

(48:24):
within the Twelve tribes. There is arcana around it, right,
depending on the era and the geographic region. They seem
to prefer using these balloon sticks or bamboo sticks, but
they also for certain things prescribed whipping kids with resin
tipped whips. I don't even know where you get those, like,
probably have to get a whip and just tip it
and resin yourself today. This is all described in detail

(48:48):
in their three hundred and forty eight page Child Training Manual,
all of which is based on Spriggs's teachings.

Speaker 2 (48:53):
Is it straight up called Child Training Manual? Does it have.

Speaker 1 (48:59):
Okay, that's what it's called. You can find it online.
You know, I've been reading a bit of it.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
Yeah, okay, yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:06):
It includes the fact that children as young as six
months old should be spanked for deviations from proper behavior,
particularly wilfulness. An infant wriggling during a diaper change is
specifically listed as in need of a physical punishment. Oh
my god, you know the thing that every infant does,
which is what he's saying. Right, Children are inherently disobedient

(49:27):
and touched by Satan, and you have to beat that
out of them. Right. Quote. The pain received from the
balloon stick is more humbling than harmful. There is no
defense against it. The only way to stop the sting
of the rod is to submit. That is exactly what
the child will do, Submit to his parents' will and
end his rebellion. Now that's fucked up and bad. It

(49:48):
is responsible to acknowledge that like smacking kids around is
not all that far from normal in the seventies, right,
we are not talking about like that, I mean, it
still happens today. Obviously, a lot of parents some form
of physical coercion with their kids, and it's even more
common back then.

Speaker 3 (50:04):
Well, and just like institutional corporal punishment, I mean, is
not at all out of the norm.

Speaker 1 (50:11):
My elementary school in the nineties spanked me. You know,
public elementary school is not in like a Catholic school
or anything. This is in fucking Idabell, Oklahoma. Yeah, so
smacking kids with rods is unfortunately yet not all that
abnormal in this period. But the Twelve Tribes engaged in
numerous and much more creative abuse tactics than this. He
Spriggs spends a lot of his time thinking up new

(50:33):
ways to abuse children and justify it with the Bible.
One ex member who grew up in the church during
the eighties were called a practice called scourging, in which
a child is stripped, naked and beaten with a rod
over every inch of their body. Yeah. Adults would also
regularly withhold meals from small children as punishment. Starvation is

(50:54):
a really common punishment for them. In some cases, food
would be withheld for days at a time. Children were
also locked alone in dark rooms for days at a
time in response to crimes like stealing food from a refrigerator.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
And so this isn't getting out right because the kids
are probably not in the school system, they're no longer
in a church, so that no one knows.

Speaker 1 (51:13):
Some of it as being There are reports. There are
reports in Chattanooga and soon after in Vermont, because like
they have neighbors, people are like people can see them
hitting kids in public, sometimes slapping them and shit. So
this is not like totally a black box. One member
later told the Denver Post the one time that I
was locked in the dungeon, it wasn't a real dungeon,
but it felt like it. I think it was for

(51:34):
more than a day because we fasted every Friday, so
I was used to starving, and it was longer than that,
which is a gives you an idea of the bleakness
of this, Like I was pretty used to starving, Like
this was worse than normal starving. Now, one of the
things that's interesting to me is Spriggs never has a kid.
He does not have a child of his own in
the cult. Sorry, he does have one boy, with his

(51:56):
first wife, but he leaves when the kid's young, which
for the best in this case, that kid really dodged
a bullet by not having his dad. Yeah, not always
a win to have your dad in your life, especially
when it's it's the how to hit children to guy.

Speaker 3 (52:11):
That makes your issues with like dad abandonment even all
the more difficult. Were Yeah, I just want him to
love me, but I'm glad he didn't love me. It's
very complicated.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
I want a dad to love me, maybe not this one. Yeah, yeah,
I think that's that's very real. So again, he has
no child in the cult. And for what I can
tell Spriggs is he seems to have kept some contact
with his family and his old friends through like the
late seventies, but by the close of the decade even

(52:39):
his close relatives had started to grow increasingly like concerned
with the violent tone that his faith had taken. His
sister Joyce talked to the press and reported that, like
you know, in the when he in the early seventies,
when he starts ministering, when he starts like speaking to
people doing these church services, I thought, well, maybe he
started to figure his life out. This is like, you know,
good for him, probably a positive turn. But by the

(53:02):
end of the seventies, December of seventy nine, she was like,
I think he's gotten very negative. And she mentions this
to him. She like goes to Eugene, She's like, I
think the stuff you're talking about is like really aggressive
and it's kind of scaring me. And he just says,
you know, all I'm doing is following the scripture, right, Like,
you can't argue with this. You can't argue with me
because this is all the Bible. Now. We will talk

(53:22):
more about this in part two, but it's worth noting
that while the Twelve Tribes's attitude on child abuse is extreme,
it does not grow up in isolation. The Jesus Movement
started out with serious countercultural elements, but it also fed
directly into the birth of the religious right, which helped
to unseat Jimmy Carter and became a major engine behind
Reaganism and the revived cultural conservatism that followed. When I

(53:44):
read about Spriggs's teachings here, I think about a book
called To Train Up a Child, which is a nineteen
ninety four parenting advice book self published by Mike and
Debbie Pearl. If you recall our episodes on the Duggers
and the organization behind them. The Institute of Basic Life
Principles the IBLP endorses this book. Right to Train Up
a Child is common among homeschooling families. It was for

(54:08):
years the standard book in the Christian far right about
how to raise kids. I have multiple friends who were
raised according to its teachings. If you knew any people
who were like quiverful kids, this book was a presence
in their house and childhood. And one of the things, like,
among other things, the book says that like you need
to kind of as Spriggs taught, you have to be

(54:29):
constantly using some form of negative physical reinforcement on your kids.
And it includes like sadistic shit like spanking your kids
like long enough to break their will. Right. It's not
just like I'm not saying this is okay. But it's
not just saying like, okay, you know you did a
bad thing, so I'm going to, like, you know, spank
you five times in the butt or something. It's like
you have to spank them until they stop being willful,

(54:51):
you know.

Speaker 3 (54:52):
Right, Well, because there's I mean, it's by no means
is this an excuse, But like I know that there
were people who who would spank their kids because they
thought that that's a thing that they you know, like
like like my parents.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
Yeah, it's pretty normal practice, yeah, right.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
That they had to do, but they do it in
passing and it was like more of an esthetic and
like scary thing. And again this is not a justification
of those things, but this idea that you then take
that to another level, which is like you do it
with will and you do it to like break will
is the first one is terrifying. But like that's just

(55:26):
it's hard to even wrap fully wrap your head around.
It's difficult.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
Yeah, and it's we'll talk about it more one of
these days if you want to hear what we do.
Get into more of this in the Dugger episodes. It
is worth noting here though. I bring this up to
say that, like Gene Spriggs is a trailblazer in child abuse,
but he's not a lonely one. Right ideas close to
the ones he promulgated are absolutely the norm among the

(55:51):
religious right in the United States today. His cult has
stayed fringe, but his child beating tactics did not. Anyway,
when you build a church around slapping, the absolute shit
out of small kids. Eventually someone's going to spot your
members slapping the shit out of small children. By nineteen
seventy nine, several members had fled and taken stories to
local Chattanooga papers. Allegations of abuse based on the fact

(56:14):
that cult members absolutely were hitting kids had also gone
the old timey equivalent of viral. This problem followed the
branch of the church, two hundred members strong, that had
moved to Vermont. By all accounts, Spriggs maintained tight control
of this breakaway segment, not breakaway, but of this like
expansion of his church, writing regular letters to David Jones
encouraging him to ensure that children on the new properties

(56:37):
were being beaten often enough. Quote, if one is overly
concerned about his son receiving blue marks, you know that
he hates his son and hates the word of God.
Blue marks are Spriggs's turn for bruises, and he speaks
of them as a positive thing. Right, Like, you're not
being a good parent if your kids don't have blue marks.
If you're not bruising them, you're not doing it hard enough, right,

(56:58):
That's what he's saying here. He's just being a little
bit more kind of biblical whimsy about it. This is
a frequent euphemism used by church leadership. A reporter for
Pacific Standard magazine writes more on this topic based on
interviews with former church members. I remember constant Weltz on
my hands, thighs and butt. A woman who was raised
and the tribes told me. Children are expected to obey

(57:18):
on the first command without talking back or complaining. They
are not allowed toys or bikes, and cannot engage in
fantasy play. They read only the Bible in the group's dogma.
The former members I spoke to claimed most children were
beaten multiple times a day for transgressions as an ocuus
as forgetting to raise their hands at the dinner table,
and dissipation, the group's term for horse play. Responding to
these descriptions, a current leader of their California communities, Wade Skinner,

(57:41):
echoed the brochure I read in Blue Blinds. That wouldn't
be how we portray our life, he said, But we
do believe that if you love your child, you will
be diligent to discipline them, and if you hate them,
you will withhold the rod. Cool guys love to see it.
The first serious trouble for the Twelve Tribes started in
from in nineteen eighty three, when an elder named Eddie

(58:02):
Wiseman whipped a child named Darlyn with a balloon stick
from her shoulders to her ankles for kissing a boy.
Darlin was thirteen years old, and he whips her badly
enough that she's like bleeding.

Speaker 3 (58:13):
Do you know where in Vermont they landed?

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (58:15):
Yeah, we read the town name out a little earlier.
I don't have it right in front of me here.

Speaker 3 (58:20):
I think it's I think it's Barton, which is like
a wild it's like a still still, like a wild
West town in Vermont.

Speaker 1 (58:27):
That one not Yeah, I I We've got it up there.
We read it out earlier.

Speaker 2 (58:31):
People pond is it is it Island Pond, Vermont.

Speaker 1 (58:34):
Yeah, I think it's Island.

Speaker 3 (58:35):
Yeah, so it's that area. Yeah, it's like a pretty
I don't know you're familiarity. I lived.

Speaker 1 (58:40):
I know very little about Vermont.

Speaker 3 (58:41):
Yeah, it is like people think of Vermont like it's
kind of like the hippies thing. It's like they think
of it like Burlington and hippies, and it's like yeah, no,
it's like some of it is like libertarian wasteland.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
Yeah, I had definitely. We'll talk about Vermont and New
Hampshire Libertarians more in one of these days. There's some
fun stories up there that involve bears.

Speaker 3 (58:58):
Yeah, that's where I'm from. So I love it, I
know it, and I love it in yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:03):
So yeah. Her father sees Darlin bleeding from the back
after this whipping and he's outraged, so he reports Wiseman
to the authorities, who charge Wiseman with simple assault. But
then something happens and her father drops the case. He claims, actually,
it wasn't that bad. I was pressured by anti cult
activists to exaggerate the abuse, so probably a very unpleasant

(59:27):
story behind that. Authorities continue to investigate, in part because
the Twelve Tribes had already been attracting concern for a while. Now.
Investigating this cult is a really difficult job. The children
who were believed to be victims were homeschooled, so they're
not ever in front of teachers. They avoid modern medical care,
so they're not ever in front of doctors. They very

(59:47):
rarely leave cult property, which makes it pretty much impossible
to build a case. Right. You can't get a warrant
when you don't know the number of children or their
names when you're just like, there's children there and we
think they're being a Like, that's that's a tough legal
situation to be in if you're if you're the people
trying to like do something about this, right like they
because you have a lot of rights obviously, especially on

(01:00:09):
your own property. And yeah, it's it's tough, Like the
actual like how to how to break into a situation
like this is incredibly difficult when they have so successfully
created an alternate world for themselves. It's it's rough.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
I never I never thought of that. That. Like one
of the benefits quote heavy quote benefits of absolute sort
of separatism is it makes it legally difficult to intervene
because there's not the data that you need in order
to create a case.

Speaker 1 (01:00:39):
Yeah, it's fucked up, and it's going to be a
real problem in this case. So what they decide to
do with the authorities decided to do here is to
summon seven cult leaders, including David Jones, to give basic
information to the state on how many children live on
the properties and what their names are. Jones and his
family refuse to do this. They are jailed, but they're
released in short orders three days later, though, an army

(01:01:02):
of state troopers and social workers raids the Twelve Tribes's
property with a mandate to do whatever is necessary to
figure out how many kids are there and who they are.
They find one hundred and twelve miners and they take
them all away. It looks, you know, initially, as if
maybe the authorities are going to do something to put
an end to this. That is not what happened. While

(01:01:23):
the parents of these kids wait nearby, prosecutors failed to
get a court order to examine the children for signs
of abuse. The district judge in this case complains that
their warrant is too broad, in part because it does
not name the children they want to search. All one
hundred and twelve miners are ordered released in very short order,
back to the waiting rods of their parents. David Jones

(01:01:43):
gloated that this had all been the result of an
unhinged small town mentality, claiming the furor had come to
a head like a boil with no puss, which is
a weird way to describe being, in his eyes, exonerated
for child abuse. Like, yeah, we're just like one of
those pusless boils. Yeah, Like what an odd what an
odd turn of phrase. June twenty second the day the

(01:02:05):
oil that you want, Yeah, yeah, where the boil you
want to have? There's not a yeah, it's plus less.
June twenty second is the day that the raid gets aborted,
and this becomes the first religious holiday that the Twelfth
tribes celebrate all to themselves. They start calling it the
day of Deliverance. They'll do passover style meals right like
they call it. They kind of make it into their

(01:02:26):
passover right because it's the day that God miraculously extended
his protection to them against the grasping hands of the state.
Jene sprigs after this will only grow more convinced of
the wisdom of his separation from society. Another thing that
plays into this is what's happening at the same time
as the AIDS crisis right is starting to kick off.
This convinces him both that like of this kind of

(01:02:47):
fallen nature of the modern world, that the only thing
to do is separation, and it also convinces him that
God's justice is being delivered against the unrighteous, even as
his hand shields believers. He writes, at this time, when
rental authority is rebelled against it opens the door to
come against all constituted authority, honoring those who are over you,
those who are honorable, especially parents. Releases a special hormone

(01:03:09):
from your brain permeating your body that gives long life.
If you don't do this, that hormone dries up and
your bones dry up. The disobedient don't live long. The
lifespan of a homosexual is about forty years. That's not
because of aids. They die of a bad conscience, and
like that's evil it is. I have to say, the
idea that like obeying your parents releases a hormone that

(01:03:30):
you die without is a pretty fun bit of pseudo
science for a cult leader. That's a good one.

Speaker 3 (01:03:36):
Several people who's whose moms told them that if they like,
if they you know, if they like cut their own
hair or war makeup or whatever, it would like give
them cancer leader in life. Yeah yeah, so I feel
like that that that's a very common bit of parenting
psychological warfare that they took to a whole other level.

Speaker 1 (01:03:54):
Yeah, yeah, quite a new Yeah, a fancy an impressed
of level. Yeah. So that's going to be all of
it for part one. Here we we how do you
feel in here? How we do an alex.

Speaker 3 (01:04:10):
That's dark man, it's a yeah, it's a I feel
I feel heavy with darkness, and I hope that things
go awry, but I bet that they won't. It seems
like these are people who have staying power.

Speaker 1 (01:04:24):
Yeah. Yeah, speaking of staying power, you got any pluggables
to plug?

Speaker 3 (01:04:30):
I would just love people to listen to. You Are Good,
a feelings podcast about movies where we talk about uh
feelings and therapy related things by talking about pop culture
because it's too scary to do head on.

Speaker 1 (01:04:42):
Yeah, very scary. You can find me at cooler Zone
Media where you can get this podcast without ads. So
do that and uh go to hell. I love you
Take it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
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