Videos show 'Message' pastors preach against interracial marriage across U.S.

Martin Maene was flipping burgers at a Wendy’s in Jeffersonville, Indiana, when a rush of questions bombarded his mind.

How could God judge the whole world based on the rules of Maene’s fringe religious sect that most people had never heard of? Why couldn’t the sect’s prophet William Branham — the man Maene’s church believed spoke for God — remember whether he was an adult or child when his own father died? Why was there no evidence for Branham’s supposedly fulfilled prophecy of men falling to their deaths during the construction of a local bridge?

Why had Maene been taught that interracial marriage was a sin? Why couldn’t Maene, a Black teenager, date a white teenage girl?

“‘Oh my God, this is not true,’” Maene thought that December 2021 day. “‘This, this is not right.’”

“It was all in one moment. It hit me all at once,” Maene said. The faith he believed for the first 16 years of his life “had all been a lie," he said.

Maene was raised in “The Message,” an offshoot of Pentecostalism started by Branham, a preacher who gained fame in the 1950s for his faith healings. Branham died in 1965 but still has millions of followers worldwide, according to a rough estimate from an organization called Voice of God Recordings. Members of The Message have a strict, rule-bound faith based on teachings from the Bible and Branham’s more than 1,200 recorded sermons. They believe Branham was a prophet. 

In a 1964 sermon, Branham said “I don’t believe in mixing marriages.” He called interracial marriage “hybreeding” and said the practice was “terrible.”

Critics say Branham associated with KKK members, supported racial segregation and pushed doctrine that some have used to justify racism.

Message pastors insist that their prophet was not racist. They point to a 1950 sermon where Branham tells the story of how he risked arrest in segregated Arkansas to heal a Black man’s blindness.

But many Message churches continue to be against interracial marriage or hold other racist views today, half a century after Branham originally preached them, according to former Message members, interviews with Message leaders and more than a dozen video sermons reviewed by Lee Enterprises investigative team.

“Most forms of The Message … believe that interracial marriage — or interracial dating or anything to do with two separate races seeing each other — is not okay. It's forbidden,” said Maene, who has attended Message churches in Virginia, South Carolina, Indiana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Growing up, I always found that a little weird.”

Maene didn’t start to question that teaching until he was 16 and wanted to date a white teenage girl. Maene said his church community at the Branham Tabernacle in Jeffersonville, Indiana, told him he couldn’t date her because he is Black.

“I wanted to see someone from a different race,” Maene said. “And everybody told me no. It was unanimous.”

Anjounette Thorstad said she and her boyfriend were also told “no” when they asked to marry in the late ‘90s, even though both of them were Message believers who attended the Golden Dawn Tabernacle together in Tucson, Arizona. Thorstad is Hispanic, and her boyfriend at that time was white, she said.

“My then-boyfriend … asked the pastor if he could marry me, and the pastor told him no,” Thorstad said.

Among the pastor’s reasons? Thorstad and her boyfriend’s differing races, Thorstad said. The pastor, Isaac Noriega, also didn’t like the couple’s two-year age gap and that Thorstad hadn’t been baptized. The couple left the church to get married anyway.

Fumiko Tipping, who used to attend Message churches in Arizona and Michigan but left several years ago, said biracial relationships were also discouraged in her churches.

“People still don’t let a white girl marry a Black boy. They won’t do that,” Tipping said of The Message. “I remember sitting down with teenage girls and having this conversation with them because there were a lot of Black boys that they liked.”

John Collins, a former Message member turned researcher who runs a support group for those who have left the sect, said the racism in The Message has “been devastating to some people, especially for those with Black skin.”

In their words

A Tennessee Message preacher was called the “most racist pastor in America” in 2014 after a sermon in which he quoted Branham multiple times went viral.

“Brother Branham says, ‘Hybreeding, hybreeding! How terrible, hybreeding. … Tell me what fine cultured, fine Christian colored woman would want her baby to be a mulatto by a white man?’” Pastor Donny Reagan preached directly from a 1960 Branham sermon. “‘No sir. It’s not right.’”

Reagan said he would not perform a marriage between a Black man and a white woman because Branham “didn’t believe it was right,” according to a video of the 2013 sermon. Reagan is still the pastor of Word of Life Church, formerly known as Happy Valley Church of Jesus Christ.

“It’s a pitiful thing,” Reagan told his congregation. “Why is it so many Black basketball stars, Black football stars, Black baseball stars want a white wife? Why? Lord have mercy. It’s another defiance of God’s law. It is a worldly way. And then it creeps over into The Message.”

In the years since Reagan’s sermon and the harsh blowback from the public, some Message pastors have continued using similar language and arguments against interracial marriage in their sermons.

“I don’t believe Donny Reagan is the most racist pastor in America,” said Rod Bergen, a former Message follower who now runs an anti-Branham research website called Believe the Sign. “Why? Because he is no more racist than most other Message ministers. His problem is that he just got caught preaching about it. … The majority of all Message ministers believe the same thing: the need for racial purity.”

Lee Enterprises reviewed and confirmed the authenticity of video segments from more than a dozen Message sermons given across the country from 2017 to 2024 that the William Branham Historical Research website identified as containing racist teachings. Collins runs the website.

In those recordings, nine pastors said they were against interracial marriage but differed on whether they considered it sinful or inadvisable. Six pastors quoted racist and anti-Semitic language that Branham used, and another three pastors used their own derogatory language toward Black people. Many justified Branham’s teachings on race, and a few defended Reagan’s 2013 sermon.

Wade Dale, assistant pastor at Spoken Word Church in Lula, Georgia, said in a 2019 sermon that a Filipino man he met “looked like a color— a negro. He looked just like black, kinky-black hair.” In 2024, Dale paraphrased Branham's description of Paul from the Bible: “As Brother Branham said, a short, stooped over, hook nose, high-tempered Jew.”

Brother Andrew Glover said in a 2023 sermon at Faith Tabernacle in Blacksburg, Virginia, that receiving the Holy Ghost was “like the colored man eating watermelon.”

Hickory Bible Tabernacle pastor Barry Coffee told his North Carolina congregation in 2017 that “God doesn’t want good things that are created mixed together in a wrong way.”

“Hybreeding is such a dangerous and damnable thing. It ruins God’s plan. It ruins the human race,” Coffee says in the video. “You can have two good people that are of different races who are not meant to be married and put them together, now all of a sudden we have a problem.”

David McGeary, pastor of Christian Life Tabernacle in Texas, told his congregation in 2021 that “God said for each to marry to their own kind.”

The Bible doesn’t support that.

Douglas Weaver, chair of the Department of Religion at Baylor University, said there’s no “good biblical scholarship” that says interracial marriage is a sin. Some Message followers believe the rule was a revelation from God simply because Branham said it, Weaver said. It’s not a belief held by mainstream Christianity, he added.

Louisiana Message minister Tim Pruitt told his congregants in 2024 that they could go against Branham’s teachings on interracial marriage if they wanted, “but you’ll pay for it.”

“You'll pay for it in your children, in your family, and society and situations. You'll pay for it with marriage problems and everything else that'll be the result of it,” Pruitt said. “I don't think you'll go to Hell for it, certainly not. But you will run into troubles.”

Marriage advice

Many Message pastors say they don’t consider interracial marriage a sin, but they advise against it because of the strain that racial and cultural differences could put on a marriage.

Voice of God Recordings, a nonprofit that distributes Branham’s sermons worldwide, would never condemn someone for marrying someone of another race, nonprofit spokesperson Jeremy Evans said in an interview. He added that the practice is not a sin. 

Evans said that if a Message believer came to him for counsel on the subject, he would explain that "there are vast culture differences between races, and that we would advise them to try to stay within your own race."

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Evans said Branham was against interracial marriage, but “that was not a prominent subject in Brother Branham’s ministry at all.” Evans explained Branham’s reasoning using an analogy Branham used in 1964.

“(Branham) believed that God made a variety,” Evans said. “He made pink flowers. He made white flowers. He made blue flowers. He made orange flowers. God’s a God of variety. And so I think he (Branham) took the stand that if I’m born a Black man, I should be proud to be that. That’s what God made me.”

This is a common argument pastors used in the video sermons to try to explain Branham’s rhetoric.

Maene said Message followers don’t seem to realize they’re being racist when they use the flower analogy.

“They’ll swear to you that they’re accepting (and) that they don’t believe in racism,” but then they use Branham’s arguments that support racial purity, Maene said.

Voice of God Recordings is closely tied with the church Maene used to attend, the Branham Tabernacle. Branham founded the Tabernacle in 1933, according to the church's website.

Indiana Message pastor Nathan Bryant said in an interview with Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team that he does not consider interracial marriage to be a sin, but he might discourage it because spouses being from “different cultures” or different countries “adds an element of strain on their marriage that maybe wouldn’t be there otherwise.”

That’s the “same thing” as separating people by race, said professor Anthea Butler, chair of the religious studies department at the University of Pennsylvania.

“It’s their way of keeping people in certain spaces,” Butler said.

Maene, who is now 19, grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo but has lived in the U.S. since he was 9. He wondered: How was he supposed to find someone to date with the same culture as him?

“I've always been such a blend of everything, of African culture, of American culture,” Maene said. “I've been such a blend of both, so I've always found that argument to be even more faulty. Because where am I gonna fit in all this?”

Civil rights era

Butler said these sorts of arguments that pastors have made in favor of racial separatism are “morally, scientifically and biblically incorrect.” Butler is a historian of African American and American religion. She noted that when Branham was preaching during the civil rights movement, interracial marriage was illegal.

But there are no such laws on the books today.

“These racial beliefs are part of the antiquated and hateful practices of racism in America,” Butler said.

Branham got his start in the ministry because of a preacher named Roy E. Davis — a high-ranking member of the KKK, according to a 1966 Associated Press article. Davis ordained Branham and left his congregation in Branham’s hands, according to the Branham Tabernacle website.

Branham once said the KKK helped pay his hospital bills: “I can never forget them” because of “what they did for me,” he said of the Klan.

Collins documented further connections between Branham and the KKK in his book, "Preacher Behind the White Hoods: A Critical Examination of William Branham and His Message."

Branham said Martin Luther King Jr. was “inspired by communism” and would lead thousands of Black people “to a slaughter.” Branham also said God was “a segregationalist.”

“I am a segregationalist,” Branham preached in 1965, less than a year after the U.S. outlawed racial segregation. “Because I don’t care how much they argue, you cannot be a Christian and be an integrationist. That’s exactly right. God even separates His nations.”

Maene said a Black parent at the Branham Tabernacle took that teaching very seriously more than 50 years after Branham preached it. The father was driving with his Black teenage sons and Maene, 15 at the time, when he started talking about how it was “‘a regression in the country that we didn’t have segregation anymore,’” Maene recalled.

“I was speechless,” Maene said. “He went on this rant about how he truly believed from the bottom of his heart that, ‘Segregation was a good thing, and that segregation should have been brought back. We believe that The Message supported segregation.’”

“I was awestruck at how indoctrinated this man must have been.”

Hispanic churches

Branham’s racial teachings aren’t limited to white-majority Message churches of the Midwest and South. In Tucson’s Golden Dawn Tabernacle, where the vast majority of the members are Mexican-American, a controversial Branham teaching called "serpent seed" doctrine is taught, former members said. 

Serpent seed doctrine is a belief that Eve had sex with the serpent in the Garden of Eden and produced Cain, an evil twin. The good twin, Abel, came from Adam. This sets up the world with two bloodlines: one good and one evil. Evans said the teaching is about the existence of good and evil spirits in the world and has nothing to do with race. But some have come up with racist interpretations. 

Rick Ross, founder and executive director of The Cult Education Institute, said Message ministers who were preaching serpent seed had to be banned from Arizona prisons in the 1980s because prisoners were using the doctrine to justify racial violence. Black and brown prisoners were targeted because they were viewed as the "cursed" descendants of Cain, Ross said. Branham never identified Cain's descendants. 

Still, the doctrine made it hard for Aaron Dueñas as a child, he said. Dueñas left Golden Dawn Tabernacle, which also goes by its formal name Tabernaculo Emanuel, in 2022. Going to public school, Dueñas had classmates who were mixed-race. On Sundays, he said, he was “taught that mulattos, all these children, are like serpent seed. They’re hybrids.”

The teaching could be especially confusing among people of Mexican descent because most are of mixed indigenous and European ancestry, not to mention Asian and African influences.

Yet the marriage handbook handed out to members in Golden Dawn contains a section labeled “Mixing of races.”

“Let the brown race marry the brown race, the white race marry the white race, the dark race, the yellow race and whatevermore, stay the way God made them,” Branham said in a 1960 sermon quoted in the handbook.

At the end of the section is an exhortation, in bold letters and all caps, that is not a quote from Branham or the Bible. Its first two sentences say: “REMEMBER GOD NEVER FORGAVE ISRAEL FOR THE SIN OF MARRYING OUTSIDE OF THEIR TRIBES. GOD CALLED IT WHOREDOM.”

‘Racist bubble’

Maene said his church members never said he was inferior because of his race. But their stance on interracial marriage along with Branham’s rhetoric made him feel that way, he said.

“You live in a community where they're like, ‘Alright, yes, you are our brother. You are equal to us. But you may not under any circumstances, date our daughters,’” Maene said. “Things like that build up to make you feel like — even if they're not outright saying it — you feel inferior.”

Maene said being part of a small minority in a mostly-white congregation made him feel “weird, like I was an anomaly.” Maene said he became insecure about his race. But that mindset shifted when he stopped believing The Message.

“When I realized that it wasn't true,” Maene said, “every racist thing I had heard, every racist thing I had experienced immediately became so invalidated in my mind.

“I don't want to say that the insecurities instantly went away. But in a sense, they did. I realized that, oh my God, I've been living in this racist bubble this entire time and the bubble just popped. And all of a sudden, I was seeing for the first time just how awesome being Black is. … It was incredible.”

Maene said he rarely feels insecure about his race anymore. But sometimes thinking about Branham’s quotes on race and mixed marriages upsets him.

“Those quotes really hurt me, like hurt my soul on a deep level,” Maene said. “It's not just that (Branham) said it, right? Okay, he was a racist, alright. But it's that his racism spread and still influences so many people around the world today. His racism lingers long after his death.”