Tucson church a controlling 'cult within a cult,' ex-members say

Andrew Loza and his elderly mother live in Tucson, but he’s only seen her a few times over the last 30 years.

Since Loza left his mother’s church, Golden Dawn Tabernacle near Tucson International Airport, she has been barred from talking with him, he said. It’s one of the many strict rules that govern the approximately 500-member congregation, which 20 ex-members called a “cult” in interviews.

Tears welled up in the corners of Loza’s eyes as he described the dilemma that growing up in that church posed. He left Golden Dawn at 18 because he wanted a life of his own, outside the controls imposed by the church’s founding pastor, Isaac Noriega, Loza said. But leaving also meant estrangement from his only living parent.

When people leave Golden Dawn Tabernacle, they are often excommunicated, with Noriega telling the congregation they are “taken out from under the blood” of Christ, former members said. They are also “handed over to Satan for the destruction of their flesh.”

Noriega himself denied in an interview that he excommunicates people but said he follows the Scriptural guidance of Matthew 18 in telling the congregation "These people are no longer part of us."

Former members said they are forbidden from having contact with family members who remain in the church. That makes leaving hard, especially for young people.

Excommunication is one of the ways Noriega has bound church members to the congregation, founded in 1973, increasingly tightly, former members said. Among other controls they say he’s imposed:

• Members must attend all three services per week, two on Sunday and one on Wednesday, each usually lasting at least two hours, and sit in assigned seats.
• Members must tithe at least 10 percent of all the money they receive and are also expected to donate when collection is taken at each service.
• Members must consult the pastor on personal decisions, such as whether to get medical care or make a significant purchase.
• Members may not use the Internet or watch TV or movies.
• Members must minimize contact with “worldly” people from outside their congregation.
• Women must not cut their hair, must wear loose-fitting clothes that cover their arms and legs and must not wear makeup.
• Education outside the church’s home-school tutoring program is discouraged.
• The pastor heavily influences marriage pairings within the church's insular community.

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In interviews, Noriega denied these traditions are rules and said members of his congregation can make their own decisions. But former members said they are strictly enforced by church leaders.

Many of the rules were not invented by Noriega but by William Branham. He was a 20th-century American preacher whose followers consider him to be God’s prophet, and who lived his last three years in Tucson before dying in December 1965.

The religious sect Branham founded is not a denomination like the Southern Baptist Convention. Rather, the churches that follow Branham form a loose network, known as The Message of the Hour, or just The Message. It has millions of followers worldwide, according to an estimate from a Message organization called Voice of God Recordings.

There are about nine Message-affiliated congregations in the Tucson area, including Golden Dawn, which is also known by its original name Tabernaculo Emanuel.

Many conservative Message congregations demand that women wear modest clothing, expect members to minimize interactions with the outside, "worldly" world, and proscribe use of the internet or television. But Golden Dawn is one of the more rule-bound Message congregations in the country, and has grown harsher over time, former members and experts said.

“They're very, very strict on dress code, very strict on doing what they call worldly events,” said John Calvo, who belonged to the church until 2006 and has been publishing research about it since late 2022. “So, going to the theaters, going to a concert, a lot of those things are frowned upon. Just doing normal things.

“It has just, over time, gotten more and more isolated, more and more strict,” Calvo said.

Zoe Cordova, who grew up in the church but left in March 2022 with her husband Gabriel, put it this way: “The William Branham religion — that’s a cult in itself. Isaac Noriega has created a cult within a cult.”

Pillars of fire

The authority Noriega wields at the church he founded in 1973 derives at least in part from Branham.

According to Golden Dawn lore, Noriega’s supernatural qualities became evident before he was even born. They’re detailed in a biography written about Noriega and his deceased wife Lucy, called “Time-Tested Memorials: The Life Story of Two Pioneers,” which was self-published in 2023.

When Noriega's mother was pregnant with him, a blinding light flashed before her, the biography says. She also heard Noriega "cry out from her womb before he was born," another sign of the Holy Spirit, the book reads.

This is similar to stories William Branham told about himself during his many sermons, more than 1,200 of which were recorded.

Branham recounted this story in a 1953 sermon: “When I was a little bitty boy, my mother told me, when I was about three minutes old … a light, about so big around, come whirling in and went down on the bed where my mother was holding me in her arms.”

This pillar of fire, it is taught in the Message, appeared near Branham at different times in his life and “vindicated” his ministry. 

As a young man living in Southern California, Noriega listened to records of Branham’s sermons. He became convinced Branham “was a vindicated prophet of God, just like Jeremiah was in the Bible, just like Paul was in the Bible,” Noriega said by phone.

Noriega and his young wife — Lucy was 15 and Isaac was 21 when they married — eventually moved to Arizona in part because of a well-known Branham prophecy, that Southern California would slip into the ocean.

As Noriega built his Tucson church, he refined Branham’s teachings, former members say, into an increasingly autocratic doctrine.

“The people in that church truly believe that he is an anointed man of God that is here speaking for God,” said Calvo, who has been publishing research online at goldendawntabernacle.org. “If they cross Isaac, they're going to cross God — essentially that's what people feel.”

In interviews, congregation member Pedro Zúñiga and Noriega himself both denied that the pastor wields that much power, or that the church is a cult.

“We are not a cult,” Noriega said. “We're affiliated with hundreds of churches, all over the world. In Spain, in Portugal, Brazil, South America, Central America.”

Demonic spirits

For many years, Golden Dawn Tabernacle hosted large meetings in early April, with fellow Message pastors and believers attending from around the United States, Mexico and other countries. What the visitors saw impressed them — a large, orderly church with well-dressed members behaving perfectly.

“What the visitors do not know is that the weeks before, he prepares the congregation to give the best face,” Zoe Cordova said. “He will yell at us, scold us and threaten us.”

“So when the pastors come, you see all these young boys dressed in suits, in tight, they don't move. They’re like soldiers. They’re looking at him.”

It impressed people like Isabel Dueñas’ father, Dueñas said. He lived in Sonoyta, Sonora, just across the border from Lukeville, Arizona, and after visiting the April meetings in 1999, he decided to move the family north.

For Isabel Dueñas, it became a journey into the depths of behavior control. Although her family belonged to a Message church in Mexico, she noticed big differences soon after arriving at Golden Dawn in 2004.

“Coming from outside here, we were really friendly. You know, like, we wanted to talk to everyone,” Dueñas said. But people were encouraged to go straight home after church. 

Her father was also told she and her sisters were dressing wrong, wearing makeup, going to the library, talking to boys and violating other rules, Dueñas said.

“My dad, he became so strict with me and my sister that we could not even wear short sleeves because he would rip the clothes in front of me,” she said. “We were living almost like saints, and they still see the defects in us.”

A common refrain when Noriega saw something that broke the church's rules was that it was caused by “demonic spirits,” former members said.

Members didn’t just slough off these comments as hyperbole back in the 1990s, former member Robert Roa said. When he was accused of being possessed by demons, Roa said, suddenly “The young people who I associate with don’t want to shake my hand.”

“Merely touching someone who has a demon on them would transfer it to them,” said Roa, who left the church in 1997.

Esther Jacques, who was with the church from the beginning in 1973 until she left in 2020, said once she left, church members would not talk with her if she saw them.

“That's his thing — that you left, because, you know, you've got a spirit on you,” she said. “And you know, that spirit might jump on (other people) if you have any communion.”

Atomic apocalypse

The behavioral restrictions at Golden Dawn also reflect the way Branham grew to govern his churches. In the first decades, they were more typically exuberant, Pentecostal-style churches, but Branham started tamping down ecstatic outbursts in 1958, when he established what he called the "church order" in increasingly strict versions. 

"With church order, you are not allowed to speak in the church," said Charles Paisley, a former Message pastor and author of the book "Come Out of Her My People: A History of the Message of William Branham." "You can’t do anything but 'Be still and know that I am God.'"

At Golden Dawn and in many other Message churches, people have followed those rules and remained subdued. They've also been afraid. The Book of Revelation, with its description of apocalypse and salvation for Christian believers, undergirded Branham’s preaching and became entwined with the Cold War’s nuclear threat.

“Before the atom bomb can strike this nation, the Church will go in the Rapture to meet the Lord Jesus,” Branham preached in 1958. “And if the sputniks and missiles are set and the hammers are pulled back, the Angels are all standing in order. The great corridors of Heaven is full. The harps are all in tune. The great bands are already practiced up.”

Noriega picked up the atomic rhetoric and wielded it in a way that kept members loyal and willing to follow the church’s strict rules, former members said.

“We believed that when God finally has had enough from the world he's gonna basically initiate all the nuclear bombs going off. And that's what's going to cleanse the world,” said Aaron Dueñas, who is Isabel’s husband and Zoe Cordova’s brother.

“One of the big lines is ‘Once you hear this, you can never turn your back on it, or you will be eternally punished,’” he said, citing the reasoning he heard in church. “‘If you turn your back on this, it will be worse for you than the regular heathens out there because you knew the truth.’”

“That's what keeps people in there,” he said. “It's that mental manipulation.”

Prison ‘similar to that religion’

Rey Aguirre has a famous name in Golden Dawn Tabernacle, because he is the son of Reymundo Aguirre, the right-hand man of pastor Noriega.

But this Rey Aguirre, full name Rey David Aguirre, has taken a different path that opened his eyes to the reality of the church he grew up in, he said.

As the son of a deacon, Rey David said, there were high expectations for following the rules. He often didn’t meet them. And when he didn’t, he said, beatings would sometimes follow, at his father’s hands.

“One time he got mad because someone had told him that I was at a carnival, one of those little carnivals that they have on parking lots,” Aguirre said. “I got beat for lying and for being there. He took a 2 by 4 to me. He actually broke my arm. I had a fracture.”

In a brief conversation, Reymundo Aguirre denied that this happened. However, Branham seemed to encourage beatings in families, at least for women.

“Any man that’ll let his wife smoke cigarettes and wear them kind of clothes shows what he’s made out of,” Branham preached in an infamous 1958 passage. “He don’t love her or he’d take a board and blister her with it.”

It’s a damaging way to be brought up, Aguirre said. When he left the church, he started on a straight path, then went crooked, getting into drug trafficking. He ended up with a 10-year sentence in state prison and was released in 2021.

The good news is, Golden Dawn prepared him well, Aguirre said.

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“When I got there I realized how prison was so similar to that religion,” he said. “In prison, you have more decision-making than you do in there.”

Living under the ministry

In Isabel Dueñas’ life, the conflict with her strict father became so intolerable that she and her sister sought a new living arrangement.

They moved in with a church "sister" who was devoted to following every rule — or “subject to the ministry,” in the terms of Golden Dawn. Isabel was 20 and her sister was 21 at the time.

“Now, me and my sister were under the ministry,” Isabel said. “When you come under the Ministry, it means, you are subject 24/7. In anything you do, you have to call.”

She would go to work cleaning houses with fellow church sisters, return home, and only go out for groceries once a week. Sometimes they rushed home to make it by the sunset deadline.

“I couldn't even go and visit my dad whenever I wanted — I had to call Isaac.”

Despite all the inconvenience and intrusion, Dueñas thought it was for the best.

“If you become subject, you feel good because you feel like you’re winning your salvation,” Dueñas said. “If I’m good with Isaac, that means I’m good with God.”

'Making this up as they go'

From the time Noriega started holding services, renting a room at Santa Clara Elementary School, the new church’s practices were strict.

“It was Brother Lonnie (Jenkins, a friend of Noriega) who first taught the congregation about church discipline and applying the Word to those who left the Word by taking them out from under the Blood,” the biography says.

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Unlike some Branham disciples, Noriega never declared himself a prophet or apostle of God, but he made a practice of telling parishioners what God prefers. Some practices changed over time, refining the Message into a harsher doctrine.

For many years, for example, young parishioners could date, if a chaperone was present, Calvo said. But in recent decades, dating was not allowed unless a marriage proposal had been made and accepted.

Part of the reason for the variability is the many contradictions within Branham’s teaching, or between what Branham taught and what he did, Zoe Cordova said.

“So when people would go to Isaac Noriega and say, ‘Well, Brother Branham did it.’ He would say, ‘Yes, but the revelation now, the new revelation, is women are not to do that.”

Her husband Gabriel Cordova interjected: “It’s called ‘progressive revelation.’ They’re making this up as they go.”

Gabriel and Zoe Cordova left in part because they concluded Noriega and the church leadership asserted too much control over their lives, they said.

Zoe recalled how Noriega became angry at the pulpit after a group of people left the congregation about 15 years ago because they thought the church was a cult. She remembers Noriega saying over and over: “We’re not a cult!”

Zoe had never heard that word before, she said.

After church, she went into her room and locked the door. She grabbed her dictionary and looked up the word “cult.” Her body went cold, and her head felt light.

“It was everything we were,” she said.

She stayed in Golden Dawn for more than a decade after that realization because her family was there, and siblings were starting to get married. She got married to her husband Gabriel a few years later. They left Golden Dawn together in 2022.

Marrying ‘against the Word’

For Isabel Dueñas, the sacrifices of living subject to the ministry became intolerable.

The woman she was living with forbade Dueñas and her sister from using any phone unless she was present, Dueñas said. The woman enforced that by unplugging her home phone and taking it with her when she left the house.

“We couldn’t communicate with my dad, Dueñas said. "What should we do? We were trapped.”

Finally, they managed to sneak a call while cleaning a house and told their dad what was going on.

“I talked to my dad and my dad said, ‘You girls are coming back.’” She had been “under the ministry” at her church sister’s house for six years.

Still, she stayed in Golden Dawn until love made it impossible. She and Aaron Dueñas had started quietly dating. When marriage came up, Isabel consulted with the pastor, Noriega, about the match, as is custom.

He warned her against marrying Aaron, she said, and asked her to pray about it. She did — and she decided to marry him anyway. When she called to inform Noriega of the decision, she recorded the call.

In Spanish, he said, “Everything that is in the Book, within the Message, is contrary to your decision. What do you think about that? It means that you are voluntarily going against the Word and advice of the Lord."

She and Aaron married and left the church in 2023. But their families are divided. Aaron’s brother remains a high-placed official in the church, incommunicado. Isabel’s sister and stepsister remain there, too, estranged.

‘Tough love’ divides families

It may strike outsiders to Golden Dawn as strange that families would split completely over belonging to this church. Not to Pedro Zúñiga Jr.

Zúñiga is a lifelong member of Golden Dawn, the son of one of Noriega's closest associates, now deceased. In an interview, he defended both excommunication and estrangement as natural for those who are taking their Christian faith seriously.

He cited the apostle Paul’s instructions on excommunication, among other Scriptures.

“Paul goes on to tell within the letters of Paul to not even bid them Godspeed, which means don't even invite them into your house. Don't even give a welcome to anybody that apostates from the faith,” Zúñiga said.

“If I call myself a Christian, and this is what the letters of Paul are telling me, to me, this is what the teachings of Jesus are telling me to do, then what would be surprising to you that I don't try to live it?” Zúñiga said. “We're human beings, we fail. But I'm going to try to adhere to it to the best of my ability.”

Zúñiga is estranged from his two brothers who have left the church, he said. He classified their misbehavior under the broader Biblical category of “fornication.”

If a brother is doing drugs or living with girlfriends, Zúñiga said, “Where’s the fellowship?”

He noted that, as a barber, he speaks to dozens of people a week and has seen that estrangement isn’t just something that happens in his church.

“It’s not something strange if somebody is estranged from a family member,” he said. “They call it tough love.”

‘I couldn’t go anywhere’

Esther Jacques has suffered from such “tough love” practices since leaving the church she had attended from 1973 to 2020, she said.

Jacques’ husband, Oscar Jacques Sr., was a church leader and a great spouse, she said.

“My husband always let me go to another sister's house, or you know, if we would meet, have lunch out. After he passed away, everything changed.”

Under the practices of Golden Dawn, when Oscar Jacques Sr. died in 2013, Noriega assumed the role of Esther Jacques’ “head,” in place of the widow’s deceased husband.

“I couldn’t go anywhere,” Jacques said. “I could only go out once a week for groceries. I had to call him (Noriega) when I left, and I had to be back by 12 (noon), and call him that I came back.”

She no longer was allowed to go visit with church friends that she used to see routinely outside of church.

Asked about Jacques’ account by email, Noriega said "That is not true. She could do what she wanted to do just like anyone else."

Leaving Noriega’s control was liberating, Jacques said, but it left her separated from her family members still in the church, including the adult daughter she lived with.

“It was so hard for me at the beginning, because we were close. We were like sisters more than mother and daughter,” Jacques said.

‘I want her to have freedom’

For these divided families, some in the church and some out, negotiating the relationship is an ongoing challenge. Some see their own parents in the store or a restaurant and avoid talking or only exchange a small greeting.

Loza has had an up-and-down career since he left the church, joining the Marines, becoming a Pima County Sheriff's Department deputy, and being fired for lying about running a red light. Now he works as a prison counselor.

He said he knows his mother still loves her estranged family like him, because she’s risked being shunned by her church community or humiliated from the pulpit by Noriega to connect with them, however briefly.

She’s talked with Loza on the phone about once a year, each time for hours on end, he said. She told him how much she appreciated it when Loza would come to clean her yard in secret while she attended church.

She met her grandchildren when they were born. She didn’t ignore her granddaughter like she was supposed to when they ran into each other at the Hobby Lobby a few years ago. But it’s all been hidden from the church.

“She would always say things like, ‘Please don’t tell anyone I called you.’ But now for me, the jig is up,” Loza said. “I want people to know it’s OK to talk to their kids. I wish the moms there would say, ‘You know what Isaac? We’re going to talk to our children because we love them.’

“My mother has never, not one time in her life, said, ‘Son you need to leave. Son don’t call me,’” Loza said. “It’s always, ‘Your brother’s home. I’m going to get in trouble.’ She’s a grown woman, and she’s going to ‘get in trouble.’”

As more people leave the authoritarian church, Loza hopes one of them will be his mom.

“I know she doesn’t want to be there, but she’s there, and that’s all she has,” Loza said, his voice shaking. “I just want her to have freedom. She’s never known that.”