Did Jane Whaley’s Church Really Decide Who Could Have Kids?

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Cults, Hidden Killers [music] Investigates.

[00:00:03]Here now, Tony Brusky.

[00:00:08]I want to start with a list.

[00:00:10]Not a grocery list, not a to-do list, a list that according to the Associated Press reportedly governed every waking minute of life inside the Word of Faith Fellowship in Spindale, North Carolina.

[00:00:24]Approximately 145 rules.

[00:00:28]You ready? We're not going to go through every single one. We're going to go through a lot of them. You can't watch television. You can't read a newspaper.

[00:00:34]You can't go to the movies. You can't eat at a restaurant that plays music or serves alcohol. Men cannot grow beards.

[00:00:40]You can't buy a car without permission.

[00:00:42]You can't buy a house without permission. You can't enroll in college without permission. And if permission is granted, you go the with another member.

[00:00:49]So, you can they can watch you. Your textbooks have to be cleared by church leadership. You cannot date without approval. You cannot marry without approval.

[00:00:58]>> [gasps] >> And here's where it crosses a line that most people can't wrap their heads around.

[00:01:03]You cannot have relations with your own spouse without approval.

[00:01:09]Ministers reportedly handed out contraception because according to former members, Jane Whaley decided who was allowed to have children.

[00:01:23]Let me say that allegation again.

[00:01:25]One woman allegedly decided which married couples were permitted to reproduce. That is the world we are walking into in this week's Cults series.

[00:01:37]A Hidden Killers investigation. Welcome, everyone. I hope you're enjoying our series every week as we dig into what in my opinion is a cult.

[00:01:47]And all this this whole series, all five parts, all in my opinion.

[00:01:52]All allegedly. Insert that in front of everything. We'll do it throughout as well, but this is an opinion piece. I just want that to be very clear and I'd love to hear your opinions in the comments section on Substack and YouTube.

[00:02:05]As we uh we work our way through this, the links are in the descriptions. This is part one of that five-part series into the Word of Faith Fellowship, secretive evangelical church in the foothills of North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains that former members and investigators have described as one of the most dangerous cults in modern American history. At the center of it, a woman named Jane Whaley, who had no seminary training, no ministerial credentials, and no theological degree, but who reportedly convinced hundreds of people that God spoke directly through her and that disobeying her meant eternal damnation.

[00:02:44]Now, when most people hear a story like this, the first question is always the same. Why would ANYONE JOIN THAT? WHY would any rational adult hand over that much control? And that question is fair.

[00:02:57]But, it also misses the point because nobody joins a cult. They join a community. They join a family. They join something that fills a hole.

[00:03:09]And what Jane Whaley reportedly built in Spindale, North Carolina looked from the outside, and especially at the beginning, like everything a searching person could want. Let's go back in time, way back. To 1979, Jane Whaley, the daughter of a plumber and a homemaker in rural North Carolina, a former high school math teacher with no no formal ministry background, and her husband Sam, a former used car salesman who had attended Rhema Bible College, reportedly converted a shuttered steakhouse into a chapel.

[00:03:47]It was small.

[00:03:49]It was humble. It was, by every account from people who were there in those early years warm.

[00:03:56]Former members who spoke to the Associated Press and the authors of the book Broken Faith described the early Word of Faith Fellowship as a place it felt like an answer.

[00:04:05]The members were welcoming, the children were well-mannered, people drove nice cars and lived in nice homes. There was a sense of purpose, of belonging, of being chosen for something greater. If you drove through Spindale and looked at the compound from the outside, you'd see clean homes, nice cars, polite children.

[00:04:24]And a community that appeared to have its act together. That is the thing about traps the best ones don't look like traps.

[00:04:34]They look like exactly what you have been looking for.

[00:04:39]Sam Whaley had the uh credentials, but uh by every account, it was Jane who commanded the room. Former members have described her as fiery, compelling speaker. You can find her YouTube videos. She's a nut, in my opinion. A petite woman with an outsized presence who radiated certainty.

[00:05:03]She did not suggest, she declared.

[00:05:07]She did not interpret scripture. She reportedly announced what God told her directly. So, she's delusional as [ __ ] And that distinction matters because it is the hinge on which everything that followed allegedly swung, in my opinion. If Jane Whaley was just a pastor giving sermons, you could disagree with her. You could question her. You You could leave. But if Jane Whaley was a prophet check prophet on your cult bingo card.

[00:05:40]If God himself was speaking through her mouth then disagreeing with Jane meant disagreeing with the almighty.

[00:05:52]And in a community built on faith, that is not a theological debate. That is a death sentence for your soul.

[00:06:02]She's got the ingredients, doesn't she?

[00:06:06]It It It's fascinating doing this series on cults.

[00:06:10]We've been doing it for several months and we've been covering all different variations of it. Uh or or high-control religious communities. Um it's a nicer way of saying it. They all operate, you know, with the same kind of structural makeup.

[00:06:27]The compound itself reportedly grew to cover about 35 acres in rural Spindale.

[00:06:32]It was not some backwoods shack in the woods.

[00:06:36]This was a real operation. A sanctuary, a private school, homes, a network of businesses owned and operated by church members, doctors, lawyers, construction companies, granite business, a tech firm. The church built an economic ecosystem that kept money circulating internally.

[00:06:54]If you worked for a member-owned business, your paycheck came from the church's orbit. If you needed a doctor, you went to the church's doctor. If you needed a lawyer, the the church had those, too. From the outside, it looked like a thriving, self-sufficient religious community.

[00:07:08]From the inside, according to former members, it was a web of financial dependency that made the church the center of every transaction in your life.

[00:07:18]Former members told the Associated Press that Whaley cultivated that belief deliberately and reinforced it constantly. She reportedly taught that God would kill anyone who betrayed her or the church. That leaving meant cancer. That leaving meant hell. Not metaphorical hell, literal eternal fire.

[00:07:37]Think about that. You are sitting in a church surrounded by people. You love people who fed you when you were hungry and gave you a place to live and help you raise your kids. And the woman at the front of the room is telling that if you walk out that door, God will give you cancer and send you to burn forever. That's not faith.

[00:08:01]That's a psychological cage. And the lock on the cage was not a dead bolt, it was terror.

[00:08:08]But the terror came later.

[00:08:11]That's the part people miss. The control did not arrive all at once. Former members described a slow, methodical tightening, a progression so gradual that by the time you realized what had happened, every exit was blocked. First you were encouraged to move to the Spindale compound or nearby, that your job was arranged through a church-connected business, or you worked directly for a minister. Then your social ties outside the church started to fray, not by accident but allegedly by design. Former members told reporters they were instructed to stop speaking to family members who had not joined the congregation. In some cases, members are reportedly forced to cut contact with relatives for a year or more. In other cases, the severance was permanent.

[00:08:53]Your mother, your brother, your childhood best friend, if they were not part of the fellowship, they were of the world. And the world, according to Jane Whaley, is where the demons lived. So you have >> [laughter] >> Once your housing, your income, your friendships, your family, all ran through the church, leaving meant losing pretty much everything. Your home, your job, your community, your children.

[00:09:22]And that's not an exaggeration. We'll get into what happened to children in another episode that's coming up this week in it.

[00:09:30]And it's one of the most gut-wrenching parts of the story. But for now, let's understand the architecture.

[00:09:38]Word of Faith Fellowship allegedly did not hold people prisoner with chains. It held them with dependency, as most cults do.

[00:09:45]Every pillar of a normal life, shelter, work, relationships, identity was reportedly routed through the institution. Pull one out and the whole structure collapsed. That is why people stayed, not because they were stupid, not because they were weak, because the cost of leaving was designed to be unbearable. And then there was the surveillance. Ooh, that sounds like creepy.

[00:10:09]>> [laughter] >> It did It doesn't sound like a church.

[00:10:12]It doesn't sound like a healthy community.

[00:10:15]Members who attended the local community college reportedly went in pairs, not for companionship, but so that one could watch the other.

[00:10:25]Report on the other.

[00:10:27]Take notes on the other.

[00:10:30]Give it back to the church. According to former members, Whailey allegedly picked their college majors, just just dictated where they could work after graduation, chose what clothing they could wear, and decided which games they were allowed to play, allegedly. Nike apparel was reportedly banned because the swoosh was considered a swoosh demonic.

[00:10:59]Demonic Nike swoosh.

[00:11:02]You know what else they banned?

[00:11:04]Root beer.

[00:11:06]Forbidden.

[00:11:08]Because beer was of the devil.

[00:11:14]And it's not even beer. It's It's It's root beer.

[00:11:19]I mean, think about it for a second.

[00:11:20]Anybody who has this kind of cognitive distortion going on in their mind where they're just going to ban [ __ ] because it has like words in it, like root beer.

[00:11:29]Root beer's in it.

[00:11:31]That's the devil. must be like They're not thinking clearly. They're not making rational decisions. Do you trust your eternal eternal salvation with someone who can't make a rational decision about root beer?

[00:11:49]Do you trust that person to lead your family, to lead your life, to to be your spiritual advisor? This doesn't seem like someone who's playing with a full deck of cards in my opinion. Someone who's offended by the word root beer and bans it.

[00:12:05]If that's what happened. My god. I mean How does that not just make you walk away right there?

[00:12:11]I'm like, oh, this all seems nice. Oh, she's freaking out about root beer.

[00:12:15]Why?

[00:12:17]That's where beer in it.

[00:12:18]All right, I'm out. I mean, more people should do that. When you when you have That's a red flag. It's a huge red flag on a human being.

[00:12:26]If this is the stuff YOU'RE GETTING LIKE, "WHOA!" ABOUT SORRY, can't play with you.

[00:12:32]You are not a rational human being.

[00:12:35]And uh I mean, you just watch Jane Whaley for just a few seconds on her preaching, her ministry.

[00:12:42]It's pretty evident pretty quick. She's batshit [ __ ] crazy, in my opinion.

[00:12:50]But if you are looking for a charismatic leader who thinks she's talking to God and delivering the message for you, damn, she's your woman.

[00:13:00]I'm not making that up.

[00:13:02]The root beer thing. That's from interviews with former members published by the Associated Press. At a certain point, the absurdity of the rule stops being funny and it really starts being diagnostic. Because when a leader can get hundreds of adults to stop drinking root beer because she says the name offends God, And again, [clears throat] we're we're talking about the ultimate bartender here. Jesus is the one who did the water into wine [ __ ] There really is nothing in the Bible that talks about God being upset about beer or wine.

[00:13:36]You know, excessive consumption, yes, it does speak of that.

[00:13:41]But just the existence or the word, not at all. That's entirely in your head, Jane.

[00:13:49]That leader certainly has crossed him influence into something else entirely in my opinion. There was another layer to the control and it is the one that in my view locked the cage tighter than anything else.

[00:14:02]According to former members, Word of Faith leadership reportedly conducted intense invasive interrogation sessions focused on congregants' most private behaviors, particularly, you guessed it, it's a church. What do they want to know about?

[00:14:15]What do they want to control?

[00:14:17]Let's talk about sex, baby. Let's talk about Jane Whaley and her obsession with your sex life. Former member Jamie Anderson, who spent much of his childhood inside the church, told the AP that the church leaders had what he described as a disturbing fixation on sexual behavior. Members, including teenagers, were allegedly questioned in graphic detail about their intimate acts, about their thoughts, about their urges.

[00:14:43]And those confessions, according to multiple former members, were not forgotten. They were cataloged.

[00:14:49]Kind of taking a Scientology play there, you know, where the E-meter.

[00:14:54]Give us your stuff. We're going to We're going to get it down. You're going to get free of it. And then if you ever try to say anything bad about us, we got a book on you.

[00:15:02]It's called coercive control and cults are good at it.

[00:15:05]>> [laughter] >> I mean, think about what this means.

[00:15:07]You're a member of this church, you've confessed your deepest shame, maybe under pressure, maybe under the belief that honesty would bring you closer to God. I'm sure that's what they're telling you. And now that information allegedly sits in a file somewhere held by the same people who control your housing, your income, and your family relationships. If you try to leave, that information comes out. Your most private moments weaponized. Former members have described this as a blackmail infrastructure built into the spiritual practice itself, because it is.

[00:15:35]It was not a side effect of the church's methods. According to the their accounts, it was the point. Control the present through dependency.

[00:15:45]Control the future through fear of damnation, and control the past through a library of secrets that made leaving an act of public humiliation. So, when people ask why members did not just walk away, the answer is a little layered.

[00:15:58]They did not leave because their entire life was inside. They did not leave because they believed God would kill them if they did. They did not leave because the church allegedly held their most vulnerable confessions.

[00:16:08][clears throat] Like a loaded weapon.

[00:16:14]They did not leave because and this is the cruelest part, many of them still believed.

[00:16:20]They believed Jane Whaley was a prophet.

[00:16:23]They believed the screaming and the control and the rules were the price of salvation.

[00:16:28]There's still people that do believe this [ __ ] There's a YouTube channel for it. They're batshit.

[00:16:36]They also don't get many views, so that's that's encouraging. It's encouraging to see that, you know, word's getting out.

[00:16:43]Fewer are choosing the cult method than ever before.

[00:16:48]When you've been told since childhood or since the moment you walked through that door looking for meaning, that this woman speaks for God, you don't question the list of 145 rules. You follow them because the alternative, as you've been taught, is death and damnation from Jane's own words and her coffee clutches with Jesus.

[00:17:10]What started in that converted state cast reportedly grew at its peak approximately 750 members in North Carolina alone, according to reporting by the Associated Press. Nearly 2,000 more followers joined affiliated churches in Brazil, Ghana, Scotland, Sweden, and other countries. Jane Whaley, a woman with no seminary education, no ordination, no theological training beyond what she claimed God whispered in her ear. Hey Jane, I got some >> Wait, that's the devil.

[00:17:39]>> [laughter] >> Oh, you thought it was God all along, Jane? OH, [ __ ] NO, I'M THE MASTER OF THE CHURCH, [ __ ] Maybe that's what happened. Maybe she thought it was God and it was really the, you know, Allegedly built a global network from a small town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And according to recent reporting, she reportedly still leads it.

[00:18:00]That's the foundation. That's how people got in.

[00:18:03]Why they stayed and what made leaving feel like jumping off a cliff?

[00:18:09]But knowing how a cage is built only tells you part of the story.

[00:18:16]The rest, what allegedly happened inside it, what happened when someone smiled at the wrong time, what happened when somebody had a thought that Jane Whaley decided was What happened in the rooms where the doors were closed and the only sound according to former members was screaming?

[00:18:35]They called it prayer. Former members call it something else entirely. In part two of this series, we go inside the practice of the Word of Faith Fellowship.

[00:18:45]What they call blasting.

[00:18:48]And the years of alleged violence that former members say were hidden behind the Word of God. Press subscribe so you don't miss it. It's coming up next here on the channel. And give us your thoughts in the comments section on Substack and YouTube. If you're a survivor of this, we'd love to hear your stories. And so many survivors of these sort of coercive control cults, in my opinion, uh they they find us. And and it's kind of becoming a community around these stories on the channel. So, um it's nice uh because it feels a lot of people are there and then you know you're not alone cuz you're not.

[00:19:24]And it's okay if you fell victim to it.

[00:19:27]It makes sense at the beginning.

[00:19:29][snorts] It does. It makes sense how someone could get into almost any of these.

[00:19:33]Nobody goes, "I'm going to join a cult."

[00:19:36]You go because it's it's inviting, it's welcoming, it feels good at first and then yeah.

[00:19:42]So, why people get into bad relationships, it's why people stay in bad relationships, uh no matter how bad and abusive it can get. I get it.

[00:19:50]I get it. It's identifying it though and getting the F out once you have your eyes opened. So, uh welcome if you've had your eyes opened and if we're helping to open your eyes to maybe something like this or maybe you're there, um keep watching. Keep listening.

[00:20:06]Not here to tell you God is bad or religion is bad or your faith is bad.

[00:20:10]That's not our goal at all.

[00:20:13]It's people that are. People that bastardize it. I believe they speak about that in the Bible of uh look out for these [ __ ] We'll help you uh shine a light on them.

[00:20:26]Until next time. My name's Johnny Bruski. We'll talk again real soon.

[00:20:31]Want more on this case and others? Then press [music] subscribe now and don't miss a moment of true crime coverage from Tony Bruski and the Hidden Killers [music] Podcast.