CultNEWS101 Articles: 1/5/2026
Patrick Ryan
"The Democratic Party of Korea has agreed to accept a special counsel for the Unification Church investigation but has taken a different stance from the opposition parties over issues such as the right to recommend special counsel candidates and the scope of the investigation. Within the Democratic Party, there have even been calls to “investigate Shincheonji as well.” However, the party has proposed excluding allegations of investigation concealment by Special Counsel Min Joong-ki, who allegedly ignored statements related to bribery suspicions involving current and former Democratic Party lawmakers from the Unification Church. The opposition bloc criticized, “Does the Democratic Party truly have the will to conduct a special counsel investigation into the Unification Church?” and urged, “If so, introduce the special counsel immediately without any conditions or stipulations.” The floor leaders of the ruling and opposition parties failed to narrow their differences on the Unification Church special counsel during a meeting."
“There's a special name for people who leave, and you're not allowed to talk to them.”
"On Dec. 12, 1972, cult leader John Robert Stevens made a big announcement: he was a time traveler.
“I had a real meeting with the Lord,” Stevens told his followers in the Living Word Fellowship (LWF), also called the Walk. “During this meeting, I was projected seven years ahead of the present time. It was such a total thing that it almost blew my mind.”“We are heading for some fantastic days,” he continued. “We really are. And the limitations that we’ve had in this Walk, we’re not going to have in the future, especially the financial limitations.”
The Nevada mine into which he’d invested their tithes would soon pour forth gold and silver. The congregations he’d amassed in southern California, eastern Iowa, Brazil and Hawaii would manifest God’s perfect kingdom on Earth — just in time for the apocalypse in 1979.“Freeways will be bombed out. They’ll be destroyed,” Stevens said. “You’re going to have to know how to survive. I’d like to have 1,000 homes stocked with the necessary equipment for survival.”
If anyone in the crowd of LWF’s South Gate, California church had doubts about this prophecy, they didn’t voice them that night. Instead, “there was an immediate flurry of confirmation from the brothers [Stevens’ top acolytes], prophesying and coming up and agreeing with him,” said Scott Barker, who was raised in the Walk. “They just heard probably the most wild claim by John Robert Stevens to date, and they are immediately up there to back him up, just eating it up.”Indeed, the Iowa farm boy turned New Age Christian prophet had made some wild claims before. He claimed a traveling evangelist miraculously cured “a terrific mastoid infection in both ears” during his childhood in Story County, Iowa. He claimed credit for the supposed Kennedy curse, believing the Walk’s focused prayers (called “intercessions”) brought about the deaths of JFK and RFK.
“There must be something violent within us that drives us to prayer and intercession until it becomes an agony within our heart,” he preached in 1967. “When God senses that drive, He answers prayer.”Stevens claimed his wife Martha was a devil-possessed “Nephilim” and asked his followers to pray for her death. Another woman, Victoria Salyer, faced a literal witch trial before the South Gate congregation after she caught Stevens in a sexual affair with another married follower, which he denied. (Martha, too, confronted Stevens with allegations of infidelity. In her divorce filing, she says he “slammed” her head against a wall “several times” and “slapped me full force across the face, causing my nose to bleed” in response.) Salyer, like Martha, maintained her innocence, but was shunned from the Walk anyway.
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