Download The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult AudioBook Free
A memoir of growing up with blind DARK-COLORED parents in a segregated cult preaching the imminent end of the world When The World in Flames starts in 1970, Jerry Walker is six years of age. His consciousness revolves around being a person in a church whose beliefs he discovers not only puzzling but terrifying. Composed of a hodgepodge of requirements and limitations (including a prohibition against doctors and private hospitals), the underpinning tenet of Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God is the fact that its people are divinely chosen, and all others will soon perish in waterways of flames. The substantive membership is ruled by fear, intimidation, and dangers. Anyone who dares leave the church will undergo hardship for the remainder of this life and eternal fighting in the next. The next life, according to Armstrong, will get to 1975, three years after the start of "Great Tribulation". Jerry will be 11 years of age. Jerry's parents were specifically susceptible to the guarantee of relief from the world's hardships. If they joined the church in 1960, they were living in a two-room apartment in a dangerous Chicago housing project with the first four of these seven children. Most significantly, they both were blind, having lost their sight to childhood accidents. They took comfort in the fact that that they had been chosen for a particular afterlife, even if it meant following a religion with a white supremacist ideology. They dutifully delivered tithes to Armstrong, whose church boasted more than 100,000 people and even more than $80 million in twelve-monthly revenues at its level. When the prophecy of the 1972 Great Tribulation does not materialize, Jerry is substantially less disappointed than relieved. When the 1975 end-time prophecy also fails, he finally starts to question his faith and imagines the probability of choosing a destiny of his own.
