Cults in the Carolinas: 5 controversial groups with North Carolina Ties

The recent indictment of an infamous nationwide cult with ties to North Carolina got us thinking, which contemporary cults—alleged or otherwise—have operated in the Tar Heel State in recent years? 

On Sept. 18, six leaders of a Kansas-based cult were convicted of running an organized child labor and human trafficking operation that sent some children to North Carolina to work grueling hours, with leaders of the sect defending the practice by telling children they owed a duty to Allah, according to reporting by NC Newsline. 

Prosecutors said that leaders with a group known as the United Nation of Islam and the Value Creators, labeled a cult by a federal judge in 2018, encouraged parents to send their minor children to the so-called University of Arts and Logistics of Civilization. 

Once children were sent to the school to “receive fulsome schooling and develop life skills,” cult leaders instead shipped kids across state lines to work up to 16 hours a day in myriad small businesses, often abusing them and forcing them to live in overcrowded and otherwise dreadful conditions. 

Six defendants were convicted, including 62-year-old James Staton of Fayetteville, who is believed to have operated a business in Durham where some of the victims worked. It is unclear what business it was.  

This troubling news and the fact that it tied in with the Tar Heel State got us to wondering what other cults—whether alleged or labeled such by a judge—had been known to operate in North Carolina during the 21st century. Here’s what we found. 

Word of Faith Fellowship

Search for “cults in North Carolina” on Google, and it’s going to take a while to break through the seemingly endless coverage of what must be considered the state’s most infamous modern-day cult: Word of Faith Fellowship.  

That notoriety is thanks in large part to journalists Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr, who interviewed hundreds of people connected to the church while acquiring a sea of secret recordings, videos, and documents for their 20202 book, Broken Faith: Inside the Word of Faith Fellowship, One of America’s Most Dangerous Cults.

The book tells the tale of how Jane Whaley and her husband Sam converted an old steakhouse in the rural town of Spindale, North Carolina, into a chapel for their new Protestant non-denominational church in 1979. Over the decades, they expanded the congregation to include related churches in Brazil, Ghana, Scotland, Sweden, and other countries. Despite that international influence, much of the most problematic incidents involving the church and its leaders happened right in Spindale. 

The Associated Press has reported that Word of Faith Fellowship forces its members to follow a list of rules that is 145 entries long, including mandating that all members must swim with shirts covering their upper bodies and cannot take them off in public, including in their own backyards; must seek permission from the Whaleys before buying a house or car; and are prohibited from watching television and movies, reading newspapers, or eating in restaurants that serve alcohol. 

Abuse allegations involving the church began to surface as early as 1995, with one of the most high-profile cases coming in 2017 when former member Matthew Fenner testified that, in January 2013, he was beaten for two hours “to break me free of the homosexual ‘demons.’” Five church members were indicted and charged with kidnapping and assault in connection to Fenner’s testimony but never stood trial.

The church has also faced unrelated charges ranging from fraud to human trafficking. 

Despite its legal troubles, the Word of Faith Fellowship continues to operate in Spindale, with Sam and Jane Whaley still at the helm. The church hosts a blog labeled Response to Media Lies on its website, though no posts have been made since 2018. 

Twelve Tribes

The headline sitting atop a January food review in the Daily Tar Heel says it all: “The sandwiches are great, too bad they fund a cult.” 

One of many new religious movements (also known as alternative spirituality or new religions) that sprung up during this time period, Twelve Tribes was founded by Gene Spriggs in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1972. After coming into conflict with much of the outside community there, the group moved to Vermont, though it keeps communities throughout the country. 

One of the biggest and most central communities to the group is located at Griggs’ former home in Hiddenite, North Carolina, which is home to the Inter-Tribal Community Conference Center, where the group hosts conferences with all of its communities, according to its website. 

A Denver Post investigation published in a series of three stories in 2022 shone a light on issues within the cult, including evidence of exploitation and the physical and sexual abuse of children. Into the mid-200s, the group has continued to face allegations of child labor, custodial interference, and illegal homeschooling. 

One of the group’s most problematic teachings involves “the curse of Ham,” which espouses that a racial curse by God justifies the enslavement of Black people by white people. While Twelve Tribes accepts Black members and teaches that “slavery is over for those who believe,” the Southern Poverty Law Center has concluded that such a statement means that, because Twelve Tribes views only its members as “true believers,” its stance is that enslavement of Black non-members is justified by God. 

So what about those sandwiches? The aforementioned food review in The Daily Tar Heel discussed The Yellow Deli, a chain of restaurants that Twelve Tribes members own and operate in and around their communities across America, including one location in Hiddenite. 

As reported by Satchel Walton in that Daily Tar Hell review, the vibes in a Yellow Deli aren’t overtly subversive, though they do hand out literature in an attempt to make people familiar with and hopefully join Twelve Tribes. 

“Though they present an idealized hippie aesthetic, what they won’t tell you is that, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in their communes ‘the internet is highly restricted,’ and secular music, books and other ‘worldly’ influences are verboten,” Walton writes. “The pamphlets show people dancing in circles and present a gentler view of hell than your average pit preacher, but the SPLC notes that they teach that slavery was ‘a marvelous opportunity’ for Black people.”  

Griggs passed away at the Hiddenite property in 2021, though that community and the international movement remain very active today, as do the nearly 30 Yellow Deli locations ranging from Buenos Aires to Japan.  

Holy Tabernacle Born Again Faith Inc. 

“That was no way to live,” Yasmine Ford told the Fayetteville Observer in its 2018 expose of the McCollum Ranch in Cumberland County. “That was not a home for anybody. That was a jail.”

Ford was describing the 10 months she spent as a child living on the ranch after her mother signed her parental rights over to ranch owner John C. McCollum, a pastor who authorities say forced children to work at his Fayetteville-area fish markets for little to no money for years.  

McCollum, who founded the Holy Tabernacle Born Again Inc. church in 1981 and bought the ranch property in 1992, was arrested in December 2017. Nine more women from the ranch were arrested over the next month for charges that included involuntary servitude of children, fraud and conspiracy. 

Among the hundreds of people the Fayetteville Observer interviewed for the story, folks who spent time at the ranch as children described a culture of fear driven by McCollum, whose followers called him chief apostle, chief, dad, or daddy. 

Besides his role as pastor, McCollum was a businessman who ran fish markets in Fayetteville, Hope Mills, Lumberton, and Rocky Mount. He reportedly recruited women to come to the ranch and live with him during tent revivals he attended in and around North Carolina, bringing at least 120 people to the ranch to live there over nearly three decades and forcing their children into involuntary servitude. 

McCollum continued to see high levels of support from neighbors and other advocates even after his arrest. He died before he could stand trial, passing away in August 2018 while in hospice care. 

The Cult at Sarah Lawrence

Known as the leader of a “sex cult” at Sarah Lawrence College, a more fitting word for Lawrence “Larry” Ray would simply be predator. 

In 2010, Ray moved into his daughter’s dorm room at the Bronxville, New York, college, where he immediately began preying on her classmates, indoctrinating them into a so-called sex cult that he would later move to Pinehurst, North Carolina. 

By the end of his daughter’s sophomore year in the summer of 2011, Ray had recruited a coterie of women to move into his own Manhattan apartment, where he led “sex lessons” during which they learned the importance of playing 13th-century Gregorian chants during intercourse. 

He regularly abused anyone who fell victim to his brainwashing techniques, including male member Dan Levin, who describes how Ray would torture him by wrapping his genitals and threatening to remove them with a knife in the three-part 2023 Hulu documentary series Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence.

By the spring of 2013, he had five women remaining under his control, and he moved them all to a suburban house near the famed Pinehurst No. 6 golf course in NC. He forced his subjects to do yard work, all the while slipping deeper into delusional paranoia. He forced his female subjects into prostitution using online escort service websites. 

In 2020, Ray was arrested at a home in New Jersey following the much-discussed publication of a New York Magazine story titled “Larry Ray and the Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence.” At the time of his arrest, two of his followers were still under his spell, publicly maintaining his innocence. 

In April 2022, Ray was convicted of 15 criminal counts, including sex trafficking, extortion, and racketeering conspiracy. In 2023, he was sentenced to 60 years in prison. Later that year, several of the cult’s survivors filed a lawsuit against Sarah Lawrence, saying the school failed to protect them.

This article first appeared on Good Info News Wire and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.