When he finally stood up to leave the Vermont compound, some 15 cult members blocked his path outside, forming a wall. They prayed and warned there would be consequences if he walked out of God’s protection. He’d probably die. Post shook as he moved by them.

“My heart was just pounding and pounding. Was something going to happen to me? I didn’t know,” Post, who is deaf, said in an interview through an interpreter.

As he walked the mile into town, his father followed, imploring him to stay.

“I finally said to my father, ‘Look, please, accept this is my decision,’” Post, 43, said. “And finally he didn’t say anything and he walked away.”

Post was free.

“I’ll never go back,” he said. “Never, not at all. I just feel like, the Twelve Tribes, they are evil.”

The Twelve Tribes religious sect burst into the news in Colorado in January, when authorities confirmed they were investigating the possibility that the deadly Marshall fire, the most destructive wildfire in state history, might have started on the group’s compound off Eldorado Springs Drive in Boulder County. Investigators have not yet pinpointed the cause of the fire that destroyed more than 1,000 homes and are investigating other potential ignition points as well.

Few on the Front Range know much about the insular religious group, whose 3,000-some members live communally in Colorado and across the nation and world, and take pains to present an innocuous front to outsiders.

The Twelve Tribes attracts new members with a folksy peace-and-love, all-are-welcome message, but underneath that hollow promise of utopia lies a manipulative cult that seeks to maintain complete control of its followers, 10 former members told The Denver Post in 26 hours of interviews. The Post reviewed nearly 400 pages of Twelve Tribes’ teachings and combed through court, real estate, business and historical records in reporting on the sect.

In a series of three stories over the next week, The Post will detail accounts of ex-members about living inside the Twelve Tribes, spotlighting three major problems identified by former followers: that the group requires excessive corporal punishment and fails to protect children from sexual abuse, exploits members for labor and money, and espouses racist, misogynistic and homophobic teachings.

“Nobody understands the real horror underneath until you’ve lived it,” said Alina Anderson, a former member born into the cult who left in 2001 at age 14. Anderson, 35, now lives in Boulder and is going by her middle and former married names in this story to avoid being identified by current cult members.

Leaders in the Twelve Tribes contacted by The Post either declined to comment or spoke only briefly, saying they were wary of publicity after past bad experiences with the press. The group also didn’t respond to emailed questions. But those who spoke defended the Twelve Tribes and its practices.

“We try to do good to everyone,” said Tim Pendergrass, a current Twelve Tribes leader who lives in a Florida commune. “It’s amazing how everyone can think bad about you. It just comes with the turf.”

Twelve Tribes members Bob Brooks, Gary Long and the group’s founder Eugene Spriggs seated together around 1982.

Physical restraint and discipline

Founded in Tennessee in 1972 by Elbert Eugene Spriggs, the 50-year-old Twelve Tribes blends Spriggs’ personal beliefs with elements of both Christianity and Judaism.

New members must give up their possessions and names, live in one of the Twelve Tribes’ three dozen worldwide communes and follow the cult’s strict rules, which, former members say, dictate everything from how much toilet paper a member should use (two sheets) to the shape of a member’s eyeglasses (round). Followers are encouraged to cut off all contact with the outside world.

The Twelve Tribes moved into Colorado in the early 2000s, first establishing a compound in Manitou Springs before expanding to Boulder in 2010; members now run the Yellow Deli in Boulder and a café in Manitou Springs. An estimated 40 people live at the Eldorado Springs Drive compound, and another 25 or so in a house in Manitou Springs.

The largest number of Twelve Tribes communities are in the U.S., but the sect also has a presence in South America, Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan.

The group can be considered a cult because it has a charismatic authoritarian leader, extremist ideology, an all-or-nothing belief system, and uses coercion to control and exploit members, cult expert Janja Lalich said. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Twelve Tribes as a “Christian fundamentalist cult.”

In recent years, the Twelve Tribes has experienced a mass exodus among the first generation of children born and raised in the group. Many — most, by some counts — of the first kids raised in the cult have left, driven out by the group’s practices and leadership’s increasingly tight grip on the shrinking membership that remains.

For many ex-members, the decision to leave came with parenthood.

“I was under no circumstances going to beat my kids the way I was beaten,” said a former member who left in his 30s and spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity to protect family members still in the cult. “I just could not do it. And you have to if you are there. If you are not beating your kids, you are going to be in big trouble.”

The Twelve Tribes taught that it was different from false religions — like mainstream Christianity — because “their children would follow them,” he said.

But the Twelve Tribes’ children fled in droves. And now, as adults still working through the trauma of their childhoods, they worry for the kids still caught inside.

When a toddler throws a tantrum in the Twelve Tribes, an adult might grab the girl, hold her tight on his lap — perhaps by throwing his leg over hers — restrain both her arms and put his hand over her mouth until she stops fighting back.

The toddler might scream and cry and struggle for an hour. She will not be freed until she surrenders, former members said. The idea is to break her will.

“Kids were supposed to be quiet. And when they weren’t, physical restraint over their bodies and mouths was expected,” said ex-member Jason Wolfe, 46. His brother, a leader in the Twelve Tribes, previously lived in Manitou Springs, and their father helped establish the Boulder community. Wolfe left the group in 2009 and now lives in Virginia; he was 6 when his parents joined.

Restraint is part of the Twelve Tribes’ overall approach to child-rearing, which focuses heavily on physical discipline. The Twelve Tribes teaches that children must be spanked with thin, flexible wooden rods — a practice the group has been consistently criticized for but has steadfastly defended, saying it is rooted in Biblical principles.

“Those are longstanding (concerns) that probably won’t be resolved until everyone comes to the understanding everyone will come to,” Pendergrass said.

A January 2000 version of the group’s 348-page Child Training Manual obtained by The Post says children as young as 6 months should be spanked, if they, say, wiggle away from diaper changes.

“The pain received from the balloon stick is more humbling than harmful,” the manual reads. “There is no defense against it… The only way to stop the sting of the rod is to submit. That is exactly what the child will do — submit to his parents’ will and end his rebellion.”

Ex-members who grew up in the Twelve Tribes described being spanked on their bare bottoms, on their hands and on the bottoms of their feet for the slightest perceived offenses; it was not uncommon for parents to spank their child 20 or 30 times each day.

“We were basically beaten down into absolutely nothing so that they could build you up into what they wanted you to be. Asking for seconds at breakfast could get you a spanking,” Anderson said. Adults in the cult were taught to discipline on the first command.

“If you have a 3-year-old son and you say, ‘Stop jumping up and down’ — the chances of that happening on the first time is zero. So that would be a spanking,” said a former 20-year member who previously lived with the cult in Boulder and left in 2016. He spoke on condition of anonymity because his family still lives in the group.

Like most everything in the Twelve Tribes, discipline is communal and guided by social pressure. Offenses that warrant spanking might vary from community to community, or even from family to family, but there is tremendous social pressure to discipline harshly, ex-members said.

Cult members meet once every morning and once every evening for mandatory “gatherings” — worship sessions at which leaders preach. They can be tedious and long, and children are expected to listen without fidgeting.

“If you don’t take your child out and spank them during the teachings, then you’re thought of as not being a good parent,” said Luke Wiseman, 46, a former member who left in 2013 and now lives in Virginia. “People tapped me on the back when I had a 2-year-old son and said, ‘Your son is not listening.’ Then if I don’t take him out and spank him, I’m not ‘receiving.’”

Adults considered to be out-of-bounds are ostracized, shamed and “cut off” from the community until they repent and leaders approve their return. Members who do wrong might also be the subject of a community-wide “public humiliation,” in which the community’s leaders shame the person during a gathering. Some wrongs might be codified into a new teaching that is sent to all Twelve Tribes communities, ex-members said.

“Most people in the Twelve Tribes really live in fear,” said Post, who now lives in Maine. He became deaf as an infant after a bout with meningitis, but his parents didn’t know he’d lost his hearing until he was 4. He was harshly disciplined as a toddler because his parents thought he wasn’t obeying them, when, in reality, he just couldn’t hear their commands, he said. Both parents are still in the Twelve Tribes today.

“Just last year, after 30 years, my parents approached me and apologized for what had happened to me growing up,” Post said. “It was over the top, it was severe and brutal.”

Longstanding abuse allegations

The first generation of children in the Twelve Tribes largely grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, and former members described enduring extreme physical abuse during that time. The ex-member who left in his 30s remembered a practice called scourging, in which a child was stripped naked and beaten with a rod from head to toe.

Post and others said adults routinely withheld food from children as a form of discipline, sometimes for days at a time. When Anderson was 6 or 7, she was locked in a dark basement as punishment for taking from the refrigerator.

“The one time that I was locked in the dungeon — it wasn’t a real dungeon but it felt like it — I think that was for more than a day, because we fasted every Friday, so I was used to starving, and it was longer than that,” she said.

On a June day in 1984, authorities in Island Pond, Vermont, raided the Twelve Tribes’ commune there over allegations of child abuse. Police and social workers took more than 100 children into protective custody with plans to examine the kids for signs of abuse. But the plan fell apart when a judge determined the raid was unconstitutional because the search warrant was too general and not supported by concrete evidence of abuse. The children were returned to the commune within hours.

“The raid that happened in 1984, what should have happened is all the children should have been taken and placed in foster care and that should have been the end of the group,” Wolfe said. “There was so much child abuse going on at that time.”

For years afterward, the Twelve Tribes celebrated June 22 as a day of deliverance, a sort of Passover-like event in which God protected the group from the overreach of government. When the children in the raid grew up, some spoke publicly at June 22 remembrances to defend their parents and proclaim they had never been abused.

The day before the 20th anniversary of the raid, Wolfe was included in a meeting with other first-generation kids ahead of the celebration to prepare for the next day’s speeches. Jeanie Swantko, a former public defender who joined the group and married Wiseman’s father after representing him in a child abuse case, told the gathered young adults that they needed to clearly say there had been no abuse. (Swantko couldn’t be reached for comment.)

“I stood up and I was like, ‘You’re dead wrong,’” Wolfe said. “‘There was a (crap)load of abuse, it was everywhere and that was all there was. Why can’t we just say there was child abuse and we’re not OK with it?’”

He was escorted out of the meeting, he said. His brother who is still in the Twelve Tribes, Peter Wolfe, said in a short phone conversation in February that he had a “wonderful upbringing.”

“I did grow up here (in the Twelve Tribes),” he said. “…My wife grew up here. We don’t share any of those views as far as different things that other people might say.”

Both Peter Wolfe and Pendergrass said the Twelve Tribes welcomed visitors and questions, but a local leader denied a request by The Post to visit the group’s Boulder compound. The organization also did not respond to emailed questions about its treatment of children.

Police calls in Colorado

For many years in the Twelve Tribes, physical discipline could be meted out by any adult on any child for any reason, former members said. Anderson was disciplined for wearing her ponytail too high and for looking around — not at her feet — when she walked.

“There was no safe space,” Jason Wolfe said.

In recent years, the Twelve Tribes seems to have shifted toward parents disciplining their own children with less emphasis on all adults disciplining all children, one of several modernizing changes the group has made in response to outside criticism. But ex-members say the Twelve Tribes would never fully abandon the practice of physical discipline, which is still a core tenet.

Logs of police calls to the Twelve Tribes’ compounds in Boulder County and Manitou Springs show that child abuse remains a concern. A 911 caller in May 2020 sent Manitou Springs police to the commune there after a young relative who had visited the group reported that children were being kept in a basement without electricity, according to records provided by Manitou Springs police.

That caller, who asked not to be identified to preserve relationships with her relatives, said police told her they knocked on the door of the commune, asked a few questions and left without going inside. The Twelve Tribes was known to be peaceful and everything seemed OK that night, they told her. Manitou Springs police records show officers spent 13 minutes at the compound; a police spokesman did not know whether officers went inside the home.

In September 2019, child welfare officials and sheriff’s deputies visited the compound in Boulder County and interviewed several people as part of a child protective services investigation, according to a report provided by the sheriff’s office. Deputies went along out of concern the group might be hostile, but the cult members welcomed the inquiry, the report says.

“The children living on the property seemed to be happy and healthy, and they even sang us a couple songs while we were there,” Deputy J. Ryan wrote in the report.

Police also responded to reports of teenagers who ran away from the Colorado properties.

In September 2020, a 16-year-old girl fled the Manitou Springs compound in the middle of the night, according to a police report. In June 2018, a 15-year-old boy who was living in the Boulder commune ran away, sheriff’s records show. The teenager returned after about two days and told deputies he’d ridden his bicycle from the Eldorado Springs Drive commune to Westminster, slept the night on a patch of grass, then continued to ride his bicycle all the way into the 16th Street Mall in Denver, where he spent the day before cycling back to the commune.

“(The boy) appeared very genuine in his statements saying he was not going to do this ever again and that he was sorry for putting his mother and father in such constant worry,” the deputy’s report reads.

The police reports also detail the Jan. 5 arrest of Ron Williams, 50, on a year-old outstanding warrant for felony sexual exploitation of children after Boulder County authorities discovered more than 1,000 images of child sexual abuse in Williams’ possession in 2020. At the time, he was living in a home in Superior; that home burned in the Marshall fire. When he was arrested in January, he’d been staying with the Twelve Tribes, though it’s not clear for how long.

As he was arrested a short walk away from the Twelve Tribes’ compound in Manitou Springs, Officer Ron Johnson described Williams to other officers as “a possible suspect in the Boulder fire” multiple times, according to body camera footage. But Carrie Haverfield, a spokeswoman for the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, said Williams was never a suspect in the Marshall fire investigation.

“He was someone that was staying on the property at the time and so was loosely associated with the property, so he was indexed along with everybody else, but never a suspect,” she said.

Failure to report

Sexual abuse of children is not condoned or allowed by the Twelve Tribes, former members said, but it does happen, and it is rarely reported to law enforcement when discovered.

Sometimes, a man accused of sexual abuse will be kicked out of the cult, ex-members said. But sometimes, he will be forgiven and allowed to stay. How a case is handled often depends on how much status the abuser has within the cult. Frequently, children who report sexual abuse are not believed; some are punished or told the abuse was their fault.

Anderson said she as a young girl told a woman she trusted about being sexually abused. That woman brought it to other adults, and Anderson was questioned by a male elder. She kept silent. Another elder’s wife then took her aside and questioned her.

“She said, ‘How do you have intercourse?’ And that is what threw me off. I said, ‘What is intercourse? And why would I have it?’ Then she said, ‘Is it anal or vaginal?’”

Anderson didn’t know what those words meant, and the elder’s wife concluded that she was lying about being abused in an attempt to get attention, Anderson said.

She still struggles to talk about it.

After escaping the group at 19, Post went to college and in his sophomore year poured out his heart in a 10-page letter to his father in which he detailed sexual abuse he’d suffered as a young teenager.

“He wrote me back and said, ‘I don’t believe anything in your story,’” Post said.

In a Twelve Tribes leadership meeting sometime around 2011, Wiseman asked why a particular case of alleged child sexual abuse wasn’t reported to outside authorities. Leaders told Wiseman that the girl’s father didn’t want to testify in court, Wiseman said.

He later followed up with the father, who said he was willing to work with law enforcement, but that a Twelve Tribes leader “told him not to testify because it would shame our Master’s (Jesus’) name,” Wiseman said, adding that the Twelve Tribes kicked out the accused abuser.

“It’s been sustained, spanning multiple eras in the Twelve Tribes, and they bury it,” the member who left in his 30s said. “They don’t advocate for the kids who are abused. They’re much more interested in their image than they are in protecting children.”

Inside the Twelve Tribes, sexual contact of any kind is forbidden outside of marriage. The punishment for young adults caught kissing or holding hands is marriage, ex-members said. Divorce is not allowed in the cult and interracial marriages are frowned on. Homosexuality is also forbidden; a 1990 teaching shared with The Post calls it “abominable,” and says gay or lesbian people “must be put to death.”

After co-ed education was banned, enough young men experimented with bestiality that Spriggs, the cult’s leader, in 2006 ordered young men to kill the animals they’d had sex with. At least 30 sheep, and several cows, goats and chickens were slaughtered, Wiseman said. He estimated around 10 men and boys confessed to bestiality around that time, both in the U.S. and abroad.

“That’s horrific psychological abuse,” Wiseman said. “These boys were repressed, not allowed to be normal kids, not allowed to talk to girls, and then when they confess their sin they’re made to go kill the animals.”

Pendergrass said the Twelve Tribes is about love, not punishment.

“Really all we are about, really, honestly, is loving people, loving our creator, loving our children and that’s really it,” he said. “All we know is if we love one another and we try to love everybody, it’s all going to work out. That might be kind of simplistic, but it sure does help me live a stress-free life and have lots of peace and be willing to do anything for love. That’s what I like.”

Periodically, the Twelve Tribes’ treatment of its children turns up in newspapers or TV news specials. In 2004, the Broward Palm Beach New Times in Florida published a story that featured an ex-Twelve Tribes member who said her husband molested her children and that the Twelve Tribes leadership denied her a divorce and attempted to cover up the abuse. She left the group, went to authorities and the man was convicted of sex crimes in 2006.

Around the same time, a criminal case was proceeding against a 25-year-old man after a 6-year-old girl told a child welfare worker the man fondled her in 2001, that story says.

In 2007, a former Twelve Tribes teacher pleaded guilty to molesting two boys in the 1990s, according to The Boston Globe. In Germany in 2013, 40 children were taken from a Twelve Tribes compound amid concerns of child abuse, according to a story in The Telegraph.

But abuse cases that lead to criminal charges are the exception, ex-members said, and many more allegations are handled behind closed doors within the Twelve Tribes.

“The only time they’d ever consider taking it to the authorities is if it was already leaked out and they had no choice,” the ex-member who lived in Boulder said.

When cases do garner publicity, the attention tends to quickly fade, and the Twelve Tribes continues operating unimpeded, ex-members said. Some find it frustrating to watch.

“We believe in religious rights,” Wiseman said. “But at some point, there needs to be discussion of where does the line come in when religious rights start to psychologically manipulate and abuse children. This is a bigger discussion that needs to be happening.”

High-profile betrayal

Around 2008, the Twelve Tribes learned that its founder’s wife, Marsha Spriggs, had carried out a series of extramarital affairs. Eugene Spriggs, the founder who died in 2021, ultimately decided his wife should be forgiven. The scandal rocked members’ faith in the group’s leadership.

“It wasn’t that she was a human and had fallen into sin, it was that she had personally been involved in sending away a lot of other families for much less serious infractions,” Wiseman said.

The affair revelations accelerated people’s departures from the group, and leadership at the Twelve Tribes responded by clamping down even more strictly on the dwindling number of families who remained.

In the past, followers could listen to traditional Irish music, go hiking or to the beach with their families on Saturdays, eat chocolate. Now, driving on Saturdays is forbidden, and Irish music and chocolate are banned. Women must part their hair in the middle; men must roll up their pant legs. Women can only wear dresses on weekends.

“It has slowly evolved into a very harsh, authoritarian-type of system,” the member who lived in Boulder said, describing the leadership’s reaction to the affairs as “total lockdown.”

Even before her husband’s death last year, Marsha Spriggs was the de facto leader of the Twelve Tribes, ex-members said, though the Tribes’ patriarchal organization would never formally reflect that.

And there were subtle signs that Eugene Spriggs may not have approved of everything his group had become, ex-members said. In 2012, a year before Wiseman left the cult, he confessed to Spriggs, who used the name Yoneq, that he drank beer with his wife, against the cult’s rules.

“He said, ‘Just don’t talk about it,’” Wiseman said.

The ex-member who left in his 30s said he met one-on-one with Eugene Spriggs as a teenager in the mid-1990s and told the man about horrific childhood abuse he’d endured in the Twelve Tribes. He said the founder wept silently as he shared the details of the abuse.

But after just five minutes, Marsha Spriggs burst into the room and sent the member out. She spoke to her husband briefly then cornered the member in the hallway.

“She comes out and says, ‘If you ever tell Yoneq anything like that again, I’ll send you (away from us) that day,’” the member said.

Years later, that member sneaked out of a Twelve Tribes commune in the middle of the night with a duffel bag of clothes. He waited in the bushes for a ride from a man who’d left the cult years before. That night, he slept on his friend’s floor.

In the morning, he woke up.

He drank a cup of coffee, forbidden in the cult.

And he realized he was, for the first time in his life, completely in charge of his own choices.

“I felt like I could float away,” he said. “That feeling, it’s impossible to describe. That feeling of freedom. And honestly, I feel some level of that every day.”

 Andre Shepherd is pictured at his apartment in Cañon City on Jan. 31, 2022. Shepherd said his ex-wife joined the Twelve Tribes religious cult in Manitou Springs with their daughter, who is now 8 years old. She’s since moved to a California compound with their daughter, and he’s preparing for a renewed custody battle. In past court filings, he has raised concerns about the religious cult’s racist teachings and their impact on his daughter.

Shepherd knew little about the religious cult early on, but became uneasy as he learned more, particularly with the group’s teachings around race, which say that Black people are cursed to be subservient to white people.

Shepherd, who is Black, went to court in 2019 to seek full custody of his daughter, objecting to both the group’s racism and its practice of physically disciplining children. A Colorado Springs judge denied his petition, and in December, his ex-wife, who is white, took their daughter and moved to California, despite their shared custody.

“I’m going to try to fight it,” Shepherd, 31, said.

While the Twelve Tribes carefully curates a harmless, idyllic public image when visited by outsiders, the group’s racist, misogynistic and homophobic teachings are well known to ex-members, who described the philosophies and other problems within the cult to The Denver Post for a series of three stories this week.

In 26 hours of interviews, 10 ex-members said the Twelve Tribes requires excessive corporal punishment, fails to stop child sexual abuse and exploits followers for labor. The Post also reviewed nearly 400 pages of the Twelve Tribes’ internal teachings to inform this reporting.

About 3,000 people are estimated to be members of the Twelve Tribes, which maintains about three dozen worldwide communities. Followers live communally and, ex-members say, work without pay at the Twelve Tribes’ assorted businesses. The cult, which began in 1972 in Tennessee, expanded to Colorado in the early 2000s and now has two communes on the Front Range, one in Boulder County and another in Manitou Springs, with an estimated 50 to 70 local members.

The Twelve Tribes drew attention earlier this year when officials confirmed they were investigating whether the Marshall fire may have started on the group’s Boulder County property, though authorities have not yet announced any conclusions about the deadly wildfire’s origin.

Twelve Tribes leaders contacted by The Post either declined to comment or briefly defended the group, which blends elements of Christianity and Judaism with its founder’s personal beliefs. Leaders did not answer a list of questions emailed to the group’s headquarters, and a local leader at Boulder’s Yellow Deli declined to let The Post visit the group’s Boulder compound.

“I appreciate you calling me, but we just don’t really have a whole lot of interest in talking to the media,” said leader and longtime member Tim Pendergrass, who lives on a Florida commune.

The group can be considered a cult because of its all-or-nothing belief system centered around a charismatic, authoritarian leader, cult expert Janja Lalich said. Cults have extremist ideologies and use coercion to control or exploit members, she said.

Generally, Twelve Tribes members do not hesitate to mislead or lie to outside, worldly authorities when challenged by police investigations or in court — a tactic that Shepherd apparently ran into when he sought custody of his daughter.

“They have no problem with lying, because everyone out here doesn’t need to know the truth,” said a member who left in his 30s and spoke to The Post on condition he not be identified to protect family still in the cult. “Whatever they need to say to keep on doing what they do is what they’re going to say.”

A sign welcomes people outside the Twelve Tribes community in Boulder on Feb. 10, 2022. The Twelve Tribes has locations in Manitou Springs and Boulder County.

Custody fight

Shepherd’s daughter lives two different lives. When she’s with her mother in the Twelve Tribes, she wears conservative clothing, lives communally, is barred from having toys or games and is only allowed to go swimming if she swims laps followed by jumping jacks.

The Twelve Tribes gave Shepherd’s daughter a new name — he refuses to use it and still calls her by her birth name, which she now refers to as her “heathen name,” Shepherd said. When his daughter is with him, she wears modern clothing, watches TV, plays with toys.

“One time, I went in there (to the commune), and they have this little closet, and in a little box, she had a couple toys,” he said. His daughter led him to the secret spot. “And she said, ‘OK, we just keep this in here for me.’”

Over time he grew worried because his daughter, now 8, sometimes had unexplained marks and bruises on her body. Once, when she was 4 or 5 years old, she arrived for his parenting time with a particularly nasty scratch on her torso — nothing that needed stitches, but enough to leave a scar — and told him she’d been hurt climbing down a ladder from a roof.

But it was when his daughter said she was “Cham” and had “Cham family” that Shepherd sat down and researched the Twelve Tribes’ teachings on race.

The cult believes Black people are cursed to be slaves, according to a 2005 teaching obtained by The Post. The teaching comes out of a Biblical story involving Noah and his three sons. Under the Tribes’ interpretation, each son represents a race: one son is white, another Asian, and one, named Cham, is Black. In the story, Noah gets drunk and passes out naked in his tent. Cham sees his naked father and tells his brothers. They react by walking backward into the tent to cover Noah’s nakedness. Noah then wakes and curses Cham for mocking him, and says he and his descendants must be slaves to his white brother.

The Tribes teaches that any poverty, unrest or problems affecting Black people today are because Black people are not subservient to white people and are living against God’s natural order. Only by joining the Twelve Tribes can Black people be freed from the curse, the cult asserts in its teachings.

“The more men try to set Cham free, he gets worse and worse in his own soul… Slavery is the only way for some people to be useful in society,” a 1988 Twelve Tribes teaching reads. “They wouldn’t do anything productive without being forced to.”

Once, as they talked about their daughter misbehaving, Shepherd’s ex-wife said, “‘Oh, we just say that’s the Cham in her,’” Shepherd recalled.

Andre Shepherd is pictured at his apartment in Cañon City on Jan. 31, 2022.

In court, when he objected to the racism, and to his daughter being called a “Chamite,” or a descendant of Cham, Shepherd’s ex-wife testified that the teaching was about “one of Noah’s sons who went to Africa,” according to court documents.

That’s not what the teaching is about, former members said. But Twelve Tribes’ members do not hesitate to lie to authorities to protect themselves, ex-members said. It’s a practice based on the Biblical account of Rahab, who in the Bible story hides two Israelite spies and lies to authorities about it, which the Tribes sees as a righteous act.

District Court Judge Erin Sokol dismissed Shepherd’s concern about racism, court records show.

“The Court does not find any credible evidence that the community is racist, but out of respect for Father asks Mother not to have anyone in the community describe (the daughter) as a ‘hamite’ (sic) or to use that description because it is offensive,” she wrote in an order. “The Court finds… this community has cross-cultural values and acceptance of people from all different cultures, ethnicities and races.”

The judge also approved disciplining Shepherd’s daughter with a wooden rod, with the instruction that only the girl’s mother could hit her. A child welfare investigator assigned to the case visited the Twelve Tribes and found no problems, court records show.

“The children appear to be healthy, happy, well-socialized and musically inclined,” the order reads.

RELATED: “They are evil”: Ex-Twelve Tribes members describe child abuse, control inside religious cult

Shepherd received 50/50 parenting time, though his daughter was in her mother’s care for a significant number of religious holidays and weeks-long religious festivals, which made the split less even, he said.

His daughter has adjusted well to living in both worlds, Shepherd said. He hasn’t seen as many marks on her since the revised court order, and her early talk about sinners burning in lakes of fire has turned more toward spreading the good word. Shepherd is careful how he talks about the Twelve Tribes around his daughter, not wanting to disparage the life she’s in.

“She’s adapted,” he said. “She’s going to be happy where she’s going to be.”

The split parenting time worked until the end of December, when Shepherd’s ex-wife took their daughter to a Twelve Tribes community in California. Leadership at the Twelve Tribes routinely moves members around from community to community, ex-members said, in part to keep people from becoming too comfortable or connected to a particular place. Separating families is also a common tactic.

Shepherd’s ex-wife originally proposed the idea as a temporary trip, maybe a week or two, but now says they’ll be staying in California permanently, despite Shepherd’s weekly visitation rights.

He’s having trouble getting in touch with his ex-wife and daughter through the California community’s one shared phone, Shepherd said. The line will ring and ring, then say the voicemail is full. So he’s preparing for a renewed custody fight, trying to scrounge up another $5,000 to pay for a lawyer’s retainer. He’s looking into fundraising for an attorney or finding free legal help.

Shepherd said his ex-wife told him she was moving because of “the community’s needs.”

“That doesn’t come before my daughter,” he said.

Alina Anderson, who asked to be identified by her middle name and former married name, is at her apartment on Feb. 1, 2022 in Boulder. She grew up in the Twelve Tribes religious cult before escaping as a teenager.

Women must submit

While every member of the Twelve Tribes is required to conform to the cult’s rules and subject to the edicts of leadership, women are particularly powerless in the highly patriarchal society, ex-members said.

Alina Anderson, an ex-member born into the cult who left in 2001 when she was 14, remembered walking in on her father kicking her mother as she lay on the floor in the fetal position when Anderson was 10 or 11.

“I freaked out,” she said. “…I went to get help for my mother. You know what they told me? They said, ‘Your father is the man of the house, so he can do whatever.’ Me trying to get help for my mother did nothing. It may have made the situation worse; in hindsight it probably did.”

Anderson is identified by her middle and formerly married last names to avoid being recognized by current Twelve Tribes’ members. Women have little autonomy or authority in the highly-patriarchal cult, and are expected to submit to men, according to their teachings.

“They believe women’s rightful place is in absolute submission to men,” the member who left in his 30s said. “…The girls raised there have been raised from birth to believe this. They have no-self worth, they have no value, except in reference to men.”

Marriages are carefully curated and allowed only with the approval of leaders; divorce is almost never allowed, unless one spouse leaves the group. Single people in the Twelve Tribes usually share bedrooms, but married couples are given a private bedroom — a major perk.

Interracial marriages are strongly discouraged, and homosexuality is considered a sin worthy of death, according to a teaching reviewed by The Post.

“They must be put to death,” the 1990 teaching reads. “Homosexuality is a capital offense. They did what was detestable, and they became detestable.”

In the past, children or teenagers suspected of being gay were interrogated and punished in inquisitions, ex-members said.

John I. Post, who grew up in the Twelve Tribes, came out as gay after he fled the group and went to college, once he’d started to undo what he described as “brainwashing” about homosexuality.

“(My dad) told me that I was going to hell for being gay,” he said. His mother supported him, he said, even though she is still in the group.

Post hopes to see the Twelve Tribes end, though he and other first-generation children worry about what might happen to their parents if it dissolved. After decades in the cult, they’d be kicked to the curb with no retirement funds, no insurance, no homes.

“I told my family we need to be prepared to support our parents,” Post said. “…I read a book about different cults — the average length is about 20 years and it falls apart. Now the Twelve Tribes, they’re still alive, barely. They will fall apart. They will.”

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