Rev. John R. Rice

Rev. John Richard Rice was a Baptist evangelist and pastor from Texas. He founded "The Sword of the Lord", a religious newspaper based upon fundamentalist and white suprematistic views. Rice was born in Cooke County, TX, just north of Fort Worth, TX where Roy E. Davis began his evangelistic career. Rice was the son of Will Rice, a preacher, one-term state legislator, Freemason in the Masonic order of Odd Fellows, and an outspoken member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Many of the “divine truths” that William Branham claimed to bring from God to a "lost and dying world" came to Rice long before William Branham's rise to fame in the Post WWII Healing Revivals. Aligned with the Ku Klux Klan, rice was very outspoken against the Catholic Church. As a hard-core fundamentalist, Rice was strongly against women in leadership roles in the church and taught that women should be subservient to men. He was also strongly against women cutting their hair, which he called "bobbing their hair". In fact, Rice published a book explaining these positions, called "Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers". These doctrines from Rice would become common themes in William Branham's ministry and foundational doctrines for Branham's cult of personality.

Interestingly, Rice also claimed to have had predictions concerning the Fascism of Italy, which William Branham also began claiming in the 1950s. In March of 1953, Branham began claiming to have prophesied in 1933 that Fascist leader Benito Mussolini would cause the end of world peace.

You can learn this and more on william-branham.org.

John R. Rice:
https://william-branham.org/site/research/people/john_r._rice

Mussolini Prophecy:
https://william-branham.org/site/research/people/benito_mussolini