He Grew Up With 300 Siblings and 27 Moms, and He Doesn’t Recommend It: ‘You Might Think I Was Living in a Mansion Like Mark Zuckerberg’
They didn't even have a stove.
Under current economic conditions, some families struggle to keep bills paid and everyone else fed. When a family is bigger, there may be an assumption that they must live in a mansion or a spacious property. But coming from a family with dozens of siblings and mothers, John Billings (@thejohnbillings) told a different story online.
“There’s a lot of people wondering what it’s like to live with 300 siblings and 27 moms,” Billings said on TikTok. He claimed to have grown up in The Kingston Group, more popularly known as The Latter Day Church of Christ. Not to be confused with the Church of the Latter Day Saints, the Kingston Group is known for practicing polygamy among its members.
“Some people think I lived in this huge house with all these siblings and wives in the same house. You might think I was living in a mansion like Mark Zuckerberg,” Billings quipped. Some people may think a family of five is already difficult to feed. One woman even had to squeeze her $15 at Walmart to feed her family of five for dinner. But in Billings’ case, he had an unusually large number of siblings. Despite saying his mother was married to Paul Kingston, the church’s leader, Billings said his mother’s side of the family endured hardship.
“But the reality is a lot of these families live in extreme poverty, including my family,” Billings alleged. He continued, “And because my mom was the wife of Paul Kingston, she was not allowed to live off any government assistance because Paul was scared that the government would come after him if she did use government assistance.” Essentially, his mother’s status as the leader’s wife did not spare them from economic woes.
It’s not affordable to live with that many siblings and moms.
“She was living paycheck to paycheck, through an order job, getting paid minimum wage, with nine kids,” he claimed. He also said that he and his siblings were expected to live in harsh conditions. The family was barely getting by and couldn’t afford home repairs, such as getting a window fixed.
As proof, Billings showed a photo of a room, which he said was the inside of his childhood home. Parts of the wall had been scraped out, with one side having faded paint. The ceiling had holes, and the floors were cluttered with debris. The wooden structural supports of the room were showing. There was also a bathroom sink, bathtub, toilet, and drawer, but it’s unclear if these amenities were functional.
“We didn’t have a stove, we didn’t have a sink, we microwaved our food. And if we wanted to wash dishes, we brought a bin to the backyard, filled it with water, and washed our dishes through hose water,” Billings alleged.
“There was one point we didn’t have hot water in our house, so we had to go collect water from outside, boil it, and fill our tub with water,” he recalled. It was a home that essentially rivals the house of horrors in Missouri, where a twelve-year-old child was found running away in nothing but diapers.
“Somebody needs to put an end to this, which is why I’m speaking up. I want to be able to have a voice out there. Let people know what’s going on inside these groups,” Billings advocated. But Billings is not the first and only former member of the group to speak out. Amanda Grant, a self-professed ex-member, raised eyebrows online when she talked about the Kingston Group’s strange fascination for blood testing.
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