Intellectual Bankruptcy

 

The above video was picked up by PZ Myers and was the source of much amusement among his followers. GOP candidate Darren Baily looks to be a young earth fundamentalist and apparently believes that dinosaurs and humans co-existed. Bailey, a likely MAGArite, Trumpite & Hamite, repeatedly responds to the interviewer's question about whether humans and dinosaurs co-existed with the question "Were you there?". 

I too was amused, especially over those people in dinosaur suits who attend Baily's rallies and send up his views; that's democracy at work for you. And yet at the same time I was horrified to think that this kind of intellectual degeneracy is being promoted in the name of Christianity. 

The eye watering stupidity of Bailey's response is evidence of just how intellectually run-down Christianity is in some parts of the US (and in the UK too). Of course, human beings can't be everywhere at once and many conclusions have to be drawn without eyewitness data, via abductive inference based on evidence (e.g. crime, deep space, the inside of the Sun and planets, complex software bugs, technological malfunctions, historical texts, claims about fairies at the bottom of the garden, ....etc.) In short Baily et. al. are undermining the whole providential rationality of our world with a postmodern take on science. I have a feeling it's no coincidence that Christian young earthism, fideism and gnosticism saw growth in the 1960s around the time postmodernism was geminating too. 

Another source of mindless irrationality is the following epistemic (Often heard from Ken Ham) :

Everyone has the same evidence, but different interpretations occur because of different starting points.

...as if there was no such thing as some world views joining the data dots more consistently, succinctly and predictably than other world views. The deep time theory built up over many years by large numbers of scientists is more probable than the spiritually threatening intellectual ad-hocery of young earthism: Another postmodernist take on science!

Origins of the US Evangelical Right

Well, according to a Christian cowboy he certainly would be shooting me! 

There was an article in the January 2021 Premier Christianity magazine by Martyn Whittock, a Church of England lay minister and historian. He has written books on the subject of the association of American evangelicalism with right-wing politics (Witness wide support for Donald Trump among US evangelicals for instance). I was therefore very interested in the article he had written, an article entitled "The Disunited States of America". In the article Whittock explains why he thinks right-wing politics and faith have became so entwined in America. Below I discuss some of Whittock's ideas.

ONE) Whittock tells us that in 1954 the words "Under God" were added to the pledge of allegiance. He makes a point similar to that  which can be found on Wiki:

Even though the movement behind inserting "under God" into the pledge might have been initiated by a private religious fraternity and even though references to God appear in previous versions of the pledge, historian Kevin M. Kruse asserts that this movement was an effort by corporate America to instill in the minds of the people that capitalism and free enterprise were heavenly blessed. Kruse acknowledges the insertion of the phrase was influenced by the push-back against Russian and Chinese atheistic communism during the Cold War, but argues the longer arc of history shows the conflation of Christianity and capitalism as a challenge to the New Deal played the larger role.

Here was an early step linking Christianity with capitalism, low taxation, gun rights and the American way, a way which was set over and against communist atheism. These items then naturally became mandated in the Christian right's agenda. For myself I've always traced low taxation and US diffidence toward government regulation back to the very formation of the US in the American revolution, a revolution triggered by the a rejection of colonial taxation and suspicion of a distant central regulator. This history seemed to become ingrained into America culture; as Ronald Reagan said, "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem. This ethos had the upside of helping economic growth via the market but the downside was an irrational suspicion of central government: Such attitudes do help create a power & influence vacuum which gives an opportunist the chance to step into that vacuum (which may be what Trump has done).

TWO)  In the 60s and early 70s there were government moves which were perceived as not favourable to the Christian cultural foundation of America. Viz: The banning of public prayers in schools, regulation of Christian academies, & legalisation of first trimester abortions. Quoting Whittock:

[Evangelicals] felt that Christian values were being overlooked, or caricatured, in the media. Furthermore, they felt that the school system drives a secular agenda. At the same time, the growth in LGBTQ rights challenged the traditional views of marriage and 'acceptable' sexual behaviour..... in short a cultural war began....

With this comment I feel I'm on familiar ground: My understanding of the rise of fundamentalist evangelicalism is that it is a response to the cultural marginalisation of Christianity especially during the 1960s (and into the 1970s) and especially among society's intellectuals who rejected the Christian rationale. In a reactionary move some parts of American evangelicalism became anti-intellectual and anti-science and the symptoms of this are seen in the rise of young earthism (latterly flat earthism) and fideist versions of Christianity that majored in the ecstatic. This was both a protest against the changing social mores and also against intellectual Christianity which was perceived to have failed. It was, I propose, akin to the response of the romantics, as puzzled but naïve Christians tried to regain a sense of sacredness in the creation and reaffirm the ecstatic component of Christian testimony. My understanding here has less to do with historical research than having lived through that time. But according to Whittock, because of conditions peculiar to the US, American evangelicals have also reacted by becoming very politicised and have expressed this via their support of the Republican party, a party which they perceive to be the party of traditional American Christian values. 

THREE)  Then in 2008, Barack Obama happened, says Whittock: He goes on to say:

The election of a young, intelligent, telegenic and highly articulate social progressive (committed to proactive federal government initiatives) was a sharp reversal of all that the evangelical right had been working on for more than 20 years. The Obama presidency was seen as an existential threat. Then the possibility of a political success for a socially progressive female Washington insider, in the form of Hilary Clinton, caused an upsurge of evangelical activism unparalleled in US history. 

FOUR)  Then in 2016 "Trump happened": According to Whittock:

It was this that led 81% of white evangelicals voting for Trump....It was a marriage of convenience in which Trump promised everything on the evangelical agenda.....Evangelicals reciprocated with intense support for a man whose personal and political morality  - which many feel is at odds with Christianity - was set aside in order to win what they perceived as a battle for the soul of America.  

His policy on immigration struck a chord, since polling reveals that 59% of white evangelicals see immigrants as threatening their cultural identity. 

For a group traditionally suspicious of government the necessary Covid-19 restrictions were often seen as unwelcome state interference.   In the same way, the shutting of churches was easy to present as state restrictions on religious freedom...the wearing if masks we seen as a sign of acceptance of state power. This occurred alongside a fear of economic decline as a result of lockdown, which further resonated with a group whose religious beliefs have long been associated with support for American free enterprise. 

....In the aftermath  of Trump's defeat, a well known US evangelical confided to me, in an off-the-record assessment, that the majority of evangelicals believe in Trump's narrative of a "stolen " election, a minority are resigned to a Biden presidency, but will keep fighting to change the abortion law; a smaller minority are relieved at Trump's defeat; and huge numbers of young evangelicals are leaving their highly politicised  spiritual communities. Clearly for US evangelicals the turbulence is far from over. 

***

It was almost as if Trump was stepping into a suit that had been specially tailored for him. The egotistical & cynical Trump exploited this situation to the full. He cynically made friendly overtures toward the crackpot professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and the crazy QAnon theorists - he was of course after the votes of their followers. The ultra-far right fascists and white supremacists were emboldened by Trump and crept out of from under their stones and appeared on the streets. Trump wanted their votes too and therefore wasn't vocal in condemning them. Trump talked the language that the right-wing wanted to hear; gun rights, low taxation, private health care, climate change conspiracy, America first etc; These things came onto the evangelical agenda and became almost mandatory adjuncts to their faith. Trump didn't care who or why people voted for him; he just wanted their votes, he wanted power. But underneath it he had complete contempt for the American system. He denigrated that system, its media and its governance with hints of conspiracy theorism and he attempted to bypass it with popularist rallies and social media. The Capitol Hill insurrection was a natural outcome of Trumpism whether he liked it or not. 

Trump had a sinister looking affinity & rapport with strong arm dictators like Putin, Kim Jong Un, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Mohammed bin Salman. If this was a sign (which think it is) that Trump had the qualities of a crypto-dictator then it is ironic that in some respects he stood for the very opposite of the things those right wing evangelicals elected him for: If allowed to have his way he was the antithesis of individual freedoms and small government. We saw hints of the kind of people Trump attracted when Michael Flynn, one of Trump's side kicks, suggested martial law be imposed to act on Trump's conspiracy theory that the election was rigged and force a re-count in Trump's favour.  But the survivor in Trump probably realised that would make America look like a tin-pot military state and blow his cover completely. The revelation of Trump's threatening phone call to a Republican election official telling him to find more votes or else, taken together with the Capitol Hill insurrection looked bad enough as it was! 

But the Christian right wing were blind to all this, blinded by their seeing the world through the paranoid spectacles of proto-Conspiracy theorism. For them mild social reforms, liberal attitudes, government initiatives and regulation were seen as the harbingers of a communist plot. 

Trump cynically exploited a run down and culturally debased evangelical community just as he had exploited the crackpot conspiracy theorists like Jones and QAnon. In fact there is an overlap between right-wing evangelicals and conspiracy theorism  (See here).  But many evangelicals, whilst  claiming to support freedom of the individual are the very opposite of what they claim to be; their cultural instincts lead them to favour a highly authoritarian fundamentalism with its absolute certainties, demagogic preachers, "anointed" patriarchs and Godfathers who rule almost by divine right. The notion of epistemic humility is utterly alien to them. They have, in fact, strong autocratic instincts; you will sometimes hear that "A church is a theocracy and not a democracy".  It is unlikely that they would feel such antipathy toward  government if government was in their hands; the tail seeks to wag the dog. Suspicious of government they may be, but I doubt they would be so suspicious if their subliminally dominionist vision came about and they at last held the reigns of power; it would be Rome all over again. 

Some right wing evangelicals attempted to excuse their support for a candidate of clearly compromised political and personal morality by likening him to Cyrus or King Jehu, Biblical figures who worked out God's plans in spite of themselves. That right-wing evangelicals drew this parallel is revealing of their autocratic tendencies: Cyrus and Jehu were Middle Eastern despots at the centre of monarchical systems, circumstances hardly paralleled in democratic America. Right wing evangelicalism's subliminally monocratic vision  of government was no model for democracy. I felt a certain amount of dubiousness when one citizen supporter of Trump told me that he believed the "Republic was being rebirthed".  On the news I heard another Trump supporter saying they wanted Trump to set up a Trump dynasty. So perhaps the "rebirth" was as a monocratic system with a Trump dynasty at its head? In which case it would no longer be a republic!

The much hoped for scenario of the right-wing evangelical imagination found expression in a solid wall of "charismatic prophecies" that wrongly predicted a Trump electoral win**. Well, if there had been a Trump win I can tell them this: According to Tolkien only one hand can wear the ring of absolute power, the one ring to rule them all.  That's why we have democracy instead of "Theocracy": Democracy attempts to distribute the power among epistemically and morally flawed humanity and forces them to give public account of themselves to one another. This may lead to untidy, messy and argumentative government, but such a system acknowledges that humanity is flawed, epistemically and morally, so that's to be expected. The fundamentalist kindergarten versions of Christianity abdicate their epistemic responsibilities and look for security & certainty and seek to end argument & debate with what they claim to be channels of unambiguous  divine revelation either in the form of so-called "plain readings" of scripture and/or the rule of "anointed" patriarchs. 

Relevant Links

The wasting of the evangelical mind

Footnote

** The news from America is that all the influential "charismatic prophets" wrongly predicted a Trump election win.  This systematic error is evidence of a systemic problem: One might argue that since we would stop listening to one prophet who got it wrong on many prophecies why should we listen to an ensemble of culturally related prophets all of whom got it wrong on one prophecy? One commentator on the failed Trump prophecies expressed his belief that some of the "prophets" had a good track record and were respected Charismatic patriarchs & therefore still worth listening too. But for me, given the sectarian complexity of evangelical culture, life's far too short to rake through this extensive and varied culture and make such fine tuned distinctions, if indeed they exist as substantive distinctions. I've got better things to do.

ADDENDUM 07/09/21

If the possibility of fundamentalist dominionists being at the head of a Western dictatorship seems farfetched let’s recall that many American Christian fundamentalists are closely linked to Donald Trump the man who:

a) Vowed to “drain the swamp” of America’s well established democratic government,

b) Attempted to by-pass established democratic institutions and set up his alternatives,

c) Hobnobbed with professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and gave credence to the QAnon theorists,

d) Seeded the democratic debate with conspiracy theories,

e) Arguably helped provoke the attack on Capitol Hill,

f) Emboldened race supremacists & fascists, (cf. the Charlottesville rally)

g) Had a rapport with dictators like Russia’s Putin (etc) 

h) Attempted to intimidate a republican election official into falsifying the vote count 

i) Had an adviser who suggested imposing Trump’s view of the election using military force.  

ADDENDUM 09/09/2021

In an address that can be seen here Steve Bannon, one of Trump's pardoned side kicks uses language that almost sounds as if he wants the 2024 US election to be the inauguration of a new dictatorship: He talks of 20k shock troops on standby ready to take over a country they effectively already control.....

If you’re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately .....pre-trained teams ready to jump into federal agencies.... .We’re winning big in 2024 and we need to get ready now.......We control the country. We’ve got to start acting like it. And one way we’re going to act like it, we’re not going to have 4,000 (shock troops) ready to go, we’re going to have 20,000 ready to go and we’re going to pick the 4,000 best and most ready in every single department.

Perhaps it's all just metaphorical election talk. I hope it is, but do people like Bannon talk in metaphors?  If the far-right win the 2024 election would they ever again concede an electoral defeat if they think of themselves as controlling the country? Having crawled over the back of Trump could Bannon one day call himself "president"?

News Monitor

On Steve Bannon:

Capitol riot: Lawmakers vote to hold Steve Bannon in contempt - BBC News

Trump to start social media under his control:

Trump to launch new social media platform TRUTH Social - BBC News

The Poverty of Prosperity Teaching

After the depressing series I've run on Bethel supremo Bill Johnson I thought I would end the series on a positive note: Well sort of....

Job and his "comforters"; Job's suffering didn't last but like all suffering,

when you are in it, it lasts too long!

As if to dispel any doubt that Premier Christianity  Magazine eschews the prosperity gospel we find an article in the July edition by the editor Sam Hailes entitled  "I was is in constant agony". At the very start of the article we read:

Eric Gaudion's story is an affront to the prosperity gospel. It contradicts the misguided belief that Christians don't get sick. It challenges those who guarantee your healing - if only you pray harder, obey more or have more faith.

Hailes then goes on to relate the story of Christian Eric Gaudion, a  Pentecostal minister afflicted for 22 years with acute haemorrhaging pancreatitis. As a Pentecostal he had no a priori principles which impeded him seeking and believing in prayer for miraculous healing, but....

...nothing seemed to work. "I had so much oil poured on my head I wonder that my hair ever dried!"

Instead Guadion had years and years of terrible pain and once very nearly died in the intensive care unit. There was psychological trauma too, for himself and his family. He was also tormented by Job's comforters...

...telling him to "pray about it" asking "Where's your faith" or even suggesting he'd been cursed. [These] were all examples of how poor theology can magnify a person's suffering. "The very worst was claiming I'd been demonised" Gaudion says.

Tell me about it! I once met a Christian schizophrenic who was told that he was in bondage to the demonic and he should have an exorcism! I'm really ashamed of many evangelical Christians with their crackpot superstitions and that's before we get to the Trump supporting Christians with their Covid 19 denying, conspiracy theory pushing and gun toting anti-establishmentarianism. As with Bill Johnson, if something doesn't quite go the way they want or expect they witch hunt until they find someone to blame. 

But then in 2017 the medical profession came up trumps. Gaudion had a risky operation that had only been done once before. In fact it was so experimental that the BBC filmed the 16hr operation. The procedure  would....

... remove his pancreas and transplant the islets that produce insulin in the liver.

It worked:

"I'm completely free. I'm no longer on opiates. I have no pain. I thank God that my life has been transformed". 

The article says that Gaudion has written a book about his journey, a book which grapples with the theology of suffering: It's titled: "Through Storms: A manual for when life hurts". The article in Christianity finishes with a final comment from Gaudion himself (alluding to Covid 19):

We're facing a massive loss and grief and I feel God's heart is with us in that grieving process; that he weeps over the losses and shares with us in the pain of all that's happening. We also know our God is a redeeming God. And he longs to work even in crises like this, to redeem, to restore, to rebuild and, ultimately to bring us through. 

As a rule I don't comment on the question of suffering and evil (I've really only ever done one article on the subject) as so much ink has been spilt on the subject already and in any case I feel that people like Gaudion are far better qualified to speak about it. Gaudion's story is challenging and humbling: Could I go through with that kind of suffering and successfully come out the other end? I'm afraid to say that I really don't think I'm made of that kind of heroic stuff, but it's good to know that some people are.

As I have said more than once, credit must go to Premier Christianity for their honest, candid and courageous publishing, especially as so much evangelicalism is in the grip of triumphalism, superficiality, self-deceiving sophistry and a distinct lack of intellectual integrity. I have at times complained about some of Christianity's occasional writers but I think I can say that on the whole we are dealing with an honest editorial team that doesn't overlook tricky issues and faces them square on. But otherwise there is a large swathe of evangelicalism badly in need of a challenge to its spiritual complacency, cloud cuckoo land fundamentalism, irrational fideism, elitist gnosticism and above all its selective gullibility.

Gaudion's story is a fitting end to my series on the self-deceiving spiritual spin of Bill Johnson.

***

For the previous parts see:

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2019/11/prosperity-christianity-part-1.html

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2019/12/prosperity-christianity-part-ii.html

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2020/01/prosperity-christianity-part-iii.html

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2020/03/prosperity-christianity-part-iv-and.html

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2020/05/prosperity-christianity-part-v.html

Prosperity Christianity Part V: Soft-cop theologian examines Bethel Biblically.

Mike Winger Soft Cops Bill Johnson. 

For the previous parts see:

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2019/11/prosperity-christianity-part-1.html

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2019/12/prosperity-christianity-part-ii.html

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2020/01/prosperity-christianity-part-iii.html

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2020/03/prosperity-christianity-part-iv-and.html

The above video is an analysis of the Bethel movement by Mike Winger. He himself is a charismatic and is no enemy of Signs and Wonders per se. He's also generous toward Bethelism and doesn't deny that some of Bethel's teaching can inspire. I would call him a "soft-cop"; in fact some of the comments in the YouTube comments thread suggest he's too generous. But having listened to Winger I can only say that if Winger is a soft-cop then just how hard are those hard cops? I'll move onto a hard cop later on, but really who needs hard cops when we've got Mike Winger's devastating points of criticism! I would, nevertheless,  recommend Winger's video to anyone wanting to find out more about Bethelism. On second thoughts I think he's a "fair cop"!

Winger's Verdict

The following is my interpretation of some of Winger's salient points. This interpretation can be checked by looking at the video. [I have put my own additions in square brackets] 

Winger says he's watched 60hrs of Bethel video footage to come to his conclusions. He doesn't accept that they are a front for shadowy demonic influences and believes that Bill Johnson and his lieutenant Kris Valloton are Christians. He even accepts that real healings do come out of this movement. But he believes there is a lot of fake stuff coming out of it as well. He says that Bill Johnson's vision for Bethel is that of spear heading a world wide movement. Through what they claim to be an apostolic network they aim to bring revival to the world wide church after the image of their own concept of revival. Johnson believes this revival will come by proactively exporting their "Jesus culture". [It's true that the Bethel influence has popped up all over place!]

But Winger sees a mixed bag. He sees twisted theology, a theology which encourages its followers to be fake and to fake healings and prophecies. Johnson's followers call him an apostle although he never makes use of that title himself; but he doesn't stop his followers thinking of him as such.  [The "apostles" of the circa 1980s "Restoration" movement  adopted a very similar coy-strategy to their apostleship] 

Winger shows a clip where it appears that Johnson is saying that "teaching" has less to do with Biblical text than it does in having an apostle as a channel of teaching. He thus subtly shifts the disciples attention away from Scripture to the apostolic figure himself and his authoritative teaching. [Hence, the cut, thrust and ongoing contention of Biblically based argumentation is supplanted by the authoritative quietus imposed by the apostle, where the apostle is almost a kind of embodiment of the Word.... clearly a dangerous precedent given that only Christ himself has claim to the title of being the Word]

On healing Johnson becomes even more extreme: Using Galatians 1 & 2 he informs us that anyone who doesn't accept Johnson's claim that all must be healed is in effect teaching a different gospel! Johnson talks about Jesus being "perfect theology" which for him means we simply must follow Jesus' practices and in a literal sense do as Jesus did: To this end Johnson resolves the resultant contradictions with scripture by constructing a doctrine of "Truth priorities": For Johnson some things in scripture are true but other things are "truer". His lesser truth category means that Johnson can ignore or override, for example, the tribulations of Job in favour of his "Jesus is perfect theology" prosperity Gospel. [Johnson neglects the fact it is still our responsibility to interpret the meaning of Christ's life and therefore we can make no claim to having in our hands "perfect theology" when we study and follow Christ]

To further justify Bethel's prosperity teaching Johnson uses the argument that "God can't give what he doesn't have". Therefore God can only impart health and wealth because He only  has health and wealth - i.e. he doesn't have poverty and ill health. e.g. God doesn't have cancer therefore he won't give you cancer. Consequently Christians must be rich and healthy. Winger calls this shallow theology.  (And see Rev 2:22-23).  But did Jesus really teach a prosperity Gospel? Johnson uses Mat 6:10 to justify his position, but Winger says that this verse only finally applies in the fullness of time when there is, eventually, no death (See Rev. 21:4). In contrast Chris Volloton has said "No one in our congregation is allowed to die except of old age". So says Winger, Vollonton accepts that death does eventually come to Bethelites and therefore Mat 6:10 doesn't, after all, hold at Bethel! 

At Bethel it feels as though there are a lot of healings taking place. But they get round the fact that healing doesn't always happen by poor confirmation of healing and using a doctrine of "keeping your healing"; that is, if your symptoms come back you are told that you are "losing your healing" which then triggers a process of spiritual investigation & diagnosis as to why the healing hasn't taken. They also talk about "the fragility of the anointing": Bill Johnson's son has a hearing problem which hasn't been healed. Once again Johnson finds an excuse to ignore this glaring inconsistency: He says that it will ruin his own anointing if he thinks with critical awareness about this inconsistency. Hence there is pressure at Bethel to avoid thinking about negative outcomes because if you do then Johnson's says it may badly effect your anointing. Bethel, therefore, have many ways of explaining away and/or coping with apparent failures of healing and this includes encouragement to turn a blind eye if no spiritual explanation is available .[In effect Johnson is proactively barring intellectual integrity as a harmful influence on their fellowship; hence a gullible unquestioning idiocy is actively encouraged at Bethel - Idiots for Christ!] 

For Bill Johnson's Bethel any nice and positive sounding words that someone feels they should say are liable to be ranked as prophecy; but only positive, happy words are allowed. Negative prophecies are banned at Bethel.  Hence Bethel becomes the source of many fake prophecies. Bethel also has such a thing as "Destiny cards" which are suspiciously like Tarot cards. 

Bethel are trying to engineer a revival in their own image. They are a contrived movement. 

So that finishes with Winger's assessment. I now want move on to.....ressurection.

A Prayer for Resurrection

The ethos of unwillingness to face the tricky realities of Christian life with critical awareness recently had a very sad nemesis at Bethel. In a very public display the Bethel fellowship prayed fervently for the resurrection of the deceased daughter of one of their worship leaders. The matter was reported in a news item in the February 2020 of Premier Christianity magazine. But the affair also got a wide airing in the secular media; the full glare of public attention as the magazine puts it. The Christianity article tells us how for several nights Bethel held services where they implored God for a resurrection, but after a week they faced the heart-breaking and tragic reality of the infant's death. 

The article quotes Johnson's well known position on healing, a position which is based on the notion that Christ's sacrificial death has already "purchased healing" (A common theological cliche among prosperity healers),  a position that encourages a witch-hunt seeking spiritual pathology should God not deliver (My emphases):

"When he bore our stripes in His body He made a payment for our miracle. He already decided to heal. You can't decide not to buy something after you've already bought it.....All lack is on our end of the equation". 

Well, that tells us where Johnson is going to look for spiritual failure when his prosperity expectations aren't fulfilled!  And I don't think Johnson is the sort of guy who is just going to tell us that his church was merely trying to be obedient to Christ's command to raise the dead (Mat 10:8) as Christianity quotes him, and then leave it at that. No, rather than just shrugging his shoulders Johnson looks like a man who is going to angle for a source of blame. But one thing you can't accuse these Bethelites of and that is a lack of belief. So where is Johnson's theological logic going to take him?  Perhaps he'll blame those Christians who criticise his "perfect theology"? After all, those who criticise his prosperity line on healing will, according to Johnson,  be teaching another gospel!

But undaunted by Johnson's theologically threatening position Christianity magazine, partly through the mouths of various pundits, arrays a strong critique of Johnson and Bethel. It is in great contrast to the Christianity article I quoted in part I where the reporter seems to be a Johnson convert. In this latest article, however, we hear that: 

The episode was grounded in really poor theology....you just take little snapshots of the Bible and pick out phrases here and there to extrapolate these huge expectations to command how God should act in a situation......they were praying for only one possible outcome...A wise pastor would stand with the bereaved parents while also gently sharing that God may have other plans as well.....Many evangelical writers have expressed similar concerns....Bethel's theology results of a transactional view of God....God is seen as a genie who will always say yes to our requests if we just say the magic formula.....my anxiety is around the mental health of the parents and the wider community when the miracle was not forth coming.

But Johnson takes no responsibility for the event. He says that they...

...had no option but to ask for resurrection, because that was what Jesus commanded his disciples to seek after.

...and remember if you don't accept Johnson's view without qualification then you may be accused of  preaching another gospel!

Christianity magazine tries put a brave face on it along and the best gloss. The hope was that....

....this story would encourage small churches to pray for healing miracles not out of habit but in the hope that God may actually act....all Christians should trust God enough to ask for big outlandish miracles even if they don't happen.

I doubt it: More like it will make Christians wary of such public failure. The Christianity article still talks about "the struggle against the giant of unbelief". I don't see any unbelief at Bethel (although I do see a lot of gullibility). Talk like this will only create more unresolved conflict, loss of confidence, heart searching and guilt in the lives of believers about their "lack of faith". Pray for healings and miracles by all means but don't think they are a reward for faith and if they don't happen don't then embark on a witch hunt for a lack of faith and/or spiritual failure somewhere. So in spite of starting well, in the final analysis  the Christianity article falls down badly, yet again.

The Hard Cop

We find our really hard cop on this web site:

http://watchman4wales.blogspot.com/search/label/Bill%20Johnson

Now I'm not sure I would want to meet this guy in a dark alley because he would likely hard-cop me and accuse me of heresy as soon as look at me. But then Bill Johnson, as we have seen, is himself a hard cop who is likely to tell us we are preaching another gospel if we don't tow his line on healing. One hard cop deserves another! So here we go with our stern Watchman4Wales' verdict on Bethel and the Johnsons:

It is important to note that the Ffald-y-Brenin bookshop is also very well-stocked with the works of Bill and Beni Johnson, the Senior Pastors of Bethel "Church" in Redding, California. This has to be one of the unsafest "Christian" couples on the planet, their "Christianity" having all the authenticity of a paste diamond, with Bethel having far more in common with sorcery and New Age mystical spirituality than with Biblical Christianity. From gold dust to glory clouds, from falling feathers to fire tunnels, from floating orbs to a born-again "Jesus," from waking up sleeping angels to grave-sucking necromancy, absolutely anything goes at Bethel under the Johnsons' (mis)leadership.

The Ffald-y-Brenin bookshop can thus lamentably be seen to be recklessly disseminating to the unsuspecting an alternative form of faith that is assuredly NOT the true Faith, but instead a deeply fallacious mystical New Age delusion, a cunning counterfeit of Biblical Christianity inspired not by the Holy Spirit but by a subtle and seducing utterly unclean spirit, working stealthily out of the war-camp of the Enemy!

To back up the charges of necromancy we are provided with pictures of "grave-sucking". Below I  include these pictures with their captions: 

And here's Beni Johnson herself, soaking up the anointing of  C.S. Lewis's bones by lying on his grave in Oxford. She also uses a 528HZ tuning fork for prophetic purposes...

A group of students from Bill Johnson's Bethel School of the Supernatural engage in sucking up Evan Roberts' anointing from his grave at Loughor in South Wales...

Hard copping done! Need I say more? 

Summing Up

Large swathes of Christian culture lack intellectual integrity. In fact I've long since come to terms with the fact that Christianity as a faith is extremely idiot proof - that is, it has a high resilience to the large numbers of gullible idiots (some of whom actually classify as malign idiots) who enter the faith. But in spite of taking onboard hoards of these idiots the integrity and dignity of Christianity's high sounding cosmic message of salvation is no more compromised than is the majesty of deep space in the presence of a few deluded "grave suckers" who inhabit one small corner of the cosmos. If I didn't believe this there would be no Christian faith for me (See here and here). In fact the only other (intolerable) alternative to the Open Gospel would be to join one of Christianity's  mean  little "holy remnants"  of huddled Christian crazies who think of themselves and their sect as the one and only true church and all others to be potentially demonic. Like Winger I don't believe Bethel are demonic but they do have a high density of gullible stupidity in their ranks, a stupidity which allows people like Johnson and Valloton to peddle their prosperity gospel justified as it is by a shallow, muddled and incoherent "quip theology".

Stay comatose!

As we have seen in this series Johnson's strategy is to do what he can to block any self reflecting & self critical stance, a stance which is liable to endanger the Bethelist philosophy of comatose forgetfulness. Critical-think, Johnson effectively warns, may lead to the loss of your all-important "anointing". Any apparent inconsistencies of Johnson's philosophy with scripture are dealt with by a doctrine which ranks and prioritises truths so that some truths can be regarded as overriding other truths. (Winger rightly identifies this notion as gobbledegook). As Winger says Johnson has therefore found ways of preventing scripture as a whole of correcting his contention that Jesus' life entails a prosperity gospel. This prosperity gospel, according to Winger, flies in the face of Job.  The ultimate backstop to critical thought is found in the notion that apostles are a kind of incarnation of scriptural teaching. Hence when the chips are down they can pull out this authoritarian card in order to further help ease through their theology. A claim to authority is the ultimate device to stultify a Berean assault on Johnsonianism. This is, however, not an original strategy: I remember reading the restorationist Arthur Wallis where he claimed that the chief way restorationist leaders exert their authority is via their Bible teaching. Thus, in effect  they claim a special almost priestly right to interpret scripture authoritatively (for more on restorationism see here).

At one point in his video Winger remarks on how Bethel teachers teach in a cheeky humorous way. This can be seen with other popular teachers of this ilk; see here. A brash humorous quip theology has great folk appeal.

All in all Bethel have contrived plenty of auxiliary hypotheses for explaining away failed miracles and stopping critical analysis of this failure in its tracks. Let us recall, however, that Bethel is a highly predatory sect determined to stamp their image on the rest of Christianity: They are pulling out all the stops to spread Johnson's teaching. But they may now have pulled out one stop too many.  Like the Restorationism of circa 1980 its empire building appeal will eventually peter out. 

Note:

Early posts I did on Johnson:

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2008/04/big-preacher-guy-phenomenon.html

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2008/05/spiritual-spin.html

Prosperity Christianity Part III

Bethel: Jesus Cult or Jesus Culture? 

(See part I and part II here and here)

The August 2019 edition of Premier Christianity magazine carried an article on the Brudehof Christian community. From the article alone one can be forgiven for assuming that Brudehof are just another Christian variant that can be placed in the mainstream. But anyone who understands the sectarian mind knows that Brudehof would likely vehemently reject this themselves; if my hunches about them are right then they would see the mainstream as at best a tainted compromised version of Christianity. In any case alarm bells should start to ring when one hears that the members of the group "share" their economic leverage; that is, all property and wealth rights are handed over to the trust of the group identity which in practice means that the (usually male) leadership hold all the economic cards. Moreover, more often than not we find that the leadership is in fact a headship, a headship which is all too ready to insist on their divinely bestowed right to rule and will no doubt very quickly turn to the NT passages on authority in order to justify their "covering authority".

The October edition of Premier Christianity carried a letter from an experienced cult watcher who took the magazine to task for letting Brudehof off the hook. The language of the letter was evidence that the letter writer had knowledge of cults and their ways and reflected my own concerns about what looks to be an exclusive community. But I'll give the author of the Christianity article the benefit of the doubt and allow that she may not have wanted to assume the role of a kiss and tell journalist. Nevertheless I feel there should have been some indication that all is not well with the Brudehof: They are a "nostalgia" sect who wish to return to what they fancy as "New Testament" purity: What that means in practice is removing arbitrariness from life as far as possible and giving it an unambiguous and secure shape by combing the Bible for the rules of life, rules that they believe are the key to good community, perhaps even a kind of heaven on Earth.

A similar situation arose in an interview with Bill Johnson the Bethel church-chain supremo, an interview which was published in the January 2015 edition of Christianity. The article makes very little mention of the controversy surrounding Bethel and one can be forgiven for thinking Johnson is a wonderful, wonderful prophet to whom we should all be avidly listening.The article tells how "God touched" Johnson at the Toronto Airport Fellowship, home of the notorious "Toronto blessing". The writer was clearly bowled over by Johnson and to all intents and purposes is one of his "converts".

Below I quote parts of the article and interleave my comments.

***

Johnson and Bethel inevitably have critics outside the Charismatic church but also within the movement. Some UK charismatics are wary of Bethel because it teaches that it is God's will for everyone to be healed. ....at Harrogate leaders' conference....a church leader asked him 'What is your theology of suffering?' Johnson's response  was as articulate as it was provocative: 'I don't have one . I refuse to have a theology for something that shouldn't exist' .... I was to learn much later that the provocation was deliberate and I'd rather missed Johnson's point. It was to get people to think .

MY COMMENT: The correspondent goes on to extol Johnson for his "Prophetic ability to provoke people to come to the Bible afresh and consider what it really says rather than simply accepting the received hermeneutic of a particular theological tradition.". As we saw in part 2 exactly the opposite is in fact the case: The ethos at Bethel favours a shutting down of thinking. In fact that's exactly what Johnson is trying to achieve here: Our world is full of strife, pain and evil and yet Johnson is telling us to forget the years of thoughtful faithful theodicy and just follow his "cease and desist" theology. As for "something that shouldn't exist"; that applies to the whole gamut of sin, evil and suffering. The irony is that this sin and suffering are precisely what Christianity targets with its message of salvation and new life; in fact one might argue that Christianity is nothing but a theology of suffering, sin and evil. Johnson's truculent response isn't especially wise as his naive correspondent thinks but rather is simply an excuse intended to deflect attention from the fact this "Yoda" like guru (See previous post) is simply in the same position as many of us humble mortals who find ourselves faced with a very similar conundrum; we simply don't have any adequate answers to the problem of suffering & evil. Johnson's pugnacious prosperity teaching is no answer to this age-old problem.

Interviewer: What exciting things do you see God doing at the moment?
Johnson:  Anywhere I see hunger with humility I know break through is in the air. I've seen hunger in the UK for a long time, but just recently I've started to see a measure of humility that is at another level.

MY COMMENT: As a rule gurus and even more so their followers measure "humility" in terms of the susceptibility to the package they have on offer. These followers look at their movement and see how successful it has been in its take-up, not to mention those highly esteemed guru-leaders; naturally enough this impresses the rank-file to such an extent that anyone willing to so much as challenge this phenomenal group identity is regarded as out of their pecking order and thinking above their lowly status ranking in the social scheme of things. Therefore those less than amenable to the group's teaching will appear to be lacking in humility or even arrogant. I've seen other sect members use the term "teachable" of those who "humbly" (and gullibly) absorb their message.

Johnson: .....to cultivate humility we need to return to the simple things. Complicated Christianity only thrives where experience is required. Where we have arrogance this is often a product of ideas without experience. 


MY COMMENT:  By "experience" Johnson is probably referring to two categories: a) Inner light experiences such as the Toronto Blessing and b) Signs and Wonders such as the "glory cloud", "angel feathers", "gold dust and diamonds", healings, and resurrections. We heard about the glory cloud in part 2. This part is about Johnson's views on healing and in part 4 we will hear something about resurrection. For an explanation of the other signs and wonders see the panel below which I have scanned in from Premier Christianity.

VNP doesn't have any a prior problems with epiphanies ("encounters" is the current vogue term!) but it does have a problem if they are used as a gnostic-like initiation into an exclusive spiritual elite and/or take on bizarre outward manifestations such as laughing mania or barking whilst on all fours (as we saw with Toronto). No doubt some would-be super-spirituals regard such manifestations as the epitome of humble submission to God's will, but to me it smacks of spiritual manipulation by the gurus who promote them.

When Johnson contrasts "simple things" with what he calls "Complicated Christianity" he is in fact pushing for a "shut down" (see part II) of theodicy in favour of his own theology (which he denies exists! - see part II) and instead tries to get past us the affectation and disingenuous "I refuse to have a theology for something that shouldn't exist";  what he means is that we should all be healthy (and wealthy?) and we don't need any theology to justify it!

Interviewer: Some in the UK have hailed you as the 'new John Wimber'
Johnson: ...I had the same theology that he had...

MY COMMENT: No, Johnson you certainly don't have the same theology as Wimber! Wimber wasn't afraid of Christian scholarship and scholars, but Johnson looks to be subliminally diffident about both; after all they tend to generate a lot of "complicated Christianity"! I very much doubt that Wimber would have claimed he hadn't got a theology and then try to prevent its examination by denying its existence. Johnson is using Wimber's name to normalise his theology, a theology which he claims he doesn't have!


Interviewer: But you differ from Wimber.. He took the view that God can heal when he soveriegnly chooses; the now and not yet. Why do you believe it is always the will of God to heal?
Johnson: Jesus healed everyone who came to him. If I am using him as a model I can't lower the standard because I don't see everyone healed. (My emphasis) I can't make up a theological reason that he didn't demonstrate. 

MY COMMENT: Congratulations to the interviewer! This is one of the few critically aware questions!.

If we analyse Johnson's response we find it empty of significant content: We all know that it is God's ultimate intention to remove sin and suffering but the question is over the long term plan. We all know that God doesn't always immediately ameliorate suffering and evil anymore than he immediately took away the cup of Jesus suffering in spite of Jesus prayer indicating that at one level he did not want this cup and asked his Father to deliver him from it (...but only if it was in his Father's permissive will). As I've emphasised in the quote above Johnson himself actually accepts that not everyone is healed. Big deal! The times I've heard that one! Further; we often can't find a theological reason for continued suffering, although we believe the Gospel will ultimately address this problem - in the long term. Johnson has told us nothing here that we do not already know and seek.

Johnson's motive, once again, looks to be that of wanting to close down thinking by placing a ban on thoughtful theology about the problem of suffering and evil. He then goes on to effectively build a straw man out of the rest of the church by insinuating that they don't accept the ultimate mystery of suffering and evil: But in fact I've been to many a discussion with thoughtful Christians who, although they may tender theological ideas as to why a sovereign God doesn't stop suffering and evil dead in its tracks, will nevertheless accept that in the final analysis there is an ulterior mystery here.  After all, there is the scriptural mystery of why Jesus' cup of suffering wasn't removed as he prayed it would. There is an apparent disconnect between what God wants and what God allows.  So  in spite of what Jesus (God) wanted he didn't get what he wanted there and then. As we know all goal seeking beings have a hierarchy of goals: In this hierarchy short term goals are notorious for conflicting with long term goals; the conflict is resolved with a system of priorities ('Morality' is about managing this system of priorities). In fact in one sense it is perfectly correct for Bethel to "teach that it is God's will for everyone to be healed", but we know that this goal is modulated by deeper theological goals and priorities; things that perhaps we will not fully understand in this life.

But oh, the irony of it all! On the one hand Christianity is nothing but a theology of suffering and evil addressed via the incarnation, sacrifice and salvation and yet here is Johnson trying to pass off the notion that he doesn't have a theology of suffering! He can't be serious!


Interviewer: A big problem in this position is that it's pastorally untenable. What about when people don't get healed?
Johnson: You have to teach people to live with the mystery.... I can and do teach people to live in the grace of what we are experiencing, because all things work together for good. It doesn't mean all things were designed by God. Not all things that happen are God's will. 

MY COMMENT: Once again Johnson is saying nothing startlingly original here. He alludes to the mystery of God's permissive will which Christians have acknowledged since time immemorial and he actually hints that the long term may trump the short term: Viz: all things work together for good. The fact is many Christians don't get healed and Johnson has really nothing new to say about it.  Johnson is trying to make out he is saying something new and challenging but he really isn't.

Johnson: I won't change my theological standard of what to expect in life and I won't blame God, myself or the sick person. I'm, not going to say 'it's because you don't have faith' - that's not sound theologically....I'd rather teach people to expect the best and then learn to walk through the mystery.

MY COMMENT: So which is it to be? Are we to "expect" healing without qualification or accept the mystery of why healing doesn't always come as we may be led to "expect" and accept that this is neither our fault, the sick person's, nor God's? Clearly Johnson is so qualifying his "theological expectations" that they no longer become necessary expectations!

I think we are seeing once again a straw man being applied to people who in Johnson's opinion are "changing their theological standard" while at the same time he is actually saying nothing that vastly differs from the very common Christian view of suffering and evil: Viz: We all seek to ameliorate suffering as far as possible and take it to God in prayer and yet we all know that the persistent existence of suffering, given the absolute sovereignty of God, is an ulterior mystery; one can hear such in many a church discussion group and one doesn't need to go to this guru to hear it. Notice that Johnson has conceded the important pastoral point: Blaming persistent suffering on a lack of faith isn't sound theology as Johnson says. So Johnson does have a theology after all, the hypocrite! In the final analysis it is clear that not everyone is healed and Johnson realises that he has to accept this fact as a mystery without recrimination. Big deal Johnson, that's what we all have to face! So what's new? Authoritarianism, fideism, gnosticism, spiritual recriminations. spiritual bullying and bizarre signs and wonders is what's new!  Actually, none of that is really new; plenty of highly sectarian groups major in these kinds of things.


Interviewer: ...some have said that it (Bethel) can appear to be soft on sin. When Todd Bentley (of the Lakeland revival)  stepped down  due to moral failure and then turned up at Bethel, he received a standing ovation. 
Johnson: I won't make public my conversations with Todd so that people will think I'm hard on sin. 

MY COMMENT:  I'm sure an unwillingness to scald people is not one of Johnson's faults and that he undoubtedly gave Todd a good telling off! After all Johnson is very ready to publicly scald us for not humbly accepting his incoherent prosperity doctrine of "high health expectations" in the face of the acknowledged mystery of suffering and evil!

However, Todd Bentley's sexual sins are just a spicy distraction. Male leaders of the pack across all sorts of traditions often face and often succumb to consensual sexual temptation given their high "alpha male" status and especially so in patriarchal church organisations. Frankly I'm not interested (unless it becomes abuse).  What is of far greater concern to me is Bentley's bizarre "ministry" and some of his theological claptrap. But I suspect it was Bentley's bizarre rallies which earned him his standing ovation at Bethel. I doubt Johnson scalded Bentley for his crackpot ministry because Johnson is going down a similar road. See below:

Inside Bethel's box of tricks (click to enlarge)

See here for further examples of "Johnsonease".

NEXT TIME:

In the news recently is the tragic case of the death of the child of parents who attended Bethel, one of whom was a worship song writer.  Bethel's very public prayers and expectation of the resurrection of the child did not have a happy ending. The story is here

https://www.faithwire.com/2019/12/30/bethel-church-holds-funeral-for-worship-leaders-daughter-after-praying-for-resurrection/

I have just discovered that this story is being told in the March edition of Premier Christianity. So, in part 4 I will look at this article. 

Prosperity Christianity Part II

Critique of the Bethel "Glory Cloud" from tbckawaii on Vimeo.

In part 1 of this series I introduced the "Signs and Wonders" ministry of Bethel church-chain supremo Bill Johnson. Originally this post was intended to look at an interview with Bill Johnson found in the January 2015 edition of Premier Christianity. I have, however, since discovered the video above and will be discussing this instead. I will look at the Christianity article in part 3. The above video gives us an example of one of Bethel Church's signs and wonders, the so called glory cloud.

The video is a critique of the glory cloud phenomenon and Bethel's accompanying apologetics. This critique comes from a Christian who probably classifies as a "Word" Christian; that is, someone whose main engagement with Christianity is mediated by reading the Bible.  I have to agree with him that the glory cloud is rather underwhelming and hardly leaves me in a state of great wonder. As the video suggests it looks suspiciously like dust (or glitter) catching the light as it is caught up in the circulating convention currents one might expect in a crowded auditorium and which is necessarily air conditioned in the hot Californian weather.

So, you have difficulty believing this "glory cloud" is anything special? Well, Bethel has ways of  making you believe....

The video then goes on to provide clips of Bethel's glory cloud apologist Danny Silk. In front of a supportive laughing crowd he ridicules any who might attempt to question the Bethel interpretation and look for explanations in anything less than supernatural terms. He advises disobedient people to "Shut up! You don't know, you so don't know!". 

The video rightly points to the psychological pressures, to the point of duress, being applied in the Bethel social environment: e.g. the peer pressures of group think, the emotional costs in contracting out once a commitment to the Bethel culture has been made and above all the guru status of authority figures like Bill Johnson who preside over the glory cloud meetings and interpret its meaning to his followers. The video also points out the glaring hypocrisy of Silk: Silk will tell critics that "You so don't know" but of course Silk thinks that he himself "So does know!"; one rule for him.....  Silk then goes onto lecture the audience on the need for discernment and yet his words make it clear that he wants to close down the questioning and analytical attitude that is necessarily implicit in any genuine discernment. He attempts to block genuine discernment with a mix of group pressure, ridicule and spiritual intimidation. For Silk genuine discernment equates to the subtext of Silk's address; that is "Agree with me or else risk divine displeasure!" 

The video then moves onto the night Bill Johnson was addressing his followers when the glory cloud appeared. Johnson explains the glory cloud as follows:

The church gathered for decades round a sermon. Israel camped around the presence (approving gasps from the audience). And we've known there are going to be some dramatic shifts in how we do life, how we do church. The presence of God is the greatest gift we have and to shut everything else down because of that is absolutely worth it to me....it's happening tonight as the church is camping around the presence..... (whoops and shouts of joy). ...finally the main thing has become the main thing...

That Johnson is regarded by his lieutenants as a guru and authority figure is evidenced when Silk says of Johnson's words "Yoda speaks!".  Notice how Johnson's words compare exposition of the Word unfavourably to the "presence", a "presence" which to him is the "main thing". For the sake of what Johnson is claiming to be a kind of theophany everything else, in his view, must be closed down; especially, no doubt, a questioning spirit and the exposition of the Word.

God, as we should know, is omnipresent although in spite of our finitude we may feel and/or see unusual tokens of his presence. But God is bigger than any experiences and/or revelations finite beings can have.  Such experiences are just one thing and  never can be the main thing. But I suppose it does become the main thing if you want to close down everything else and use the putative "main thing" to manipulate people. I have no a priori reason to reject out of hand the account of people who claim to have had an epiphany they cannot articulate or explain easily: In the historical church there has always been a tension between Word-laden and Wordless encounters with the divine. But Bethel weighs in to exacerbate the fault line between the analytical & intuitive and comes out in favour of a shut up! and shut down! fideism.

The creator of the video is a bit of a hard cop; I myself like to give Christians the benefit of the doubt knowing that confirmation bias and gullibility can fully account for this kind of stuff: But if Bethel  persists in maintaining its spiritually intimidating stance toward all who might at first cautiously balk at what they are claiming, hard cops are what Bethel has brought upon itself. 

Meanwhile, Back in Theological Toy Town....

Good News maybe, but it didn't last long! 
[Click to enlarge]

This post was triggered by an attic clear out. During that clear-out I happened across a 1994 Good News Christian newspaper for Norwich. The headline article was on the conversion of Samantha Fox (See above). Samantha Fox was a popular Sun newspaper Page 3 girl and that seems to be her main claim to fame. However, she eventually turned pop-star. I don't think she was ever a tip-top pop talent, but probably had enough of it to pull off a performance; except, that is, when she co-hosted  the Brit pop awards in 1989 with Mick Fleetwood. It was by all accounts a complete disaster and although certainty not her fault, I doubt if poor Samantha had the calibre to retrieve the situation. After the debacle at least one tabloid treated her cruelly; for them she was a slapper who could safely be made fun of. Not surprisingly she subsequently talked about moving to America where she thought her talent would be viewed more positively.

In spite of her treatment as a bimbo by some, she clearly was a thinking person and was looking for meaning and purpose and this may have lead her to Holy Trinity, Brompton's Alpha course. It was 1994, a bad year for evangelical Christianity; the so called "Toronto blessing" was at large and found fertile ground among Christians who were looking for spiritual fireworks to escape from the humdrum run-down cultural rearguard action that had so characterised Western Christianity since the 1960s. It seemed that as long a touted "new move of God" smacked of the supernatural anything would go, no matter how bizarre. As the article above makes clear the Toronto Blessing was identified by spontaneous bouts of laughter, crying, fainting and ecstasies. Rumour had it that barking, roaring and other animal noises were also among the manifestation of the blessing. As I have remarked before the whole phenomenon had suspicious similarities with the dancing mania of the middle ages. The "blessing" also came with a fair measure of spiritual pressure: People who didn't buy it were regarded as resisting the Holy Spirit and in one case even accused of being in danger of committing the unforgivable sin. This sort of intimidating behaviour is a proud conceit often found among super-spiritual Christians who readily equate any disbelief of their words with a disbelief in the Almighty himself.

HTB ran with the "blessing" (for a while) and it seems likely that this is what Samantha must have witnessed. In the light of her later rejection of HTB (and perhaps even Christianity itself) her testimony of Holy Spirit enlightenment in Good News comes as a grating jar; it is evidence that at least some of these testimonies of epiphany, testimonies which can sound so convincing, are little more than the aping of the words of a group think and are as shallow as an evaporated puddle. 

Not long after Samantha must have moved away from HTB circles because around 2000 she came out as a lesbian and was in a relationship with a woman; this would not have sat comfortably with HTB.  Her wish to disassociate herself with the HTB experience is expressed in a 2003 article in the Guardian:

'Well, on the Alpha course, you learn a lot. And what I learned was I've got my own faith.' She laughs her fizzy laugh and adjusts her two-tone hairdo. 'The people I met there... I felt more Christian than any of them. To me, it looked like a fashion show. I felt I didn't need to be there. I felt everyone there was a poseur. All the women were looking for these rich guys. I wasn't,' she pronounces a little sniffily, 'brought up like that.'

She must have started visiting Holy Trinity Brompton at the time when she was coming to terms with being gay, so I ask how she coped with the evangelical hostility to homosexuality. Actually, she says, Holy Trinity's position struck her as so bananas that her confidence in her own beliefs, about her faith as well as her sexuality, grew stronger.

'I think we've come a long way since the Bible was written. No, Alpha never made me feel bad about my sexuality, because I believe in love: at the end of the day, I think all God wants for us is to be happy and love each other. But Alpha was good because it helped me find myself a bit. It has taken me a while.'

This account is just so utterly at odds with the testimony of her HTB epiphany that I wonder where the truth lies. I wonder if Samantha's reference to "bananas" applies to the weird aspects of the Toronto blessing? In order to uphold their world-view some charismatic evangelicals may attempt to explain away this situation by telling us that perhaps Samantha had a genuine "touch of God" but is currently resisting the Holy Spirit: This is a common explanation among charismatic fundamentalists who, putting their world view first, are sometimes conceited enough claim to have privy to one's inner thought life; so much so that they will boldly offer such condemning judgements.

Another Christian account of Samantha fox's conversion can be found in this 1994 Cross Rhythm web article. Interesting is a comment from a Christian reader in the comment thread of this article. This reads:

Posted by Marion in Birmingham @ 21:58 on Aug 6 2016

 Any chance this could be removed after years passing waiting for confirmation of Faith, fruit. So sad. But please keep praying

In case this Cross Rhythm article should disappear from the web, I have a copy of it here. This tendency to erase inconvenient and perplexing Christian history only serves to feed a confirmation bias. In contrast the Gospels didn't erase Peter's or Judas' failures, as is so often remarked.  When the failures and the vexed questions are forgotten, a sanitized plastic version of Christian history emerges and salutary lessons and cautions are lost to posterity.

This now brings me to an article in the September edition of Premier Christianity magazine about the high profile Christians Joshua Harris and Marty Sampson renouncing their faith. Harris was known among fundamentalist Christians for writing a dreadful book on marriage and sex early on in his Christian career (which he later disowned) and Sampson was a well known song writer and worship leader for the the mega-church chain, Hillsong. The article quotes Sampson as giving the following reasons for rejecting Christianity (Presumably among others). Viz:

How many preachers fall? Many. No one talks about it. How many miracles happen? Not many. No one talks about it. Why is the Bible full of contradictions? No one talks about it. How can God be love yet send 4 billion people to a place, all coz they don't believe. No one talks about it. 

The article then goes on to quote Free Church minister David Robertson who addresses Sampson's complaint in an open letter:

You seem to have been living in some kind of sheltered cocoon. In the Christian circles I inhabit people never stop talking about these things!  Was your faith or your church background  really so superficial and shallow that these questions were never discussed? Little wonder that your faith collapsed like a house of sand, if it was built on such flimsy foundations  and was never tested! 

This is in fact an implicit criticism of the Hillsong culture*. But Robertson is right to contrast Sampson's experience with his own and question Sampson's undiscriminating and blanket accusation: For example, Christianity magazine itself  is not shy of facing and discussing awkward questions and issues. Also, theologians like Tom Wright and Alistair Mcgrath don't strike me as the sort of guys who wouldn't talk about and face up to theological conundrums. And yet I have to say that there are Christian subcultures out there where confirmation bias is rife and where toy-town and authoritarian doctrines are preached with little or no talk about their difficulties & inconsistencies and where a group think pressures uncritical acceptance. Any attempt at analysis and criticism is looked at askance as the thin end of the Satanic wedge. As Ellie Mumford, an aficionado of the Toronto Blessing, put it  "Don't analyse it". This is fideism. Moreover, sometimes diverging interpretations of scripture are rounded on as tantamount to rebellion against God. As might be expected the authoritarian fundamentalist theme park manager Ken Ham yet again provides a fine example of the kind of spiritual pressure one can expect if one doesn't tow the line. He accuses Christians who might be tempted to accept evolution of;

...undermining the biblical doctrine of sin and death being a result of Adam’s fall. Really, when someone rejects a literal Genesis, it affects the way they view the rest of the Bible and the Christian message, as can be seen with this author.....Once we abandon the Bible as absolute truth, anything goes, and anyone can just make God and his gospel message in their own image. But that gospel won’t save—only the biblical gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation  ("Progressive Children's book to offer a different picture of creation" 17 Oct 2019)

Once again Ham thrusts his perverse & paranoid thin end of the Satanic wedge logic into the mouths and minds of those he disagrees with and attempts to manipulate them onto a collision course with the Almighty. As one might expect from his inquisitional tactics he all but denies access to Gospel truth to his antagonists.This is the way fundamentalists attempt to forestall critical analysis of their position. (See also here)

So, although David Robertson is right, he is only right for selected Christian subcultures. Elsewhere the kind of toy town plastic theology bolstered by spiritual intimidation and which has deceived Sampson reigns supreme. As for those who are self-critical, analytical, exploratory, tentative, experimental and ask hard questions, they may find themselves being accused of at best resisting the Holy Spirit and at worst of being heretics!

Footnote:
* One of the factors at work here is the almost exclusive premium that is so often placed on purely intuitive engagements with God: Sensings, epiphanies, sublime revelations, touches of God, gnosis etc are regarded as the acme of faith; a more analytical approach is not just a poor relation in this context, but sometimes explicitly put down as mere head knowledge in comparison with the  superior "heart knowledge" of the super-spiritual Christian. The trouble is that when people like Sampson come out of their quasi-gnostic stupor they find roaring lions waiting for them, ready to devour their faith. Robertson's criticism is then justified.



Quoted links
http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2017/11/confirmation-bias-and-terry-virgos-bad.html

http://www.crossrhythms.co.uk/articles/music/Samantha_Fox_The_Page_Three_girls_Christian_conversion/40205/p1/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-6584193/Samantha-Fox-52-turns-years-spangled-cheerleader-inspired-ensemble.html

https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2003/feb/02/features.review7 

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/tv/what-really-like-disastrous-1989-14319405