Bartholomew's Notes

Back in October, Nature published an article about Creationism in Poland:

…”The theory of evolution is a lie,” Miroslaw Orzechowski, Poland’s deputy education minister, told the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza on 14 October. “It is an error we have legalized as a common truth.”

The LPR [Liga Polskich Rodzin, League of Polish Families] entered the ruling coalition in May 2006. Its leader, Roman Giertych, is also known to favour creationist views. These, as well as his openly homophobic, anti-Semitic and nationalistic opinions, have sparked student demonstrations in Warsaw since he took the minister of education job in May.

Giertych’s father, Maciej Giertych, is an LPR member in the European Parliament and is lobbying for obligatory inclusion of creationism in Polish biology curricula. Maciej, who holds a PhD in tree physiology from the University of Toronto, Canada, claims darwinian evolution is refuted by scientific evidence.

Maciej Giertych then wrote to Nature, bizarrely complaining that he was not a Creationist, but that he believed all the Creationist arguments: microevolution is a reduction in genetic information; there are no positive mutations; dinosaurs co-existed with humans; and so on. Giertych’s assertions were dismantled by numerous scientists in a subsequent issue, and these have been preserved at Pharyngula. The most interesting was from Ulrich Kutschera of the University of Kassel, who refered to an earlier report about Creationism at the European Parliament:

Your Special Report “Anti-evolutionists raise their profile in Europe” (Nature 444, 406407; 2006) mentions a seminar held in Brussels at the European Parliament on 11 October 2006, as part of a new strategy by supporters of intelligent design (ID) to disseminate anti-evolutionism among the general public of Europe.

…The anti-evolution seminar was a series of three public lectures, introduced and moderated by Giertych, who is the retired head of the genetics department of the Polish Academy of Sciences and an honorary member of the Daylight Origins Society, a Catholic creationist organization based in Britain. The seminar was co-organized by Dominique Tassot, director of the Centre d’Etude et de Prospectives sur la Science, an association of 700 Catholic intellectuals who do not accept macroevolution because it is in conflict with their interpretation of the Bible…

Maciej and his son Roman Giertych have been featured on this blog before; Roman is the education minister, and his League of Polish Families has also been vocal in opposing gay rights. WorldNetDaily covered a sinister march through Warsaw organized by the group, while declining to tell readers about its far-right philosophy.

Roman Giertych is also the honorary chairman of the All Polish Youth, a skinhead group that he used to lead. A few days ago a 2004 video surfaced which showed All Polish Youth at a neo-Nazi rally, complete with burning swastika, Nazi flags and “Sieg Heil”s. One detail:

The newspaper [Dziennik] said a young woman in the video was Leokadia Zwiazek, an assistant of Giertych’s father Maciej Giertych who is a member of the European Parliament and the LPR.

But Giertych denied the accusation and asked prosecutors to investigate the incident.

However, shortly thereafter Zwiazek was dismissed. Roman added:

“Anyone who propagates the swastika in Poland is not only an idiot, but also a criminal,”…

So you see, Maciej and Roman Giertych are not neo-Nazis. In the same way that they’re not Creationists.

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Meanwhile, Maciej’s younger brother Fr Wojciech Giertych is keeping a low profile – as I noted a year ago, he’s the current “Theologian of the Papal Household”, which means he sub-edits the Pope’s writings and speeches. Of course, he’s not his brother’s keeper, but one would like to know just what links, if any, he keeps with his far-right family.

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The Analyst (Monrovia) reports on a healing rally by Canadian evangelist Len Lindstrom:

A crowd numbering over 50,000 people from across the county and surrounding counties gathered to hear the exciting message about Jesus who restores dignity, destiny, divine health and spiritual life.

…An old lady almost totally blind and crippled from Lofa received her healing. She was seeing dancing on the platform. A local boy who was run over last year in Gbarnga by a car also got healed. The only way he could move was to sit on his chair and bounce down the road, but now he was up and walking freely…

Etc, etc. Lindstrom’s website gives further details about the alleged miracles that attend his “World Harvest” ministry:

Lepers have been cleansed, the Human Immune Virus (HIV) and the AIDS virus vanished, blind eyes opened, hearing restored, cancers cured and the dead raised, the list of God’s miracles seems endless and they give God all the Glory! (1 Corinthians 15:10.)

The Analyst goes on to note that Lindstrom also has business concerns in the country:

…But Rev Lindstrom is not only an evangelist, he is a very busy man as he left the campaign late Sunday night, God’s Business done, now to visit again with his exploration companies who employ 17 geologists in Liberia and over 250 other people.

He said he has been busy restructuring the parent companies in Canada into one new company called Liberty International Mineral Corporation which he intends to soon make a publicly traded company on the Stock Exchange.

This will provide funding for further rallies, and for building an orphanage.

Details of Lindstrom’s interests are scarce, although last year he featured in an AFP report on foreign investment in the country:

“Selon tous les rapports, le Liberia semble être un pays très riche en richesses naturelles, mais il a besoin d’investissements étrangers pour les développer”, selon Len Lindstrom, président de la société Liberty Gold and Diamants, qui a signé un contrat d’exploration de deux millions de dollars en juin 2004.

The company was earlier known as the Liberty Gold and Diamond Mining Company, and as Liberty Diamond International the company was advertising for a new geologist just a few weeks ago.

Naturally, when one thinks of diamonds, Liberia, and foreign evangelists, Pat Robertson quickly comes to mind. Lindstrom, however, takes a different view: while Robertson notoriously called for the US to support Charles Taylor as a “Christian, Baptist” president in conflict with Muslims, Lindstrom’s website denounces Taylor as a “despot”. Lindstrom does, though, enjoy political links of his own:

When God begins to move, the hunger for His blessing and presence goes right to the top of a nation, as evidenced when we met with several of the country’s top officials! First was the National Director of Defense and Director of the Police Department, the Honorable Chris Massaquoi along with the Head of the CID, Central Intelligence Department who I jokingly called the CIA. After a powerful service in the Police Dept, it was off to the Executive Mansion, they said the first visiting evangelist to ever be invited there. We were warmly greeted by the Vice-Chairman or ‘Vice President’ of the country, the Hon. Wesley Jones, whom we prayed with for peace and the healing of the nation. He said, ‘If I had known I would have been there, but when you come back, I will be there every night!’ The President was out of country at the Donor Conference in the USA, so it was next to the office of the Hon. Lawrence George, the Chief Minister of Presidential Affairs where we had a great time of prayer, and then to several other dignitaries who called us into their offices to pray as we passed by! They had all heard what God had done in the crusade, wanted His blessing and asked us to come back quickly! In fact, Rev. Arku tells me that an official letter from the joint heads of government inviting us back for the stadium crusade is on the way and they have all declared that they will be present in the campaign!

“Rev. Arku” is James Arku, who is somewhat oddly described on Lindstrom’s website as “Minister of Religious Affairs and Minister of National Defense”; this is mysterious, since Arku is not given these titles anywhere else (and is actually somewhat obscure), while the actual Minister of National Defense from 1997 to 2006 was Daniel Chea. Arku also pastors Liberty Church in Kakata, which is associated with Lindstrom’s ministry.

Lindstrom’s ministry began in the 1970s, and originally focused on First Nation Canadians. He was apparently trained a Bible College run by Pastor Max Solbrekken, who is an apocalyptically-minded Christian Zionist. Lindstrom’s ministry has apparently

…held over 300 Mass Crusades in any venue possible in over 100 nations resulting in over 3,000,000 decisions for Christ. Under the leadership of Evangelists Len & Julie Lindstrom and located in Kelowna, British Columbia, it has impacted the nations for more than 25 years through miracle and power ministry. In Canada and the USA World Harvest has held over 115 tent crusades and more than 250 indoor rallies resulting in over 30,000 first time decisions for Jesus Christ.

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Simpson Book Deal Recalls Ripper Fiasco

Staying with the subject of the Christian book industry, the (slightly old) news that Rupert Murdoch has shied away from profiting from O.J. Simpson’s bizarre “hypothetical confession” brings to mind an earlier example of the Digger’s interest in sensational murder, and how that affected the running of the respected publishing house of Collins here in the UK.

Collins had been founded in the early nineteenth century as a religious publisher in Scotland, although it also sold secular books, and in the late twentieth century its Fount imprint was particularly known for publishing the works of CS Lewis. Under Murdoch from 1988, Collins joined Harpers to become HarperCollins. Christian Bookseller magazine (December 2000) contains an interesting article by Robin Baird-Smith, who has been a significant figure in British religious publishing for many years, and who worked for Collins in early 1980s:

If you are running a religious book list as part of a large corporation, you are in the last analysis a small part of someone else’s global plan…[Y]ou are also subject to censorship, and outside editorial control. At HarperCollins we were owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owned the Sun newspaper. One day I received a call from the features editor of that newspaper saying that they were going to publish in serial form the memoirs of Sonia Sutcliffe, the wife of Peter Sutcliffe (The Yorkshire Ripper) and he wanted Collins to publish the book. That was the moment when what it meant to be part of a corporation really sunk in and I decided that I had to leave.

The context at the time was distaste over “chequebook journalism” in the wake of the arrest and trial of Peter Sutcliffe, who had murdered thirteen women and attacked seven others between 1975 and 1980; notoriously, the Chief Constable of Yorkshire, Ronald Gregory, reportedly pocketed £40,000 from the (non-Murdoch) Mail on Sunday for his account of the investigation (this was particularly upsetting given that it had taken the police so long to stop the serial killer). However, the planned memoirs of Sonia never materialised, as a report in the Guardian earlier this year explained:

…despite the grim details emerging from court number one [at the Old Bailey in 1981] it was chequebook journalism that had most people talking. And the feeding frenzy was about to climax with the race to sign up Sutcliffe’s wife, Sonia…The popular estimate of its worth at the time was £1m. Unfortunately, she had proved to be not very sporting. The door [to her home] was mostly kept locked while an average of 30 to 40 media personnel were camped outside waiting for something to happen. But it had opened for the Daily Mail and again for the News of the World [the Sun’s Sunday edition], led by its newly-appointed editor, Barry Askew, whose starting bid was a paltry £80,000.

…Askew claims to have been given an unlimited chequebook by Murdoch in his attempt to the answer the Big Question – did Sonia know or suspect her husband was the Yorkshire Ripper? (“The answer is no, so far as I’m aware,” Askew says.) But returning to the old NoW’s offices in Bouverie Street in the second week of May 1981, he learned that “suddenly the coffers clanged shut”. He was left in the lurch, he says. Murdoch had got uncharacteristic cold feet after the Queen revealed her “sense of distaste” over chequebook journalism. “I remember Rupert saying something like, ‘They’ll pass a law against you’.”

NoW assistant editor at the time, Stuart Kuttner, now the paper’s managing editor, wonders if Sonia would ever have signed to tell her story. “The word she used a lot was ‘averse’. She was averse to entering into any deal with the press.”

The Press Council went on to conclude that newspapers should not make payments to those close to criminals or close to their victims. Of course, the Council had no authority beyond the British press, but had Murdoch taken the general spirit of its advice to heart he might have avoided some embarrassment now.

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Decrees Koran must not be sold

Sad news about the chain of bookshops formerly run by the venerable Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge:

BRITAIN’S oldest chain of church bookshops is to remove the Koran from its shelves because it believes it is “inimical” to Christianity.

The decision not to stock any non-Christian holy text has been taken by SPCK Bookshops, formerly part of the 308-year-old Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

…The new policy follows the society’s sale of a majority stake in the chain on November 1 to the St Stephen the Great Charitable Trust, which is tied to the Eastern Orthodox church.

“Stocking books which are inimical to Christianity, which without question the Koran is, could well create the wrong impression among some that we endorse the belief systems of other religions as equal or viable alternatives,” said Mark Brewer, the Texan lawyer who chairs the trust.

The stated aim of the trust is to take the bookshops back to the missionary roots of the SPCK and reverse the advance of Islam and secularism.

The involvement of the SSG Charitable Trust in the SPCK was announced in a press release a few weeks ago:

St Stephen the Great Charitable Trust (SSG) is an Orthodox Christian charity. Its partnership with SPCK will enhance and broaden its mission of distributing Christian literature.

SPCK have agreed that the Bookshops and their staff will transfer to SSG, continuing to operate as SPCK Bookshops (under licence) by SSG, with a maintenance of their breadth.

…Under the new arrangements, SPCK Bookshops will continue to stock a broad and diverse range of Christian books and resources.

The press release contains no indication that the SSG would be dictating that the shops would no longer be allowed to sell certain books.

The SPCK was founded an Anglican vicar, Thomas Bray, in 1698, and as a publisher (among other activities) the organisation was originally a mouthpiece for the Anglican establishment. Bray complained that:

All the Grand and Fundamental Articles, both of Natural and Revealed Religion, are now most furiously storm’d by Atheists, Deists, and Socinians on the one hand, or secretly and dangerously undermined by Enthusiasts [i.e. Evangelicals] and Antinomians [Quakers] on the other. (1)

The SPCK was supposed to remedy the situation – the conversion of Quakers was a particular obsession, and early titles published by the Society included Against Enthusiasm and Against Popery. However, the organisation soon adopted a broader perspective, and members included evangelicals such as John Wesley. Eventually, the Society stopped being a didactic publisher, and came to see itself as providing a forum for discussion; in 1919 William Lowther Clarke expressed his hope that the SPCK would soon

stand in relation towards Anglican theology as the Oxford and Cambridge Press stand towards learning generally. (2)

That is indeed what happened in subsequent years, and today the SPCK is one of most important UK publishers of intellectually serious books on subjects like church history and Biblical scholarship, as well as theology.

This was also the ethos of the bookshops, which first opened in the 1930s – and as an undergradate studying religion in the mid 1990s, I found the local SPCK bookshop to be an incredibly useful and stimulating scholarly resource. As well as books published by the SPCK itself, the shops stocked a range of material from other sources, such as the SCM Press. Some of the books were doubtless controversial: you could find material by, for example, the “non-realist” Christian Don Cupitt, or radical Biblical scholarship by the likes of Gerd Lüdemann, or books sympathetic to gay Christians. However, the philosophy was that these were issues which intelligent people, particularly clergy, ought be aware of, and the SPCK was providing a useful service by stocking them. Hence also the reason, I’m sure, for selling the Koran.

The Church Times has further details of the SSG’s agenda:

Concerns over Islam are apparent on the SSG’s website, where the charity reports: “England has not only become extremely secularised in recent years, but has witnessed the explosion of Islam. . . In an effort to stem the growth of non-Christian faiths and re-establish Christianity in areas where it has been driven out, the Trust has acquired a beautiful building [the redundant St Mary Magdalene’s] in Bradford. (This city has one of the highest percentages of resident Muslims in the UK.)”

Text on the website has been amended since the Church Times published the report announcing the partnership. References to the “misguided beliefs” of those who turned to the Roman Catholic Church, and other references to the Orthodox Church as “the only Church true to the Word of God, and therefore the only one that offers true salvation and eternal life”, have been removed.

…The charity is headed by Mark Brewer, managing director of the Texan law firm, Brewer & Pritchard, who is a former judge advocate for the US Air Force at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk.

According to the Brewer & Pritchard website, Brewer is a member “of Saint Joseph (the Betrothed) Orthodox Christian Church (Antiochian Archdiocese)”. That would appear to be this church, in Houston. The Antiochian Orthodox church split from the National Council of Churches in the USA last year.

How long before the SSG decides that Biblical higher criticism, or certain positions on homosexuality, are “inimical to Christianity” and should therefore be banned from the SPCK shops? Will certain books published by the SPCK eventually be excluded from the bookshops that bear their name?

(Hat tip: MediaWatchWatch)

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(1) C. Rose, “The Origins and Ideals of the SPCK 1698-1740” in J. Walsh, C. Haydon and S. Taylor, eds., The Church of England c.1689-c.1833, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 178, quoting Thomas Bray, A Course of Lectures upon the Church Catechism, Oxford, 1696, epistle dedicatory (no pagination).

(2) William Kemp Lowther Clarke, A Short History of S.P.C.K., London: SPCK, 1919, pp. 84, 86. This work should not be confused with his A History of the SPCK, published forty years later, in which “S.P.C.K.” has become “SPCK” – an important point in the days of computer catalogues.

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WorldNetDaily moves into Christian publishing:

What would you do if armed terrorists broke into your church and starting attacking your friends with automatic weapons in the middle of a worship service?

Would you be prepared to defend yourself and other innocents?

…There is one man in the world who can address these questions with first-hand experience.

His name is Charl van Wyck – a South African who was faced with just such a shocking scenario.

…In “Shooting Back: The Right and Duty of Self-Defense,” van Wyk makes a biblical, Christian case for individuals arming themselves with guns, and does so more persuasively than perhaps any other author because he found himself in a church attacked by terrorists.

This was the 1993 St. James Church Massacre, in which eleven people were killed and 58 wounded in a church in Kenilworth. The terrorists were three members Azanian People’s Liberation Army, a militant anti-white South African group run by the Pan-African Congress, and under orders from Letlapa Mphahlele. A 2003 article has further details:

The horror of these attacks burnt itself into the imagination of South Africa, and the Apla soldiers who carried them out were hunted down and prosecuted. The man who commanded them could have stayed beyond prosecution since he flitted in and out of South Africa and was not present during the attacks. But this did not fit the mould of Letlapa Mphahlele.

‘I’ve never shied away from taking responsibility for Apla activities at the time I was Director of Operations,’ he says in his quiet but decisive voice. ‘At the time the Heidelberg Tavern was attacked I had issued an order suspending attacks on civilian targets. I waived this order after the murder of five schoolchildren by the South African Defence Force in Umtata (in the Eastern Cape).

…In 1998 Mphahlele met Charl van Wyk, one of the survivors of the St James’s Church massacre. ‘Charl was the man who returned fire and wounded one of the Apla cadres in the church,’ says Mphahlele. ‘My meeting with Charl was facilitated by journalists who had interviewed us separately and so before TV cameras we shook hands and shared our experiences from different viewpoints. This was the beginning of an exciting journey I was to travel.’

Van Wyck is a long-time sidekick of evangelist Peter Hammond – he’s the Deputy Director of Hammond’s Frontline Fellowship, the Director of his African Christian Action, and a missionary with his In Touch Mission International organisation. Van Wyck’s book was originally published in 2001 by Christian Liberty Books, which is mostly a platform for Hammond.

Hammond and his ministries have a controversial history, and his perspective is one of belligerent fundamentalism, anti-Communism and anti-Islamicism. Here’s a taster from the African Christian Action Newsletter:

When the President of South Africa calls for “an African Renaissance”, what exactly does he mean? Is he calling us to the humanism of the European Renaissance that culminated in the French Revolution and the Soviet Gulags? Or is he merely desiring a return to the pre-Christian Paganism and Animism that afflicted Africa prior to the spread of the Gospel?

…We want God to bless South Africa. However, we cannot expect God to bless a nation which is in rebellion to His Laws.

…The consequences that flow from Atheism, Evolutionism, situation ethics and other cardinal tenants of humanism are very tangible and very tragic: euthanasia, abortion, gun control, humanistic education in state schools, concentration camps, massacres and marxist tyranny.

…The other choice before us is for a Biblical Reformation. The Bible contains the Law of God, the absolute and unchanging principles by which all areas of life must be governed. History records that where nations are built upon the principles of God’s Word, true freedom and justice flourishes.

Naturally, Hammond has links with the hard-core Christian dominionists of the Chalcedon Foundation.

Hammond is British, but he served in the South African National “Defence Force” in the 1980s. An essay by Jeffrey Marishane (1) has some background:

…Foremost among such [right-wing Christian] groups is Frontline Fellowship, formerly known as the Motorbike Mission. Formed in 1981 as a prayer fellowship within SADF ranks, Frontline Fellowship is led by its founder, Peter Christopher Hammond…and is one of the groups affiliated with [United Christian Action].

The UCA is an umbrella body for several Christian groups, and at that time was headed by Ed Cain, who was also associated with Fred Shaw’s Christian League of Southern Africa. CLSA was named as a secret beneficiary of state funding by Eschel Rhoodie before his death in 1993, although Hammond rejects similar accusations against the UCA (“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Volume two, Chapter six is entitled ‘Special Investigation into Secret State Funding’. It deals exhaustively with the former government’s secret projects, naming the projects of the defence force, foreign affairs, the police, national intelligence and the education department. Nowhere does United Christian Action appear.”).

Frontline Fellowship at this time was particularly concerned with “persecuted churches in Mozambique, Angola and the Cape Verde Islands”; critics charged that it was a front for the deployment of South African military men in Southern Africa under the guise of being “missionaries”, and in October 1988 Hammond and some associates were detained for a week in Mozambique.

This was exactly a year after an arrest in Zambia; this undated essay by Brian M. Abshire has some details, which I’ll quote at length:

Peter Hammond, South African missionary to the persecuted church and director of Frontline Fellowship, recently briefed me on one of the most exciting developments in central Africa, the Christian Reconstruction of Zambia.

…In October 1987, Peter Hammond and three other Frontline Fellowship missionaries, experienced first hand the hospitality of this Marxist miracle when they were arrested for bringing Bibles into the country…They were finally confined in Lusaka Central Prison, the maximum security facility…

…What Peter and his colleagues did not realize was that they were sharing their cells with the next government of Zambia!  During the following weeks of Bible study, prayer and vigorous discussions in the prison, they were able to teach Biblical principles of government to the very men God would raise up after He deposed the Marxists; the future vice-president of Zambia – General Godfrey Miyanda – and a few cells away, Frederick Chiluba, the future Christian President of Zambia.

…The first freely elected President, Frederick Chiluba, promptly testified to the saving power of Christ and called for a day of prayer. At a simple ceremony in December 1991, the new President publicly confessed the national sins of witchcraft and corruption and committed Zambia to becoming a Christian nation!  When he was asked if he intended writing a new Constitution, Chiluba replied that he didn’t have to. It was already written – the Bible. He held up the Bible to the full view of the world press.

…They distributed tens of thousands of Christian Reconstructionist booklets, tracts, Bibles and Christian books in prisons, government departments, schools and churches throughout Zambia. They then launched a “Salt Shakers” ministry, small groups committed to prayer, strategy and action throughout Zambia. They presented Christian Reconstructionist, pro-life, pro-family, messages on national radio and TV, in schools and churches. Zambia Christian Action was launched under the leadership of Pastor John Jere. Frontline also held Biblical Worldview Seminars in Ndola and Lusaka, took part in delegations to the various government departments and presented copies of Reformed and Reconstructionist books to the vice-president…

Pastor John Jere, incidentally, now runs a church which is part of the Every Nation neo-Pentecostal organization; I’ve been keeping an eye on this particular grouping for some time. There’s no space here to discuss Chiluba and Zambia as a “Christian nation”; I would advise all those interested to read Paul Gifford’s book African Christianity: Its Public Role. The “Biblical Worldview Seminars” (BWS) have become a particular strategy used in by Hammond and his team in various African countries, along with the wide distribution of his book Biblical Principles for Africa.

Hammond has maintained a public profile in the post-Cold War world; his many books have been praised by the likes of Joseph Farah and D. James Kennedy. One publication, however, became the focus of a free-speech debate in 2002:

At the end of January, the newly released book The Pink Agenda became the first non-pornographic book since 1994 to be lobbied for banning. Written with the underlying Biblical belief that the homosexual lifestyle is wrong in God’s eyes, author Christine McCafferty, along with Peter Hammond, wrote The Pink Agenda in an attempt to engage South African society in an open debate concerning what they outline in the book to be a homosexual agenda in South Africa….After the book’s publication there was an immediate and outraged response from the Gay and Lesbian Equality Project, saying the book “instills hatred” and is “the worst homophobic hate speech ever published in South Africa.” Claiming that the book “instills hatred” is of course a direct plea to consider The Pink Agenda as one of the few types of speech that is specifically not protected in our constitution…The book was brought up for review by the Film and Publications Board at the end of January, with their final ruling being that the book should be sold with an adults-only age restriction. Those under 18 would not be allowed to read it since it promotes a viewpoint, and draws conclusions from research, that are considered, as one reviewer put it, “close to constituting hate speech.”

Hammond and Van Wyk’s newsletter claimed that this was “homo-fascism”, and that the legalisation of sodomy was just one of many “privileges for perverts”.

A few months later, Hammond was arrested in the Sudan while giving a “Biblical Worldview Seminar”; WND reported:

Rebel forces in southern Sudan detained an Anglican bishop and a missionary on charges of “treason and insurrection,” according to a U.S.-based evangelical Protestant group.

…Rev. Peter Hammond, director of Frontline Fellowship, and Bishop Bullen Dolli of the Episcopal Church of Sudan were arrested Saturday in Yei Province by the Public Security Office of the SPLM, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement… Kristi Messick, ITMI administrator of African affairs, told WorldNetDaily she believes the arrests were made by junior officers of the SPLA, against the wishes of senior officials.

That’s probably the case; the SPLA has no problem in principle with foreign missionaries, and I blogged a while back on the case of Sam Childers, a pastor from Florida who is also an SPLA commander. Hammond was released a few days later, and he claims the incident was a conspiracy hatched in Khartoum.

Last year, Hammond was arrested yet again – this time in South Africa, and in circumstances not lacking in bathos:

Controversial Christian evangelist Peter Hammond confirmed on Wednesday that he has been charged with assault following what he said was a Halloween “accident” with a paintball gun.

…He said his family — he has a wife and four children — do not approve of Halloween, which they see as an “occult holiday celebrating human sacrifice, witches and goblins”.

His children had wanted to do a “counter-Halloween”, and he had agreed to drive two of them around to “do paintballing” on trick-or-treating youngsters on October 31.

…He said his 10-year-old son initially paintballed some youngsters who appeared to have just strewn rubbish across the road as a Halloween prank, shooting low and from a distance, and then called out to another child, asking whether he was a trick-or-treater.

The boy came over to the car, saw the paintball gun, swore at Hammond’s son and tried to pull it out of his hands.

The gun went off, and Hammond drove away.

The victim, apparently, hurt his jaw…

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(1) Jeffrey Marishane, “The Religious Right and Low-Intensity Conflict in Southern Africa”, in Jan P. Nederveen Pieterse (ed.), Christianity and Hegemony, New York and Oxford: Berg, 1992, pp.59-119

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A fascinating article on religious protest in Belarus, from Forum 18:

When Catholic parishioners in Grodno announced a hunger strike to begin on 1 December if officials fail to overturn their decade-long refusal to allow them to build a new church, they took their inspiration from protests by New Life Church. This Minsk-based charismatic congregation held a high-profile hunger strike in October to try to prevent the authorities seizing their church. “We are grateful to the Protestants for giving us courage,” Fr Aleksandr Shemet declared.

…In the wake of this year’s presidential elections, the Evangelical Belarus Information Centre reported that on 20 March more than half of those demonstrating against the regime in central Minsk raised their hands when asked who would join in prayers for Belarus: “The next day almost everyone responded to the same request, and the day after that the majority of songs heard in the tent camp were Christian.”

However, this faith-based dissent needs to be balanced against the support Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko gets from the Russian Orthodox Church. Back in August Private Eye (1164, p. 19) published a “Letter from Minsk” which touched on the subject:

A few years ago [Lukashenko] presented the Russian Orthodox Patriarch with $85,000 worth of gold, silver and jewel-encrusted banners for the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. In return, Patriarch Alexis II commended Lukashenko for resisting the “cult of force, self-destruction and lack of morals that permeate the west”, then he decorated senior Belarus KGB men (we have not bothered to make the secret police sound more customer-friendly) with the Order of Apostle Grand Duke Vladimir (no relation) for “decisive implementation of the government’s policy of spiritual development of the nation.”

In 2001, Alexy presented Lukashenko with a prize from the “International Foundation for Unity of the Orthodox Peoples”; he followed this up in 2002 with the Order of St. Sergius of Radonezh, “for strengthening unity of Slav peoples”. After the farcical recent election in Belarus, Alexy wrote with words of gushing appreciation:

Seeing the impressive results of your previous work in this office, the multinational people of the republic have again given you a vote of confidence through supporting your candidature by a majority of votes’, the patriarchal messages says.

‘…As primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, I am very much gratified with the fact that good relations have been established between the religious and secular leaders in Belarus in the last years. These relations are called to show common concern for the restoration of shrines ruined in the past, for religious education, Christian enlightenment and moral health of society,’ the document notes.

Meanwhile, Lukashenko has recently been swapping notes with another leader noted for using religion to bolster a reactionary and oppressive agenda:

(Pic from Wolny, via Belarusan American Blog)

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