Bartholomew's Notes

Robert Mugabe is a “black, political, economic Moses” whose vision is “to raise millionaires and billionaires” in Zimbabwe, according to Reverend Obadiah Musindo (or Obediah Musindo), at a ceremony to give thanksgivings for the despot’s eightieth birthday.

However, for those Christians who may have different opinion (such as Archbishop Pius Ncube), Musindo has previously warned that

The church is not allowed to rebel against the Government and has no business aligning itself with opposition movements.

“In cases where there is bad governance, the church must pray for leaders to rule wisely, but they must not be actively involved in efforts to bring down a government”.

He could have added that such behaviour was bad for the health, often leading to arrest, death, being tortured or raped.

Musindo, who heads the Destiny of Africa Network, also sees George W. Bush in a biblical light, as

the world dictator, world chief thief, world number one murderer, world big human rights abuser, big racist, unelected court-appointed president, world peace destroyer, international criminal liar – the true earthly representative of the Anti-Christ and the devil on earth.

Meanwhile, as the country suffers inflation of over 600%, unemployment of over 50% and 60% of the population needing food aid as the economy implodes and the country totters on the edge of famine, the “black Moses”  used the birthday celebration to show that fixing the nation’s woes is his top concern:

“I’m morally repulsed by homosexuality,” Mugabe told the function…”It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Adam, Eve and Eve…Let us never entertain the theory that man and man can form a family.”

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Last year saw one of the weirdest “scandals” to erupt around Tony Blair. His wife, Cherie Booth, was receiving advice and friendship from a New Age therapist named Carole Caplin, whose partner was a convicted Australian fraudster named Peter Foster. Foster helped Booth buy an apartment, creating an opening for reactionary British tabloids frustrated at being unable to attack Tony Blair politically from the right. The odious Daily Mail was at the forefront, but given that the apartment story, while damaging, was not really that serious, the rag tried to portray Booth’s liking for Caplin’s quackish therapies as a national crisis, devoting dozens of pages spread over days to humilating Booth in an attempt to wound her husband. Now Foster, living in Australia and separated from Caplin, has written a book with the help of a Mail freelancer, in which he alleges that Caplin was also close to Blair. According to today’s Observer, the book alleges that

Caplin shared late-night telephone conversations [with Blair] and went for long walks in the woods at the Prime Minister’s official residence, Chequers.

She also gave him advice on what clothes to wear, down to his underpants.

Whether he took the advice is unstated; and, given Foster’s background, the whole story is quite likely rubbish. However, whereas with Bush what you see is more or less what you get (although there is the notorious suppressed tape of his pre-election speech to Tim LaHaye’s Council for National Policy), Blair’s religiosity is somewhat mysterious.

Like Booth, Blair also enjoys some New Age therapies: Francis Wheen’s new book records how Blair and Booth underwent a rebirthing experience in Mexico, which allegedly involved being smeared with mud and papaya and indulging in primal screaming. My question is how that went down with Graham Dow, the Bishop of Carlisle. Dow was Blair’s university chaplain, and he is probably the highest clergyman in the Church of England to espouse the “deliverance” ideas of the likes of Derek Prince or C. Peter Wagner. According to one report derived from his booklet Explaining Deliverance, Dow believes that

miscarriages denote the work of evil spirits and that people who choose black cars may well be possessed.

(From stories I have heard, Dow also has the habit of suddenly performing exorcisms on people he has decided are demonically oppressed, including bewildered teenagers up for confirmation)

However, Blair is also a regular worshipper at Westminster Cathedral, the centre of English Catholicism, and he got into trouble with the late Cardinal Hume for taking communion there despite being Anglican. It seems that Blair is probably virtually Catholic, but has not converted because he wants to avoid media attention, or perhaps for reasons concerning Northern Ireland. He is friends with Hans Küng, the dissident German Catholic priest and intellectual whose ability to knock off huge tomes makes him the James Michener of serious theology. Much to the bewilderment of political hacks, Blair chose to give a paper at a conference organised by Küng in Tübingen in 2000. Blair’s religion is rather more sophisticated than underpants, demons and papaya.

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From the Kansas City Star (via Christianity Today):

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A statue criticized as anti-Catholic continues to cause problems for Washburn University, a week after a federal judge ruled that the school does not have to remove it from campus…The sculpture, entitled “Holier Than Thou,” depicts the bust of a scowling, heavyset clergyman wearing a ceremonial headgear called a miter. Some observers believe the miter looks like a penis, and have said the statue insults Catholics.

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Saints Thérèse of Lisieux and Gemma Galgani are the subjects of a review essay by Hilary Mantel in the London Review of Books that looks at the connections between holiness, anorexia and stigmata in a way that goes beyond reductionism into “hysteria” or merely dwelling on the morbid aspects of their illnesses and self-abasements:

The saint first affected by the stigmata was Francis of Assisi, but it has afflicted many more women than men. It insists on the likeness of the believer’s body to that of Christ. It argues that the gender of the redemptive body does not matter. It undermines the notion of a masculine God. It shows that Christ can represent women and women can represent Christ – no wonder it makes the church nervous.

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The Rev Dr Ian Paisley’s website notes that there are 679 seats in the European Parliament, but that number 666 is unallocated. I suggest three possibilities:

1. Paisley is making it up.

2. No MEP wants the number – which would be an interesting concession to superstition, like the lack of row 13 on aeroplanes.

3. As Paisley suggests, the seat is being kept vacant for the anti-Christ, who will take it up in due course. Bit of a giveaway, though.

By the way, if A=6, B=12, C=18, D=24, E=30, F=36 etc. (a formula beloved of some fundamentalists), Ian Paisley is himself the anti-Christ.

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Rochdale council in the UK is being sued by the parents of four children who were among fourteen taken from their homes in 1990 by care workers obsessed with Satanism:

Sensational claims emerged of satanic rituals including sacrificing babies in cemeteries, children being locked in cages and being drugged by occult followers, and the slaughtering of animals. Then 18 months later, a judge ruled that there was no evidence to back up the bizarre claims and branded social services staff “amateurs”.

This was, of course, a transatlantic phenomenon, in which Christian fundamentalists in the USA and the UK (see works by Victor and LaFontaine) touted Satanic conspiracies that led to families being broken up and innocent people facing prison sentences for the most hideous of crimes. As accounts by Christian “survivors” of Satanism such as Lauren Stratford (endorsed by Hal Lindsey, by the way) and Doreen Irvine were discredited (although still available from Christian bookshops), those committed to the conspiracy theory turned to other forms of evidence: bizarre medical tests such as “anal dilation” and the notorious idea of repressed memories.

The latter idea is discussed at length by Frederick C. Crews in the latest New York Review of Books, in a review of The Trauma Trap by Richard J. McNally. The big question is, how did this idea ever get taken seriously? First, there was the question of the evidence:

McNally finds that no unanswerable evidence has been adduced to prove that anyone, anywhere, has ever repressed or dissociated the memory of any occurrence. Traumatic experiences may not always remain in the forefront of memory, but, unlike “repressed” ones, they can be readily called to mind again. Unless a victim received a physical shock to the brain or was so starved or sleep deprived as to be thoroughly disoriented at the time, those experiences are typically better remembered than ordinary ones.

This is the conclusion from studying Holocaust survivors and others.

Second is the question of credibility. Alan Scheflin, an “expert” on the subject, had presented a paper at a conference in Texas

held by the Society for the Investigation, Treatment and Prevention of Ritual and Cult Abuse, whose other speakers asserted, inter alia, that there were 500 Satanic cults in New York City alone, committing 4000 human sacrifices per year, that Bill Clinton was serving as the Antichrist in the worldwide Satanic fraternity of the Illuminati and that the False Memory Syndrome Foundation [an organisation opposed to the idea] is “a Central Intelligence Agency action.”

Meanwhile, D. Corydon Hammond, another “authority” manages to flirt with Jewish conspiracy theory when he argues that abuse victims who had repressed memories of trauma

will be slaves to a worldwide intergenerational cult that is organized into “Illuminatic councils.” The cult, said Hammond, is headed by a shadowy “Dr. Greenbaum,” a Hasidic Jewish collaborator with the Nazis who once assisted in death camp experiments and later used the CIA to further his nefarious ends.

Quoting Hammond directly:

My best guess is that they want an army of Manchurian Candidates, tens of thousands of mental robots who will do prostitution, do child pornography, smuggle drugs, engage in international arms smuggling, do snuff films, …and eventually the megalomaniacs at the top believe they’ll create a Satanic order that will rule the world.

Both Hammond and Scheflin contributed to a work titled Memory, Trauma Treatment, and the Law. It won an award from the American Psychiatric Association in 1999. McNally gives some reasons for why the ideas managed to gain currency, concerning the legacy of Freud and past failures by therapists to spot real (and remembered!) sexual abuse. However, the continued credibility given to these claims by therapists and the media suggest that there may be future tragedies inspired by self-serving panic-mongers.

PS – Crews notes that some day-care workers remain in prison even today in the USA as the result of accusations prompted by fundamentalist investigators, and cites Dorothy Rabinowitz, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times (Wall Street Press Books/Free Press, 2003).

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The conflict between Christians and Muslims in Northern Nigeria is well-known. Killings of Christians are widely reported, as well as the problems non-Muslims face in those areas that have adopted Sharia. The perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure decision of Ibrahim Shekarau, the Governor of the province of Kano, to ban polio vaccines in case Westerners were trying to make Muslim women infertile has added grist to the mill (1).

What’s less reported are a) when Christians retaliate and b) the baneful outside forces that exacerbate the conflict.

Local Christians have long suffered the attentions of Reinhard Bonnke, the German Pentecostal faith healer who operates mainly in Africa (no doubt Shekarau has provided future customers for him). During the 1980s, Bonnke held a series of revivals across sub-Saharan Africa, where he was welcomed by despots such as Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya, who liked Bonnke’s message that poverty was caused by demons rather than poor leadership. As Bonnke headed north, the climax was to be his “breaking down the gates of Islam” in North Africa. Eventually his huge rallies reached Kano in 1991, where his virulent anti-Islamic rhetoric led to riots and his hasty departure. Local Christians were left to face the Muslim wrath, and hundreds were killed. Bonnke’s toned it down a bit since then, but he’s still a regular visitor to Nigeria.

Meanwhile, local Muslims have to endure Saudi cultural imperialism. Most Muslims in Kano are followers of the mystical Qadiriyya Sufi tradition. Like most fundamentalists, the Wahabi Saudis can’t cope with the ambiguities of mystical religious experience, and Sufism is banned in Saudi Arabia. They also devote massive sums on spreading Wahabism abroad – a story the media have belatedly picked up on since 9/11 (although, alas, neo-con demagogues seem to be noticing more it than anyone else in the US). A report in yesterday’s Vanguard newspaper (Lagos) describes how:

THOUSANDS of Nigerian followers of the Sufi branch of Islam protested yesterday in Kano, and demanded the closure of the local office of a London-based Muslim charity accused of sponsoring extremist violence…The crowd marched on the Kano State Assembly, chanting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), to demand that the group, which promotes the Wahhabi strain of Islam on behalf of wealthy Saudi donors, be banned.

However, here’s why we’re unlikely to here much about it in the foreign press:

The protest remained peaceful.

(1) After an expensive investigation during which God knows how many children have been exposed to the disease, a committee in Nigeria has declared the vaccine to be safe, but Shekarau’s response is unknown. Beliefs based on paranoid delusions tend to be non-falsifiable anyway. See also my entries here and here.

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Hot on the news that Saudi Arabia was banning Jewish tourists (since retracted) comes a report that the Iraqi Governing Council is appalled at the thought of the ancient Jewish Iraqi community returning to the land they fled from in the 1950s and 1960s:

Late last year, the council approved proposed legislation that would have allowed thousands of Iraqis who fled or were expelled from the country to reclaim their Iraqi citizenship — unless they were Jewish, council members said. The proposal did not specifically mention Jews, they said, but it contained language that would have kept in place the revocation of citizenship of tens of thousands of Jews by the Iraqi government in 1950.

Muhammad Bahaddin Saladin,  a member of the council, argues that “as long as the Palestinian problem exists, as long as there is a state of war, then we should not allow the Jews to return…The minister of defense in Israel is an Iraqi Jew. Should we let him return?”

Somehow I doubt that particular problem is likely to arise, and the idea that Jews in general (or even Israelis in general) are responsible for Israel’s actions is a depressingly common one in the region. To his credit, Paul Bremer has declined to sign off on the legislation, while one member of the council, an Assyrian Christian named Yonadam Kanna, had the guts and vision to say that “I think we should allow everyone to return. It should not matter that they are Jewish.”

Israel, of course, refuses to allow Palestinian refugees from 1948 to return to their homes in Israel proper, despite evidence from scholars such as the Israeli Ilan Pappe as to how their accomodation could be perfectly feasible. Allowing Jews to return to Iraq would not only be just, but would put pressure on Israel to treat the Palestinians more fairly. But I suppose that’s a bit too subtle for some.

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With Jean-Bertrand Aristide in exile from Haiti, the Christian Religious Right are rejoicing. Aristide, of course, was a proponent of liberation theology and had given state recognition to voodoo – an attempt “to rededicate Haiti to Satan”, according to Jim Uttley, a former second-generation missionary to the republic. Reports from ASSIST Ministries describe a corrupt tyrant, and contrast the evil dictator with the good old days of Paul Magloire.

Uttley describes Aristide’s nefarious cunning: “He used his position as a priest to gain power and then used that power as president to sway the hearts and minds of his citizens as well as foreign powers, to do his bidding.” What a shocker! Thank God for people like Uttley who can see past the façade and know better than the Haitians what’s good for them. Meanwhile, Joanne Derstine of Gospel Crusade tells of “pro-Aristide” thugs attacking a boys’ home (Derstine is the daughter of Dr. Gerald Derstine, who set up Christian Zionist groups in central America back in the 1980s.)

Now, Aristide was far from perfect, but there is another side to the story, as described by Peter Hallward yesterday (although Hallward is critiqued by Christian Aid today). I also fail to see why Aristide was worse than Uttley’s hero Magloire, who modernised the country, but who also, according to his Guardian obit in 2001:

scored a time-honoured 99% of the poll when the new system [of elections] was first used soon after his 1950 coup. But corruption, growing repression, the destruction wrought by Hurricane Hazel in 1954, and the theft of subsequent relief funds turned the tide against Magloire.

The difference, of course, was that Magloire was a strict ant-Communist, and in such cases (as with Chiang Kai-Shek or Rios Montt), politically-minded conservative Christians are generally rather more indulgent of corruption and repression.

As for the voodoo, The Revealer weblog currently has a good analysis of how the media are failing to say anything sensible about this religious tradition.

UPDATE (8 March 2004): Turns out that the voodoo priests themsleves are claiming credit for Aristide’s flight to the Central African Republic:

Mr Aristide…adopted as his symbol the cockerel, a voodoo icon. Mr Aristide…was guilty of the voodoo equivalent of hubris and then struck down by its version of nemesis, several voodo priests said this week…

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Knocking off a religious book to piggyback on a movie has a venerable history, going back to at least 1976 when the aptly-named Frank Allnut brought out After the Omen to cash in (sorry, “provide an evangelistic tool”) in the wake of the great 70’s schlocker.

Now Crossway Books brings us The Passion of Jesus Christ, with a cover designed in such a way that it just about avoids treading on Mel’s copyright (This book is not to be confused with Tyndale’s official movie tie-in, mentioned a couple of posts ago). Playing Schrader to Gibson’s Scorcese, the author is a Calvinist named John Piper, and the book provides “Fifty Reasons Why He [Jesus] Came to Die”.

Piper first, though, decides to tackle the anti-Semitism issue head on, with an introduction titled “The Christ, The Crucifixion and the Concentration Camps”. Although it tries to be sensitive, this section seems likely to wind Jews up:

Is there a way that Jewish suffering may find, not its cause, but its final meaning in the suffering of Jesus Christ? Is it possible to think, not of Christ’s passion leading to Auschwitz, but of Auschwitz leading to an understanding of Christ’s passion? Is the link between Calvary and the camps a link of unfathomable empathy?…And perhaps a generation of Jewish people, whose grandparents endured their own noxious crucifixion, will be able, as no others, to grasp what happened to the Son of God at Calvary. (p. 16)

In fairness, Piper uses Elie Wiesel’s mention of the word Calvary in relation to the Holocaust as a springboard for these reflections. However, I suspect many Jews will be rather annoyed that the Holocaust should be interpreted in Christian terms, and the implication of “oh well, the Holocaust was bad but look on the bright side: Jews might understand Jesus better than anyone else” is likely to appal.

I’m also uneasy with Piper’s implicit mysticism. Yes, the Holocaust was unique. It was an industrialised, bureaucratic death machine aimed against a people ultimately not because of what they believed, nor because of their behaviour, nor because they had land or assets that their persecutors wanted to steal, but simply because of their existence on the earth. It can be therefore be distinguished from other horrors, such as, say, the Armenian genocide or the Atlantic slave trade – events that are also sometimes called “Holocausts”. But the idea that the descendents of Jewish Holocaust victims (not just the victims themselves, and not the non-Jewish victims of Hitler at all!) therefore have a unique insight into suffering is mystical and problematic. It seems to me that Piper is working with an abstract idea about “the Jews”: a romantic stereotype based on his theology rather than on spontaneous human encounter, with all its complexities and ambiguities.

This is a pity, as Piper is clearly opposed to anti-Semitism and racism. He’s a critic of Christian Zionism, a theology that also stereotypes Jews and Arabs. But he’s also a man who cannot think of people as just people rather than as types fitting some predetermined role. I note his writings against Evangelical feminism, where he approvingly quotes J.I. Packer’s absurd claim that “‘a situation in which a female boss has a male secretary’ puts strain on the humanity of both”, because (Piper says) “The God-given sense of responsibility for leadership in a mature man will not generally allow him to flourish long under personal, directive leadership of a female superior” (p.43). If not having a female boss is what Piper needs in order to feel good about himself, he’s really rather sad. But I digress…

UPDATE (3 March): According to AP

A book unrelated to Gibson’s film, “The Passion of Jesus Christ,” by Baptist minister John Piper, came out in January. Published by Crossway Books with a first printing of 175,000, “The Passion” now has 1.6 million copies in print…Tyndale reports that a 150,000 first printing of the film’s companion book, called “The Passion,” sold out so quickly that some stores may have to wait up to two weeks before an additional printing of 250,000 fully arrives…

Meanwhile sales of Gibson’s source, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, “have jumped from under 3,000 for all of 2002 to 17,000 just last month”. This last work has obvious anti-Semitic content, by the way. As well as “cruel” Jewish mobs, it has this bizarre story (not in the film or the Bible) about how the cross was built, not by the Romans, but by the Jews:

A short time before when Judas had received the price of his treason, a Pharisee had gone out, and sent seven slaves to fetch wood with which to prepare the Cross for our Saviour…They procured this wood from a spot about three-quarters of a mile distant, near a high wall, where there was a great quantity of other wood belonging to the Temple, and dragged it to a square situated behind the tribunal of Caiphas.(section 124)

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