Bartholomew's Notes

Charisma has an article on neo-Pentecostal revivalist Rodney Howard Browne:

He said in the last six months the U.S. has advanced socialistic policies that could lead to religious persecution, and eventually set the stage for a one-world government and the introduction of the Antichrist.

“I don’t think the American church is ready for what’s coming because the preachers are preaching each other’s sermons; they are prophesying each other’s prophecies,” he said. “People are asleep at the wheel.

“The only thing we can do is bring in the harvest of souls,” he added, noting that he plans to host a Great Awakening Tour event in Washington, D.C., Sept. 7-11 but is still seeking churches to sponsor it. “This is not about a government bailout. The government cannot change what’s coming. … We’ve got to see a revival. We’ve got to see a Great Awakening.”

The idea of Obama as being either the Anti-Christ or his forerunner is spreading rapidly among conservative American Christians; of course, this kind of conflation of prophetic vision and political preference  – used to here to whip up fear and paranoia rather than reasonable dissent – is not in itself a new development.

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According to a rumour in the Italian media over the last couple of months, former Roman Catholic Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo (who is now a follower of Rev Moon) may be a contestant on a reality show named Isola dei Famosi, which is set on an Honduran island. Others who have been named as possible contestants include a film actress (Pamela Prati), two singers (Donatella Rettore and Laura Freddi), and a pornographic actress/politician (Cicciolina). This may just be some silly rumour; alas, I don’t know Italian, so I’ve had to rely on the Google translation tool.

Meanwhile, one of the sites reporting the story links to this remarkable performance from a chat show in January, involving Milingo and his Korean wife:

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A blog at Christianity Today sounds a note of caution over the case of Fathima Rifqa Bary, a Sir Lankan teenager living in Ohio who recently fled to Orlando claiming that her parents planned to kill her for converting to Christianity:

“They [my parents] threatened to kill me,” Bary says tearfully in a YouTube video …posted Tuesday. She goes on to explain the logic of honor killings: “They have to kill me. My blood is now hallal, which means that because I am now a Christian, I am from a Muslim background. It’s an honor, they love God more than me. They have to do this.”

…Sgt. Jerry Cupp with the Columbus missing persons bureau disputes Bary’s claims, telling The Columbus Dispatch that Mohamed Bary has known about his daughter’s conversion for months and appears to be caring. And today, the attorney for Bary’s parents issued a statement that they have never threatened Bary: “If this case is perceived as a clash of religions, it is because Mr. Lorenz recklessly and without authorization put someone else’s child in front of television cameras to publicly renounce her previous faith,” McCarthy said in the statement. “The parents who love Rifqa are in the best position now to protect her from the mess that Mr. Lorenz has made.”

Bary headed for Florida after contacting Pastor Blake Lorenz through Facebook. Video footage and photos of the two together show her hugging the pastor for protection.

The girl gives a rather strange interpretation of what an “honour killing” is for; rather than being the remedy for a perceived dishonour suffered by a family, she tells the journalist that to kill her would be an especially “great honour” because she is the the first Christian in her family for “150 generations” and it would show her family’s love for Allah (Lorenz concurs with a “yes” at 5:03). This seems to me to be a garbled “Christianized” understanding of the phenomenon, making it into something like a human sacrifice. Her claim that Muslim converts to Christianity in Sri Lanka (where Muslims are a minority) are confined to a mental hospital is not one that I have seen reported anywhere else.

Lorenz used to pastor the Pine Castle United Methodist Church, but he now runs the Global Revolution Church, which has no apparent links to any other church or grouping. He believes that he receives special personal messages from God about the imminent end of the world:

Recently God gave Blake a new call to share with the church, Israel, and the Gentile nations that the return of Jesus Christ is imminent. After 24 years as a United Methodist pastor and evangelist, Blake retired from the Methodist Church in obedience to Jesus Who told him to separate himself and serve only Him. This led to the founding of Global Revolution Ministries and Global Revolution Church, based in Orlando, Florida.

Blake has written many articles, tracts, and pamphlets on Jesus and His salvation. He also authored “Visits to the Gate of Heaven,” and has begun a weekly television ministry to share the word that Jesus is coming and to teach how one can be ready for His return.

Some of his sermons can be seen here; his wife introduces them, telling us that God gave him a “new calling” one day while he was out jogging.

The girl’s parents and brother can be seen in the news report below; they do not give the impression of wanting to kill her. However, Robert Spencer – fresh from scrubbing details of the bogus “mass paedo wedding in Gaza” tale from his website – assures us that this is undoubtedly a “slow-motion honor killing“.

Young female converts have been “rescued” before for the purpose of religious propaganda; in the 1950s in Northern Ireland, a young Catholic girl named Maura Lyons joined Ian Paisley’s fundamentalist Protestant church. According to the story, she said that

Her father beat her and called in three Roman Catholic priests who ‘seemed determined to force me into convent life’, she said later. She escaped by jumping from a bedroom window. Free Presbyterians smuggled her into Scotland – a criminal offence. Irish newspapers, north and south, went wild. The Royal Ulster Constabulary searched for the girl, and found a wall of silence. Two months later, Paisley publicly played a tape-recording of Maura Lyons describing her conversion. He was laconic with the truth: the tape, he said, had been found among milk bottles on his doorstep. He also showed his talent for playing the beleaguered hero. ‘If I knew where the girl was I would not take her to the police,’ he said. ‘Very well, I am committing an offence. I will do time for it. I would be proud to do time for Protestant liberty.’…Most Ulster Protestants were embarrassed.

Name variations: Global Revolution Ministries; Pastor Blake William Lorenz

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Crosstalk is a Christian radio programme described as a ministry of “VCY America“, “VCY” standing for “Voice of Christian Youth”. According to a blurb on its website:

Crosstalk covers the issues that affect our world, our nation, our families and the Christian church from a perspective centered in the Word of God. Whether we discuss the economy, the political scene, the continuing moral collapse of our nation, legislation that affects the family, or the state of evangelicalism, our authority is found in the unchanging standard of the Holy Scriptures. Veteran co-hosts Dr. Vic Eliason, Jim Schneider, and Ingrid Schlueter have worked as a team for over 20 years to bring solid information to the body of Christ.

This “solid information” now includes the remarkable conspiracy  theory that Madelyn Dunham was the true mother of Barack Obama, and that her daughter Ann colluded in a cover-up by pretending to be the one who gave birth. The theory is propounded by a studio guest, Joseph Farah; curiously, despite running WorldNetDaily (which the Crosstalk website describes, absurdly, as “the world’s leading independent Internet news source”), this is the only outlet where Farah has chosen to discuss the conspiracy:

Well, Madelyn Dunham is a very interesting person.  As you know, Barack … the … and I want to be careful when he identify people as “mother,” “father,” “grandmother,” and so forth because honestly I don’t think we know with any certainty whatsoever who those players are in Barack Obama’s life. And perhaps he doesn’t either. I suspect he does, but it’s possible he doesn’t know. And it is entirely within the realm of possibility that Madelyn Dunham was his mother and there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that.

Schneider responds (at 36:31) by calling these “interesting thoughts”.

VCY promotes old-school fundamentalism;  its latest show is a critique of animal rights with the gloriously Landover-esque title “Worship Not the Creature“; other recent offerings include “Growing Government Tyranny” (“The Obama health care logo looks similar to the Nazi logo”); “Spiritual Warfare and New Ageism” (including the “role of the Jesuit Priests” and how Oprah Winfrey is “helping to lay the foundation for the coming of a one world religion, a one world political structure, a one world leader, and the new world order”); and an attack on Rick Warren entitled “Purpose Driven Islam: Rick Warren and the Muslims“. There is an associated blog here.

Schneider himself is rather obscure, although he did gain some attention last year, when he was moved to wrath against a “Wacky Week” event at an elementary school:

An elementary-school event in which kids were encouraged to dress as members of the opposite gender drew the ire of a Christian radio group, whose angry broadcast prompted outraged calls to the district office.

“We believe it’s the wrong message to send to elementary students,” said Jim Schneider, the network’s program director. “Our station is one that promotes traditional family values. It concerns us when a school district strikes at the heart and core of the Biblical values. To promote this to elementary-school students is a great error.”

The station’s founder, Vic Eliason, has been involved in various public campaigns in Wisconsin over many years; in 1990 he persuaded the UPI to fire a lesbian reporter on the grounds that as a UPI subscriber he should not be “helping finance Brienza’s work for a publication aimed at homosexuals” (although he has also spoken against Rev Moon, who now owns UPI).

But Crosstalk and VYC are not without critics; this blog believes the station is too liberal:

Why is it that Vic would not have Ron Paul, or even a Paul representative (I offered Vic several alternatives) on CrossTalk, but he does have Alan Keyes? Ron Paul is a Baptist, who believes the things Eliason purports to believe himself and holds for WVCY. Keyes, as a Catholic, rejects salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

WorldNetDaily, meanwhile, has promoted the idea that Obama is either the Anti-Christ or his forerunner; that he recently sent a secret message to Muslims in a speech, promising to extermine the Jews; and that he created swine flu as a “bio weapon”.

(Hat tips: Jesus’ General; Right Wing Watch; ConWebWatch)

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A few days ago the “Casuals United” website changed its name to the “British Defence Leagues”, with links to the following groups: The English Defence League, the Welsh Defence League, the Scottish Defence League, and…erm, the Jewish Defence League. This final page links, as expected, to the American “Jewish Defense League”. The JDL, of course, is a notorious extremist organisation with a history of violence in the USA, and which has been repudiated by most other Jewish groups. The Anti-Defamation League has a chronicle of its activities here.

I doubt very much there is any real link with the JDL – more likely, this is just the usual vicarious identification with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But if there is a link, perhaps someone from the JDL will ask why “Casuals United” created a video – since removed from YouTube – which promoted a quote by Kevin Alfred Strom, an American known for railing against Jewish “supremicism”.

UPDATE: Several hours later, the link to the JDL has been removed. Instead, we now have the Sikh Defence League; we’re told that “some Sikhs and Hindus even have started to support and liaise with the BNP”, and we’re directed to watch “a tape made by the BNP a few years back with a Sikh and a Hindu”.

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From the Manchester Guardian (1947):

The anti-Jewish demonstrations which have marred the week-end in Manchester, Liverpool, and other towns are clearly the work of the most irresponsible and hooligan elements in our population. But that does not make these outbreaks less menacing or less disgraceful…

The man who condemns the Zionists in Palestine on account of the crimes of the Irgun gangsters is only a degree better the youth who expresses his hatred by mobbing the innocent men and women of Cheetham Hill or Wavertree. There is no political fault so common or so dangerous as this primitive confusion between many and few. The murder of the British sergeants in Palestine was a brutal crime, the act of crazed fanatics. But…to answer terrorism in Palestine with terrorism in England is sheer Hitlerism. We must be desperately careful to see that we do not let ourselves be infected with the poison of the disease we had thought to eradicate.

According to a thesis posted at this site:

For over five days [Liverpool] bore witness to such extreme violence and looting that the Lord Mayor was compelled to issue an appeal to the city ‘to assist the police in the prevention of attacks on property and shops supposedly owned by Jews’.317 In total over 300 Jewish properties were affected by the rioting in Liverpool, and the police made 88 arrests.

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From the European Times:

ON Sunday, the 16th June, Mr. W. Murphy, a lecturer against Romanism, commenced a series of lectures ia a wooden building erected for the purpose in the centre of the town of Birmingham; a large mob collected outside, and stones were thrown at the building, and three of the ticket takers were seriously wounded. There were only three or four policemen at hand at the time, but a large force was afterwards brought to the spot, and armed with cutlasses…It appears from the Birmingham papers that the disturbances were of a very serious character. Twenty-six persons, men and women, were to be brought before the magistrates.

…Mr. Murphy’s addresses, as reported, are of an extremely fanatical charactor. Before he had finished his lecture, he said he would prove to the people of Birmingham that every Popish priest was a murderer, a cannibal, a liar, and a pickpocket…and if ever there was a rag and bone gatherer in the universe it was the Pope himself.

…A continual shower of stones, brick-ends, tiles, and other such missiles was kept up, so that it was dangerous to the life of any person to enter the street ; and when the rioters were at a loss for a causus belli, they would get up a row amongst themselves, attacking each other indiscriminately.

According to further details on this site:

Murphy only acted more defiantly and provocatively by saying that he was willing to risk his life for the cause of truth and liberty and that “Popish stones would let him see what Popery was”… The Catholic district of Birmingham was invaded by his supporters who, to the tune of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” and “John Brown’s Body,” attacked a Catholic chapel and looted houses.

…He [stressed] that Catholicism appealed mostly to young women, while his lectures on the confessional served to increase the sales of a sensational and pornographic pamphlet, The Confessional Unmasked.

..Matthew Arnold…took the right of Murphy to speak as a clear example of “a very strong belief [in England] in freedom, and a very weak belief in right reason”.

Supporters of Murphy – who had been born a Catholic but whose father converted to Protestantism – complained about the government and the police pandering to a minority:

 Englishmen are being deprived by a Military Despotism at the dictation of ROMISH PRIESTS. Such is the tyranny and cruelty to which Loyal Protestants are exposed under the il-Liberal Government of our Popish Premier.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun – Ecclesiastes 1:9

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The website of “Casuals United” has removed a statement attacking immigrants and Muslims. It’s not in any internet caches either, although a trace can be seen on the UK Yahoo search page:

The original statement, which asked supporters to write letters of complaint to the government, was:

the traitor Alan Johnson wants to keep letting immigrants, most of them terrorists or sympathisers into this country…British people must make a stand and the scum that have allowed our country to get in this state need to be told.

We have no chance of removing islam with rodents like this in power. This man is in charge of immigration control and openly states that he doesnt care how many people come here. No, well he wont be on the train when the next bomb goes off, so why should he care?

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Following the unrest in Birmingham on Saturday, Paul Ray has published a second diatribe (see here for the first) against Chris Renton, the BNP-linked activist who set up the English Defence League website. However, Ray complains not that Renton’s BNP connection makes the EDL look bad; rather, that Renton makes the BNP look bad:

Do high level BNP politicians, such as the two who are now in Europe, want their credibility damaged in the eyes of the electorate by links to football hooligans and riots on the streets of Britain because of the likes of Chris Renton?

It is people like Chris Renton who damage not only the street movement that aims to be a neutral voice for the silent majority within Britain, but also the BNP that is becoming a modern, respectable alternative to the Establishment in Westminster.

Is he an agent of the Left trying to blacken the BNP name?

Ray takes the view that Nick Griffin has perhaps, like Saint Paul, turned to Christ, based on his “stance on Christianity, and his seasoned re-evaluated view on Israel and the Jews”, but that Renton is an “imposter” who has “hijacked” the English Defence League name:

Him, standing in front of a placard saying we are not BNP is laughable. The Luton EDL division who created the placards are not BNP, because they have people of all colours and races amongst their ranks. They have been forced into defending this position out in the open when they should be attacking the Islamic militants because of Chris Renton but none of them decided to take the action necessary.

Ray also shares some screenshots of email correspondence with Renton. In these emails, Renton mocks Ray’s complaint about the use of the Templar cross design for EDL placards. According to Ray,

It is a Templar Cross, and Templars are Christians, who live and die for their faith, nothing else. It isnt something that just anybody can wear.

I hope that in time the leaders who are rising will embrace the cross.

For now i think the design has to be just the St Georges cross, and not the Templar cross.

Renton’s response:

like everyone keeps saying, one man band, people dont wanna hear this religious shite from a keyboard warrior they want action, protests, thats what we ae doing, you can write as much bnp bullshit as u want but its all lies and you will be found out! you fucked off [Chris] goodge the first minute you spoke to him, you ruined your relationship with [Jeff Marsh], you ruined your relationship with me and my bro, you destroyed your relationship with luton now as well, oh but no hang on its us not you LOL yeah right

Plus:

…i reckon you ought to see a soctor mate your obviously nuts…

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The campaign in Nigeria against the stigmatisation of children as witches by certain evangelists is facing some resistance; a few days ago the British Humanist Association reported that Nigerian sceptic Leo Igwe (who wrote a guest post for me in December) had been assaulted at a conference highlighting the problem:

As the anti-witchcraft conference began at around 10.30am…religious protestors dressed in orange raided the venue and began protesting loudly. The exremists were carrying a number of banners with slogans such as, “This protest is organised by The Akwa Ibim Government”, “We give freedom to the witches” and “Stepping Stone is not a registered organisation”.

Leo blames followers of the evangelist Helen Ukpabio for what happened.

Meanwhile, a hostel for children who have been abused and abandoned after being labeled as witches has been raided; the UK Daily Mirror reports:

The headquarters of Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network (CRARN), which works with the British fund Stepping Stones Nigeria, was raided by a group of men claiming to be police officers earlier this month.

CRARN president Sam Itauma, a winner at the recent Amnesty Awards in London, had to escape through the ceiling of his own home adjoining the care centre.

…It has since become apparent that the police were accompanied by a lawyer from Lagos, Gary [Foxcroft, founder of Stepping Stones Nigeria] says.

This is the same lawyer who has been representing Evangelist Helen Ukpabio in the law suits that she has filed against CRARN, Stepping Stones Nigeria and Channel Four since the broadcast of the internationally acclaimed documentary film – Saving Africa’s Witch Children.

Itauma’s wife was arrested, computer equipment was seized, and it is alleged that children were beaten by police when they objected. Ukpabio has stated that Itauma is a wizard, and that Stepping Stones exists simply to gain NGO money. The raid has apparently caused some embarrassment, and state governor Godswill Akpabio has now visited the hostel and announced a substantial donation.

Ukpabio’s followers aren’t too keen on my blog posts on the subject either (in particular here, here, and here), and some wonderfully florid insults have been received (“You are wicked, crooked, crafty, poisonous, and dangerous to women in general”, etc.).

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