Kenya’s Gay Hatred Is Rooted In A Global Evangelical Movement
Riot police stop Orthodox protesters who are trying to interupt Ukraine’s first gay pride demonstration in Kiev, Ukraine, Saturday, May 25, 2013. About a hundred gay and lesbian Ukrainians and those from other countries took part in the gay pride rally, protected by hundreds of riot police. Antipathy toward homosexuals remains strong in Ukraine. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov)
IN Nigeria, President Goodluck Jonathan has put his signature to the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act. Among a range of anti-gay laws, homosexuals can be jailed for ten-years for displaying affection in public. Helping homosexuals avoid detection is also a crime.
It’s getting to be like Eastern Europe and some people’s visions of a better USA in sub-Saharan Africa. The links between the bigotry in Africa and what’s happening in parts of Europe and the UK has links to US missionaries.
The BBC has reported on pending legislation in Ukraine which would criminalise any “positive depiction” of gay people. The Beeb notes the involvement of the Christian Hope evangelical church in Kiev, describing it as “One of the legislation’s incubators”. The article includes an encounter with the church’s pastor, Valery Reshetinsky:
In his opinion, freedom of speech for sexual minorities is a violation of what he considers his inalienable right not to have to hear something he finds offensive.
“You can’t do everything that you want to do, because there are people who have the exact same rights as you do,” he insists.
The pastor goes on to accuse a worldwide conspiracy of Masons, New-Agers, postmodernists and financiers of various nationalities, of imposing ideas that are not “characteristic for Ukraine” on the nation’s children.
Olumide Makanjuola, an executive director of the Initiative For Equality, speaks to Associated Press during an interview in Lagos, Nigeria, Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2014. Police, working off a list of 168 suspects purportedly obtained through torture, are arresting dozens of gay men in Nigeria’s northern Bauchi state, human rights activists said Tuesday. A new law in Nigeria, dubbed the “Jail the Gays” bill, is encouraging the persecution of gays and will endanger programs fighting HIV-AIDS in the gay community, said Dorothy Aken’Ova, executive director of Nigeria’s International Center for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights. On Monday, President Goodluck Jonathan’s office confirmed that the Nigerian leader signed the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act that criminalizes gay marriage, gay organizations and anyone working with or promoting them. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
The BBC then highlights a picture captioned “A Kiev protest against homosexuality by the ‘Embassy of God church’”. This church, also known as the “God Embassy”, was founded by a Nigerian immigrant named Sunday Adelaja. He recalls his mission:
At that time the Lord spoke to me saying, “I am about to raise up a mega-church in Europe, at this end time and I am calling people who will establish those churches. Some people have already responded to my call. Your destiny and that of millions of other people depend on whether or not you will obey me. The primary assignment is to raise up a mega-church. The second assignment is to train up missionaries to evangelize throughout the world, especially in China and the Arab world. I want the people of Ukraine and the former Soviet Union to take the Gospel to other nations”.
In 2008 OneNewsNow reported on an event in Atlanta:
The three-day conference — called “Synergize” — begins today in an Atlanta, Georgia, church. Pastor Sunday Adelaja, founder of God’s Embassy Church in Kiev, Europe’s largest church, organized the event. Speakers include actor Ben Stein, Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy, and Pat Williams, senior vice president of the Orlando Magic.
…Pastor Adelaja believes if the church in America became as “active and aggressive” in culture as the homosexual movement, then the church would have a missions movement that the “world would be proud of again.”
A Ugandan man reads the headline of the Ugandan newspaper “Rolling Stone” in Kampala, Uganda. Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2010, in which the papers reveals the identity of allegedly gay members of Ugandan society and calls for public punishment against those individuals. The “Rolling Stone” is a fairly new publication under the management of Giles Muhame, a Ugandan journalist..rights activitists say that at least four homosexuals have been attacked since a Ugandan newspaper published an article this month called “100 Pictures of Uganda’s Top Homos Leak _ Hang Them.” A year after a Ugandan legislator tried to introduce a bill that would have called for the death penalty for being gay, rights activists say homosexuals face a host of hostility. (AP Photo)
In 2005, the BBC Radio 4′s ongoing Crossing Continents show looked at Pastor Sunday Adelaja of Kiev:
Pastor Sunday Adelaja arrived in the Ukraine from Nigeria on a Soviet student scholarship in 1993.
Twelve years later he is the head of the “God Embassy” [or “Embassy of God”], the largest evangelical church in Europe, with flock of 25,000 Ukrainians in Kiev, and churches in 32 countries around the world, all originating from Ukraine.
You can listen to the show on this link.
Barthes has more:
Presenter Julian Pettifer also encounters a couple of critics: a disaffected ex-member named only as “Edgar”, and a grumpy Orthodox priest called “Father Alexander”. Edgar suggests (with the help of some leading questions) that Adelaja is appealing to an authoritarian nostalgia left over from Communist days, and claims that he lives in luxury; Father Alexander dismisses the GodEmbassy as “nothing more than showbusiness”. He also charges Adelaja with misusing religious freedom “to actually take away people’s freedom”, and notes the church’s emphasis on tithing 10% of income.
Pettifer puts these accusations to Adelaja, who heartily laughs them off. His church members are not “zombies”, he tells us, and he lives on modest means. He sees his teaching on money as being about empowerment, and he rejects the Prosperity teaching found in some US churches; indeed, he says he has even preached against it in Nigeria. He took the “showbusiness” complaint as a compliment.
Obviously, such a short introduction can only scratch the surface. Although Edgar complains that members are encouraged to vote in a particular way, the political dimension is more or less completely absent. This is a shame; as I blogged just recently, the officially recognised Pentecostal head in Russia has warned of “outsiders” encouraging politicisation, while Ted Haggard boasted to Jeff Sharlet at Harpers that evangelicals connected with his Colorado New Life church had been foremost participants in the recent “Orange Revolution”.
New Generation “base church” in Riga is known more for its virulent anti-gay activism. The church’s head, Alexei Ledyaev has worked with Makarenko:
Following a protest against a gay-rights march in Riga, Ledyaev complained that: “Security of the gay was more important than security of the people” and warned that …Islamization goes full speed wherever homosexual lifestyle is legally accepted. Muslim organizations and committees, centers and mosques, schools are being opened overwhelmingly everywhere…. Homosexuality and islamization are two sides of the medal and integral elements of the one destructive process of European culture and civilization.”
And:
In a speech given after Riga’s first gay pride parade in 2005, Ledyaev told his international congregation: “Homosexuality is a…dangerous and contagious disease. The contagious should be isolated and treated. Otherwise, an epidemic will sweep through the entire community.”
In this Feb. 27, 2012 file photo, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, visits Koluama 2 village, in Nigeria. Local and international groups fighting AIDS warned on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2014, that a new Nigerian law criminalizing same-sex marriage and gay organizations will jeopardize the fight against the deadly disease. President Jonathan’s spokesman confirmed Monday that he had signed the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act on Jan. 7, 2014, providing penalties of up to 14 years in jail for a gay marriage and up to 10 years’ imprisonment for membership or encouragement of gay club, societies and organizations.
He has links to Scott Lively and Pastor Ken Hutcherson, an “advocate of a biblical stance” against divorce and homosexuality”. He once opined:
On a Sunday…Hutcherson was preaching on gender roles. During his sermon, Hutcherson stated, “God hates soft men” and “God hates effeminate men.” Hutcherson went on to say, “If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center notes on Lively:
Written by fundamentalist activists Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika says that rather than being victimized by the Nazis, gay men in Hitler’s inner circle actually helped mastermind the Holocaust.
“While we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore their central role in Nazism,” write Lively and Abrams. “To the myth of the ‘pink triangle’ — the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted — we must respond with the reality of the ‘pink swastika.’”
Lively wrote a piece for WorldNetDaily on Uganda
The murderers are the lavender Marxists, the now-global network of sexual revolutionaries bent on remaking the entire world in their own perverted image, whose juggernaut has toppled even once-mighty Britain, crushing under their lavender boots after eight centuries the symbol of its Christian power: the Magna Carta, whose first principle had proclaimed “The English church must be free!”
…Uganda is the only country in the world with a national holiday commemorating its rejection of sexual perversion. Every June 3 it honors the 22 young men and boys who were tortured and roasted alive in 1886 by homosexual King Mwanga, because they refused to submit to sodomy. Is it any wonder, then, that Uganda has reacted violently against the army of agitators, led by George Soros, who now seek to re-homosexualize Ugandan culture?…
Lively later said has was not favour of the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which included the death penalty for “serial offenders”.
“Frankly, when I learned that bill included the death penalty I was mortified,” said Lively. “I publicly rejected it as written, and privately expressed my strong disapproval through my pro-family allies in Kampala, asking them to pass my concerns along to the MPs. Thank God the sponsors did in fact agree to change the bill. I can’t say that I necessarily agree with every element of the revised bill, but I believe this revision is an acceptable compromise under the circumstances and well within the prerogative of a civilized sovereign nation.”
Prior to the revision of the bill, Dr. Lively had been the subject of intense criticism in the international media, which implied without evidence that he had advocated for the death penalty. Even The New York Times joined in the attack under the headline “ After Americans Visit, Uganda Weighs Death for Gays.”
“I’m used to being hated by the Left,” said Lively, “because I speak plainly and truthfully about the global homosexual movement and it’s terribly destructive agenda…
Reshetinsky has some links to American Jim King Ministries of Tulsa. We learn from them:
We helped establish the Missionary Training Center in Kiev with Pastor Valeriy Reshetinsky. The center focuses on equipping emerging church leaders with tools to plant new churches.
There are links to Calvary Chapel of Murrieta, California, run by Eastern European Outreach. EEO’s executive director Jeff Thompson says on his outfit’s website:
We are blessed and excited to serve the Lord through ministries of compassion for the “children at risk” in the former Soviet Union; we sponsor 100 indigenous pastors with Christian libraries to Russian prisons and public schools; 1500 children are sponsored by EEO Child sponsors in Ukraine and Kosovo; 6 different two week bible camps were sponsored for 1200 children (all expenses paid) for underprivileged children from the Chernobyl area of Ukraine and in war torn Kosovo; approximately 80,000 Bibles and Christian books are distributed each year by EEO teams and indigenous missionaries.
One other missionary is Lou Engle, who in 2010 was heading to Uganda to talk, among other things, on “homosexuality and increased immorality”. Engle says homosexuality is the result of demons. San Francisco has avoided the anger of God only because his son lives there and is casting out spirits. Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) issued a statement about his visit:
Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) condemns Lou Engle’s upcoming crusade scheduled for May 2, 2010. The crusade could cause incalculable damage, as it is designed to label homosexuality as a “vice” in Uganda and to incite people to “fight” against this “vice” in society. In the context of an already inflamed extremist religious movement against homosexuality in Uganda sparked off by American evangelicals, the inflammatory preaching of Lou Engle and his associates is likely to incite further violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people in Uganda.
…This crusade could have the same kind of impact that the March 2009 anti-gay conference had in Uganda. Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer reinforced the desire of some religious leaders to persuade the government to create laws which would eliminate homosexuality from the nation. Eventually, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was introduced in the Parliament of Uganda by MP’s David Bahati and Benson Obua.
Tom and Melody Monk testify to the power of their faith at work in Ukraine:
A young teenage girl, Anya, came to our camp last year. She learned so much from the Bible Studies and was especially touched as we studied the miracles of Jesus. She suffered from severe Psoriasis and was ashamed to come to camp. After going home and sharing the camp experiences with her mother, they began to pray for her healing. The mother began attending church with Anya and one day went forward to pray for her daughter. She was convicted that she had been putting more faith in the physicians of man than God. She repented and asked Jesus to be her Savior and Lord. Soon Anya’s skin began to heal and now she is totally free from psoriasis.
Wow, indeed. And now that if you are gay, there’s always exorcism.
Posted: 15th, January 2014 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
