Two scenarios: A man knocks on the door of an old lady’s
house, and offers to repave her driveway. Instead, he puts on cheap coat of
paint, and walks off with two thousand dollars.
That, we all agree, is fraud, and the state has the
legitimate interest and obligation to interfere.
Second scenario: A man invites an old lady into his church,
which is an old movie theater, tells her that God wants her to be rich, and
that God will reward her if she gives “until it hurts,” because that’s the way
God will listen.
And what’s this? Well, if I told you, you wouldn’t believe
me, so here’s
Wikipedia:
Prosperity theology (sometimes referred to as the prosperity gospel,
the health and wealth gospel, or the gospel of success)[A] is a Christian religious doctrine that financial
blessing is the will of God for
Christians, and that faith,
positive speech, and donations to Christian ministries will increase one's
material wealth.
Well, I can tell you all about this because I spent
most of the weekend wrapping my head around a Brazilian Church—now the largest
in the country—which has spread to over 200 other countries and has an annual
income of 735 million bucks.
The church, La
Iglesia Universal del Reino de Cristo or The Universal Church of the
Kingdom of God, was founded in 1977 by “Bishop” Edir Macedo; today, there are
eight million followers in Brazil alone and there are 4700 “temples” across the
world. Want a more concrete example? In Uganda—always an interesting place for
gay people—the church started in 1996, and now has nine “temples.” Here’s one
of them:
OK—they’re Pentecostal, they practice “Prosperity Theology,”
and they believe in exorcising
demons, though when pressed they say that it is all just theater—nothing
serious. What else about them?
Well, they seem to get into trouble pretty much everywhere
they go: money laundering, failure to register ministers, buying oils and other
materials at local supermarkets and reselling them at higher prices as products
from Israel, and thus miraculous. In the United States, the treasurer for the church,
Regina da Silva, was convicted of obtaining 22 million dollars in fraudulent
mortgages that benefitted the church. Two Brazilians, Marcelo Marini Bismarck
and Cristina Rodríguez, allegedly shipped 420 million dollars over a six-year
period from 1995-2001. In addition,
The Guardian
had this to say in 2011:
Three leading members of
one of Brazil's most powerful churches have been accused of laundering millions
in church donations and using worshippers' money for personal gain.
The
charges, unveiled on Monday by São Paulo's public prosecutor, relate to 404m
reals (£150m) allegedly obtained from mostly impoverished churchgoers by
leaders at Brazil's Universal Church of the Kingdom of
God.
The church, as you can imagine, has critics: Here’s one
quote from the New York Post:
“There is nothing we can do legally,”
said Heather Browne, state’s attorney spokeswoman. “There’s a problem here –
but we cannot legally sue.” Victoria and Jesus Lorenzo of Houston left the
church after giving $60,000. They lost their office-cleaning business and went bankrupt.
“They left us in
the street,” said Victoria Lorenzo. “It got to the point that we had to give
them all our money – literally they were asking members in the church to empty
their pocketbooks on the altar.”
All of this would be bad enough, but check out this picture,
taken from a blog post titled “Un
ejército Cristiano para exterminar a los gays” or “A Christian Army to
Exterminate Gays.”
…or especially this:
Then there’s this:
Who are all these people? According to the church, they are
young men—called the Gladiadores del
Altar and part of the Fuerza Joven Universal—who have had
problems, turned to Christ, and are preparing to be pastors. But a gay
legislator, Jean Wyllys, in Brazil caused a flurry of activity in the Spanish
social networks by asking
the following:
Ahora están formando un ejército, ¿cuándo nos
daremos cuenta del monstruo que emerge de la laguna? ¿Cuando comiencen a
ejecutar a los que llaman infieles? ¿Cuando empiecen a empujar a los homosexuales desde las torres,
como el ISIS? No porque tenga la palabra cristiano deja de ser más peligroso
este tipo de fundamentalismo”.
(“Now they’re forming an army: When will we see
that monster emerge from the lagoon? When they start executing the infidels?
When they start pushing the homosexuals from the towers, as did ISIS? No,
because the word “Christian” lets that form of fundamentalism be more
dangerous.”)
Wyllys also notes that under Brazilian law,
paramilitary organizations are illegal. The church claims that that’s rubbish,
and points out that the Boy Scouts and the Legionaries of Christ have similar
traits. And listening to the clip below, the message is rather innocuous,
unless the bit about going into hell each day to cleanse the sinner struck a
nerve or two.
And watching the second clip, in which the founder
of the church is directing another minister to perform an “exorcism” of a young
gay man—well, wait, if the state of California can make
conversion therapy illegal, what’s the deal here?
But poking around, I realized that there’s more,
since I went into the Departamento de
Estado, which registers churches as well as corporations, and guess what?
The Catholic Church is there, as is the—arguably—most famous of the gay
churches, the Metropolitan Community Church, which here in Puerto Rico is
called Iglesia
de la Comunidad Cristo Sanador. But what happens when you type in this?
Take a look:
Or what about the name that the church also goes
by: Pare de Sufrir?
In fact, Pare de Sufrir was quite familiar to me, since I rode the bus every day past the movie theater which had been abandoned all those years and then had become…you can guess.
“Hey,” said
Lady, the owner of the café where I write, “you should register yourself and
become the legal owner of those names. Then you could turn around and sue
them!“
“Get a gun,” said my New-York city lawyer /
brother, when I explained this brilliant scheme. So then I wondered, were these
guys registered in New York?
So I thought about it—should this old atheist
finally come to Jesus, and become the minister of the Universal Church of the
Kingdom of God? I actually started the process of inscription, when it occurred
to me: Do I want to be affiliated with, or the legal head of such a gang of
gangsters? Somehow, I didn’t hit that “submit” button.
I never had much truck with churches, since the
church I grew up in was solidly middle class, and didn’t have too many problems
to deal with. It was a different age, and of course the problems were there:
The drunkenness, the wife-beating, physical abuse. But if any of those were
being addressed—and I doubt it—I didn’t see it.
But once I was playing a Christmas service in
Cristo Sanador, and couldn’t help but notice that a woman was sobbing all the
way through it. People would come, put their arm around the woman, hold her
hand. Then they drifted of; another one came.
“Her family kicked her out, saying she was
possessed with demons, and they didn’t want ever to see her again. So this Christmas,
at least, we’re pretty much all she has….”
That’s what Pablo, my friend and then minister of
the church, had to say. So I may start a church, the Universal Church of the
Kingdom of God Reformed. But there’s one thing I do know…
…there won’t be a place for Bishop Macedo and his
fellow bastards in it!
