South Africa
GroundUp: Call for action against abusive churches
Advocacy group Speak the Truth marches in Braamfontein. By GROUNDUP Reporter.
First published by GroundUp
False prophets and pastors are extorting money from the poor and abusing vulnerable women. These are some of the claims made by an advocacy group called Speak the Truth. Its members protested on Wednesday in Braamfontein. They demanded that government and legislators deal with fake pastors.
There has been a proliferation of abusive churches across the country. Photos have circulated on social media of pastors ordering their congregations to eat grass and snakes, while others spray worshippers with insecticide promising to cure them of ailments. Some pastors have encouraged HIV-positive members to stop taking their medication and instead drink “holy water”.
In 2011 the Advertising Standards Authority — following a complaint from the Treatment Action Campaign — ordered e.tv to stop running a weekly Sunday morning advert by Christ Embassy. That church’s pastor claimed to miracle heal a range of illnesses. Recently a church in the Eastern Cape was found to be a venue from which a group of men launched a murderous attack on a police station.
Solomon
Led by a group of bikers, the protesters went to the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural‚ Religious and Linguistic Communities (CRL) in Braamfontein. The police allowed ten representatives from the protesters along with the media to enter the premises so that they could deliver a memorandum.
Thoko Mkhwanazi-Xaluva, the chairperson of the CRL, received the memo. Eliot Buthane, a lawyer representing the group, said that they approached the CRL in the hope that together they could forge a way forward to deal with what he called a crisis.
Mkhwanazi-Xaluva called for a revolution in the way South Africans and the government deal with fake pastors. She said that every time she raised these issues she is confronted with the response that there is freedom of religion. “Every right in the Constitution has limitations,” she said. She also said she has received death threats because of her work on these churches, and now she has to have bodyguards.
“The majority of the people who are in these churches are women. And that is not by accident. Women are being targeted deliberately. These pastors claim to be talking to God and that God tells them that these women need to sleep with them,” said Mkhwanazi-Xaluva. She said that false prophets need to be ushered out of their professions with the use of legislation.
Protesters we spoke to said they were reasonably satisfied with the response from the CRL but said that if nothing was seen to be done they would mobilise a larger protest at the Union Buildings directed at the President. DM
Protesters against false prophets and pastors marched to the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural‚ Religious and Linguistic Communities (CRL) in Braamfontein.