Church claims to heal HIV sufferers: 1 of many obsessed with sex and ‘curing’ homosexuals
The news that Evangelical churches in Britain are ‘curing’ HIV sufferers and persuading them to come off their medication tells us a whole lot more about those churches than it does about their victims.
Undercover reporters from Sky News have exposed pastors from the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN) in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow, who claim a ‘100 per cent success rate’ in curing HIV infection through exorcism and prayer alone.
SCOAN is described as Evangelical, though it sounds to me that it’s more likely to be at the fundamentalist, Loony-Tunes end of Pentacostalism.
Disturbing: A Sky News investigation has exposed pastors from the Synagogue Church of All Nations, who claim they can ‘cure’ HIV sufferers with prayer alone
It’s a kind of abstraction of Christianity, which offers a healing ministry not so much through faith in Jesus Christ as the incarnate son of God, but as a kind of witch doctor.
But it would be wrong complacently to assume that this represents an aberration at the margins of Christian churches.
There are disturbing resonances of this kind of superstitious guff in mainstream Anglican churches too.
In some Evangelical traditions of the Church of England you will be told that HIV and AIDS - not so long ago dubbed the ‘gay plague’ - is God’s judgment on the sinful.
This is really a branch of Protestantism that considers its adherents the ‘elect’, God’s pure and perfect chosen people who will be raised in the ‘final days’ through the ‘Rapture’ to live in eternal bliss with Christ, leaving the rest of we miserable sinners to burn forever in the molten pit of our own sinfulness. Nice.