There’s no doubt that the evangelical movement is one of capitalism’s and patriarchy’s most faithful allies. And at some point, I think it’s way past time to tear off the masks and draw a clear line against the growing influence of this malevolent nebula. I’m not even going to try to apologize if this offends the sensibilities of a few practitioners. Because you don’t fix obscurantism by tiptoeing around it.

Enough with the evangelical sect meddling in our private lives!

For once, let me start at the end. Everyone’s got their own take on things. But as far as I’m concerned, there’s absolutely no way I’ll let a sect with zero logical foundation dictate how I live my life. On what basis do they claim the right to determine what’s virtuous and what isn’t? By what authority do these people decide what a woman does with her body? By what right do they stick their noses into questions of gender or sexuality? Divine right? If that’s all they’ve got, it’s pretty damn convenient to make your neighbor’s life miserable on the basis of a hypothesis that’s still 100% unproven. So at least have the honesty to admit you’re nothing but impostors in the service of your own reactionary agenda.

So let’s get one thing straight right from the start. Having read the same book a thousand times without understanding a word of it doesn’t give you any special rights. On top of that, in the interest of social cohesion, it’s worth restating this basic rule: Religion is like a penis. There’s nothing wrong with having one or being proud of it. But you don’t wave it in public, you don’t impose it on children, you don’t write laws with it, and you don’t think with it. With that settled, let me add one more thing. I have no problem with people having a spiritual life. If an adult needs a security blanket to feel better about themselves, or to face the fear of death a little more easily, why not. That said, intolerance, threats, violence, and manipulation are completely unacceptable!

These people’s stock in trade is not love, as they clumsily try to make you believe. No, their raw material is fear. Everything revolves around that, serving purposes that are anything but clean, as we’ll see further along. So I’m saying it plainly right now! Let these people keep their fears to themselves and stop with the intimidation, because their religion of peace and love has already done more than enough damage. Now that the groundwork is laid, let me walk you through who these good Samaritans who feel entitled to lecture us really are.

Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Fundamentalists: The nebula that wants to convert you to its delusions

Let’s start by clearing up a common misconception. When we talk about evangelists, we’re not talking about a single sect. We’re talking about a sprawling tentacular nebula, an ideological magma that lumps together under the convenient label “evangelicals” a whole constellation of movements whose only common ground is wanting to convert you, control you, and above all, relieve you of your money.

Quick side note while we’re at it. What even is a religion? It’s nothing more than a sect that succeeded by conning enough people to earn the “respectable” label. The difference between a sect and a religion essentially comes down to the number of followers and lobbying power with governments. American evangelicalism excels at both.

Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, Charismatics, Fundamentalists, Neo-Charismatics. It’s all the same lousy brew in different cups. With 660 million gullible customers worldwide, this ideology exports from the United States with the same arrogance as its foreign policy.

This movement was born in the bowels of Protestantism in the 16th century before mutating into an industry in the United States. And like any good American industry, it set itself up with a flagship product, a market, a communications strategy, and a business model. The product is Salvation. The market is your distress. The communications strategy is the fear of hell. And the business model is nothing short of criminal genius. All without paying a cent in taxes. Because it’s religion. And religion is sacred. Or so they say.

Evangelical sexual puritanism, or the art of double-standard morality

Ah, sex! Their absolute obsession. Their emotional stock in trade. Their weapon of mass destruction against individual freedom. These people literally spend their lives telling you how to have sex, with whom, in what position, and above all why you’re going to burn in hell if you get it wrong. Except that between the morality they preach and the lives they actually lead, there’s a gap so deep you could bury several of their leaders’ private jets in it, and there’s nothing remotely divine about any of them.

Jimmy Swaggart. The crusader. God’s thunder against adultery and fornication. The man who publicly destroyed fellow televangelists for their sexual misconduct. Caught with a prostitute in a seedy motel. His reaction? Crocodile tears live on TV. “I have sinned.” The next day he was back at it. Presumably to demonstrate the virtues of forgiveness.

Ted Haggard. President of the National Association of Evangelicals. Regular visitor to the White House. Also a regular visitor to a gay male escort who supplied him with crystal meth. His reaction when the scandal broke? He claimed his homosexual tendencies came from a childhood sexual assault. That’s genuinely tragic, no question. But is it a reason to be a massive hypocrite and hurt other people? A few sessions with a good psychologist would have been far preferable to a mystical cover-up.

Jim Bakker. A Christian television empire, a biblical theme park, and millions of followers. He bought the silence of an employee he had sexually assaulted. With donation money, naturally. Why hold back when there are always believers willing to open their wallets?

I’ll stop there, because the list goes on and on! These aren’t accidents. This is structural. The reason is that repression produces exactly the kind of twisted personality we’ve just described. But the real crime isn’t their personal hypocrisy. The real crime is what they do to others. Like the absolutely intolerable conversion therapies to “cure” homosexuals, condemned by the entire medical community as psychological torture. Not to mention abstinence-only sex education, which produces an explosion of unwanted teenage pregnancies in the states where they hold power. And at the far end of their delusions is of course the absolute sin of transgender identity. Well, they can all go to hell! Because the evidence is clear: the more they preach purity, the longer their rap sheet. Remember that. It has no exceptions.

Fake evangelical miracles: God heals, but you have to pay first or he can’t do anything

The divine healing business is the most despicable thing in the entire evangelical arsenal. Because here they’re not targeting just anyone. They’re targeting the sick. The desperate. People who have exhausted every option. People who have nothing left to lose except their last few bills.

The mechanism is diabolically simple. You’re sick, you can’t afford a doctor, or the doctor has told you there’s nothing more to be done. And along comes a man in a three-piece suit who tells you God can do anything. He lays his hands on you. The crowd erupts! You fall into a trance. Hallelujah! You’re healed! Now hand over the cash. And if it doesn’t work? That’s definitely your fault. You don’t have enough faith. Or you didn’t give enough. The loop closes, the sucker gets fleeced, and the preacher flies home on a private jet.

Benny Hinn and his “Miracle Crusades.” Entire stadiums filled with sick people, many of them in wheelchairs. The result is a series of carefully staged healing spectacles. Except that a panel of independent doctors scrutinized hundreds of cases. Result: zero evidence of a single genuine healing. Yet the donations keep coming. It’s simply appalling!

Morris Cerullo in London in 1992. He takes the stage, points to a little girl with cancer, and solemnly proclaims before thousands of people that she has been healed by the grace of God. The girl died two months later. Cerullo never offered a single word of apology. Why apologize? It was God’s decision. Convenient that he’s always unavailable for comment.

Oral Roberts. He really pushed the genre to its limits. He announces live on television that God will “call him home” unless his followers send him 4.5 million dollars before March 31st. Blackmail with a divine death threat. In primetime! People sold their furniture to send him checks. It reminds me of a pretty repulsive guy I once ran into at a market who told me you can sell any piece of garbage. Wrap it right and you’ll always find someone to buy it.

But what are the real-world effects behind these pathetic spectacles? People stop their medical treatments because they believe they’re cured. Children die because their parents chose prayer over insulin. So this isn’t without devastating consequences. It’s homicide by manipulation. And in the meantime these organizations enjoy tax exemptions, protection under religious freedom laws, and are completely beyond the reach of the justice system in most American states.

Evangelical financial scandals: Jesus was poor, his representatives much less so

Let’s get the facts straight. According to the legend, Jesus was homeless, broke, and got around on foot or by donkey. His last meal was a communal dinner of bread and wine. And he ended up nailed to a cross without a single cent to his name. His American representatives, on the other hand, have a very pronounced taste for luxury.

The engine driving all this machinery is called the Prosperity Gospel. The concept has a Machiavellian audacity: God wants you to be rich. So if you give money to your pastor, God will pay it back a hundredfold. And if you’re still poor, it’s because you haven’t given enough. Or once again, you don’t have enough faith. In the end, the racket is blessed and the scam is protected by the American Constitution.

The numbers are staggering! Annual revenues from American televangelism approach 2 billion dollars a year. All tax-exempt. With no accountability. In 2003 a study revealed that out of 17 televangelists put under the microscope, only one was a member of a financial oversight body. One out of seventeen! So let’s take a little tour.

Kenneth Copeland. Owner of a fleet of private jets! When a journalist asked him why he didn’t sell his planes to help the poor, he replied without batting an eye that he couldn’t travel in a tube full of demons. The demons in question apparently being the passengers on commercial flights.

Creflo Dollar. His name says it all 🙂 He asked each of his followers to donate 300 dollars to buy him a 65-million-dollar Gulfstream jet. Not for humanitarian missions. Just for himself! But in the meantime he was arrested for assaulting his 15-year-old daughter. God forgave him. The American justice system apparently did too. And these are the people who come and lecture us about depravity! What a bunch of lunatics!

Jim Bakker. At the head of a television empire. Owner of a Christian theme park that was the third most visited in the United States after Disneyland and Disney World. Also the owner of several mansions and luxury cars. All while embezzling 1.3 million dollars from his ministry’s funds for personal expenses. The cherry on top: he used 279,000 dollars in donations to buy the silence of an employee he had sexually assaulted. Sentenced to 45 years in prison, he was out in 5 thanks to a reduced sentence. And the rest of the story is quite something! Today he’s back on screen, still smiling, still live. Except he’s ditched the Prosperity Gospel and reinvented himself selling survival gear for the apocalypse. What a disgrace!

Joel Osteen. The richest of them all! His Houston megachurch welcomes 45,000 people a week in a former sports arena. During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Houston was underwater. Osteen kept the doors of his church shut for two days. Probably worried about the carpet. A fine example of Christian charity!

Benny Hinn, Joyce Meyer, Eddie Long, Kenneth Copeland. In 2007 Senator Chuck Grassley opened an investigation into six televangelists for financial misconduct. Rolls-Royces, private jets, mansions, luxury vacations, all paid for with followers’ donations. The investigation resulted in zero convictions. Because you don’t mess with religious freedom.

Evangelicalism and racism: The cross on one side and the white hood on the other

Let’s be direct. A significant part of American evangelicalism has never truly broken with racism. Not the shameful kind you sweep under the rug. The theological racism that they claim is blessed by the Holy Scriptures.

A bit of history to understand this better. For decades, pastors across the American South used the Bible to justify slavery, and later segregation. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, was founded in 1845 specifically to defend the right to own slaves. They waited until 1995 to issue a formal apology.

The Ku Klux Klan was not an anti-Christian organization. It was, on the contrary, a deeply Christian one. The crosses they burned on Black families’ lawns were religious symbols. Pastors blessed the lynchings. Meetings opened with prayers. This is not a malicious reinterpretation of history. These are widely documented facts.

Today racism has dressed itself up as Christian Nationalism. The thesis is simple and terrifying: the United States is a white Christian nation, founded by white Christians, for white Christians. Everything else is a deviation that needs to be corrected. These people are represented in the United States Congress. They influence the Supreme Court. They have armed militants. When it comes to loving your neighbor, once again, it leaves a lot to be desired.

And what about megachurches in all this? Go visit any large American megachurch on a Sunday morning. You’ll find that despite fifty years of preaching universal love and Christian brotherhood, they remain massively segregated in practice. Black people pray with Black people. White people pray with White people. Martin Luther King Jr. himself said that Sunday morning at 11 o’clock is the most segregated hour in America. Sixty years later, it’s still just as true.

Evangelical Zionism, or how to trigger the apocalypse to bring Jesus back?

Here’s something a lot of people don’t understand. Why are American evangelical Christians among the most fanatical supporters of Israel? More so than many Jewish people themselves? Why did they push Trump to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital? Why do they massively fund settlement expansion in the West Bank?

Out of love for the Jewish people? No! The answer is theological and completely unhinged. These people believe in the Rapture. The imminent return of Christ. And according to their reading of the Book of Revelation, that return can only happen under very specific conditions: Israel must control the entirety of the Promised Land, the Temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt on the Esplanade of the Mosques, and a great apocalyptic war must break out in the Middle East. What a program for psychopaths!

In other words, they support Israel solely because they need Israel to play its role in their end-of-the-world script. In this story, Jewish people are nothing but bit players. Props for theology. Once Christ returns from his vacation in the 5th dimension, according to their doctrine, those who haven’t accepted Jesus as savior will be condemned regardless. Which includes by definition every practicing Jew. It’s paradoxical but this support for Israel is actually a form of eschatological antisemitism. We use you to trigger the apocalypse, then we condemn you for eternity.

The political influence of this madness is real and massive. Tens of millions of American evangelicals vote based on American foreign policy in the Middle East. Organizations like Christians United for Israel directly shape decisions at the White House. John Hagee, their leading figure, has met with Trump and Netanyahu. And pretty much every right-wing Israeli leader. Obviously not for peace. Just to speed up the apocalypse timeline. Wow! What a platform!

So we’re in an absurd situation where the foreign policy of the world’s leading superpower is partly shaped by people who are actively waiting for the end of the world and doing everything they can to bring it about. Maybe it’s time to wake up! And above all to take real action to fight this phenomenon effectively.

Evangelicals and politics: When the theocratic mafia takes power

Let’s be clear. These people are not fringe crackpots preaching in their corner. They are at the heart of power. They have elected officials, judges, generals, and presidential advisors. And they have a very specific political agenda that rivals the worst theocracies they claim to oppose.

The United States at the center of the problem

It all starts with Reagan. The first American president to officially court evangelicals as an organized electoral base. The founding bargain was that in exchange for their votes he gave them a sympathetic ear on abortion, school prayer, and the anti-communist crusade dressed up as a holy war. The marriage between evangelicalism and the Republican Party was consummated. They’ve never divorced since.

Pat Robertson, a televangelist and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988 and lost. No matter! He immediately founded the Christian Coalition and continued to shape American politics without ever having been elected by anyone. Democracy is fine, but imposing a pseudo Kingdom of God is better.

Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority. A political machine disguised as a religious movement that helped shape the Republican Party as we know it today. Anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, pro-gun, pro-death penalty. All this hatred supposedly blessed by the Scriptures.

Under Trump. Paula White, prosperity gospel televangelist, three times married and three times divorced, became official spiritual advisor at the White House. Appointed to the Office of Faith-Based Liaison. These folks voted for Trump at 80% because he promised them conservative Supreme Court justices. They got them, and Roe v. Wade fell. Mission accomplished.

The Dominionists and the Seven Mountains movement. The most explicitly totalitarian project imaginable. They want to take control of the seven spheres of influence in society: government, education, media, economy, family, arts, and religion. Not metaphorically. Literally! With trained, funded, and deployed militants in each of these spheres. It’s a project for seizing absolute power dressed in religious vocabulary.

Exporting this social plague to Brazil

Now let’s turn to the South American laboratory. Bolsonaro didn’t come to power by accident. He was carried by an evangelical coalition, organized, funded, and mobilized like never before. 70% of Brazilian evangelicals voted for him. In exchange he gave them ministries, positions, direct influence over the country’s educational and cultural policies.

Brazilian megachurches are among the largest in the world. The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God owns an empire with television networks, banks, and large shopping centers. Its founder Edir Macedo is a billionaire. Yet another miracle of the Prosperity Gospel, tropical edition.

The concrete results of this alliance between evangelicalism and political power in Brazil: massive deforestation of the Amazon blessed by pastors, indigenous peoples handed over to missionaries and mining operators, the rights of women and LGBTQ people attacked head-on, sex education stripped from school curricula.

The same pattern repeats itself everywhere. Evangelists convert the poor with their far-fetched stories, then make sure to translate that into votes in their favor. This isn’t even religion anymore. It’s just politics with a crucifix to mask a fascist agenda.

Evangelical proselytism in the West: The soft takeover

Gone are the days of the suited missionary ringing your doorbell with a Bible under his arm. Too visible, too annoying, a total turnoff. These people figured out that a frontal conquest doesn’t work in the West anymore. So they changed tactics. Now they do soft power by quietly settling into your couch, your smartphone, and your kids’ heads. And they’re very good at it. You have to give them that.

First, films. An entire industry funded by American evangelical foundations with unlimited resources. “God’s Not Dead,” “Heaven Is for Real,” “The Passion of the Christ.” Well-made, well-distributed productions with real marketing budgets. The agenda is carefully concealed behind the appearance of mainstream cinema. The average viewer walks out of the theater without realizing they just got two hours of religious propaganda poured over them.

Then series. Dozens of productions that subtly normalize prayer, submission to divine authority, and “Christian family values.” Not in an obvious way. But very subtly. Very gradually. The goal being to normalize what is fundamentally regressive.

But the most insidious, most cynical, most unforgivable thing of all is cartoons! VeggieTales and its biblical vegetables. A whole slew of productions targeting children aged 3 to 8. Before they can read. Before they can question anything. Before their critical thinking even exists. They install the software. They lay the foundations. The rest follows on its own. This is pure conditioning, applied to brains that have no way to defend themselves.

And then there are the testimony shows. The favorite format of evangelical channels. A man or woman in front of a camera recounting how they were an alcoholic, violent, addicted, depressed, or broke. And then they found Jesus. And now their life is wonderful. Let’s stop here for a second because this needs to be carefully taken apart.

No! You didn’t stop drinking because of God. You stopped because you had the will. Because you did the work. Because you woke up one morning and decided enough was enough. Because you suffered, resisted, struggled, maybe relapsed, until you finally pulled yourself out of your addiction. You did that. You and no one else. Religion was just a crutch. Which is its only remotely acceptable use. But the crutch doesn’t work without the leg. And the leg is you, not Jesus!

That’s the sleight of hand right there and it’s despicable! They take credit for your personal victory. They steal your merit. They erase your willpower and replace it with their god. And then they make you dependent on their system to maintain your sobriety. In other words, everything is designed to keep you dependent on them forever.

In the West this infiltration is accelerating. Social media is saturated with algorithmically favored evangelical content. Seemingly neutral charities and youth groups serve as entry points for recruitment. University campuses are blanketed by evangelical student associations that specifically target students who are isolated and vulnerable during their first year away from home. In short, they’ve figured out what Coca-Cola has known for a hundred years. If you’re not thirsty, they’ll hammer the message until you are.

Evangelical proselytism in Africa and the Maghreb: The new colonial missionaries

Africa is the evangelists’ prime hunting ground. On this point, we’re dealing with religious neocolonialism in full bloom.

The mechanism has been perfected over centuries and hasn’t changed one bit. You arrive in a poor community. You build a school, a clinic, a well. You hand out food. And then gradually, subtly, or sometimes not subtly at all, you start conditioning all of this on conversion. And in doing so, you destroy all the traditional social structures. You replace ancestral beliefs with made-in-USA Pentecostalism. The ultimate goal being to create a permanent dependency on your organization.

New Tribes Mission was founded in the United States in 1942 with the stated objective of reaching “the last tribe” on earth. Their newsletter shamelessly described indigenous peoples as “little brown savages” whose religion was “animated by satanic forces.” In Paraguay under the Stroessner dictatorship, they organized manhunts into uncontacted tribal territories. Many indigenous people were killed, communities were decimated by imported diseases, and millennia-old cultures were erased within a few years. All in the name of Jesus.

In the Amazon, evangelical missionaries are still today attempting to force contact with uncontacted peoples in defiance of legal prohibitions and protests from indigenous rights organizations. Their logic is both stupid and terrifying: these people are going to die someday anyway, better they die saved.

In the Maghreb the infiltration takes a different form but the logic is the same. American evangelical missionaries specifically target Berber and Kabyle populations by skillfully playing on identity grievances and tensions with the central Arab government. In this context, converting to evangelical Christianity becomes an act of cultural resistance. But given the danger for missionaries, proselytism is more discreet, more patient, and more sophisticated. Conversions are often tied to promises of material aid or help obtaining visas to the West.

And on the subject of the damage evangelists do in Africa, I have a story to share. About fifteen years ago, I was living in a small village in the southwest of Burkina Faso. One day, I went to the market with some Burkinabe friends. At some point, a gathering caught my eye. People were setting up benches and a sound system. So I went over to see what it was. A man with excellent oratorical skills, clearly an African-American who had been thoroughly indoctrinated and trained by his sect, started speaking into a microphone. He claimed to be able to cure AIDS, cancer, and every other disease. He promised wealth and redemption to anyone who would turn to his evangelical sect. It was so over the top that at first I was stunned. I initially thought it was street theater, it was so grotesque. But after a while, I realized it was a goddamn missionary. So I couldn’t hold back. I started calling out this self-proclaimed representative of God. But the guy tried to use my intervention to his advantage, pulling a Charlie Kirk move by handing me the microphone in the hope of making me look ridiculous. Tough luck for him, because I come intellectually armed. Every single one of his talking points crumbled in record time. So this man who preached love for his neighbor tried to hit me 🙂 But I’m not an easy target for that kind of thing. So I gave him a solid beat-down. And with my friends we ran these crooks out of the village. It was only afterward that someone explained their technique to me. After their con-man pitch, they offer to sell people little booklets for the modest sum of 20 dollars. And virtually all of the money flows back to the US to fatten up millionaire evangelists! When you consider that in that part of the world people live on an average of less than 1 dollar a day, it’s enough to make your blood boil. That’s what evangelists do in Africa. And the other religions are right there alongside them fleecing the population. We’ll have occasion to come back to that.

And while we’re at it, let’s talk about their anti-LGBT crusade in Africa. Because when they realized they were losing the battle on same-sex marriage in the United States, these people decided to export their hatred elsewhere.

The results are concrete and terrifying. In Uganda, life imprisonment for any homosexual act and the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.” In Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Senegal, similar laws voted or in progress. All told, 33 out of 55 African countries criminalize homosexuality, punishable by imprisonment or death.

Behind these laws is American money. A lot of it! More than 70 million dollars poured into Africa by right-wing evangelical groups to fund this homophobic crusade. Family Watch International organizes inter-parliamentary conferences in a dozen African countries to train local elected officials and push anti-LGBT legislation. Scott Lively showed up in Kampala in 2009 to harangue the Ugandan parliament directly in favor of the “Kill the Gays” bill. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Focus on the Family, and their ilk open their checkbooks. Not to build schools or clinics. Just to convince governments to sentence innocent human beings to death for the crime of existing in a way that displeases them.

The most reprehensible thing about all this is that these same groups publicly deny any connection to these laws while proudly posing for photos with the corrupt presidents who sign them.

And here’s the crowning historical irony: homosexuality was present and widely tolerated in many pre-colonial African societies. It was British colonization that introduced the laws criminalizing homosexual acts. American evangelicals have simply picked up the colonial torch and rebranded it as Christian values. I hope that one day soon all these bastards are brought to justice and made to pay for their crimes.

So what’s actually in the evangelists’ book?

The word “evangelical” contains the word “gospel.” So let’s do something radical! Let’s open this book together and see what it actually says. Because clearly these people haven’t read it. Or they have and they don’t care. Which is even worse.

First devastating finding: homosexuality. Their absolute obsession. Their moral stock in trade. The thing they condemn with the most vehemence, the most hysteria, and the most unabashed hatred. In the four Gospels, homosexuality is mentioned exactly zero times. Not a line. Not an allusion. Not a hint. Jesus never mentions it.

So where does this obsession come from? From Paul. Not from Jesus. From Paul and his epistles, written in a first-century Greco-Roman cultural context that has absolutely nothing to do with modern reality. What’s worth noting is that Paul uses two Greek terms whose translation is fiercely debated even among the most serious Christian theologians. The first, “malakos,” literally means “soft” or “effeminate” in the Roman sense, with no explicit sexual connotation. The second, “arsenokoitai,” is a word Paul appears to have essentially invented, and it most likely referred to practices of male prostitution or pederasty, meaning relationships of exploitation and domination rather than consensual relationships between adults.

So the very concept of homosexuality as we understand it simply didn’t exist in Paul’s mind. These evangelicals are therefore condemning something their own sacred text doesn’t actually condemn. At least not in the way they claim.

The same goes for abortion. The issue around which they have built decades of political mobilization, overturned Roe v. Wade, and criminalized millions of women. Throughout the entire Bible, Old and New Testaments combined, the word abortion does not appear once. Not once! It’s a modern ideological construct dressed up as a divine commandment. A theological lie in the service of a political project designed to reinforce patriarchy.

And the Prosperity Gospel, their central business model, the idea that God wants you to be rich and that giving money to your pastor will make you prosperous? Jesus says exactly the opposite. Matthew 19:24: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Hard to be clearer than that. Kenneth Copeland and his private jets will be thrilled.

Now let’s look at what IS in the Gospel and what these people completely ignore.

Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, lest you be judged.” A verse apparently unknown to the entirety of American fundamentalists, who spend their time judging, condemning, and excluding anything that doesn’t fit their mold.

Matthew 6:24: “You cannot serve both God and money.” A verse that every single American televangelist has apparently torn out of their Bible before use.

And the most devastating of all. Matthew 7:15-16, the words of Jesus himself: “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them.”

By their fruit: Private jets. Fake miracles. Ruined followers. Indoctrinated children. Decimated indigenous peoples. Theocratic policies. Those are the rotten fruits of the evangelists!

In short, the problem isn’t that these people are bad Christians. The problem is that they’re not Christians at all. They’re just entrepreneurs of the sacred who found in religion the perfect business model. If he ever existed, Jesus would have chased them out with his sandals.

Conclusion: Neither God nor Masters!

I don’t know about you, but I’m a fairly easygoing person. As I’ve already mentioned, I have absolutely no problem with people who have a spiritual life and don’t impose it on others. On the other hand, I have zero tolerance for con artists who try to force their nonsense down our throats. And I can lose patience pretty quickly with people who attack our fundamental rights. So all the religious types can pack up their stories of heaven and hell, because I don’t need religion to have a moral compass. I’d much rather be free than a slave to far-fetched fables. There, I’ve said it!

Now, if we want to get rid of obscurantism the answer is to shine a light on it. We need to wake up and take back the ground we’ve lost! To do that, as widely as possible, we need to call out all these impostors who claim to speak in the name of an old bearded man living in the sky. This circus has gone on long enough! If they don’t like gay people, they don’t have to hang out with gay people. If they’re against abortion, they don’t have to get one. If they don’t like anarchists, rest assured the feeling is mutual. But let them leave us the hell alone once and for all! So here’s what to do next. You can start right now by sharing this article as widely as possible, in whatever form you like. Then be a media outlet yourself! We need thousands of people doing everything they can to make sure the shame lands where it belongs. It’s possible! Together we’ll get there. See you very soon for new adventures, and in the meantime, a little reading recommendation: God and the State by Mikhail Bakunin.