The Rise of Charismatic Christianity

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The following is the text of a speech delivered by Levi Fragell at the Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, in May, 2000, in Los Angeles, California, USA. The theme of the Conference was "Imagine There's No Heaven: A Future Without Religion".

Levi Fragell was President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union or IHEU (http://www.iheu.org) and a leader of the humanist movement in his native Norway. The text is posted here with his kind permission.

Where It All Began

As a former pentecostal Christian and a former preacher it is a special experience for me to be here in Los Angeles, where the pentecostal movement was born in 1906. Here the black preacher William Seymour spoke in tongues so it was heard all over the US and even Europe, and curious church leaders from my own country -- Norway -- went to Los Angeles to get blessed, were slain by the holy ghost, fell to the floor, cried like babies and shouted like football team supporters and came back to Norway to spread the tongues of fire.

It happened in Azusa street, in a modest church. I went down there the other day, and even if the old buildings had been replaced, I got that strange feeling of sorrow and anger. If it wasn't for what happended here almost 100 years ago, my life would have been different. Most probably I wouldn't have spent a childhood in fear of Jesus' second coming, I woundn't have spent my teen years in search of a baptism in the holy spirit, and the first years of my professional life -- from the age of 17 -- as a revival preacher, causing hundreds of youngsters to change their lifestyles and careers, causing them to follow Jesus into a life of self-denial, cultural ignorance, intolerance against ordinary human habits -- called sin -- and causing them to deliver hypocritical and untrue testimonies about the shining happiness of being saved and born-again.

The conference theme, John Lennon's "Imagine", means more to me and people with my background than it will ever be possible for people with a humanist family background to understand.

My personal life story and experiences have of course little interest outside my own circle of friends. The relevant question is if pentecostal and charismatic churches generally are harmful or not -- and if this kind of Christianity has a format or size of importance, or if it is more like a subculture among others, something to be studied by anthropologists and not to be confronted by humanists.

Losing Faith

Well, there are certainly more than enough cases to report. The former preacher Skipp Porteous was saved at the age of 11, and after becoming a humanist he wrote the book "Jesus doesn't live here any more" published by Prometheus Books. Another colleague is Dan Barker, who started as a preacher at the age of 15 and is a well known writer of Christian hymns. He wrote the book "Losing faith in faith" and is now one of the leaders of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. But most of us do not dare to reveal our background, partly because of our mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers who are still praying for us, partly because it is stigmatising and socially uncomfortable to expose one's own ridiculous failures -- and partly, maybe mainly, because so many of us are broken down mentally.

Changing political opinions is looked upon as a normal intellectual and social process. Gorbatchov and Yeltsin may be communist leaders one day and pioneer democrats the next. But leaving a religious position -- especially as a leader -- is looked upon as an abnormal change of identity. Most of us prefer to keep our mouth shut. I know a former pentecostal preacher in Norway. He started his career 16 years old, and the two of us arranged revival meetings together. Like me he stopped preaching at the age of 23, after losing his faith. Without any education he worked as a taxidriver till he was 30, and studied in his freetime. He became a school teacher and is now 60 years old. Nobody in his neighbourhood knows about his pentecostal background, neither do his children. Therefore we can never meet in his home, since my background and defection are well known and even scandalized in some social circles.

A Dangerous Expansion

The challenging question to the larger society is: How long will the Charismatic expansion proceed and develop all over the world, before psychologists, sociologists, liberal writers and politicians understand that something fundamentally unhealthy is going on, that the religion called Christianity is changing its character -- not necessarily away from the original Biblical practises -- but very far from today's schoolbook versions of modern and humanised religion.

Only very few studies of this change of streams have been made. One of them is David Martin's book "Tongues of Fire", where he shows that the pentecostal or charismatic church very soon will be the largest Christian church in Latin America. Already 80 % of the protestants in Chile are pentecostals, and even if the Catholic church still is leading in most of the Latin American countries, the pentecostals grow with the highest rates. The pentecostal cathedral in Santiago has 18.000 seats and The Temple of Brasil para Christo takes even more, writes David Martin.

The world's best known sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, comments on this development in an introduction to Martin's book. He admits that the charismatic movement's explosive growth is quite unkown in the West, and that it is high time that our perspective changed, because the effect of this development will be powerful.

Prometheus Books is one of the very few publishing companies which have taken interest in this situation. I have already mentioned the autobiography by Skipp Porteous. Several titles like James Randi's "Faithhealers", and books about Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Bakker and other charismatics have been published. The most comprehensive of these books is "The Hallelujah Revolution" by the British journalist Ian Cotton, published by Prometheus in 1996. Cotton writes:

The highly esteemed statistical surveys published by David Barrett now show beyond doubt that the Pentecostal/Charismatic churches are the world's largest protestant movement, with 500 million followers in 1997. While the Baptists and the Methodists till the middle of the 20^th century where the flagships of the protestants, these churches are now left behind by the Pentecostals -- or they have changed their own character and joined the more successful Brethern in the Lord. Those of us who come from cultures like for instance the Scandinavian or English societies, may have lived in the illusion that the Lutheran or Anglican Churches are the big ones, and we have to realize that these are minorities compared with the hallelujah-shouting half billion Charismatics.

We are now facing the fact that the Pentecostals within a period of time also may outnumber the Catholic church, which today is the world's largest Christian denomination, with 1 billion members. Barrett's 1997 prognosis says that this number will increase to 1.3 billion in 2025, while the Pentecostals in the same timespan will more than double their number from 500 million to 1.1 billion -- an increase that with a similar speed will make the Catholic church the world's number two church before the year 2030. Even if this prognosis fails, we have to add to the picture that the Pentecostals are active and practising believers. Their churches do not have the same kind of formal and passive membership as the old churches have.

Glamour and Glitz, Fraud and Deception

Certainly we have to take into consideration that the most astonishing charismatic growth happens in the third world, where illiteracy and poverty make more people defenceless and easy preys when the glamorous American faithhealers arrive in their private jets, with television crews, free Bibles to all and promises of good health and prosperity to everyone. I have been to some of these meetings on my regular visits to India, and I have felt extremely ashamed on behalf of my skin colour as well as my parents' religion. But on the other hand it is a fact that also in the Western societies the charismatic groups are the most successful, and when it comes to visibility, spectacular arrangements and media coverage these new Christians often put the establised bishops in the less glamourous shadow. When the churches want to demonstrate their ecumenical strength, they often invite the charismatic preachers as main speakers -- to get larger and more enthusiatic audiences. In Norway the bishops invite an evangelist called Aril Edvardsen to their catherdrals, he is an international faith healer and exorcist. But he gathers 2000 to the meeting, while the bishop is happy if he spots 50 scattered listeners -- elderly women -- in the Sunday morning service.

It is also reasonable to ask if the Charismatic expansion is dangerous in itself. Can it harm anyone to speak in tongues, become temporarily spasmic, believe in miracles and pay a relatively large part of one's income to the church -- a part that after all is less than others use in restaurants and casinos. What about all those who find a warm and including fellowship in the congregation? These questions are not always easy to answer. Sometimes anxious parents call me and ask for advice about their teenage children who have been captured by a charismatic group. I do not always alarm them. Individually it may be better to be a member of a religious sect than a violent gang. In my childhood church I have met some of the warmest, most generous and most honest people I have ever known. But the Pentecostal/Charismatic Church is the only legally and politically accepted movement in the world that is fully and completely based upon systematic fraud, deception and cheating. Historically you will find fraud and cheating in most church traditions, connected to prophesies, claimed revelations and miracles, financial transactions etc. But where else in the world today would you find and accept television programmes where hundreds of sick people are declared miraculously healed from their illnesses. Where else would it be accepted that the leader tell his audience that God has spoken directly to him and informed him that 5 persons in the assembly, three men and two women, will be cured of their diabetes right now. Where else would a group leader avoid criminal investigation after insisting that God has told him that 30 persons in the group are going to pay 10,000 dollars each to construct a new building for the assembly. The most successful Charismatic churches have been established and developed by such methods. The American ministries of this kind are well known, and sometimes even exposed -- with regrettably little effect. In Europe we have sometimes looked upon these phenomena as "typically American", connected to a mass media culture and a kind of capitalistic liberalism that is foreign to a more regulated social democratic West European tradition. That is a shortsighted simplification. We should have learnt that what is today "typically American" will some day become "typically global".

All the successful charistmatic leaders I know in Scandinavia today have learnt their ways and techniques directly from Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Hagin, etc., etc. The global outreach from Azusa street in Los Angeles goes all the way to Seoul in South Korea, where David Yonggi Cho has built the largest Chrtistian congregation in the world with close to 800,000 born-again members, who every week pay at least 10 % of their income to the the church. Yonggi Cho does nothing to hide the reason for his success. In his book "The Fourth Dimension" he writes that every Sunday he tells his audience that God has revealed to him how many are going to be healed that particular day from specific illnesses.

A Challenge for Humanists

The psychological and social consequences of this change of Christian practice, concepts and structures may differ from family to family, from person to person. I personally think that the net result of charismatic devotion may be tragic for multitudes, even if I can see individual exceptions. But as humanists we have a supplementary obligation to the humanitarian concerns. The New Charismatic Christianity is based on intellectual corruption, which in the eyes of humanists has been the most disgusting moral vice since the days of Socrates. The charismatics tell their audience and the world that they can prove the existence of God and the truth of their faith. The faith itself, a person's beliefs, should be respected on the basis of personal choice and philosophical and ethical conviction. But miracle claims in the form of alleged Evidence are not a question of faith but a question of fact. False evidence connected to a person's choice of lifestance is an attack on the person's integrity that must never be accepted. No fraud is more despicable -- no fraud is more dangerous for the mental health of a group and a society.