While Christian fundamentalists and Pentecostals dismiss the beliefs of Muslims and Hindus etc. as ’sheer superstition’, they are in fact extremely superstitious themselves. Supporters of the Religious Right, both Protestant and Catholic, love the idea of ‘miracles’ and are very credulous about supernaturalist stories. This renders many of them easy prey for the cash-extracting stage hypnotists sometimes called ‘televangelists’.

Only Christian miracles are any good, however. Clifford Wilson, a veteran evangelical creationist, urges his readers to reject the ‘greatly exaggerated false stories about the boyhood of Jesus’ recounted in early gospels left out of the Bible:

In one story we read of a child who is supposed to have run against Jesus and fallen down dead. We read of a man who had been changed into a mule being turned back into a man when Jesus was placed on his back. We are told of Jesus making figures of animals and birds of clay and then making them walk, fly, and take food … (‘The Bible comes alive’, New Life, 16 June 2005)

These stories seem no more unbelievable than those about Jesus being virgin-born, walking on water or raising Lazarus from the dead, but Wilson will have none of it. ‘Fantasy took over from fact’ in many non-canonical gospels and all non-biblical accounts of such events as the creation of the world are ‘corrupted, grotesque [and] absurd’.

Turning over a few pages of this same issue of New Life, Australia’s main evangelical Christian weekly, we arrive at the children’s page. The items on the kids’ page are often very useful in assessing the doctrinal position of religious journals, as the writers focus on the essentials of their message and express ideas in simple terms. Here, then, is ‘a true story from Ethiopia’:

Ethiopia is a country in Africa. In the late 1900s the government told Christians they had to stop living for Jesus or go to prison. Over 20,000 were arrested. One of them was Tadesse Ayissa … Tadesse would not give up his faith. He had to stand on his own and six or seven soldiers lined up to shoot him. The officer gave the order and the soldiers fired. Every bullet missed.

The officer was so shocked he didn’t tell his soldiers to fire again. In fact he started thinking that Jesus must be alive and powerful to protect Tadesse like that. The officer later became a Christian and so did many others.

If you look at the Web – www.globalgoodnews.org/tadesse_ayissa.htm – you will find another story about Tadesse:

… [T]he Communist authorities finally decided to get rid of [Tadesse] since he didn’t comply with their warnings. They decided to execute him by electrocution … [T]hey told him to step on a table in the middle of the room and climb on a chair that was placed on the table … After he climbed and stood on the chair they told him to grab the exposed set of electric wires hanging from the ceiling … [W]hen he grabbed the wires the electric power in the house went down and his [executioners] were baffled … When they finally checked they found out that power went out all over the city. After he found out that the live electric wires didn’t have any effect on him, Evangelist Tadesse said, humorously, that he was full of faith and kept on touching the wires like a piece of cloth …

It’s clear that what we have here is a fairly typical piece of evangelical Christian myth-making. While some conservative Christians strenuously reject this sort of thing – indeed, a small group called Concerned Christians Growth Ministries in WA specialises in carefully debunking such tales – many Pentecostals, in particular, will latch on to it and promote it as (literally) gospel truth. Obviously this is already happening in publications like New Life.

And once generally ‘established’, perhaps through an approving reference on an American televangelist’s show, the story will never entirely disappear. As with the ‘proofs of creation’ advanced by anti-evolution organisations, Tadesse’s adventures will be repeated and embellished indefinitely, regardless of any opposing evidence no matter how authoritative.

This is the nature of modern religious superstition and gives some insight into the way in which the Religious Right thinks. Not too pretty, is it?

Filed in: Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism