Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:00 pm
Meet televangelist Frank Amedia of Touch Heaven Ministries (THM), Donald Trump’s new “liaison for Christian policy.†Daystar.com tells us that Pastor Frank’s “call is to ‘prepare the way for the coming of the Lord'” and that “Pastor Frank moves in the gifts of healing, miracles, deliverance, words of knowledge, teaching, and is also a skilled piano player and psalmist.”
Fascinating as all that is, People for the American Way’s (PFAW) Right Wing Watch had never heard of him so they did a little digging and found out that as well as playing the piano, Pastor Frank is into religious persecution and letting people starve unless they convert. That’s in this disturbing report from 2010:
Angry crowds in a seaside slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, attacked a group of Voodoo practitioners Tuesday, pelting them with rocks and halting a ceremony meant to honor victims of last month’s deadly earthquake.
Voodooists gathered in Cite Soleil where thousands of quake survivors live in tents and depend on food aid. Praying and singing, the group was trying to conjure spirits to guide lost souls when a crowd of evangelicals started shouting. Some threw rocks while others urinated on Voodoo symbols. When police left, the crowd destroyed the altars and Voodoo offerings of food and rum.
Tensions have been running high since the Jan. 12 earthquake killed an estimated 200,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless. More than 150 machete-wielding men attacked a World Food Program convoy Monday on the road between Haiti’s second-largest city of Cap-Haitien and Port-au-Prince. There were no injuries but Chilean peacekeepers could not prevent the men from stealing the food, U.N. spokesman Michel Bonnardeaux said.
Religious tension has also increased: Baptists, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, Mormons and other missionaries have flocked to Haiti in droves since the earthquake to feed the homeless, treat the injured and jockey for souls. Some Voodoo practitioners have said they’ve converted to Christianity for fear they will lose out on aid or a belief that the earthquake was a warning from God. “Much of this has to do with the aid coming in,” said Max Beauvoir, a Voodoo priest and head of a Voodoo association. “Many missionaries oppose Voodoo. I hope this does not start a war of religions because many of our practitioners are being harassed now unlike any other time that I remember.”
[…]
“There’s absolutely a heightened spiritual conflict between Christianity and Voodoo since the quake,” said Pastor Frank Amedia of the Miami-based Touch Heaven Ministries who has been distributing food in Haiti and proselytizing.
“We would give food to the needy in the short term, but if they refused to give up Voodoo, I’m not sure we would continue to support them in the long term because we wouldn’t want to perpetuate that practice. We equate it with witchcraft, which is contrary to the Gospel.”To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
Literally then, convert or die. You know, like Jesus did it when he handed out loaves and fishes at the Sermon on the Mount. Follow me or none of this food is for you. Oh wait. He didn’t say that, did he?
Yes, this huckster could be serving in our White House. Representing our country to the world:
Amedia talks about the gospel, but he doesn’t live it.
PFAW also found a 2011 video in which Amedia again goes after voodoo, as though voodoo were responsible for all the evils that plague Haiti:
“The redemption of the country has to be in the fathering of the country. Pastors need fathers; the president need a father; and the families need fathers. There’s a lack of a fathering spirit here. And once that’s restored, the relationship with the Father in heaven and then the fathers here on earth, and there’s a mentoring and a fathering going on, this land will heal.
“It’s the curse of Voodoo that has taken away the fathering in this land.”
Watch courtesy of Right Wing Watch:
It is unclear to rational people how persecuting people is going to make things any better. But then, Donald Trump likes to punish people. He’s made it clear he will punish everyone who said anything bad about him once he is cloaked in the power of the office of president. With attitudes like that, Amedia should fit right into a Trump administration.
For going on 2000 years, conservative Christians have been shoving their religion down the throat of indigenous people while destroying every alternative to their own religion. That this was going on in the United States between different Christian sects before the Revolution, and continued, directed at Native Americans after, scarce needs be said.
Pastor Frank says he’s been “Called to prepare the way for the coming of the Lord…†but it’s funny, I don’t recall anywhere in the Gospels where Jesus says to starve them in preparation for his return. That’s a peculiar form of love, you have to agree.
Americans are right to ask if this is the thinking that will infuse Donald Trump’s foreign policy, where foreign aid, humanitarian and disaster relief is dependent upon conversion to the Religious Right’s bastardized version of Christianity.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
