Suffer the Little Children : Witch Hunters in the 21st Century

By Anthony David Jacques on February 26, 2012

Helen Ukpabio is a Christian fundamentalist and Biblical literalist who incites torture, violence, and persecution against alleged witches and wizards, citing Exodus 22:18 as a primary justification and foundation for her methods: ”Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Based on this and quite a few more Old Testament scriptures, Ukpabio and many other witch hunters in several African countries put children, the elderly and the mentally infirm at serious risk.

Ukpabio’s ministry is based at Nigeria’s Liberty Gospel Church, but she is coming to Houston, Texas in the middle of March at the invitation of Glorious Praise Ministries, to lead a conference on witch-hunting.

The oddly upbeat tagline for her conference is: “12 days of battling with the spirit of freedom” but don’t be fooled. Read a little further and you find that attendants should expect to be delivered from: Bad dreams, witchcraft attack, possession by mermaid spirits or other evil spirits, lack of promotion in work, and quite a lot more.

While I can’t speak for my fellow contributors, I’d like her to be banned from entering the US in a few weeks due to her notorious support of violence and torture. There is already a petition to this effect in progress if you are interested.

But first, consider the recent death of 15 year-old Kristy Bamu last Christmas.

Bamu succumbed on Christmas Day, 2011, after being tortured by his sister and her boyfriend for the suspicion of witchcraft. The young man was beaten so thoroughly that he begged to die, getting his wish in a small bath tub where his assailants proposed to rinse the blood from his body. Tragically, Bamu was too bludgeoned and exhausted to lift his head up out of the water when they left him. So he drowned.

Where in the world could something like that happen? I asked myself the same question when I first heard the story, and I was completely unprepared for the answer: London, England; One of the largest, most important cities in the civilized world.

Here we are, homo sapiens, more than a decade into the twenty-first century, with a Global Positioning System capable of tracking applicable devices to about three feet, video game systems where a person’s body movements alone translate into game play, and voice control gadgets popping up almost everywhere. We have computers mastering more calculations per second than the smartest person could hope to solve in an hour. One might rightly ask, in this advanced technological age, how is it witchcraft continues to not only find believers, but cost lives?

Though not unique, this is a rare tragedy in the first world. Of course, in a fundamentalist wonderland such as the great state of Texas, it’s not unimaginable Ukpabio and those of her stripe could spark a new wave of religious hysteria in the US.

The problem in Africa has already reached a fever pitch in recent years. As if disease, starvation, political or social unrest and economic instability weren’t enough, painful torture and death at the hands of religious zealots remain very real dangers for thousands of Africans. This video offers only a glimpse into the world of pain and suffering that young children face at the hands of Christian priests and bishops and even their own families, a problem so widespread there are now homes for those children lucky enough to escape with their lives.

This video (which is not for the faint) shows five suspected witches being beaten and burned alive.

Christian missionaries, for their part, repeatedly claim they have never condoned any form of physical harm in their religious services, especially involving children; but it takes only a cursory glance through the Old Testament to find more than enough scriptural justification for these acts. Among other passages, we find it commanded that rebellious children be stoned to death, we find babies being happily dashed against rocks and pregnant women’s bellies being ripped open.

And they say the Bible is pro-life.

These Christian missionaries may not explicitly preach harm (which I find debatable in and of itself), but they remain clearly unable to warn their converts against the dangers of taking God’s word literally.

It seems even God forgot that he commanded, ”Thou shalt not kill” just a few chapters before he issued the death warrants that continue to put so many youngsters at risk.

* * *

In Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, his discussion of the witch trials in Europe sheds some much needed light on this matter:

Witches are of particular interest in this context because their persecution required an extraordinary degree of credulity to get underway, for the simple reason that a confederacy of witches in medieval Europe seems never to have existed. … It seems such notions were the product of folklore, vivid dreams, and sheer confabulation–and confirmed by confessions elicited under the most gruesome torture.

It is now virtually academic that witches only ever existed in the over-active imaginations of religious piety and fear. So what is the fuel for these modern-day pyres of unreason? Church competition.

In order to fill seats, a pastor or prophet must seem holy. And the holiest trend of the past decade, in addition to the preaching prosperity and wealth to the poor, has been to denounce unruly children as witches and charge their parents for exorcisms, torture, and even death. Yes, you’ve read that correctly. These parents often pay their priest to pour blood, poison or even acid down the throats of their children to elicit a confession and save their souls.

The depressing truth is that the only real reason to fear witchcraft is if you should be accused of practicing it by someone with the means to do you harm and the zeal to act it out.

How ironic is the realization that the real monsters in these stories, the real devils who ought to be imprisoned and punished, don not the black cloaks of witchcraft, but the white robes of Christian piety and service to God.

This is a call to action!

This isn’t something we normally do at an An American Atheist, but in writing this, I am hoping to rally support for a petition asking the US Department of State to ban Helen Ukpabio entry into the United States in March. It doesn’t cost any money and will only take a few seconds. I think this is the least we can do. I will also be linking to this article and the petition in the coming days on every social networking site I’m involved with.

- The petition can be found by clicking here -

Please sign it and pass the word along to anyone you feel would be interested in helping prevent such nonsense from being openly endorsed here in the US. And if you have any other ideas, please use the comments section below to share them. This is the kind of thing I think we can all be united against.

* * *

Scriptures referenced above:

Deuteronomy 21:18-21

If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.

Psalm 137:8-9

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

Hosea 13:16

The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God.
They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.

Other relevant links:

Houston’s Glorious Praise Ministries

Ukpabio’s Liberty Gospel Ministries

About Helen Ukpabio:

WBAI Blog NY - Pharyngula

About Kristy Bamu:

MSNBC - BBC - The Sun