Guatemala: A case history of dominionist hell
A lot of people in past--and occasionally, even now--tell me I'm being a bit of a worrywart when I express my real concern regarding the possibility of a dominionist hijack of our government.
My own worry here is that people may not be worried enough.
You see, the nastiest of the dominionist groups--the same type as the dominionist groups I escaped--have a very long and nasty history of involvement in politics (usually portraying themselves as "anti-Communist" and occasionally getting government support)...and a history of operating in stealth, and a documented history of governmental hijacks which are occasionally quite bloody indeed.
To people who say "It can't happen here"...well, at least in Central America, it has happened before, not once, but twice--in coups supported by dominionists here in the States, and being frightening proof (especially in the second case) that even a democratically elected government can all too easily turn into the Republic of Gilead in "real life".
We forget Guatemala's history of dominionist horror--far more recent than the era of the conquistadores but dating more from the 50's onward, and being especially flagrant in the 70's and 90's--at our gravest peril. Guatemala's hell shows all too easily how it can happen.
Dominionism and politics actually has a far earlier origin than most people realise--most people think of dominionism or the "religious right" and assume it started in the 80's (or, in some cases, the 70's).
They are about fifty years too recent there, if not more.
The strange history of dominionism and "anti-communism"--and the promotion of dominionist churches as specifically anti-communist groups--practically dates all the way back to the very beginnings of what I term the "Pentecostal Dominionist" segment (Fred Carlson has referred to these as "Christian Nationalists" as opposed to "Christian Reconstructionists"; the latter tend to be more of the "fundamentalist Baptist" segment) of what we now call dominionist churches. In 1907, the Scofield Reference Bible was first published, and a revision came out in 1918; among many of the things that are seen as peculiar (if not outright heretical) in mainstream Christianity promoted (among other things, the Scofield Reference Bible was the first "reference Bible" published that explicitly promoted the concept of the "Rapture") that Russia would be the home of the Antichrist:
That the primary reference is to the northern (European) powers, headed up by Russia, all agree. The whole passage should be read in connection with Zechariah 12:1-4; 14:1-9; Matthew 24:14-30; Revelation 14:14-20; 19:17-21, "gog" is the prince, "Magog," his land. The reference to Meshech and Tubal (Moscow and Tobolsk) is a clear mark of identification. Russia and the northern powers have been the latest persecutors of dispersed Israel, and it is congruous both with divine justice and with the covenants (e.g. "Genesis 15:18") See "Deuteronomy 30:3" that destruction should fall at the climax of the last mad attempt to exterminate the remnant of Israel in Jerusalem. The whole prophecy belongs to the yet future "day of Jehovah" ; Isaiah 2:10-22; Revelation 19:11-21 and to the battle of Armageddon Revelation 16:14 See "Revelation 19:19" but includes also the final revolt of the nations at the close of the kingdom-age. Revelation 20:7-9.
Now, when the Scofield Reference Bible came out in 1907, the justification was that of the Russians committing progroms on the Jewish population (and these were vicious at the time--among other things, the Russian equivalent to the Secret Service had published the infamous forgery Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to justify persecution of the Jewish population); when the Bolshevik government took over the Russian government in 1918, the very early dominionist movement suddenly had a way to sell itself--specifically as an anti-Communist organisation (Russia, soon to be the USSR, was the first obviously "communist" country, and as Russia was already defined as Evil Incarinate and the Literal Country Of The Devil, communism was quickly equated with "Satan's Religion" especially as the USSR government was officialy atheist).
The earliest record I can find on a dominionist (or proto-dominionist) specifically using anti-communism as a selling point for dominionism--and using accusations of being a communist as a reason for their listeners to avoid a person--is not from the Cold War but rather Aimee Semple McPherson from the 1920s-1930s. (Semple McPherson, interestingly, is one of the very first televangelists known (Billy Sunday, who was a fundamentalist Baptist, also started among the same era; to this day, the vast majority of televangelists have been from the Assemblies or from churches descended from the Assemblies and the few who aren't tend to be linked to the SBC); she originally started out as an Assemblies of God radio preacher, but ended up forming the first of many "daughter denominations" of the Assemblies when her husband divorced her for marital abandonment (the Assemblies does not allow divorcees to preach); International Foursquare was the prototypical model for groups like New Life Church (which Ted Haggard ran till he was outed), Ron Parsley's World Harvest Church (linked to elections hanky-panky in Ohio), and the like. She was also responsible for what may be the first recorded televangelist scandals--she faked her own kidnapping to elope with a lover, and eventually died of a barbituates overdose. Much of her radio misbehaviour at the time actually led to the formation of the Federal Communications Commission (so that the government could have a way to effectively enforce radio regulations).)
Semple McPherson in fact may have been the first of the radio preachers to give an explicitly political message; she conducted a campaign called "America Awake!" in the 1930s to explicitly promote "anti-communist" candidates as well as to push for political adoption of dominionist agendas (including, notably, railing against the ending of Prohibition). Of particular note here, Semple McPherson is also the first televangelist--and one of the first recorded dominionist preachers--to explicitly "red-bait" someone:
Religious Right broadcasters long ago learned an important lesson: Repeat almost anything often enough and many people will believe you -- even if it leads them to act against their own interests. Starting with radio evangelism in the 1930s, media-evangelists have perfected the use of each new technology to influence elections and legislation, hammering home reactionary theology with the clear aim of gaining political power.
Aimee Semple McPherson pioneered the approach in the 1930s on a powerful Los Angeles' radio station. Broadcasting from her "temple," McPherson styled herself a modern-day Joan of Arc in a titanic struggle against communism. Her crusade reached the boiling point in 1934 during the insurgent Democratic gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair. The socialist author had pledged to "end poverty in California," but the evangelist, in an alliance with Republican leaders, Hollywood propagandists and political consultants, redefined the race in apocalyptic terms.
"Someone has cast in the poison herb," she bellowed on the Sunday before Election Day, "and if we eat thereof we shall all perish and the glory of our nation as it has stood through the years shall perish with us." At first the front runner in an era of mass unemployment and hard times, Sinclair had become the target of the nation’s first "media campaign," and ultimately lost by 200,000 votes. McPherson had seized on growing fears of revolution, convincing her flock -- many of them poor -- that the real enemy was satanic communism and its Democratic messenger.
These tactics had become so effective by the 70's and 80's that no less than Ronald Reagan was elected to office by them--Jimmy Carter and the entire Democratic Party were literally condemned in sermons in Assemblies churches as "closet communists" and "communist lite"--and by extension, being Satanists. (This is especially ironic as Jimmy Carter is known to be an evangelical Christian, though not of the dominionist variety.)
In the 50's, the same dominionist groups who were red-baiting Upton Sinclair were taking full advantage of Cold War hysteria and--through a new group that an Assemblies preacher ran as a "business ministry" called the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship International--dominionism was being heavily promoted to the US government as a way to stem the potential march of communism and to "protect America's interests" in Central America.
And to say that the FGBMFI happily engaged in skunk-works of the worst sort is quite possibly the understatement of the decade, if not the millenium. One of the first things they did was rather explicitly incorporate the Red Scare into the theology and mythology of dominionism, and by promoting themselves as "anti-communist", was able to get the CIA's help to establish benchheads. The Peace Corps themselves report all too damningly on the FGBMFI's antics throughout Central America:
Most of the group's members are businessmen, but prominent U. S. members include high military officers, ex-officers, or managers in the military-industrial complex, many of whom worked within the nuclear weapons establishment. Many of them believe that the Gog-Magog war prophesied in the Bible will culminate in nuclear war, but that they will be raptured before the apocalypse. (1)
. . .
FGBMI produces books, a magazine called The Voice (in seven languages), and Christian TV programs which are aired on networks such as Trinity Broadcasting and PTL, as well as independent stations. In fact, the group provided the seed money to found the Christian Broadcasting Network, PTL teleministries, and Trinity Broadcasting. The fellowship holds national, regional, and world conventions. Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, the evangelical ex-president of Guatemala, spoke at the world convention in 1984. At the 1986 world convention, people gathered the signatures and addresses of potential supporters for Pat Robertson for President. (1) FGBMFI organizes "airlifts" in which members fly to target countries at their own expense to organize prayer breakfasts with the country's top business leaders. There have been "airlifts" to Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala, as well as Haiti, Mexico, the Philippines, and South Africa. (1) It was reported in 1987 that the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras had all attended FGBMFI prayer meetings.
. . .
Guatemala: The fellowship entered Guatemala in 1952, only one year after its inception in 1951. The Guatemala directors are leading businessmen, media people, and military officers, including a former minister of defense. Prominent members frequently travel through Latin America setting up chapters. FGBMFI members often say that they have turned their business over to the Lord and that they are the happiest people on earth. (9) John Carrette, a prominent FGBMFI member, told a meeting of the Indian Evangelical Association ASIDE that Indian pastors should not support or finance political candidates in any way. Carrette himself was a vocal supporter of the evangelical ex-president Gen. Efrain Rios Montt. (9) Rios Montt spoke at the FGBMFI 1984 world convention. (1)
(Footnotes:
1. Larry Kickham, "The Theology of Nuclear War," inset on The Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International, Covert Action Information Bulletin, No. 27, Spring 1987.
9. Interhemispheric Resource Center, "Private Organizations with U. S. Connections in Guatemala," July, 1988.)
The article goes into detail on the other skunk-works the FGBMFI participates in--including coordination of funders of dominionism like the Coors Foundation, dominionist leaders, and pro-dominionist politicians as well as the use of the FGBMFI to funnel aid to the Contras under the claim of "aid packages" (and yes, Ollie North is quite associated with them; Ollie North actually did a speech at the church I later escaped to state that the Iran-Contra scandal was his way of doing "God's Work" to "defeat the satanic communists").
Right now, though, I want to focus on the first of those names--Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt.
Ríos Montt actually did not start out as potentially the most genocidal leader in the all-too-bloody history of Guatemala since the conquistadores. However, he was originally placed in position as an "anti-communist" with help from the CIA:
Ríos Montt's ties with the United States military go back fifty years when he received training by the Pentagon. In 1950, Ríos Montt graduated as a cadet at the School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, which at the time educated students in counterinsurgency tactics for the purposes of combating potential "communist" influence in the region.
In 1954, the young officer played a minor role in the successful CIA-organized coup against President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who was alleged to have embraced socialist ideologies largely as a result of his efforts to break the economic monopoly of the United Fruit Company, a US firm with strong ties to the Washington establishment.
Following the coup, Ríos Montt rose swiftly through the military. In 1970, under the military regime of President General Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio, he became a general and chief of staff for the Guatemalan army.
In the early 1970's, Guatemala tried its first transition to a democratically elected government. Ríos Montt ran as an opposition candidate for the "Christian Democratic Party" as part of the National Opposition Front (after resigning a post he had held for the US Embassy) and proceeded to blame the loss on Catholic priests who protested mistreatment of Mayans--a claim that would become all too prophetic in future:
In 1973, Ríos Montt resigned from his post in the Washington embassy to participate in the March 1974 presidential elections as candidate for the National Opposition Front (FNO). He lost the election to a rival right-wing candidate, General Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García, by 70,000 votes. Ríos Montt denounced a "massive electoral fraud", blaming Catholic priests who had questioned the mistreatment of the Catholic Mayans, and claimed that the priests were leftist agents. It is alleged that he was given a payoff of several hundred thousand dollars along with the post of military attaché in the embassy in Madrid, Spain, where he stayed until 1977.
After this loss, Ríos Montt became a preacher for Iglesia el Verbo (now known as Verbo Ministries in English). Per the group's website, they claim to have started out as a ministry targeting Guatemala; Verbo Ministries is in fact a subdivision of Global Outreach Ministries, an abusive neopente church that was one of the originators of abusive "cell church" practices--and also an explicitly dominionist church at that.
And it was here, among other things, that Ríos Montt began establishing a dominionist beachhead as being one of the primary workers for Global Outreach:
After he had been blatantly defrauded of electoral victory, he
went to “diplomatic exile”. When he returned from Spain in 1977, he joined the World
Church, El Verbo. “Charismatic religion became a balm for his wounds, transfigured his
ambitions, and offered to realize them in the Lord´s way” (Stoll 1988: 95-96). Gospel Outreach/
World Church/El Verbo was founded in Eureka, California, in the early 1970s: Lay
preacher Jim Durkin acquired the Lighthouse ranch commune and taught a group of hippie
followers about the millennial drama and the Second Coming of Christ (Stoll 1988: 92-93). In
the early 1980s, 4,000 people were said to belong to Gospel Outreach, having forty congregations
in the United States - and one in Guatemala. Following the earthquake in 1976, Gospel
Outreach and its moral rigidism attracted many followers, especially among the upper
classes (Garrard-Burnett 1998: 139).
In 1983, Holy Hell was about to begin for Guatemala. In a coup that was partially helped by the CIA (in an effort to essentially surround Nicaragua, then led by the Sandanistas), Ríos Montt was about to hijack the country and turn it into a particularly genocidal version of the Republic of Gilead:
On March 7, 1982, General Ángel Aníbal Guevara, the official party candidate, won the presidential election. On March 23, with the support of fellow soldiers, General Horacio Egberto Maldonado Schaad and Colonel Francisco Luis Gordillo Martínez, Ríos Montt seized power in a coup d'état, that was quietly backed by the CIA, deposing General Romeo Lucas García. They set up a military junta with Ríos Montt at its head. The junta immediately suspended the constitution, shut down the legislature, set up secret tribunals, and began a campaign against political dissidents that included kidnapping, torture, and extra-judicial assassinations. The coup was described as being of the Oficiales jóvenes ("young officers"), and prevented Guevara from being installed as president on July 1.
Initially, there was some expectation that the extremely poor human rights and security situation might improve under the new regime. Drawing on his pentecostal beliefs, Ríos Montt invoked a modern apocalyptic vision comparing the four riders of the Book of Revelation to the four modern evils of hunger, misery, ignorance and subversion, as well as fighting corruption and what he described as the depredations of the rich. He said that the true Christian had the Bible in one hand and a machine gun in the other. On April 10, he launched the National Growth and Security Plan whose stated goals were to end the extermination and teach the populace about nationalism. They wanted to integrate the campesinos and indigenous peoples into the state, declaring that because of their illiteracy and "immaturity" they were particularly vulnerable to the seductions of "international communism."
A second article notes that Ríos Montt did pretty explicitly wish to establish dominionist rule over Guatemala, including forcibly converting the Mayan population (mostly Catholic or following the old ways) to neopentecostalism--by gunpoint, if necessary:
At first, Ríos Montt’s rule was marked by his embrace of El Verbo. He appointed two members of the World Church to ad-hoc created advisory positions, and appeared on Pat Robertson’s talk show The 700 Club. Moreover, he addressed the Guatemalan public every Sunday in a series of television and radio broadcasts. The speeches, widely known as “sermons”, outlined his plan to create a New Guatemala (La Nueva Guatemala), based on three fundamental principles: Morality, discipline and order, and national unity (Garrard-Burnett 1998: 141). Realizing the need for moral credibility, Ríos Montt immediately initiated a plan to end the widespread corruption in the military and the public administration.
For Ríos Montt,
“communism represented the ultimate rejection of morality and God-given authority; it had to be countermanded by his own divinely sanctioned ‘final battle against subversion’, which he conceptualized in nearly apocalyptic terms” (Garrard-Burnett 1998: 145).
Moreover, he designed repressive tactics as an accompaniment to his social engineering project. Ríos Montt, who intended to rescue the Indian souls, sought to integrate all Guatemalans into his New Guatemala. Thus, he “mayanized” both state institutions and the counterinsurgency apparatus. For instance, he established a Council of State (Concejo de Estado), replacing the National Assembly. The 34 Council members included ten indígena representatives (Schirmer 1998: 28). A second example is the Special counterinsurgency units, the Fuerzas de Tarea, which were established throughout the armed confrontation to carry out counterinsurgency operations. In the early 1980s, the army established the Fuerza de Tarea Gumarcaj, which operated in the highlands of El Quiché and Huehuetenango. After the military coup d´état against Lucas García, a young Maya-quiché commander, who had been a member of EMP, was appointed commander of this unit (ODHAG 1998, Vol. II: 102). Most of these task forces participating in the genocidal campaign were given Mayan names: e.g. Iximché, Kaibil Balam, Quetzal, and Tigre. Obviously, these appropriations of indigenous cultures were both terror instruments and paternalistic attempts to create a “multicultural” national identity.
To say that Ríos Montt held a grudge against both Catholicism and the Mayan population is quite the understatement. In fact, it's now estimated that over two hundred thousand Mayans lost their lives in that brutal era, and over a million had to flee their homes for their lives; a survivor of Ríos Montt's reign has many horrifying stories to tell of what went on at that time, and in fact, investigators are still finding mass graves to this day of Mayans slaughtered by Ríos Montt's men. (Ríos Montt himself cannot leave Guatemala, as there is now an international arrest warrant with his name on it for crimes against humanity and genocide issued by a Spanish court after survivors filed suit.)
Eventually, Ríos Montt's abuses got too much for his fellow army-men, and they overthrew him. The sick and sad thing is, he's tried running for office *twice* since then in post-junta Guatemala.
If it were just Ríos Montt we had to worry about there, that'd be one thing (and trust me, Ríos Montt's history is quite bad enough!). Sadly, though, he's not the only neopente preacher to try a coup in Guatemala.
The second dominionista was actually elected to public office in what was only the second election in Guatemala's history (and one of the first that met international standards for free, fair elections). Jorge Serrano Elías was an advisor under Ríos Montt, and also a member of Global Outreach before joining another neopente church:
In 1976 he collaborated with various American Protestant churches to help the population recover from the devastating earthquake that had afflicted the country. He then published a document describing the miserable conditions under which the indigenous population lived, which resulted in his receiving threats. He went into exile in the US, only returning in 1982, to work in the government of fellow evangelist General Efraín Ríos Montt as Vice President of the Advisory Board to the government.
A Bartholomew's Notes article gives a little more backgrounder:
(Rev. Doug) Giles's brother-in-law Mell Winger (or "Mel Winger") has a doctorate from Fuller Theological seminary, where it looks like (based on his theology) he studied under C. Peter Wagner, who promotes an interesting worldview based on constant "Spiritual Warfare" against demons. He is currently district pastor at New Life Church near the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, working under Ted Haggard (see below). Previously, however, he was a pastor at Trinity Church in Lubbock (now run by a follower of Kenneth Hagin) and the director of the Bible Institute of El Shaddai Church in Guatemala City (1).
. . .
(1) El Shaddai was set up by a pastor close to TL Osborn, and has had links with members of the global neo-Pentecostal "A-List", such as the Korean Pastor Formerly Known as Paul Yonggi Cho (now David) and (the late) Nigerian Benson Idahosa. Serrano Elías, Guatemalan president from 1991-93, was a member.
(More about Cho later--he's a *big* influence in Assemblies dominionism in particular.) El Shaddai Church in Guatemala is a neopente church, quite explicitly dominionist, and very much like the Assemblies church I escaped in that they have some...decidedly...interesting (in the "may you live in interesting times" sense) concepts on what's wrong with Guatemala. From the book Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, they blamed Guatemala's present economic conditions on Mayan veneration of the old gods, as shown when a pre-Columbian relic was found at the planned site of their new church:
As soon as the church started building, government archaeologists leaped to the defense of the pre-Colombian site. But before the church's laborers stopped, they are said to have dug up the head of a snake carved in stone. The leaders of El Shaddai Church interpreted the suddenly revealed archaeology of their new location as a sign: the Lord had brought them face to face with his vision for Guatemala.
Three hundred years before Christ, Pastor Haroldo Caballeros announced, the serpent mound had been built to dedicate the entire country to Satan. Ever since that offering to the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, Guatemala and all of Latin America had been cursed. Why else would a continent so rich in resources and faith be among the poorest and most indebted of the earth? Why else would a country so green and blessed by God be so afflicted with violence and poverty? But now this curse of centuries could be lifted, Caballeros said. It is probably no coincidence that the name of his church, El Shaddai, means "The Almighty" in Hebrew; this was a vision not just for saving souls, but for seizing a country's destiny. Caballeros preached like a polished courtroom advocate--his former profession--and was attracting influential people to El Shaddai, including a man about to be elected president of the country.
Funded by a well-heeled congregation, Caballeros mounted a national prayer campaign to take the vision for overcoming the serpent's curse to every evangelical pastor in the country. Fifty thousand prayer warriors were needed to battle the territorial demons controlling Guatemala, Caballeros declared. God wanted to open up the skies and rain down his blessings. He wanted to bring a revival with so many signs, prodigies, and wonders that every tongue would confess that Jesus is Lord of Guatemala. Uplifted by an army of prayer, the church would rise up like a giant. It would prophesy over Guatemala, liberate it, and turn the curse into a blessing.
As an aside, I've heard almost this exact speech--only with LGBT people substituted for Quetzalcoatl (or sometimes communists) and with the US substituted for Guatemala--literally used in the Assemblies church I escaped. Yes, this includes the bits on "Territorial demons" (which I'll get into more this weekend--it's a concept in neopente dominionist churches that essentially teaches that areas can be "possessed" by demons).
The first potential presidential candidate El Shaddai threw out there ended up becoming president of the FGBMFI in Guatemala; the second ended up being Serrano Elías. He is probably most infamous for attempting an auto-coup and being the second dominionist in power where the military literally had to boot him out:
On May 25, 1993, Serrano illegally suspended the constitution, dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court, imposed censorship and tried to restrict civil freedoms, allegedly to fight corruption. The attempted self-coup was similar to the one carried out by Alberto Fujimori. However, Serrano's action met with strong protests by most elements of Guatemalan society, at the forefront of which was the Siglo Veintiuno newspaper under the leadership of José Rubén Zamora. This was combined with international pressure, and the army's enforcement of the decisions of the Constitutional Court, which ruled against the attempted takeover. In the face of this pressure, Serrano resigned as president on June 1 and fled the country. He was replaced on an interim basis by his vice president, Gustavo Espina Salguero. However, Espina was involved in the coup as well, and Congress replaced him with Ramiro de Leon Carpio.
Among other things, he's been specifically named as potentially hiding people who were involved in Ríos Montt's regime who have international arrest warrants out for them as well:
In statements to EFE on Saturday, Serrano Elias, exiled in Panama for the past 12 years, denied that he was protecting Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz, as a spokesman for the Rigoberta Menchu Foundation, Eduardo De León, has said.
Menchu, a Guatemalan Indian and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, brought charges against Alvarez Ruiz and other ex-high ranking Guatemalan officials accused of attacking the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala in 1980, killing four Spanish priests and committing other human rights crimes between 1978 and 1986.
In the Jan. 31, 1980, attack on the embassy, a group of peasants from the Guatemalan province of Quiche, accompanied by students and workers, peacefully occupied the Spanish mission to call for an end to violence in the region.
In response, security forces staged an attack on the embassy that left 38 people dead, many of them in the fire that ensued.
The really sad and scary thing is that the story is still not over. Guatemala is still at real risk of becoming la Republica de Gilead, as the preacher of El Shaddai himself has now announced he's running for office there--in about as expressly a dominionist platform as one can get (he even states he's running in part to "take dominion" over the country!).
Even worse...the same group responsible for all this horror, the FGBMFI...the same ones who invited Ríos Montt as a speaker and still welcome him as a member, the same ones who pretty much planted dominionism in Guatemala as an anti-communist movement and under guise of being a "relief movement"...are also, in large part, the same folks who pretty much turned the Republican Party into the American Dominionist Party and who are very, very good friends with George W. Bush.