Deaths by fasting in Kenya are used to put all religions under state control. Churches vow to “stand firm to the last drop of our blood until the policy is dropped.”
by Massimo Introvigne
Now, it’s Uganda. In Kenya, Pastor Paul Mackenzie of Shakahola’s Good News International Church is in jail, accused of having promoted an extreme form of fasting that caused the death of more than 400 of his followers. It was an easy prediction that the incident would be used to import into Africa the usual anti-cult rhetoric, to crack down on the religious freedom of all churches, and to revamp proposals to put religion under state control that had already been advanced in South Africa, Rwanda, and elsewhere.
After a Kenyan Senate Committee produced a controversial report that liberally borrowed from European and Japanese anti-cultism, now it’s Uganda. A governmental body called Directorate of Ethics and Integrity, established to fight corruption but called “shameless and redundant” by critical local media, is peddling a National Religious and Faith Organizations Policy, seeking political support. Isolated incidents in Uganda and the unavoidable Good News case in Kenya are mentioned to promote a policy that would ask religious organizations to submit to the government their accounts, including of manual gifts collected during religious services, have pastors or leaders trained by government-approved institutions, and report to an umbrella organization controlled by the state.
The government mentions the mass suicides and homicides in Uganda in 2000 of the fringe Catholic movement Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. Churches and other religious organizations, most of which oppose the Policy, counter by reminding the Ugandan government that they have been more often at the receiving end of violence, from the Catholic and Anglican Martyrs of Uganda killed in the 1880s to the religious leaders assassinated during the bloody reign of dictator Idi Amin in the 1970s.
Under the umbrella of the International Centre for Religious Advocacy and development (ICAD), leaders of different churches and religions in Uganda have come together to denounce the policy as liberticide. ICAD Director Wisdom Peter Katumba told the media that “The proposed policy is intended to tighten oversight of the clergy and congregations by the government and bring religion under direct political control of the reigning president… Like the Uganda Martyrs, we shall stand strong and firm to the last drop of our blood until the policy is dropped.”
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
