To the editor:

I am again depressed to find that InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is up to its usual disingenuous antics. Currently, InterVarsity is promoting a new documentary, “Nefarious,” which they will show once this week and once next week (it has already been shown once before). “Nefarious” purports to be a documentary about the exploitation of women via sex trafficking and the need to therefore abolish the sex trade. This is a cause, of course, which we all would presumably get behind. What InterVarsity fails to tell us in their gleaming posters is of “Nefarious’s” links to various theocratic leaders in the Christian right aligned with the powerful but fringe Pentecostal movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The movie was made through the sponsorship of Mike Bickle’s International House of Prayer. Mike Bickle is one of the most radical proponents of NAR philosophy and his IHOP (International House of Prayer) organization is directly responsible for the spread of anti-gay death penalty legislation in Uganda. Bickle is best known for claiming that Oprah Winfrey is the harbinger of the Antichrist and arguing that the “gay marriage agenda” is “rooted in the depths of Hell;” [he] recently said in an interview about homosexuality that gays and lesbians must “declare war” against their sexual orientation or will face “flaming missiles of the Evil One.” He warned that gays and lesbians, along with heterosexuals who have sex before marriage, who “give up and give in” will ultimately begin “denying the faith,” which “opens the door to the demonic realm to touch them.” The organization that IHOP has set up to handle “Nefarious’s” distribution and dissemination also promotes the teachings of Lou Engle. You may remember him from Jesus Camp; he’s the guy who gets all the little children at the end of the film to scream “righteous judges, righteous judges” as they hold little miniature fetuses in their hands. Engle is even more directly tied to the gay death penalty bill in Uganda than Bickle. An audio teaching of his directly available and easily locatable on The Exodus Cry site talks of his encounter with a “post-abortive” woman who had a dream of blood spurting out of her mouth, which he claims is a “deliverance [that’s Pentecostal for exorcism] from blood guilt” and a victory over the “demonic spirit of Jezebel”. Are these really the kind of sex trafficking “abolitionists” we want to put our money or support behind?

But what is most damning and most offensive to me is the link Exodus Cry makes between being an abuse victim and being demonically possessed. According to one commentator on the website, promoting a trafficking rescue mission in Southeast Asia, “Sex slavery and the commercial sex industry is a spiritual oppression. That means there are demons involved. There are big ones that oppress countries and regions, and there are smaller ones that hold individual women in a death grip. While the three cannot truly be separated — physical, emotional, spiritual — they need to be acknowledged. Just as the physical acts of rape and torture destroy a woman’s emotions and psyche, the dark grip of a demon will torment her years after its over.  These demonic spirits attach themselves to the women because they live in Thailand, where “animism and witchcraft are prevalent”.

It was not hard at all for me to find this information. It took less than an hour to obtain it. So I am forced to conclude that either InterVarsity lacks the basic research skills of an average college freshman or that they endorse such teachings. The latter seems increasingly likely given InterVarsity’s stunt in supporting reparative therapy last semester. As a Christian, I find InterVarsity’s continued promotion of anti-gay (and now anti-women) leaders abhorrent. And as a concerned teacher I worry about the growing influence of NAR teaching on evangelical students on this campus. I love my evangelical friends dearly. But if they are to retain any respect on our campus, they need to publicly, urgently, and immediately divorce themselves from this kind of regressive politics.

Dr. John Weaver
Adjunct Professor
English department