Who’s afraid of big, fake pastors?
Uganda’s fake pastors controversy exposes a thriving business built on alleged miracles, manipulation and the faithful’s hard-earned money. Despite repeated scandals and revelations, thousands continue flocking to self-proclaimed prophets in search of healing, wealth and breakthroughs, leaving one question hanging: do the faithful really care whether their pastors are genuine? Writes Kalungi Kabuye
Poster of the movie Marjoe. (File)
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WHAT’S UP!
There is a film entitled Marjoe, actually a documentary. It tells the story of Marjoe Gortner, an American evangelist who began plying the trade when he was only four years old. Trained and ordained as a preacher by his parents (four generations of preachers), and being quite excellent at the job, he made quite a bit of money for them (estimated at tens of millions of dollars). But when he was 16, his father ran away with all the family money.
Marjoe (a combination of Mary and Joseph) eventually began preaching on his own, making even more money for himself. But by the time he got into his late 20s, his conscience began troubling him, and he regretted all the lies he told from the pulpit and all the tricks used to get money from the faithful.
So, he organised a film crew to follow him on his ‘final’ revival tour, and he was filmed preaching and praying for people. He gave interviews where he admitted that he no longer believed in God, and revealed the tactics that preachers used to manipulate people.
The documentary was a huge success, was hailed as an expose in the business of evangelism and even won an Academy Award. That was 1972. But guess what? Evangelism is still big business in the United States and all over the world, and preachers still use the same tactics that Marjoe exposed to manipulate and convince the faithful and make lots of money for themselves.
When we were growing up, an American pastor named Jimmy Swaggart was big on TV. With very little to choose from on TV, we watched Swaggart almost religiously. I know some people who were convinced that Jesus was calling them, just from listening to Swaggart on UTV.
But then it was revealed that the famous preacher had been consorting with prostitutes and was suspended from his ministry. He later gave a public ‘I have sinned’ speech and asked for forgiveness.
Barely two years later, he picked up a street prostitute and was stopped by the police. This time, he reportedly said that “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business”. And kept on preaching to the faithful who stayed with him, till his death last year.
Where am I going with this? There has been a lot of hullabaloo over the past two weeks or so about ‘fake pastors’ in Uganda. It got really intense and at times painfully personal, with insults hurled and even curses thrown around ‘in the name of God’.
Ugandans are funny like that. We all know most of these pastors are fake, the pastors themselves know they are fake, and even the so-called ‘faithful’ know their pastors are fake. But they still go, have convulsions, speak in tongues, fall all over the place, and give the pastors their money. Lots of money.
But hey, it’s a business, so what’s the big deal?
Sounds ridiculous, right? But people believed these women, and turned up in the hundreds and even thousands. ‘Right-minded’ citizens of Uganda read my stories and scoffed at the gullible multitudes, but many hedged their bets, and sent for a bit of soil on the side.
In 2024, the BBC aired an expose on one of the most famous pastors in Africa – TB Joshua. Joshua had founded his church more than 30 years, based on ‘self-professed divine powers and ability to heal the sick’. Carefully curated videos of disabled people walking (and at one time he claimed to have resurrected a dead person) were circulated among the faithful.
When the Nigerian government banned those videos from national TV, Joshua formed Emmanuel TV and beamed his message around the world, effectively creating an empire which made him filthy rich.
But it was all a fraud, as revealed by the BBC documentary, which is eerily similar to the Marjoe film. But did the Nigerian faithful care? Not at all. When Joshua died, hundreds of new pastors claiming divine powers strove to take his place and his millions of followers. And of course the dollars that came with it.
By last count, millions more Nigerians still go to these pastors seeking shortcuts to wealth and luxury lifestyles, even romance. Same with Ugandans. They know the pastors are probably fake and that there is no documented proof that any of the ‘miracles’ actually work, as opposed to the documentaries proving that they don’t.
But they will still go in their hundreds and thousands and millions and give their hard-earned money to the fake pastors. And all the fake pastors will shout “Hallelujah” and go buy another SUV.