February 27, 2024 • 66 mins
Robert sits down with Miles Gray to talk about TB Joshua, a Nigerian pastor whose cult trapped people from all over the world in a literal physical hell of his own design.
(2 Part Series)
Sources:
https://www.ru.ac.za/perspective/2014archive/tbjoshuaafalseprophetmustcomeclean.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-56771246
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-59295624
https://punchng.com/trump-you-need-spiritual-understanding-to-interpret-my-prophesy-tb-joshua/
https://www.modernghana.com/news/685268/police-urges-calm-over-terror-prophecy-.html
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, h what's got the plague? My Robert Evans,
host of Behind the Bastards, the sickest man in podcasting.
I have some sort of non COVID thing.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I did take the test.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Uh, so I have been I've been mainlining, you know,
I said, I've been sober lately. But now I am
a theorough flu addict. I don't even mix it into
my drinks anymore. I just pour the powder straight out
and rail that shit, you know, for you, that's the
good stuff. Our guests who just congratulated me on my
theorough flu addiction, mister Miles Gray, how are you doing,
(00:39):
Miles Gray?
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I'm great, I'm great. Thank you for having me back.
Shout out to the bTB what do you call a
BTV nation, your little bad Shout out the little bastards.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, yeah, the little bastards. Sure, yeah, shout out my
little bastards out, shut out all. Shout out all the
little bastards out there, love y'all. And I'm yeah, I
just uh, I'm bracing myself for you again, the ups
and downs and recording with you where I'm like what
hah and then like crying inside for the rest of
the day. You said that, it just made me think
(01:09):
if we'd gone with my original plan for this podcast
and made it all about Saddam Hussein, we could call
our fans the Husseiniacs. Oh oh yeah, see I just
thought about that now. But that's a good one.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Yeah, Miles, were you in the room when Robert pitched
the show on the phone when he was running through
what sounded like a wind tunnel. Were you in the room?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
I must have been.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I mean that was so such early days and like
we were all working on all this shit together. But yeah,
I feel like yeah, and even I mean I remember
all the fucking process of coming up with a title
and the art and all that shit. Shout out my
boy Allan, you know, for the iconic cover art.
Speaker 5 (01:44):
Yeah, Alan Lee.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Yes, Miles, are you been a good day?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
You happy dude? Just oppose a ship?
Speaker 5 (01:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, I'm having a fucking good day.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Man.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
My little boy has two little teeth coming in. I'm like, wonderful. Yeah,
I gotta go. I gotta go and get my fucking
head kicked in by whatever tale or fuckery you're gonna do. Nothing.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Nothing goes with a nice peaceful day like a story
of one of the most nightmarishly abusive people I have
ever read about my life. See, God is punishing me
with a sickness for taking such pleasure and making you
unhappy Miles.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Oh yeah, oh you okay. Well look I'm as someone
who was went to school where they tried to put
the fear of God in me, but it didn't work.
You know, I'm kind of split. I don't know if
I want to talk ill of a man of God? Yeah,
to see have you heard of this man of God?
A fellow named TB. Joshua. First of all, no, And
(02:47):
when Sophie hit me up and was like, hey, you know,
we might be talking about this or that, and then
she's like, okay, actually Robert Robert's gonna write something on
TV Joshua. I didn't google it because I'm like, what
the fuck is this? I thought it was like, did
he give a bunch of people tuberculosis?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
And that would be the fun version of this if
he was just like the typhoid Mary if tuberculosis, Johnny
apple seed of tuberculosis. It's like, Oh, who's this TV Joshua,
Well that's whole TV Joshua giving everybody TV.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, he's like when he coughs, look at his little
handkerchief he coughs into, and tell me if there's blood.
But yeah, I was like, And then this morning, out
of a morbid curiosity, I'm like, let me just see
what the top line description of this person was. And
I was like, oh, no, yeah, we got a pastor
in Nigeria, and I don't know what the rest is,
but I know how evangelical things operate over there, and
(03:39):
they can be pretty wild.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, and this is one of those, Like you know,
there's like Africa for whatever reason, like bastardry over there
does not usually go as viral as like the very
worst people from like I don't know Europe, United even
like South America, Asia.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
But like TB.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Joshua is not just He's not just a bastard. He
was like, up until his death very recently, one of
probably like the twenty or thirty most influential religious figures
alive on the planet. Massively influential Pentecostal preacher millions not
just in Nigeria and not just in West Africa, but
all over the world, in Southeast Asia and Europe unit
millions and millions of followers, huge, huge spoke in the
(04:24):
international Pentecostal community very very important.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Guy. Yeah, I feel like the religious bastards, they're able
to fly under the radar a little bit longer than
everybody else. Like if you're not like some dictator, despot,
kind of despotic leader, you're like it's like, I don't know,
like when you get the cover, when you're covered in
the blood of Christ. Yeah, it is one of those.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah, it's this mix of I think they get protected
from like members of the same faith, some of whom
obviously a lot of times the people who do expose
them are also members of the same faith. But like
that's probably one reason why sometimes it takes while to spread.
And I think also you get among like atheists or
even as we'll talk about Pentecostals are kind of in
an extreme sect of evangelical Christianity from like more moderate
(05:09):
centrist you know, Christians and like the West. I mean,
obviously Pentecostal movement is huge in the United States, but
even in the United States, I think a lot of
like people who are Christians, but you know they live
in like the East Coast, do they live in the
West Coast or like just like big cities. They may
not know how wild. Some of that shit gets right,
and they may kind of write off stories about these
(05:30):
guys as just like, oh, well that's just you know,
normal in that chunk of the faith or whatever.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
And TB.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Joshua was not, to be honest, like, I have a
lot of issues with Pentecostal Christianity, but a lot of
the people who were trying to expose him for years
were other Pentecostal pastors. But he just got ignored for
in a lot of what he was doing. Now, a
lot of people who enabled him were other Pentecostals. Don't
get me wrong.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Side note, I feel like, you know, based on all
the fuck real that's going on, you could have a
like a sister podcast, Behind the Pastors.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Behind the past Yet we can do an episode every
week for the next year.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
I'm not joking every fucking week. There's some freak somewhere
who's like, yeah, this youth pastor is colledge, child porn
or some other dark shit, and I'm like, man, we're
still we're still acting like these are the people that
are above or beyond reproach. But yeah, anyway, Behind the
Pastors look Behind the Pastors.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, we could also do a whole podcast series on
the Catholic Church, on the Catholic Church in like the seventies.
You know, even if we just skicked to one decade, Yeah, yeah,
we could really So here's the hard facts of this
guy's life. Timatope Balligan Joshua was born on June twelfth,
nineteen sixty three, in a town called Araghiti a Coco
(06:44):
in the southwest coastal state of Ondo in Nigeria. Arigedi
a Coco is very poor and it is unlikely that
his family had access to any kind of like really
meaningful wealth at any point. Stretching back in recent memory,
he is very poor. Everyone around him is very poor.
He grows up in like a background of pretty desperate poverty.
(07:06):
Now he does seem to have a fairly strong family,
which is good. It gives him a leg up on
a lot of people who are like like don't have
that benefit obviously, But this is this is a guy
who's going to have to fight for any amount of
like wealth that he wants to have. His family are Yoruba.
That is an ethnic group in southwest Africa that encompasses
the largest chunk of niger Congo language speakers. Like many
(07:29):
Yoruba families TV Joshua grows up. He has both Muslim
and Christian relatives in his close family, and one thing
people will say about him when he's a pastor is
that a lot of evangelical pastors in Nigeria are very
anti Muslim, and he was. He was, not nearly as
much as is Commons, not nearly as much. We'll get
into he's going to like he's going to like throw
(07:51):
Muslims under the bus at a certain point in his future.
But he does have like a lot of Muslims in
his family, and so for a while at least, he's
a lot better on some of that stuff than a
lot of other people then a lot of other like
pastors Christian pastors in the area. His father, Kolaole, was
well educated and made a living translating the Bible, so
from a fairly early age, he's both taught that it's
(08:12):
important to learn how to read and specifically to be
able to read the Bible, like this is something that
he's going to do obsessively from a very young age.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Oh God, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
He is big on that. His father dies when he's young,
and he is I think when he's like twelve or
something like that, and he's raised after that by his uncle,
who is a Muslim Man. Again, he's going to be
kind of more tolerant than a lot of people on
that sort of situation. He grows up speaking a mix
of Yoruba, English and pigeon. His English is never going
to be considered very good, in part because he doesn't
(08:42):
finish secondary school and he has limited formal education in general.
What time he does spend in school is at Saint
Stephen Anglican, which is a religious primary school. His teachers
called him Little Pastor because he was obsessed with the
Bible from a young age and preached to his classmates
it's not a red flag. That's not a red flag
at all. Preaching to your kid.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Preachers are the freakiest fucking creatures on Oh my God.
There's like, yeah, there's like this vibe of like you're
just showing, you're just regurgitating shit the adults are saying
around you. But they do it with such passion and conviction.
You're like, oh, I don't know, maybe you fucking God
is talking to you, but please you were nine years old.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah, yeah, and it's you know, take some of this
with a grain of salt. I think the stuff about
him being called little pastor right here often enough and
is consistent enough that I believe it. We don't have
great sources on his early life, like there are all
fan websites and the like.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Oh wait, so like, first of all, your research methodology
for this is what, Like, I don't imagine there's like
a book on like all the shitty things to you.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
I should read a book on him. Now there's good.
The best info on this guy's actual crimes comes from
the BBC. BBC So the BBC can be a problematic
entity in some ways, but they have a division of
the BBC called BBC Africa Eye, which reports on Africa
that does extremely good work. There are some of the
only people, for example, reporting on like war crimes by
the Camerooney and government. They do really good work, and
(10:07):
they did a long series on this guy, So there's
and interviewed a lot of people. So there is good
reporting on his crimes at this point. There's just not
a whole lot that we can absolutely verify about his
early life.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Right, because it's always some form of like myth building
or praise or yeah, just bias towards like how great
he was.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, the anecdots we get are all shit that his
fans pulled out of like speeches he gave during like
religious ceremonies, right, because that's like a big thing you're
talking about, Like when I was a kid, I did
this and this, and I saw, you know, the spirit
of God came into me and whatnot. That's where you
get a lot of these details, which is like there's
a good duck if you people want to know the
way in which these kind of pastors massage and just
(10:47):
outright invent backstories in order to like make themselves kind
of fit in with some of these common evangelical narratives.
There's a documentary I always recommend called Marjoe, and it's
about a guy who started out as a child pastor.
His parents may had him preaching when he was like
four or five years old. He was like doing marriages
at like age four or five or so, and it
was all a scam for money, right. He was like,
I never believed in God, and his parents abandoned him
(11:10):
as soon as he was old enough that it wasn't cute, right,
So you can't make money once he's an adult. There's
nothing special about an adult pastor. So they just fucking
bounce and he like takes a film crew and this
is in the United States and all these like evangelical
revivals in the seventies. It's a really good documentary. It
won an oscar. I'm recommend it to everybody. Marja one
of my very favorite movies. Also, he grows up to
(11:31):
be an actor and is on the A Team. So
Marginal was, yeah, he's a bad guy in one episode
of the A Team.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
I think yes. So there you got praise Christ praise
through him.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
All things are possible.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
You can starting, Yeah, you can be a bad guy
on the A Team type cast.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Probably it was this guy black. No, no, no, he's a
white guy. He's a white guy.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Oh wow, okay was Look maybe it wasn't God. It
might have just been a white supremacy that guy either.
I don't want to conflict the two, but it was
one of the two.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
I'm gonna say, anytime you get to hang out with Barakas,
that's the hand of God.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
That's the hand of God. Yeah, oh yeah, most if
you could. Yeah, he'd like, can I wear one of
your chains? He's like, yeah, man, oh yeah, raised Christ baby.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
So the website who owns Kenya, which I'm not sure
about the providence of, but it does seem to have
a lot of detail on this guy. They have an
article on him titled the Man of God who stayed
in his mother's womb for fifteen months, which gives you
an idea of the kind of claims he makes. And again,
this is stuff he's saying during speeches. He like claims
that he was his mom was pregnant with him for
(12:32):
fifteen months, and so he's a miracle baby. I guess
when you're that holy God needs an extra like six
months to really make sure you get finished.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah, you need you need that way, Yeah, man, you
need to just the what is that the fourth and
fifth trimester?
Speaker 1 (12:46):
So one eight babies? Yeah, roughly, I'm not great at math. Folks,
don't come in here and correct me if that's wrong.
He better have been walking and talking and shit yeah
that long coaching. No, he'd better come out knowing how
to read God.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Damnah into my taxi. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
So I do find that very funny because I even
heard that claim that, like, yeah, I took fifteen months
to be born.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
What are you stunting on people?
Speaker 4 (13:11):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Is that really a brag?
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Thing like, yeah, you're like, you're clingy? Yeah, are you?
Speaker 1 (13:17):
They giving ship to kids who were born early. Oh
you came out after eight months, not nearly as holy
as me.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Baby, I'm a fifteen month there. Yeah, my mom tried
to get rid of me. I said, no, I'm doing
some Bible study in here. I'm not ready yet.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
On the weekends he goes to just just goes to
like nick you wards and makes fun of the babies.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Ah, look at you, look at you. Couldn't be me,
couldn't be me. I came out. I came out twenty
six pounds.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
I almost didn't come out at all.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
I was gonna stay in there.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
I'm like, I said, I would have physically killed my
mother if I say it in there, I kept growing.
It would have been bad the person. Maybe, Oh that's funny.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
So later in life he would also claim that as
a child, he became aware that his coming had been
foretold in prophecy.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
For more than one hundred years.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I've never found what this prophecy is supposed to be.
Maybe someone was like, yeah, there's going to be a
huge fucking baby someday. Is that in the Book of Revelations,
And that boy was me so anyway, This bullet proof
source cites statements from Joshua that as a child, he
would read the entire Bible every two months. Quote, every
(14:24):
two months, I would have read the Bible from Genesis
to Revelation. It was the only subject that interested me
in primary school. In exams, I scored ninety nine percent consistently,
whereas I performed woefully in other subjects. My excelling and
Bible knowledge affected the other subjects where I performed poorly.
So basically, he was so good at the Bible that
his brain just didn't work for anything else.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Yeah. I can't. I can't do I can't even do
one plus two. Yeah, so I'm so christ it up
up here now.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
What I do disbelieve is a claim that he made
that one day, whilst at school, a madman entered his
class carrying a weapon. The type is not specified.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Everyone ran away, but he managed to calm the madman
down through prayer. From that day onwards, he knew there
was something special in him. I'm gonna need more details.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Yeah, how old is he?
Speaker 1 (15:10):
I think what this is like when he's in like
like middle school.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Maybe and a man came through with a weapon, just
a weapon, just a weapon.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Okay, okay, praise he praise him out of hurting anybody.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
I'm guessing. I mean, it's West Africa. Maybe he's a cutlass,
you know, so it's a it's a machete.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Maybe, I mean, machetes are very certainly, very accessible, but
who knows. My actual guess is that this did not happen.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Right right, right, Yeah, he's acting like he's Kevin Spacey
and the Negotiator. He's Chris Saviian or Shocks.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
So shortly before starting secondary school, his father died and
again he's raised by his uncle. He drops out of
school pretty soon after this, I think because he has
to get a job to help take care of the family.
And he spends years working a series of odd gigs,
like a lot of people and who come from his
level of like wealth and stuff in Nigeria and that
part of Nigeria. One of his jobs is a poultry attendant,
(16:07):
which mostly consisted of scrubbing chicken shit with his hands
and putting it in bags to be turned into fertilizer.
My my new favorite Kenyan news and culture website says
this job was so demeaning that no Nigerian did it.
It was mainly done by Ghanians. Wow, shots fired at Ghana.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Your neighbor's next door.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
There's all in these articles. There's a lot of shots
fired at Ghana.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Mya, it's wild. I've been to Ghana and there there
is like this sort of back and forth or they'll
be talking. They talked, They just chat shit about each
other like Nigerian m I don't know, I don't know.
Write them. This happens a regional Yeah, exactly. Your neighbor is.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Texas and Oklahoma, shit, right, like Nigeria and Ghana, right
right right?
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
So at some point in his early twenties, he experienced
a three day trance in which God visited him and
told him I am your God. I am giving you
a divine commission to go and carry the work of
the heavenly Father. This is the inciting incident of the
TV Joshua story. In the interest of trying to put
together a more complete picture of the man, I opted
to read a propaganda by what I thought was a
propaganda biography by one of his followers. Its title is
(17:13):
Rejoice and See what Happens Next? The Life and Times
of TB. Joshua. Now, this book does not give us
the life and times of TV Joshua. It's basically a
big brochure for like going to visit his church. And
we will talk about why a little later that he
wanted people doing that.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Just marketing. It is marketing material.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
It's all marketing. You get very little on the guy's life.
It is kind of interesting to note that the preface
of this book opens by saying TB. Joshua has shown
every indication of following this anointed path. He is worthy
of careful study and emulation, and then complaining TB. Joshua
has been made out to be controversial and has become
the subject of persecution, especially by fellow religious leaders. This
(17:52):
is puzzling to me. I have been in his presence
and I can say that he is disarmingly humble, gentle,
and a generous man.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
So that's good.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Glad, glad we're opening with like a real unbiased account
of this.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Oh yeah, he's so humble. Yeah, well he sounds great
so far. He sounds like he's you know, he's cooking
months talked about his miracles. Yeh, yeah, he topped down
a man with a machete, or who could have been
a bazooki, any kind of weapon.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
We have no idea.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Yeah, he just had an enriched plutonium maybe in his hand,
who knows, but he stopped it. Okay, look, this doesn't
just get to the bastard. I don't even know this
guy sounds.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Cool, Robert, Ye, so far he's great.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Praise Christ.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Yeah, so he's he starts preaching at some point. He's
probably in his like early to mid twenties when he
starts preaching, and this seems to have been a fairly
like humble start. There's some grainy footage that exists, apparently,
I've heard it reported on. I haven't seen it, that
shows him somewhere. It started out with something like a dozen,
maybe twenty followers under a bamboo marquee in the early
(18:54):
nineteen eighties. So he starts out small, but his his
flock grows fairly rapidly. And the mid nineteen eighties is
a pretty terrible time for most things, except for cocaine
and being a Pentecostal preacher in Nigeria, and especially for
the latter, it's basically the best time ever and this
merit's a little bit of explanation. First off, on Pentecostalism.
(19:17):
If you've ever seen a video, if you're wondering, like,
what the fuck is he talking about when he says Pentecostals,
Because I do think a lot of like even a
lot of people who are Christian right, but who are
like a fairly mainstream like kayaks Christianity and like normal
you know, believe in evolution, live a normal modern life.
They just like you know, they're Christian whatever. May not
know much about this. It's something you really encounter a lot,
(19:37):
particularly if you grow up in kind of the Deep
South and rural areas. It's gotten more common obviously as
we've gotten older. If you've ever seen videos of like
some wild seeming Christian religious ceremony where people are chanting
in tongues or screaming, flopping around on the floor looking
like they're seizuring, that's a Pentecostal service. Almost certainly. There
are some other denominations where you'll get stuff like that.
(20:01):
In popular culture, they're often called snake handlers. This is
because a lot of Pentecostals used to pass around venomous snakes,
and basically the idea is if you get bitten like
it means that you weren't faithful enough. And also if
you get bitten and die, it means that God just
wanted you to die.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, that was his plan.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
That was his plan for you. A lot of times
they're using non venomous snakes and it's like it's a show,
right right, And a lot of times they'll like defang
the snakes, especially for like the pastor, because the pastor
you want to like, could you imagine? It's like, but
I don't have any wound on my hand the fruit Jesus, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Where's that? Wait? I didn't give you the stunt snake pastor?
Oh fuck? Oh fuck, Okay.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
There's definitely motherfuckers who died from that, Like oh.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Yeah, yeah, there has to be. I mean, I feel
like there's there were headlines about like some snake handling
preacher who you know, somehow who'd a thought his handling
of a copper head whended with his demises.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
It was also common you still find this sometimes, but
like people would drink strych nine during these ceremonies. Again,
it's like a you know, if you have faith, you'll
know God won't kill you unless it's your time.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Now, Pentecostals are not the only Christian sect to do
snake handling. It actually probably started. I think the first
snake handlers on the Christian historic record are the second
century o Fights, which is a Gnostic sect. I do
not know much about them, but I came across that
when I was looking up snake handlers, So yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
That's neat.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Pentecostalism has its origins in the eighteen hundreds with radical
evangelical movements that focused on faith, healing, and the imminently
coming end times. One description you'll hear a lot is
that regular Christians kind of as modernity comes in, they
stop believing in miracles, or at least not miracles as
a thing that like people can can incite, you know,
through their direct faith, you know, but as a thing.
(21:57):
You know, maybe it's a thing that happens sometimes, but
you're not You can't make miracles by like praying for
God and stuff, Right, that's not a thing. I think
a lot most people believe, but Pentecostals do, and this
obsession with miraculous happenings is a hallmark of that kind
of worship. Pentecostal churches started to spread in Nigeria around
the turn of the nineteen hundreds. It was really given
(22:18):
a shot in the arm by the influenza epidemic. A
lot of early Nigerian Pentecostal preachers engaged in faith healing
of influenza victims. They started out as kind of an
Anglican offshoot because obviously the Anglican Church is British, and
the British, you know, owned them in Nigeria for much
longer than Yeah, and Aghana, yes, and Aghana and yeah.
(22:41):
The breaks kind of between the Anglicans and the Pentecostals
became more defined in the twenties and they started, like
Nigerian Pentecostals started to affiliate with US based churches, more
like the Faith Tabernacle in Philadelphia. One characteristic of this
particular segment of Christianity is a near constant conflict with
medical sens. I'm not going to say that's every group
(23:02):
of Pentecostals, but it's very common to find Pentecostals who
preach against like at least certain kinds of modern medicine.
You know, faith is supposed to handle it. It's not
like an across the board thing like it is with thinking,
like Jehovah's witnesses. But it's not uncommon, and early Nigerian
Pentecostals were extreme, even to their British cousins in their
rejection of modern medicine. A lot of this is tied
(23:23):
into colonialism. I think a lot of it also has
to do with the difficulty of obtaining good medical care
in a lot of the areas where this is spreading.
A study in Pew Research Notes Originating in evangelical student revivals,
a wave of Pentecostal expansion spawns new churches in the
sixties and seventies. The leader of this expansion is Benson Idahosa,
one of Africa's most influential Pentecostal preachers. Idahosa establishes the
(23:46):
Church of God Mission International in nineteen seventy two. In
nineteen seventy four, the Pentecostal umbrella organization Grace of God
Ministry is founded in eastern Nigeria. The Deeper Life Bible
Church founded in nineteen seventy five and soon becomes one
of Nigeria's largest Pentecostal churches, with an estimated three hundred
and fifty thousand members by nineteen ninety three. So this
(24:06):
is a pretty rapid expansion and these are very big churches.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
I mean, it's it's all line enough for that. Man.
The faith part is yeah, it's like I mean, because
there's already you know this culturally, there's a lot of
thinking that sort of goes beyond the bounds of like science, right,
So to even for these you know, these very opportunistic
sort of faith healers, to really get in on them,
be like, oh man, I just fucking believe.
Speaker 6 (24:31):
Maybe that's all.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah, yeah, And that's that's where Chibi Joshua is going
to stitch in.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
So TB.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Joshua's church, which also began in nineteen eighty six, was
called Synagogue Church of All Nations or SCONE, and I
think the synagogue this is very common. I made a
comment once that like Christians reincorporate, some groups of like
particularly fundamental Christians like to reincorporate bits of Jewish religious tradition,
(25:00):
and like the abuse of Showfars, reincorporate was the wrong term.
People got rightfully frustrated. This is cultural appropriation, right, right, Yeah,
that's what's going on. And I'm guessing because I have
never heard of synagogue used outside of the tradition of
the Jewish faith.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
So my guess is that stand for me, that's what
that would imply, Yes, ten times out of ten in
my mind.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Yeah, So that's that's what I'm guessing they're doing here.
So people will call it scone, and that's what we
will usually call it, because Synagogue Church of All Nations
is a bit of a mouthful, and in fairly short
order throughout the mid like mid to late nineteen eighties,
scone goes from dozens to hundreds to hundreds of thousands
of regular attendants. It becomes common for there to be
more than fifteen thousand people attending services at once in
(25:46):
a single day. Obviously, this necessitates the building of a massive,
like stadium sized church. You know, these are huge events
every time, and he's out there every day. Basically he
hears some of his disciples. A lot of appeal of
these Neo Pentecostal churches in Nigeria is the ability of
worshippers to witness and participate in miracles. Right, not just
(26:09):
that miracles are happening, but that your pastor is able
to call down miracles and you get to be right there.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
And watch this shit.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
You know, some of this there's some like cafe here.
Some of this is like what people get out of wrestling,
you know, right for real? Yeah, yeah, And it's not
coincidental that the massive expansion of these churches that are
all doing these very big and we'll talk about how
these look, these big like miracles shows, coincides with a
huge expansion in the availability of televisions for working class Nigerians.
(26:38):
Right that has hit like it it hits saturation by
the eighties, and so these preachers and not only that,
but it also becomes a lot easier to make your
own TV and get it on the air, right, So
all of those things kind of have to happen, and
that takes a period of time, but by the eighties,
all of those things are possible, and so any of
these preachers with big congregations have access to enough capital
(27:00):
to purchase cameras in airtime, which they use to air
slick videos of different ill people being miraculously healed and
miles you know what will miraculously heal our listeners.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I hope it's some kind of product. Yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
The only guarantee we make on this podcast is that
if you are sick, buy someone something that advertises on
our show, and you will be.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Healed of anything. Just rub it on your head.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah, yeah, you cannot die if you purchase the products
that advertise on our show unless that was God's plan.
Unless that was God's plan.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Obviously obviously obviously.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
We're dallas ridiculous ad transition, both of you.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
We're back and we're thinking about how ematic unless that's
God's plan really really gives you a lot of you're
going away with anything with those words.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, but people, I.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Just you know, if it's really funny, please please send
us what what what that pops up?
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Please it's really funny. Please, that's a good like parenting tip.
Can we go to the playground, daddy? If it's God's plan,
you know, if it's God's.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
I mean, but that is the kind of ship like
super religious parents we'll say to like avoid the responsibility.
They're like, I don't know, I mean, maybe you didn't
maybe I forgot your birthday because that was God's plan. Yeah,
and you do.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
It is like it's used very differently, but like it's
used a lot in the in the Muslim world as
like if you're like, hey, do you think you know
we'll be able to do this or this will happen
like you know inshallah, Right, which means like probably not.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
I'm not looking go I mean, but you know, it's
the same thing people say that to their like yeah, man, yeah,
we'll see, we'll see what happens.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
I'll never forget your birthday.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Thank you, thank you never Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
You don't have the same privilege as Miles.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Yeah, I don't remember my own birthday. Not after all
this THEO flu I've been dropping. Let me do a
that line of the of the peach flavor. Oh yeah,
why does he stuff?
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Hey?
Speaker 2 (29:05):
What's he snorting out of that bullet? Dude? It's kind
of fair.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Round bullet bullet power that opens the capillaries, gets the
N s A I DS into your system faster, straight
to the vein. Baby. Yeah, just just like cooking flair
the on apoo.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
You're like, hey, hand me that dialysis to being really quick,
I'm gonna tie off what.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah, we couldn't arrest him. There's no log against dejecting
the aflu in parting.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
I don't know, there's no log. It's just freaking people
the funk out. It's fucked up.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
So spectacle was always part of the deal at Scone.
Healing the blind is like easy ship, right, you can
have someone pretend that they're blind, right, and then they
can see. You know, it's super easy. But that doesn't
look exciting, right, What looks exciting? He would love to
have like parades of people who were missing limbs, like
roll in on wheel boards and stuff to get like
(30:09):
the healing touch and claim like their pain went away
or something. He would love to have people who had
like like skin lesions and stuff come in and then
they all fall off, right, and this kind of shit
like these are these are staged right, like they're using makeup,
they're doing all this kind of shit, but it works.
His flock goes from dozens to hundreds to tens of
thousands over the course of like the eighties to the nineties,
(30:33):
like it gets massive. There are two is wiping off
people's skin conditions. Oh yeah, yeah, that's a big one.
That's a bit And there's there's too many stories of
this time to count. So I'm going to focus on
one really well documented recent case. And I'm focusing on
this because this is someone who got arrested by the
Nigerian government for miracle fraud recently. But it gives you
(30:53):
an idea of how this industry is always worked miracle.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Wait, is that a law we have on all?
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Yes, Oh no, we don't have that shit. You can,
you can. That's Nigeria is so far ahead of us
and that way.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
They're like, no, you guys don't understand. These people are
gonna fucking bring down our entire society. Like if we
don't get that shit under control. Yeah, god damn, because
who's the guy who sells those fucking buckets, those end
time buckets?
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Oh yeah, fucking we did episodes on him, but I'm
spacing on his name right now. But yeah, the one
of the three lines in the story. Obviously he gets
away with a lot because of corruption in the Nigerian government,
because of bribing people. But there's also like the Nigerian
government has like passed laws and shit that I wish
we had in the US to try to limit some
(31:37):
of this stuff.
Speaker 7 (31:38):
We're talking about.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Jim Baker, aren't we Jim Baker?
Speaker 2 (31:43):
I'm like, we did.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
We did seeveral episodes.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Yeah, yell those buckets though they look like absolute shit.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Like I have. I have to say, the Nigerian government
fails in a lot of ways. The US government has
also failed to contain this stuff. But they have also
attempted to limit it in more ways than we have,
so I'll give them some credit.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Could you imagine if someone tried to put forward like
a bill for miracle fraud and oh no, they would
get shot.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
They would get literally get fucking shot.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Like somehow, like that's the fucking life. Oh God, that.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Would kiss people off so much. So I'm going to
I want to detail the story of one specific miracle fraudster,
forty four year old missus bows Olasukanmi. I think is
how that's pronounced. She was arrested by the Nigerian government
in twenty twenty for being a fake miracle actor who
would sell her services to different pastors. Right basically, she
(32:36):
was really good. She was able to dislocate her arm
in an unconventional way that made it look like it
was shattered and in pieces, like there was at least
I saw.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
There's like one.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Picture of it out there, like it's pretty good at it.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
This is a little bit of skill.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
And I'm going to quote from a write up in
the Nigerian Guardian here. Once she enters the stage, she
would pretend that the broken right arm had been hanging
and all medical efforts to heal her in both Orthodox
in native hospital proved abored of until one of her friends,
who was a member of the church, advised her to
try the church. At this point, one of the ministering pastor,
the General overseer, would step forward and demonstrate as if
the Holy Spirit had entered him. After speaking in tongues
(33:11):
for some minutes, he would order the woman to come
very close to him, while the congregation would be silent
anxiously waiting to see the broken right arm that has
been hanging. The pastor would ask the woman, do you
want to be healed? Have you been born again? If
she answers in the negative, then he led her to
Christ in prayer. He would then order the evil spirit
that bent her arm to depart and be destroyed by fire.
As he is ordering the evil spirit to depart, the
hanging broken arm will be coming back gradually to its
(33:34):
form until it is completely stretched down and normal, And
then he would ask the congregation to praise the Lord.
Well the congregation is busy praising God, one of the
church members whose role is to take the woman away,
would appear and whisker away, and then she gets paid.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Wow, and so she's just like the Meryl Streep of
fucking miracles.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
There's a bunch you know how there used to be
like a circuit of people who would do the Jerry
Springer style talk shows because they had something like marketable,
you know, in a weird thing about them.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
I think it's like that, right. Yeah, they're like, oh,
did you get the arm lady? It's like, no, I
got the dude with the buggy eyes.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, what.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Are you gonna do?
Speaker 4 (34:12):
What?
Speaker 2 (34:12):
You can explain that it's because his blood pressure is
so high his eyes are bulging and then there's.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Too many demons in his blood they pop the pressure
right up.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Now this is one woman, but like she gets arrested
because the Nigerian police have like units dedicated to busting
miracle crimes, which is I do want to see that
TV show. I want to see like a Law and
Order some miracle c frauds Jersey.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
In it and we get people the wrong. I did,
like do Law and Order mc U Yeah no, not
marvel asshole miracle crimes. Yeah they don't. They don't own
those letters.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
So Joshua and other pastors like him would not just
like have these people over and do these miracle shows,
but they would make videos of them, and Joshua is
really going to be like the number one pastor for
pioneering making videos out of this stuff and distributing them
around the world. The basic way this works is that
you know, within kind of Nigeria, if you have these
(35:07):
people being healed in your shows, it will convince people
who are really injured or sick that they or their
loved ones might get healed. Right obviously, but Joshua took
this tactic several steps further. Right from an early date,
he starts filming videos of these healings, picking the most
sensational and impressive and putting them in videos not meant
for Nigerian domestic consumption, but these were sent over to Europe,
(35:29):
to Great Britain, into the United States with white missionaries
returning from Nigeria. For decades, Nigeria has been a hot
destination for missionary tourists, young Christians and professional missionaries traveling
to minister to the poor in a relatively friendly climate.
Joshua was not the only person to see this as
a profitable endeavor, but his matter of fishing for them
(35:51):
was unique at the time. Sending out propaganda to evangelize
British Christians, in particular. The BBC documentary that I cited
earlier includes interviews with several young British and South African
Caucasian women who were enraptured with and then terribly abused
by TV Joshua. Their journeys all start the same way.
Members of their local religious communities came back from Nigeria
(36:14):
with VHS tapes of miraculous healings. To give you an
idea of what some of these healings were and how
they looked. I wanted to return to that book Rejoice
and See what happens Next, which is centered around numerous
case studies ranging from poor people getting good paying jobs,
and I think that shit is meant mainly to evangelize
them to locals, right like this is something that can
improve your financial situation, to shit like this which is
(36:36):
very much geared towards Europeans that they're trying to get
to come over and join the church. Jude Orakas showed
up at the scone with a life threatening disease. The
case which I originally viewed live, has now been archived
by a manual TV that's his TV channel and includes
a commentary. The story opens with the camera zooming in
from a full body shot, then to a medium shot
of a man sitting in a chair. He is separated
(36:58):
from others, his body quivering in the sunshine and wearing
nothing but a pair of shorts. A close up shot
reveals her inndous skin damage. Narrator. A shocking condition brought
this man to the Synagogue Church of all Nations. His
body riddled with sickness right from the crown of his head.
His entire body has been engulfed in a plague, shattering
his skin into scale like fragments. There is not a
hair left on his head, as the frightening sickness has
completely destroyed his skin. From his head, the disease rages
(37:21):
across his body, damaging every inch and rendering his arms useless.
The skin flakes and peels horribly all the way down
his arms to his fingers. Not one inch of his
skin has been left unaffected. Jude's sister, Man of God,
help my brother. He has skin disease. For the past
six years, we have taken him all over. There is
no solution. Neither the herbalist's homes or hospitals have provided
any solution. Joshua talked to him briefly, and when he
(37:43):
sees Iraka is too sick to even talk, he asks
him if he can accept Jesus Christ as his Lord
and savior, which the man is able to answer. In
the name of Jesus Christ, I command that infirmity out.
Begin to vomit it out.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
TB.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Joshua watches the man intently for about fifteen seconds, then
he speaks again. I say to you, disease, can hear me?
Come out of this man's life, and the name of
Jesus come out out TB.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Joshua.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
The man begins to shake uncontrollably and bends forward to
throw something white and foam me up. You can see
what the name of Jesus can do out, I say
out in the name of Jesus. So gives you an idea, right, dude,
this yeah, okay, it's wild.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Foam me at the mouth. He's like, yo, dude, don't
put this Alca Seltzer in. It's gotta be Alca Celtic. No,
that's the oldest stricken the fucking book. M Yeah, it's
good shit.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
And again, when we're talking about his appeal, obviously as
a preacher, he appeals to Nigerians as a preacher, but
to a lot of these like Europeans, these British people,
you know, he's not speaking their language fluently. The appeal
is not the specifics of what he's saying. It's that
he is promising them that if they come to see him,
they will get a direct physical connection to a miracle.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
And if you are one of these evangelicals from a
wealthy country, like you're going to you know, reading the Bible,
you're watching veggie tails or whatever, but you're living like
these this what you would probably consider, compared to these videos,
a fairly boring, safe life, And then you see this
man physically fighting demons, right, and you're like, right, well,
(39:15):
of course I want to be a part of this.
This sounds so much more exciting than like going to
church and doing like fucking youth group shit.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
Right.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
It reminds me of like nineties skate culture, where like
you would be like, oh, you get the new Toy
Machine tape and you're like, yo, I'll bring it over.
You're like, oh, dudelet we see the bail scenes or whatever,
and like there's always this culture being like yo, to
check this tape out. I got this tape, except in
this version, I also, I mean, it's clever that he's
also using the way the Western world views Africa in
this like exotic, mystical way and weaponizing it to be
(39:45):
like watch this shit, because they are they're already on
some bullshit thinking that this is some fucking magic shit
is happening here. It's like, no, I'm just a next
level scammer that was in the womb for fifteen months.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, that time really let him prep. Yeah, but no,
you have anticipated something we'll get to. He deals with
this very directly. He is very consciously taking advantage of
the way Westerners look at Africa. Right, So I do
want to I want to give you an idea of
what it looks like when he's because he's these are
not just he's not just doing healings. He's doing exorcisms,
and these take the place of like Gandolf Saromon magic
(40:18):
fights like that at the most extreme level. He'll like
walk in and they're like people will lunge at him
and he'll like put his hand and use the name
of GM. They'll go flying backwards like it's so it's
it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Actually it looks like kung fu film, Like they're like, yeah,
high production.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
You know, actually what it looks a little bit like
if you've watched the fake Steven segal a keto videos
or like the Vladimir Putin fake a keto videos where
they're just like touching guys and flinging them through.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
The air like Russians video exactly.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Ah, yeah, god, it's so funny.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
I want to play you with video of this.
Speaker 8 (41:00):
Miles okah oh ship play as an lad a party.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
I got this shorty by the dome piece Python. Watch.
That's great.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
He's on the ground rolling like a Python. Boss.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
It is boss.
Speaker 6 (41:27):
It's boss.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
Yeah, it's Boss.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Of the Boss of the Boss.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
That's pretty. That's like wrestling grade, you know. Hell yeah,
that's fucking school play level. Of course. Of course, a
bunch of like fucking sheltered like teenage evangelical kids are
seeing this and they're like, well, I want to go
fight demons in Africa?
Speaker 2 (41:50):
My god, did you see that? He just like just
a closed fish swiped in front of his chest and.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Blew the guy down. Yeah, Christ, it's so fun. I
mean a lot of people get horribly abused. It's actually not.
But this part of it is fun. Look, you got
to enjoy these little moments, right, yeah, yep, yeah. I
want to note here again, I don't want to fall
into the thing of being like, wow, look at this
African preacher and all these people believe this shit like
(42:15):
this goes down in the US all the fucking time.
Members of Congress go to churches that are not all
that different from this. Okay, Like you know, this is
not a Nigerian thing.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
This is a thing. This is just that that's what
religion gives you. We've got a whole bunch of people
that are working in the government. They're like circle jerking
for the end times. Like this isn't like mainstream religious
stuff necessarily, but it's not like wildly uncommon evangelical. I mean,
especially when you see people prophesying, you know, or speaking
in tongues and shit, you're.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Like, oh, this is this is a derivation on a theme, right,
And I think it's also probably my guess would be
this is pretty close to what used to be a
lot more common back in the day, right, Like when
you hear about these stories of like demons and exorcisms
and shit, and like you know, someone someone in the
town water supply like someone will get like some fucking
(43:09):
air got poisoning, and everyone will hallucinate and you'll have
like a big demon fight in some medieval French village.
I'm sure like there's versions of that to explain it,
like these kind of there have always been people who
have known that, Like, well, if you really want to
make some money in the religion business, you got to
put on a fucking show. Yeah, and nothing's a better
show than fighting demons.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Yeah you got a pyrotechnics guy, Yeah, exactly, Yeah, I
got one, dude, you cat fingers. I'll say, Satan demon
get out with the fires of hell. Fucking full plume
of fucking flame shoots up his back. Dude, it's sing gig.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
It's pretty affordable, It's it's cool, it's good stuff. So again,
what I want to note is that like, while what
he is doing is not unique to him, he is
maybe the best I've seen at it. He's good, like
these are these are well orchestrated shows.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Well, yeah, it's also the riz bro he's got. Yeah
you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
It seems like so cool. He's like watching me hold
this mic with my vessel.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
I don't give a fuck. That this dude's a python.
Watch this shit. Yeah, Like it feels like superman ish
kind of thing. I was like, Damn, he's super cocky
about it.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
Yes, some Superman, some Vince McMahon, Like you got some
of that going in there?
Speaker 2 (44:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Now you can see in some of his videos from
the arts that he's very deliberately taken framing techniques from
Western reality television. And I'm gonna play you a segment
from a different scone video about a secret demonic infiltrator,
mister Anny, being caught by one of TV Joshua's disciples,
and it just feels like something I would have seen
on MTV in like two thousand and one.
Speaker 7 (44:38):
Here is mister Annie pretending to be a Christian, but
is a wolf in sheep's clothing? What is his mission
here among the people of God? Can darkness be in
the midst of light?
Speaker 9 (44:52):
No?
Speaker 7 (44:54):
Capital?
Speaker 2 (44:55):
No, look at.
Speaker 7 (44:57):
Mister Annie praying capital? Who is he praying to? There
is here and they're on prayers.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
And it's like highlighting him and like the crowd shot
every time, like it's like surveillance footage, yeah, or.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
Likeny, like back when a hard copy was a show.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Yeah, hard copy is as Yeah, yeah, sixty minutes hard copy.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
That's a better. That's a better. The current affair from
our old heads and.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
The rest of the video proceeds. It's like this big
choreographed exorcism because obviously he's like a secret devil infiltrator
in scone. Oh, this goes it's it's great, it's great.
Speaker 9 (45:35):
Ship.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
Yeah, it's really good.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Like you have a Marvel movie fucking unfolding. Yeah, at
your churtzers, Like dude, last week, a fuck three dudes
came out of a fucking portal, Yeah, and fucked up
this infiltrator and then TV Joshua turned this woman's droopy
leg into a muscular one. It was wild man. You
had to you had to be.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
So what happened in your church? This Sunday priest told
us we shouldn't have sex before marriage. Guy turned into
a snake at my church.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
No, yeah, and then you fucking punched him in the
head and a flame came out.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
Of his As of course, I'm going to the snake church.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, I can barely stay awake. Now.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
This all goes over really well with these young white
evangelicals from Western countries who are just not used to
services being this exciting. You will hear comments from yeah,
no seasoning. You'll hear comments from a number of them
that are like, I felt like this was where real
biblical Christianity was still going down right, and I wanted to.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Be a part of it.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
You know, I cannot exaggerate the extent to which a
lot of this was a conscious attempt by TV Joshua
to recruit white people. And I'm going to play a
clip from a BBC documentary on TV Joshua called Disciples.
The guy talking here is his former right hand man
who helped him start the church.
Speaker 10 (46:52):
He had special interest into Ubu.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
You will the whites.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
Are you?
Speaker 9 (47:00):
Are you surprised that God is using a black man
to do disince?
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm not surprised that God is using
a black man. What are these motherfuckers worried?
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (47:17):
Wow.
Speaker 10 (47:18):
Nineteen ninety six, one of the midior parcels came from
South Africa. When they were living. He gives more than
two hundred videos to take home to give to people,
videos of miracles, videos of confessions, video.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
Videos that will feel their head.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Wow, I say this is too expensive?
Speaker 10 (47:42):
He left. You think I'm a fool. I know what
I'm doing. A time will come this synagogue. Josh is
going to shoot out from South Africa to the whole world.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Now this guy also will claim TV. Joshua basically said
to him, what I am doing by recruiting the people,
I want to take advantage of them. I want to
get revenge for what white people have done to us,
which is I think is part. I think is largely
him because as a spoiler, this guy is not some
sort of like anti colonial hero. Most of the people
(48:13):
he abuses are Black African women, right like, he is
not not at all and actually like a hero. But
I think he understood that this guy who worked with
him might respond to that. Right, That's that's how I read.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
It, right right, right right? Yeah, Yeah, we're taking them.
We're taken from them because for years they've been taken
from me.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
Yes, And the BBC documentary is a very very good
job of Obviously, a lot of the victims at Cites
are white people from South Africa, from England, but most
of the victims that I see are black Nigerian Ghanian women,
you know, which which is I'm glad, Like they clearly
put in an effort to not just be like, look
at what this guy is doing to white women, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
(48:53):
but rather to highlight the differences between how he approached.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Like which would have been the way people first sort
of had outraged, like he yeah, he could get.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
Over on us. Yeah no, no, no, yeah. And it's interesting.
There's also there's a lot of very interesting racial dimensions here.
You saw in that video the guy he asks like,
are you surprised to see a black man, you know,
preaching the word of God? That like, I think that's
a South African pastor. Did you see what he was wearing?
Speaker 2 (49:16):
That dress? Oh yeah, very traditional?
Speaker 1 (49:18):
That is, yeah, traditional African dress. And I think what
is happening here is that these kind of established South
African and Western white pastors were being fited by TB.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
Joshua.
Speaker 1 (49:30):
He was giving them basically like you can have an
authentic African experience, right, Like I'm going to give that
to you if you endorse me as legitimate. I can't
have any other explanation for the way that man is
portraying himself.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
There's also I mean I saw this one when I
was in Ghana, Like there is like this Canadian expat
that lived in this village that like nearby where I
was visiting, and he kind of became like the elder,
like the chief of the village, only because like he
like was married to a Genan woman, but like built
like a proper there, and like he dressed like that,
like he had the whole vio, like he was like, no,
I'm here to do the African thing. So I wonder
(50:07):
if like on some some level they like they just
really loved the larp of it all, you know too,
or they're like, yeah, look at me, bro, I look
like a goddamn fucking god from West Africa right now.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Yeah, some of this is maybe beyond like my pay grade,
but that was my read there in that particular scene
that like that's kind of what he's offering some of
these established white pastors. Isn't that kind of legitimacy?
Speaker 2 (50:29):
I'm sure, And I'm sure that's a very attractive proposition
for someone who probably finds himself very self important like
a pastoro and like watch me enter all of these
spaces and I accepted with open arms, like no fucking
friction at all, Like yeah, yeah, TB. Joshua is uh yeah, man,
fucking Machiavelli over here.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
It to kind of highlight the experience that he's he
is offering to a lot of these white visitors. I
want to play you another clip.
Speaker 4 (50:56):
Believe you me, brother Ridia. It was the last type
on uth that I ever wanted to come to, Thy broadst,
thy money, Launders, thy drag pedness, And I say, God, sorry, Yeah,
he's a piece of heaven honor.
Speaker 2 (51:14):
The greatest and.
Speaker 10 (51:14):
The prompt and I got church was when the foreigner
started coming. This was strategic and it was planned.
Speaker 6 (51:25):
I just got a confession to make that I want
the old world to know. In the past, I've always
I really hated them. When I got back, every year
I saw the love that we received from black people.
Speaker 11 (51:40):
He used the white people for markets is bad. I
mean white a man or white woman around is like
you have achieved. He just said, look at these people,
they don't know where the Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
The white people dancing video there, it's like there's some
there's some good good like eighties dudes shuffling.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
About, yeah, doing some kind of foot loose.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
Shit, some kind of footler shit.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
What the fuck is going on? But yeah, I mean geez,
I mean like it's interesting you know, like, there are
these people who become predatory like this. It's because they
understand the predation that exists around them at many different levels.
And he's just able to, like he has such a
mastery of it that he's like, no, watch this, and
then I can use white people to legitimize it. It's like,
I already know how this works. I already know how
(52:38):
this works. I've seen it. I've seen this shit a
hundred times.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
You know what, I know how it works. Miles sponsoring
a podcast and we're back.
Speaker 2 (52:55):
I just want to say that product, fank fuck for that.
Did that save you?
Speaker 1 (53:01):
Did that cure your your arm? Oh? Yeah, yeah, no,
it cleared my ear chlamydia?
Speaker 2 (53:08):
Yeah, clear it right. All my hair grew back to.
Speaker 1 (53:10):
Your uh huh you even you even have several other
people's hair.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
Yeah, just from listening to the fucking ad. That's how
powerful that is. So I'm definitely gonna buy it.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Yeah, absolutely, folks, spend your money please. So from the
end of the nineties to the early two thousands, Scone
expanded rapidly, driven by the surge in foreign religious tourists
who flooded into Nigeria to see the man deemed a
profit and miracle worker. According to former associates, he often
paid for the plane tickets of these white evangelicals because
he saw their presence as the best marketing his church
(53:41):
would get. Every youth group leader or pastor from the
US or Europe who visited came back enthralled and directed
funds and more followers.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
TB.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
Josh was way White followers again also acted as marketing
for his church within Nigeria. It was important to him
that the Synagogue Church of All Nations be seen as
a world church, and this made it more appeal to
Nigerians for the same reason people are always drawn to
international celebrities. Right, are you more impressed with like the
guy who like me, he's got like a local access
(54:09):
TV show and he owns a car a lot or are
you more impressed by like the NFL.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
Dude who owns a series of car dealerships?
Speaker 5 (54:15):
Right?
Speaker 2 (54:15):
I don't care what that NFL do, But I mean
if you're like, if you're some dude named TV Joshua
do and you got some South Africans doing footloo shit.
Speaker 1 (54:22):
Yeah you gotta dancing. You got South Africans dancing? You
I might get to meet John lyfth Gow, And I've
always wanted to meet John left Gow. That would totally
change my opinion of this guy. If there's John in
the mix. Yeah, I'll do anything to meet John Lythgow.
Oh yeah, I mean he's in the best season of Dexter,
He's in the best season a Dexter, He's in Bukaroo Bonzai.
(54:45):
What would Yeah, just a just a rich, rich history
of being John Lyftgow. So yeah, it was all brilliantly executed.
Footage from the church in this period is distinctly uncomfortable.
You can see very small groups of ravenously excited white
evangelicals given positions of honor at the front of huge
(55:06):
stadium crowds of Nigerian citizens, Like look at look at
this picture here, Like it's it's very stark, like all
the white people in one area, everyone else in another,
and the white people are right next to TV Joshua.
Speaker 2 (55:19):
Yeah, it's sort of like kind of like the same
logic of like the like a Maga rally where it's like,
please help the people, like the few people of color,
Please give them prominent spaces, even though it's the same
five people. Just please we need them there, we need
them there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:32):
So TV preaching was and is huge in Nigeria, but
TV Joshua took it to another level, filming much more
than most of his colleagues and theming his videos for
an international audience. One interview he recorded features a white
english woman asking him why he makes so many videos
and his answer is fucking amazing because if Jesus was
not recorded in the Bible, you would not believe that
(55:54):
Jesus is the same today. I fucking love that answer.
I fucking love that ads there. That is like that.
That's a smart man. That's a smart man, like he
either had that in the chamber or he.
Speaker 2 (56:07):
Just extempt that ship. But that is good. What a
fucking clap back.
Speaker 1 (56:12):
Yeah, that man knows his business. I'll give him that.
It's a horrible business, but he fucking knows it.
Speaker 2 (56:17):
Fucking knows.
Speaker 1 (56:18):
Yeah, Yeah, it's fun stuff. So I want to play
a clip for you here of a woman you're about
to hear from. This lady is the church's head of
foreign visitor relations and she's talking about kind of bringing
in these like foreign white religious tourists to Scone. So
we're gonna press play.
Speaker 11 (56:35):
Here for it was a game on a trap that
hecets for the whites people.
Speaker 1 (56:43):
Wow, yeah, it's fun around that, yeah for the white people. Okay, TV,
Well we're gonna continue in a second. But there's a
couple of things going on here. One is that for
these young people traveling from other parts of the world,
these are mostly kids who are more affluent, they are
(57:07):
seeing the wider world for the first time, and that's
intoxicating anytime you go to a country that's not like
the suburbs, right, yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (57:15):
You're so sheltered too, and such a homogeneous fucking yeah environment. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (57:21):
Yeah, it's a drug. And in addition to just like, yeah,
you're in Africa after a lifetime and a place that
is not at all Africa, and that's like this whole
fascinating journey. And then you get love bombed too. You
are the focus of thousands of locals who are not
It's not just like going to a country and being
like a tourist. It's going to a country and seeing
a crowd of locals overjoyed that you're there, and then
(57:45):
after you get love bombed. Over the next several days,
these tourists, the first couple of days you spend at scone.
You're just watching hours of miracle videos every day. It's
like a clockwork orange style thing. And then after your treatment. Yeah,
and you prime them with the videos and then you
do live miracle shows, right, because you don't want him
to just see that ship when they're like kind of tired,
(58:07):
and it's like you want them in the most suggestible
mind state possible, right, you prime that shit.
Speaker 2 (58:13):
Yeah, horny for a miracle horny And I'm absolutely horny
for America.
Speaker 9 (58:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (58:17):
And it's wild that he's using the same playbook as
like Andrew Tait and all these other people's like traffic
them in. Yeah, love bomb them and then and then
run run your playbook.
Speaker 1 (58:27):
The court leaders only ever work, what like, there's variations
based on the tech available to you in the time period,
but it's all the same, you know.
Speaker 2 (58:35):
HS DVD streaming whatever. Ron Hubbard did it, you.
Speaker 1 (58:40):
Know, yeah, the classic way with boats. We're going to
play you one more clip explaining how this process goes.
Speaker 5 (58:48):
I've never seen a local African town before, and it
was a hustle and mustle and street sellers and food
and it's very colorful. I was just taking everything in.
Speaker 2 (59:00):
You kind of went down a driveway.
Speaker 4 (59:02):
In these these vehicles that had other foreign visitors in.
Speaker 1 (59:06):
There were tour groups going up from South Africa in
quite large numbers.
Speaker 12 (59:11):
I'm Angelique and I'm from South Africa. Even before I went,
I had these VHS tapes that I had watched and
I'd seen the most incredible things, and I was so
beyond excited to see this in real life.
Speaker 11 (59:33):
I was coordinator of international visitors. Anytime this visit dot
com SI Videosha will call and say, go and meet
your visitors.
Speaker 12 (59:44):
Nag your own disciples with these beautiful smiles, welcome you.
There's just people smiling. Everyone looks so happy.
Speaker 11 (59:52):
We make you feel like like celebrity.
Speaker 1 (59:57):
Oh yeah, that's that's it's so smart, like it is
such a it's such a slick operation. I'm just very
I'm as evil as a lot of this is. I'm
very impressed. Right, this is the point at which the
battery hits full swing, because one of the chief things
he'll do when he's like showing people life miracles is
he'll cure HIV.
Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:00:18):
And the way you the way you do this is
you have someone come up with like a piece of
paper that looks official that says I have HIV, and
then you pray over them, and then they get a
test and they come back with a sheet of paper
that says I don't have HIV. Right, you know, I
don't have to explain to you how to fake that, right,
it's not hard Like you have a printer, you can
(01:00:39):
bribe a doctor, right, But it's very impressive to these kids.
Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
And I'm gonna have Sophe play a one more clip here.
Speaker 9 (01:00:46):
When I came here, I had been suffering from asthma,
and after a short time as the ministry from the
Prophet TB, I thought my breathing come totally clear. God
had healed me.
Speaker 11 (01:01:00):
So I see you've.
Speaker 4 (01:01:01):
Got a medical report check.
Speaker 2 (01:01:02):
Can you please just show the camera that, right be
to God?
Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Negative states it for HIV and HIV two. So it's
not that fucked up to just like it's fucked up,
but like the amount of damage you can do by
convincing like these these evangelical tourists that you've cured someone's AIDS,
you're mainly just going to be able to abuse them more, right, Right,
(01:01:26):
But you're not necessarily causing a public health crisis with that.
What does cause the public health crisis is that he
is also convincing his Nigerian followers of this right, and
they are actually the people who have HIV at a
highd rate, right, certainly higher than these like evangelical tourists.
And not only is he convincing them that he can
(01:01:46):
cure them by praying over them, part of what he's
convincing them is that they should not go get medical
treatment or take retrovirals for their HIV only right, HIV
retrovirals are very available, HIV very treatable. It is not
a death sentence when you have access to retrovirals. And
one of the things he is doing to members of
(01:02:06):
his flock is telling them, do not take these. God
doesn't want you to take these. I can cure your HIV.
And we don't know how many people he got to
stop taking their retrovirals as a result of this, but
we do know that in twenty eleven, in one public
sized case, three women in London died when they were
convinced by preachers to stop taking their retrovirals. And one
(01:02:30):
of those preachers was TV Joshua and I think these
women were immigrants. When reporters asked TV Joshua if he
advised followers to avoid treating their HIV. He gave this answer,
let me tell you, I am a medium in the
same way doctors are mediums to bring treatment. So basically saying, hey,
I'm just a doctor too, you know.
Speaker 2 (01:02:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
One follower I read an interview with because he's not
just doing this with HIV. He's telling people to avoid
all sorts of modern medicine in favor of paying him,
you know, to pray over them. His followers at devoted
member of the church who was like helping to run
the church. His mother was enthralled with TV Joshua and
refused to take chemotherapy for her cancer after Joshua healed
(01:03:11):
her and told her that she did not need it.
Within six months, she was dead. This follower, who again
was a dedicated volunteer of the church, calls TB.
Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
Joshua.
Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
He's close enough to this guy to have his phone number.
He calls him to let him know that his mom
is dead, and TB. Joshua hangs up on him, and
he later he like asks one of the other workers there,
like he hung up on me, Like what the fuck?
And that guy's like, well, the prophet doesn't listen to
bad news.
Speaker 2 (01:03:37):
Oh hey, you're gonna fuck up the prophet's confirmation bias,
so I don't fucking tell him about that shit. He's
just gonna Oh yeah, you're just going to.
Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
Hear the click's wild stuff. Anyway, that's the TV Joshua story.
Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
Oh got anything to plug at the end of part one.
Speaker 2 (01:03:56):
Miles please you know, when when appropriate, listened to your
healthcare providers and not someone named TV Joshua or whatever TV.
Speaker 1 (01:04:07):
Jakes, I don't care who it is at T don't
get don't get help advice for many of them. Yeah,
uh plug, Uh yeah, just listen to the Daily Zeitgeist.
You know, that's my daily news and politics and.
Speaker 2 (01:04:20):
Comedy shit show. And uh, if you like ninety Day Fiance,
look one of your other favorite guests, Sophia Alexandra. That's
a show I host with her, and this is us
getting high and talking about ninety Day Fiance. That's how
we kind of blow steam off between Bastard's recordings and
you know, just the general world of it all.
Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
Well, blow off some steam with that, and blow off
some steam with steam I don't know. Yeah, and a
new show Sarah flu is really starting to fit me up.
Speaker 3 (01:04:52):
Now will you plug edge show?
Speaker 1 (01:04:56):
Oh yeah, Ed's got a show. It's called Better Offline.
It's about all the fucked up tech industry shit that
you probably need to know because they're actively trying to
destroy your life and everyone else's life, so you know,
keep an eye out for that.
Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Anyway, I'm gonna go, Miles, I'm gonna go. Uh, I'm
gonna go hang out.
Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
At a fucking playground with a with a spoon and
some foil and a pack of a thera flu Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
Watch, You're gonna go to like a needle exchange and
they're like, no, man, this is the people that actually
need it. Man, that's your fucking weird old theraflu shit.
Yeah yeahould be ashamed of yourself.
Speaker 1 (01:05:31):
I got to take a needle from one of my
diabetic friends to shoot the.
Speaker 2 (01:05:34):
Flu up, like my EpiPen. Where is it? Oh sorry
I needed the needle. Yeah no, I empty.
Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
I emptied the epidephyrin from my EpiPen and just theorough
fluid that ship up. Get that right into the meat.
Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
The episode is so over Bye. Behind the Bastards is
a production a cool Zone Media. For more from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or
check us out on the iHeartRadio
Speaker 2 (01:06:04):
App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Also media, h what's got the plague? My Robert Evans,
host of Behind the Bastards, the sickest man in podcasting.
I have some sort of non COVID thing.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I did take the test.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Uh, so I have been I've been mainlining, you know,
I said, I've been sober lately. But now I am
a theorough flu addict. I don't even mix it into
my drinks anymore. I just pour the powder straight out
and rail that shit, you know, for you, that's the
good stuff. Our guests who just congratulated me on my
theorough flu addiction, mister Miles Gray, how are you doing,
(00:39):
Miles Gray?
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I'm great, I'm great. Thank you for having me back.
Shout out to the bTB what do you call a
BTV nation, your little bad Shout out the little bastards.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, yeah, the little bastards. Sure, yeah, shout out my
little bastards out, shut out all. Shout out all the
little bastards out there, love y'all. And I'm yeah, I
just uh, I'm bracing myself for you again, the ups
and downs and recording with you where I'm like what
hah and then like crying inside for the rest of
the day. You said that, it just made me think
(01:09):
if we'd gone with my original plan for this podcast
and made it all about Saddam Hussein, we could call
our fans the Husseiniacs. Oh oh yeah, see I just
thought about that now. But that's a good one.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Yeah, Miles, were you in the room when Robert pitched
the show on the phone when he was running through
what sounded like a wind tunnel. Were you in the room?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
I must have been.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I mean that was so such early days and like
we were all working on all this shit together. But yeah,
I feel like yeah, and even I mean I remember
all the fucking process of coming up with a title
and the art and all that shit. Shout out my
boy Allan, you know, for the iconic cover art.
Speaker 5 (01:44):
Yeah, Alan Lee.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Yes, Miles, are you been a good day?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
You happy dude? Just oppose a ship?
Speaker 5 (01:53):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, I'm having a fucking good day.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Man.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
My little boy has two little teeth coming in. I'm like, wonderful. Yeah,
I gotta go. I gotta go and get my fucking
head kicked in by whatever tale or fuckery you're gonna do. Nothing.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Nothing goes with a nice peaceful day like a story
of one of the most nightmarishly abusive people I have
ever read about my life. See, God is punishing me
with a sickness for taking such pleasure and making you
unhappy Miles.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Oh yeah, oh you okay. Well look I'm as someone
who was went to school where they tried to put
the fear of God in me, but it didn't work.
You know, I'm kind of split. I don't know if
I want to talk ill of a man of God? Yeah,
to see have you heard of this man of God?
A fellow named TB. Joshua. First of all, no, And
(02:47):
when Sophie hit me up and was like, hey, you know,
we might be talking about this or that, and then
she's like, okay, actually Robert Robert's gonna write something on
TV Joshua. I didn't google it because I'm like, what
the fuck is this? I thought it was like, did
he give a bunch of people tuberculosis?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
And that would be the fun version of this if
he was just like the typhoid Mary if tuberculosis, Johnny
apple seed of tuberculosis. It's like, Oh, who's this TV Joshua,
Well that's whole TV Joshua giving everybody TV.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, he's like when he coughs, look at his little
handkerchief he coughs into, and tell me if there's blood.
But yeah, I was like, And then this morning, out
of a morbid curiosity, I'm like, let me just see
what the top line description of this person was. And
I was like, oh, no, yeah, we got a pastor
in Nigeria, and I don't know what the rest is,
but I know how evangelical things operate over there, and
(03:39):
they can be pretty wild.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, and this is one of those, Like you know,
there's like Africa for whatever reason, like bastardry over there
does not usually go as viral as like the very
worst people from like I don't know Europe, United even
like South America, Asia.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
But like TB.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Joshua is not just He's not just a bastard. He
was like, up until his death very recently, one of
probably like the twenty or thirty most influential religious figures
alive on the planet. Massively influential Pentecostal preacher millions not
just in Nigeria and not just in West Africa, but
all over the world, in Southeast Asia and Europe unit
millions and millions of followers, huge, huge spoke in the
(04:24):
international Pentecostal community very very important.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Guy. Yeah, I feel like the religious bastards, they're able
to fly under the radar a little bit longer than
everybody else. Like if you're not like some dictator, despot,
kind of despotic leader, you're like it's like, I don't know,
like when you get the cover, when you're covered in
the blood of Christ. Yeah, it is one of those.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah, it's this mix of I think they get protected
from like members of the same faith, some of whom
obviously a lot of times the people who do expose
them are also members of the same faith. But like
that's probably one reason why sometimes it takes while to spread.
And I think also you get among like atheists or
even as we'll talk about Pentecostals are kind of in
an extreme sect of evangelical Christianity from like more moderate
(05:09):
centrist you know, Christians and like the West. I mean,
obviously Pentecostal movement is huge in the United States, but
even in the United States, I think a lot of
like people who are Christians, but you know they live
in like the East Coast, do they live in the
West Coast or like just like big cities. They may
not know how wild. Some of that shit gets right,
and they may kind of write off stories about these
(05:30):
guys as just like, oh, well that's just you know,
normal in that chunk of the faith or whatever.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
And TB.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Joshua was not, to be honest, like, I have a
lot of issues with Pentecostal Christianity, but a lot of
the people who were trying to expose him for years
were other Pentecostal pastors. But he just got ignored for
in a lot of what he was doing. Now, a
lot of people who enabled him were other Pentecostals. Don't
get me wrong.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Side note, I feel like, you know, based on all
the fuck real that's going on, you could have a
like a sister podcast, Behind the Pastors.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Behind the past Yet we can do an episode every
week for the next year.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
I'm not joking every fucking week. There's some freak somewhere
who's like, yeah, this youth pastor is colledge, child porn
or some other dark shit, and I'm like, man, we're
still we're still acting like these are the people that
are above or beyond reproach. But yeah, anyway, Behind the
Pastors look Behind the Pastors.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, we could also do a whole podcast series on
the Catholic Church, on the Catholic Church in like the seventies.
You know, even if we just skicked to one decade, Yeah, yeah,
we could really So here's the hard facts of this
guy's life. Timatope Balligan Joshua was born on June twelfth,
nineteen sixty three, in a town called Araghiti a Coco
(06:44):
in the southwest coastal state of Ondo in Nigeria. Arigedi
a Coco is very poor and it is unlikely that
his family had access to any kind of like really
meaningful wealth at any point. Stretching back in recent memory,
he is very poor. Everyone around him is very poor.
He grows up in like a background of pretty desperate poverty.
(07:06):
Now he does seem to have a fairly strong family,
which is good. It gives him a leg up on
a lot of people who are like like don't have
that benefit obviously, But this is this is a guy
who's going to have to fight for any amount of
like wealth that he wants to have. His family are Yoruba.
That is an ethnic group in southwest Africa that encompasses
the largest chunk of niger Congo language speakers. Like many
(07:29):
Yoruba families TV Joshua grows up. He has both Muslim
and Christian relatives in his close family, and one thing
people will say about him when he's a pastor is
that a lot of evangelical pastors in Nigeria are very
anti Muslim, and he was. He was, not nearly as
much as is Commons, not nearly as much. We'll get
into he's going to like he's going to like throw
(07:51):
Muslims under the bus at a certain point in his future.
But he does have like a lot of Muslims in
his family, and so for a while at least, he's
a lot better on some of that stuff than a
lot of other people then a lot of other like
pastors Christian pastors in the area. His father, Kolaole, was
well educated and made a living translating the Bible, so
from a fairly early age, he's both taught that it's
(08:12):
important to learn how to read and specifically to be
able to read the Bible, like this is something that
he's going to do obsessively from a very young age.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Oh God, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
He is big on that. His father dies when he's young,
and he is I think when he's like twelve or
something like that, and he's raised after that by his uncle,
who is a Muslim Man. Again, he's going to be
kind of more tolerant than a lot of people on
that sort of situation. He grows up speaking a mix
of Yoruba, English and pigeon. His English is never going
to be considered very good, in part because he doesn't
(08:42):
finish secondary school and he has limited formal education in general.
What time he does spend in school is at Saint
Stephen Anglican, which is a religious primary school. His teachers
called him Little Pastor because he was obsessed with the
Bible from a young age and preached to his classmates
it's not a red flag. That's not a red flag
at all. Preaching to your kid.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Preachers are the freakiest fucking creatures on Oh my God.
There's like, yeah, there's like this vibe of like you're
just showing, you're just regurgitating shit the adults are saying
around you. But they do it with such passion and conviction.
You're like, oh, I don't know, maybe you fucking God
is talking to you, but please you were nine years old.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah, yeah, and it's you know, take some of this
with a grain of salt. I think the stuff about
him being called little pastor right here often enough and
is consistent enough that I believe it. We don't have
great sources on his early life, like there are all
fan websites and the like.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Oh wait, so like, first of all, your research methodology
for this is what, Like, I don't imagine there's like
a book on like all the shitty things to you.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
I should read a book on him. Now there's good.
The best info on this guy's actual crimes comes from
the BBC. BBC So the BBC can be a problematic
entity in some ways, but they have a division of
the BBC called BBC Africa Eye, which reports on Africa
that does extremely good work. There are some of the
only people, for example, reporting on like war crimes by
the Camerooney and government. They do really good work, and
(10:07):
they did a long series on this guy, So there's
and interviewed a lot of people. So there is good
reporting on his crimes at this point. There's just not
a whole lot that we can absolutely verify about his
early life.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Right, because it's always some form of like myth building
or praise or yeah, just bias towards like how great
he was.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, the anecdots we get are all shit that his
fans pulled out of like speeches he gave during like
religious ceremonies, right, because that's like a big thing you're
talking about, Like when I was a kid, I did
this and this, and I saw, you know, the spirit
of God came into me and whatnot. That's where you
get a lot of these details, which is like there's
a good duck if you people want to know the
way in which these kind of pastors massage and just
(10:47):
outright invent backstories in order to like make themselves kind
of fit in with some of these common evangelical narratives.
There's a documentary I always recommend called Marjoe, and it's
about a guy who started out as a child pastor.
His parents may had him preaching when he was like
four or five years old. He was like doing marriages
at like age four or five or so, and it
was all a scam for money, right. He was like,
I never believed in God, and his parents abandoned him
(11:10):
as soon as he was old enough that it wasn't cute, right,
So you can't make money once he's an adult. There's
nothing special about an adult pastor. So they just fucking
bounce and he like takes a film crew and this
is in the United States and all these like evangelical
revivals in the seventies. It's a really good documentary. It
won an oscar. I'm recommend it to everybody. Marja one
of my very favorite movies. Also, he grows up to
(11:31):
be an actor and is on the A Team. So
Marginal was, yeah, he's a bad guy in one episode
of the A Team.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
I think yes. So there you got praise Christ praise
through him.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
All things are possible.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
You can starting, Yeah, you can be a bad guy
on the A Team type cast.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Probably it was this guy black. No, no, no, he's a
white guy. He's a white guy.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Oh wow, okay was Look maybe it wasn't God. It
might have just been a white supremacy that guy either.
I don't want to conflict the two, but it was
one of the two.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
I'm gonna say, anytime you get to hang out with Barakas,
that's the hand of God.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
That's the hand of God. Yeah, oh yeah, most if
you could. Yeah, he'd like, can I wear one of
your chains? He's like, yeah, man, oh yeah, raised Christ baby.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
So the website who owns Kenya, which I'm not sure
about the providence of, but it does seem to have
a lot of detail on this guy. They have an
article on him titled the Man of God who stayed
in his mother's womb for fifteen months, which gives you
an idea of the kind of claims he makes. And again,
this is stuff he's saying during speeches. He like claims
that he was his mom was pregnant with him for
(12:32):
fifteen months, and so he's a miracle baby. I guess
when you're that holy God needs an extra like six
months to really make sure you get finished.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Yeah, you need you need that way, Yeah, man, you
need to just the what is that the fourth and
fifth trimester?
Speaker 1 (12:46):
So one eight babies? Yeah, roughly, I'm not great at math. Folks,
don't come in here and correct me if that's wrong.
He better have been walking and talking and shit yeah
that long coaching. No, he'd better come out knowing how
to read God.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Damnah into my taxi. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
So I do find that very funny because I even
heard that claim that, like, yeah, I took fifteen months
to be born.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
What are you stunting on people?
Speaker 4 (13:11):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Is that really a brag?
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Thing like, yeah, you're like, you're clingy? Yeah, are you?
Speaker 1 (13:17):
They giving ship to kids who were born early. Oh
you came out after eight months, not nearly as holy
as me.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Baby, I'm a fifteen month there. Yeah, my mom tried
to get rid of me. I said, no, I'm doing
some Bible study in here. I'm not ready yet.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
On the weekends he goes to just just goes to
like nick you wards and makes fun of the babies.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Ah, look at you, look at you. Couldn't be me,
couldn't be me. I came out. I came out twenty
six pounds.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
I almost didn't come out at all.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
I was gonna stay in there.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
I'm like, I said, I would have physically killed my
mother if I say it in there, I kept growing.
It would have been bad the person. Maybe, Oh that's funny.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
So later in life he would also claim that as
a child, he became aware that his coming had been
foretold in prophecy.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
For more than one hundred years.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I've never found what this prophecy is supposed to be.
Maybe someone was like, yeah, there's going to be a
huge fucking baby someday. Is that in the Book of Revelations,
And that boy was me so anyway, This bullet proof
source cites statements from Joshua that as a child, he
would read the entire Bible every two months. Quote, every
(14:24):
two months, I would have read the Bible from Genesis
to Revelation. It was the only subject that interested me
in primary school. In exams, I scored ninety nine percent consistently,
whereas I performed woefully in other subjects. My excelling and
Bible knowledge affected the other subjects where I performed poorly.
So basically, he was so good at the Bible that
his brain just didn't work for anything else.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Yeah. I can't. I can't do I can't even do
one plus two. Yeah, so I'm so christ it up
up here now.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
What I do disbelieve is a claim that he made
that one day, whilst at school, a madman entered his
class carrying a weapon. The type is not specified.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Everyone ran away, but he managed to calm the madman
down through prayer. From that day onwards, he knew there
was something special in him. I'm gonna need more details.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Yeah, how old is he?
Speaker 1 (15:10):
I think what this is like when he's in like
like middle school.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Maybe and a man came through with a weapon, just
a weapon, just a weapon.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Okay, okay, praise he praise him out of hurting anybody.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
I'm guessing. I mean, it's West Africa. Maybe he's a cutlass,
you know, so it's a it's a machete.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Maybe, I mean, machetes are very certainly, very accessible, but
who knows. My actual guess is that this did not happen.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Right right, right, Yeah, he's acting like he's Kevin Spacey
and the Negotiator. He's Chris Saviian or Shocks.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
So shortly before starting secondary school, his father died and
again he's raised by his uncle. He drops out of
school pretty soon after this, I think because he has
to get a job to help take care of the family.
And he spends years working a series of odd gigs,
like a lot of people and who come from his
level of like wealth and stuff in Nigeria and that
part of Nigeria. One of his jobs is a poultry attendant,
(16:07):
which mostly consisted of scrubbing chicken shit with his hands
and putting it in bags to be turned into fertilizer.
My my new favorite Kenyan news and culture website says
this job was so demeaning that no Nigerian did it.
It was mainly done by Ghanians. Wow, shots fired at Ghana.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Your neighbor's next door.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
There's all in these articles. There's a lot of shots
fired at Ghana.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Mya, it's wild. I've been to Ghana and there there
is like this sort of back and forth or they'll
be talking. They talked, They just chat shit about each
other like Nigerian m I don't know, I don't know.
Write them. This happens a regional Yeah, exactly. Your neighbor is.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Texas and Oklahoma, shit, right, like Nigeria and Ghana, right
right right?
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
So at some point in his early twenties, he experienced
a three day trance in which God visited him and
told him I am your God. I am giving you
a divine commission to go and carry the work of
the heavenly Father. This is the inciting incident of the
TV Joshua story. In the interest of trying to put
together a more complete picture of the man, I opted
to read a propaganda by what I thought was a
propaganda biography by one of his followers. Its title is
(17:13):
Rejoice and See what Happens Next? The Life and Times
of TB. Joshua. Now, this book does not give us
the life and times of TV Joshua. It's basically a
big brochure for like going to visit his church. And
we will talk about why a little later that he
wanted people doing that.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Just marketing. It is marketing material.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
It's all marketing. You get very little on the guy's life.
It is kind of interesting to note that the preface
of this book opens by saying TB. Joshua has shown
every indication of following this anointed path. He is worthy
of careful study and emulation, and then complaining TB. Joshua
has been made out to be controversial and has become
the subject of persecution, especially by fellow religious leaders. This
(17:52):
is puzzling to me. I have been in his presence
and I can say that he is disarmingly humble, gentle,
and a generous man.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
So that's good.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Glad, glad we're opening with like a real unbiased account
of this.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Oh yeah, he's so humble. Yeah, well he sounds great
so far. He sounds like he's you know, he's cooking
months talked about his miracles. Yeh, yeah, he topped down
a man with a machete, or who could have been
a bazooki, any kind of weapon.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
We have no idea.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Yeah, he just had an enriched plutonium maybe in his hand,
who knows, but he stopped it. Okay, look, this doesn't
just get to the bastard. I don't even know this
guy sounds.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Cool, Robert, Ye, so far he's great.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Praise Christ.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Yeah, so he's he starts preaching at some point. He's
probably in his like early to mid twenties when he
starts preaching, and this seems to have been a fairly
like humble start. There's some grainy footage that exists, apparently,
I've heard it reported on. I haven't seen it, that
shows him somewhere. It started out with something like a dozen,
maybe twenty followers under a bamboo marquee in the early
(18:54):
nineteen eighties. So he starts out small, but his his
flock grows fairly rapidly. And the mid nineteen eighties is
a pretty terrible time for most things, except for cocaine
and being a Pentecostal preacher in Nigeria, and especially for
the latter, it's basically the best time ever and this
merit's a little bit of explanation. First off, on Pentecostalism.
(19:17):
If you've ever seen a video, if you're wondering, like,
what the fuck is he talking about when he says Pentecostals,
Because I do think a lot of like even a
lot of people who are Christian right, but who are
like a fairly mainstream like kayaks Christianity and like normal
you know, believe in evolution, live a normal modern life.
They just like you know, they're Christian whatever. May not
know much about this. It's something you really encounter a lot,
(19:37):
particularly if you grow up in kind of the Deep
South and rural areas. It's gotten more common obviously as
we've gotten older. If you've ever seen videos of like
some wild seeming Christian religious ceremony where people are chanting
in tongues or screaming, flopping around on the floor looking
like they're seizuring, that's a Pentecostal service. Almost certainly. There
are some other denominations where you'll get stuff like that.
(20:01):
In popular culture, they're often called snake handlers. This is
because a lot of Pentecostals used to pass around venomous snakes,
and basically the idea is if you get bitten like
it means that you weren't faithful enough. And also if
you get bitten and die, it means that God just
wanted you to die.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, that was his plan.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
That was his plan for you. A lot of times
they're using non venomous snakes and it's like it's a show,
right right, And a lot of times they'll like defang
the snakes, especially for like the pastor, because the pastor
you want to like, could you imagine? It's like, but
I don't have any wound on my hand the fruit Jesus, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Where's that? Wait? I didn't give you the stunt snake pastor?
Oh fuck? Oh fuck, Okay.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
There's definitely motherfuckers who died from that, Like oh.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Yeah, yeah, there has to be. I mean, I feel
like there's there were headlines about like some snake handling
preacher who you know, somehow who'd a thought his handling
of a copper head whended with his demises.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
It was also common you still find this sometimes, but
like people would drink strych nine during these ceremonies. Again,
it's like a you know, if you have faith, you'll
know God won't kill you unless it's your time.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Now, Pentecostals are not the only Christian sect to do
snake handling. It actually probably started. I think the first
snake handlers on the Christian historic record are the second
century o Fights, which is a Gnostic sect. I do
not know much about them, but I came across that
when I was looking up snake handlers, So yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
That's neat.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Pentecostalism has its origins in the eighteen hundreds with radical
evangelical movements that focused on faith, healing, and the imminently
coming end times. One description you'll hear a lot is
that regular Christians kind of as modernity comes in, they
stop believing in miracles, or at least not miracles as
a thing that like people can can incite, you know,
through their direct faith, you know, but as a thing.
(21:57):
You know, maybe it's a thing that happens sometimes, but
you're not You can't make miracles by like praying for
God and stuff, Right, that's not a thing. I think
a lot most people believe, but Pentecostals do, and this
obsession with miraculous happenings is a hallmark of that kind
of worship. Pentecostal churches started to spread in Nigeria around
the turn of the nineteen hundreds. It was really given
(22:18):
a shot in the arm by the influenza epidemic. A
lot of early Nigerian Pentecostal preachers engaged in faith healing
of influenza victims. They started out as kind of an
Anglican offshoot because obviously the Anglican Church is British, and
the British, you know, owned them in Nigeria for much
longer than Yeah, and Aghana, yes, and Aghana and yeah.
(22:41):
The breaks kind of between the Anglicans and the Pentecostals
became more defined in the twenties and they started, like
Nigerian Pentecostals started to affiliate with US based churches, more
like the Faith Tabernacle in Philadelphia. One characteristic of this
particular segment of Christianity is a near constant conflict with
medical sens. I'm not going to say that's every group
(23:02):
of Pentecostals, but it's very common to find Pentecostals who
preach against like at least certain kinds of modern medicine.
You know, faith is supposed to handle it. It's not
like an across the board thing like it is with thinking,
like Jehovah's witnesses. But it's not uncommon, and early Nigerian
Pentecostals were extreme, even to their British cousins in their
rejection of modern medicine. A lot of this is tied
(23:23):
into colonialism. I think a lot of it also has
to do with the difficulty of obtaining good medical care
in a lot of the areas where this is spreading.
A study in Pew Research Notes Originating in evangelical student revivals,
a wave of Pentecostal expansion spawns new churches in the
sixties and seventies. The leader of this expansion is Benson Idahosa,
one of Africa's most influential Pentecostal preachers. Idahosa establishes the
(23:46):
Church of God Mission International in nineteen seventy two. In
nineteen seventy four, the Pentecostal umbrella organization Grace of God
Ministry is founded in eastern Nigeria. The Deeper Life Bible
Church founded in nineteen seventy five and soon becomes one
of Nigeria's largest Pentecostal churches, with an estimated three hundred
and fifty thousand members by nineteen ninety three. So this
(24:06):
is a pretty rapid expansion and these are very big churches.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
I mean, it's it's all line enough for that. Man.
The faith part is yeah, it's like I mean, because
there's already you know this culturally, there's a lot of
thinking that sort of goes beyond the bounds of like science, right,
So to even for these you know, these very opportunistic
sort of faith healers, to really get in on them,
be like, oh man, I just fucking believe.
Speaker 6 (24:31):
Maybe that's all.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah, yeah, And that's that's where Chibi Joshua is going
to stitch in.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
So TB.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Joshua's church, which also began in nineteen eighty six, was
called Synagogue Church of All Nations or SCONE, and I
think the synagogue this is very common. I made a
comment once that like Christians reincorporate, some groups of like
particularly fundamental Christians like to reincorporate bits of Jewish religious tradition,
(25:00):
and like the abuse of Showfars, reincorporate was the wrong term.
People got rightfully frustrated. This is cultural appropriation, right, right, Yeah,
that's what's going on. And I'm guessing because I have
never heard of synagogue used outside of the tradition of
the Jewish faith.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
So my guess is that stand for me, that's what
that would imply, Yes, ten times out of ten in
my mind.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Yeah, So that's that's what I'm guessing they're doing here.
So people will call it scone, and that's what we
will usually call it, because Synagogue Church of All Nations
is a bit of a mouthful, and in fairly short
order throughout the mid like mid to late nineteen eighties,
scone goes from dozens to hundreds to hundreds of thousands
of regular attendants. It becomes common for there to be
more than fifteen thousand people attending services at once in
(25:46):
a single day. Obviously, this necessitates the building of a massive,
like stadium sized church. You know, these are huge events
every time, and he's out there every day. Basically he
hears some of his disciples. A lot of appeal of
these Neo Pentecostal churches in Nigeria is the ability of
worshippers to witness and participate in miracles. Right, not just
(26:09):
that miracles are happening, but that your pastor is able
to call down miracles and you get to be right there.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
And watch this shit.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
You know, some of this there's some like cafe here.
Some of this is like what people get out of wrestling,
you know, right for real? Yeah, yeah, And it's not
coincidental that the massive expansion of these churches that are
all doing these very big and we'll talk about how
these look, these big like miracles shows, coincides with a
huge expansion in the availability of televisions for working class Nigerians.
(26:38):
Right that has hit like it it hits saturation by
the eighties, and so these preachers and not only that,
but it also becomes a lot easier to make your
own TV and get it on the air, right, So
all of those things kind of have to happen, and
that takes a period of time, but by the eighties,
all of those things are possible, and so any of
these preachers with big congregations have access to enough capital
(27:00):
to purchase cameras in airtime, which they use to air
slick videos of different ill people being miraculously healed and
miles you know what will miraculously heal our listeners.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I hope it's some kind of product. Yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
The only guarantee we make on this podcast is that
if you are sick, buy someone something that advertises on
our show, and you will be.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Healed of anything. Just rub it on your head.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah, yeah, you cannot die if you purchase the products
that advertise on our show unless that was God's plan.
Unless that was God's plan.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Obviously obviously obviously.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
We're dallas ridiculous ad transition, both of you.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
We're back and we're thinking about how ematic unless that's
God's plan really really gives you a lot of you're
going away with anything with those words.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, but people, I.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Just you know, if it's really funny, please please send
us what what what that pops up?
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Please it's really funny. Please, that's a good like parenting tip.
Can we go to the playground, daddy? If it's God's plan,
you know, if it's God's.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
I mean, but that is the kind of ship like
super religious parents we'll say to like avoid the responsibility.
They're like, I don't know, I mean, maybe you didn't
maybe I forgot your birthday because that was God's plan. Yeah,
and you do.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
It is like it's used very differently, but like it's
used a lot in the in the Muslim world as
like if you're like, hey, do you think you know
we'll be able to do this or this will happen
like you know inshallah, Right, which means like probably not.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
I'm not looking go I mean, but you know, it's
the same thing people say that to their like yeah, man, yeah,
we'll see, we'll see what happens.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
I'll never forget your birthday.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Thank you, thank you never Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
You don't have the same privilege as Miles.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Yeah, I don't remember my own birthday. Not after all
this THEO flu I've been dropping. Let me do a
that line of the of the peach flavor. Oh yeah,
why does he stuff?
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Hey?
Speaker 2 (29:05):
What's he snorting out of that bullet? Dude? It's kind
of fair.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Round bullet bullet power that opens the capillaries, gets the
N s A I DS into your system faster, straight
to the vein. Baby. Yeah, just just like cooking flair
the on apoo.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
You're like, hey, hand me that dialysis to being really quick,
I'm gonna tie off what.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah, we couldn't arrest him. There's no log against dejecting
the aflu in parting.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
I don't know, there's no log. It's just freaking people
the funk out. It's fucked up.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
So spectacle was always part of the deal at Scone.
Healing the blind is like easy ship, right, you can
have someone pretend that they're blind, right, and then they
can see. You know, it's super easy. But that doesn't
look exciting, right, What looks exciting? He would love to
have like parades of people who were missing limbs, like
roll in on wheel boards and stuff to get like
(30:09):
the healing touch and claim like their pain went away
or something. He would love to have people who had
like like skin lesions and stuff come in and then
they all fall off, right, and this kind of shit
like these are these are staged right, like they're using makeup,
they're doing all this kind of shit, but it works.
His flock goes from dozens to hundreds to tens of
thousands over the course of like the eighties to the nineties,
(30:33):
like it gets massive. There are two is wiping off
people's skin conditions. Oh yeah, yeah, that's a big one.
That's a bit And there's there's too many stories of
this time to count. So I'm going to focus on
one really well documented recent case. And I'm focusing on
this because this is someone who got arrested by the
Nigerian government for miracle fraud recently. But it gives you
(30:53):
an idea of how this industry is always worked miracle.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Wait, is that a law we have on all?
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Yes, Oh no, we don't have that shit. You can,
you can. That's Nigeria is so far ahead of us
and that way.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
They're like, no, you guys don't understand. These people are
gonna fucking bring down our entire society. Like if we
don't get that shit under control. Yeah, god damn, because
who's the guy who sells those fucking buckets, those end
time buckets?
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Oh yeah, fucking we did episodes on him, but I'm
spacing on his name right now. But yeah, the one
of the three lines in the story. Obviously he gets
away with a lot because of corruption in the Nigerian government,
because of bribing people. But there's also like the Nigerian
government has like passed laws and shit that I wish
we had in the US to try to limit some
(31:37):
of this stuff.
Speaker 7 (31:38):
We're talking about.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Jim Baker, aren't we Jim Baker?
Speaker 2 (31:43):
I'm like, we did.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
We did seeveral episodes.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Yeah, yell those buckets though they look like absolute shit.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Like I have. I have to say, the Nigerian government
fails in a lot of ways. The US government has
also failed to contain this stuff. But they have also
attempted to limit it in more ways than we have,
so I'll give them some credit.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Could you imagine if someone tried to put forward like
a bill for miracle fraud and oh no, they would
get shot.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
They would get literally get fucking shot.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Like somehow, like that's the fucking life. Oh God, that.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Would kiss people off so much. So I'm going to
I want to detail the story of one specific miracle fraudster,
forty four year old missus bows Olasukanmi. I think is
how that's pronounced. She was arrested by the Nigerian government
in twenty twenty for being a fake miracle actor who
would sell her services to different pastors. Right basically, she
(32:36):
was really good. She was able to dislocate her arm
in an unconventional way that made it look like it
was shattered and in pieces, like there was at least
I saw.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
There's like one.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Picture of it out there, like it's pretty good at it.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
This is a little bit of skill.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
And I'm going to quote from a write up in
the Nigerian Guardian here. Once she enters the stage, she
would pretend that the broken right arm had been hanging
and all medical efforts to heal her in both Orthodox
in native hospital proved abored of until one of her friends,
who was a member of the church, advised her to
try the church. At this point, one of the ministering pastor,
the General overseer, would step forward and demonstrate as if
the Holy Spirit had entered him. After speaking in tongues
(33:11):
for some minutes, he would order the woman to come
very close to him, while the congregation would be silent
anxiously waiting to see the broken right arm that has
been hanging. The pastor would ask the woman, do you
want to be healed? Have you been born again? If
she answers in the negative, then he led her to
Christ in prayer. He would then order the evil spirit
that bent her arm to depart and be destroyed by fire.
As he is ordering the evil spirit to depart, the
hanging broken arm will be coming back gradually to its
(33:34):
form until it is completely stretched down and normal, And
then he would ask the congregation to praise the Lord.
Well the congregation is busy praising God, one of the
church members whose role is to take the woman away,
would appear and whisker away, and then she gets paid.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Wow, and so she's just like the Meryl Streep of
fucking miracles.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
There's a bunch you know how there used to be
like a circuit of people who would do the Jerry
Springer style talk shows because they had something like marketable,
you know, in a weird thing about them.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
I think it's like that, right. Yeah, they're like, oh,
did you get the arm lady? It's like, no, I
got the dude with the buggy eyes.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, what.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Are you gonna do?
Speaker 4 (34:12):
What?
Speaker 2 (34:12):
You can explain that it's because his blood pressure is
so high his eyes are bulging and then there's.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Too many demons in his blood they pop the pressure
right up.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Now this is one woman, but like she gets arrested
because the Nigerian police have like units dedicated to busting
miracle crimes, which is I do want to see that
TV show. I want to see like a Law and
Order some miracle c frauds Jersey.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
In it and we get people the wrong. I did,
like do Law and Order mc U Yeah no, not
marvel asshole miracle crimes. Yeah they don't. They don't own
those letters.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
So Joshua and other pastors like him would not just
like have these people over and do these miracle shows,
but they would make videos of them, and Joshua is
really going to be like the number one pastor for
pioneering making videos out of this stuff and distributing them
around the world. The basic way this works is that
you know, within kind of Nigeria, if you have these
(35:07):
people being healed in your shows, it will convince people
who are really injured or sick that they or their
loved ones might get healed. Right obviously, but Joshua took
this tactic several steps further. Right from an early date,
he starts filming videos of these healings, picking the most
sensational and impressive and putting them in videos not meant
for Nigerian domestic consumption, but these were sent over to Europe,
(35:29):
to Great Britain, into the United States with white missionaries
returning from Nigeria. For decades, Nigeria has been a hot
destination for missionary tourists, young Christians and professional missionaries traveling
to minister to the poor in a relatively friendly climate.
Joshua was not the only person to see this as
a profitable endeavor, but his matter of fishing for them
(35:51):
was unique at the time. Sending out propaganda to evangelize
British Christians, in particular. The BBC documentary that I cited
earlier includes interviews with several young British and South African
Caucasian women who were enraptured with and then terribly abused
by TV Joshua. Their journeys all start the same way.
Members of their local religious communities came back from Nigeria
(36:14):
with VHS tapes of miraculous healings. To give you an
idea of what some of these healings were and how
they looked. I wanted to return to that book Rejoice
and See what happens Next, which is centered around numerous
case studies ranging from poor people getting good paying jobs,
and I think that shit is meant mainly to evangelize
them to locals, right like this is something that can
improve your financial situation, to shit like this which is
(36:36):
very much geared towards Europeans that they're trying to get
to come over and join the church. Jude Orakas showed
up at the scone with a life threatening disease. The
case which I originally viewed live, has now been archived
by a manual TV that's his TV channel and includes
a commentary. The story opens with the camera zooming in
from a full body shot, then to a medium shot
of a man sitting in a chair. He is separated
(36:58):
from others, his body quivering in the sunshine and wearing
nothing but a pair of shorts. A close up shot
reveals her inndous skin damage. Narrator. A shocking condition brought
this man to the Synagogue Church of all Nations. His
body riddled with sickness right from the crown of his head.
His entire body has been engulfed in a plague, shattering
his skin into scale like fragments. There is not a
hair left on his head, as the frightening sickness has
completely destroyed his skin. From his head, the disease rages
(37:21):
across his body, damaging every inch and rendering his arms useless.
The skin flakes and peels horribly all the way down
his arms to his fingers. Not one inch of his
skin has been left unaffected. Jude's sister, Man of God,
help my brother. He has skin disease. For the past
six years, we have taken him all over. There is
no solution. Neither the herbalist's homes or hospitals have provided
any solution. Joshua talked to him briefly, and when he
(37:43):
sees Iraka is too sick to even talk, he asks
him if he can accept Jesus Christ as his Lord
and savior, which the man is able to answer. In
the name of Jesus Christ, I command that infirmity out.
Begin to vomit it out.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
TB.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Joshua watches the man intently for about fifteen seconds, then
he speaks again. I say to you, disease, can hear me?
Come out of this man's life, and the name of
Jesus come out out TB.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Joshua.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
The man begins to shake uncontrollably and bends forward to
throw something white and foam me up. You can see
what the name of Jesus can do out, I say
out in the name of Jesus. So gives you an idea, right, dude,
this yeah, okay, it's wild.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Foam me at the mouth. He's like, yo, dude, don't
put this Alca Seltzer in. It's gotta be Alca Celtic. No,
that's the oldest stricken the fucking book. M Yeah, it's
good shit.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
And again, when we're talking about his appeal, obviously as
a preacher, he appeals to Nigerians as a preacher, but
to a lot of these like Europeans, these British people,
you know, he's not speaking their language fluently. The appeal
is not the specifics of what he's saying. It's that
he is promising them that if they come to see him,
they will get a direct physical connection to a miracle.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
And if you are one of these evangelicals from a
wealthy country, like you're going to you know, reading the Bible,
you're watching veggie tails or whatever, but you're living like
these this what you would probably consider, compared to these videos,
a fairly boring, safe life, And then you see this
man physically fighting demons, right, and you're like, right, well,
(39:15):
of course I want to be a part of this.
This sounds so much more exciting than like going to
church and doing like fucking youth group shit.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
Right.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
It reminds me of like nineties skate culture, where like
you would be like, oh, you get the new Toy
Machine tape and you're like, yo, I'll bring it over.
You're like, oh, dudelet we see the bail scenes or whatever,
and like there's always this culture being like yo, to
check this tape out. I got this tape, except in
this version, I also, I mean, it's clever that he's
also using the way the Western world views Africa in
this like exotic, mystical way and weaponizing it to be
(39:45):
like watch this shit, because they are they're already on
some bullshit thinking that this is some fucking magic shit
is happening here. It's like, no, I'm just a next
level scammer that was in the womb for fifteen months.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, that time really let him prep. Yeah, but no,
you have anticipated something we'll get to. He deals with
this very directly. He is very consciously taking advantage of
the way Westerners look at Africa. Right, So I do
want to I want to give you an idea of
what it looks like when he's because he's these are
not just he's not just doing healings. He's doing exorcisms,
and these take the place of like Gandolf Saromon magic
(40:18):
fights like that at the most extreme level. He'll like
walk in and they're like people will lunge at him
and he'll like put his hand and use the name
of GM. They'll go flying backwards like it's so it's
it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Actually it looks like kung fu film, Like they're like, yeah,
high production.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
You know, actually what it looks a little bit like
if you've watched the fake Steven segal a keto videos
or like the Vladimir Putin fake a keto videos where
they're just like touching guys and flinging them through.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
The air like Russians video exactly.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Ah, yeah, god, it's so funny.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
I want to play you with video of this.
Speaker 8 (41:00):
Miles okah oh ship play as an lad a party.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
I got this shorty by the dome piece Python. Watch.
That's great.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
He's on the ground rolling like a Python. Boss.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
It is boss.
Speaker 6 (41:27):
It's boss.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
Yeah, it's Boss.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Of the Boss of the Boss.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
That's pretty. That's like wrestling grade, you know. Hell yeah,
that's fucking school play level. Of course. Of course, a
bunch of like fucking sheltered like teenage evangelical kids are
seeing this and they're like, well, I want to go
fight demons in Africa?
Speaker 2 (41:50):
My god, did you see that? He just like just
a closed fish swiped in front of his chest and.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Blew the guy down. Yeah, Christ, it's so fun. I
mean a lot of people get horribly abused. It's actually not.
But this part of it is fun. Look, you got
to enjoy these little moments, right, yeah, yep, yeah. I
want to note here again, I don't want to fall
into the thing of being like, wow, look at this
African preacher and all these people believe this shit like
(42:15):
this goes down in the US all the fucking time.
Members of Congress go to churches that are not all
that different from this. Okay, Like you know, this is
not a Nigerian thing.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
This is a thing. This is just that that's what
religion gives you. We've got a whole bunch of people
that are working in the government. They're like circle jerking
for the end times. Like this isn't like mainstream religious
stuff necessarily, but it's not like wildly uncommon evangelical. I mean,
especially when you see people prophesying, you know, or speaking
in tongues and shit, you're.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Like, oh, this is this is a derivation on a theme, right,
And I think it's also probably my guess would be
this is pretty close to what used to be a
lot more common back in the day, right, Like when
you hear about these stories of like demons and exorcisms
and shit, and like you know, someone someone in the
town water supply like someone will get like some fucking
(43:09):
air got poisoning, and everyone will hallucinate and you'll have
like a big demon fight in some medieval French village.
I'm sure like there's versions of that to explain it,
like these kind of there have always been people who
have known that, Like, well, if you really want to
make some money in the religion business, you got to
put on a fucking show. Yeah, and nothing's a better
show than fighting demons.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Yeah you got a pyrotechnics guy, Yeah, exactly, Yeah, I
got one, dude, you cat fingers. I'll say, Satan demon
get out with the fires of hell. Fucking full plume
of fucking flame shoots up his back. Dude, it's sing gig.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
It's pretty affordable, It's it's cool, it's good stuff. So again,
what I want to note is that like, while what
he is doing is not unique to him, he is
maybe the best I've seen at it. He's good, like
these are these are well orchestrated shows.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Well, yeah, it's also the riz bro he's got. Yeah
you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
It seems like so cool. He's like watching me hold
this mic with my vessel.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
I don't give a fuck. That this dude's a python.
Watch this shit. Yeah, Like it feels like superman ish
kind of thing. I was like, Damn, he's super cocky
about it.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
Yes, some Superman, some Vince McMahon, Like you got some
of that going in there?
Speaker 2 (44:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Now you can see in some of his videos from
the arts that he's very deliberately taken framing techniques from
Western reality television. And I'm gonna play you a segment
from a different scone video about a secret demonic infiltrator,
mister Anny, being caught by one of TV Joshua's disciples,
and it just feels like something I would have seen
on MTV in like two thousand and one.
Speaker 7 (44:38):
Here is mister Annie pretending to be a Christian, but
is a wolf in sheep's clothing? What is his mission
here among the people of God? Can darkness be in
the midst of light?
Speaker 9 (44:52):
No?
Speaker 7 (44:54):
Capital?
Speaker 2 (44:55):
No, look at.
Speaker 7 (44:57):
Mister Annie praying capital? Who is he praying to? There
is here and they're on prayers.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
And it's like highlighting him and like the crowd shot
every time, like it's like surveillance footage, yeah, or.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
Likeny, like back when a hard copy was a show.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Yeah, hard copy is as Yeah, yeah, sixty minutes hard copy.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
That's a better. That's a better. The current affair from
our old heads and.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
The rest of the video proceeds. It's like this big
choreographed exorcism because obviously he's like a secret devil infiltrator
in scone. Oh, this goes it's it's great, it's great.
Speaker 9 (45:35):
Ship.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
Yeah, it's really good.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Like you have a Marvel movie fucking unfolding. Yeah, at
your churtzers, Like dude, last week, a fuck three dudes
came out of a fucking portal, Yeah, and fucked up
this infiltrator and then TV Joshua turned this woman's droopy
leg into a muscular one. It was wild man. You
had to you had to be.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
So what happened in your church? This Sunday priest told
us we shouldn't have sex before marriage. Guy turned into
a snake at my church.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
No, yeah, and then you fucking punched him in the
head and a flame came out.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
Of his As of course, I'm going to the snake church.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, I can barely stay awake. Now.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
This all goes over really well with these young white
evangelicals from Western countries who are just not used to
services being this exciting. You will hear comments from yeah,
no seasoning. You'll hear comments from a number of them
that are like, I felt like this was where real
biblical Christianity was still going down right, and I wanted to.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Be a part of it.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
You know, I cannot exaggerate the extent to which a
lot of this was a conscious attempt by TV Joshua
to recruit white people. And I'm going to play a
clip from a BBC documentary on TV Joshua called Disciples.
The guy talking here is his former right hand man
who helped him start the church.
Speaker 10 (46:52):
He had special interest into Ubu.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
You will the whites.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
Are you?
Speaker 9 (47:00):
Are you surprised that God is using a black man
to do disince?
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm not surprised that God is using
a black man. What are these motherfuckers worried?
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (47:17):
Wow.
Speaker 10 (47:18):
Nineteen ninety six, one of the midior parcels came from
South Africa. When they were living. He gives more than
two hundred videos to take home to give to people,
videos of miracles, videos of confessions, video.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
Videos that will feel their head.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Wow, I say this is too expensive?
Speaker 10 (47:42):
He left. You think I'm a fool. I know what
I'm doing. A time will come this synagogue. Josh is
going to shoot out from South Africa to the whole world.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Now this guy also will claim TV. Joshua basically said
to him, what I am doing by recruiting the people,
I want to take advantage of them. I want to
get revenge for what white people have done to us,
which is I think is part. I think is largely
him because as a spoiler, this guy is not some
sort of like anti colonial hero. Most of the people
(48:13):
he abuses are Black African women, right like, he is
not not at all and actually like a hero. But
I think he understood that this guy who worked with
him might respond to that. Right, That's that's how I read.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
It, right right, right right? Yeah, Yeah, we're taking them.
We're taken from them because for years they've been taken
from me.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
Yes, And the BBC documentary is a very very good
job of Obviously, a lot of the victims at Cites
are white people from South Africa, from England, but most
of the victims that I see are black Nigerian Ghanian women,
you know, which which is I'm glad, Like they clearly
put in an effort to not just be like, look
at what this guy is doing to white women, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
(48:53):
but rather to highlight the differences between how he approached.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Like which would have been the way people first sort
of had outraged, like he yeah, he could get.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
Over on us. Yeah no, no, no, yeah. And it's interesting.
There's also there's a lot of very interesting racial dimensions here.
You saw in that video the guy he asks like,
are you surprised to see a black man, you know,
preaching the word of God? That like, I think that's
a South African pastor. Did you see what he was wearing?
Speaker 2 (49:16):
That dress? Oh yeah, very traditional?
Speaker 1 (49:18):
That is, yeah, traditional African dress. And I think what
is happening here is that these kind of established South
African and Western white pastors were being fited by TB.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
Joshua.
Speaker 1 (49:30):
He was giving them basically like you can have an
authentic African experience, right, Like I'm going to give that
to you if you endorse me as legitimate. I can't
have any other explanation for the way that man is
portraying himself.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
There's also I mean I saw this one when I
was in Ghana, Like there is like this Canadian expat
that lived in this village that like nearby where I
was visiting, and he kind of became like the elder,
like the chief of the village, only because like he
like was married to a Genan woman, but like built
like a proper there, and like he dressed like that,
like he had the whole vio, like he was like, no,
I'm here to do the African thing. So I wonder
(50:07):
if like on some some level they like they just
really loved the larp of it all, you know too,
or they're like, yeah, look at me, bro, I look
like a goddamn fucking god from West Africa right now.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Yeah, some of this is maybe beyond like my pay grade,
but that was my read there in that particular scene
that like that's kind of what he's offering some of
these established white pastors. Isn't that kind of legitimacy?
Speaker 2 (50:29):
I'm sure, And I'm sure that's a very attractive proposition
for someone who probably finds himself very self important like
a pastoro and like watch me enter all of these
spaces and I accepted with open arms, like no fucking
friction at all, Like yeah, yeah, TB. Joshua is uh yeah, man,
fucking Machiavelli over here.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
It to kind of highlight the experience that he's he
is offering to a lot of these white visitors. I
want to play you another clip.
Speaker 4 (50:56):
Believe you me, brother Ridia. It was the last type
on uth that I ever wanted to come to, Thy broadst,
thy money, Launders, thy drag pedness, And I say, God, sorry, Yeah,
he's a piece of heaven honor.
Speaker 2 (51:14):
The greatest and.
Speaker 10 (51:14):
The prompt and I got church was when the foreigner
started coming. This was strategic and it was planned.
Speaker 6 (51:25):
I just got a confession to make that I want
the old world to know. In the past, I've always
I really hated them. When I got back, every year
I saw the love that we received from black people.
Speaker 11 (51:40):
He used the white people for markets is bad. I
mean white a man or white woman around is like
you have achieved. He just said, look at these people,
they don't know where the Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:03):
The white people dancing video there, it's like there's some
there's some good good like eighties dudes shuffling.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
About, yeah, doing some kind of foot loose.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
Shit, some kind of footler shit.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
What the fuck is going on? But yeah, I mean geez,
I mean like it's interesting you know, like, there are
these people who become predatory like this. It's because they
understand the predation that exists around them at many different levels.
And he's just able to, like he has such a
mastery of it that he's like, no, watch this, and
then I can use white people to legitimize it. It's like,
I already know how this works. I already know how
(52:38):
this works. I've seen it. I've seen this shit a
hundred times.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
You know what, I know how it works. Miles sponsoring
a podcast and we're back.
Speaker 2 (52:55):
I just want to say that product, fank fuck for that.
Did that save you?
Speaker 1 (53:01):
Did that cure your your arm? Oh? Yeah, yeah, no,
it cleared my ear chlamydia?
Speaker 2 (53:08):
Yeah, clear it right. All my hair grew back to.
Speaker 1 (53:10):
Your uh huh you even you even have several other
people's hair.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
Yeah, just from listening to the fucking ad. That's how
powerful that is. So I'm definitely gonna buy it.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Yeah, absolutely, folks, spend your money please. So from the
end of the nineties to the early two thousands, Scone
expanded rapidly, driven by the surge in foreign religious tourists
who flooded into Nigeria to see the man deemed a
profit and miracle worker. According to former associates, he often
paid for the plane tickets of these white evangelicals because
he saw their presence as the best marketing his church
(53:41):
would get. Every youth group leader or pastor from the
US or Europe who visited came back enthralled and directed
funds and more followers.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
TB.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
Josh was way White followers again also acted as marketing
for his church within Nigeria. It was important to him
that the Synagogue Church of All Nations be seen as
a world church, and this made it more appeal to
Nigerians for the same reason people are always drawn to
international celebrities. Right, are you more impressed with like the
guy who like me, he's got like a local access
(54:09):
TV show and he owns a car a lot or are
you more impressed by like the NFL.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
Dude who owns a series of car dealerships?
Speaker 5 (54:15):
Right?
Speaker 2 (54:15):
I don't care what that NFL do, But I mean
if you're like, if you're some dude named TV Joshua
do and you got some South Africans doing footloo shit.
Speaker 1 (54:22):
Yeah you gotta dancing. You got South Africans dancing? You
I might get to meet John lyfth Gow, And I've
always wanted to meet John left Gow. That would totally
change my opinion of this guy. If there's John in
the mix. Yeah, I'll do anything to meet John Lythgow.
Oh yeah, I mean he's in the best season of Dexter,
He's in the best season a Dexter, He's in Bukaroo Bonzai.
(54:45):
What would Yeah, just a just a rich, rich history
of being John Lyftgow. So yeah, it was all brilliantly executed.
Footage from the church in this period is distinctly uncomfortable.
You can see very small groups of ravenously excited white
evangelicals given positions of honor at the front of huge
(55:06):
stadium crowds of Nigerian citizens, Like look at look at
this picture here, Like it's it's very stark, like all
the white people in one area, everyone else in another,
and the white people are right next to TV Joshua.
Speaker 2 (55:19):
Yeah, it's sort of like kind of like the same
logic of like the like a Maga rally where it's like,
please help the people, like the few people of color,
Please give them prominent spaces, even though it's the same
five people. Just please we need them there, we need
them there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:32):
So TV preaching was and is huge in Nigeria, but
TV Joshua took it to another level, filming much more
than most of his colleagues and theming his videos for
an international audience. One interview he recorded features a white
english woman asking him why he makes so many videos
and his answer is fucking amazing because if Jesus was
not recorded in the Bible, you would not believe that
(55:54):
Jesus is the same today. I fucking love that answer.
I fucking love that ads there. That is like that.
That's a smart man. That's a smart man, like he
either had that in the chamber or he.
Speaker 2 (56:07):
Just extempt that ship. But that is good. What a
fucking clap back.
Speaker 1 (56:12):
Yeah, that man knows his business. I'll give him that.
It's a horrible business, but he fucking knows it.
Speaker 2 (56:17):
Fucking knows.
Speaker 1 (56:18):
Yeah, Yeah, it's fun stuff. So I want to play
a clip for you here of a woman you're about
to hear from. This lady is the church's head of
foreign visitor relations and she's talking about kind of bringing
in these like foreign white religious tourists to Scone. So
we're gonna press play.
Speaker 11 (56:35):
Here for it was a game on a trap that
hecets for the whites people.
Speaker 1 (56:43):
Wow, yeah, it's fun around that, yeah for the white people. Okay, TV,
Well we're gonna continue in a second. But there's a
couple of things going on here. One is that for
these young people traveling from other parts of the world,
these are mostly kids who are more affluent, they are
(57:07):
seeing the wider world for the first time, and that's
intoxicating anytime you go to a country that's not like
the suburbs, right, yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (57:15):
You're so sheltered too, and such a homogeneous fucking yeah environment. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (57:21):
Yeah, it's a drug. And in addition to just like, yeah,
you're in Africa after a lifetime and a place that
is not at all Africa, and that's like this whole
fascinating journey. And then you get love bombed too. You
are the focus of thousands of locals who are not
It's not just like going to a country and being
like a tourist. It's going to a country and seeing
a crowd of locals overjoyed that you're there, and then
(57:45):
after you get love bombed. Over the next several days,
these tourists, the first couple of days you spend at scone.
You're just watching hours of miracle videos every day. It's
like a clockwork orange style thing. And then after your treatment. Yeah,
and you prime them with the videos and then you
do live miracle shows, right, because you don't want him
to just see that ship when they're like kind of tired,
(58:07):
and it's like you want them in the most suggestible
mind state possible, right, you prime that shit.
Speaker 2 (58:13):
Yeah, horny for a miracle horny And I'm absolutely horny
for America.
Speaker 9 (58:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (58:17):
And it's wild that he's using the same playbook as
like Andrew Tait and all these other people's like traffic
them in. Yeah, love bomb them and then and then
run run your playbook.
Speaker 1 (58:27):
The court leaders only ever work, what like, there's variations
based on the tech available to you in the time period,
but it's all the same, you know.
Speaker 2 (58:35):
HS DVD streaming whatever. Ron Hubbard did it, you.
Speaker 1 (58:40):
Know, yeah, the classic way with boats. We're going to
play you one more clip explaining how this process goes.
Speaker 5 (58:48):
I've never seen a local African town before, and it
was a hustle and mustle and street sellers and food
and it's very colorful. I was just taking everything in.
Speaker 2 (59:00):
You kind of went down a driveway.
Speaker 4 (59:02):
In these these vehicles that had other foreign visitors in.
Speaker 1 (59:06):
There were tour groups going up from South Africa in
quite large numbers.
Speaker 12 (59:11):
I'm Angelique and I'm from South Africa. Even before I went,
I had these VHS tapes that I had watched and
I'd seen the most incredible things, and I was so
beyond excited to see this in real life.
Speaker 11 (59:33):
I was coordinator of international visitors. Anytime this visit dot
com SI Videosha will call and say, go and meet
your visitors.
Speaker 12 (59:44):
Nag your own disciples with these beautiful smiles, welcome you.
There's just people smiling. Everyone looks so happy.
Speaker 11 (59:52):
We make you feel like like celebrity.
Speaker 1 (59:57):
Oh yeah, that's that's it's so smart, like it is
such a it's such a slick operation. I'm just very
I'm as evil as a lot of this is. I'm
very impressed. Right, this is the point at which the
battery hits full swing, because one of the chief things
he'll do when he's like showing people life miracles is
he'll cure HIV.
Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:00:18):
And the way you the way you do this is
you have someone come up with like a piece of
paper that looks official that says I have HIV, and
then you pray over them, and then they get a
test and they come back with a sheet of paper
that says I don't have HIV. Right, you know, I
don't have to explain to you how to fake that, right,
it's not hard Like you have a printer, you can
(01:00:39):
bribe a doctor, right, But it's very impressive to these kids.
Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
And I'm gonna have Sophe play a one more clip here.
Speaker 9 (01:00:46):
When I came here, I had been suffering from asthma,
and after a short time as the ministry from the
Prophet TB, I thought my breathing come totally clear. God
had healed me.
Speaker 11 (01:01:00):
So I see you've.
Speaker 4 (01:01:01):
Got a medical report check.
Speaker 2 (01:01:02):
Can you please just show the camera that, right be
to God?
Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Negative states it for HIV and HIV two. So it's
not that fucked up to just like it's fucked up,
but like the amount of damage you can do by
convincing like these these evangelical tourists that you've cured someone's AIDS,
you're mainly just going to be able to abuse them more, right, Right,
(01:01:26):
But you're not necessarily causing a public health crisis with that.
What does cause the public health crisis is that he
is also convincing his Nigerian followers of this right, and
they are actually the people who have HIV at a
highd rate, right, certainly higher than these like evangelical tourists.
And not only is he convincing them that he can
(01:01:46):
cure them by praying over them, part of what he's
convincing them is that they should not go get medical
treatment or take retrovirals for their HIV only right, HIV
retrovirals are very available, HIV very treatable. It is not
a death sentence when you have access to retrovirals. And
one of the things he is doing to members of
(01:02:06):
his flock is telling them, do not take these. God
doesn't want you to take these. I can cure your HIV.
And we don't know how many people he got to
stop taking their retrovirals as a result of this, but
we do know that in twenty eleven, in one public
sized case, three women in London died when they were
convinced by preachers to stop taking their retrovirals. And one
(01:02:30):
of those preachers was TV Joshua and I think these
women were immigrants. When reporters asked TV Joshua if he
advised followers to avoid treating their HIV. He gave this answer,
let me tell you, I am a medium in the
same way doctors are mediums to bring treatment. So basically saying, hey,
I'm just a doctor too, you know.
Speaker 2 (01:02:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
One follower I read an interview with because he's not
just doing this with HIV. He's telling people to avoid
all sorts of modern medicine in favor of paying him,
you know, to pray over them. His followers at devoted
member of the church who was like helping to run
the church. His mother was enthralled with TV Joshua and
refused to take chemotherapy for her cancer after Joshua healed
(01:03:11):
her and told her that she did not need it.
Within six months, she was dead. This follower, who again
was a dedicated volunteer of the church, calls TB.
Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
Joshua.
Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
He's close enough to this guy to have his phone number.
He calls him to let him know that his mom
is dead, and TB. Joshua hangs up on him, and
he later he like asks one of the other workers there,
like he hung up on me, Like what the fuck?
And that guy's like, well, the prophet doesn't listen to
bad news.
Speaker 2 (01:03:37):
Oh hey, you're gonna fuck up the prophet's confirmation bias,
so I don't fucking tell him about that shit. He's
just gonna Oh yeah, you're just going to.
Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
Hear the click's wild stuff. Anyway, that's the TV Joshua story.
Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
Oh got anything to plug at the end of part one.
Speaker 2 (01:03:56):
Miles please you know, when when appropriate, listened to your
healthcare providers and not someone named TV Joshua or whatever TV.
Speaker 1 (01:04:07):
Jakes, I don't care who it is at T don't
get don't get help advice for many of them. Yeah,
uh plug, Uh yeah, just listen to the Daily Zeitgeist.
You know, that's my daily news and politics and.
Speaker 2 (01:04:20):
Comedy shit show. And uh, if you like ninety Day Fiance,
look one of your other favorite guests, Sophia Alexandra. That's
a show I host with her, and this is us
getting high and talking about ninety Day Fiance. That's how
we kind of blow steam off between Bastard's recordings and
you know, just the general world of it all.
Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
Well, blow off some steam with that, and blow off
some steam with steam I don't know. Yeah, and a
new show Sarah flu is really starting to fit me up.
Speaker 3 (01:04:52):
Now will you plug edge show?
Speaker 1 (01:04:56):
Oh yeah, Ed's got a show. It's called Better Offline.
It's about all the fucked up tech industry shit that
you probably need to know because they're actively trying to
destroy your life and everyone else's life, so you know,
keep an eye out for that.
Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Anyway, I'm gonna go, Miles, I'm gonna go. Uh, I'm
gonna go hang out.
Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
At a fucking playground with a with a spoon and
some foil and a pack of a thera flu Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
Watch, You're gonna go to like a needle exchange and
they're like, no, man, this is the people that actually
need it. Man, that's your fucking weird old theraflu shit.
Yeah yeahould be ashamed of yourself.
Speaker 1 (01:05:31):
I got to take a needle from one of my
diabetic friends to shoot the.
Speaker 2 (01:05:34):
Flu up, like my EpiPen. Where is it? Oh sorry
I needed the needle. Yeah no, I empty.
Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
I emptied the epidephyrin from my EpiPen and just theorough
fluid that ship up. Get that right into the meat.
Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
The episode is so over Bye. Behind the Bastards is
a production a cool Zone Media. For more from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or
check us out on the iHeartRadio
Speaker 2 (01:06:04):
App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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