Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki's autobiography is released on Friday, and in it are revelations about Tamaki's early life of drug and alcohol abuse and pre-marital sex, as well as, predictably, another diatribe against gays. In ‘Bishop Brian Tamaki: More Than Meets the Eye', Tamaki spells out his reasons for his controversial stance against the ‘gay lifestyle'. One chapter refers to his exorcising a church-goer of his ‘homosexual spirit' several years ago at an inter-denominational church meeting in Invercargill. “I felt a strong prompting by the Holy Spirit to pray for a man in the meeting who was captive to a homosexual spirit,” Tamaki writes. “You can be free tonight in the name of Jesus if you come forward and let me pray for you,” he insisted. “I laid my hand on his forehead and began to rebuke that spirit and commanded it to come out of his body.” Now Tamaki is flying out an American ‘Superpreacher' who describes homosexuality as ‘brokenness' to speak at Destiny Church's ‘Join the Revolution' festival this weekend. Peter Lineham, Chair of the Auckland Community Church and Professor of History at Massey University, has grave concerns about ‘exorcism' behaviour in the Destiny Church. “When this kind of theory is used in this kind of Pentecostal Church, it takes everything they don't like, from religious attitudes, to sexuality, and says they are the result of an evil spirit,” he tells GayNZ.com “In this Church, if you're not a clone of Brian Tamaki, all the bits that are ‘different' to him and his beliefs are blatantly treated as ‘evil'. It's all horrendously coersive.” Lineham sees evidence of very great danger in exorcism behaviour, which has in the past been justification for extreme brutality by religious groups. “There's also evidence that being ‘exorcised' is intensely damaging to people's psychological cohesion. For example, if a gay person is exorcised in a religious ceremony, and then sometime later has a gay fantasy again, the result can be very great psychological damage to that person and thoughts of suicide,” Lineham observes. Ref: Sunday News, GayNZ.com (m)
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Tuesday, 17th October 2006 - 12:00pm