"The reason why I know that God’s speaking to me [is] that I can hear his voice. Sometimes he sounds like me, but I say 'no', it’s God".Terry’s manager is his father Todd Durham, who has good line in T-Shirts and DVDs promoting the prodigy. Todd Durham is frank about his rather worldly ambitions for his son – as well as a church of 30,000, he expects that "...within the next three years this empire [will be] internationally recognised and renowned".
The programme describes Terry – who wears clerical robes – as "the world’s youngest minister". That may be so, but it doesn’t match the achievement of soul legend Solomon Burke, who was a bishop from the day he was born.
Another example is Ana Carolina Dias (official website here), a twelve-year-old Brazilian who has been preaching since the age of three. Dias is a celebrity in Brazil, and she goes preaching with her father in the most notorious prison in Rio de Janeiro. She also has visions and engages in spiritual warfare, and is particularly close to her father Ezequiel, who was a wife-beating drunk and prison inmate himself before God intervened. Now he says that he’s the happiest father in the world; Ana responds that she has "a father in heaven and my father on earth".
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| 7 year old Samuel Boutwell, child evangelist. |
"If you don’t repent you’re all going to hell. Like I said, worms’ll be eating, worms’ll be down there. Theys going be long worms."The Boutwell family and their support team take in a Philadelphia casino and Washington DC before finally arriving in New York, where Samuel is at first bewildered by a Hare Krishna procession and rival preachers, but his cute factor wins him a polite hearing from curious onlookers as he delivers an anti-evolution speech while perched on a wall. Alas, his father’s sandwich board condemning homosexuals to hell goes down rather less well, and the child is reduced to tears and calling for his mother as his father is harangued by an angry hippy.
Oh, and it's not just the Jesus Camp Christian sect they're indoctrinating either - there's even Assud the rabbit, who recently debuted on the Palestinian kid-targeted program “Pioneers of Tomorrow” and bears more than a passing resemblance to WB’s Bugs Bunny. The similarities stop there, as Assud says he will “get rid of the Jews” and will “eat them up.” Assud is the latest in a line of deceptively cute and fuzzy “Pioneers” characters—following martyred Farfour the mouse and Nahoul the bee—to take up Hamas’ cause in its long-standing clash with Israel. See the video here.
Religion poisons everything.
