Barmy Army plans to use force to impose Christianity on non-believers

WHEN we posted a piece recently on Christian “healer” Todd “Bam” Bentley, we realised at the time that he was clearly wired to the moon. What we didn’t know is that he is a lot more deranged than we initially thought.

How’s this for evidence? Bentley tells his followers that he’s seen King David and spoken with the Apostle Paul in heaven.

And guess what?:

He was looking very Jewish.

Paul, that is.

What, we wonder, do the letters DNA stand for on Bentley's site?

But Bentley is not a clown to be laughed at. According to this in-depth investigation, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaven-headed Canadian preacher has tattooed across his sternum military dog tags that read “Joel’s Army.” They’re evidence of Bentley’s generalship in a rapidly growing apocalyptic movement that’s gone largely unnoticed by watchdogs of the theocratic right.

According to Bentley and a handful of other “hyper-charismatic” preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel’s Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian “dominion” on non-believers.

Bentley declares on his Fresh Fire ministry school website in British Columbia, Canada – motto: “Battle for the lost multitudes with love and the raw power of God!”:

An end-time army has one common purpose – to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion. The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel’s Army …  Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God’s kingdom on earth.

Note the word “aggressive”.

Joel’s Army followers, many of them teenagers and young adults who believe they’re members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world, are breaking away in droves from mainline Pentecostal churches. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they base their beliefs on an esoteric reading of the second chapter of the Old Testament Book of Joel, in which an avenging swarm of locusts attacks Israel. In their view, the locusts are a metaphor for Joel’s Army.

Those sounding the alarm about Joel’s Army are not secular foes of the Christian Right, few of whom are even aware of the movement or how widespread it’s become in the past decade.

Instead, Joel’s Army critics are mostly conservative Christians, either neo-Pentecostals who left the movement in disgust or evangelical Christians who fear that Joel’s Army preachers are stealing their flocks, even sending spies to infiltrate their own congregations and sway their young people to heresy. And they say the movement is becoming frightening.

The Discernment Research Group, a Christian watchdog group that tracks what they call heresies or cults within Christianity, says:

The pitch and intensity of the military rhetoric of this branch of the global Dominionist movement has substantially increased since the beginning of 2008. One can only wonder how long before this transforms into real warfare with actual warriors.

Joel’s Army believers are hard-core Christian dominionists, meaning they believe that America, along with the rest of the world, should be governed by conservative Christians and a conservative Christian interpretation of biblical law. There is no room in their doctrine for democracy or pluralism.

Sounds as if they’ve been taking lessons from the Muslims.