Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s spiritual guide is Rikki Doolan, and Doolan’s is Uebert Angel, who is a black Zimbabwean immigrant and a naturalised British citizen, as well as a heretic and probably a crook. The probable crookery need not detain us here. But what of the heresy?
Donald Trump grew up in the Marble Collegiate Church of Norman Vincent Peale, who even took his first wedding there. The Power of Positive Thinking was the old mainline American Protestant tradition reconfigured by the New Thought movement. The practically indistinguishable Word of Faith movement is that reconfiguration of Pentecostalism, and is exemplified by Trump’s close ally, Paula White. As the prosperity gospel, although there are also plenty of other things wrong with it, it is preached both by White and by Angel.
The mainline has become the oldline by turning to secularism and paganism, very much in the liberal Catholic mould of agreeing with whoever it was talking to by sending different people to different encounters. But it is White who has ties to the Unification Church that the Tokyo District Court recently ordered to liquidate its assets because of its role in the assassination of Shinzo Abe, and through that to the Nation of Islam, with which the Unification Church organises mass events and which promotes Dianetics, the basis of Scientology. Such is the sea in which Angel swims. Pulling Yaxley-Lennon behind him. But there is a better way. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
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