My take on Helen Ukpabio

Warning! Below is my opinion.  I do not make a habit of typing things on this blog that I do not source.

I cannot stress enough that Christianity is a big religion.  Africa is a big continent.  Nigeria is a big place.  I am not trying to make any blanket statements. While I see similarities between Congolese witchcraft and the witchcraft in the Nigerian delta, I do not know enough to connect the two.  Like all religion, we cannot look at child witches myopically.

I don't think that anyone is saying that Lady Apostle Helen Ukpabio is a witch killer.  As far as I know, she has never directly harmed a child.  As far as I know, she does not charge for delivering children from witchcraft.  What is being alleged is much more broad.  Ukpabio presides over more than a hundred churches.  She produced several movies about child witches.  While she maintains that these movies are just as fictional as Harry Potter, I disagree. In the western world, witches and wizards are largely fictional characters.  J.K. Rowling does not believe in witchcraft.  In her book, she goes to great lengths to make her magic so fanciful that it cannot be replicated.  Can you find me an unicorn hair or a phoenix feather for your wand?  Unlike Rowling, Ukpabio believes in witchcraft.  She wrote a non-fiction work on how to identify child witches.  The comparison is not with Harry Potter, but with the Left Behind series.  In the Left Behind series, the authors write fiction that they believe to be representative of the facts.  Ukpabio says the movies are fiction, but she teaches the spiritual facts behind the fiction.

Because of her bloody movies about child witches and her broad ministry proclaiming child witches, she is being blamed for the majority of the child witch crisis. The fact of the matter is that child witches do not exist. She claims that these witches are harming people, but it is the make believe that harms people. She could be teaching them about modern medicine. She could be teaching people they should not be superstitiously scared of their own children. Instead she teaches that their child has the power to magically kill them. There is no reason that children should be taught that they are witches. This superstitious teaching is being used by people as an excuse to kill children.

Far from solving the problem, she travels the world blaming the problem on an atheist conspiracy.  Rightly she divines that her biggest opponents do not only not believe in mermaids and witchcraft. They deny the existence of God Himself.  As evangelical Christians this should outrage us, but not for the reasons that she suggests.  An area of the world that boasts allegedly the largest amount of churches proportional to the population is harming thousands of children.  Why should the atheists be front and center dealing with this problem?