You may recall TV evangelist Kenneth Copeland when he was featured in the Australian satire show The Chasers War on Everything.
Copeland is now back in the news with a startling new revelation. You know what brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989? Fundamentalist Christian preachers. According to him, these preachers would walk up and down alongside the wall in East Germany, taunting it in the manner of Mohammed Ali and saying, “You’re going down!” And one day, it fell, just like that.
As an added bonus, the person Copeland reveals this to is none other than David Barton, notorious revisionist of American history, who has made a career out of telling the Christian rubes that the founders intended the United States to be run on Christian principles. No doubt he can add Copeland’s breathtaking revelation to his next book, where he shows that the entire world was intended to be run according to Christianity.
That Berlin wall thing makes me so angry. First people gave Reagan credit, and now this. What about actual dissidents behind the iron curtain? There were a bunch of them and they made it happen at great risk to themselves.
And of course it was inevitable that the wall would fall. There is no better way to convince a population that a country sucks to bad to even exist than to build a wall and shoot people who try to leave.
The fun thing being, he actually would have half a point, if he wasn’t taking things so literal -- some churches did play a pivotal part in the fall of the East German regime, and the so-called “Monday demonstrations” in Leipzig, which were one of the first cracks in the dam, originated with the “Monday prayers” at the St. Thomas church there -- nowadays widely considered the birthplace of the revolution.
Take a note that these were rather progressive protestant churches, however, and that their contribution to bringing down the wall consisted essentially in community organizing. So yes, prayer sessions did (help to) bring down the wall, just without divine intervention and within the context of churches that were far from being fundamentalist, and would probably hardly qualify as Christian by Copeland’s standards.
The peddlars of such drivel do not bother me so much those consume it. There must be very many of the latter given that they allow these nincompoops to make a good living from such outlandish claims.