Jamaica is a deeply Christian country. Anyone with working eyes can tell you that. On almost every street you will find at least two churches, of different denominations, and you will find just as many street preachers and people holding revivals. This does not even account for the open-air and tent-travelling evangelists who come by for a week or two to do baptisms and speak the good word, getting people in a religious frame of mind.
When people think of the church in Jamaica, they often think of mainline denominational churches like the Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian. These are churches with the big and pretty buildings at which we all marvel at some point in time, and were once time the major churches on the island. This is no longer the case; the old churches are dying, and are being replaced by non-denominational churches or straight-up evangelical churches.
I normally wouldn’t care and just view it as an outsider. I, after all, hold no faith, but I am forced to pay attention because the evangelical churches and organizations popping up do not seem to be organic home-grown things. Instead, they seem to have got either inspiration, funding or both from nefarious influences abroad, namely the Christian far right in the US.
Groups like the Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society and the Love March Movement are the two major groups representing the social interests of this segment of the Church, and both openly parrot and mimic their counterparts in the US. On issues like abortion and homosexuality we see where they have taken talking points straight from the US. And while many may be okay with what they have to say regarding gay rights and abortion, they go further, even if they don’t openly say it.
These groups believe that a woman’s place is in the home, barefoot and pregnant, submissive to her husband. If we are frank, they want women out of the social sphere (workplace, schools) and have them as they were in their idyllic version of the US circa 1950s.
They are also closet racists, as seen with their holding a vigil for the murdered US far-right activist Charlie Kirk, the man who said that blacks were better during slavery, that we are subhuman and need to be exterminated or otherwise removed from the US. He was many things, but he was not doing what most practicing Christians would call evangelizing; he was hate-mongering and race-baiting.
Rather than preach against homelessness, landlessness, bad jobs or the high rates or interpersonal violence, these people have found time to preach against gays and abortions, things which are not even on the radar of our politicians and doing so in a way that has nothing to do with the local context. They even found time to stand up and endorse Israel in its genocide against Gaza (a move that again runs counter to mainline churches) but are eerily silent on the allegations against the Jamaica Constabulary Force of extrajudicial killings or the gangs murdering innocents.
The US Christian right is insidious; it infects denominations like Pentecostalism with health and wealth doctrine, and then promotes the fallacy that it is a sin to have a strong state and safety nets. It endorses extrajudicial killings and the making of a police state, all in the name of destroying a non-existent enemy or an enemy who is preaching a doctrine close to what Christ taught.
We have seen where this ends, be it El Salvador, Brazil, or any other Latin American nation that has had a despotic-leaning leader in the past 20 years, and if we are honest, during the Cold War. This type of Christianity is not Christian at all. Instead it is a political movement masquerading as religious, because if it did otherwise it would not have nearly as much support as it currently does.
As has been noted by others, they refuse to speak out on our national issues — the abuse of minors, our high murder rate — and they, up to now, have done nothing as it relates to hurricane relief. With that being the case, can we really say that these bodies that only come to action when it means infringing on the rights of certain groups are Christian?
We see mainline churches still doing outreach even with the damage they have suffered, why do these groups not do the same? The answer is that Christianity is merely a tool for them to achieve the primary goal of state power, it is because the Christianity they practice is not the Christianity indigenous to the island, one borne out of struggle and which is closer to liberation theology than it is to the far right evangelical movement.
We should be extremely wary of hate mongers who dress up in religious garb and use religious language. They give religion a bad name, sully it with things it should never be a part of, and in the end drive people away from organized religion altogether.
This foreign import must be rejected, and the indigenous form must be allowed to flourish to its fullest potential. This is not a dig at non-denominational churches or evangelicals; this is a dig against the foreign-funded ones and the ones that take inspiration from the far right. They must be challenged, shown to be wrong, or we risk repeating the errors of other countries.
