Stella Immanuel's name is suddenly all over everyone's news feed. According to her Facebook page, she considers herself a “Physician, Author, Speaker, Entrepreneur, Deliverance Minister, God’s battle axe and weapon of war.” She's a practicing physician, and she was recently retweeted by Trump after she advocated for the use of Hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19 and called the usage of facemasks redundant. Beyond these pieces of bad advice, however, Dr. Immanuel sports a number of odd beliefs.
Here are just some of the things she's stated publicly:
Alien DNA is being used in medical treatments.
Scientists have located the gene that makes an individual religious and are developing a vaccine against it.
Medical problems like cysts, endometriosis, and infertility are caused by having sex with "spirit husbands" and "spirit wives," which she compares to succubi/incubi.
Harry Potter and Magic 8-Balls are all part of a plot to introduce children to witchcraft.
After seeing her name on my Twitter newsfeed, I did a bit of research into her background and found that she wrote a book entitled "10 Point Plan to Disciple America Back to God." I knew right away that I needed to read it.
This actually wasn't the most outlandish religious text I've read since I started studying theology. Given her beliefs, I was expecting something a lot stranger, but instead I was face-to-face with the Religious Right ideologies that I've seen before, but with a twist of cult-like obsession. It was almost the normal sort of bigotry I might expect to see from my conservative uncle on Facebook, but reading the details made it pretty creepy.
Immanuel opens the text with a letter to Americans that's full of dismay and despair. Right away, she establishes that she sees herself as a "prophet" (page 8), which is a little odd. Technically, a prophet is defined as anyone who is able to communicate directly with God and speaks for Him, like a mouthpiece. You'll see in a bit why she uses that word to describe herself. She also addresses her audience as "saints," which isn't nearly as strange as it sounds. A saint is anyone who is seen as holy or virtuous in the eyes of God, so it's pretty common to think of all believers as saints in their own right, even if they aren't a canonized, capital-S Saint.
Through her prophetess abilities, Immanuel claims that she feels the suffering that's ringing throughout America. And what kind of suffering would that be? Could it be the cries of minorities being killed by policemen? Could it be the hoarse whimpers of the homeless as they slowly starve on the streets?
No, it's the cries of parents who have children with ADHD.
"My heart bleeds every day as I see children on hard medicines for ADHD and behavioral problems. As beautiful as my job is as a pediatrician, I feel the helplessness of parents looking at me and to drugs to combat the craziness of their children. I see them zooked out on their ipads, iphones, tablets playing the very demonic games that has brought all these craziness in their minds" (page 9).
She goes on to say that medical diagnoses such as ADHD are caused by demons that are welcomed into the minds of our children via media. She thinks that America as a whole is going downhill in a similar manner, and that and an overall lack of God that has made our land "sick." If we return to God, she claims, then the core problems of our nation will be solved. Right away, we see some issues with the separation of church and state.
But it only gets worse.
In chapter two, Immanuel brings up a text written by Alice Bailey entitled "The 10-point Charter," in which Bailey plots ten moves that she claims would erase Christianity from the nation. Bailey is a well-known esoteric theosophical universalist. In other words, she was a hyper-spiritual religious thinker who believed that all religions ultimately believe in the same thing at the core of their ideologies. She took it one step further and believed that all religions will eventually merge into one because of how similar they are, which she referred to as the "New World Religion." Bailey died in 1949, but she's been the source of Christian paranoia ever since.
In my humble opinion, none of the ten points Bailey proposed would completely erase the faith even if they were performed perfectly; they would simply lessen Christianity's grasp on the politics of America. Again, Separation of church and state. For instance, some of the items on her list involve making abortion and divorce legal.
Needless to say, the very idea of someone trying to remove Christianity from our sacred nation has Dr. Immanuel in a fritz.
So, Immanuel has been praying, and she's been praying a lot. 5-7 hours daily, in fact. Don't get me wrong, I'm a devoted theologian, but I have hobbies outside of my faith and studies that help keep me sane. During one of her hours-long sessions, however, Immanuel claims that she heard the voice of God and "picked a pen and started writing frantically as the Holy Spirit ministered to [her], giving [her] a ten point plan to disciple America back to God." This explains why she called herself a prophet earlier.
So, here's what she thinks God wants us to do:
Place "prayer warriors" in our schools and prisons who host ministries and student-led prayer.
Teach children to respect authority, including their parents and teachers.
Support Christian marriages and get marriage counselors to teach the Biblical stance on marriage.
Teach abstinence and beef-up our pro-life organizations.
Raise deliverance ministers, counsellors, and prayer support for "those who are struggling with sexual immorality." (Yes, she means LGBT+ individuals.)
Mobilize people to fast all across the nations. All Christians should fast for one day out of the week.
Get America to listen to the Bible as they drive, do dishes, etc. Immanuel recommends a few apps that will do this for you.
Locate Christians in our government and pray for them.
Get local churches to pray for our nation and "charge the environment with fire." No, she does not explain what that means.
Spread the word of these ten points through social media. She helpfully provides a printable version in case you're inclined to hand out pamphlets.
These are your classic Evangelical/Baptist beliefs, but they're on steroids. The Christian concept of using prayer and fasting to try to affect the real world is absolutely wild to me, and she believes that the entire Christian population needs to do this in order to make any sort of difference. (You can learn more about Evangelicals and this attitude here.)
After that, Immanuel offers a series of prayers that the "prayer warriors" can use as they combat the evils of our nation. Some of these prayers are written by a guy named Pastor Titus Babalola, the founder of TBM International and author of the book "Disarming Your Enemy," which is also addressed to these "prayer warriors" they keep talking about. Even though he wrote a few, most of the prayers are written by Immanuel herself and include some very specific instructions. For instance, one of them must be said seven days in a row and must be accompanied by seven days of fasting.
The content of the prayers themselves are pretty typical and unexciting. One of them is even intended to help people who are living in poverty, which stuck out to me since most of the Religious Right doesn't seem to care about that population.
The book ends somewhat anti-climatically. The final page of text is a prayer just like the prayers before it, and then there are a few pages dedicated to advertising Immanuel's other books. There's also a bunch of quotes from George Washington in a series of ugly fonts, which is kinda weird.
I've definitely encountered more eccentric views from Christians in the past, but something about this text was particularly unnerving to me. Her more practical ideas are fairly in-line with the Religious Right, such as being pro-life, pro-abstinence, and anti-divorce, but the way she worded her beliefs puts me in fight-or-flight mode. Dr. Immanuel truly believes that we're on the path to apocalypse because of the separation of church and state, and she honestly thinks that fasting and prayer is going to change that.
If Trump was so fast to endorse her, it makes me wonder how many other people in our country think the way that she does.