Pastor Manché: gay conversions, end times, anti-vax conspirator and Trump love

A short history of a religious right-wing a-hole

Gordon John Manché actually has a music video on YouTube

I don’t know when Gordon John-Manché – a one-time dancer whose American bible study classes brought him back to Malta as an evangelist pastor – first bleeped onto our radars.

But in 2011, I remember him being faced down by protest by gay rights activists who had clocked a gay conversion event – ‘gay no more’ – connected to his River Of Love evangelical congregation.

Malta then was in the throes of a massive social revolution that would propel Labour’s civil rights programme into power. People like Manché were only one of several right-wing conservatives enjoying the comfort of Nationalist hypocrisy (there was also the anti-abortionist Paul Vincenti hoping to resurrect his aborted attempt to entrench abortion in the Maltese Constitution). Since then, all these right-wing conservatives have worked hard to put the spokes in the wheel of attempts to legislate PGD testing for IVF, and send the much-needed Equality Bill on the backburner.

Now Manché has been finding a compliant police force and its lily-livered prosecution unit to prosecute his bullshit criminal reports against satirists who hooked on Matt Bonanno’s ‘bomb the pastor’ quip... it feels like the Li Tkisser Sewwi saga once again, and Labour is caught napping because its police force is so busy not prosecuting corruption it might as well prosecute comedians and satirists and theatre-makers through the Electronic Misuse Act (since censorship laws are no more…).

Since 2011, the allegations of covert gay conversion therapy have dogged Manché and his psychologist wife, always denied; they have not been helped by their associate Matthew Grech’s militancy on gay conversion and his prosecution on charges of breaching Malta’s criminalisation of these harmful practices are a major test for the island.

What is clear is that Manché represents all that is wrong about the hypocrisy of the religious right in Malta.

Days before the 2013 election, Manché told his flock that politicians proposing civil unions were being “arrogant”, claiming civil unions would not pass in a popular referendum. Then in 2014, he presented a petition signed by over 10,000 calling on MPs not to introduce gay unions and gay adoptions. He claimed he could get 10% of the electorate’s signatures for a referendum to abrogate a future law on civil unions. Today, Malta’s marriage equality is set in stone.

He whips up a frenzy about the so called “end-times”, having promised the rapture back in 2017 for his followers; how many times has he yet to proclaim the end of the world for his congregation?

Then he goes on a rant against journalists and “liberal media” when Biden won the US election in November 2020... and starts speaking in tongues. Important note: Manché actually believes Donald Trump’s mission in life is “breaking the build-up to the new world order”.

And it is at this point that Manché is clearly carving himself a role as the leader of all things religious-nuttery: revealing he might not be vaccinated because... he says... government restrictions against the unvaccinated are part of a global conspiracy heralding “the mark of the Beast” – or allegiance to the antichrist. Back in September 2020 during one of his sermons, he claimed the ‘mark’ would consign people to Hell. “I am preparing you... I will take no vaccination, in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. I have already been vaccinated by the blood of Christ, the Holy Spirit, God’s word.”

He also claimed that those who do not accept the ‘mark’ will have their liberty threatened.

“The spirit of the antichrist has long been here, and the Beast is forming, and the antichrist’s movement is growing. We are nearing end-times... God will bring upon us plagues. If ours is the generation that will witness Christ’s second coming, then I would not be surprised that this is a plague from God. I think we are very close... that our generation will witness the second coming. Jesus will take back His people, protecting them from the plagues on the world... such as viruses.”

I wish Jesus’d take you back.