Cult Members Keep Trying to Die, Even After Rescue

UPDATE May 14, 2023 12:35 PM CDT

The death toll from a Kenyan doomsday cult whose members fatally starved themselves has surpassed 300, making it "one of the worst cult-related tragedies in recent history," per Reuters. The adjusted number came after authorities exhumed 19 more bodies from mass graves in the nation's southeastern Shakahola Forest. A regional official says more than 600 people believed to have belonged to the Good News International Church, led by self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie, are still missing. Meanwhile, on Monday, 65 parishioners rescued from the site were charged with attempted suicide after staging a hunger strike at the shelter where they were being kept, per the AP. They've since been moved to a jail. A government official says Mackenzie, who's in custody and being held without bail, could be hit with terrorism or genocide-related charges.

May 14, 2023 12:35 PM CDT

Authorities are still exhuming and trying to identify bodies that were placed in shallow graves in the wilderness of an 800-acre site in southeastern Kenya, the home of an evangelical Christian doomsday cult whose followers were told to starve themselves until death so they could meet Jesus. On Saturday, the death toll climbed to 201, per the AP. More than 600 people still are missing. The country is wrestling now with questions, including how such a thing could happen and how law enforcement agencies could have been unaware of it. The debate involves whether religious freedom, which the Kenyan Constitution guarantees, should be curbed. The New York Times looks at how Kenya reached this point and what happened in the Shakahola Forest.

A televangelist marketed the property as a sanctuary from the impending apocalypse and sold plots, though he didn't own the land. The arrival of the pandemic in 2020 boosted Paul Mackenzie's credibility. "It was a normal church at the beginning," said the original property owner's daughter. A former deputy pastor said that was derailed by Mackenzie's "false prophecies" about the world ending: "His main interest became making money, not preaching to the world." In January, Mackenzie said he had new instructions for the hundreds of people living at the property: mass suicide by starvation. Children should "fast in the sun so they would die faster," he was quoted as saying. Women would do the same in March and April, then the men. Mackenzie would stay alive to help others "meet Jesus," then starve himself before the world ended.

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Mackenzie, who had been arrested before, is in custody. "People are very angry and blame Mackenzie, but I blame the government," said a member of another evangelical church. Many evangelical churches operate independently of any larger organization, overseen only by their pastor. President William Ruto Half, an evangelical himself whose wife is an evangelical preacher, has hesitated to enact restrictions on them; evangelicals make up half the nation's population. But he's now asked church leaders and legal experts for ideas. A rights activist who went to Shakahola in March wants oversight. When he tried to help the people he saw dying, they cursed him. "I wanted these starving people to survive, but they wanted to die and meet Jesus," Victor Kaudo said. "What do we do? Does freedom of worship supersede the right to life?" The full Times piece can be found here. (More Kenya stories.)