Pip: There’s a long tradition of prophets in Christianity — and then there’s the tradition of people who found out prophecy pays better when you also control the credit card reader.

Mara: Today we’re looking at material from Babylon Today covering the exploitation that happens when spiritual authority gets weaponized for financial gain. Let’s start with one of the most disturbing cases they document.

The False Prophet and The “Drunk” Woman

Pip: The setup here is a revival service in Kernersville, North Carolina, where a preacher named Richard Hayes told a woman who we will call Janet that if she sewed a seed — meaning gave money — God would honor a prophecy made over her.

Mara: The post describes what followed in plain terms: “Richard Hayes instructed the church assistants to REMOVE JANET’S CREDIT CARD FROM HER WALLET, AND PUT IT IN HER HAND then held Janet’s hand and SWIPED IT IN THE CHURCHES CREDIT CARD READER. All of this was done while she was seemingly unconscious.”

Pip: So the upshot is that a woman in a dissociated, vulnerable state had her credit card physically removed from her wallet and charged over twelve hundred dollars — by the man running the service.

Mara: And when Hayes realized she’d need to sign the receipt, he had someone hold her hand and put a mark on the paper. Then he left for a movie theater. The post is direct: this is blatant criminal activity, not a gray area of enthusiastic fundraising.

Pip: The “drunk in the spirit” framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting here — it’s the mechanism that makes Janet appear to consent while being in no state to do so.

Mara: The post pushes back on that framing directly, asking readers to be honest with themselves about whether anything actually changed after being slain in the spirit — and pointing out that a genuine encounter with God would leave a mark, not just a floor burn.

Pip: There’s a line that lands hard: “The floor is FILTHY and God didn’t make you lie on a filthy floor.” That’s not theology — that’s someone trying to hand people their dignity back.

Mara: The post closes with 2 Timothy Chapter 4, the passage about people heaping up teachers who tell them what they want to hear. The warning is that the appetite for this kind of performance creates the market for people like Hayes.

Pip: And the market, apparently, runs on envelopes, vows, and a credit card reader — which brings us to the question of what keeps these structures standing.

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Mara: The pattern here is consistent — spiritual language used to lower resistance, then a transaction.

Pip: Next time, we keep following the money. It tends to lead somewhere.