John Ensign's Church Head Endorsed Sex-With-Succubus Economic Theory

What drives economic boom-and-bust cycles and stock market fluctuations ? In the late 1970's, the Texas oil tycoon Hunt brothers caused a mammoth speculative bubble in world silver prices by buying up between fifty and seventy five percent of the precious metal. This spring, 2009, a new Rolling Stone Magazine story claimed that the financial investment firm Goldman Sachs "has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression."

But Van Nuys, California based megachurch pastor Jack Hayford, current head of sex-scandal embroiled GOP Senator John Ensign's religious denomination, has endorsed a theory proposing that a supernatural mechanism drove down Japanese stock market prices during the early 1990's: the Japanese emperor's alleged sexual intercourse with a "sky goddess" who, according to the theory, might be a succubus.

[image, right: a 20th Century succubus]

Footage from a 1993 evangelical video shows Hayford enthusiastically introducing and endorsing a talk during which his colleague C. Peter Wagner claimed that the early 1990's economic downturn of the Japanese economy was due to what Wagner depicted as a Shinto ritual in which Japanese emperors have sexual intercourse with a demonic sky-goddess being that, posited Wagner, may have been a succubus. Wagner blamed slack Japanese stock prices on the alleged tryst. As British religious scholar Richard Bartholomew notes, C. Peter Wagner's treatment of the Shinto ceremony is factually dubious on a number of counts.

US GOP Senator John Ensign belongs to the 5-10 million member (estimates vary) denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, which Church on The Way Pastor Jack Hayford has headed for 5 years. Hayford gave the benediction at former president George W. Bush's 2001 inaugural prayer service. In 2006 Senator Ensign addressed the Foursquare Gospel International Church's yearly convention via a videotaped message. In 2003, Ensign traveled to Philadelphia and addressed the yearly Foursquare Gospel convention in person.

Jack Hayford has also been one of the regularly featured speakers at Promise Keepers events. The Promise Keepers, a men's ministry which John Ensign joined in college, held rallies during the 1990's with up to several hundred thousand participants and has promoted evangelists who practice demon deliverance, otherwise known as exorcism.