Fundamentalists and Radicals: The AfD’s Evangelical Network

A member of the Bundestag for the AfD is building a worldwide network of fundamentalist Christians. They fight according to research by Contrasts and the “taz” mainly homosexuals and want to influence legislation.

The AfD member of the Bundestag Waldemar Herdt has established contacts with right-wing evangelicals and homophobic activists on at least four continents. It is an environment that, under the guise of Christian values, combats lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.

AfD MP fears “Sodom and Gomorrah”

The German legislation has changed so much under pressure from non-believers that he fears that one will soon end up in “Sodom and Gomorrah”, claims Herdt in an interview with the ARD political magazine Contrasts and the “taz”. He would like to see a network of right-wing conservatives as a counterbalance, Herdt continued.

Herdt, himself a Russian-German, presented his plans for the first time in 2019 on Russian parliamentary television, and a few months later the AfD founded a so-called “Interparliamentary Human Rights Commission” (IPMK) in the Bundestag. According to the parliamentary group, the committee should campaign for “Christian conservative values”, and Herdt was elected as spokesman. Joint research by Contrasts and the “taz” show that Herdt created structures with the same IPMK for a network that he himself had built up over the years.

Homophobic activism

Many of his contacts are active as clergymen, and he too used to act as a preacher. Herdt is a member of “Lebensquelle”, a Russian-German Pentecostal church in Osnabrück. The Pentecostal movement interprets the Bible literally. Apparently followers of the “source of life” believe that there are demons and that homosexuals are afflicted by such. A pastor even preached there that one could “trample” such demons. Herdt protests across the board Contrasts and the “taz”, the Free Church has nothing to do with his travels. His aim is to achieve a practical goal.

The AfD’s network, the IPMK, is supposed to work out resolutions that will be included in legislative initiatives. Parliamentarians and experts from 30 countries have joined the body. Her spokesman, Herdt, does not want to reveal who exactly when asked. However, in some cases it is known who attended such meetings. An online conference on extremism hosted by the IPMK was also attended by members of the Duma, as well as Sam Brownback, former US Ambassador for Religious Freedom under the administration of Donald Trump and a vocal opponent of LGBT rights.

Global agenda

Herdt recently put out feelers to South America. In the National Congress of Brazil devout MPs have great influence. The country’s evangelical elite is looking for closeness to the new right, especially the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

The anthropologist Christina Vital suspects that Brazil’s evangelicals want to turn their agenda into a global issue. “To do this, they connect with numerous forces around the world and operate in international networks,” she says. So far, there have been few contacts with Europe, and certainly not with Germany.

Herdt is apparently working to change this. In March he traveled to Brazil and met, among others, the high-ranking government member Marco Feliciano. He is considered the most important link between free churches and politics, but was noticed several times through racist and homophobic statements.

Brazilian analysts believe that the country could play a leading role for Christian rights after Donald Trump was voted out of office as US president. Herdt might then already be well connected. According to him, representatives from Brazil have also joined the IPMK.

Influence on LGBT laws

Herdt also maintains close ties to Alexey Ledyaev. The Latvian preacher, with whom he is friends according to his own account, is the head of the “Watchmen on the Wall”. The main purpose of this evangelical group is the fight against homosexuality. Ledyaev founded the “Watchmen” together with the US pastor Scott Lively, who wrote a book as early as the 1990s in which he constructed a conspiracy story about alleged connections between homosexuality and the crimes of the National Socialists.

In Uganda, where politicians have repeatedly called for the death penalty for homosexuals, Lively campaigned years ago for a law that provided draconian penalties for LGBT people. In 2012 he gave an address to Parliament. The law came into force, only the constitutional court of the East African country stepped in. A US court later concluded that Lively’s influence was aiding and abetting the “demonization, intimidation and harm of LGBT people”. In doing so, he violated international law. Such a law seems hard to imagine in Germany. The Lively case, however, gives an idea of ​​what it can mean if radical activists elsewhere interfere with LGBT legislation – much as the IPMK appears to have in mind.

No fear of contact with radical forces

The Bundestag member Herdt appeared in 2018 together with Scott Lively at an event of the “Watchmen”. Herdt says Contrasts and the “taz”, the views of the group correspond to his views. He’s also not afraid of being associated with Lively. Lively even mentions him on his website. There it was recently said that the AfD politician would award the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán a so-called human rights award for his anti-LGBT law.

In the name of the “World League of Citizens and Civil Society Associations”, an organization from Kyrgyzstan that joined the IPMK in March – at the invitation of Herdt. She previously awarded her “human rights award” to Lively and Chechnya’s authoritarian ruler Ramzan Kadyrov, who reportedly has homosexuals imprisoned and tortured. Last weekend, the organization announced that it would soon also be honoring Herdt – because of his commitment to what it calls “traditional, family-friendly and national values”.

Different understanding of human rights

Herdt says that for him human rights meant three things above all: the right to life, the right to work, and the right to believe. In a study in June, however, the German Institute for Human Rights came to the conclusion that, from a human rights theoretical point of view, the AfD represents positions that are “not based on the Basic Law”.