There is a particular kind of courage required to criticise a movement you love, and Reverend Acheampong E. S. Builderman writes with exactly that courage in Charismatic Hoax: Unmasking the Deception Behind Superficial Spirituality. This is not a book written by an outsider taking cheap shots at Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. It is written by a pastor within that tradition, who believes in the gifts of the Spirit so deeply that he cannot bear to watch them counterfeited.
The book opens with a confession rather than an accusation. Reverend Builderman has watched sincere believers hand over their wages and their dignity to men who trafficked in fear and called it anointing. He has seen mothers weep at altars where money changed hands but no truth was exchanged. That grief, not spite, is what drives every page that follows.
His argument builds with real theological patience. He begins by tracing how colonialism conditioned the African mind toward dependency on external authority, then shows, with uncomfortable precision, how that same psychological pattern simply changed hosts. The colonial administrator has been replaced, in far too many pulpits, by the charismatic prophet. The consultation fee has replaced the shrine offering. The garment is new, he writes, but the body underneath is old.
The book then shifts to more critical territory. The author criticises what he calls the Corinthian error; the tendency to hold up the church at Corinth, known as the most spiritually gifted church in the New Testament, as a model to follow. However, Paul himself described it as the most carnal church he had written to. Reverend Builderman emphasises that spiritual gifts do not equate to true godliness. For example, Judas cast out demons, and Balaam prophesied correctly despite being corrupt and hired. The author highlights that a church can be abundant in spiritual gifts yet still be immature, refusing to let readers overlook this complex reality.
The chapters on the religious spirit and on proxy Christianity are the book's quiet centre. Reverend Builderman is less interested in exposing obvious frauds than in naming the subtler drift, the believer who cannot pray without a prophet's instruction, the congregation slowly trained to perform spirituality rather than live it. He offers four biblical tests for discernment, drawn straight from 1 John and 1 Corinthians, and a closing set of twenty searching questions that any reader could put to their own church without needing anyone else's permission.
What keeps the book from becoming merely a work of demolition is its constant return to the cross. Time and again, when the argument reaches its most severe point, the author pulls back to Paul's own remedy for a spectacle-obsessed church: not more gifts, but Christ crucified. That refusal to let the critique become the whole message is what gives the book its integrity.
This is not a comfortable read, and it is not meant to be. It is a fierce and closely reasoned defence of authentic charismatic faith against the very forces that have hollowed it out from within.