"There's demonic influences that are very present, explicit and overt there [BLM], and it just made sense that why wouldn't they understand the spiritual aspect of it, right, it's just not a holy spirit, it's an evil spirit. . ."
Then a young African American tattoo artist, Fr. Turbo Qualls' background included drug use, witchcraft and Magick before he became a Christian as an Evangelical. He had been leading a Monday night Bible study and discussion group at a tattoo shop in California with other young, disaffected, punk-rock counter-culture kids, turned off by the overtly materialistic American culture and looking for solid truth. One of Turbo’s first encounters with Orthodox Christianity was the book “Youth Of the Apocalypse” published by Saint Herman of Alaska Monastery in Platina, California (founded by Fr Seraphim Rose). Once he read the book he discovered that some of the lyrics and ethos of the punk rock music scene had in fact been inspired by Orthodox Christianity, without being directly attributed to it. Through his reading and exploration Turbo discovered the Eastern Orthodox Church of “St Moses The Black” - the fourth-century Ethiopian Orthodox monk from Egypt. Turbo visited St Barnabas and became a catechumen, eventually becoming an Priest and iconographer.
In the video below, Fr. Turbo - with his unique wealth of knowledge - addresses the spiritual danger that lies in the Black Lives Matter movement.
"I saw things that the other part of my background - being involved with demonology and embracing, you know, quote-unquote, the occult - I saw things that were right off the bat like, 'nope, that's not what people think it is'. The tactics that were being used - sure there's various kind of like organizational activist tactics that were moved, that were used, are just general in any type of activist movement culture - but there were other things that were pulling from your animistic religion. There's things that were being pulled into that function on a spiritual level and there was an interview in particular where one of the founders was speaking explicitly about those influences in BLM and that made me go like, 'yep, I see that', because another thing there is I'm very keen on the demonic influence of Karl Marx as well and so when people speak to me about Communism, it's never about just this kind of like psychological socioeconomic philosophy, it's much deeper than that. There's demonic influences that are very present, explicit and overt there, and it just made sense that why wouldn't they understand the spiritual aspect of it, right, it's just not a holy spirit, it's an evil spirit".
WATCH FULL INTERVIEW: