Argentinian president criticised left-wing ideology and claimed to defend Christian values. "His statements were completely contrary to the gospel”, critics say.
Javier Milei, during his speech at the Puerta del Cielo church in Chaco, Argentina. / Casa Rosada.
Argentinian president Javier Milei, attended the inauguration of the Portal del Cielo (Heaven's Gate), the new temple of the International Christian Church in Chaco with a capacity of over 10,000 people.
The building of the Portal del Cielo took a decade. According to the pastor Jorge Ledesma, the work was financed entirely in cash, and the building was inspired by a spiritual prophecy he received 17 years ago, as reported by Infobae.
The opening of the reportedly largest evangelical auditorium in Argentina was part of the two-day World Congress of Invasion of God's Love, a Christian leadership meeting.
Tickets to the event ranged from $30,000 Argentine Pesos to $100,000 (between 20 and 60 euros) in the VIP areas. The cheapest tickets (at $20,000) sold out quickly.
Given the magnitude of the event, the local government of the city of Chaco implemented a large-scale security operation involving at least 120 police officers.
Founded in 1994 by Jorge and Alicia Ledesma, the International Christian Church started with just a small group. It now has over 25,000 worshippers per week and claims to have 50,000 active members.
This group is part of the worldwide Pentecostal charismatic movement and has 166 congregations in 66 countries, including 45,000 members in Argentina.
Javier Milei is the first president of Argentina to give a speech in an evangelical church.
“President Milei has had a non-religious spiritual relationship with pastor Ledesma for a several years now. They first met during the 2023 campaign”, an official from Chaco told the Argentinian newspaper La Nación.
In his speech, Milei quoted Bible verses and criticised the socialist ideas of social justice, income redistribution and the phrase attributed to Eva Perón, which says “where there is a need, a right is born”.
“If Judeo-Christian values have been an endless source of progress, the anti-values of the left lead to poverty, misery and underdevelopment”, said president Milei.
“The first thing they attack when they begin to advance is people's faith. They want to replace the God of heaven with the god of the state, which the envious and resentful use to rob good people of the fruits of their labour”, he added.
The president stressed that Judeo-Christian culture “profoundly guides” the design of his policies. “The 2023 elections were nothing more than the Argentinian people reuniting with the values of freedom and rejecting the false god of the state”.
Milei pointed out that the state is a diabolical concept and justified his view with passages from the Old Testament and the temptation of Jesus in the desert when Satan offered Jesus the kingdoms of the world. “That is the state”, said Milei.
The president described leftist ideology as a “virus in people's heads” that fills them with “hatred and resentment”. “Since when did a capital sin become a virtue? They are not going to break us; we know the Holy Scriptures”.
“During the last decades, the left has imposed a single discourse on justice, defining it only in distributive terms. But this is not the true meaning of justice because, to give to some, you have to take from others. As we learnt the hard way in Argentina, the one who gives out gets the better part”.
“But fortunately, they are starting to end up in jail”, said Milei, referring to the prison sentence of former president of Argentin, Cristina Kirchner.
Milei's participation in the event has sparked a heated debate about the involvement of evangelical churches in Argentinian politics in recent years.
Evangelical pastor Norberto Saracco is one of the critical voices that have spoken out against Milei's participation.
Saracco has led the evangelical Christian church Buenas Nuevas (Good News) for almost 40 years. He is the co-founder of the Council of Pastors of the City of Buenos Aires, and a member of the board of directors of the Christian Alliance of Evangelical Churches of Argentina (Aciera), the national Evangelical Alliance.
He lamented that “the sacred place of the pulpit was lent to the president, in a clear partisan act, to address a diatribe full of false arguments, malicious distortions, and statements that are completely contrary to the teachings of the gospel”.
The Aciera representative recalled that “no president has ever given a speech at a Jewish, Catholic or Muslim religious event. These religious groups have a respect for sacred spaces and events that we evangelicals obviously lack”.
Regarding the relationship between capitalism and Protestantism, about which Milei spoke, the pastor underlined that “the president, or those who write his speeches, forget or ignore that slavery and racism were developed and sustained in capitalist and Protestant societies such as the United States and England”.
“The countries with the best standard of living for all, not just for a few, are the Scandinavian countries. They are based on Protestant principles, but they are applied by a very present state”.
Also Walter Ghione, a politician and evangelical leader, warned that Milei made “serious mistakes” in his speech when he said that “the state itself represents evil”.
“That idea contradicts biblical history as well as Christian theology. The state is not a moral entity in itself; it is inert and takes on the character of those who govern it and the principles by which they do so”, he said, adding that Romans 13:1 says that all authority comes from God, although it can be misused when those who exercise it turn away from Him.
Moreover, the pastor recalled that social justice does not have a Marxist but a Christian origin, although it was later “ideologised”. “It was a model of justice that did not condemn wealth, but did condemn selfish accumulation and the oppression of the weak”, says Ghione.
"That is why reducing social justice to ‘envy with rhetoric’ is a dangerous oversimplification. True social justice is not about robbing from some to give to others, but about creating conditions in which human dignity, work and solidarity are respected as gifts from God”, concluded Ghione.
Jorge Fernández, an Argentinian evangelical pastor living in Spain, who is currently the press officer of the Federation of Evangelical Religious Entities of Spain (FEREDE), also expressed his discomfort with both Milei's speech and the invitation to take the pulpit.
“Latin evangelicals have not yet sufficiently repented for the shame of giving the pulpit of some of our churches to leading politicians such as Augusto Pinochet and Efraín Ríos Montt”, both of them dictators, he said.
“Some will say that it is not the same thing, that Milei is a legitimate democratic president and not a coup leader. That is true, but he is still a president, the highest representative of political power in a republic, and his place is in government, not the pulpit of the Church of Jesus Christ”, stressed Fernández.
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