I want to take a moment to talk about a bit of my evangelical history. Does anyone else remember the name Silvania Machado? Or maybe the “glory dust” phenomenon?
Back about 2001 or so, my church got interested in this woman from Brazil, who (it was claimed) manifested “gold dust” from her hands and hair. She’d been doing this for a handful of years, since about 1996 or so. People who witnessed her ministry in person also claimed that their hands would spontaneously manifest gold-flecked oil; there were several similar manifestations of unusual gold-glittering and sparkling “glory” signs associated with Silvania. The famous – or infamous – Bethel Church in Redding, California has been the nexus of a lot of this supposed supernatural manifestation for quite some time.
Our church had been through an extended season of “revival” related to the 1994 “holy laughter” events that started in Toronto, known to many as the Toronto Blessing, and we spent four months living through some rather unusual manifestations of God’s presence. We were primed by our former experiences to expect tangible manifestations of God’s glory. So this idea of gold dust showing up on a person, as strange as it was, was hardly unbelievable to us.
So our pastor invited Silvania Machado to come minister at our church.
Now, please know that in my daily job life, I’m a test engineer with about 35 years of scientific experience in looking at hard data and calling things as I see them, even when those conclusions make people unhappy. I approach my faith with every bit of mental integrity that I bring to my job.
But I was also raised in evangelical spaces, where we were trained that faith sometimes meant shoving down our doubts, because God might offend our minds when God chooses to do something outside our existing experiences. We were supposed to rely on our “spiritual knower,” our discernment, to tell when something was spiritually true even when our mind rebelled. In discussing situations like Silvania’s ministry, our pastor often talked about how God many times asked him to trust the Holy Spirit even when it required going against some doctrinal thing he’d been taught by his church – like growing up Baptist and becoming a charismatic and discovering that speaking in tongues and healing and such manifestations of the Holy Spirit were actually not demonic after all. So, I’d been very carefully taught – and maybe you’d prefer the word “groomed” – to surrender my mind to spiritual things.
By the time she arrived, the church leadership team had been well-prepared for this visit – the stories about this lady and the miraculous things that were happening were well-known to us already. Given this training (or grooming, depending on your perspective) I was prepared to be uncomfortable but to sit with that discomfort of the mind but let my spirit discern the truth or falsehood of what I saw.
Well, she showed up, and it was just as weird as I imagined.
Shortly after being introduced, she raised her hands to her head and mussed up her hair, and cascades of golden flakes began pouring down onto a Bible held under her head.
Naturally, the reaction in the sanctuary was immediate, and it was mixed. Some were jumping up to see it closer. But there were also some people leaning back in their seats with an uncomfortable look.
Based on that supposedly-miraculous demonstration, she then gave an innocuous message through a translator, which encouraged us to press in to the Lord and experience His presence, which really didn’t raise any alarm bells in my spirit, and concluded with some prophetic proclamations.
Despite my background with the church and the 1994 revival, and my pastor’s encouragements, I was one of the uncomfortable ones. Although I had nothing against what she’d said from the pulpit, something didn’t feel right. In particular, the hands-through-the-hair looked very odd to me – and made me immediately think she’d pre-loaded her hair with glitter, and used a solid layer of hairspray to stabilize things until she was ready. And naturally, nobody had inspected her hair BEFORE this display – despite everyone who knew about her before her visit knowing exactly what was about to happen.
Being the test engineer that I am, after the service I collected some of that “gold dust” that had ended up on the communion table, and I scanned it at high resolution – and found that it was composed of perfectly square pieces, all exactly the same size – exactly as if it was a very fine, and entirely manmade, glitter.
I did more research, and found reputable sources and credible witnesses saying that they’d assayed the powder and found it contained zero metallic gold, and was mostly plastic. Those who claimed it did contain gold apparently did so without any scientific tests. There was exactly zero credible evidence that this sparkly stuff was real gold, or anything other than common glitter.
In retrospect, I’m absolutely certain the “gold dust” that I had in my possession, that had fallen from Silvania’s head, was manmade. In a word, I believe it was simply storebought glitter. Real gold flakes would be random sizes and shapes.
If you’re watching on my video channel, here’s a high-resolution scan I made the day after Silvania visited our church.
I still have an email from a few days after these events at the church building, and I spent a page or so telling a friend about my feelings and concerns. In that email, I wrote
“I wonder… does testing a miracle make it unreal? Would God allow me, in testing this, to falsely conclude its error, simply because I do not believe it and want to test it? For example, would someone somehow able to perform chemical analysis on Jesus’ Water-To-Wine miracle come up with positive proof it was a fraud? There is a school of thought that says that God will not allow positive proof of His existence or actions, because to do so would remove the requirement for faith. I tend to lean this way. I wonder if the lack of faith makes the data change…”
That sounds, in retrospect, a bit like the Schrödinger’s Cat problem: as long as I didn’t open the box and look inside, I could continue to believe the cat was still alive – in some sense the cat is neither alive nor dead until you check. But open the box, and you change the situation, and now a conclusion must be reached. I could choose to believe in this gold dust miracle, as long as I didn’t test it. But as soon as I put that stuff under a microsl’cope, I’d corrupted it. I’d opened the box, and I’d found that it wasn’t gold. It was glitter. In my take on Schrödinger’s experiment, the cat was now dead.
Come to think of it, that feels a bit like an inverse of the Catholic transubstantiation thing, where you have to have faith that in the process of taking communion, it is literally transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus… but heaven forbid you do any tests, because that would be a lack of faith, and it would be ineffective. Probably – as a non-Catholic – I don’t understand the actual Catholic thinking, but it feels to me like a similar problem to this gold dust versus glitter thinking.
But ultimately, I brought my God-given intellect to the table along with my discernment, both of which agreed that whatever this was, it wasn’t real gold. More to the point, gold or not, it wasn’t anything supernatural. And I really had a hard time accepting the idea that God, too, would lie to me by making a real miracle look like human glitter simply because I used a microscope. That’s perhaps an even worse indictment of El Emet, the God of Truth, than anything else. (That Name of God comes from Psalm 31:5.)
But despite acknowledging that my own experience wasn’t supernatural, and concluding this supposed “miracle” was not real, I nonetheless ended up at a wrong conclusion: at that moment in my personal faith journey, I let myself be convinced to shut down my intellect, in the face of clear evidence that something was false, and not call into question my tribe’s acceptance of the supernatural nature of what was being shown to us. I only showed my findings to couple other people, and I never told my pastor about it.
And then I went on with my evangelical charismatic life, not applying that lesson to future supernatural-seeming experiences. I basically shoved that discomfort under the rug for over 20 years.
Looking back, I was wrong because my ultimate response to seeing those glittery squares under magnification was to choose to believe that, while it may have been faked on our visit and what I saw that day was not supernatural, maybe, just maybe, it had been real once. And so I chose to minimize the clear evidence of man-made glitter, and not challenge Silvania Machado’s billing as a real prophetess, and not ask my pastor to recant his support of her ministry to us.
In truth, while she spoke prophetically to us, declaring what she said was the word of the Lord for us, she based her authority on a lie. No matter what might have really happened in the past, her credentials with us were based on a lie performed in our presence.
I may not have known it while she was speaking, because I didn’t look at those flakes until later. But later I DID know, and yet I was silent. So I was complicit in a lie – because I’d been taught that I shouldn’t challenge God’s anointed, and that God often did mysterious things that were above my pay grade.
So I said nothing. I went along with the game.
I let the tribe suppress my God-given intellect.
For quite some time after her visit, many people in the church still focused on this idea of gold appearing spontaneously, in the hair, on their hands, even floating in the air overhead. It was for many months after her visit that people praying at the alter would look at their hands and exclaim “look! oil! sparkles!” and people would look up at the flood lights to see if there were any gold dust drifting in the air unexpectedly. A failure to address the obvious lie that was presented in our midst led dozens of people to continually chase something that, in all likelihood, never was real. There was a focus on a glorious golden manifestation, not on the God we were there to meet. I was uncomfortable about it every time, yet I said nothing.
It was a glittering golden idol set up right in the middle of our sanctuary that I failed to challenge.
It’s now 2024, and this event from 2001 had lingered in my history, unchallenged and unexamined for over two decades. So why is God bringing it up to my memory now? Why did I just now trip on that rather sizeable lump under my rug of faith?
I think it’s because I’m watching my former tribe of evangelicals circling their wagons on a great number of topics, and deliberately choosing to ignore a lot of very clear evidence that’s right in front of them, insisting that God is a certain kind of God, and says certain things in the Bible, when no such thing is true.
- The absolute inerrancy of scripture – despite tons of scholarly evidence about the huge numbers of variations between manuscripts.
- Purity culture – despite much evidence in how it damages women for life, and creates unhealthy relationships between men and women that persist long into marriage.
- Complimentarianism, despite evidence that it teaches men to belittle and disrespect women and shut down their God-given gifts, robbing the church of half of its leaders and teachers.
- COVID, despite a million dead fellow Americans from denying science and vaccines and instead ingesting worthless horse medicine and Christian leaders teaching their people to reject medical advice and refuse lifesaving treatments, literally killing them as a result.
- Climate change, despite clearly rising temperatures and tides and increased violent weather.
- Sexual abuse by thousands of pastors and elders against many women and children, with new stories and cases each week.
- The ongoing harm of racism, as if it has been completely defeated.
- The crushing of immigrants.
- The rejection of Jesus’ own words about the poor and needy and oppressed.
- The heartless murder and dehumanization of queer people.
- And to top it all off, anointing a horribly-acting and very unChristlike human being as the de facto head of the American church.
I’ll be clear: I’m certain some of you vehemently disagree with me about those conclusions. I understand those objections – I really do – if only because I used to also disagree with those who arrived at similar conclusions.
But now, looking back at myself from a few years ago, I can also understand what it was that led me to reject a lot of very clear data: it is an awful lot like this glitter-versus-gold-dust debate in my mind: I had a conclusion that mattered to me more than the data. It didn’t matter how much new information I got; it absolutely had to be fit within my existing conclusions. So I would either reject the data, or find some way to emasculate it.
That’s nearly the definition of “dogma” – a belief that is held uncritically.
Staring at a microscopic view of obvious glitter, I somehow concluded that Silvania Machado was nonetheless someone I should not challenge, because it might actually be God.
How many humans do this every day, to avoid asking the hard questions about their faith?
How many humans do this every day, to avoid asking the hard questions about their spiritual leaders, thus enabling bad doctrine – if not outright spiritual and physical abuse?
I actually do think I know the answer, after a handful of years actively rethinking my evangelical roots:
Pride and fear.
Regarding pride:
We humans are tribal creatures, by millenia of social training; we deeply value our tribe, and we will go to great lengths to avoid making it look bad. We’ll excuse an awful lot of misbehavior, because we believe that the tribe’s strength is more important than truth and honesty and integrity.
For a Christian, that’s an incredibly toxic choice. We’re exchanging the truth of God for a lie (to use a Bible verse out of context), stripping our witness of its holy power, and allowing ourselves, or others, to use falsehood in an attempt to bring credibility and honor to El Emet, the God of Truth. How warped is that – a lie in service of The Truth?
I think we’re watching that happening across American churchianity these days, people lying left and right to avoid bringing to light the misconduct of their leaders, to protect “the man of God” at all costs. I’ve read story after story of pastors and elders being convicted of hiding sexual misconduct of their peers, rather than their assembly looking bad to outsiders.
But when the truth eventually comes out, it leads to even worse consequences for the Kingdom.
Not many years after Silvania Machado visited our church, we got involved in the ministry of Todd Bentley – the young tattooed firebrand leading a controversial ministry of signs and wonders in Lakeland Florida around 2006 to 2007. For months people from our church – including my family – attended his revival meetings. In retrospect, we were hoping to catch the flame and spark another copy of our 1994 revival.
But Bentley’s ministry self-destructed not long thereafter, when evidence of significant personal failings came to light – that those who had known him had known very well, yet covered up so that this supernatural ministry might continue.
In the end, the choice to hide his failings “for the sake of the Kingdom” led to great ridicule on the church, and great harm to many people.
We cannot continue to cover up misdeeds by spiritual leaders. It never ends well. And that should not surprise us: Galatians 6:7 says God shall not be mocked; whatever a man sows, he shall reap. When we cover up the sowing, the harvest of evil grows larger before finally being reaped by the church.
Regarding fear:
We don’t know what to do when our foundational beliefs are shaken; it’s frightening and intimidating to have to change and surrender and repent of something that deep. So we’d rather hold on at all costs, even if it means denying obvious information, or even going so far as to shut down our critical thinking skills.
The problem is that the church today trades in fear on a weekly basis. We’re taught to fear for the reputation of the church. We’re taught to fear damage to God’s reputation. We’re taught above all else to fear going to hell, which leads to fear of getting our doctrine wrong, which leads to doubling down when we’re confronted with confounding data. And so we’ll do anything to avoid repentance.
What would we do without fear?
What could we do if we were willing to repent on a moment’s notice if God challenged us with something new?
What heights could we attain if we didn’t fear making a mistake?
Some years ago, on a pleasure cruise, my wife and I were seated in the formal dining room with a very well-off entrepreneur. We listened to his tales for several nights, and I came away with one overriding conclusion: the man was effective because he had no fear of failure. He would start a new business venture at the drop of a hat – and if it didn’t work, he’d shut it down just as quickly. He wasn’t married to anything he did; if it worked, great; if not, he’d try again at something else. He owned a dozen businesses and was rich enough to spend weeks on a cruise ship every year, despite being merely in his 40s.
What could we do with our faith if we lived like that?
Perhaps that is why Jesus was so effective. He wasn’t afraid of anything. He was willing to go out on a limb, take radical actions, challenge any social norms, even challenge the spiritual leaders of His day, all to follow God’s direction. Even the threat of death meant nothing to Him. And He did more in three years than most of us could do in a hundred lifetimes. Could He have lived longer if He was more circumspect, if He didn’t rock so many boats? Sure. But I am certain He would have been no more effective than any of us today.
I realize it’s a long way from musing about Silvania Machado and fake gold dust, to realizing my church culture’s willingness to ignore obvious falsehoods, to becoming determined to not live in fear. But I hope this inspires you to be unfearful about repenting – and to recognize when you’re ignoring something obviously wrong in your spiritual community, and to be willing to admit it, then be bold enough to speak out about it.
Because ultimately, we are supposed to be people of the Truth – one of God’s primary self-identified characteristics. If we’re going to accurately represent El Emet to a watching world, that’s very keenly aware of hypocrisy, then we’re going to need to be scrupulously honest with ourselves and with them.
As 2nd Chronicles 7:14 says, “if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” God’s people. Not the world watching them. God’s people. We’ve got to be willing to repent for our own failings as a church, before God will heal our land.
A Few Personal Anecdotes
I should probably explain what I mean by the title, “fool’s gold.” That’s another name for the mineral iron pyrite, and this is a sample. The chemical formula is FeS2 – iron disulfide, or pure iron and sulfur. No gold at all.
But sometimes when you’re looking for gold, you’ll find the bottom of your pan covered in gold-colored flakes, and inexperienced gold hunters might get all excited that they’ve struck it rich… only to learn later that they wasted a bunch of time on some worthless and exceedingly common fool’s gold. But interestingly, iron pyrite is often found in the same rock samples as real gold. So I see this as an intriguing analogy to this issue I’ve talked about today: fruitlessly chasing after something worthless, that is easily confused with something real, and potentially found in close proximity to the real thing.
Once you know what pyrite is, it’s very easy to see the difference between the two. And actually the best way to know the difference is to handle both of them, because they really are nothing alike when you see them side by side. You’ll never make the mistake again, if you do hold them both.
One other anecdote from my past… many years ago, when I was maybe six or seven years old, I found a gold-colored button, something like this one, and showed it to my mom, and asked “is this gold?” I don’t remember how she answered, but whatever she said, I interpreted her response to mean that yes, my button was real valuable gold.
So I kept it as a treasure for some time. A few years later, when my dad got interested in precious metals for inflation-proofing his investments, I thought about that button, and I took it to my mom and asked how many thousands of dollars she thought it might be worth. She looked at it dismissively and said, oh, that’s not worth anything. It’s just a button.
I was puzzled and asked what she meant, since she’d told me years before that it was gold. “Oh,” she replied, “I am sure I just agreed that it was gold-colored.” I was crushed, having thought for years that I owned something truly valuable.
That, too, is an interesting analogy here for the “fool’s gold” title of this episode. I foolishly assumed a very high value for something that was actually worthless, and when I finally discovered the truth, it took me a long time to emotionally recover from something that was ultimately nobody’s fault but my own. I think we want to believe, and so we turn off our critical thinking skills, and foolishly hold onto a belief that is unwarranted, only to our harm later.
So perhaps another moral of this story is that we need to be careful what we invest ourselves in, both spiritually and emotionally, and to carefully investigate claims of golden glory with a bit of healthy skepticism. All too often, it’s much less valuable than we want to believe.
A compilation of video clips about Silvania Machado:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPxZsvtC6tE
Silvania Machado speaking at a church (starts when the “gold” manifests):
https://youtu.be/9SbFUP4SEx8?t=807
Some stories about the “gold dust” being proven untrue:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040204233930/http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/miraclegold.htm
https://banner.org.uk/tb/golddust.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20111212202542/http://riverforum.blogspot.com:80/2008/11/sylvania-machado-gold-dust-exposed-as.html
A testimony from a true believer in the glory dust:
https://www.maxgreinerart.com/glory_dust.htm
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