In February, Sam Childers’s home in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, was raided by the FBI while he was away in Africa. Armed agents burst into the house, patted everyone down, locked Sam’s daughter in a closet to keep her out of the way, and continued their search. Sam believes they received a tip-off that he was harbouring arms which he had supposedly been smuggling into Africa.
“The Feds raided my warehouse looking for guns,” Sam told me, eyes wide with disbelief.
“They took a 40ft container and stripped it. They found nothing but destroyed 50% of the contents. And guess what was in it? Children’s clothes.”
Known most famously throughout the world as the Machine Gun Preacher, Sam’s personal journey from troubled drug-addicted – and dealing – youth to reborn freedom fighter in South Sudan is well documented, most prominently in the 2011 Hollywood movie starring Scotland’s Gerard Butler.
He has also written two biographies, providing harrowing insights into his fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) – a militant religious cult which has been responsible for more than 400,000 murders and 40,000 child abductions in Uganda, Sudan and other East African nations.
To date, Sam has established four orphanages, a 1,000-acre farm in North Uganda teaching orphans how to feed themselves, a security company and many other initiatives aiming to secure a safer future for young people affected by the atrocities of civil war and terrorism.
So how does someone like Sam, who in October last year became the first American to be awarded the Mother Teresa Memorial International Award for Social Justice, find himself the target of a federal investigation?
He has been rattling cages ever since he was 11, and although now widely recognised as a humanitarian, charity champion and freedom fighter, his methods and motives are often questioned.
Described regularly as having channelled his faith into action with “a bible in one hand and an AK47 in the other”, he has never fit snugly into the definition of humanitarian as, say, the Dalai Lama or Malala Yousefzai. So what is he? Mercenary, vigilante, humanitarian?
“I don’t think of myself as a vigilante, but as a rebel,” the 50-year-old Pennsylvanian said, his deep tan the result of spending eight months a year in Africa.
“If you ever look up the definition of the word rebel, it means someone who will fight for a cause. What did they call Jesus? A rebel. And that was 2,000 years ago. It’s maybe time that people started to become rebels again.”
I WAS THE SCUM OF THE EARTH
My meeting with Sam was slightly bizarre. He was in the north-east to deliver a live talk and Q&A at Fraserburgh’s Assemblies of God church – a public event organised by the Teen Challenge charity, attended by 350 people.
We spoke together in the conference room at the Tufted Duck Hotel at St Combs, the juxtaposition of Machine Gun Preacher sitting in a sleepy fishing village hotel providing the main riff of bizarreness.
He looked just as I imagined, from his cutoff denim top, to handlebar moustache, multiple tattoos and toothpick which regularly traversed between hand and mouth. He might not be easily definable from his work, but visually he fits snugly into the archetypal image of his past as a motorbike-riding outlaw.
But then he opened his mouth. I was expecting the gruff, brooding tones effected by Gerard in the movie, not the upbeat, frankly jovial notes which came out of the man himself.
“The biggest thing people find intriguing about me is who I was 30 years ago, and what changed me to do the work I do now,” Sam explained of his current tour to churches and community centres across the UK.
“People all around the world are coming to hear me share the testimony of my life. And through sharing it, it seems like it inspires people to do more in their own lives.”
And come to hear him speak they do. Despite his many critics, he has just as many, if not more, fans who get their photos taken with him, ask for autographs, and even ask him to kiss their babies.
He never tires of sharing his tale, because it reminds him of the new life he now lives, far from the horrors of his misspent youth.
“I say ‘not at all’, because I know who I was. I was the scum of the earth. I thank God that people are asking me for an autograph.”
Sam’s damaging relationship with drugs began at age 11, when he followed the “cool kids” into smoking cigarettes and marijuana. Despite growing up in a model middle-class Pentecostal Christian household, his morals slipped.
“By 15 years old, I didn’t care if I looked cool any more. I had a drug addiction. I had a needle in my arm every day, and I just kept going as deep as you can go into the field of drugs,” he said.
Soon after, he became a shotgunner – an armed guard for drug dealers. The turning point in his life came in the 1990s, when he was involved in a Florida bar fight during which people “got shot up pretty badly”.
“On the way home, I made up my mind that I was done living that life. I told my wife we were moving and she started crying. She said she had been waiting for an opening for us to leave for a long time. I said: ‘Someone’s going to kill me and I’m going to die for some stupid reason.’ I don’t have a problem with dying, but I do have a problem with what I’m going to die for.”
And so he moved back to Pennsylvania, became sober, rediscovered his faith in God and set up his own construction firm. And when a preacher came one day, telling of the atrocities happening in Sudan, Sam’s journey into his second life chapter began in earnest.
KILLING IN SELF DEFENCE
The movie Machine Gun Preacher has focused on what Sam calls the “gloomy” parts of his life, paying particular attention to the misdemeanours of his youth and during his years fighting against the LRA, before the ceasefire of 2005.
Some elements have been heightened for impact, but that’s the extent of the poetic licence.
“Everything in the movie is based on the truth. But I can tell you this much, if there’s something in it that you really didn’t like, that really didn’t sit well in your heart, it probably wasn’t true,” he said.
This sounded to me like a catch-all, get-out-of-jail-free card, so I asked what parts didn’t sit well with him. The main untruths were that his faith in God and his sobriety from drugs and alcohol wavered – both of which the film depicted, but never actually happened.
What about killing people, I asked? In one scene, he is shown killing an LRA sniper – a youth who was shooting at Sam and his colleagues during one of their missions to free a group of children from the military cult. In reality, Sam said, the sniper wasn’t a youth. But the rest is true.
In fact, Sam has never hidden the fact that he has killed. He has admitted killing in self defence in Africa, and also having killed during his years as a drug dealer in the US – the latter only in so much as having given them the means to throw their own lives away through addiction.
This side of Sam’s life has led many to question his title as humanitarian. Instead, many call him a mercenary, vigilante and radical Christian. He doesn’t agree with these labels, but he’s happy to hear his critics’ viewpoints.
“If you Google ‘Machine Gun Preacher’, you will find good and bad stories on me. Since the beginning of time, anyone that does something good has always had some people hacking on them.”
His cast-iron belief is that he is doing right. His acceptance of opposing views, he said, stems from his belief in preserving freedom.
“We say we believe it, but what is freedom? It means that every man and woman can choose what they believe in, and what they want to say. So if I believe in freedom, how can I be upset if someone doesn’t like me, or is completely against guns?”
He particularly refutes being labelled a radical Christian, though.
“I’m not. I fight for every man and woman to serve who they want to serve. If you want to be a Moslem or Buddhist, I’ll fight for that right. If you don’t want to believe in any god at all, I’ll fight for that, too. And you won’t hear another preacher say that.”
WHAT’S RIGHT IS RIGHT
In terms of cage rattling, Sam expects his thoughts on the continued bloodshed in East Africa may explain his loss of favour with the US government. He firmly believes that Joseph Kony, the LRA’s infamous leader who has obeyed a ceasefire to the Sudanese civil war which came into effect in 2005, is no longer the problem. Instead, it is Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, who Sam considers the “route to al Qaida” and who continues the bloodshed.
It’s certainly true that President al-Bashir has indictments against him by the International Criminal Court. They don’t allege he personally took part in acts of genocide and crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur – a region in western Sudan which has been in a state of humanitarian emergency since 2003. Instead, he’s “suspected of being criminally responsible, as an indirect co-perpetrator”.
However you look at it, Sam is speaking out loudly against an incredibly powerful figure, and one which even his own homeland is treading carefully around. And so I was left wondering: at what point does Sam drift away from the realms of humanitarianism, and into the world as a renegade who follows the beat of his own drum?
What he has achieved in East Africa, the lives he has saved there, plus the inspiration he has been to many people around the world is irrefutable. But what makes him convinced that he’s the one who needs to step up to the plate?
In response, he told me about a recent incident he had experienced in an airport. He and his wife, Lynn, stopped by a Starbucks. There, they saw a man stealing sandwiches in front of 40 or 50 customers, all studiously averting their gazes. Predictably, it was Sam who took action, and hauled the thief to the counter to be held accountable.
Afterwards, an older gentleman approached Sam, and told him he had wanted to bring the thief to justice too, but was afraid to speak out.
“And that’s just it,” Sam said. “I believe that most people would like to do exactly what I do, but are too worried about ‘what ifs’. If you start speaking out, everyone will come at you. But I don’t care. What’s right is right.
“This tour I’m on is called Rocking the Boat. It’s time we all started rocking up the boat. If you’re on a canoe and you stand up, what happens? People tell you to sit down. That’s the problem with the world today – they want every-one to sit down. But I’m not sitting down.”