The Devil Within

“What is a man?” asks Peter J Madden, preacher, former sex addict, and heir apparent to the Christian Democratic Party (CDP), led by Reverend Fred Nile, member of the New South Wales Upper House. “That is the great question. Our masculinity is often clouded by what society tells us a man is, what the movies say a man is, what the media says a man is, what the Church says a man is. But the only definition that makes any sense is … that you have a penis. That’s it. You’re a man because you’re a man.” It’s interesting that the man who’ll be challenging Clover Moore for the seat of Sydney in the NSW state election assumes this particular definition.
Born in 1961, Madden was raised in the outer-Sydney town of Windsor. When he was six, he was run over by a car, God seeing fit to hitch a caravan on the back to collect whatever the car missed. The boy emerged from a coma three weeks later with severe brain trauma that “altered my personality radically”. Three years later, by his own account, he was molested by an older female, an experience that resonated into his teens and “set very destructive patterns of anger and lust in my life”. At the age of 20, he was “born again”, but the birth didn’t destroy the Devil in Peter J Madden, who, while travelling the world as a married preacher, indulged a private “sex addiction” that sought satisfaction in the bosoms of prostitutes and lasted until his mid thirties, when he came to see that it was “not I, but Christ who lives in me”.
Last year, his fire-and-brimstone ministry (he travels the country preaching from a truck converted to incorporate a stage and sound system) brought him to the attention of Nile, and Madden has again been reborn – as a political force on the CDP ticket. His impassioned videos raging against the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras have gone viral, along with his personal message of the sinner having been saved...

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Jack Marx @'The Monthly'