This weekend, a video of Katelyn Christabel suddenly surfaced on multiple timelines on Facebook. At least that’s her official name. To her followers, that she has inherited from her father, she has a more dramatic name: Power Kid Katelyn.
Power Kid Katelyn expectedly has many powers, if you were to believe her followers and her father’s ministry, which has put up videos of her achievements. Primarily she’s a human Ghostbuster, with the ability to drive out demons from people.
If you have a taste for the dramatic, see the video below that shows Katelyn directing a ‘demon’ out of a woman who says she constantly troubled by pain in her spine. The women writhes and with widened eyes tells the child to shut up. But Katelyn holds her ground, telling the ‘demon’ to break until her father, preacher Paul Dawson declares the woman is healed.
The video that was originally being shared on social media has since vanished, as have all the videos on the child’s public Facebook page. Her Facebook page is now restricted to a series of quotable quotes from Katelyn, in which she speaks about healing, God and other deep things.
Now there a discussion possible about faith healing and its merits, but not one about using a child to perform these ‘miracles’.
Dawson is basically using his daughter to perpetrate his own ministry. It’s hardly new. India has many religious preachers who claim to have passed on their powers to their children, and it’s such a popular practice that it is seen across almost all religions.
Katelyn’s case isn’t the same as a parent pushing a child into sports or any other pursuit in order to prepare them for life. This is much worse. This is the perhaps steady set up to making her a legend in her own right. So that one day, when the preacher leaves for his presumably heavenly abode, his daughter is in line to continue to take forward her father’s philosophy while adding some of her own.
Katelyn, as it stands, has over 1 lakh followers on her Facebook page and it is bound to grow as her legend does. But her father’s decision to have his own daughter to perpetrate his fame is the sort of exploitation that shouldn’t be ignored.