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Televangelists in the Mist
By Marc | October 18, 2007
I’ve been thinking a lot today about televangelists. Not the straight talking guys like Billy Graham, but the plastic-faced gilded personalities I remember from my formative years. The ones who were one of the factors that made me distrust Christians and see the whole thing as phony and self-serving. Ah, good times!
There were (and still are) evangelists who preach from the heart and honestly believe in all they are doing. I don’t mean them. The camp of hooligans I think of can only be described as fake. There seemed to be similar traits on a lot of these programs:
The people seemed to use more Aquanet than your average metal band in 1987. My friend, Steve, always used to say, "The higher the hair, the closer to God." The men wore thousand dollar suits with huge rings on most fingers. The women looked like a mass of hair with make-up that was applied with a salad shooter.
The gold ornate furniture and crap was everywhere. High-backed gold chairs with velvet cushions that seemed more like thrones. It looked like the entire Rococo era threw up in a television studio, ate the vomit, and then threw up again. I’m not sure what the goal was. Maybe they wanted you to think of that stuff as what Heaven is like. Maybe they wanted you to think that if you were as righteous as them, you could afford to travel to Europe and ransack some German castle and decorate a studio. Whatever the plan was, the only thing I got was waste, pretension, and tastelessness.
Old Bob Tilton even had a huge bookcase behind him (when he was at his "desk") filled with what looked amazingly like Readers Digest Condensed Books.
The thinly-veiled demands for money (or "love offerings") appeared like clockwork in every program. (I understand that ministries need money for various projects and just to function so they have to ask, but these guys were just silly and greedy.) Not only requests, but actual dollar amounts so you could get a better cheap gift. For such amount of money, you could get a bookmark that was dunked in the Jordan. For this amount, you could get a paper prayer rug, some anointing oil, or a prayer cloth. What the HECK is a prayer cloth? From what I can tell it’s a way get your prayers answered without actually going through the hassle of deep meaningful prayer. Evidently we need cheap trinkets to make the blessings happen as if faith was a party trick.
And the scandals. Who can forget the sex scandals, the money problems, and the tax problems? Oral Roberts will surely die if God doesn’t get big cash; Jimmy Swaggart and his "companion" caught just a few months after attacking fellow preachers following their own failings.
I can’t tell if they have gotten themselves straight with God, but I’d like to think they have, and I’m willing to believe that He has used them for His own glory. The bad times, as well as the good times, are used by Him as part of His plan. Perhaps the exposure of their sins was both what they needed and what the rest of us needed. I checked out Jim Bakker’s site just tonight (Thursday), and as far as I can tell, he seems back to basics. I like that. Realistically, I don’t know who’s out there anymore on TV, but I do catch Billy Graham’s specials when he’s on or one of the local churches’ programs.
As a Christian, I stick with the lesson I learned as a youth: stay away from snakes (and wear boots in tall grass). If they preach fluffy clouds that rain money, stay away. If they ask for money in thousand dollar increments to buy a new plane, stay away. If they offer magic trinkets to make sure your prayers will be answered, stay away. If they puff themselves up to be more important than the Word, stay away. If they spout unbiblical looniness, stay away.
But if they come offering nothing but Christ, a humble heart, and a life filled with pain as well as joy, then listen a while longer.
To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. – 2 Corinthians 12:7-10
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