American Fascists
Page 20
Trinity Broadcasting Network is the world’s largest televangelist organization, with programming beamed from some two dozen satellites and thousands of cable and terrestrial channels in some 75 countries. It owns interests in stations in El Salvador, Spain and Kenya and has contracts with numerous other cable and satellite companies and station owners. Its programming is carried on more than 6,000 stations in the United States and abroad as well as the Internet.6 The network is the platform for some of the Christian Right’s most reactionary and bizarre preachers, including many from other countries. The success of the network lies in its array of programming and the variety of different “faith” messages it is willing to incorporate. It provides religious entertainment, children’s programming, gospel music concerts from Nashville, live coverage of Christian events, lifestyle shows, health and beauty tips, financial counseling and prosperity tips, news and current events, Christian documentaries and feature films, teaching programs, worship services at megachurches and spirited revivals. The messages range from the theologically conservative—embodied in the Southern Baptist preachers Charles Stanley and Adrian Rogers—to Catholic Ministries’ Father Michael Manning, to those who preach the gospel of prosperity, such as Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar and John Avanzini. The network broadcasts Dr. D. James Kennedy, who is at the forefront of the movement to create a theocratic America, and it gives a voice to some of the outer fringes of the movement, such as the Christian exorcist Bob Larson and the popular healer Benny Hinn, who says that Adam was a superhero who could fly to the moon and claims that one day the dead will be raised by watching TBN from inside their coffins.7 In a Praise the Lord broadcast on October 19, 1999, Hinn told viewers that he will one day be able to raise the dead through his television broadcasts, that soon those who have lost loved ones will refuse to bury them but
place him in front of that TV set for 24 hours. I see rows of caskets lining up in front of this TV set, and I see them bringing them closer to the TV set, and as people are coming closer I see loved ones picking up the hands of the dead and letting them touch the screen, and people are getting raised as their hands are touching that screen.8
Hinn, who says he is a prophet who speaks with God daily, also tells followers that he has been transported to heaven and regularly receives visions and revelations. He has predicted that one day Jesus would appear at one of his crusades. He claims to be able to heal the sick and told Larry King he had healed himself by watching a previously recorded broadcast of one of his sermons.9 He also, like the Crouches, lashes out at his critics, once saying: “Sometimes I wish God would give me a Holy Ghost machine gun. I’d blow your head off!”10 This sentiment was echoed by the elder Crouch, who has attacked critics as “heresy hunters” and lambastes them as enemies of God who will soon feel God’s wrath.
In an April 2, 1991, “Praise-a-Thon,” Crouch let loose on his critics:
To hell with you! Get out of my life! Get out of the way! I say, get out of God’s way! Quit blocking God’s bridges or God’s going to shoot you—if I don’t. I don’t even want to even talk to you or hear you! I don’t want to see your ugly face.11
The Crouches have repeatedly been embroiled in scandals in their three decades on television, including battles with the Federal Communications Commission over the legality of some of their station licenses.12 Lonnie Ford, Paul Crouch’s chauffeur, said he had a homosexual relationship in 1996 with Crouch, something Crouch has vehemently denied. But Ford was, the network admitted, paid $425,000 and given housing in settlement when he threatened to go public with the charges shortly after the affair allegedly took place. The story was first reported six years later by the Los Angeles Times.13 Disgruntled former employees complain about the lavish lifestyles of the Crouches, paid for by contributors who are often of modest means.
None of this seems to dampen the enthusiasm—or lessen the coffers—of the network. The promise of miracles, coupled with the fear of falling out of the favor of God (and the Crouches), compels loyal “partners” to mail in monthly “love offerings.” The network, expanding in areas such as the Middle East, dubs its programs in 11 different languages. It is watched by viewers in more than 5 million households in the United States each week and millions more overseas. And televangelists such as Pat Robertson, despite having networks that once dwarfed TBN, now buy time on the TBN network to reach a wider audience. The network generates more than $170 million a year in revenue, according to tax filings reported by the Los Angeles Times. Viewers’ contributions make up two-thirds of the income, and the rest comes from fees imposed on those who want to buy airtime.14
Crouch encourages viewers to send in checks for $1,000, even if they cannot afford it. Write the check anyway, he tells them, as a “step of faith,” and the Lord will repay them many times over. “Do you think God would have any trouble getting $1,000 extra to you somehow?” he asked during one Praise-a-Thon.15
The constant appeals for money, the fantastic stories about angels and healings and miracles, and the opulence of the Crouches’ lifestyles are defended by many viewers who cling to the network. The Crouches’ wealth is merely proof, many say, of God’s blessing and a sign that such blessings will one day flow to them as well, as long as they mail in their prayer offerings and love gifts and have faith.
The triviality of American popular culture, its emptiness and gossip, accelerates this destruction of critical thought. It expands the void, the mindlessness that makes the magic, mythology and irrationality of the Christian Right palatable. Television, the movement’s primary medium, allows viewers to preoccupy themselves with context-free information. The homogenized empty chatter on the airwaves, the banal amusement and clichés, the bizarre doublespeak endlessly repeated on cable news channels and the huge spectacles in sports stadiums have replaced America’s political, social and moral life, indeed replaced community itself. Television lends itself perfectly to this world of signs and wonders, to the narcissism of national and religious self-exaltation. Television discourages real communication. Its rapid frames and movement, its constant use of emotional images, its sudden shifts from one theme to an unrelated theme, banish logic and reason with dizzying perplexity. It, too, makes us feel good. It, too, promises to protect and serve us. It, too, promises to lift us up and thrill us. The televangelists have built their movement on these commercial precepts. The totalitarian creed of the Religious Right has found in television the perfect medium. Its leaders know how television can be used to seduce and encourage us to walk away from the dwindling, less exciting collectives that protect and nurture us. They have mastered television’s imperceptible, slowly induced hypnosis. And they understand the enticement of credo quia absurdum—I believe because it is absurd.
Arlene Jacques, in dark-framed rectangular glasses and with her hair pulled back, is wearing a bright red sequined shirt, flashy red sequin earrings and fire-engine red nail polish. She is browsing with her 35-year-old daughter Brandy in the Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh gift shop on the ground floor of the Costa Mesa TBN headquarters, situated next to the San Diego Freeway. The headquarters is a gaudy, white wedding cake of a building with a dramatic front lobby that holds two spiral staircases winding upward, their railings ornate, gold-painted ironwork. Set in colored marble at the foot of the staircases, directly in front of the double glass doors, is the imperial-looking emblem of the network. Above the shoppers, the staircases converge on a huge white statue of the archangel Michael slaying the dragon, a 13-inch replica of which is on sale in the gift shop. The walls have gold-tinted mirrors and huge windows that allow visitors to look at the fountains, reflecting pools, sculptures, neoclassical colonnades, manicured lawns and white lights that outline the building and the shrubs. It’s Christmastime: elaborate light displays outline reindeer and hug the palm trees. On the top of the building, lights spell out “Happy Birthday Jesus.”
Jacques, from Visalia, California, looks at the displays of books by various members of the Crouch family, the clothing with
the TBN emblem, and trinkets such as the Mary and Baby Jesus Decorator Plate or the Coming King Medallion. This is her first visit to TBN, although she has been a “partner” of the network for many years and has long made regular monthly contributions. She busily snaps pictures, including shots of herself in front of a gold grand piano on the second floor, with her daughter Brandy, who is a nurse. They visited the virtual reality theater earlier in the day and walked through the re-creation of the Via Dolorosa, the route through Jerusalem by which Jesus carried the cross to his crucifixion. In the 50-seat theater she has seen one of the End Time movies, which portray the apocalyptic end of the world, the death of nonbelievers and saving of the righteous, and she has felt the seats tremble during projected quakes and storms. She is about to head to the Heavenly Bistro for something to drink. The network has a similar complex near Dallas and a Christian entertainment center outside of Nashville. But there are few visitors today and the headquarters is nearly empty.
Jacques turned to the network 30 years ago at a time when she was “in a lot of pain.” She was living in a tiny, run-down apartment with her two small daughters, Brandy and Raquel, and had been recently divorced.
“I had never been a working parent,” she says. “I was scared to death to go out into the working world. I was not real churched at the time. They were speaking to me, Paul and Jan and the people at TBN, about my spiritual side. I knew Jesus, but I did not have a personal relationship with Jesus. God could know you personally, they told me, and I could know Him personally.”
She met with a neighbor to pray and talk about changing her life. She watched the broadcasts, the promises of salvation, the stories about how finding God changes lives, melts away problems and leads to financial and emotional security. The broadcasts gave her comfort.
“I got down on my knees by myself by the couch,” she remembers. “I got a great big Bible, a 90-pound Bible that my husband got overseas, it was a big white one with gold print, and I put my hands on it and said, ‘God, please touch me, my life and children.’ Then I cried for three hours. I saw a slide show in front of my eyes. It seemed like every single wrong thing I had ever done flashed before my eyes and I was truly sorry.”
She visited various churches, but nothing gave her the glow of the TBN broadcasts. She began to pray daily, sometimes for long stretches. And she began to watch, slowly drawn into the culture and the message preached by Paul and Jan Crouch.
“I was taking a load of clothes down to the washing machine in the basement of the apartment building,” she says. “We were poor, living on welfare and food stamps, and when I came back upstairs I felt that I wanted to kneel by the bed and pray. I lifted up my hands and started to talk in a loud language I had never heard before. I thought, ‘It’s happening. My mind is thinking one thing and something different is coming out of my mouth. I am speaking in prayer language.’ ”
She found a job driving a school bus, but her emotional life remained in turmoil and the family often had a hard time paying bills. She struggled with depression. There were nights she could not sleep. She felt as if she was hanging on by her fingertips and there were few people listening or willing to help.
“I don’t know if you have ever been in a place in your life where it takes effort to walk from one room to the next,” she says. “It takes so much effort. I was in those places several times. But just by hearing the worship on TBN, by listening to different people speak the word of God, it gave me strength. The network is on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The pastor of your church and all your wonderful friends do not want you to call them up at four a.m. in tears when you feel such total despair. But you can call TBN. You can call TBN and there are people who actually speak to you. You can speak to a real, live person. They ask who you are and what you want to pray about. You can do this 24 hours a day.
“There is power in prayer,” she says. “Not only do you feel different; you feel more peaceful. In time you see answers to those prayers. Nothing happened instantly, but you know you can actually live another day, and you get to a place where you can keep on living.”
When she called the toll-free “prayer line,” the number of which is always visible at the bottom of the TV screen, she was asked by a “prayer warrior” on the other end for her name and address. The information was put into a direct-mail database, one of the network’s most successful fund-raising tools. Her calls to prayer partners, she says, gave her strength. But they also led her, a young, single mother on welfare, to take some of her meager income and mail it to the network.
“I was living on welfare, collecting food stamps,” she says, “and I would tape fifteen cents to one of their little cards and mail it back.”
Her life had always been turbulent. She started working very young, in her father’s restaurant. There was little time for school. She says she came from a “dysfunctional family” in which there was “no value of people, no value for life, for relationships and how to talk and relate to people.
“I didn’t know kids didn’t work,” she says. “My parents were divorced early on, and I lived with my dad and my stepmother since I was about 10. I did not know some kids got to eat dinner with their family, do their homework and go to bed.”
She barely made it through high school and eloped a couple years later with a man in the Navy. They went to Los Angeles and got married. He was sent to Vietnam. When he came back from the war, the marriage was tempestuous. They split and reconciled numerous times until they finally gave up.
“I remember as a little girl living in that apartment,” says Brandy. “My mom was a total Jesus freak. She used to bring homeless people in from the park and feed them and pray over them. She loved everybody with the love of God.”
Arlene baptized homeless people who visited in a small inflatable children’s pool. The pool was where she also baptized her daughters. She taught her daughters that, as Paul and Jan Crouch said, faith alone would be enough to let them survive. Jesus, if you had enough faith, would take care of you.
“For us, for my sister and I, to this day we know that God is so real,” Brandy adds. “We know God brought us through and protected us. One time me and my sister and mom got on our knees and prayed for our rent money. We left. We went to do the laundry at the laundromat. When we got back, there was a check in the middle of the floor, not like it was pushed under the door, but right in the middle of the floor. It was for our rent, and it was signed by Jesus Christ, and Wells Fargo cashed it.”
But the gospel of prosperity has a more insidious effect than the personal enrichment of leaders such as Paul and Jan Crouch at the expense of gullible, desperate and often impoverished followers. When it is faith alone that will determine your well-being, when faith alone cures illness, overcomes emotional distress and ensures financial and physical security, there is no need for outside, secular institutions, for social-service and regulatory agencies, to exist. There is no need for fiscal or social responsibility. Although many of the followers of the movement rely, or have relied in the past, on government agencies to survive, the belief system they embrace is hostile to all secular intervention. To put trust in secular institutions is to lack faith, to give up on God’s magic and miracles. The message being preached is one that dovetails with the message of neoconservatives who want to gut and destroy federal programs, free themselves from government regulations and taxes and break the back of all organizations, such as labor unions, that seek to impede maximum profit.
The popular Christian textbook America’s Providential History cites Genesis, which calls for mankind to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26–27) as evidence that the Bible calls for “Bible-believing Christians” to take dominion of America and the world: “When God brings Noah through the flood to a new earth, He reestablishes the Dominion Mandate but now delegates to man the responsibility for governing other
men.”16 The authors write that God has called the United States to become a Christian nation and “make disciples of all nations.”17
The book fuses the Christian message with the celebration of unrestricted capitalism. It denounces income tax as “idolatry” and property tax as “theft,” and in a chapter titled “Christian Economics,” calls for the abolishment of inheritance taxes.18 This indoctrination is designed to form a cadre of young believers who will follow biblical rather than secular law. They are told that when the two laws clash, they as believers must defy secular authorities. And they are taught to judge others not by what they do but by their fidelity to Christian doctrine.
“Even if Christians manage to outnumber others on an issue and we sway our Congressman by sheer numbers, we end up in the dangerous promotion of democracy,” the book reads. “We really do not want representatives who are swayed by majorities, but rather by correct principles.”19
The book also teaches students that a Christian’s primary responsibility is to create material wealth. God will oversee the increase and protection of natural resources. America’s Providential History belittles secular environmentalists, who see natural resources as fragile and limited, and says of those who hold these concerns that they “lack faith in God’s providence and consequently, men will find fewer natural resources. . . . The Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God’s earth.” The book blithely dismisses the threat of global warming and overpopulation, saying, “Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all the people.”20