by Tanya Levin
The Family First Party’s explicitly homophobic agenda can’t be based on the teachings of Christ because Jesus never mentioned homosexuality at all. Still, the party gave every Liberal member its preferences in the 2004 federal election, except for Ingrid Tall, an openly lesbian candidate. This was only because, as a volunteer accidentally slipped out, ‘All lesbians are witches who should be burned at the stake.’
In 2004, thanks to the vagaries of preferencing, Family First’s Steve Fielding was elected to the Senate. Another Tasmanian candidate came close to election too. This would all be another tale of politics if there weren’t a bizarre twist. The members of the party are the staff and friends of Brian. The parents of the kids from youth group now include many would-be senators. Shouldn’t they be going to retirement parties, not political fundraisers?
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu required his ministers to sever all links with the African National Congress as soon as it won political standing. The church, he believed, must take an impartial stance and act as an observer, a critic and a respondent to the government, not intervene in its affairs.
Mainstream politics is about lots of compromise. Running a country is not as easy as running a church. Fundamentalists don’t compromise, unless it’s to do with tax law. Or remarriage. They believe they are enlightened, and have an imperative to share their truth with everyone. Any challenge is a direct threat, and an attack from the Enemy against God and his people. With the AoG holding the moral balance of power in parliament, Question Time may suddenly prove very interesting.
Chapter 21
WHEN THE GENERALS TALK
If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message that Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him.
—Deuteronomy 18:22
Brian and Bobbie Houston didn’t make this stuff up. It would be called plagiarism if there were such a thing as an original. But as you wade through the murky swamps of TV evangelism, there’s nothing even slightly unique about Hillsong. It’s one imitation after another. And they have memories as short as goldfish. (An AoG youth group in Melbourne is named Heaven’s Gate. In 1997, thirty-nine mainly middle-class forty-something Americans put on their Nikes, got ready to go with the aliens and committed suicide. Their group was called Heaven’s Gate.)
In evangelical churches, an expert by definition is someone from out of town. The speaker from a faraway place necessarily has experienced God in an exotic, unknowable way that surpasses the home crowd’s imagination. This mythology underpins the appeal of a mass rally. At Pentecostal conferences and churches, international speakers must know more than we do about God’s word.
Brian and Bobbie are close friends with some of the grand poobahs of evangelism. Hillsong has Big Names speak at the church and at its conferences. Because the people they model themselves on have all copied each other, the same doctrine is regurgitated as breaking world news. Ideology is kept consistent, and confirmed by the spiritual expert from overseas. The Lord’s words you hear from a pulpit in Sydney may well have been photocopied from last week’s inspiring speech by someone else in Seattle. And vice versa.
All of the big names that appear at Hillsong, and most tel-evangelists, will espouse the same beliefs: invest in me, and God will invest in you. Refuse, and you only have yourself to blame.
Whoever draws the crowds is the most revered, and together they make up a small, opulent circle of friends from around the world.
After the infamy of the televangelists of the late eighties, many people went cold on religion on TV. Even so, audiences are booming. So who’s watching? According to the non-profit religious watchdog the Trinity Foundation, 2500 radio and TV evangelists (including over 500 televangelists) are vying for a donor pool of about five million people. Fifty-five per cent of these are elderly women. Thirty-five per cent of donations come from a group Trinity call the desperation pool, made up of the poorest and neediest members of society, people who are poverty-stricken or have a terminally ill relative. The remaining ten per cent of viewers are from the upper middle class, a demographic that truly believes God wants it to be stinking rich.
The who’s who of modern evangelism is a long, complicated, incestuous list and to draw a neat family tree is impossible.
However, the one person all the wealthy DIY preachers have in common is Oral Roberts, the forefather of the Word of Faith movement and one of televangelist history’s most prolific lunatics.
The Word of Faith celebrities who visit Hillsong and then fl y in their private jets back to the United States, stopping for a few days’ rest in Hawaii, can all be traced back to a man who in 1980 had a vision of a 900-foot talking Jesus.
Without Billy Graham’s public seal of approval, Oral Roberts, his Word of Faith university and all his prosperity protégés might never have come to be. Billy Graham, a Southern Baptist, arrived at a time when the liberal Christians and the fundamentalist Christians had reached a cultural impasse. While tensions were rising over theological difference, Billy Graham began his famous crusades, providing a united Christian front based on the message of salvation. He is universally regarded as a nice guy, the gentle evangelist, sincere, stable and kind.
Invited in 1950 by Graham to sit on the platform and pray at one of his meetings, the Pentecostal Roberts was given unexpected public acceptance. Fifteen years later, at the opening of Oral Roberts University (ORU), Graham invited Roberts to attend the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. There, in 1966, Graham introduced Roberts as ‘a man that I have come to love and appreciate in the ministry of evangelism’. In 1967, Billy Graham appeared on campus to dedicate Oral Roberts University.
Billy Graham himself stayed away from fl ashy TV shows and excess. A long-time Democrat, though currently unregistered, he has been spiritual adviser to every US president since Dwight Eisenhower. He led the funeral for Lyndon Johnson in 1973, spoke at Richard Nixon’s in 1994, and only missed Ronald Reagan’s because Graham himself was in hospital. He is said to have close relationships with both the Clinton and the Bush families.
During the seventies, while Billy Graham was discussing Israel in the White House with Nixon, Oral Roberts’ soon-to-be colleagues were getting on with the business of television. TV evangelists have been around about as long as television, yet there were only a handful in the fifties and sixties. Their numbers and influence grew in the seventies and have steadily increased ever since, as has their social and political clout. The seventies provided the current generation’s forefathers and doctrinal bases. It was a time of solidifying the primitive foundations.
Oral Roberts first broadcast from a studio in Oklahoma to sixteen stations in January 1954, and over the next twelve years he also broadcast his TV show from a tent. After a two-year break, he returned to televangelism, based at the NBC studios in Burbank, California. By 1980, Oral Roberts and You was filmed at Oral Roberts University.
The now disgraced Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker had been working with Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) with their Christian variety show Praise the Lord (PTL) since 1961 and were instrumental in buoying Robertson’s channel and his live television program, The 700 Club. In 1973 the Bakkers went to Tustin, California to set up the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) with Paul and Jan Crouch. A year later, they moved on to Charlotte, North Carolina and started the PTL network.
Like the other political evangelists, Pat Robertson avoided the preaching limelight, although his fortunes were always large. In 1979, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a lobby group credited with mobilising the religious Right in the United States.
Falwell worked hard to influence elections and ‘moral’ legislation and to prevent an ‘anti-family agenda’.
Right at the end of the seventies a little-known couple, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, began Believer’s Voice of Victory. Ken had worked as a pilot for Oral Roberts and had studied under Pastor Kenneth Hagin,
founder of the RHEMA Bible College, sister college to Oral Roberts University. The Copelands were respectful admirers of Roberts and Hagin, and have been instrumental in getting the message of ‘seed faith’ out ever since. (Currently Nabi Saleh, Hillsong elder and bringer of Gloria Jean’s Coffee to Australia, is a director of Kenneth Copeland Eagle Mountain International Church.)
There was no doubt among the leaders even then that most of what was being sold to the public as an individual interaction with God was leftovers warmed up from the generation before.
Yet they continued to sell each revelation, no matter how clichéd or tired, as hot off the holy presses.
The man Kenneth Copeland calls Dad, Kenneth Hagin, was exposed in 1983 by two students at Oral Roberts University as having copied verbatim most of his teachings from a 1930s evangelist, E.W. Kenyon. Hagin also plagiarised the title and contents of a book by John A. MacMillan called The Authority of the Believer.
Yet no one took away the honorary doctorate Hagin had received from ORU in the seventies. Maybe that’s because so many evangelists have dodgy PhDs. Dr Rodney Howard-Browne, who spread the Toronto Blessing, reported a Doctorate of Ministry degree from ‘the school of bible theology’ in San Jacinto California, which has no faculty and has been likened to a diploma mill.
A college with similar allegations against it, Life Christian University in Tampa, Florida has provided many doctorates to evangelists, offering advanced standing for previously published works. Among its illustrious alumni are Dr Rodney Howard-Browne (Doctor of Divinity, Doctor of Theology), Dr Joyce Meyer, Dr Kenneth Copeland and Dr Benny Hinn, each of whom has a Doctorate of Philosophy in theology.
Putting your name to writing or ideas that aren’t yours is much more common than believers realise. Christian ghostwriting is commonplace. Jerry Falwell’s autobiography Strength for the Journey, Billy Graham’s Approaching Hoofbeats and Pat Robertson’s America’s Dates with Destiny are only a few of the Christian bestsellers ghost-written by gay activist the Reverend Mel White.
Which is why you won’t fi nd anti-gay stuff in so many of these books.
The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970) sold over 35 million copies and made little-known preacher Hal Lindsey a household evangelical and prophetic name. Lindsey later admitted the book had been written by an unknown woman, Carla Carlson.
The hedonistic eighties provided a cesspool of joy for the televangelists’ fundamentalist beliefs. Everyday life was portrayed as an ongoing orgy of wilful rebellion against God. Before money became the overriding message, crimes of the body were the preachers’ number one fixation. Anything to do with sex before, outside or after marriage, or for money, led to well-deserved punishment, beginning with the evils of divorce and illegitimate babies and abortion and going on from there.
Then the walls fell down. Jimmy Swaggart publicly criticised Jim Bakker for his financial and sexual scandals, only to have his own close relationship with the sex industry revealed months later. Jerry Falwell took over the PTL network when Jim and Tammy Faye left. His photographed involvement with prostitutes never stopped his campaigning against that sort of thing.
The ministries that were left, and the new graduates emerging, turned to Oral Roberts for advice. Oral Roberts’ statements may strike a first-year psychology student as floridly psychotic, but he was prospering financially.
In 1980, God told Oral Roberts to open the City of Faith Health and Medical Center, a hospital that would have 777 beds.
Later, Roberts announced a 900-foot Jesus had appeared to him and told him that City of Faith would be finished, and that God would use the research facilities to find a cure for cancer. (By late 1984, the hospital had only opened about 130 of its 294 beds.)
Although support was dwindling, Oral Roberts’ advisers consulted with Gene Ewing, a successful tent evangelist. Ewing laid out the Word of Faith doctrine as it related to finances. It was called ‘seed faith’. Audiences were told that if they planted a seed of faith with money, it would grow into a big ministry to save the world. And God would reward them by giving them the harvest of what they had sown.
In January 1987, Oral Roberts told his TV audience that God had instructed him to raise US$8 million (of which he claimed to have US$3.5 million already) by March or God would take him.
How he would die, the Lord had not mentioned, just that God wanted scholarships for medical missionaries from the City of Faith to go overseas. Or else.
By 1 April 1987, Oral Roberts said that the ministry had received US$9.1 million, which was more than necessary. Reports say that his adviser, Gene Ewing, received a US$1 million commission from the project.
In November 1987 it was announced that the City of Faith was closing down, and the following January the medical scholarships were discontinued. By March the scholarship fund was bankrupt and students were required to repay their scholarships at 18 per cent interest. Oral Roberts told Charisma magazine:
It is clearly in my spirit, as I have ever heard Him, the Lord gave me an impression, ‘You and your partners have merged prayer and medicine for the entire world, for the church world and for all generations.’
And then He said, ‘It is done.’
And then I asked, ‘Is that why after eight years you are having us close the hospital and after eleven years the medical school?’
And God said, ‘Yes, the mission has been accomplished in the same way that after three years of public ministry, my Son said on the cross, “Father, it is finished!”’ 1
In 1989 the City of Faith hospital building was abandoned, having never been fully occupied or completed. All projects were suspended indefinitely. Nonetheless, after meeting with Ewing and outlining the principles of seed faith on national TV, Oral Roberts Ministries doubled its income from US$6 million to US$12 million in a year.
All the other evangelists consulted him and his adviser, Ewing, immediately.
Outdistanced in the seventies by Pat Robertson’s CBN and Jim Bakker’s PTL, it took the Bakkers’ downfall amidst overwhelming moral and financial scandal to give the Trinity Broadcasting Network the market boost it needed to become a contender. With much the same folksy appeal as the Bakkers, Paul and Jan Crouch combined financial and media PR to build a formidable ministry media conglomerate, eventually eclipsing all comers. In 1989, just sixteen years after it was established, the net worth of TBN was estimated at US$500 million.2
So where are all these televangelists now? TBN hosts nearly every pastor worth knowing on its network: Oral Roberts, the Copelands and Benny Hinn.
Indeed, the sins of the father have been handed over to the sons. Billy Graham’s Parkinson’s disease was the catalyst to hand over to wildchild Franklin. Richard ‘I’m so glad I got a normal name’ Roberts took over from Oral. And so it goes.
They run ministries, some for the poor. Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing International, Franklin Graham’s Operation Christmas Child, and the Trinity Broadcasting Network are all in the top ten highest-earning charities in the United States, with TBN at number nine, bringing in nearly US$200 million a year. On the record.
Gene Ewing used the nineties to expand his publishing house, St Matthew’s, which, though tax exempt due to ‘worship services’, is contracted by other ministries for marketing of their seed faith campaigns. Currently, ministries are charged US$400,000 for the use of the services and promised US$600,000 profit.3
St Matthew’s researches the poorest and neediest demographics in the United States, where one in four children under eighteen are deemed at risk of being hungry. Poverty-stricken neighbourhoods are inundated with prosperity progaganda and gimmicks. They are told that they are driving God away with their lack of faith. The publications they are sent guarantee miracles if only they give what little they have.
The business also operates a call centre which takes the prayer requests offered to viewers by the pastors on TV. The counsellors who take these calls are contracted to work under strict conditions. They must not spend more than two t
o three minutes with each caller, they must ask them to donate at least three times during the conversation, and they must get the caller’s name and address. Their pay is docked if they talk over time, and there are bonuses for successfully getting credit-card details. The credit-card companies have deals with the St Matthew’s company. St Matthew’s Publishing Inc. reported US$15.6 million in revenue in 1997, US$26.8 million in 1999 and has refused to disclose finances since.4
Gene Ewing is a very wealthy evangelist, who doesn’t preach at all.
The 1990s set the stage for the present-day global enterprise of Pentecostalism, of which Hillsong is Australia’s largest, proudest and most active member. Hillsong is now internationally acclaimed for its philosophies and music. It preaches a doctrine that is similar to all the preachers on TBN, and it holds TBN celebrities in high esteem. In fact, out of the ten visiting names advertised for the Hillsong annual conference in 2006, only three didn’t have a regular show on TBN. Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, doesn’t and neither does Billy Hybels, ex-adviser to Bill Clinton and pastor of Vineyard’s Willow Creek Community Church, because they don’t need to. Frank Damazio is committed to prosperity evangelism but isn’t on TV. Jentzen Franklin hosts Kingdom Connection, Matthew Barnett The Dream Center, Rick Godwin is on TBN’s PTL and The 700 Club, and Rheinhard Bonnke appears regularly on others’ TBN broadcasts.
Gospel singer Alvin Slaughter, who toured with Benny Hinn for ten years, and in 2006 received an honorary doctor ate from Canada Christian College, is one of TBN’s music front men with his show Highest Praise. Israel Houghton and Cindy Cruse-Ratcliff appeared courtesy of Joel Osteen’s ‘biggest in America’ Lakewood Church and appear regularly on TBN specials. Hillsong 2006 was one long TBN advertisement.
TBN has come under huge scrutiny in the past few years. An ex-employee sued founder Paul Crouch for sexual harassment, saying he was forced to engage in acts in order to keep his job.