People in Glass Houses

by Tanya Levin

  Crouch settled out of court, paying $425,000.

  Ministrywatch.com has placed a donor alert on TBN, urging viewers not to send money. Ministrywatch lists that from 1999– 2004 TBN received $643 million in donations and $341 million in cash and short-term investments, yet it continues to ask for more money. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is the only association given an A by Wallwatchers, a Christian group that monitors ministries and charities for their financial integrity. All the other major televangelists who have their own shows, who have been trained by Oral Roberts or at his university or by his teachers, got an F. Their books are closed. They don’t have to tell.

  As is the case for Hillsong, in the United States a charitable institution or not-for-profit organisation is exempt from paying tax.

  Those who have sprung from Oral Roberts ministries, or who at least have close relationships with pastors who did, don’t have to pay tax and don’t have to tell anyone. In the States, the tax form for a not-for-profit is a 501c3. One website refers to all the prosperity pastors as ‘501c3 Chief Executive Officers’.

  It’s not clear where tax is paid when a visiting pastor speaks abroad. When it comes to an event the size of a Hillsong conference, however, someone must pay for the Americans to fl y all the way to Australia. Even if your Gulfstream jet costs $3500 an hour to fl y like Joyce Meyers’s does.

  If it all sounds like Amway, it’s because it may as well be. It’s not just because the wealthiest leaders live in Florida and Texas.

  There are about a hundred people in the world making an absolute killing out of millions of foot soldiers and thousands of captains. Pat Mesiti got a lot out of Amway. He rose high in the ranks, and learned the power of motivational speaking and of selling the tapes. Amway also teaches that God wants you to be rich.

  The punch-line with Amway is that no money is made selling cleaning products. It’s only when you are important enough to teach other people how to be like you that you can make tapes and DVDs, merchandising and royalties.

  The Double Diamonds in Amway and head honcho preachers are identical twins raised apart, only for their selling styles to be reunited once again in the early 1990s. Same mansions to prove success, same hopes and dreams for your kids to turn out okay, and same family-based solutions to your fears. The difference seems to be entry point. The evangelicals sell God first, money second. Amway at least offers you some floor cleaner to start with.

  So never worry. It doesn’t matter what happens. Brian and Bobbie will never be out of a job. Australia is too small right now for them to ever rise much above what would be in Amway a Pearl level, really only middle management. In Amway, those who are brought into the business are downline. Bobbie and Brian’s down-line are very loyal. Distributor-wise, they can’t lose much. They are at the very top of Hillsong’s corporate structure, with everyone below them. They are the tip of the iceberg, and are self-appointed presidents and leaders. In Australia, the buck stops there.

  Brian and Bobbie also have very strong upline support. Upline are the people who bring you into Amway, benefit from your success, and teach you all you know. Brian and Bobbie are dear friends with their upline, Wendy and Casey, loving and defending them at all costs. If anything should go horribly wrong in Australia, I’m sure there’s a top of the charts Emerald role just waiting somewhere on the US west coast for the Houstons. I could practically guarantee it.

  Bobbie’s own preaching reputation means she could actually have a show of her own. She’s an internationally renowned speaker now. She could always copy her old friend Lyndie McCauley.

  When Lyndie ran away from her husband, Pastor Ray, in South Africa after thirty years, abandoning their 20,000 strong congregation at Rhema Church, everyone at Hillsong got a letter, and Brian went over to hold his mate’s hand. Pray for Ray, the letter said, his wife ran away.

  Lyndie McCauley tried to go back, but within three months Pastor Ray was engaged to a younger blonde. They decked out the church building like a fairytale for the wedding. Many of the white congregation left in disgust. The Africans poured in, curious about prosperity theology in a failing post-apartheid South Africa. Lyndie McCauley moved to Florida to start Lyndie McCauley Ministries. That marriage is something her website fleetingly refers to as ‘a great challenge in her personal life in 2000’. Christian Life University recently presented Lyndie with an honorary doctorate of divinity.

  Bobbie could do the same thing easy. Get used to the names, Brian and Bobbie Houston. They’re not going anywhere.

  Chapter 22

  IF IT MAKES YOU HAPPY

  Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.

  —Proverbs 13:12

  Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

  —George W. Bush (20 September 2001)

  When Natascha Kampusch left her captor of eight years after being kidnapped at the age of ten, the Austrian teenager did not recall a world of pain. ‘It is true that my youth was different to the youth of others, but in principle I don’t feel I missed anything. I have been saved from some things, from starting to smoke and drink, or from having bad friends.’

  The same could be said for me. I had one of the healthiest childhoods on record. However, should usual adolescent development be arrested due to the fear of God, the breaking out can be far worse. The bad friends I could have made as a teenager might have been more innocuous. By the time I found my bad friends, I was old enough to do what I wanted and drive there as well. And having a thorough idea of what good people think is righteous helps you get away with murder.

  Some people claim that Hillsong is better than nothing; that it prevented them from ending up a juvenile delinquent, despite the embarrassing memories of playing guitar on Blacktown train station during outreach crusades.

  The relief most people feel when they embrace Christianity can often be accompanied by health changes. Quitting smoking, drinking and drugs is common and usually expected. No pressure. Frank Houston used to say smoking won’t keep you out of heaven, it’ll just get you there sooner. Emotionally, being part of a world-wide crusade can be very comforting. In a church like Hillsong, being surrounded with so many good friends, a new sense of self-worth, and knowledge that any day now you’re going to be rich, can certainly give rise to positive emotions.

  The American market research group Barna randomly sampled 3000 adults throughout the United States. Its results showed that:

  Evangelicals are almost universally ‘happy’ (99%) and were by far the segment that was most satisfied with their present life (91%). This upbeat frame of mind may be related to the fact that evangelicals are the least likely to say they are ‘lonely’ (8%), ‘in serious debt’ (9%) or ‘stressed out’ (16%). The percentage who admit to high levels of stress is less than half the level measured among adults connected with non-Christian faiths (33%) or those who say they are atheistic or agnostic (42%).1

  So if Hillsong makes people happy, what could be wrong with that? There’s just that one per cent problem. Christianity made me deeply depressed for many years, before I left Hills and after. The concept of original sin meant I was born worthless, and was only saved by the bestowing of grace. Salvation is free, sure! It’s a gift! But Jesus said if you love me you will keep my commandments. So getting in was simple. Staying in was excruciating. I hated carrying the burden of Eve. I hated knowing that I didn’t believe and couldn’t defend what I was being told, but that the alternative was a fiery pit. It kept me up at night, it terrified me in the day. It is literally a life lived damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

  Emotionally, for me it was a horrible way to live. All the blame and none of the credit. If anything goes well, it’s because God did it or did it working through you. If things go badly, it’s your fault.

  As evangelist Joyce Meyer says, if we all got what we deserved, we’d all be going to hell.

  We were told not to
trust our feelings. Feelings had nothing to do with the Facts. We were instructed not to see life as we see it but as God sees it. Thus the anxieties or sadnesses that might accompany a life event are to be repressed as an illusion. Instincts can’t be trusted. According to fundamentalists, suspicion, doubt, worry must all line up with how the Word of God says your life should be. And if ninety-nine per cent of people around you are happy, then happy you should be.

  Still, if Pentecostalism is engraved on my psyche forevermore, what effects might it have on other people? The system continues to reward those who comply with it and exile those who don’t.

  While you are happy, you will stay happy. If you show resistance to your leader, by requesting to look at the books or asking questions about theology, your survival in that system is limited, and so is your happiness. Emotions, we know, have historically been the tool of the devil. What about the mind? I very nearly went crazy and that’s one you don’t want to tell at church.

  Mental-health issues have traditionally been viewed as demonic by Pentecostals, and are largely ignored or countered with a bible verse from 2 Timothy, that covers anything remotely psychological. ‘God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of love and of power and of a sound mind’, it says. The inference, once again, is that if you’re experiencing something that God didn’t give you, then you had better take a closer look at yourself.

  As Brian and Bobbie said, before removing the article ‘You can be depression free’ from the Hillsong website:

  The bottom line is: depression is a supernatural spirit of destruction straight from the devil, and as such, needs to be treated like an enemy.

  We must take a strong stand against it and deny it any power in our lives. Depression stems from an underlying root of unbelief in God’s care, His goodness, His faithfulness, or even His ability to get you out of seemingly ‘impossible’ situations.2

  Kind of makes Tom Cruise’s Scientology look passé. One 1994 study looked at the mental health of Pentecostal baby boomers in North Carolina. Investigators found that com- pared to Protestants, the Pentecostal group had up to three times higher rates of short-term and life-time depression, anxiety disorders and life-time risk for any DSM-III disorder (the manual used by psychiatry professionals to diagnose mental health).

  Frequent church attendance did not seem to be hazardous to one’s health, but low-attending Pentecostals had the highest rates of life-time psychiatric disorder of any subgroup. Yet not one Pentecostal baby boomer in the study had consulted a mental-health professional in the previous six months.3

  Some people hear audible spiritual voices, some see visions of people who talk to them. Other people just espouse beliefs that make no sense in any arena other than their own religious rationale. So what’s the difference between Moses talking to a burning bush, Frank Houston’s visions for Australia, and the homeless guy in the park talking to himself? There seems to be two ways we treat these people. As fifty per cent of people with ‘mental illnesses’ have religious ideations, we either schedule them involuntarily to a psych hospital when they see God, or we give them a church, a bunch of people to look after and a car. It’s all about what’s socially acceptable.

  Back in reality, people who leave Hillsong and Assemblies of God churches often suffer responses common to individuals who leave thought-reform groups. Dr Margaret Singer, a longtime researcher into cult theory, described the psychiatric casualties of these groups as exhibiting standard behaviours. She said that the most common reaction regardless of length of membership is: a varying degree of anomie—a sense of alienation and confusion resulting from the loss or weakening of previously valued norms, ideals, or goals. When the person leaves the group and returns to broader society, culture shock and anxiety usually result from the theories learned in the group and the need to reconcile situational demands, values, and memories in three eras—the past prior to the group, the time in the group, and the present situation.4

  Yep, that was me. The person feels like an immigrant or refugee who enters a new culture. However, the person is re-entering his or her former culture, bringing along a series of experiences and beliefs from the group with which he or she had affiliated that conflict with norms and expectations. Unlike the immigrant confronting merely novel situations, the returnee is confronting a rejected society. Thus, most people leaving a thought-reform program have a period in which they need to put together the split or doubled self they maintained while they were in the group and come to terms with their pre-group sense of self. 5

  No wonder I feel like I’ve had multiple personality disorder all my life.

  Dr Singer also talks about more extreme responses such as post-traumatic stress disorders, and atypical dissociative disorders which involve memory loss. It was only when I had met several ex-AoG members who could not remember the name of their senior pastor that I began to give credence to this. Dr Singer also lists other reactions such as relaxation-induced anxiety and: miscellaneous reactions including anxiety combined with cognitive inefficiencies, such as difficulty in concentration, inability to focus and maintain attention, and impaired memory (especially short-term) … and psychological factors affecting physical conditions …6

  These reactions occur equally in those with no family history of mental-health problems and those with such a history.

  Fundamentalism can make you crazy. That’s because its logic is impossible. It is impossible to say that every word of the New Testament is truth when four different gospels give a Picasso effect to the basic story. For some people, that’s okay; for me it didn’t work. Taking the bible in its entirety literally, it is logically impossible to know or please the God it outlines.

  Still, as the world’s most famous born-again Christian, The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders, says, ‘We believe all the bible, even the bits that contradict the other bits.’

  All of this might otherwise be kooky and funny if the crazy people kept their truth to themselves. But they can’t and they don’t. When the AoG men of God tell the world that their fundamentalism—prosperity theology—is truth, it is cruelty to a hungry world.

  TV evangelists and prosperity proponents are targeting the weakest groups, not just in the West but internationally in developing countries. ‘It is probably the single most dangerous religious trend because it is causing further impoverishment of the poor in the Third World,’ said Hector Avalos, an associate professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University. ‘It is a religious version of Wall Street,’ he added. ‘It focuses on people’s need and greed. You give money to the church, and you are supposed to get multiple returns on your investment.’7

  But it offers people hope. Hope, even if it is temporary, or disappointed, is a good thing, isn’t it? In some countries, hope is all there is to work with, hope is all they have. Better than nothing, right? It’s just the premise their hope is based on is all askew. No, God is not Santa Claus. Santa Claus isn’t even Santa Claus. The rich kids always get the best presents. Even if you are good all year, not everyone can be a millionaire.

  The American social critic H.L. Mencken said that fundamentalism was by definition ‘a terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun’. Fundamentalism of any kind is far-reaching. And they’re all the same, according to The Fundamentalism Project, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1988 until 1993, over 100 scholars from a range of disciplines were briefed to report on every fundamentalism in existence. Their conclusion: all fundamentalisms share five ‘family resemblances’, regardless of the belief system they put forward for emulation.

  1. Each fundamentalist group believes in its truth as the only truth. This truth must be applied to all areas of life, and to all people. Ideally, there should be no separation of church and state.

  2. Men have the power, through physical strength and through making the rules. Women are defined by men, generally by their biological capabilities—that is, they should be submissive wives and mothers, kept in the home. Ind
ependent women are hated and sexual freedom is highly restricted.

  3. Control of the children is essential. In order to reproduce a fundamentalist culture, children must be educated exclusively and with much censorship.

  4. All fundamentalists espouse a demand for a return to an ideal age that never existed. Change and modernity are seen as enemies to this process, and so technology, science and social progress are often strongly resisted.

  5. While fundamentalists remain obsessed with modern society’s failure to uphold their utopian system of morality, they fail to see how their own doctrine is clouded with all kinds of historical and cultural themes. Fundamentalists insist their scriptures or dogma be taken literally; it is unchanging.8

  Fundamentalists like their world view. I can’t. Seeing the world in black and white misses out all the colours of the rainbow. And being human is an incredible concept, one that entails all sorts of failure, disappointment and mistakes, some for no reason at all. It is also strung together with irrational hope, unmanageable love and beauty that surprises us and humbles us when we least expect it.

  Culturally and politically, fundamentalism has devastating effects. Because of its refusal to acknowledge anything besides black and white, many subtleties as well as the inexplicable do not exist in this world. The essence of fundamentalism is found in its opposition to difference and diversity in every sphere of life.

  Humour and art shrink to live within narrow borders in fundamentalist societies. They are unnecessary, and way too open to interpretation. They challenge the absolutes that are vital for fundamentalist thinking’s survival. Fundamentalism is a state of mind that takes life very, very seriously.

  Chapter 23

  CONSIDER ME GONE

  But I cannot leave it at that; there is more to it than that. In spite of everything, there was in the life I fl ed a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love.