After more music, Hinn started ticking off the healings that were taking place throughout the arena at that very moment. Within a ten-minute span, the pastor proclaimed that people in the arena had just been cured of asthma, cancerous tumors, arthritis, leukemia, emphysema and 22 other ailments. And believers lined up on both sides of the stage to tell the pastor that they had been healed of heart conditions, knee problems, osteoporosis, breast cancer, deafness and more. Hinn applied his touch to their foreheads, scattering them like bowling pins across the stage.
The real drama happened after the pastor left the stage and the music stopped. Terminally ill people remained, just as sick as before. There were folks with Parkinson’s disease whose limbs were still twisted and shaking. There were quadriplegics who couldn’t move any muscle below their neck. These people—and there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them at each crusade—sat in their chairs, bewildered and crushed that God hadn’t healed them; their caretakers tried to offer some comforting words.
Brian Darby has worked for more than two decades with severely handicapped people in Northern California and often has experienced the disappointment left in the wake of a Miracle Crusade. Over the years, he told me many of his clients have attended the events, where they were swept up in a wave of excitement, thinking they were about to walk for the first time or have their limbs straightened.
“You can’t minimize the impact of not being healed on the person, the family, the extended family,” Darby told me. “They have a sense of euphoria at the crusade and then crash down. [Hinn is not] around to pick up the pieces.”
Many people believe, as Hinn preaches, that God fails to heal them because their faith isn’t strong enough. Maybe they didn’t give enough money to Hinn’s ministry. Or maybe they just didn’t believe enough.
In Anaheim, Jordie Gibson, then 21, wanted God to know how much he believed. Before the crusade, he stopped kidney dialysis as an act of faith before he flew to Southern California from Calgary, Canada.
“When I told my doctors, they said they could make arrangements for me to do dialysis” in Orange County, Jordie told me. “But I was going to be healed, so it didn’t matter. I needed to step out in faith.”
A volunteer usher at the event, Jordie pushed up the sleeve of his shirt to show the shunt in his arm used for dialysis. He survived “stepping out in faith,” but had to go back on dialysis once he returned to Canada. He told me that blood work showed his kidneys were functioning better after the event. “Whatever the Bible says is true,” he added. “And it says God can heal you. It’s true. All you need to do is ask.”
There is a great deal of medical research on the placebo effect, the idea that the body responds to the mind if the mind is duped. The extent of the placebo effect varies greatly depending on how and when it’s used, but studies show up to 75 percent of patients who take sugar pills have a measurable response to them. You could argue that Hinn is a placebo provider, and this does some good. But what of all those who go off their meds? CNN and the Australian version of 60 Minutes have aired interviews with relatives whose family members died after they allegedly stopped medical treatment because Hinn had told them they were cured of their terminal cancer.
Sitting with me for the interview at the Four Seasons, the pastor seemed like an entirely different man from the faith healer I’d seen onstage the night before. He dressed casually in black, with designer sunglasses, leather jacket and black shoes. His trademark hair had been brushed forward, bangs hanging over his forehead like Caesar. Hinn fiddled with his cell phone, which sported a Mercedes logo. The fingers that allegedly heal people were delicate, with manicured and polished nails. A gold wedding band, so wide it covered the bottom of his left ring finger from knuckle to knuckle like a piece of copper pipe, bore the insignia of his church: a dove, symbolizing the Holy Spirit, sparkling with a cluster of diamonds.
“I know me, and those close to me know me,” he said. “But sadly, the outside world thinks I’m some kind of a crook. I think it’s time for me to change that.”
He was quiet, charming, humble and introspective. We talked for three hours. I asked him a series of questions delving into his ministry’s finances, his lavish salary and perks and the inability to prove that his “healings” lasted after the euphoria of the event was over.
He admitted that even one of his daughters, then 11, had a difficult time figuring him out: “One day she asked me a question that absolutely blew me away—from my own child! ‘Daddy, who are you? That man up there [onstage], I don’t know.’ If my own child is asking that, surely the whole world is asking that.”
He told me he had a heart condition that God hadn’t cured, and his parents had suffered serious medical problems.
“That is a very difficult thing for me because I told my daddy to believe,” Hinn said. “But he died. Now I don’t know why…My mom has diabetes, my daddy died with cancer. That’s life.”
The way Hinn portrayed it, being a faith healer was a terrible burden placed on him by God. If not for the divine calling, Hinn said he would walk away from the job in an instant. I couldn’t look into Hinn’s soul, but from where I sat, I saw a gifted actor who parlayed his theatrical skills and feel for the human condition into the material life of a movie star. I didn’t think for a moment he believed a word of what he preached—or that he was bothered that people who didn’t get their miracle cure had died. I imagined him behind the doors of his cliff-top Dana Point mansion, giggling to himself at his good fortune as he looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the 180-degree view of the Pacific with surfers bobbing in the waves, dolphins swimming just outside the surf line and sailboats dotting the horizon. He had hit the lottery, his actions protected from the law by the First Amendment.
Most people would discern this simply by watching his show. I had the added advantage of meeting people such as William Vandenkolk. He was a nine-year-old boy living in Las Vegas with his aunt and uncle, who were raising him. Unbeknownst to his guardians, a babysitter took the legally blind boy to a Miracle Crusade in hopes of regaining his eyesight. She managed to get William onstage, and Hinn bent down and placed his hands on the child’s face. “Look at these tears,” said Hinn, peering into the child’s eyes. “William, baby, can you see me?”
Before more than 15,000 people in a Las Vegas arena, William nodded. In a small voice, the boy said: “As soon as God healed me, I could see better.” Hinn, an arm wrapped around William, told the audience that God had just instructed him to pay the child’s medical expenses and education. People wept. The video clip was shown repeatedly on Hinn’s television show, a tear-producing, faith-inspiring fund-raising tool.
Two years later, William was still legally blind. He told me his sight never improved and that his onstage comments were the wishful thinking of a little boy not wanting to disappoint God and the thousands of people who were watching him.
“It’s pretty sad when you mess with a little boy’s mind,” said Randy Melthratter, William’s uncle and guardian. It took two years, a series of phone calls and my inquiry before his family was told that a $10,000 fund had been set up in William’s name. Randy still couldn’t get any details on how to access the account until a second story appeared about William.
When my piece on Benny Hinn was published, I thought his donations would dip at least a little. I even hoped it would prompt him to clean up his act. I was wrong on both counts. His supporters had been indoctrinated in the belief that the mainstream media was a tool of the devil designed to bring down great ministries and men of God. If I had caught Benny in bed with a dead woman or live boy, it wouldn’t have made a difference. CNN, HBO and NBC’s Dateline have done devastating reports on Benny Hinn and his ministry, and Pastor Benny’s career has kept sailing along. My article didn’t stand a chance. Today, he continues to be, by far, the most financially successful “faith healer” in the world.
Besides a handful of secular media outlets and a few fringe Christian organizations, no one i
s bothered enough by Hinn’s antics and the harm he does to people and the Body of Christ to call him out. Many fear the tight relationship between Hinn and the leaders of the Trinity Broadcasting Network—coming out against the faith healer would mean incurring the wrath of the world’s largest religious broadcaster. The Christian media, whose voice could make a difference with believers, have shied away from most criticism as well. In general, the Christian media is extremely hesitant to undertake investigative reporting on Christian organizations, no matter how corrupt. Controversy—and the resulting loss of advertisers and readers—scares them. Several freelancers have come to me with their unpublished stories after Christian magazines rejected the material as too controversial. I started to wonder why my faith had so few people of principle.
My story about Benny Hinn was part of a larger investigation into the Trinity Broadcasting Network. From time to time I had received e-mails making allegations about the leadership of TBN. Often the anonymous messages came with details about sexual impropriety, lavish spending and questionable use of donor money. But no proof was offered, and the senders rarely responded to my questions. Then I wrote a small, straightforward news story that involved TBN. Twenty-four hours later, a flurry of e-mails arrived in my inbox accusing TBN and its founders, televangelists Paul and Jan Crouch, of various misdeeds. I decided that where there was smoke, there might be fire.
TBN was the Fort Knox of Christian organizations. No reporter had completely penetrated it; the network operated with a level of secrecy that the CIA would envy. The ministry is valued at more than $2 billion, generates about $200 million annually and beams its programming from dozens of satellites into every country on Earth. If a pastor can get a show on TBN (the waiting list is long), money pours in. What went on behind the scenes was a closely guarded secret. The network’s founders didn’t give media interviews, and their employees were told not to talk to the press.
Channel surfers probably know TBN by the image of Jan Crouch, who wears heavy makeup, long false lashes and champagne-colored wigs piled high on her head. She speaks in a singsong voice and lets her tears flow freely, whether reading a viewer’s letter or recalling how God resurrected her pet chicken when she was a child.
Her husband, Paul, with his silver hair, mustache and bifocals, comes across as a grandfatherly sort. What he calls his “German temper” can rise quickly, however. He often punctuates a point by shaking a finger at the camera.
“Get out of God’s way,” he said once, referring to TBN’s detractors. “Quit blocking God’s bridges or God is going to shoot you, if I don’t.”
The Crouches’ eldest son, Paul Crouch Jr., a thick man with bushy graying hair and a 1970s-style mustache, has taken the reins of the television empire from his aging parents and is trying to modernize it. Already under the leadership of PJ, as he is known, the studio sets have gone from gold and gaudy to chic. The programming is tilting rapidly away from big-haired Southern preachers to Christianized versions of secular fare, including an American Idol–style reality show featuring gospel singers.
Together, the three Crouches make up TBN’s entire board of directors, giving the ministry little outside oversight. Like a miner looking at rock formations, a journalist can survey the ground before him and see the potential for a good story: secrecy, concentrated power and lack of oversight. But digging beneath the surface isn’t easy. Over the next two years, while juggling other stories, I traveled back and forth across the country several times to meet with sources, stake out houses, knock on doors late at night, comb courthouses for documents and even sift through piles of trash others had collected in order to produce a portrait of the TBN empire and Paul and Jan Crouch.
I received threatening phone calls. A man with a menacing voice asked if I would be driving my usual way home that night and warned me to watch my back. Another caller said that a private investigator had discovered an illicit affair I was having with a male newsroom colleague (not true). A pastor in Riverside, California launched a website devoted to “bringing me down” because I was doing Satan’s work. He posted a series of lies about me (such as that my editors had kicked me off the story) along with personal information about my family and me. He solicited donations so he could hire a private investigator to dig up dirt.
I didn’t think I was in physical danger. My sources, however, felt their lives were at risk. I talked with hundreds of people for the story, and more than a few believed that their phones had been bugged and that they were being followed. This was undoubtedly just paranoia, but some of it was bred by the culture at TBN—an us-against-them mindset. Either you were with TBN and Jan and Paul Crouch or you were working for Satan. (The bunker mentality filtered right down to TBN viewers. I called fans of TBN, looking for their positive take on the ministry and what it meant to their lives. Inevitably the first question they would ask was, “Did Jan and Paul say it was okay if I talked with you?” I was able to talk to many of them only after Paul Crouch Jr. announced on the air that it was okay.)
I spoke with many former TBN employees and current and former associates who said that as Christians, they wanted to blow the whistle on what they believed was abuse of donor money and immoral behavior, but they just couldn’t. It would be too risky, they said, even if I withheld their names. Several were so scared that they reported our conversation to TBN officials. I grew increasingly frustrated by this nearly uniform lack of courage by people who claimed to be devout Christians. I’d often find myself quoting Scripture to them to see how they justified silence when they claimed to know about abuses within God’s ministry.
“What do you think Jesus meant when he told his disciples, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me’?” I would ask. “Didn’t Jesus warn repeatedly that the Christian life would involve sacrifice?”
But TBN provided a gravy train for producers, pastors, singers and filmmakers. Rank-and-file employees needed a paycheck. Almost no one wanted to risk what he had, even when I’d ask about Jesus’ promise that “everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”
There were some wonderful exceptions. A few workers had been concerned enough about how donations were being used to smuggle out documents showing lavish spending by the Crouches. And I did find several brave souls who felt it was their Christian duty to talk about what was happening inside TBN. First among them was a quiet, unassuming woman with a soft Southern accent named Kelly Whitmore. She had seen a lot as Jan Crouch’s personal assistant for several years; she told me she fled the ministry in the middle of the night, fed up with the hypocrisy.
TBN officials painted Whitmore, then 46, as a disgruntled former employee, but that just didn’t fit. She was sweet, polite, naïve, and had an unwavering sense of right and wrong. Her accounts were straightforward and filled with telling details. Other witnesses and documents corroborated much of her information. I talked with Kelly for hours, and she seemed to have only one primary motive: to shed a light onto what was happening within TBN. (She had retained an agent and talked about selling her story to Hollywood, but that seemed to be pushed more by her friends than by Kelly.) A lot of her information ended up in my story, but even more was left out, because in many cases I couldn’t get anyone on the record to back her up out of fear of retribution. People didn’t even want to be used as anonymous sources. Kelly and a few others stood alone, but they—along with hundreds of documents—were enough.
By September 2004, when my series of stories was published, I thought I had gathered information devastating enough to TBN and the Crouches that the ministry would be forced to reform itself. I had discovered, for instance, that TBN’s patriarch, Pastor Paul Crouch, had secretly paid $425,000 to keep allegations of a homosexual tryst with one of his employees under wraps. TBN viewers often heard about the evils of homosexuality and how to battle the “scourge.” In 1
990, Pastor Benny Hinn prophesied on TBN: “The Lord also tells me to tell you in the mid ’90s, about ’94 to ’95, no later than that, God will destroy the homosexual community of America. [The audience applauded.] But He will not destroy it with what many minds have thought [He would use], He will destroy it with fire. And many will turn and be saved, and many will rebel and be destroyed.”
Lonnie Ford, a former TBN employee, claimed that he was forced to have sex with Paul Crouch during a weekend stay at the ministry’s cabin in Lake Arrowhead. Through his attorney, Crouch denied the allegations and said he paid a settlement to avoid a sensational trial and massive legal bills. TBN officials pointed out that Ford was a drug addict and felon. Still, Ford’s story couldn’t be easily dismissed.
Working as a mortgage salesman at the time of my story, Ford had been hired in 1992 to work in TBN’s telephone bank in Orange County. Crouch took an interest in him. Within four years, Ford said, he was doing special assignments for the pastor. One such job was to drive Crouch to Hollywood and take publicity photos for TBN at a Christian nightclub. Ford said he and others in the ministry were surprised at the assignment because he wasn’t a photographer.
“They had to show me—and I’m not kidding—how to work a camera,” Ford told me. Crouch told him not to worry about it.
After visiting the nightclub, Ford said Crouch took him to dinner at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. Shortly after that, in October 1996, Ford said he and Crouch spent two nights at the same hotel in separate rooms. Ford said they worked out together at the hotel gym and ate expensive meals with bottles of wine and after-dinner drinks. “I knew what he was doing,” Ford said. “He was seducing me.” Ford was an openly gay man.
Losing My Religion Page 17