Televangelism Part One: A History of Dirty Money For God
Televangelism Part One: A History of Dirty Money For God
Part Four of the Fringe Beliefs Series. Edited by Brynn.
As summer continues and I pull out my flowy goth wardrobe while listening to Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” album and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” on repeat, I come back to this topic of televangelists and want to scream. Not because I don’t want to write it, I like learning about weird fringe religious sects, it’s just because these people make me insane in my head.
I had to write about these people during pride month for two main reasons. One, most televangelist preachers wear more makeup than the average drag queen, and two, televangelists keep sticking their nose into politics that don’t concern them. It’s growing increasingly frustrating to see the queer community, my community, demonized by these charlatans.
I’ve always been interested in televangelists. Most of the time, it’s to make fun of them, but they’re so pervasive to American culture, I believed they deserved a deep dive. I think one of America’s greatest minds, Hank Hill described it best when he said, “you aren’t making rock and roll any better, you’re just making Christianity worse.” In a lot of ways, that’s what this worship movement looks like from the outside. They’ve taken modern day Christianity, and they’ve made it worse, compounding television, radio, and greed for their own selfish gain. I don’t think that the TV show, The Righteous Gemstones is making a lot of exaggerations. I believe that televangelists are actually like the crazy, gun firing, rhinestone wearing, dumpster fire Danny McBride characters on the show.. So: what is this whole movement, why did it get started, and why should we be worried now?
Televangelism has steadily been on the rise in the past century or so, growing hand in hand with Christian Nationalism, which innit of itself gives off keep it in the family vibes. It seems like it’s always been around, parodied for their big hair and many sex scandals, which we will get to, but that’s not true. This is a relatively new phenomenon, but it’s not stopping anytime soon. It’s like crypto, or HPV. It’s sadly here to stay for the long run.
Many televangelists make millions of dollars-all tax exempt- every year. They live lavish lifestyles while their congregants lose homes, cars, and rack up thousands of dollars of debt in search of salvation. I’m not the first to talk about these people, and I certainly won’t be the last. And I should probably address this now before I get a million hate comments. While it might look like on the outside that I hate Christians, it’s nothing like that. Christianity isn’t a problem to me. Believe what you want. Preach God. I’ll support you till my dying breath, but I don’t like con men. There’s a difference.
I hate when people in positions of power take advantage of others who put their trust in them and that’s what Televangelists are. When people speak with tongues of gold and with pulpits lined in Chanel, there is nothing they can say that is not heresy. The lies that they will spin and deception that entangle good people knows no bounds. Beware of something that seems too good to be true. All those pastors are made of cheap bronze; forced to patina and rot when left out in the rain.
I support whatever someone wants to believe, but I also want to fight for the truth, for justice, and to expose the lies that certain members of religions use to exploit others. For that reason, I’ve chosen to talk about Televangelism in its entirety to see what it’s going to become. We’ve seen the past, we’ve seen the present, but the future, that’s truly terrifying. What can Televangelism and the rise of Christian Fundamentalism/Nationalism say about America as a whole? How do we combat it before it completely obliterates the separation of church and state? What does Alex Jones’ weird “prophetic” dreams, Project 2025, Elon Musk, and unpasteurized milk bird flu all have to do with it?
To truly understand where we are now with the private jets, multi-million-dollar homes, and multiple universities (I MEAN MULTIPLE), let’s talk about where it comes from. So, strap in, grab some popcorn, and pray to whatever god you believe in, because this article is just going to get worse the longer I keep typing.
WHAT IS PENTECOSTALISM
To understand evangelicals, especially in the United States, you have to understand that most of the country's earliest colonists fled England because of religious persecution. Quakers, Methodists, Catholics, Puritans, and Pilgrims flocked to the shores of America after their way of life was threatened in Europe. America was the promised land for these people. It was a place where everyone could practice what they believed, as long as they practiced whatever crazy thing the church elders of the town believed. If they didn’t, those people were accused of witchcraft, but that’s beside the point.
The United States loves loopholes when it comes to religion. While we have many protections about the freedoms of religion, we also have no consequences for when those religions take advantage of people.. This is shown in the modern Pentecostal movement, which is where we can trace a branch of televangelism from. Our story starts in the early 1900s, in small churches all over the country.
This isn’t regular church service, with the fire,brimstone, and some boring ass white man preaching for hours on end before you’re forced to eat ambrosia and potato salad with raisins in it. This is Pentecostal church. That man’s speaking in tongues. Do I know what he’s saying? No, but he sure is saying it. And he’s got a snake. Where did he get a snake? Don’t ask questions. He has one now.
Preachers are performing miracles, let’s hear it again, miracles, on people. You’ve got tuberculosis? Not no more you don’t. Can’t walk? I’m gonna touch your head, spew a bunch of gibberish, and hallelujah, Grandma can dance now. These preachers can do anything. Plus, these people didn’t have television, so it was most entertainment they probably had until the circus came to town or something.
As it says in the book, “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel”, the four main tenets of Pentecostalism are divine healing, personal salvation, baptism with the Holy Spirit, and the return of Christ. That is what Pentecostals tell people their religious views are based on, even if most layman people would associate them with their more extremist beliefs. This would shape into the idea of being God’s chosen people. Pentecostals desire to be considered perfect in the eyes of the Lord, and they do that by speaking in tongues and performing miracles.
Speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, if you want the fancy name for it, came into Pentecostalism through the Azusa Street Church in Southern California. A black evangelical preacher, William J Seymour is one of the first mainstream Pentecostal preachers to speak in tongues, causing many others to follow suit. Honestly, if we know anything about history, it will always be that a black person popularizes an idea, and white people then get to steal it and claim it for their own.
TENT REVIVALS AND FAITH HEALINGS
This first wave of Pentecostalism would remain popular from the 1890s to the late 1930s. At the time, radio was a newfangled technology, and many cashed in on spreading the good word to the masses. Remember that the 1890s was the tail end of the Industrial Revolution in America, and there was a huge boom of immigrants from mostly Catholic countries that flooded the cities, pushing many protestants into the Midwest. Additionally, Spiritualism was at its heyday, and many WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, turned to the alternative, crazy Pentecostals because they offered salvation that you could buy.
One father of Pentecostalism was Alexander Dowie, the American preacher most well-known for healing revivalism. He had started his small church in Australia with little success, and later moved to Chicago in the early 1890s. He drew in large crowds after he premiered his “miracle” filled church service at the city’s World’s Fair, where his audience plants seemed to cure even the most stubborn of illness with the touch of a hand. What the audience didn’t know was that the plants didn’t have the illness to begin with, so it was less of a miracle and more of a bad community theater performance for their donations.
His regular church grew quickly due to his amazing “miracle” services, but they didn’t go without scandal. He was frequently arrested for practicing medicine without a license, and eventually bought 6000 acres north of Chicago to create his own Zion. It Was basically a town that he created to commit securities fraud. After two years, numerous scandals, and his penchant for spending the money of Zion on himself, he was ousted as leader and then died two years later.
This doesn’t mean the men had all the fun at the old tent revivals. The biggest known female Pentecostal preacher was Aimee Semple McPherson. Her life was filled with scanda:, from her constant infighting for power over her church with her overbearing mother, to a kidnapping scheme that might have actually been a whole farse to get away with extramarital affairs, to her surpassing Billy Sunday, who we’ll talk about in a second, as the most talked about Pentecostal preacher in the Northern Hemisphere.
Her life was full of twists and turns. From three high-profile marriages, one ending in death and another in divorce, something that women weren’t societally allowed to do in the 20s and 30s, and her close relationships with Hollywood’s biggest stars, she basically had America’s ear for a good part of the early 20th century. She was known for lavish sermons, huge production values, and the fact that she was a woman preaching. When I was researching this story, all the books just skipped over her. It’s insane how many people hate to see a woman girl bossing, gatekeeping, and gaslighting her way into success. It was also crazy how she only got snippets of credit in the founding of evangelicalism when she was such a big part.
Now, the most famous male Pentecostal preacher of the time was Billy Sunday, former baseball player and man who absolutely thought pepper was too spicy. If you’ve seen Footloose, imagine John Lithgow’s character. That’s Billy Sunday. He was the OG tent preacher, traveling all over the country to speak in large tents to thousands of people about Christ, performing miracles, and getting rich from the process. He dined with presidents and was personally good friends with Rockefeller and other tycoons of the day.
While he was actually progressive in some respects, even to today’s evangelical standards, like his views on women’s suffrage and labor unions, he still appealed to the Ku Klux Klan and took a lot of their financial contributions. Also, he opposed dancing, music, alcohol, and anything fun, except of course, baseball. I wasn’t kidding about the Footloose comparison.
Sunday bridged the gap between the church that people at the time were used to and this newfangled Pentecostalism with his inherent ethos of celebrity. And he made a whole lot of money in the process. That’s the lesson every single preacher would quickly learn soon after; there’s money to be made in making miracles happen.
SILVER TONGUED SNAKES
Many tent revivals died out in the late 1930s. As the depression continued, the dust bowl ravished most of the Midwest, and the looming threat of fascism came to the coast, people had a lot more to be worried about than the pleasures and leisurely activities they enjoyed in the 10’s and 20’s. When WWII broke out, the United States was thrust onto the national stage, and for a while, most of the country was worried about the threat of fascism of Germany. As a result, the Pentecostal, and in a way, the televangelism movement, stalled. However, that all would change when the United States came back as heroes.
The 50's was the time of prosperity. The American Dream-which doesn’t exist, but we’re not getting into that- was thriving, and radio was finally being beat by something even cooler, television. Television was a game changer for many things, but those radio evangelicals saw something too. They saw a new way to make money, none more than the three ghosts of white privilege past: Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, and Pat Robertson.
Oral Roberts, (it’s okay to laugh, his name is stupid) is not the first televangelist, but the very first one isn’t talked about and doesn’t have a university, so he’s not relevant here. . Oral started out as a faith healer, claiming he could raise the dead at the ripe old age of 19. Now, at that age I was out disappointing my parents, but at least I wasn’t trying to convince people that I could make dead people somehow be alive again. So, you know, tit for tat.
In the 60’s, he heard a commandment from God, and probably his pocketbooks, to build Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Still operating today, Oral Roberts is one of those colleges that you forget exist until someone brings up that they went there. Then you just feel sorry for them.
What Oral was good at was getting poor people to send him money. He was an early proponent of seed faith, and with his successful university, a hospital , and his congregation, he raked in millions of dollars a year. He would pass on the kingdom of fraud to his son, who ran most of it, except for the university, into the ground. Still, Oral Roberts died a rich man, living off the wealth that others gave him. But there was one person who would still be bigger-Billy Graham. At one point, he was one of the most powerful people in the free world, which is terrifying to think about, and he did it all while still taking poor people’s money.
Graham would become famous for his crusades; sermons that attracted tens of thousands of viewers every Sunday that included some well-known eyes. He was personally close to many of the presidents, from Lyndon B Johnson all the way up to George W. Bush. He was good friends with Martin Luther King Jr. and was an early proponent of integration. Graham’s evangelical association would even go on to oversee radio shows, Christian television programs, newspapers, and even a Christian movie production company with over 100 films under its belt.
By the time he died, Graham had conducted over 400 live sermons, had gotten a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (the only evangelical to have one), and had stayed relatively scandal free. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a terrible man. He hated gay people, campaigned for anti-gay legislation, and was for abortion bans unless it was in extreme cases.
While Billy Graham has faded from the public consciousness, his impact led to multiple generations of televangelists, so in a sense, he’s horrible, and we should all blame him for all of this. One of his protégé’s would absolutely take his foundations of televangelism and run with it, and that’s the last of the three white men we’re talking about in this section, Pat Robertson.
Pat Robertson isn’t important as a televangelist. He was literally like every other white man who wanted to hear his own voice. He hated feminism, gay people, abortion, and said that Hurricane Katrina was because America was heading towards sin. I want to talk about him because he started Christian Broadcasting Network, and the 700 club.
CBN is still the biggest television production company that makes the worst shows known to man, but what Pat Robertson did was give so many other televangelists their start into the grift business. CBN was a company that raked in millions of dollars each year, and they were never taxed for it, which sounds like tax evasion, but is apparently not.
If you’re wondering, CBN still exists today with amazing programs for all of us to check out: the 700 club (which really shouldn’t be running still, but is), and an 80’s bible anime for kids called Superbook that they still run reruns of.
Anyway, Pat Robertson is in hell, but what he gave us was the best duo of televangelists the world has ever seen, and a gay icon that we didn’t know he could have. What the fifties and sixties were for televangelism was a time of transition, and what would come from these good ol’ boys in the decades that followed would be scandal after scandal.
BIG HAIR AND LARGE POCKETS
There are a lot of things in the 70’s and 80’s that should not come back. Shag carpeting, pastel bathtubs, crimped hair, and the song “Bette Davis Eyes” to name a few. Just like the huge decades that they were, the televangelists were also bigger and flashier in the 70’s and 80’s. Large mansions, luxury cars and clothes, and opulence were on full display. With this however, the almost nonchalance acceptance of televangelism would crack, and it would never truly be healed.
So, we’ve had the tent preachers and the button up televangelists, but what we got in the 70’s was a man who would bridge the gap between the old suit and tie and the new wave “healers”- Jerry Falwell.
If you’ve heard of Jerry Falwell, I’m sorry. If you haven’t and are about to, I’m also sorry. If you only know about him because of what his son did, and well, didn’t do with that pool boy, good. It’s how you should remember his legacy. Jerry Falwell was like if you wished that white bread had less of a personality. His televangelism wasn’t as pervasive as some of the other preachers of the time, but Jerry just couldn’t keep his pudgy little fingers out of politics.
What Jerry would start, The Moral Majority as he called it, is the reason for the rise of conservatism in the 80’s, the inaction of the AIDS crisis, and in a sense, Trump’s presidency. Without the moral majority messing things up, lobbying Republicans in Congress, and scaring your grandparents with media fodder from Fox News, I think the United States would be in a more progressive place.
What The Moral Majority did was break down the idea that the church and state should be separate. It used super PACS, or political action committees, to get conservative laws passed, and worked with the church on what those laws would be. If the church can pay for politicians, I should be able to bribe my politicians to announce that all the frogs are gay because of the chemicals. That would be fair.
Anyway, if that wasn’t enough meddling in the United States for you, Jerry would go on to make Liberty University in 1971. It’s still around today, but it’s not in the Falwell’s hands anymore, for reasons we will get to in the next part. This conservative Christian college teaches the next generation of Jerry Falwells and Jim Bakkers.
What Falwell will probably be most remembered for is his insane takes throughout his life. He opposed integration in the 60’s, befriending many segregationists and demonizing Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. He was very anti-gay and called homosexuality a sin-of course. He thought Islam was evil, was considered a Christian Zionist, and said that 9/11 happened because of the United States. decided to be OK with gay people, and went after the Teletubbies because Tinky Winky carried a bag, and he thought that it was the gay agenda.
So, who was this man? Well, he’s dead, so it shouldn’t matter, but it does. He meddled so much in our politics that we still feel his effects to this day, and as I just said, he’s dead. He lived a full life of terror, and he’s absolutely burning in hell for it. But, he would have a weird relationship with these next televangelists, first as a friend, then as an adversary. These next characters, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, were nothing short of opulence and materialism.
Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker are probably what people think of when the word televangelist is mentioned. I mean, I get it, me too. When I think about it, they are the reason I wrote this article. The Bakker’s are the shining example of why the world hates televangelists. When they first started out, sure, you could argue that they were in this business to help people, but it sure didn’t end that way.
When Jim and Tammy Faye finally got their own show on Pat Robertson’s CBN-yeah, they’re all connected-the pair seemed thick as thieves, and they were. Both had dropped out of Bible college to get married and preach on the road, appealing to kids with their interactive puppet shows and comedic approach to youth ministry. They had a syndicated children’s Christian show, and even guest hosted the 700 club from time to time, until a falling out of creative differences caused them to go solo.
That didn’t matter, because the Bakker’s seemed like they couldn’t be stopped. They built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park-something I talk about in the next article of this series-and were raking in millions of dollars, tax exempt.. They were Icarus with their wax wings made of new money, and it was all about to come crashing down.
Jim Bakker would be accused of sexual assault by his secretary and mail fraud, things he absolutely did, and went to jail for 8 years. Here, in his own words, he actually read the bible for the first time cover to cover. Tammy Faye would go on to divorce him.
Tammy Faye was a character. She is not with us anymore, but after leaving Jim, she opened up, apologizing about a lot of the beliefs she had and becoming a more progressive woman. She even enraged Jim many times by showing her compassion for the victims of the AIDS crisis at the time, something that other televangelists, and frankly, most of the rest of the country, weren’t.
She became almost a gay icon in a sense, from her outrageous makeup and wigs to her continued support of the gay community after leaving Jim. She was one of the only, if the only, televangelist that people seem to forgive. She’s seen as respectable to most queer people I know, and it’s mostly because she never came off as crass or abrasive like Jim, who still steals people’s money every Sunday with his third wife over on Kenneth Copeland’s network. As I said, she is not with us anymore, after passing away from a long battle with colon cancer in the early 2000s, but what she showed is that people can change and grow.
That’s why I think many normal Americans despise televangelists if they aren’t affiliated with them. These people know what they are doing is wrong, and they still get away with it. When they sit up and preach about being God’s chosen scribes and then get caught with sex workers, commit fraud, or even worse, sexually abuse children, it’s a slap in the face to honest, law-abiding citizens, and also to other criminals as well.
Most bank robbers don’t stand up each Sunday and talk about how moral they are; but, if they did, someone would probably beat the hell out of them, and for good reason. So, when people saw Jim Bakker crying because he was going to lose everything, or when Jimmy Swaggart came on television and said, “I have forsaken you lord” with crocodile tears in his eyes after being caught with a sex worker, most people didn’t feel bad for them, but some did. And some stayed.
Even with the scandals, televangelism didn’t go away, sadly. It probably got even worse, in my personal opinion.
DIGITAL AGE OF GREED
The internet is a wonderful thing, and a terrible thing, but one thing it got wrong, and in a sense, what YouTube got wrong, was allowing televangelists on their platform. Some of them you’ll probably know.
Names like Creflo Dollar (Yes, he’s a real man and not what I originally thought, a character in that Illumination Lorax movie they made), Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, and even Paula White.
I have avoided this for the entire article because it has nothing to do with their character and it’s just me being a petty bitch, but every televangelist I’ve ever seen is terrifying to me. They all seem off, and I think it’s the veneers. Please indulge me for a second, but I think that all these televangelists have bad veneers that make their teeth too big for their mouth. Also, the teeth are always too white, like you don’t eat anything at all. When I was a kid and saw Jim Bakker’s picture for the first time, or Joel Osteen’s, or even Kenneth Copeland’s, I thought they were going to unhinge their jaws like snakes do and eat me whole. I still think they probably do eat like that, but I have no proof. Look up pictures and tell me I’m wrong.
Anyway, back on topic, these new types of preachers are living the high life without consequences, just like their predecessors. Creflo Dollar and Paula White can be explained as one: Trump’s spiritual advisors and pushers of the whole Christian nationalism movement. However, the two I want to end this part on are Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland: white men who are the final bosses of televangelism today.
Joel Osteen is a name you might have heard recently because of the shooting at his church in Texas. It was horrible what happened, and I wish nothing but the best for the families of the victims that were affected, but Joel himself is on the highway to the deepest layer of hell, and for good reason.
Joel Osteen is the Temu version of Tim Allen, and is just like the rest of these fake Christians, all smiles and love until it actually comes down to helping out people, and his response to Hurricane Harvey is a perfect example of that.
After Hurricane Harvey ravaged Texas, Osteen was admonished in the media for not opening up his stadium sized church as a shelter for displaced people. His team came up with a million excuses for why they couldn’t do it,, including but not limited to: the church elders couldn’t drive to the complex to let any of the displaced people in, that it would impact worship services, and the flood waters, one inch, was too bad. Local emergency officials even offered to open up the complex and take care of the victims, providing them with food and shelter. All Joel Osteen had to do was say, sure absolutely, but he didn’t. If you run a church, and you can’t even care for the hurricane victims of your state, you aren’t really preaching the word of God, are you?
There’s other scandals, but I just wanted to call him a piece of shit. I’m not going to mince words here. Joel Osteen is a terrible man, and definitely not a Christian, but somehow, not the worst televangelist today. I think I want to crown that horrid honor on Kenneth Copeland, because by some miracle of Satan, he has probably killed more people than Joel Osteen did by his failed response with Hurricane Harvey.
Kenneth Copeland and his wife Gloria, or the Crypt keeper and the Crypt keeper in a wig if those were real, are still the biggest televangelists today. Kenneth and Gloria own a megachurch in Texas (surprise) and preach all over the world using their 3 different private jets, because, and this man actually said this, the devil flies commercial.
Kenneth has all the terrible views as the other televangelists, while also being anti-vaxx and linking the measles vaccine to autism, which is just wrong and terribly ableist. He gained viral attention when he tried to blow COVID 19 away, (yes, that’s Kenneth Copeland, and yes, sadly, he’s still alive), and even suggested taking colloidal silver as a cure, which you should not do unless you want to turn into a Smurf.
His wife, Gloria, is also against modern medicine. She’s a firm believer in praying cancer and other life-threatening illnesses away, which isn’t how illness works, and tells people to keep giving money if they want to see results in their condition, a ghoulish thing to promise.
They live in their two-million-dollar tax exempt house, big game hunt for fun, and are genuinely psychopaths with no remorse for their actions. For all the televangelists I have talked about, there have been hundreds more, even more so around the world, and especially in the United States, who face little to no consequences.
The United States tax code is so vague on what a church is. Even John Oliver made his own church, and did it completely legally. The Incognito Press could become a church, and honestly, it would probably be easier for us to file to become one than it is for us to be considered a nonprofit every year, something that Stephanie, our founder, does that actually takes real paperwork and time. So, if it’s so pervasive, why should we care? What laws could these people be breaking?
Actually, a lot. And it affects us all, in more ways than one.
I mean, Let’s talk about the three reasons why televangelists suck. No, but seriously, here’s my three top reasons, or pillars of salt that seem to hold up many of these televangelists, and what we can do to stop it, the prosperity gospel, tax exemption on churches, and the amount of criminality allowed to happen under the church.
THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL
If you aren’t already aware of how televangelists make money, they do so through two interconnected and deceitful ways. The first is the prosperity gospel and the second is seed faith.
The prosperity gospel isn’t a new teaching, by any means. From the beginning of televangelism, every single preacher has had one thing in common, they teach the prosperity gospel. The long and short of it is that financial blessing, (i.e seed faith) and one’s physical well-being towards religious causes increases the givers’ material wealth. So, the more seed (money) you sow (give to the preachers), the more seed (blessings and maybe money) you will sow in the future, because God loves you if you love these preachers.
You can see how this seems, I don’t know, super exploitative, and it affects the poorest congregants of all. We can make fun of televangelists all day, and you should, but there are real followers who have gone into thousands or tens of thousands of debt giving to these preachers, hoping that they can sow the money later. Many followers have lost homes, cars, and lives because of this principle, and it's completely legal, yet totally sleazy.
These people pay for these preachers' lives while many can’t afford to live or afford basic necessities. On top of that, none of the money is taxed, which takes me to my next point.
TAX EXEMPT
As I said with Kenneth Copeland, these preachers live in million-dollar homes, have private jets, and huge stadium ministries, all tax exempt. They are the reason I advocate that all churches should be forced to pay taxes.e What kind of preacher needs three private jets and Chanel suits?
While Catholicism has its flaws- its many, many, many flaws- the vow of poverty is not one of them. And while some might think Kenneth Copeland is the exception, in televangelism, he’s the rule. I didn’t even bring up Matt Murdock, who basically bragged once that he bought two jets in cash and made his audience applaud him.
This is opulence to a level that should not exist, and yet it does with supposed men and women of God. I’m not a Christian, and even I know that if a man is preaching to you with 100,000 dollars on their wrist, they are probably scamming you. These preachers want one thing, and that’s money, and they don’t really care how they get it.
The solution to both the idea of the prosperity gospel and loopholes in tax law is taxing churches. Since there are little to no government regulations on what’s going on financial wise, I think this would be a good idea. Unless the preachers commit mail fraud and the post office comes after them, their large sums of money are basically theirs for the taking, and it’s wrong, both on a moral level and a criminal level.
What these people preach, the prosperity gospel, is only for them. It’s never been about the people they hurt. It’s the “do as I say, not as I do” that comes true more often than not that gets these preachers in trouble.
CRIMINAL ACTIONS
As I hinted throughout this article, these televangelists have been less than holy. There has been a long list of scandals among the lot of them: from affairs with other women or men, drug use, and a lot of exuberant wastes of money. These preachers act like celebrities that have just been given millions of dollars, because they’re basically celebrities that have been given millions of dollars.
Some, like Jim Bakker, face the consequences for their illegal actions, but the rest, well, they don’t. They lead exuberant lives of sin and then go preach about how ungodly the rest of us Americans are. Sure, none of us lead perfect lives, but I don’t go and preach to others about how they should lead theirs. It’s such a hypocritical move, almost golden calf like, but when I say that I’m kicked out of the church lobby.
Some televangelists bounce back from scandal, like Jimmy Swaggart and his soirée with sex workers. Or, some crash and burn, like Jerry Falwell Jr, who had to resign when everyone found out he liked watching his wife and their pool boy who they picked up at a club in Miami, or Ted Haggard, who had to resign from his Colorado Springs church after they found out he was having an affair with a male sex worker and smoking meth with him. Who knew meth turned men gay? All this time, I thought it was the chemicals in the water.
Anyway, this pillar cannot be solved. It’s an issue that is persuasive in all walks of televangelism, and unless you get rid of the practice all together, scandal will still happen. It’s why there were so many priests on To Catch a Predator. When you give these people an inch, they’ll take a mile. I mean, we can try and catch every single televangelist when they do something illegal, but cheating on your wife isn’t technically illegal, anymore. It’s morally messed up, and a total dick move, but not illegal.
CONCLUSION
I wish I had some concrete, let’s do this to show the man like the last couple of articles, but there really isn’t a lot we can do to stop them. The best we can do as bystanders is to inform the public about how horrible these televangelists are, and that’s about it.
So, if you see your grandparents on CBN or watching the 700 club, you know what to do. Block the channel on their television so they can’t watch it. It’s a small step, but it could keep your family safe, and you wouldn’t have to see their scary veneers any longer.
Maybe they should’ve prayed to God for better teeth? Oh well. They’ll be in hell soon, at least that's what I tell myself to get through the day. Get ready for Christian Disneyland, cause that’s where we’re visiting next. Pack some sunscreen and pray for a better vacation. Until then, stay safe and if you see Joel Osteen in the middle of the road, it’s morally correct to forget which pedal is the brake.
RESOURCES
Baker, Vicky. “The Preachers Getting Rich from Poor Americans.” BBC News, BBC, 28 May 2019, www.bbc.com/news/stories-47675301.
“Holy Smoke.” The Economist, The Economist Newspaper, 9 Oct. 2011, www.economist.com/international/2011/10/29/holy-smoke.
Gershon, Livia. “When Televangelism Got Big.” JStor Daily, 14 Sept. 2015, daily.jstor.org/televangelism-got-big/
Bowler, Kate. Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Harrell, David Edwin. All Things Are Possible the Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America. Indiana University Press, 2016.
Wigger, John H. PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire. Oxford University Press, 2022.
Bekkering, Denis J. “Drag Queens and Farting Preachers: American Televangelism, Participatory Media, and Unfaithful Fandoms.” Drag Queens and Farting Preachers: American Televangelism, Participatory Media, and Unfaithful Fandoms, University of Waterloo, University of Waterloo, 2015.
Wiard, Jennifer L., and John H. Wigger. “At Home in Babylon: Billy Sunday’s Revival Team and Evangelicalism in Modern America.” At Home in Babylon: Billy Sunday’s Revival Team and Evangelicalism in Modern America, University of Missouri, University of Missouri, 2016.