How Do Their Associates Feel About the Faith-Healers?

It has to be wondered just what the colleagues of the faith-healers think about their operations. They surely must suspect that tricks are being used. In some cases, they are absolutely sure of that fact. The first director of the Peter Popoff TV show was Paul Crouch, Jr. His father is the head of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), which in some areas of the United States provides 24 hours of Christian-style TV, seven days a week, to the faithful. We discovered that Crouch Jr. had dropped out of the Popoff gang for ethical reasons when he discovered the nature of the operation, but when my colleague David Alexander, an investigator for CSER, suggested to Crouch Sr. that he should have told his TV audience of Popoff’s methods, Crouch showed no interest at all. Crouch might have felt ethically bound to warn his viewers but decided to commit what we might call the sin of silence. TBN chose not to protect Christians from being exploited, and Popoff was allowed to work his TV game for many years. That’s no surprise to a veteran of the business, musician Bill Williamson. Says he: “You don’t say anything when you find out something bad. You hurt one, you hurt them all.” That was well before PTL blew up in a series of scandals and Oral Roberts became the clown prince of TV evangelism by threatening to die unless the faithful sent him more money. Now, all the evangelists are at one another’s throats and accusations are as plentiful as “miracles.” The American way allows us to take advantage of the free capitalist system. There is nothing wrong with making money at a chosen profession. Most of us are required to account for our income and pay taxes for our share of the financial burden of government. But not all of us. Religious organizations are not required to. Though the U.S. Constitution does not say specifically that churches should be exempt from taxation, the statement “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” has been interpreted to mean just that. Many churches and religious organizations choose to register with the Internal Revenue Service as nonprofit organizations, though they are not required to do so. Many evangelists, such as Billy Graham and the Wycliffe Bible Translators, have joined the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a 350-member Protestant group founded in 1979 by those who chose to publish their financial statements for public scrutiny. One of the founders was Jerry Falwell, who dropped out shortly afterward. W. V. Grant and Peter Popoff, among other faith-healers, are not members. If they were, we would have some way of knowing how much money goes into the plastic trash bags that line the wastebaskets carried about by their ushers at revival meetings, and how much is deposited by the mailman daily at all of the post office boxes and street addresses where they do their mail-order business.

Caution: Demons at Work

The churches have had to deal with the problem of accommodating medieval thinking and modern science, and living with both. The two entities are quite incompatible, but both must be accepted if the religious philosophy is to survive. Anthropologist author Kaja Finkler looked into this strange marriage of opposites. Writing on the subject of faith-healing in Mexico, she said that, in her opinion,science and technology are destroying the fabric of society. With this have come various movements, preaching an antagonism between Reason and Feeling, exalting the latter at the expense of the former.

Finkler also recognizes that biomedicine cannot provide a patient with a satisfactory relationship between pain and some “symbol” —while faith-healing can and does. The most common symbol of pain and disease provided by the faith-healers is the demon, which can be exorcised by magic, that is to say, by proper incantations, gestures, and—most important—offerings. That last requirement was emphasized by Reverend Don Stewart, the preacher who eventually took over the A. A. Allen empire in Miracle Valley, Arizona, after the scandalous demise of the founder. Stewart said, exhorting the crowd waiting for A. A. Allen to appear.You got to promise God, and you got to keep the promise. If you want him to lift your pain, to make you whole, to bring you joy, you got to have faith. And faith is to vow and pay.

This simple faith-plus-payment formula is very appealing to many who misunderstand the profession of medicine and the nature of the organic healing process, and who are prepared by their religious training to accept the demon symbol without question. These observations are echoed by Dr. Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago in one of the most talked-about books of 1987, The Closing of the American Mind. Professor Bloom says:The ideology of passion has come to dominate America’s young. They generally believe that feelings are deeper than reason and that the two are in opposition—not that they develop one another, which was the old idea. They think that reason can’t help you decide whether to believe in God or not, whether to like democracy or monarchy. Even in the rhetoric of conservatism there is the notion that reason can’t provide values. So there is a turn to religion. I’m not suggesting religion is unnecessary, but there is a widespread belief that religion can decide values and reason can’t. On the left, many young people turn to rock music. They say it’s deeper than words—that they don’t have to explain what role it plays in their lives. They just say: “That’s my taste. That’s the way I feel about it.”

I would add to that my opinion that not only is there “the notion that reason can’t provide values,” but there is a feeling that religion provides firm, inarguable values that are predigested, infallible, eminently acceptable (within the believer’s immediate social milieu), and satisfying. In addition, no intellectual effort is required to adopt them, and the pressure for adopting them is very strong. The pressure may be the strongest influence in the lives of some people. Dr. Bloom goes on to commentThere used to be an intellectual class in America.... These people kept the world of ideas alive. But today the distinction between intellectuals and nonintellectuals doesn’t make any difference; celebrity is the only standard.... Everybody has become a talker of cheap philosophy that anybody can pick up.

The celebrity status that the TV evangelists have attained merely by purchasing air time and putting on a good show gives them the charisma that attracts the faithful moths to their deadly flames.