Does Grant Ever Heal Anyone?

Let us examine whether evangelist W. V. Grant is actually able to heal the afflicted as he says he can. It would seem that checking out his healing record would not be difficult. It’s a simple matter of following up on as many “healees” as we can find. But that can be a lengthy, harrowing, and often unsuccessful task. For instance, from a videotape of one of Grant’s revival meetings in Atlanta, Georgia, we were able to transcribe—from one healing ritual—the full name of a patient, the names of his six doctors, the name of his hospital, the date of a specific planned coronary operation for that patient, the birthday of the patient, and the name of the church that he attended. Grant, it seemed, had even correctly divined a comment made to the patient by one of those six doctors. Because the tape had been made less than four weeks before the broadcast, I decided to visit Atlanta and determine whether the patient had undergone the operation, and what his present condition might be. In his healing hocus-pocus on the videotape, Grant had told this man that “Dr. Jesus” had “put a new heart” in his body by means of “closed-heart surgery” and that he no longer needed orthodox open-heart surgery, an operation that the man agreed was planned to take place shortly. The patient, toothless and advanced in years, had trotted up the aisle and back to demonstrate the “new heart” in response to Grant’s command. I felt that this was an ideal prospect for checking because so much data had been given. I arrived in Atlanta and enlisted the help of an associate at a medical school there, who agreed to try contacting the doctors named in the videotape. We were both in for a surprise. Not one of the six doctors named by Grant appeared in the current list of the Medical Association of Georgia (MAG), which lists all of the state’s more than 8,000 physicians, MAG members or not. Nor were any of the six listed as chiropractors. The hospital named by Grant had no such patient and no such operation planned for that date. In fact, it reported that it never performed cardiac surgery of any kind. Furthermore, the pastor of the church named could not identify this person as a church member, by name or by description. We had apparently discovered an absolute “ringer,” a person who, for one reason or another, had fabricated the entire situation. And W. V. Grant and Dr. Jesus had looked pretty good in that videotape.

An Unhappy Customer

But one victim of Grant in St. Louis, J. Elmo Clark, was a different story. When we located him, he was eager to talk to us about what Grant had done to him. He’d gone to Grant’s service after having sent him “a lot of money” by mail over a period of years. Clark is blind in one eye, and he firmly believed that this preacher he had seen heal so many others on television could heal him, too. When I spoke to him two days after his encounter with Grant, he was angry and upset. Grant had “called him out” of the audience, announcing his name, his doctor, and his ailment. But Elmo Clark is still blind in that eye, although witnesses believed he was able to see with it following some mumbo jumbo by Grant. How this came about, we will learn later. Though Grant led his audience to believe that he had restored Clark’s vision, that claim was not true, and Clark recalled that the information Grant “called out” had been obtained from him in a pre-show interview. He was not at all deceived by that procedure, but had been given no opportunity—until he talked with us—to tell his story.