Styles vary. Some preachers tout health instead of money, which in America often means the same thing. Gene Profeta, who looks like Frankie Vaughan at the London Palladium, stands surrounded by the remnants of slum families who have found togetherness again with the Lord. ‘Yeah, Gene, since I been praying and everything, I ain’t had no seizures.’ Gene grabs the mike: ‘Oh praise Jesus.’ Dr W.V. Grant’s televisual pantheon looks like a field hospital at Gettysburg. Grant interrupts a spiritual to solace a crippled negro. ‘The name’s Jim, right?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘You don’t know me, do you, Jim?’ ‘No.’ ‘Jim, how long you been crippled up like that? Long time?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Jim, I want you to throw down these crutches and walk!’ ‘Okay.’ Jim gets lithely to his feet, without looking pleased or grateful or even mildly surprised, and troops morosely up the aisle. ‘Oh, hallelujah, praise that Lord!’ sings Brother Grant. ‘The Lord has healed him!’ At this point, you begin to wonder Who crippled him. But Grant does not tarry with points of theodicy; he has his sales pitch to make.
Pat Robertson, chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, the great Sanctimoney genius of Portsmouth, Virginia, goes one further: he heals and rewards his flock over the airwaves. In the miracle-facility section of his show, the kneeling Robertson is granted visions of various recoveries, reunions and windfalls throughout the land. Robertson describes the miracles, and people ring in to claim them. His poorer viewers send him their rent cheques and disability allowances — because the gamble works better ‘if you give out of your need’. Like all the TV preachers, Robertson also does big business in what the trade calls ‘the pretty-pretties’: sacred key-rings, beatified pen-clips and whatnot. CBN takes in over $1 million a week.
Robert Schuller’s line typifies the logic of the holy sting, and he articulates it with all the unction of sweet reason. Gently waving his arms about and baring his practised false smile, Schuller explains that ‘the major decision’ in his life was ‘tithing’ — ‘or the giving of 10 per cent of one’s income back to the Church”. This of course means the giving of 10 per cent of one’s income back to Robert Schuller. ‘And it turned me into a very good business manager,’ he adds, without a blush. ‘If you can’t live on the 90 per cent, you couldn’t live on the 100 per cent. No way — ‘ And, in return, ‘God will give you management skills.’
Schuller’s show is entitled, candidly enough, Hour of Power. Of course, there is nothing peculiarly American, or peculiarly Western, about the religious emphasis on material reward. Present-day Hinduism, for example, is very largely structured on the principle of worldly success. However, the Midas tradition in Ame’rican worship has little to do with modern laxity. It shocked de Tocqueville in 1831. A century later it effloresced in a host of how-to books on harmonial and self-bettering themes, under a thin shine of gnosticism: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, Billy Graham’s Peace with God. What could be more American, in its way, than a version of Christ as the eternal miracle-worker and faith-healer — bringer of salubrity and cash, here and now?
The Rev. Jerry Falwell is the most powerful, most convincing, most committed — and the least vulgar — of all the electronic Evangelicals. He is without the messianic stridency of James Robison (with his talk of ‘prophets’ and ‘new Jeremiahs’), and without the frank hucksterism of Pat Robertson. Falwell will last when the others are too bored, frightened or mad to continue usefully on the political wing. And if you ask him about his colonial mansion in Lynchburg, Virginia, his private aeroplane and airport, his tax-avoiding loans within his corporation, his bodyguards and gofers, he will tell you that material wealth is ‘God’s way of blessing people who put Him first’.
‘I known Jerry Falwell since he was knee-high to a duck,’ said the old Lynchburger in the bar (which took some finding). ‘Knew his daddy too, biggest bootlegger ever hit this state. I seen Jerry Falwell so drunk he couldn’t stand up — thirty years back, must be. But don’t you trash Jerry now, you hear? Bet he earns more money than you ever will.’