Televangelists Get Kudos?
Christianity Today Magazine is reporting at its web site that, according to a new study, televangelists don’t spend as much of their on-air time fund-raising as they are accused of.
I haven’t seen the study, only CT’s reporting of it, but several points come to mind.
One is that televangelists do a lot of their fund-raising by direct mail to the people who contact them as a result of their television shows. Those pitches can be hard-sell.
My objection to televangelism is that televangelists, even if they don’t spend all their time asking for money, tailor their message in subtle ways to reach their likely donors. They are not really “evangelists” at all — their ultimate success depends on cultivating, and therefore not offending, regular donors.
Of course, any pastor could potentially be accused of pandering to his congregation’s wealthiest and most powerful members. But the fiscal demands of a TV ministry make money an even higher priority for televangelists. And some televangelists rely heavily on consultants, who tell them how to structure their messages and their broadcasts to attract the most response.
Every little compromise along those lines takes the televangelist further and further from his original good intentions, and closer and closer to a vicious cycle of perpetual fund-raising. It’s a lot like a state lottery — a lot of money comes in, a lot goes out, and after all the administrative and advertising costs you’d be surprised what a small percentage of the cash flow actually winds up doing any good.
By the way, this study mentions Billy Graham, whom I do not consider a televangelist at all. He really is an evangelist — a completely different model, and while his crusades are taped and televised he is in a different position altogether.
Televangelism also feeds on, and therefore encourages, self-aggrandizement. Any televangelist will pay lip service to being just another one of God’s shepherds, but the money-making machine requires that the televangelist promote himself or herself as something unique — God’s amazing healing prophet for our time.
As the televangelist starts to believe his/her own publicity, he or she is able to justify his own ethical lapses — the “prayer request forms” that are all but ignored once the check has been removed from the envelope, the shallow, ghost-written books, the obscene salaries and lavish lifestyles.
I want to tell you the story about the moment at ORU which cemented my suspicion of televangelism as a process. I think I will.
During the time I was at ORU, the ministry was offering to donors a leather-bound Oral Roberts Ministries edition of the Bible. (Note the self-aggrandizement — what kind of arrogance does it take to put your own name on the cover of a Bible?)
The Bible contained a section of color pictures documenting the various aspects of the Oral Roberts ministry. One such photo was of the groundbreaking for the City of Faith hospital, which turned out to be a 70-story white elephant but which the ministry was still boasting about at the time. I didn’t own a copy of this Bible, but I was looking at a friend’s copy and came across this photo. The ground-breaking took place on a beautiful, clear day, and there was blue sky at the top of the photo.
It was this blue sky that caught my attention. I noticed a very, very faint vertical line running through the sky. I followed this line down through the picture and realized that the picture had been doctored — a narrow sliver of it had been cut out and removed.
The sliver that was removed contained an ex-wife. One of the key figures in the ministry had gotten divorced between the time of the groundbreaking and the time the Bible was published, and so the ministry had conveniently cut his ex-wife out of the photo. (Today, with Photoshop, they could probably have cut her out with much less evidence left behind.)
I was not angered by the divorce, which was none of my business, but by the doctoring of the photo — a “lie,” if only a visual one, bound in the pages of a Bible, no less!
This is the type of thing that televangelism leads to. I honestly don’t think of televangelists as Elmer Gantry, willfully and gleefully scamming the public; I think of them as people who sell out to power and money, thinking that the end justifies the means. But power and money gradually, imperceptively corrode their spiritual integrity.
And I don’t think this new study would change my assessment.
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