So I’m flipping through the channels (all fifteen of them) this morning and—in between spoonfuls of frosted mini-wheats—I catch a few minutes of televangelism. I watched about five minutes of Andrew Wommack, two or three minutes of Kenneth Copeland, and took in a few “Hallelujahs” from some local black churches. I’m struck by a few things. First, about half of the channels here in Carrboro, NC run televangelism programs every morning. The ratings must justify this. Second, the things these preachers say strike me as flagrantly irrational, if not insane. I mean this sincerely. As a counselor in a psychiatric hospital, I’ve listened to many impassioned—yet delusional—rants, and the stuff I saw this morning is cut right from the same cloth. Sorry, but I can’t offer any qualifications to this, like “In my opinion” or “From my perspective.” Some things are just plainly nuts.
And yet Kenneth Copeland, for example, is not tucked away in some psychiatric facility, but rather is revered by tens of thousands of people, lives in a mansion, drives a Rolls Royce, and has a fleet of private jets. And he gets tax-exempt status from the United States Government. How can this be?
I was happy to see that Iowa Senator Charles Grassley is looking to hold Copeland accountable for some dubious financial dealings. This is the same Senator Grassley that has been exposing the unholy marriage between academic psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry.
Give ’em hell, Chuck!
“grampa” grassley has long been a hero of mine. He takes on the corrupt in a non-partisan way.
A lot of people think I am a conservative nut, yet he and DC bureaucrat, Michelle Rhee, are my political heros right now. I used to be a huge John Mccain fan, but there’s nothing like running for president to make me upset with someone.
These southern preacher-types are a trip. I actually argued with a small-time black preacher over the whole “God with reward you with [material] Blessings….” message, using nothing but well-known quotations from the gosphels. He kept responding with what must be well-worn self-help fluff, reasonable-sounding financial talk, and some needless alliteration (did you know “buick” and “bentley” both conveniently begin with a “b?” Apparently, that has a spiritual significance. I kept pointing out to him that if he were some kind of life-coach, this might be easier to swallow, but that really nothing he was saying was in the new testament, and that a lot of it directly resembled what Jesus complained about the most and contradicted his message.
Scary thing was, I’m pretty sure I didn’t win the arguement, but I think the listeners agreed with me, at least.
Shawn,
Truthfully, I had never heard of Grassley until recently, when he busted a Harvard psychologist for failure to disclose ties to Big Pharma. The mental health field is ridiculously corrupt at this point, from researchers to practitioners, and it all comes down to dollars and cents. This has frustrated me for years, because nobody seemed to be doing anything about it — until Grassley. The fact that he’s also busting spiritual predators is icing on the cake!