Give ’em hell, Chuck

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!