Oral Roberts
Harrell, David Edwin Jr.
women's issues full circle to the debates of an earlier, and saner, period in American history. Much of what she has to say about the shortcomings of the American women's liberation movement is not...
...She does see ("You just lose something and its gone that's all"), and then pushes him into bed with the girl...
...The question is neither rhetorical nor impious...
...it seems to lure American feminism back from the wilder shores of madness, where much of it has been moored for all these years...
...To separate fact from fiction in his memoir, A Moveable Feast, for ex-ample, requires what he himself referred to as a "built-in, shock-proof shit detector...
...A good biography has yet to be written...
...Hemingway wrote from direct experience and made discoveries about the use of language—or, more precisely, moved deeper into territory already discovered by writers as diverse as Mark Twain and Ronald Firbank—which made him the most influential prose writer of the twentieth century...
...Moreover, Roberts has had to contend with a phalanx of critics and outright opponents who question the righteousness of his motives and methods...
...The message of Hemingway's other THE GARDEN OF EDEN Ernest Hemingway/Charles Scribner's Sons/$18.95 George Sim Johnston 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986...
...Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises is a gelded stud...
...When Papa's women cry, there are no cartoon captions, just tears, falling straight and true...
...Aren't Hemingway men supposed to slap around their women and throw grenades and bring down lions with shots which are clean and true...
...Readably Fresh and Jargon Free Above all, Chronicles is a tough-minded, clear-thinking, plain-talking magazine...
...While it is unlikely that it will live up to its publisher's heady expectations (to "change the way in which we live," no less), the book has the makings of providing much needed planks for the Democratic party platform, if only because it has the appearance of something new...
...He was a kind of aesthete who possessed much strange knowledge, a bookish man who knew all the five-dollar words, and yet he chose to be "Hemingway" and write simple straightforward prose...
...Among Protestant sects, Pentecostals are often sniffed at as "holy rollers" because of their ostensibly spiritual seizures...
...But in the case of Roberts what may, indeed must, set him apart is less the cultural background of his ministry than the fervor of his Pentecostalism and the relentlessness of his mission...
...Roberts is hardly the first to make that claim, or to say Jesus has appeared to him...
...As contributors we have enlisted today's most distinguished thinkers and writers —like Robert Nisbet, Jorge Luis Borges, Fred Chappell, Eugene Ionesco, Paul Hollander, Anthony Powell, Richard John Neuhaus, and Allan Carlson...
...What in the world should the Lord of Hosts have to do with a bumptious Anglo-Cherokee-Welsh Okie, a high-school drop-out, the child of dirt-poor Pentecostal preachers...
...whether he can sustain the pentecostal gift amid the importunities of the various academic sects is far from certain...
...Things happen to the men in Hemingway novels...
...REGULARLY $18 A YEAR NOW YOURS FOR ONLY $12.97 Chronicles is a magazine written for people in search of a positive and hopeful vision for American culture...
...Apart from Roberts's worldly success, there is the American feat of building an empire of sorts out of unlikely materials...
...Harrell is perhaps wise to decline to make such judgments, not only be-cause the life of Roberts has yet to run its course, but because these are matters that exceed the competence of professional historians, even one so meticulous as Mr...
...Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms, for example, is a non-combatant who drives an ambulance, barely holds up his end of a conversation, and lets his lover orchestrate their affair ("What the hell, I thought...
...Instead, we are proud to uphold the middle-American literary tradition that gave us Mark Twain, T.S...
...they seldom take the initiative...
...Norman Douglas, who surely knew, neatly summed up the psychological climate of this book in South Wind: "Northern minds seem to become fluid here, impression-able, unstable, unbalanced—what you please...
...To be vilified by the likes of the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, the National Council of Churches, the American Civil Liberties Union, "60 Minutes," and other guardians of the common good should be proof that the victim is, if not a saint, perhaps a latter-day Job...
...During the early fifties he got in a few licks against the Reds, but since then has kept quiet about partisan issues or ideological conflicts...
...Simply forward the coupon below with your check...
...Even so, the fact that a major university press has published a serious work on a contemporary American religious figure deserves attention...
...Unlike publications of today's dominant cultural elite —which parade their undisguised contempt for traditional American values—we confidently assert the importance of civility, moral decency, and artistic standards in our monthly coverage of American life, politics, and culture...
...But his case is complicated...
...But with Roberts, the impetus of faith does not drive believers here and now to replace the City of Man with the City of God...
...Here's your invitation to enjoy a year of Chronicles —for only $12.97...
...Has he enlarged the spiritual dimension of American life through the institutions he founded and developed...
...Harrell is in fact a Christian is, of course, beside the point...
...With this readiness to give already an obligation it is not hard to understand how the Roberts organization can raise millions of dollars from hundreds of thousands...
...Some leading Democrats are beginning to realize this...
...And some of the bestshort stories are devastating studies of the male psyche stripped of everything except fear...
...Hemingway was far more complicated than the hard-drinking braggart depicted in Lillian Ross's famous New Yorker pro-file...
...Harrell...
...That he has brought the institutions into being is a fact...
...Whether Mr...
...The emerging platform, however, offers little solace for those who care for the family for its own sake, not as fodder for liberal strategists...
...The Solid Virtues of Middle America Chronicles is the only national magazine of ideas and issues which is today coming out of the Midwest— and is intending to remain here...
...The Garden of Eden, which Hemingway started in the forties and never finished, appears to be a revisionist history of at least three of his four marriages...
...T8658 = Name Address Apt...
...ORAL ROBERTS: AN AMERICAN LIFE David Edwin Harrell, Jr./Indiana University Press/$16.95 Kent Owen 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 through radio and television across America and, eventually, through barn-storming campaigns to Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia...
...He is in his way as much a pioneer of the medium as Milton Berle, Edward R. Murrow, Ed Sullivan, or John Cameron Swayze...
...City State/Zip THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 43 Oral Roberts and the growing appeal of pentecostalism are likely to be ignored by those who fancy themselves enlightened...
...All superbly assembled and directed by Thomas Fleming, our editor...
...Perhaps more than anyone else, Oral Roberts can be blamed for that...
...They exchange genders in bed and experiment with some kind of bizarre androgynous sex whose technical nature is not revealed...
...That task has not been eased by the invasive force of television, now incessantly thrusting religiosity wherever electric current courses...
...Put another way, one is tempted to say that Mr...
...contains some of Hemingway's best writing...
...But Decter et al...
...When all is said and done, Hewlett's book is yet another attempt to subsume the pervasive and persistent pro-family values held by most people under the statist principles of liberal politics...
...Perhaps those who distrust Roberts are less annoyed by his free-form Christianity than by his talent for business organization...
...Harrell has had to prove himself trustworthy and responsible, according to whatever standards Roberts saw fit to impose...
...Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue...
...For the good Christian it is a matter of mercy, and in a world lousy with rancor and suspicion its presence is precious...
...Plus an impressive pool of talented young writers...
...Has success spoiled Oral Roberts...
...Jeez, I've beaten Mr...
...Still it does come as an affront to those who feel themselves better qualified to merit the privilege because of purity of character and goodness of works...
...Outside of the U.S...
...Harrell seems unwilling to make that judgment, perhaps because he seems in awe of Roberts the individual and Roberts the corporation...
...And, of course, they have been for centuries, whether with the connivance of Italian bankers, German merchants, British traders, or American industrialists...
...This has not, however, prevented Roberts from engaging sympathizers in "blessing-pacts," which "promise" material as well as spiritual rewards to those who invest in his works...
...According to Admiral Stansfield 'Ihrner's admission, the CIA analyzed everything about Iran except the convictions of Shia Muslims, which were taken to be of little account...
...But he lived by a self-imposed code on the way he was going to present himself in his writing and his life...
...What Roberts brings to his preaching is a rough-hewn manliness, blunt, knotty, horny-handed...
...It is this baptism by fire that divinely seals the true believer in his faith, making him feel immediately the working of God's power...
...Yes, they are supposed to do all these things, but if you consider the run of Hemingway's male characters, David Bourne is not that far out of line...
...Chronicles • P.O...
...With our feet firmly planted in the heartland we focus on all of America...
...That is what people mean when they say that they `discover themselves' here...
...A novelist named David Bourne comes to the south of France on his honeymoon...
...Presumably, this has made him less interesting to commentators who find preachers arresting only when using religion as a pretext for political assaults...
...More like Peter, the man of the people, than Paul, the man of the world, he takes command as God's straw-boss, giving orders, setting matters straight, bracing workers to the task...
...But even superficially, A Lesser Life reveals the same deplorable class bias and historical ignorance of the feminist politics it purports to debunk...
...It is ironic that latterday fundamentalists should re-enter the sinful world with a vengeance, casting aside their forefathers' warnings about the shallowness and sterility of secular involvement...
...Hemingway placed too many obstacles in the way...
...Accreditation standards and procedures are as rigorous as John Calvin's theology and less lenient...
...In the end, though, it must be on spiritual terms that Roberts should be measured...
...It is a pleasant surprise that the book is not only an absorbing narrative but George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...
...A quote from one of her recent New York Times op-ed pieces supplies some premonitions: "As for abortion, we simply have to widen the pro-choice agenda...
...Ilirgenev, but don't get me in the ring with Mr...
...Or have his endeavors been merely the willful and arbitrary expression of compulsive egotism...
...Know how complicated it is and then state it simply," the writer David Bourne tells himself, and that is the way Papa operated...
...Another powerful appeal may be that, apart from whateversatisfaction investors derive from sup-porting good works, they are also able to identify with the success of Oral Roberts University, the City of Faith hospital and medical center, and all the other agencies of Roberts's mission, even the victories of the ORU basket-ball team (a matter of no little concern to the reverend founder...
...Christian faith need be no bar to candor, as the words of Jesus show...
...If the epithet, secular humanist, reveals any real shame, it is that those so stigmatized are mired down in a dispirited worldliness that prevents them from respecting either God or man, what Bunyan called "the Slough of Despond...
...Such unyielding belief is especially disturbing to conventional churchmen who have learned to adjust themselves and their faith to the profane standards of modernity...
...We are seeing a side of Hemingway which he seldom allowed to slip into his writing...
...Pentecostals, in the main, have continued to keep their distance, confident their lives are more "Christ-centered" because they resist such distractions...
...lb be sure, Roberts isn't given a whitewash, and the controversies that have beset him aren't dismissed as so many contretemps, hardly worth bringing up...
...There follows a menage a trois in the course of which the two women switch roles as David's muse...
...The trouble with Oral Roberts is he persists in saying God tells him what to do...
...But there is, nevertheless, a principled predisposition to go beyond giving one's human subject, any human subject, the benefit of the doubt...
...as he is given to understand it, advanced or retarded the spirituality of those who accept his message...
...For all the popular tracts written by Robert Schuller, Norman Vincent Peale, Pat Robertson, and similar Christiancelebrities, there have been few recent scholarly works that examine the spiritual dimensions of American experience in a way comparable to, say, recent studies of social dislocation, urban poverty, defense strategies, medical ethics, abortion, euthanasia, fiscal and monetary policy, or supply-side economics...
...At some point Oral Roberts the individual became Oral Roberts the corporation, surely one of the more remarkable instances of self-aggrandizement...
...But among his brethren in religious broadcasting he lacks the urbane graciousness of the late Fulton Sheen or the compelling intensity of Billy Graham...
...No, what is new about The Garden of Eden is not the passivity of its protagonist, but the eerie sensibility which governs the book...
...Some events' which we know about, such as his first wife Hadley's losing a trunkful of his manuscripts, have been transposed, and others no doubt have been invented, which is the storyteller's prerogative...
...rather it moves the individual to concern himself above all with his own salvation...
...Box 800 • Mt...
...There is something in the brightness of this spot which decomposes their old particles...
...The Myth of Women's Liberation in America is an important book...
...The Rev...
...By redefining the core agenda of the collapsing women's movement, Hewlett may give feminism a new lease on life...
...Against this background of (un)studied disdain, the presence of an 4 moaef -idanf is4sciiYa4on...
...Thus, no mat-ter how obscure and downtrodden the individual lives of Roberts's "partners" may be, they are magnified to great power by his successes and, as such, bring comfort and joy...
...Given Roberts's run-ins with the media and his skittishness about having them poke and sniff around, it is understandable that Mr...
...It is evident that the disciplined conviction underlying much of business success is akin to the mind-set of Roberts and his co-workers...
...And our pages are easy on the eye—richly illustrated with original art of a caliber rarely seen in magazines today...
...Kent Owen is The American Spectator's Indiana editor...
...As Max Weber proved beyond cavil, the Protestant Ethic mates well with free enterprise...
...Harrell describes carefully the development of the Roberts organization, providing almost everything but spreadsheets and flow-charts...
...those are apparent, as are his sources and methods...
...add $6...
...Our regional correspondents bring you regular reports on the state of literature and the arts, music, religion, philosophy, education, criticism, and morals and manners — from every part of the country...
...Make check payable to The Rockford Institute...
...speaking in tongues, glossolalia, is the best-known manifestation, going back to the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles on Whitsunday, the seventh Sunday after Easter and the fiftieth day after Passover...
...Biographical speculation aside, we have an interesting story of three people who do weird things to one another under the Mediterranean sun...
...Do it today, and we'll start you with our very next issue...
...Given the reports over the years of a 1,500-page turkey sitting in the Scribner vaults, one would expect The Garden of Eden, no matter how well edited, to be at least as bad as the bad parts of Islands in the Stream...
...or with the contention that the "male rebellion" (?) of the "hollow men" during that period was caused by the material demands and oppressiveness of family life...
...This, if you will, is orthodox fundamentalism, consistent with the reaction against liberal Protestantism's social gospel during the early years of the twentieth century...
...Simple, yes—but just try to write a paragraph of the stuff...
...Even if The Garden of Eden turned out to be a bad novel, I could count on it being writ-ten in English and not some dialect of the media...
...He was not only an actor ("Papa" was one of his most carefully wrought fictions), but also a misleading chronicler of his own past...
...What is new, however, is the book's political potential...
...Her analysis of American family life remains on the surface only...
...The American intelligentsia, especially in academe, can scarcely bear to consider that religion is desperately vital to millions of people, no less so in the United States...
...No writer ever worked so close to self-parody even when he was at his best...
...Starting with tent revivals in rural Oklahoma, Roberts's ministry quickly outgrew small-town pastorates, extending beyond the limits of his denomination Charlatan, liar, hypocrite, fraud, false prophet, con-man, blasphemer, huckster...
...Because of a profound reluctance to apprehend the fundamental complexities of a pluralistic society, the book's policy suggestions are unable to add anything new to those of (for example) Kenneth Keniston and the Carnegie Council on Children, or Alfred Kahn and Sheila Kamerman's recurrent proposals...
...His biographer, David Edwin Harrell, Jr., professor of history at the University of Alabama, liiscaloosa, appends the subtitle, "An American Life," to the book, and the additional emphasis suggests much more than the obvious...
...If such elements of character can direct the inner-workings of capitalism, why can't the rational procedures of enterprise—accounting, marketing, advertising, planning, and so forth—be put to use in a religious organization...
...funds only...
...He certainly would not beat E. B. White: "They entered the restaurant...
...But even for those who declare themselves indifferent to religion, unless it bears on Let there be no mistake: A Lesser Life...
...In recent years the Roman Catholic Church has produced a counterpart in its charismatic movement, which celebrates the palpable presence of the Holy Spirit in similar ways...
...Has he been true to the Holy Spirit in his life and ministry...
...moral issues (as it is prone to do), America's evangelists offend their sensibilities...
...Has his doing of God's will, After finishing the latest work of an acclaimed living novelist, which is filled with sentences like "Great silly Quaalude tears like Disney raindrops were rolling down her cheeks," I opened the "new" Hemingway novel with a sigh of relief...
...Indeed, populism has been powered as much by religious passions as by social grievances, whether among the German Anabaptists, the English Levellers, the Democrats of William Jennings Bryan, or the socialists of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas...
...In the modern age it shocks the worldly to discover anyone whose passionate purpose is to obey the will of God...
...Brisk in tone, lively in style...
...If the Democratic party cannot divorce itself from this vision, it will increasingly become a minority party...
...Tolstoy...
...Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner...
...It is the presence of a country man, not softened by city ways, holding in check a temper that could mean trouble If Roberts were but one more television evangelist, he would deserve little more than passing notice...
...But what is going on here...
...What may balk the scrupulous is whether the efficient practices of business have taken on a life of their own and, in doing so, diminished or even corrupted the spiritual purposes of religion...
...What is one to do with analyses that declare the domesticity and "cult of motherhood" of the 1950s a deplorable aberration in Western history...
...Unlike most of his television brethren, Roberts has rarely involved himself in politics...
...The Republicans, for their part, have shown themselves singularly unable to present a credible alternative vision for social policy...
...You discover a mechanism, you know, when you take it to pieces...
...His bride talks him into getting a unisex haircut to match her own...
...Fundamentalism contains a tradition of sacrificial giving that exceeds the tithes ordinary Protestants are asked to make to their churches...
...By now it should be evident to anyone who haseyes to see that the Swedish model of the modern welfare state, which continues to inform Hewlett's great vision of a good society, is thoroughly obsolete...
...She then picks up a girl and tells him that she is going to see what it is like with a woman...
...He possessed as many sensitivities as you might care to find in a modern writer...
...The usual offenses charged by churchmen against the preachers are cheapening, coarsening, and vulgarizing the Gospels...
...The lapses in gram-mar, the herky-jerky gestures, the vaguely menacing set of his dark, leathery features, all serve to stress the patriarchal force of his presence...
...There are no indications that she has bothered to reach out of the charmed circle of new-class literature on women, and truly ac-quaint herself and her study panel with family issues and their implications for society...
...But it seems that we have yet another American novel motivated by the desire to settle scores with past and present mates...
...Much of what she has to say about the shortcomings of the American women's liberation movement is not so novel, of course...
...Any man who has had to endure such abuse for forty years is, to say the least, tough...
...did so with more refined reasoning and with their anthropological, historical, and philosophical foundations securely in place As is to be expected, Hewlett shares the conventional contempt for Reaganites and the New Right...
...Morris, IL 61054 t I enclose my check for $12.97 for 12 monthly issues of Chronicles, regularly $18...
...One of the biography's strengths is privileged access, but this may have been gained at the cost of a certain objectivity...
...This is not to suggest that he has failed to exercise his professional skills as a historian...
...Has his organization grown so large and "profit-conscious" that its very success violates the spirit for which it was founded...
...The dodgy thing is to distinguish the saints and the prophets from the idol-mongers and the demagogues...
...What is at issue is whether his book makes allowances for Oral Roberts that are unwarranted...
...Chronicles The genuinely American magazine of arts, letters, and ideas...
...The wind was still west, ruffling the edges of the cookies...
...Others such as Midge Decter, Jean Elshtain, George Gilder, and Allan Carlson have made similar observations regarding feminist frenzy and irresponsibility...
...Harrell is too Christian in his interpretation...
...One begins to suspect that the harshest criticism comes, both among Christians and beyond the pale, be-cause of differences in class, tastes, and manners...
...Presumably the same transgressions committed by their free church forbears against the perfection of Holy Mother Church or High Anglicanism...
...What makes him stand apart is the vision he is driven to fulfill: creation of a university and medical center instinct with the Holy Spirit, but second to none in academic and professional capabilities...
...There is a readiness to forgive, even before Roberts's actions are explained...
...They may find out to their regret that latching on to the fury of the pro-life movement is not a responsible substitute for a coherent policy of American family life...
...Reviewers have been baffled by the passivity of David Bourne...
...at his worst, he would have had difficulty making it to the final rounds of a Hemingway parody contest...
...All the while Roberts was shrewdly drawing to him a cadre of fellow workers to build and run what he had created: magazines, radio and television productions, movies, and a direct-mail operation that may have given Richard Viguerie ideas...
...In fact, pentecostalism as a pan-Christian phenomenon is spreading rapidly in North and South America as well as in Africa and parts of Asia, notably Korea...
...We stand apart from the reigning critical "establishments"— their jargon, their squabbles, and their pet causes...
...Let us march in Washington for prenatal care, maternity benefits, job-protected parental leave and high-quality child care...
...If not pleased with my first issue, I may cancel within 15 days and receive a full refund...
...This is surely the strangest honeymoon in fiction since The Kreutzer Sonata...
...Let us demonstrate on the streets and fight for the benefits needed to do a better job for the children we choose to have...
Vol. 19 • September 1986 • No. 9
