Religious distraction
Burris, Keith C.
310: THE PTLAFFAIR RELIGIOUS DISTRACTION WHAT BAKKER FED HIS FLOCK It has been labeled "Holy Wars" or "Biblegate" or "Pearlygate," and once the titillation of personal scandal fades, the PTL...
...For the higher cause that coincides coveniently with personal aims, it is permissible to make one's own rules...
...That would be a shame...
...It is needed perhaps more now than ever...
...The real sin of Biblegate is not money or materialism...
...The real scandal, the sin of the Holy TV Warriors, is that many ordinary Americans who desire rectitude and the sanity of the Christian ethic find that their seeking has been ridiculed, and that what they were persuaded was bread turns out to be gravel...
...Preachers host talk shows or run for president...
...True religion, like true democracy, must be depended on to reform itself...
...Yes, Mr...
...Jerry Falwell described the Bakkers, not unkindly, as "religious entertainers...
...It could be argued, of course, that the Bakkers had never offered those lonesome Americans much more than that materialism in a new disguise...
...Celebrity introduces a new variety of pride to the organized church...
...It is an opiate...
...310: THE PTLAFFAIR RELIGIOUS DISTRACTION WHAT BAKKER FED HIS FLOCK It has been labeled "Holy Wars" or "Biblegate" or "Pearlygate," and once the titillation of personal scandal fades, the PTL affair, like the Irancontra spiracy, may boil down to intricate efforts to follow the money...
...Otherwise it is not holy...
...That fact by itself would add up only to singular tragedies or at least instances of pathos—except that there are more people involved...
...Bakker has said he is accountable to God...
...Paul...
...He or she wished to believe in something greater than the materialism that seems to be suffocating us, that seems to have finally suffocated the Bakkers...
...the problem was not simply the material success that seemed so much a part of the Bakkers' gospel...
...There is a marked resemblance between Colonel North and the likes of Jim Bakker...
...it is not sex...
...Are Bakker and his wife the ones who will suffer...
...Theologians believe they can solve all the mysteries of love, sex, life itself...
...It would mean that we have lost sight of the fundamental issue...
...But it is simply not the same function as religion's...
...Similarly in the PTL scandal, the true issue is responsibility...
...This would be an exaggeration...
...Somehow to con such people is not the same as selling swamp land condos or even a better tax code...
...True religion pierces through all of our self-deceptions and upsets our comforts...
...And there is nothing wrong or depraved about that function...
...KEITH C. BURRIS Keith Burris has recently become an associate editor and editorial writer at the Toledo Blade...
...What does he owe them...
...Religious entertainment does not ultimately offer consolation...
...Its net result is to make the solitude of honest religious belief impossible...
...Accepting that Bakker is on his own with his Maker and can square himself there, what about his flock...
...But God is not to be mocked...
...It was also the sheer publicness of it...
...Because entertainment is not art, which shares a kinship with true religion...
...To make a preacher an entertainer is ultimately to corrupt the preacher and what he or she preaches...
...Entertainment exists to please people in great numbers...
...They seem to be persons who operate along lines of narcissistic heroism while cloaking themselves in the mantle of St...
...It offers distraction...
...Just as Colonel North's gambits ultimately involved the lives of persons he didn't appear to have imagined on his chess board, Jim Bakker's pinball theology may most perversely affect those who listened to him and wanted to believe in his work...
...The Bakkers were not only false to their "product" but the "product" was false in itself...
...Perhaps Ollie can mock Jefferson and the Constitution...
...In the long run it is the lonesome American, for whom the PTL Club has been a genuine comfort, who will suffer...
...Why...
...In the case of Iran-contra, the focus should be the president's governance...
...Such men become nations or religions unto themselves, and the trouble with that kind of patriot or that kind of believer is that they are not answerable, finally, to anyone or anything but their own fantasies of grandeur...
...But as with the assignments in the basement of the Reagan White House, that is rather freewheeling duty...
...it is not even the debasing of religion, which has been debased on and off for thousands of years before television...
...Popes become globetrotters...
...Professionals in their game have a way of landing on their feet...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 10
