American Televangelism and Participatory Cultures

Fans, Brands, and Play With Religious "Fakes"

Denis J. Bekkering

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783030005740
• eBook ISBN: 9783030005757
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Entertainment Industry
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines unintended participatory cultures and media surrounding the American televangelists Robert Tilton and Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner. It brings to light heavily ironic fan followings; print, audio, and video projects; public access television parodies; and other comedic participatory practices associated with these controversial preachers from the 1980s onwards. For Tilton's ministry, some of these activities and artifacts would prove irksome and even threatening, particularly an analog video remix turned online viral sensation. In contrast, Bakker-Messner's "campy" fans – gay men attracted to her "ludicrous tragedy" – would provide her unexpected opportunities for career rehabilitation.

 Denis J. Bekkering challenges "supply-side" religious economy and branding approaches, suggestions of novelty in religion and "new" media studies, and the emphasis on sincere devotion in research on religion and fandom. He also highlights how everyday individuals have long participated in public negotiations of Christian authenticity through tongue-in-cheek play with purported religious "fakes."

© The Author(s) 2018

Denis J. BekkeringAmerican Televangelism and Participatory CulturesContemporary Religion and Popular Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00575-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Denis J. Bekkering¹

(1)

Independent Scholar, Calgary, Canada

Denis J. Bekkering

Keywords

TelevangelismParticipatory culturesFandomReligious economyNew mediaPopular culture

End Abstract

It is the last day of May in 1993: Memorial Day in America. A day to remember those lost in military service, for millions of evangelicals it is also an opportunity to ritually reaffirm the special relationship between their country and their god. In Irving, Texas, the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) hosts a televised Memorial Day party. Founded in the early 1970s by Pentecostal preaching couple Paul and Jan Crouch, TBN had become a televangelical superpower, wrapping a gospel of health and wealth in an entertaining package, and attracting millions of donation dollars in the process. ¹ Much of this money was spent on the network’s sprawling campus, where TBN regular Mike Purkey, backed by a canned country rock soundtrack, sings of the fall of Jericho from the porch of an appropriately patriotic neoclassical mansion. Among the crowd gathered at the foot of the porch is a beautiful dark-haired young woman in sunglasses and a sparkling white dress. Smiling and bouncing to the music, she holds up her white-bonneted baby for a roving cameraman. A pace behind is the woman’s husband, dressed conservatively in a short-sleeved button-up shirt and with a camera around his neck. Enthusiastically clapping and dancing, he looks over and smiles approvingly as his wife and daughter are captured by the camera. ²

Later in the broadcast the mood is more solemn. TBN singer Betty Jean Robinson, standing on the same porch with eyes closed and left arm outstretched, beseeches her god to send down his healing and liberating presence, to the accompaniment of spare notes from an electric piano. A crossfade leads to a high-angle shot of a gathering near the edge of an artificial lake. The camera slowly moves in on three people standing waist-deep in the water. Flanking a red-haired young woman is Paul Crouch himself, his white hair and mustache matching his gleaming white robe, and a similarly clad ministry assistant. The woman pinches her nose, and as Robinson concludes with a soft “amen,” the two men lay her back into the water and quickly raise her up, symbolically washing away her sins and bringing her into a new life in Christ. ³

At least this is how it appeared on television. These images of a young, attractive family enjoying a day of sanctified fun, and a woman entering into Christian community, reinforced TBN’s avowed mission to entertain the faithful and evangelize the unsaved. The network’s need for camera subjects reflecting this mission, however, rendered it vulnerable to being “misused” by a troupe of practiced “performative parodists,” who crashed the festivities for some tongue-in-cheek fun. ⁴ Earlier that day, “Brother Randall ,” the exuberant, seemingly devout husband, and his wife “Sister Donna” dressed themselves and their infant daughter in clothing sharp enough to catch the attention of a TBN camera operator. The couple’s good friend “Sister Wendy ”—her nickname also a dig at evangelical fictive kinship titles—opted for all-black, fitting for her convincing role as the lost sinner in need of salvation. Having left their Dallas homes for nearby Irving, the crashers avoided paying entry fees by parking near the outskirts of the TBN campus, hopping a fence, and hiking across a field to the party in progress. There, they ate their fill of free food and kept their eyes peeled for the network’s cameras. Back at home, Brother Randall had set up a Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) to tape the live broadcast, and thus document their parodies for posterity. While his family managed to win some airtime, the day would belong to Sister Wendy for her impressive faux baptism by TBN’s founder, which went ahead despite her giggling as she awaited immersion. ⁵

Nearly three months later, Brother Randall and Sister Wendy donned different disguises for a prank associated with the embattled Dallas-based prosperity preacher Robert Tilton . On August 12, 1993, dozens of members of Tilton’s megachurch gathered outside of a downtown courthouse to protest a judge’s decision that his ministry was to hand over records related to a civil suit filed by a former supporter. ⁶ A crew from Dallas’ ABC affiliate WFAA-TV, led by reporter-on-the-scene Bill Brown, covered the public action. ⁷ The protesters circle in the shade of the courthouse, singing and holding signs with messages such as “Stop Invasion of Privacy.” Asked for comment, church member Dennis Schroeder claims that Tilton’s latest legal entanglement evidences the aggression that bearers of the true faith always face: “Bob Tilton is much like Jesus. I didn’t say he is Jesus. I said he’s much like Jesus in that he’s done nothing wrong. Even in the time when Jesus walked on the earth, they didn’t like what he said, and they killed him for it.”

“It got more interesting,” Brown transitions midway through the report, “when several people showed up saying they’re part of the ‘Bob Tilton Fan Club,’ a Dallas satirical group that holds parties and shows tapes of Tilton preaching.” WFAA aired accompanying footage of Brother Randall —a near mirror-image of Brown with his crisp white dress shirt, tie, and microphone in hand—standing at the periphery of the protest with a friend manning a bulky camera on a monopod. Playing a reporter, Brother Randall interviews a Tilton supporter in a purple shirt and safari hat. Their conversation, however, is inaudible due to Brown’s voiceover. Questioned by the “real” reporter, Brother Randall reveals his worries about the uncertain future of Tilton’s television ministry: “I sure would hate for him to be taken off the air. They cancelled Green Acres, they cancelled F-Troop, it’s really one of the most entertaining things you can see…You know, I’ve found a lot of people…like to watch Bob just for fun.”

Following the brief interview with Brother Randall comes grainier footage sourced from the interlopers’ own camera, starring Sister Wendy . Provocatively dressed in a red gingham top tied up to reveal her midriff, she stands in the center of a cacophonous circle of protesters. “A woman from the fan club held up a sign with a picture of Tilton on it,” Brown explains, “a sign the marchers didn’t like, so they all gathered around her and began to speak in tongues.” A middle-aged woman yanks the sign, which is adorned with a smiling headshot of the preacher and the slogan “Robert Tilton Turns Me On,” from the hands of Sister Wendy , who strides out of the crowd with a satisfied smile. “A few minutes later though,” concludes Brown, “it was all patched up. The Tilton follower told the woman she was sorry she tore up her sign, and to show it she gave her five dollars. In a few days, the Tilton action moves off the street and back into the courtroom.”

Televangelism has long been synonymous with the commodification of American religion. It is unsurprising, then, that scholars have often turned to economic concepts to analyze successful television ministries. Sociologist Shayne Lee and historian Phillip Sinitiere, for example, describe the top televangelists Paula White, T.D. Jakes, and Joel Osteen as “holy mavericks,” who have thrived in America’s “competitive spiritual marketplace” by offering “spiritual goods and services that match the tastes and desires of religious consumers.” ⁸ According to their framework, Osteen—often called “the Smiling Preacher” due to his preternatural cheerfulness—markets “a message of uplift and personal transformation” that meets his audience’s need for “the possibility of refashioning one’s identity and a sense of spiritual accomplishment in the face of life’s disappointments.” ⁹

Osteen and other leading televangelists are undoubtedly savvy marketers of messages and products that “resonate” with millions. ¹⁰ Conceptualizing such individuals as mere “consumers,” however, artificially limits their agency to a simple shopping decision, and masks the myriad and messy ways that they may use televangelism within the contexts of their everyday lives. For one thing, as scholars of black televangelism Marla Frederick and Jonathan Walton have emphasized, viewers are often selective. During her fieldwork in North Carolina, Frederick encountered elderly black Baptist women who would “sift through” religious broadcasts and “determine for themselves” what they found useful and inspiring, and what they considered chaff and unchristian. While some of these women derived “spiritual encouragement” from the broadcasts of Pentecostal/Charismatic preachers, for example, they were wary of, and even understood as religiously “inauthentic,” ecstatic practices featured in these programs. ¹¹ As Walton writes, viewers “filter the intended messages of televangelists to adjust and apply them personally as they see fit”—in other words, they “eat the fish and…spit out the bones.” ¹²

Walton here draws on cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s influential ideas about the “encoding” and “decoding” of television. According to Hall, while producers encode “preferred” meanings into television programs, audience members may decode them in unintended ways. “Negotiated” decodings, for example, may involve acceptance of the central intended message of a program, such as the promise of salvation, yet rejection of other elements, like speaking in tongues. ¹³ For Walton, as for most other analysts of televangelism, the “fish” that viewers derive from such programs is spiritual sustenance—an assumption tied to his assertion that “(v)iewers and producers obviously have similar belief systems and moral outlooks.” ¹⁴ The activities of the individuals featured in the opening vignettes, however, contradict this sweeping claim. Me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Robert Tilton, Ironic Fans, and Fake Religions
• 3. A Fan Club, a Fart Tape, and a Tabloid Scandal
• 4. From the Margins to the Mainstream: Recreational Christianity and a Viral Rebranding
• 5. Tammy Faye Bakker, Campy Fandom, and Ludicrous Tragedy
• 6. The Eyes of Tammy Faye and a Complicated Rebranding
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter