MARTIN'S TBN WATCH
by Martin Wagner, your smilin' A.E. cohost

Benny Hinn!

See, you're laughing already!

Where does one begin? Benny Hinn, Benny Hinn, Benny Hinn. I confess--the man amazes me. Could it be the hair? That, ahem, interesting toupeé--or maybe it's just the world's worst combover--that seems to have been designed using some alien form of non-Euclidean geometry (hilariously dubbed the "scalp ferret" by those wags over at The Door).

Or could it simply be that, out of all of the fundamentalist televangelists throughout the past few decades, Hinn is the most brazen, most audacious and sleazy? Yes, even considering Robert Tilton, whose act has gotten so bad he wouldn't make the first cut in an open call for a high school play; even considering poor, faded Jimmy Swaggart, whose prostitution scandal has left him, today, a spectre of his former brimstone-spewing self, pitifully trying to sell sermon tapes on late-night cable paid programming; even considering the disgrace to end all disgraces, Jim Bakker. Hinn, out of all of them, is, bar none, the grand sleazemaster...because he's so goddamn good at what he does.

What exactly does he do so well? He has, quite simply, perfected the art of taking Christianity, denuding it of any qualities it may possibly have that could be called good and beneficial to humankind (such as Jesus' alleged exhortations that we love one another, which, I know, is hardly a concept unique unto Jesus, but is still nice advice), and transforming it into simple moneymaking pop trash. Arena-filling kitsch for the mindlessly cheering masses. A Benny Hinn "Miracle Crusade" is nothing more or less than the fundamentalist equivalent of WWF Smackdown. His preposterous onstage "healings" are religious showboating at its most banal and shallow. Dozens of people tromp up onstage, obediently fall and convulse on cue when Hinn slaps them on the forehead (some of them forget to fall quickly enough, and Hinn has to give them a little shove), and the throng goes into collective apoplexy. Hinn understands--whether he thinks of it this way or not--the stupefying power of mob manipulation and social reinforcement; that people, generally, want to do what the crowd is doing, and if the crowd is cheering wildly and rolling around on the floor wetting themselves and babbling incoherent drivel, then everyone in the arena will want to do it. It's simply too intimidating to be the only calm person in a big room full of 35,000 screaming imbeciles; you join the imbecility because you don't want to be left out, don't want to feel that there's something going on that you're not getting and everyone else is. And so this is why Hinn's arena shows are so jaw-droppingly excessive. He knows he can get away with it. He knows that at no time is anyone going to board the stage, grab the mike away from him, and shout, "What the hell is wrong with you idiots!? Can't you see this is all a big fat fraud!? Do you care? Are you all STUPID?" Yes, in that moment, in that arena, caught up in the madding crowd, they are completely and willfully stupid...but rest assured, Benny Hinn is not. He's a calculating and shrewd performer, Christianity's P.T. Barnum, bringing his circus to your town soon. Line up, suckers.

The art of absolute shamelessness

Downtown Austin has become the stomping ground of our fair city's most prominent local eccentric, a middle-aged homeless cross-dresser named Leslie. Imagine a man pushing fifty who looks quite a bit like John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, yet who sees fit to appear in public in women's lingerie, heels, and push-up bras. Upon viewing this apparition one night on Sixth Street--Austin's popular strip for bars, collegiate drunkenness, random knifings, and other cultural pursuits--a friend of mine offered the following erudite commentary: "Dude, that shit is fucked up."

A similar response might follow a viewing of one of Benny Hinn's "Miracle Crusades." These are the massive revival meetings Benny holds in arenas around the country--indeed, around the world--and one just gets queasy looking at the huge crowds in his audiences, eating up all of this bad theatre as if it were coated in chocolate syrup. Apparently, you can fool most of the people most of the time. Benny's shamelessness is utterly boundless at these freak shows. He brings weeping children up on stage and humiliates them solely so that he can hug them and get a collective "awwwww" out of the crowd. He has a lineup of wheelchairs that grows as the evening progresses, as his actors leap out of them to the cheers of the throng. One wonders what he might say to someone who asked him, "Hey, Benny, if you can really do this, why don't you just go to hospitals around the country and lay hands where it's needed?" He might mutter some silliness about how he isn't really the healer, Jesus is. In point of fact, the honest answer would be that it wouldn't make very good television. Hospitals are full of people who actually have something wrong with them, and it wouldn't do much for Benny's business if his--oh, I'm sorry, Jesus'--healing powers didn't kick in on cue. Of course, sometimes, even at Benny's carefully stage-managed crusades, they don't kick in anyway, if the four people who had the bad taste to die at his May 2000 Nairobi, Kenya, atrocity are any indication. But I'm sure the television cameras were careful to avoid that bit of unpleasantness.

Now what may surprise and amuse you in equal measure is this: Benny has a personal physician! That's right! The guy who can supposedly tap paraplegics on the noggin and have them dancing out of their wheelchairs for some reason needs to consult Don Colbert, MD, when he gets sick! Why? Hey, haven't you learned you're not supposed to ask intelligent questions like that? Silly person! Anyway, this Colbert in fact travels around with Benny on his crusades and is part of Benny's inner circle, so one is given to wonder exactly what kind of a doctor he really is. Maybe he just plays one on TV.

Opening for Benny Hinn...Jesus H. Christ!

As with Jack van Impe (see last month's column), you won't find a whole lot of anti-Benny sites on the web maintained by atheists. We generally tend to treat scam artists like Hinn as if they were zits you can't quite pop: leave them alone and they'll just go away. But...you can find a ton of anti-Benny sites maintained by other Christians, who seethe with rage at Hinn's false prophecies, bogus healings, and general bad taste. In fact, among some Christians, their embarrassment and loathing of Hinn is so profound that they have thoughtfully collected all of Hinn's most ludicrous moments in one form or another, providing entertainment that we freethinkers can enjoy as well. To save you the effort of excessive surf-n-search, I've collected some of my favorite Hinn masterpieces right here. It's the kind of stuff that makes me wish there were more Benny Hinns out there, making as big a mockery of Christianity as he's been doing. Note: you will need RealPlayer to hear these clips.

Fundies are known for their habit of making, shall we say, indelicate remarks when they are in the throes of rapturous religious delusion. One of Benny's best and most infamous was an announcement he made back on New Years Eve, 1989, at the Orlando (FL) Christian Center, that the omnibenevolent, loving God of Christianity was going to wipe out the entire United States homosexual population "by fire." When was this to happen? Around 1994-95, according to the Hinnmeister. What's really grim about this clip is the applause this remark receives from the congregation. And fundies always look astonished that the real world condemns them as bigots and won't take them seriously.

This, however, was nothing next to the absolutely priceless claim Benny made on the March 29, 2000 episode of his TBN show This Is Your Day, and repeated on the April 2, 2000, episode of TBN's flagship show Praise the Lord. The curious thwacking sound you might recall hearing that day--indeed, it almost caused a major tectonic shift--was that of the jaws of millions of aghast mainstream Christians hitting the ground as Benny, in a thoroughly calm and even gentle voice, told everyone that Jesus Himself was going to manifest physically at one of Benny's upcoming crusades. That's right. It seems that Benny is so staggeringly important, such a highly placed figure in the Big G's cabinet, that Jesus was going to pop by in physical human form, before His regularly scheduled Second Coming (which, naturally, wouldn't make it the Second Coming any more, but when did the raving of fundies even obey simple logic?), and, I guess, wave to the crowd or something. Maybe share an onstage hug with Benny. We atheists giggle merrily at a remark like this; in the Christian world, well, shit, men have been executed for less! But Benny didn't care. He got so excited by the prospect of having JC in the house at one of his crusades that he talked about it again on April 20, 21, and May 2. Amazing! (That last link is a complete RealVideo episode of This Is Your Day, by the way. Benny makes the "physical appearance" claim a little over 6 minutes in.) Christians who have a habit of studying scripture seriously in an effort to figure out what Revelation really means may not agree on much, but they probably all do agree that a Benny Hinn Miracle Crusade isn't mentioned anywhere, and Christian newsgroups and chat rooms lit like Christmas trees last May as many of the faithful wondered if this crazy son of a bitch with the accent and the hair hadn't finally taken leave of whatever senses he still had. Benny's style and rhetoric seem more akin to that of a fringe cult leader than that of a minister in a mainstream, established religion. And we all know how fringe cult leaders tend to end up, don't we? Will he finally push his luck too far one day?

Suffer the children...

Beyond the absurdity of Benny Hinn's religious spectacles lies a very tangible danger. The belief in faith healing, of all of the kooky beliefs fundies tend to hold, is the one that has been shown to have the direst consequences. Recently, a spate of deaths, mostly among young children whose parents chose to pray rather than seek medical attention for illnesses which were not particularly life-threatening in most cases, has made the news, and in at least one incident, one dead child's parents were charged with outright homicide for their neglect. We can applaud the sagacity of law enforcement for cracking down on this kind of nonsense, but we can only groan at the fact that ludicrous numbers of people still go to see Benny Hinn. For Benny, or anyone, to continue to champion faith healing--and, in Hinn's case, to make a career out of pretending to do it--when helpless children are dropping like ninepins ought to have the public rioting in the streets. But what is the public doing instead? Lining up to see Benny Hinn, that's what. In an age of science, technology, and reason, those of us of a rational bent raise our eyes (figuratively, of course) to the heavens and wonder how this kind of madness can still go on. Perhaps we will never know. But as long as there's a sucker born every minute, Benny Hinn, and showmen like him, will probably always find an eager, unthinking, and willing audience.

Next month's column will be posted 4/1/01, so I'll see you all again then. And don't forget to watch Jeff Dee and myself on The Atheist Experience every Sunday afternoon at 5 PM on TimeWarner Cable Channel 16 in Austin!

Go without gods,

Martin Wagner
© 2001
martinwagner66@excite.com

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