So Long, Oral Roberts

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Oral Roberts, who died today at age 91 after a weekend fall, was probably the first evangelical Christian I knew of growing up. I became aware of him via Berkeley Breathed’s Fundamentally Oral Bill in Bloom County, an irreverent comic strip my dad was a big fan of.

Oral Bill was the televangelist persona of Bill the Cat, created in the wake of real-life televangelist Oral Roberts’ warning that if he wasn’t able to raise $8 million from his followers, God would “call him home.” During the spectacular constellation of controversies plaguing televangelists in the late 1980s–sex scandals, embezzlement, a smorgasbord of petty crimes (why has this era not spawned a television series?) Oral Bill morphed into a crooked catch-all for evangelical hypocrisy and thought-control.

Reading about Roberts today I feel a spike of nostalgia for that time, when public evangelicals were openly weird. Roberts was an old-school revival-tent faith healer, a pinky-ring wearing Johnny Cash-lookalike with a penchant for drama. He claimed to have had a vision of a 900-foot Jesus who told him to build a faith-healing medical center called City of Faith, claimed his wife stopped the devil from strangling him to death in his own bed, sent packets of healing water to followers with which they could “anoint” their billfolds. He claimed to have brought a dead infant back to life (later adjusting his claim to allow that the infant may only have seemed dead).

His Oral Roberts University has been sort of a flop, especially when compared to influential Christian colleges like Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and Pat Robertson’s Regent University. ORU–identifiable in the public consciousness primarily for that 60-foot tall statue of praying hands–was enmeshed in financial scandal several years ago, when it was revealed that the school was more than $50 million in debt, and financial misdeeds on the part of several in the Roberts clan seemed to blame. Roberts’ daughter-in-law Lindsay spent $39,000 at one Chico’s store in less than a year, saying, “As long as I wear it once on TV, we can charge it off.” The debt has since been cleared by a $70 million donation, not obtained on threat of anyone being called home.

Roberts’ career strikes us as theatrically laughable now, filled with such transparent manipulations that we have a hard time imagining how anyone could have bought them, how he could have raised that $9 million when he cried martyr. And maybe that’s why I feel nostalgic–in the sepia light of retrospect he seems so silly as to be unthreatening, destined for the obscurity he died in.

The giants on the evangelical scene these days are savvier: Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and Tim Keller carefully suck in their eccentricities to keep from appalling the mainstream. Which means their expulsion from it seems rather unlikely.