Oral Roberts, R.I.P.
Dec. 16, 2009
Oral Roberts died yesterday at age 91.
I have known a good number of the televangelists, because I have spent time on the Christian lecture circuit. That was where I met Roberts.
Roberts was a man of exceptional innate abilities. Nobody starts a university that gets as big as ORU who is lacking in ability. The same could be said of Jerry Falwell. But Falwell was more conventional than Roberts. I think he was smarter in the ways of this world. I knew him better than I knew Roberts.
Roberts was one of those radio evangelists who broke the sweetheart relationship that existed between the two FCCs: the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Council of Churches (National Council after 1950). From 1927 onward, the Federal Radio Commission mandated that commercial radio stations had to offer free public service broadcasting. The FRC controlled the allocation of valuable radio airwaves, and this was a quid pro quo to the stations.
A big chunk of this public service requirement was fulfilled by Sunday broadcasts. The FRC mandated religious programming. The Federal Council of Churches, the self-appointed agency representing mainline Protestantism, went to the networks and got them to agree that the Council would provide the programming for the free-time religious broadcasts. The FCC was liberal. Its main radio preacher was John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick, the most famous liberal preacher in the country.
The evangelicals fought back by purchasing air time. This did not count as public service broadcasting. Radio was the mass-market medium that the non-mainline churches used to gain an audience. But the Federal Council liberals controlled over half the religious broadcasting slots.
The second generation of radio preachers arrived in the 1950s. Roberts was one of them, the best known of the Pentecostals.
In 1960, the FCC reversed its separation of free broadcasts and paid broadcasts. This allowed the paid broadcasts to fulfill the public service requirement. By 1977, the National Council broadcasts constituted under 10 percent of the market.
In their superb book on the history of American Christianity, The Churching of America, authors Finke and Stark point out that whenever government has granted special favors to mainline churches, these churches lose their ability to compete. The authors use the FCC-FCC story as an example.
I can remember seeing Roberts in the mid-1950s on my grandmother's television -- maybe once. The only other preachers I can recall from that era are Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and the incomparably creepy O. L. Jaggers, a Los Angeles fixture for two decades -- marvelously described by Frank Zappa. Why I remember Roberts, I cannot say. He had charisma in the popular sense, and maybe the theological sense.
I remember a meeting in 1986 where Roberts and I spoke. It was in Atlanta. The sponsoring church was a megachurch. I can remember seeing a mother with her sick infant, who had heard that Roberts would appear. He warned all such miracle-seekers that he would not be performing any that day.
I thought at the time that a man who gains his reputation by healing people has a real problem. He must be ready to heal at all times. To store up healing power for large-tent performances -- large conference centers if you get famous -- seems strange to people in need. I wondered at the time what it would be like to be denied treatment by a healer from God. Do they blame God or the healer? Do they blame anyone?
He had his share of failures. He built a huge, multi-story hospital in 1980. He did so against the advice of specialists in hospital management. It would not attract enough patients, they said. They were correct. It closed in 1989.
His university is a better-than-average school. I spoke there once to a class in the law school, which has also shut down. The students seemed bright and dedicated. ORU opened in 1965.
Here was a man with no college degree who started a university. He came out of Pentecostal circles, the least educated of all Protestant traditions, yet he was able to put together a faculty full of Ph.Ds. This was no small accomplishment.
He adjusted to the times. When he sold his huge portable tent, he did more than sell a tent. The Pentecostalism of his youth is today the middle-class charismatic movement, more famous for its music than its healings.
He avoided any hint of a sexual scandal, but he had his share of media attention over his use of ministerial money. He died in Newport Beach. He lived in a ministry-owned home. He was being paid over $80,000 a year at the time. But, whatever money he had, he gained through voluntary means. His supporters could have stopped sending in money at any time.
I did not know him well, but he seemed like a self-effacing person in private. He did not strut.
He achieved more, institutionally speaking, than most men I have known. In terms of how he started out, he achieved more than anyone would have predicted in 1947.