Tampa Bay Times du lieu suivant : St. Petersburg, Florida • 70

Evangelical infighting leaves people asking, 'What is Christian jEnnnE PUGII Perhaps to be pitied most are the millions of viewers who have supported these TV preachers so loyally with their money and devotion over the years. For many, the events of the last two weeks probably have been devastating. Garden Grove, got into the fray when a lawyer for Bakker suggested that one of Bakker's alleged adversaries lived "in a glass church." Jerry Falwell and Rex Hum-bard were drawn into it when they were named to the new board of directors chosen by the PTL organization to pick up the pieces after the Bakkers' withdrawal from the ministry. Capping it all, Pat Robertson, the one who wants to be president, observed wryly that "the Lord seems to be cleaning house." No soap opera could create a better scenario for grabbing the attention of the public. Amid all the infighting and the smug "I-told-you-so's" of the skeptics, there is a large element of sadness in all of this.

All of the Christian community suffers when leaders as prominent as the Bakkers are revealed as transgressors. All of Christianity is put on trial when a preacher as prominent as Roberts uses threats of punishment from the divine to achieve earthly goals. And the cause of Christianity is certainly not advanced by a cat fight in any of its many and diverse sectors. To top it off, all of the allegations accusations and revelations have been couched in expressions of "Christian love" by both accusers and accused. People watching this battle from the sidelines might well be justified in asking, "What is Christian love?" Perhaps to be pitied most are the millions of viewers who have supported these TV preachers so loyally with their money and devotion over the years.

For many, the events of the last two weeks probably have been devastating. For millions of lonely and homebound people, however, the cast of characters on Christian television has become "family." They have been dependable daily visitors in their homes. In some cases, no doubt, the electronic family has in appearance, at least shown much more concern for lonely individuals than blood relatives. Their prayer lines can be reached by toll-free numbers, at least. For that reason, I doubt that any of these recent developments will have a lasting effect on the hard core of supporters of electronic evangelism.

It will not take long for the faithful to come to the defense of all of the figures in this melodrama just as mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers often do for errant family members. A few benefactors have already stepped forward to say that they plan to increase their contributions to the PTL ministry. (Such a phenomenon has occurred in several of America's mainline Protestant denominations, despite reports that nearly all have experienced declines or stagnation in membership in recent years.) And there are indications of a rising tide of forgiveness that will lead to pleas for the Bakkers to rejoin the fold. One explanation, of course, is that many of the most faithful followers of these evangelists know all about the temptations of life. They know that to be human is to be imperfect.

Finding out that their leaders have been just as vulnerable as they is likely to tighten, rather than loosen, the bonds of faithfulness. Among them, there could indeed be individuals who have been driven out of the established churches by the self-righteousness of some judgmental congregations. But another development could do much more to salvage electronic evangelism. That is an upsurge in demands that the TV ministries become rigidly accountable for the money they solicit. No stringent laws regulating religion can be enacted, of course, in the interests of church-state separation.

But pressure from both supporters and clergy colleagues might do the trick. Much of the ongoing criticism of TV preachers focuses not on their personal lives, but on how they spend the tens of millions of dollars contributed to them each year. Billy Graham is one who has long demanded financial accountability in his organization and has urged his preacher-colleagues to do the same. Unfortunately, most of the figureheads in the current flap are among those who have chosen not to participate in the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability that Graham helped organize. But now, locally as well as nationally, Christian television evangelists are worried.

Bob D'Andrea of WCLF-TV said this week he fears "a lot of good ministries" may suffer because of the indiscretions of more well-known colleagues. "What most people don't realize," he said, "is that most television evangelists make very little money." Maybe, if these preachers would all come clean with balance sheets showing how little or how much they make and where it goes, confidence in their ministries can be restored. After all, they all claim that their principal mission in life is to spread the faith to the unsaved and the unsaved are the most likely to need such reassurance. Meanwhile, however, the hurt suffered by all Christian observers of the current morass was expressed this week in the plaintive plea of a young local minister. "What has happened," he asked, "to all the good old guys like Billy Graham?" The catharsis, as Jimmy Swaggart calls it, going on in the world of television evangelism could have long-term repercussions both good and bad.

It could hang as a dark cloud over evangelical Christianity in America for a long time, to say nothing about its immediate effects on electronic evangelism. Or, ironically, it could provide an unexpected boost for a segment of the religious community that had seemed to be approaching a saturation point. During the last two weeks, we have heard revelations about the drug addiction of Tammy Faye Bakker and the sexual improprieties of her husband, Jim Bakker, the co-founders of the multi-million-dollar PTL (Praise the Lord) ministry based in Fort Mill, S.C. Bakker also has admitted paying blackmail to avoid disclosure of his indiscretion. We have heard suggestions that John Wesley Fletcher, an evangelistic healer well-known in Pinellas County, may have stage-managed Bakker's sexual encounter at a Clearwater Beach hotel.

In 1979, Fletcher was vice president of the founding board of directors of WCLF-TV, Channel 22 in Largo, the mother station of the Christian Television Network. He is said to have arranged the meeting of Bakker and Jessica Hahn, the woman involved in the allegations, in December 1980, while he and Bakker were in the area to make appearances on a WCLF-TV fund-raising telethon. (Bob D' Andrea, founder-president of the station, said this week that Fletcher resigned from the board in 1981 after he was disfellowshipped by the Assemblies of God denomination for an alleged "drinking problem" and has had no connection with the station or network since then.) We have heard accusations that Swaggart who, along with the Bakkers, is a member of the Assemblies of God denomination hoped to use the downfall of Bakker to take over the vast PTL ministry. Then, on another front, we witnessed Oral Roberts' apparently miraculous rescue from God's retribution. Roberts told his followers several months ago that they would have to come up with $8-million in contributions by April 1 or God would "take me home." He had gone into his last two weeks of prayer and fasting still short of the goal when word came of a last-minute donation of exactly from a Sarasota dog track owner.

All of these developments have opened up an evangelical can of worms. What has been exposed, in addition to the personal vulnerabilities of the Bakkers and Roberts, is a large bag of jealousies and resentments within the evangelical hierarchy. Swaggart, while denying he had any covetous intentions toward the Bakkers' PTL empire, has called the Bakkers a "cancer that needed to be surgically removed from the Body of Christ." Oral Roberts made a special appearance on his son Richard's television show to chastise Swaggart for attacking the Bakkers. Whereupon, Swaggart retaliated with sharp criticism of Roberts' money-raising tactics. Charges and countercharges were leveled by several leading television evangelists during appearances on network television news shows.

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