Saturday, November 9, 2019

My Gorge Rises - Part 2



Earlier in the week, I posted about Paula White, the evangelical minister who has risen to become Donald Trump's chief fluffer spiritual adviser. Yet it is interesting, though hardly surprising, to glean some facts about this insane lady's past, a past that is as sordid as one might expect about someone so intent on exalting both herself and the United States' current unhinged Commander-in-Chief.

Andrea Jefferson writes tellingly about this poseur:
She’s frequently introduced and identified as “Dr. Paula White” despite not having a college or seminary degree of any kind. No degrees…not even an undergraduate degree from college.
What could have been an inspiring story about someone pulling herself out of a very bad background proves less than inspiring, the more one reads about White:
According to Orlando Weekly, “Her mother was an alcoholic and her father committed suicide. Living for a time in a trailer, she was the victim of childhood physical and sexual abuse. As a teen, she says, she was promiscuous, became a single mother and, as a young adult, was bulimic. Years later, she was addicted to prescription medication; her teenage son was addicted to crack, and an adult stepdaughter died of brain cancer. If, through the love and power of Christ, White tells her followers, she has been able to break through these “generational curses,” so can they.”
The rub comes in how she has achieved her success, on the backs of her largely low-to-middle-income adherents:
Newsweek reported that White asked congregants to donate as much as a month’s salary to her. “Every time we give, something supernatural happens,” a third reporter saw White tell worshippers who she had asked to donate as much as “a tenth of your gross income.” She once apparently wrote in a fundraising email that donating to her church “will get God’s attention.”
I'm not sure about God, but Pastor Paula has certainly benefited from that mantra:
White reportedly owns “several Mercedes”; a Bentley was once photographed in her garage; she and her husband once owned a private jet; she lived in a $2.2 million Tampa mansion. And yet her first church—Without Walls—went bankrupt in 2014 after defaulting on a reported $29 million in loans.
Her journey to this mountain of material prosperity, which, in addition to the mansion includes two homes in Trump properties in New York City, has not been, as they say, without controversy:
Shortly after being saved at the age of 18, Paula Furr left her first husband and ran off with Randy White, her Maryland church’s pastor, who was at the time married with three young children – a fact she does not include in her redemption testimony.

At the height of their popularity, Paula and Randy White reported generating $40 million a year from her broadcast ministry and their Without Walls International Church in Tampa. The racially diverse congregation, in two locations, claimed a membership of 28,000, with the co-pastors taking together between $600,000 and $1.5 million a year in compensation.

White was also once the subject of a sensational tabloid exposé in the National Enquirer that linked her with fellow (and separated but still married) televangelist Benny Hinn in a romantic tryst in a five-star Rome hotel. Hinn, another prosperity gospel proponent, was registered in the presidential suite under the biblically suggestive name “David Solomon.” White denied the affair, but Hinn later acknowledged an “inappropriate relationship.”


How White wormed her way into the White House is a story with no real surprises, and one you can read about in the link provided at the top of this post.

As for me, my gorge has risen to a dangerous level, so I shall conclude this post and leave you to draw your own conclusions about the religious right, their cognitive abilities, and which master they truly serve.


6 comments:

  1. There's a passage in Huck Finn, Lorne, where te two con men walk into a camp meeting in Arkansas. They rise, claim that they have been moved by the spirit, and pass the hat to pay for a trip to the Indian Ocean, where they intend to convert "the pirates" there.

    As one of them says later in the novel, "The fools are the majority in any town."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As apt today as it was in Mark Twain's time, Owen. Clearly, as in your post today, the political arena is not the only one that needs some real humility.

      Delete
  2. Evangelical Christianity has become a second home to grifters. Once they had to eke out a living on whatever they could scrounge from attendees at their tent revivals. Then, in the 30s, the more enterprising latched onto radio. As Kruse explains in "One Nation Under God" it was this group, the radio preachers, that America's industrial types recruited to subvert FDR's New Deal. Both groups - the preachers and the industrialists - saw it as a threat. They've been in lockstep ever since.

    In "Better Off Without'Em" Chuck Thompson explores these mega-churches that are something of a 'southern' thing. Massive followings led by grifters who monetize their numbers. White folks join white churches. The church operates a charter school where white folks can send their kids to school with other white kids. No segregation there, right?

    We're all familiar with their TV hustles. It earns them fortunes. Remember that one grifter who told his TV audience that God wanted him to have a new jet - bigger and faster and more luxurious than his existing jet - and the millions poured in.

    They don't just sell salvation but wealth itself. If you can scrounge up a thousand dollars - maybe you don't pay your rent or go without your meds - and send it to them instead, God will put ten times that much into you bank account.

    That's not freedom of speech. It's not freedom of religion. It's fraud, criminal fraud. Only the grifters never face trial, never wind up in prison. They're 'connected' and connected people don't go to jail except when they stumble, i.e. Jim Bakker, and even he was 'reborn.' Now he flogs buckets of food instead of non-existent condos but, without having to cover Tammy Faye's cosmetic bills, I'm sure he's doing just fine.

    America has succumbed. It is in the hands of charlatans of many descriptions - religious, political, economic. The little people - the dumb ones, the easily frightened, the easily angered - are their lawful prey. How can they break those leg irons?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Your commentary sums up these people very effectively, Mound. And thanks for the authors, whose work I will look up, my constitution permitting, that is.

      Delete
  3. .. Mound says it well.. I see it as diseased behaviour.. with the kind of money and lifestyle available, its no wonder organized 'religion' is a delicious target for grifters.. Interesting too is how Trump has made his 'rallys' into similar arena level exhibitions targetting Americans who must surely be suffering from lead poisoning and sheer ignorance.. that does not in any way explain Mitch McConnell or Leslie Graham, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich et al.. its pure 'showtime'.. and WWF wrestling on display.. but the money & power, the sheer luxury & decadence.. dwarfs belief

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Such behaviour calls into question how far our species has actually evolved, Sal.

      Delete