Preacher's Progress

Oral Roberts: An American Life.
by David Edwin Harrell, JR.
Indiana University Press. 622 pp. $16.95.

“I was trying to play golf with Oral Roberts the other day,” Bob Hope once cracked, “but the holes kept healing up.” Quite a bit of revealing social data is embedded in that homely one-liner. It says a lot about Oral Roberts that most people, remembering his notorious early days as a television preacher, get the joke without benefit of lengthy explanation; it says almost as much that Bob Hope found it an appropriate joke to tell on television twenty years later. But the really interesting aspect of the joke is the fact that the first part of it is true: Bob Hope and Oral Roberts do play golf together.

What makes this so interesting is the social background of Oral Roberts. Born in abject depression-era poverty, Roberts grew up to become the leading figure of a comparatively obscure religious sect given to such arcane practices as faith healing and speaking in tongues. His clientele consisted in large part of the single most socially disenfranchised segment of the American public: the rural poor. But in the course of his long career Roberts has traveled from these miserable beginnings to something very much like middle-class respectability. He built a surprisingly good university in Oklahoma, joined the Methodist church, and achieved a substantial measure of acceptance among conservative Protestants. He has also become the sort of person about whom comedians like Bob Hope tell good-natured jokes, an equally formidable achievement in its way.

This unlikely success story has now found a scholarly teller: David Edwin Harrell, Jr., chairman of the history department at the University of Atlanta. As a biographer, Harrell shares many of the characteristic infirmities of his profession. He is long-winded: Oral Roberts: An American Life runs to over six hundred pages of very small print. Moreover, though he never descends to anything like out-and-out hagiography, Harrell clearly suffers from an acute case of clientitis. And his prose style is so pedestrian at times as to make one quail at the decline of upper-level literacy in the American academy. (“But Oral's gift and curse—that probing, innovative, creative, restless spirit which attracts the masses and makes queasy less-talented men—boiled precariously near the surface.”)

All this having been said, it is necessary to add that Harrell has still managed to give us a surprisingly worthwhile book. The story he has to tell is so compelling and well-documented that his literary offenses generally assume secondary importance. And while Oral Roberts may not quite be, as Harrell claims, “one of the most influential religious leaders in the world in the 20th century,” he is almost certainly the best-known Pentecostalist around—give or take Pat Robertson—which makes Oral Roberts: An American Life essential reading for anyone trying to come to grips with the growing influence of conservative Protestantism in American life today.

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When H.L. Mencken went to Tennessee to cover the Scopes trial in 1925, he took an evening off to visit a local prayer meeting, an experience which he subsequently wrote up for the Baltimore Sun:

The leader kneeled facing us, his head alternately thrown back dramatically or buried in his hands. Words spouted from his lips like bullets from a machine-gun—appeals to God to pull the penitent back out of Hell, defiances of the demons of the air, a vast impassioned jargon of apocalyptic texts. Suddenly he rose to his feet, threw back his head and began to speak in the tongues—blub-blub-blub, gurgle-gurgle-gurgle. His voice rose to a higher register. The climax was a shrill, inarticulate squawk, like that of a man throttled.

The sensational events recounted here clearly fall under the heading of “Pentecostal practices.” The Pentecostal movement is a modern branch of conservative Protestantism which emphasizes faith healing and speaking in tongues, practices associated with the early days of the Christian church and described in the New Testament. Outside of these controversial practices, Pentecostalists have much in common with Protestant fundamentalists.¹

The appeal of Pentecostalism was long restricted to rural and lower-class Southerners. “One of the attractions of such groups,” Harrell observes of the Pentecostalists, “is that they provide an avenue for advancement and professional status outside traditional institutional channels.” This was the career track taken by the young Oral Roberts, born in a log cabin in Oklahoma in 1918 to itinerant Pentecostal evangelists who made a meager living from passing the plate at back-country revival meetings. Roberts never forgot the humiliation of being poor and Pentecostal.

After being “healed” of “tuberculosis in both lungs and in the final stages” at a Pentecostal tent meeting in 1935, Roberts dropped out of high school and spent the next twelve years as a minister of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, conducting revivals throughout the South and becoming widely known in Pentecostal circles as an exceptionally accomplished preacher. But Roberts became increasingly dissatisfied with what he described as the “lethargy” and “complacency” of the Pentecostal establishment, as well as with his own continuing near-poverty.

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A series of unexpected events in the mid-40's drastically changed the course of Oral Roberts's life. In 1945, he began experimenting for the first time with faith healing. He discovered a biblical text (“I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth”) which convinced him that a lower-class living was not the necessary lot of the good Christian. Finally, in 1947, came the moment of revelation:

Suddenly, Oral recalled, he once again heard an “audible voice” speaking like a “military commander, words of crisp command, clear and strong.” “Stand upon your feet,” the voice said. “Go and get in your car.” Oral obediently walked to his car. “Then God said, ‘Drive one block and turn right,’” starting him back toward his parsonage. As he drove toward his home, the message was completed: “From this hour your ministry of healing will begin. You will have my power to pray for the sick and to cast out devils.”

Roberts subsequently began to hold Pentecostal tent revivals throughout America. “His audiences were the poor,” says Harrell, “and those who, by hard work and moral habits, were one generation removed from society's bottom rung.” Though these revivals were conducted in a manner almost austere by prevailing Pentecostal standards, it was the “healing touch” of Roberts that pulled in the crowds. (“As soon as the crippled were touched,” one sympathetic witness reported after a 1948 meeting, “they threw their crutches away, deaf ears snapped open, people leaped off stretchers. Next morning crutches were lying all around the tent where they had been left.”) Roberts soon developed a huge direct-mail ministry and began producing a thirty-minute television program, filmed at his tent meetings, which by the end of 1957 was seen on 135 television stations around the country. His widely publicized (and criticized) activities made him the best-known evangelist in the United States after Billy Graham.

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In 1961 Roberts announced his plans to build a college in Tulsa, Oklahoma for those Pentecostal youth who were being “lost to the Full Gospel movement by virtue of going to these other universities where God was not supreme.” The result was Oral Roberts University, dedicated in 1967 with a speech by Billy Graham, then the touchstone of respectable evangelical Christianity. The Oral Roberts University “life-style” includes a compulsory aerobics progam and mandatory attendance at chapel and Sunday-morning services. All male students wear ties to class. Bizarre as it may sound, the formula seems to have worked. By the end of the 1983-84 academic year the university had an enrollment of 4,507; most of its students come from middle-class families and have finished in the top two-thirds of their high-school graduating classes.

As Roberts turned his energies to the building of Oral Roberts University, his assimilation into the mainstream of Protestant life became more and more complete. He converted to Methodism and in 1968 terminated his long series of tent revivals. He abandoned his old television program for a series of slickly produced prime-time specials that made use of popular music and celebrity guests. Roberts's timing was good: his move toward the Christian mainstream coincided with the rise of the American charismatic movement during the 60's and 70's. In 1977 Roberts embarked on the construction of the City of Faith, a Tulsa health-care complex which contained a sixty-story clinic and diagnostic center, a thirty-story hospital, and a twenty-story medical research center. (“You know,” he told an associate, “they just don't believe that God told me sixty, thirty, twenty.”) President Reagan sent a letter of congratulations to be read at the dedication ceremonies in 1981. Oral Roberts had finally arrived.

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“Only in America,” Oral Roberts has remarked on numerous occasions, “could a little stuttering boy, born in the Indian territory of Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, the son of a poor preacher, . . . amount to anything, could start a school from scratch and build a university.” Roberts's comments remind us that the entire thrust of his career has been toward the forms and trappings of social respectability—exactly as has been the case with every other conservative Protestant religious leader from Billy Graham to Jerry Falwell. Indeed, what is most surprising about Oral Roberts's gaudy career is its sheer benignity: no anti-Semitism, no racism, no political agendas, no serious claims of venality or personal dishonesty, a truly remarkable degree of doctrinal tolerance. While there may be much to be offended by in the activities of Oral Roberts, there is nothing whatsoever to fear.

To view Roberts's ministry in perspective is to see its manifest relationship to the activities of England's Victorian reformers and of the American reformers who accompanied the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century. Both groups exerted a moral and civilizing influence on their followers that helped prevent the development of a lumpenproletariat and helped move England and America in the direction of a middle-class society. It was with the gradual demise of these reform movements, as James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein have recently reminded us in Crime and Human Nature, that there occurred the equally gradual development of a true American underclass. For all its intellectual naiveté, the Pentecostal movement (as Harrell rightly observes) clearly played a similar role as a response to the conditions of rural Southern life.

It is understandably hard for educated Americans to find any enduring merit in the activities of a television preacher who speaks in tongues and claims with numbing regularity to receive messages directly from God. But there seems little question of Oral Roberts's sincerity. “His faults,” Harrell asserts, “if faults they be, are rooted not in chicanery but in calling. . . . [H]e is motivated not by greed but by God, as he hears Him.” And religions like Pentecostalism, as alien as they must inevitably seem to sophisticated onlookers, surely offer a superior alternative to the squalor and demoralization of America's underclass.

Oral Roberts: An American Life suggests an obvious corollary to Samuel Johnson's remark that no occupation is as innocent as that of making money. In a society like ours, perhaps no occupation is as harmless, or as potentially civilizing, as the preaching of an essentially moralistic and individualistic religion—even with a little faith healing thrown in on the side.

¹ The doctrinal specifics of fundamentalism are discussed in Richard John Neuhaus's “What the Fundamentalists Want” (COMMENTARY, May 1985).