Internal contradictions of televangelism: ethical quandaries of that old time religion in a brave new world

Abstract

The personal ethics of television evangelists have lately been the subject of intense public scrutiny, centering especially on the sexual indiscretions and financial troubles of the Reverends Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert. These episodes have made for a great television spectacle, but the mass media have tended to focus primarily on personalities to the neglect of more complex and often more important factors. Thus, in most news accounts, the Bakker and Swaggert episodes ran mainly as sensational stories of personal corruption, as morality plays in which the greed and lust of two men caused their dramatic falls from grace and shook the foundations of their evangelical empires. The attention cast on these two wayward evangelists has caused many to regard all televangelists as corrupt and hypocritical, as a group of slick, money-grubbing Elmer Gantrys in three piece suits and pompadour hair-dos. It is certainly possible, of course, that these characterizations of Bakker and Swaggert are correct and that they are simply the victims of their own personal frailities and corruptions. Indeed, we can go further to point out the obvious: that there are hucksters and charlatans aplenty in Protestant evan? gelism, which has been rocked before by very similar sex scandals.1 Because faith to one person means gullibility to another, spiritual enterprises offer all sorts of opportunities to moral entrepreneurs and opportunists, who could rightly claim P. T. Barnum as their true patron saint and moral guide. Still, not all evangelists are hypocrites and con artists. We can reasonably assume, in fact, that most are honest, dedicated, and pious people who sincerely believe they are doing God's work as best they can. Despite their highly publicized backsliding, this may even be true of Bakker and Swaggert.2 Be that as it may, however, even the most personally honest and sincere television