IN TV EVANGELISM AS IN LIFE, LET THE BUYER BEWARE

The death of a salesman?

TV evangelist Oral Roberts said that God told him he would die if he didn’t raise $8 million by March 31. After getting his money, he reported that the Lord told him that he needed to raise $8 million a year for the rest of his life.

And speaking of gospel vendors, everyone knows by now that TV evangelist Jim Bakker admitted that a church secretary was paid money to hush up his fleeting sexual liaison with her in 1980. Then Bakker resigned as head of the PTL (Praise the Lord) ministry, a $129-million empire that includes a TV talk show that starred Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, and a 2,300-acre Disneyland-type resort and luxury-hotel complex in Fort Mill, N.C. called Heritage USA.

The TV show and resort, along with the Bakkers’ lavish life style, were big-ticket items that gobbled funds, and Jim and Tammy Faye repeatedly, endlessly used TV to pass the tin plate. Her mascara budget alone would probably feed all of Ethiopia.

Too far? Too much?

Someone wondered on TV recently if maybe it was time for the church to lower its electronic profile, suggesting that pulpits and airwaves were probably incompatible anyway. He labeled evangelists as TV’s latest victims, invariably controlled by the very medium they had sought to control.

He cited as evidence the spectacles of Roberts, the Bakkers and the other reved-up reverends and holified hucksters, who seem to expend at least as much energy in front of the camera soliciting money to keep their TV ministries on the air as they do worshiping God.

Because the Bakker case is so juicy (he also revealed that Tammy Faye was being treated for prescription-drug dependency) and their life styles so up-scale, it does give one pause. Moreover, their personal soap opera sounds like an extension of their melodramatic TV show.

The truth, however, is that TV didn’t teach extravagant fund-raising techniques to preachers. True, there’s never been another Heritage USA or Oral Roberts University to support. Long before the arrival of TV, though, there were Elmer Gantrys roaming America and doing all sorts of high-pressure selling and collecting--pitching their tents and passing their hats to accumulate small fortunes that were not earmarked for resorts, prayer towers or TV time.

Preachers pulling the plug? Never. The TV industry wouldn’t like that, for such TV preachers as Roberts, Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, Robert Schuller and Pat Robertson, along with untold smaller-fry evangelists, pump a reported a $1 billion annually into local TV stations and cable operators.

What’s more, they and their pitches belong on TV. They fit. They’re family. They have all the proper tools. They act. They weep. They sell.

Everyone’s talking about TV’s wave of home shopping programs. Actually, TV’s been in the home shopping business since its inception. TV is nothing if not a huckster heaven, from Oral Roberts to oral hygiene, a place for selling religion along with toothpaste. In a broad sense, TV is a turnstile that pushes viewers on to advertisers. In a narrow sense, it’s largely a series of billboards, most of them unannounced.

A TV commercial is more than a message from Madison Avenue. It is Ronald Reagan selling himself to the electorate, Alan Cranston turning his hair orange for the camera and Geraldo Rivera selling himself to anyone who will watch. It is “live” news coverage whose only purpose is to create an atmosphere that sells the news coverers. It is Dr. Ruth selling entertainment as therapy. It is TV interviews that sell books, movies, personalities and the people doing the interviews. It is Vladimir Posner or the Ku Klux Klan and anyone else who manipulates the media by staging demonstrations. It is terrorists, who essentially are publicists with bombs. It is TV’s movie critics, who use their reviews to sell themselves.

So evangelists are part of the family, as in tune with the medium as Cal Worthington.

And so it seemed just perfect on a recent post-Bakkers edition of the “PTL Club” program when the following Heritage USA hotel special was announced: “If you pay the regular rate the first day, the second day is free. . . . That’s 50% off!”

And then the beaming man who runs the Goodie Barn--”the largest retailer at Heritage USA”--was introduced and asked if he was expecting a big season.

“All the merchandise in the shops are (sic) all discounted,” he announced. “And PTL Club members get 10% off.”

It was almost like old times, except that Jim and Tammy Faye weren’t there to say, “Praise the Lord.”