Word: prayers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Oral Roberts was fasting in his Tulsa Prayer Tower, a 200-ft.-tall glass- and-steel spire on the Oral Roberts University campus, and still awaiting this week's life-threatening deadline, despite a surprise stay of execution -- a gift of $1.3 million from Jerry Collins, a short, gruff dog-track owner from Sarasota, Fla. ("It's very seldom I ever go to church," said the philanthropic Collins. "I help them all.") Roberts, feeling perkier after the donation, proclaimed Bakker a "prophet of God," who had been victimized by an "unholy trio of forces," presumably referring to Swaggart, the Assemblies...
...Ronald Reagan's Interior Secretary after offending several minority groups, and was recently fired by a Native American tribe that claimed his work as its lawyer was inept. Evangelist Bailey Smith, while president of the Southern Baptist Convention, gained brief notoriety by declaring, "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." Retired Televangelist Rex Humbard was once rebuked by the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling unregistered securities, and was taken to task in the press for spending too much of his ministry's money on his family...
Collins remarked to reporters that Roberts "doesn't have to commit hara- kiri now" but allowed that he could probably make do with some "psychiatric treatment." Even though the gift met the divinely ordained total that Roberts had announced, he continued his fast in the Prayer Tower and asked his flock for more cash. Roberts' performance caused Swaggart to lament, "The gospel of Jesus Christ has never sunk to such a level...
...moral ecology of American politics is altering. Issues that figured in the Reagan revolution -- family values, school prayer, abortion, pornography -- remain powerful. But some of them will be in collision with problems such as AIDS, homelessness, racism, toxic waste, business ethics, nuclear disarmament and the national debt -- a more public agenda, one that veers somewhat away from religion...
Still, the circus of sleaze didn't unfurl its tend until Meg made her fatal mistake--she died. When her children, Bessie and John, found out that they didn't even get the placque that used to hang over the kitchen sink with the Lord's Prayer on it, all hell broke loose. Special crack teams of Rockefeller lawyers, trained in jungle survival techniques by G. Gordon Liddy and in rhetoric by Jesse Jackson, sprang out of camouflaged foxholes to launch a frontal attack on the U.S. judiciary system. The objective: $50 million in diamonds, stock, and Third World countries...