Word: preacherly
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What accounts for the surprising impact of the televangelists? In part, showbiz flair: outsize personalities, sermons carefully shaped around themes that pull audience response, dramatic personal stories of life-changing events, and toe-tapping music. But broader cultural forces are surely at work. "Everybody thinks the TV preacher is doing a number on people," says Armstrong, "but it's the viewer with his hand on the dial who controls the system." People who hope TV Gospel will fade when today's stars are gone, says Armstrong, "do not understand that the real key is grass-roots people, dying for personal...
Jimmy Swaggart, 50, is a brash, rafter-ringing Pentecostal preacher and Gospel singer (his albums have sold 13 million copies) who preserves the old tent revival style at his striking 7,000-seat Family Worship Center outside Baton Rouge, La. In his weekly one-hour broadcasts, he prowls the stage, sometimes breaking into excited jig steps, as he revs up perorations assailing Communism, Catholicism and "secular humanism," the last of which he blames for abortion, pornography, AIDS and assorted social ills. He takes in $140 million a year. The money pays for his weekly show (aired in 197 markets...
...parking lot. Inside, caged canaries chirp and camera-toting tourists click away through worship. As the service begins, 90-ft. doors open to reveal twelve fountains, one for each apostle, and an 11-ft. by 15-ft. Jumbotron video screen, so the back pews can catch the preacher's every gesture. Schuller's sermons, taxing to neither spirit nor intellect, owe as much to psychology as to Scripture. They are peppered with greeting-card aphorisms for seekers of happiness and self-esteem. "Coping and hoping." "Turn your scars into stars." The cross is "a minus turned into a plus." Beyond...
...Puritan, high-minded. The severe geometries of Frank Lloyd Wright's turn- of- the-century interiors and Steven Holl's beautiful side chair (1984), for example, can have an almost oppressive sobriety. As playfulness alternates with the more austere, missionary vision, the American cultural personality seems like a preacher's child, frisky and slaphappy on Saturday night, dour and repentant Sunday morning. In the battle for America's aesthetic soul, it is the Shakers vs. the Rockettes...
...bring his dual message of self-help and hate. The message of hate predominated. How the crowd hungered for that meal. At the words of defiance they stood and roared. At the in-jokes they laughed joyfully. At the derisive words they smiled and sneered. The converted attended the preacher...