Word: rader
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Times have changed. Now Herbert's closest aide and spokesman is Lawyer Stanley Rader, himself recently sidelined and now back in power. Rader denies that Herbert ever designated Garner Ted as his successor. In a florid churchwide encyclical, the father explains the sudden ouster by accusing his son of perfidy: "I derived my authority from the living CHRIST. You derived what you had from me, and then used it totally CONTRARY to THE WAY Christ...
Many see in these goings-on a byzantine power struggle, in which Rader and his former secretary, who is now married to Herbert, have ganged up on Garner Ted. There is also another possible issue. Garner Ted has gradually played down some of Dad's more embarrassing dogmas. Among them: that heaven is racially segregated, that Britain and the U.S. have become the "real Israel," and that remarried converts must forsake their second spouses and, if possible, rejoin their first. He also opposed use of physicians...
...will eventually succeed the aged and ailing Apostle Herbert? Recent Convert Rader appears all-powerful, but he is not a minister and has numerous enemies. "Many people fear Stan immensely," says a veteran headquarters official. An anonymous "Committee of Twelve" has sent a vicious anti-Rader letter to all Worldwide ministers. Rader's candidate to take over may be the newly installed director of the church's ministry, C. Wayne Cole. But Garner Ted should not be counted out. Says Professor Joseph Hopkins of Pennsylvania's Westminster College, author of a recent book called The Armstrong Empire...
...some cases the preposterous plots are exceeded by the presumptuous flackery. Templeton's publishers announce that during his promotional tour he will "break the last taboo on national TV." Rader's novel was unveiled at a Manhattan disco with a gospel sing-along starring Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, William F. Buckley and Walter Cronkite. Stein & Day let it be known that The Final Conclave was printed under extraordinary security lest it be "suppressed." By whom? The publisher didn't say; surely a banning in Boston or a burning in Butte would have hyped the book...
These two ex-clergymen profess affection for the church. Not so Dotson Rader, a preacher's kid who says he wrote his hate-filled book about American Evangelicals because they are so filled with hatred. Rader's grandfather Luke and great-uncle Paul were big-time revival preachers. His father, also named Paul, who still conducts meetings around the South, raised Dotson on the road and wanted his son to become a preacher too. It was the novelist's great-uncle who had the distinction of preaching at the very meeting in Los Angeles where the adolescent...