Authors: Mitch Horowitz
Of the six megachurches investigated by Grassley’s finance committee from late 2007 to early 2011, only two cooperated: Joyce Meyer Ministries,
based in Missouri, and Benny Hinn Ministries, based in Texas. Leaders of the remaining four, who often refused the committee’s most basic requests for information, were Kenneth and Gloria Copeland of Kenneth Copeland Ministries of Texas; Creflo and Taffi Dollar of World Changers Church International in Georgia; Randy and Paula White of Without Walls International Church of Florida; and Bishop Eddie Long of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church of Georgia.
The Joyce Meyer and Benny Hinn ministries vowed to practice better financial transparency, but the other four megachurches dismissed the committee’s activities, calling its inquiries intrusive and violative of religious freedom. Senate investigators were left with little choice but to accept such stonewalling. Grassley’s staffers acknowledged that they had neither time nor resources to issue and enforce subpoenas. What’s more, many potential informants told the committee that they were too frightened to testify, fearing “retaliation by the churches,” including harassing lawsuits.
In a disappointment to megachurch critics, Grassley’s report, which appeared in January 2011, after more than three years of investigation, found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing and proposed no new legislation related to church tax exemption, transparency, or financial disclosure. Yet despite the odds stacked against the finance committee’s investigation, the report did call attention to a disturbing trend among tax-exempt megaministries: the creation of networks of IRS-shielded co-businesses operating under church umbrellas. These offshoot entities often lacked any clear connection to ministerial activities. They included private airports, aircraft leasing firms, recording companies, hotels, real-estate holdings, and fleets of vehicles. The four churches that had refused to cooperate with the committee were discovered to harbor “multiple for-profit and non-profit entities” and “multiple ‘assumed’ or ‘doing business as’ names were also used.” Kenneth Copeland Ministries, for example, operated under “at least 21 ‘assumed names,’ ” which included record companies and recording studios. One minister who was not investigated by the committee, Star Scott of Calvary Temple in Sterling,
Virginia, explained that the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of automobiles that he and his wife used were part of a “racing ministry.”
“This raises the question,” the committee wrote, “of whether church status is being gamed to shield such activities of a tax-exempt entity from public scrutiny.”
Ministers Eddie Long and Creflo Dollar, meanwhile, experienced separate legal struggles in early 2011 around the time the Grassley report came out. Reverend Long fended off court challenges by four young men who claimed the prosperity minister had coerced them into sexual relationships, charges the pastor vigorously denied. The cases were settled out of court. Reverend Dollar was arrested in summer 2012 following an argument with his fifteen-year-old daughter, who accused him of choking and beating her, claims that Dollar disputed.
At the time of the report’s appearance in 2011, it seemed doubtful that the political culture within Congress would permit a more decisive legislative oversight of the megaministries. When challenged with calls for greater regulatory measures, the megachurches raised cries of religious persecution and used a network of magazines, television broadcasts, and social media to fend off calls for reform.
Critics believed that more oversight was needed not only to determine whether the megapulpits’ finances fell within the boundaries of their tax-exempt status, but also whether their political activities adhered to the law. As part of their privileged IRS status, the megaministries, like all tax-exempt churches, are prohibited from electioneering and significant lobbying efforts. This was another requirement run through with leaks and loopholes. The 2012 presidential campaign witnessed the now-familiar ritual of millions of church “voter guides,” generally prepared by conservative political action committees and foundations, being distributed throughout, and by, many of the megachurches.
As the twenty-first century opened, many of the nation’s largest ministries conducted their financial and political affairs without transparency or federal tax obligations.
Outside the domes of the megachurches and the pep-rally atmosphere of motivational seminars, some life coaches and positivity teachers drew connections between physical endurance and peak performance. Rather than use mental preparation to bolster physical stamina, as in athletic training, they reversed the equation: Some motivational coaches prescribed physical challenges to workshop attendees as a means to achieve mental breakthroughs. Such breakthroughs, the reasoning went, would build greater self-assurance and foster a willingness to venture boldly through life.
Done responsibly, the testing of physical boundaries could bring constructive results, as sometimes occurs in Outward Bound nature programs. From the 1980s onward, several motivational instructors used fire-walking ceremonies as a confidence-building exercise. In such programs, participants were trained to walk barefoot across hot coals. Occasional injuries occurred, usually minor burns and blisters.
In July 2012, the
San Jose Mercury News
reported that during a fire-walk event hosted by life coach Anthony Robbins, and attended by six thousand people, three participants went to the hospital for burns and a total of twenty-one were injured. A San Jose fire captain told the Associated Press that several attendees reported second- or third-degree burns. The
Mercury News
quoted a San Jose City College student who witnessed the fire walk saying that he heard “wails of pain, screams of agony” among participants.
The Robbins organization vociferously disputed the accounts. The Fox News morning show
Fox and Friends
issued an on-air correction of a segment that it had run on the event, in which it reported that “nearly two dozen” attendees were hospitalized following the fire walk. Fox’s retraction stated that “none were hospitalized” and “a few of the six-thousand received minor burns akin to a sunburn, they received on-site medical attention, and continued to participate in the event.” Regarding the reported “wails of pain,” a writer in
The Huffington Post
stated, “Those who participated said the young man must not have realized that seminar
participants are encouraged to yell and scream to psyche themselves up and they were not all screaming in physical pain.”
The conflicting accounts indicated the tension of covering motivational teachers like Robbins. Journalists sometimes cast a jaundiced eye at the ivory-toothed, mountainous man who seemed to be selling miracles to stadium-sized audiences. This titan-of-the-positive did, in fact, proffer innovative programs to teach participants to linguistically and psychologically “model” the habits of highly successful figures through step-by-step protocols of communication, body language, and internal dialogues, sometimes called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Robbins’s insights about self-taught limitation, and the root motives that drive us toward success or failure, were shrewder and more complex than the ideas offered by many on the motivational circuit.
The success of the 2006 book and movie
The Secret
increased the demand for motivational seminars and brought new stars to the field. Hungry to copycat Robbins and build empires of their own, a few life coaches devised incredibly busy appearance schedules and developed their own brand of over-the-top methods to lead weekend workshop attendees into “breakthroughs.” In one horrendously tragic case, a motivational superstar showed no decency or judgment in how far he was willing to push his attendees.
James Ray, a bestselling author and former telemarketer and internal trainer with AT&T, conducted a brutal Arizona sweat lodge in fall 2009 that led to multiple injuries and the deaths of three participants: two from heat stroke and one from heat-related organ failure. Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide in November 2011 and sentenced to two years in prison.
After initially rising to fame for his commentary in
The Secret
, and subsequent appearances on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
and
Larry King Live
, Ray drew growing audiences. Known for a frenetic events schedule, as well
as a hard-driving presentation style, the former marketer crossed the nation delivering talks, seminars, and weekend and weeklong empowerment programs.
In October 2009, fifty-six participants joined him at a lodge in the Sedona desert for a weeklong “Spiritual Warrior” retreat. Ray’s program for self-development was extreme: Even before the evening sweat-lodge ceremony—a sauna-like ritual adapted from Native American rites—most of his attendees had endured a night outside in the desert without food or water for thirty-six hours. The two-hour sweat lodge became a nightmarish ordeal as many participants in the darkened, broiling structure vomited, passed out, or struggled to assist others while Ray admonished them to stick it out for the sake of personal growth. Two people died at the scene and another later passed away in the hospital.
One of the most revealing aspects of the Ray episode was the apparent lack of acknowledgment with which he and his organization initially responded to the deaths. Ray left Arizona the morning after the deaths without speaking to the survivors or visiting those hospitalized. He did not reach out to victims’ families until days later, after hosting another positive-thinking motivational seminar over the weekend.
From the start, Ray was a coarser breed of motivator. Pioneers such as Napoleon Hill and Norman Vincent Peale attracted millions of people with promises of self-development. But their methods were private, contemplative, and oriented toward personal illumination. Intense and public displays were never part of their program. Yet a handful of early-twenty-first-century motivational teachers, of whom Ray was the most extreme, used psychologically or physically grueling activities, often without the full foreknowledge of participants.
In one of the troubling aspects of intense motivational seminars, participants can experience a strong but subtle pull to “go along” with questionable exercises, especially under the urgings of workshop leaders, who typically label refusal to join in as precisely the kind of inner resistance that requires breaking down. The high fees that sometimes
accompany such programs—Ray charged up to ten thousand dollars per person—also discourage participants from pulling out.
Prosperity ministries and extreme motivational seminars created a chasm between the promise and the reality of positive thinking. The earlier ideals of the movement seemed at risk. Yet one of the most distinctive and skilled spiritual thinkers of the late twentieth century deftly avoided these pitfalls. He was a man who began his career in the tradition of the success gospel but eventually distanced himself from it. Leaving behind his old life, and with it the ethical and materialist dilemmas of positive thinking, he defined a wholly fresh concept of spiritual mind-power.
His name was Vernon Howard. While this spiritual writer and philosopher lacked fame or renown, he possessed an extraordinary, and probably singular, gift for distilling the complexities of the world’s religious and ethical philosophies into aphoristic and deeply practical principles. Howard was the most remarkable figure to emerge from the modern mind-power movement; though as his outlook matured, it became impossible to pin any labels on him.
In the first leg of his writing career, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Howard produced books that could have come out of the conventional New Thought catalogue. They bore such titles as
Success Through the Magic of Personal Power; Time Power for Personal Success; Your Magic Power to Persuade and Command People;
and
Word Power: Talk Your Way to Life Leadership
. His oeuvre extended to works of popular reference, trivia, and children’s nonfiction, such as
Lively Bible Quizzes
and
101 Funny Things to Make and Do
. To the outside observer, the Los Angeles–based author was just one more writer-for-hire, of the type found in any large city.
But in the mid-1960s, Howard’s outlook underwent a remarkable maturation. His personal genesis began with a wish to escape from the cycles of euphoria and depression that characterize the life of an ambitious writer. “I started realizing the uselessness of the extraneous,” he
told the
Los Angeles Times
in 1978. “People could tell me I was a good writer and I realized all it did was make me hungry for more applause. And when that didn’t come, I’d get hurt. I decided I had to find something without applause so I could live independently, without the approval of other people.”
Howard found his own solution to this predicament. He left behind his career as a writer of success literature and resettled in out-of-the-way Boulder City, Nevada. “Not exactly a community noted for breeding literary mystics,” observed the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
in a 1979 profile. In Boulder City, from the late 1960s until his death in 1992, Howard became a wholly new kind of spiritual thinker. He produced a remarkable range of pamphlets, essays, full-length books, and cable-televised talks in which he expounded with total clarity and directness on the need to abandon the fleeting rewards of outer life in exchange for an authentic and self-directed inner existence.
In a sense, Howard’s teachings could be said to come down to the inner meaning of the parable of Jacob and Esau. Esau sells out his birthright for a bowl of porridge—not realizing that he has given up his life for a fleeting pleasure, which quickly gives way to pain and resentment. Howard urged people to see how we do this every moment of our existence. He encouraged listeners to exchange the baubles and trinkets of worldly achievement, and the depression that quickly follows, for the rewards of real Truth: a contented, flowing, inner state that is the birthright of all people.