Corrupt Evangelists? Maybe They Don’t Believe In God (May 21, 2006)

“I think they’re atheists.”

That was my mother’s succinct appraisal of televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert in light of their disgraceful behavior that became known in the late 1980s. Bakker and Swaggert funded lavish and decadent lifestyles by swindling pious people out of their money. And they were moral deviates: Swaggert hired prostitutes; Bakker slept with a secretary and then paid her a six-figure sum of hush money. (She didn’t hush.)

Of all the analyses of Bakker’s and Swaggert’s corruption (to which we can add that of Benny Hinn, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and all the pedophile priests), my mother’s brutal observation made the most sense to me. When she discerned that these men were atheists, she was not insulting them with a carelessly derogatory label. She was not saying, “Atheists are bad, so anybody who does something bad must also be an atheist.” She knew, and I have known, quite a few atheists who were kind and genteel and restrained and respectful.

What she was saying was that no man who actually believed in God could possibly do what Bakker and Swaggert did. The distance between their verbal profession of faith and their physical transgression of deed was too great a span for reason to tread. Look at it this way: If a man says, “I am a pacifist - I hate all use of violent force,” we could still understand it and grant him a pass if, when mugged, he kicks and struggles and swings away in the passion of self defense. But if while claiming to be a pacifist he trains with Michigan militia groups, and hordes automatic weapons in a basement whose walls are adorned with posters of Paul Wolfowitz that hang over stacks of “Soldier of Fortune” magazines, then we’d be fully justified in saying, “I don’t think you’re a pacifist at all.” If he responded, “Yes I am! Though, I must admit, there may be a little inconsistency between my belief and my practice,” we might say, “A little?”

1 John 3:3 says, “Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself,even as he [Christ] is pure.” In context, “this hope” refers to the expectation of seeing Jesus in the afterlife and being like him. That contemplation is a purifying one because it both scares us away from sin and attracts us to the delight of everlasting fellowship with Christ. But when a man loses (or has not) the faith that he will see
Christ or answer to God, it should not surprise us at all to find him defrauding widows and mating with whores. Why not? What is there to stop him - conscience? Most men have little trouble overpowering that shabby little resister when there is no fear of God to give it substance.