Thumping the Tube for God

Mixed Media

JAMES WOLCOTT

Television is getting more complicated all the time," claims TV Guide, and this is certainly true when it comes to God's self-appointed bullhorns, the born-again Evangelicals. Except for Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who earned the nickname ''Uncle Fultie" by being scheduled in prime time opposite Milton Berle, old-time television evangelists tended to be shunted into the fringe viewing hours of Sunday morn. No longer. In the age of cable and satellite bounce, they're all over the damned dial.

Like professional wrestling, television evangelism has snazzed up its act to reach beyond the rubes and grannies. Technologically, it can slip into our pockets with lightning hands. I can remember the lotion-slick black preacher Reverend Ike telling his TV congregation that he wanted green stuff in the collection plate, not loose change. Loose change, explained Ike, ''makes me nervous in my service." Now evangelists don't need to sully themselves with cash. Call an 800 number and a credit card does the rest. But what of the shows themselves? Do they still have that certain nutty crunch? Here are the results of a recent taste test.

T)at Robertson presents himself as the -L acceptable face of Fundamentalism. The host of The 700 Club, Robertson doesn't rant or perspire or wear himself ragged trying to slam Satan to the mat. He maintains a civilized tone and succumbs to a leprechaun giggle. His show's decorum is endangered only when he and co-host Ben Kinchlow kneel on the floor together and tune into the holy waves of healing sweeping the country like so many weather fronts. Eyes shut, Robertson goes into a visionary trance and locates the distress points of disease dotting America. ''There's a woman in Huntsville with cataracts—those cataracts are being healed... Praise God!" Robertson also concerns himself with the spiritual diseases sapping America's strength, which leads to a roundup of the usual culprits—homosexuality, the absence of school prayer, abortion, porn, etc. The son of a former U.S. senator, Robertson has been flirting with the idea of running for president like a coy senorita making eyes over her fan. So brazen are his flirtations that at a meeting of Republican hopefuls in Nashville he was introduced at the Grand Ole Opry by that rhinestone cowboy Porter Wagoner, an honor denied the mainstream pols.

Whether Robertson runs or not, he's certainly become a master of the Slippery Equation. In San Antonio to celebrate the Texas sesquicentennial, he made a veiled comparison between the defenders of the Alamo and those ''freedom fighters" in Nicaragua, the contras. Of course, TV evangelism and hawkish anti-Communism have long been sweethearts. Bishop Sheen once did a reading of Julius Caesar substituting the names of Stalin, Malenkov, and Vishinsky for those of Shakespeare's characters, proclaiming, ''Stalin must one day meet his judgment." (A week later, Stalin obligingly died.) Robertson has yet to do anything that flamboyantly ballsy.

A former protege of Pat Robertson's, baby-faced Jim Bakker broke free to create and host The PTL Club, now called Jim and Tammy. (The 700 Club is based in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Jim and Tammy in Charlotte, North Carolina.) When I began watching Bakker, he was a blinky cherub with dark hair and a gee-whiz manner. Time has dusted his hair with white flour and taken the squeak out of his voice; struggle and stress have sullened his mood with Nixonian spite. For years Bakker has conducted a feud with the Charlotte Observer, and the most entertaining parts of Jim and Tammy are when he lashes out against the press in the manner of Jerry Lewis unraveling at the muscular-dystrophy telethon. Bakker tries to remain above the fray, maintaining that God will mete out justice to his tormentors, but he just can't get his teeth out of old grievances.

Wheeled out like a dessert cart is Bakker's miniature wife, Tammy, who provides comic relief with her battery of wigs, false eyelashes, and shrill interruptions. What is it about born-again women? Their voices never come from any place deep and abiding; they turn themselves into pinched martyrs of nasality. Tammy Bakker's specialty, however, is becoming distraught and weeping through her mascara. In some circles, Tammy is a camp figure of fun— her black tears awaited as avidly as the cat fights on Dynasty. (Once in Charlotte a PTL connoisseur told me, ''You should have been here last week— Tammy had a real good cry.") The guests on Jim and Tammy are mostly traveling pastors who hope to get shows of their own and hence are poor listeners. A moment's pause and they plunge in with a lifetime supply of anecdotes they've stashed beneath their silver toupees.

More in the Elmer Gantry tradition of hollering to the hilltops is Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Lee Lewis's saved cousin. Where Robertson and Bakker work in a talk-show format, Swaggart plays big arenas, prowling the stage in a burdened crouch, as if contemplating the cold, cold ground where our bodies will eventually bed. "Shame, shame," says the shake of Swaggart's rockabilly head as he spins elaborate tales of sinners' taking the express route to dirt and perdition. Nowhere near as slobbery or veinbulging as Fort Worth's James Robison (a notorious gay basher from the pulpit), Swaggart still hangs his laundry pretty loose on the line, baring his crazy ideas to the flapping wind. Like so many evangelists, Swaggart sees America as a citadel rotted by Red termites— feminists, homosexuals, secular humanists, rock stars with raunchy lyrics, trendy theologians who fail to adhere to the Scriptures, all of them undermining the country's Christian foundations. Swaggart's enemies list puts him squarely in the great American rut of anti-intellectualism. There's a deep groove of ignorance in Swaggart's mind, and what's more, he's dam proud of it. Time and time again he tells his audience that he'd rather have the divinely inspired truth of the Bible on his side than all the fancy, phony book learning of some pointy-headed "perfesser." On cue, the camera cuts to a reaction shot of Swaggart's followers, who express fervent belief with clasped hands and coin-slit mouths. Yes, they nod, too much book learning can mess up a righteous head.

Stepping down the evolutionary scale, we come to the Liberace of faith healing, Ernest Angley. "This dumpy little primitive in a wig specializes in screams and awful slaps to the head of sick Christians," wrote Elizabeth Hardwick in The New York Review of Books some years ago, and Angley's kung fu exorcisms have made him the most parodied of TV preachers. (Robin Williams does a wicked Angley.) A grand and prissy showman, he is perhaps too downscale to make a run at Liberace's diamond studs. Sporting a dainty carnation in his powder-blue prom-night tux, Angley is closer to Mr. Joyboy of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, that soft, pale aesthete of the embalming room. Angley also has the sickly air of sanctity that marks one of death's beauticians. Even as he's trading karate chops with Satan, he takes pride in his handiwork.

There's nothing scented or cosmetic about Gene Scott, who seems to subsist on a diet of cobra venom and Raw Bits (the tough-guy breakfast cereal from A Prairie Home Companion). His is a whiskery ministry. Dressed like a lumber-camp pimp and twiddling a cigar, Scott keeps the camera dead tight on his hairy, fanatical face as he prophesies doom and tries to bleed a few dollars from his cringing flock. Of all the evangelists I've seen, Scott is definitely the creepiest. He seems to have brought cabin fever with him out of the wilderness and installed it in the studio, thickening the claustrophobia of zealotry with anger, scorn, threats, and sarcasm. By the end of the first hour (his show runs three hours in New York), Scott has turned the studio into his own private bunker. He sits in pitiless judgment, the Good Book spread on his lap. Is Gene Scott a bonehead zealot or a hick charlatan? Perhaps both. The various kinds of crap in his mind may have all blurred into a single mass. Faked or truly felt, Gene Scott's manic intensity has won him a cult following among white punks. To them, he's Armageddon's rock video jock. Boy, some people sure are bored.

f I ''he evangelists themselves seem a X trifle bored with their own rhetorical wind. After a decade of empire building (colleges, campsites, satellite networks, overseas ministries), it's understandable that some of the TV preachers might suffer from burnout and brain lock. That would explain the blank spots and repetitions in Jimmy Swaggart's tirades, the long dry spells that plague Jim and Tammy before Tammy prompts her tear ducts. Besides, consolidating power isn't as much fun as accumulating it. When Pat Robertson sashays down the aisle in the Republican swimsuit competition, he seems to be vying not out of a burning desire to be president but because he's got to do something with all that media clout. Checking the radar for cataracts ain't enough. But Robertson and his Fundamentalist brethren ought to heed the example of Jerry Falwell, who embarrassed himself off the map by his insistent slow dancing with authoritarian leaders. He's now a soiled, spent force. Look on his works, ye Mighty, and beware. □