Losing My Religion (16 page)

Together, the three Crouches make up TBN’s entire board of directors, giving the ministry little outside oversight. Like a miner looking at rock formations, a journalist can survey the ground before him and see the potential for a good story: secrecy, concentrated power and lack of oversight. But digging beneath the surface isn’t easy. Over the next two years, while juggling other stories, I traveled back and forth across the country several times to meet with sources, stake out houses, knock on doors late at night, comb courthouses for documents and even sift through piles of trash others had collected in order to produce a portrait of the TBN empire and Paul and Jan Crouch.

I received threatening phone calls. A man with a menacing voice asked if I would be driving my usual way home that night and warned me to watch my back. Another caller said that a private investigator had discovered an illicit affair I was having with a male newsroom colleague (not true). A pastor in Riverside, California launched a website devoted to “bringing me down” because I was doing Satan’s work. He posted a series of lies about me (such as that my editors had kicked me off the story) along with personal information about my family and me. He solicited donations so he could hire a private investigator to dig up dirt.

I didn’t think I was in physical danger. My sources, however, felt their lives were at risk. I talked with hundreds of people for the story, and more than a few believed that their phones had been bugged and that they were being followed. This was undoubtedly just paranoia, but some of it was bred by the culture at TBN—an us-against-them mindset. Either you were with TBN and Jan and Paul Crouch or you were working for Satan. (The bunker mentality filtered right down to TBN viewers. I called fans of TBN, looking for their positive take on the ministry and what it meant to their lives. Inevitably the first question they would ask was, “Did Jan and Paul say it was okay if I talked with you?” I was able to talk to many of them only after Paul Crouch Jr. announced on the air that it was okay.)

I spoke with many former TBN employees and current and former associates who said that as Christians, they wanted to blow the whistle on what they believed was abuse of donor money and immoral behavior, but they just couldn’t. It would be too risky, they said, even if I withheld their names. Several were so scared that they reported our conversation to TBN officials. I grew increasingly frustrated by this nearly uniform lack of courage by people who claimed to be devout Christians. I’d often find myself quoting Scripture to them to see how they justified silence when they claimed to know about abuses within God’s ministry.

“What do you think Jesus meant when he told his disciples, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me’?” I would ask. “Didn’t Jesus warn repeatedly that the Christian life would involve sacrifice?”

But TBN provided a gravy train for producers, pastors, singers and filmmakers. Rank-and-file employees needed a paycheck. Almost no one wanted to risk what he had, even when I’d ask about Jesus’ promise that “everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”

There were some wonderful exceptions. A few workers had been concerned enough about how donations were being used to smuggle out documents showing lavish spending by the Crouches. And I did find several brave souls who felt it was their Christian duty to talk about what was happening inside TBN. First among them was a quiet, unassuming woman with a soft Southern accent named Kelly Whitmore. She had seen a lot as Jan Crouch’s personal assistant for several years; she told me she fled the ministry in the middle of the night, fed up with the hypocrisy.

TBN officials painted Whitmore, then 46, as a disgruntled former employee, but that just didn’t fit. She was sweet, polite, naïve, and had an unwavering sense of right and wrong. Her accounts were straightforward and filled with telling details. Other witnesses and documents corroborated much of her information. I talked with Kelly for hours, and she seemed to have only one primary motive: to shed a light onto what was happening within TBN. (She had retained an agent and talked about selling her story to Hollywood, but that seemed to be pushed more by her friends than by Kelly.) A lot of her information ended up in my story, but even more was left out, because in many cases I couldn’t get anyone on the record to back her up out of fear of retribution. People didn’t even want to be used as anonymous sources. Kelly and a few others stood alone, but they—along with hundreds of documents—were enough.

By September 2004, when my series of stories was published, I thought I had gathered information devastating enough to TBN and the Crouches that the ministry would be forced to reform itself. I had discovered, for instance, that TBN’s patriarch, Pastor Paul Crouch, had secretly paid $425,000 to keep allegations of a homosexual tryst with one of his employees under wraps. TBN viewers often heard about the evils of homosexuality and how to battle the “scourge.” In 1990, Pastor Benny Hinn prophesied on TBN: “The Lord also tells me to tell you in the mid ’90s, about ’94 to ’95, no later than that, God will destroy the homosexual community of America. [The audience applauded.] But He will not destroy it with what many minds have thought [He would use], He will destroy it with fire. And many will turn and be saved, and many will rebel and be destroyed.”

Lonnie Ford, a former TBN employee, claimed that he was forced to have sex with Paul Crouch during a weekend stay at the ministry’s cabin in Lake Arrowhead. Through his attorney, Crouch denied the allegations and said he paid a settlement to avoid a sensational trial and massive legal bills. TBN officials pointed out that Ford was a drug addict and felon. Still, Ford’s story couldn’t be easily dismissed.

Working as a mortgage salesman at the time of my story, Ford had been hired in 1992 to work in TBN’s telephone bank in Orange County. Crouch took an interest in him. Within four years, Ford said, he was doing special assignments for the pastor. One such job was to drive Crouch to Hollywood and take publicity photos for TBN at a Christian nightclub. Ford said he and others in the ministry were surprised at the assignment because he wasn’t a photographer.

“They had to show me—and I’m not kidding—how to work a camera,” Ford told me. Crouch told him not to worry about it.

After visiting the nightclub, Ford said Crouch took him to dinner at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. Shortly after that, in October 1996, Ford said he and Crouch spent two nights at the same hotel in separate rooms. Ford said they worked out together at the hotel gym and ate expensive meals with bottles of wine and after-dinner drinks. “I knew what he was doing,” Ford said. “He was seducing me.” Ford was an openly gay man.

After checking out of the hotel, Ford said, Crouch took him to a TBN-owned cabin near Lake Arrowhead. It was there, Ford said, that Crouch first had sex with him. “I did it because I didn’t know if this man is going to throw me straight out of that cabin,” Ford said. “And I didn’t want to lose my job. I was going to be in trouble if I said no.”

The next morning, Ford said, Crouch read a Bible passage (Proverbs 6:16–19) to him in an attempt to reassure him about the night before.

There are six things the LORD hates,

seven that are detestable to him:

haughty eyes,

a lying tongue,

hands that shed innocent blood,

a heart that devises wicked schemes,

feet that are quick to rush into evil,

a false witness who pours out lies

and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.

 

Crouch told him that because homosexuality wasn’t listed among the sins, the Lord wasn’t worried about what they had done. Still, Ford said, Crouch warned him to keep the encounter quiet “because people wouldn’t understand.”

Ford said Crouch told him the ministry would pay his debts—about $17,000—and offered him a rent-free apartment at TBN’s Tustin studios. He believed Crouch was trying to pay him off. Ministry officials confirmed that TBN paid at least some of Ford’s debts around that time. They said it was an act of Christian charity that TBN performs regularly for employees.

Within weeks of the alleged Arrowhead encounter, Ford—on probation for drug-related offenses—tested positive for cocaine and marijuana. He was arrested in the fall of 1996 and sent to a drug treatment center in the state prison system. After he was released in early 1998, TBN officials refused to rehire him. Ford threatened to file a lawsuit alleging wrongful termination and sexual harassment and quietly settled for $425,000.

Though I had been on the religion beat for six years at this point, I still possessed some level of naïveté. I thought when the news broke that Paul Crouch had paid nearly a half-million dollars to keep quiet allegations of a homosexual tryst, the TBN faithful would get in an uproar, demanding more information from Crouch and maybe even his resignation. Instead, there was mostly silence. Donations streamed in unabated. Then came my two-part series that detailed the Crouches’ lavish spending, Paul Crouch’s drinking (a Pentecostal no-no), their strained marriage, their ministry-owned mansions, ranch and dozens of homes across the country and the rest of their earthly treasures. This information didn’t jar the fans of TBN, either.

In fact, my stories were used as fund-raising tools—evidence that TBN was doing God’s work and that the devil (that is, yours truly) was trying to stop it. Of course, one way to fight this satanic attack was to give money to TBN, allowing the network to continue to spread the Gospel to the ends of the Earth, as Jesus commanded. In 2004, the year my stories were published, TBN raised $188 million in tax-free money, a slight increase over the prior year. Its profit: $69 million.

The stories weren’t ignored just by TBN’s fan base. Top-name pastors such as Billy and Franklin Graham, Robert H. Schuller, Joel Osteen and Greg Laurie continued to air their programs on TBN. Politicians, including Senator John McCain, still used the network as one of their media platforms. And B-list celebrities, including Chuck Norris, Kirk Cameron, MC Hammer and Gavin MacLeod, never stopped using TBN as a way to stay in the spotlight.

In the Gospels, Jesus warns that what you didn’t do for the “least” among us, you “did not do for me.” (Matthew 25:45) That’s pretty sobering news, whether you’re passing by a homeless person on the street or watching idly as the poor and desperate are manipulated by pastors on TBN to send in what little money they have in hopes of a financial windfall. TBN pastors even recommend that those with massive credit card debt put their donation on a credit card—showing God an ultimate act of faith that will result in that credit card balance being paid off within a month.

I walked away from the TBN stories doubting God’s call for me was to report on corruption within the church. It just didn’t make a difference. Many believers couldn’t be bothered with any bad news that could break the fantasy of their belief. They held a blind allegiance to their favorite Christian leader—whether it was a priest, a Mormon prophet or a faith healer. Those who could help clean up messes like Benny Hinn and TBN—such as the big-name ministers who appeared on the network or Christian journalists—turned a blind eye. This allowed a handful of pastors and the network to keep flourishing, and caused millions of viewers to keep waiting patiently for their financial blessing or miracle cure.

I didn’t know what to call the arrangement, but it wasn’t Christianity. Or if it was, I didn’t want to be a part of it. I had lost my way.

As the deer pants for streams of water,

so my soul pants for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When can I go and meet with God?

My tears have been my food

day and night,

while men say to me all day long,

“Where is your God?”

—
PSALM
42:1–3

 

I
N
C
HRISTIAN CIRCLES
, the book
The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus
became an instant classic when it was published in 1998. Written by Lee Strobel, a respected legal reporter with the
Chicago Tribune
, the book chronicles the author’s spiritual journey from skeptic to devout evangelical as he investigates the scientific and historical evidence of Christianity.

Inspired by Strobel’s work, I thought I, too, could use my investigative skills to bolster my waning faith. I wanted to find evidence that what the Apostle Paul told the Corinthians was true: that a person would be transformed by his belief in Christ.

“And [Jesus] died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again,” Paul wrote (1 Corinthians 5:15–20). “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!…We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.”

If the Gospels were true, then shouldn’t I be able to find plenty of data that showed Christians acted differently—superior in their morals and ethics—from the rest of society? I wanted to see that people were changed in fundamental ways by their belief in Christ. This was a new tack for me. For years, my assumption was that Christianity was true, and my studies and readings focused on shoring up that belief. I used the historical record, the Bible, anecdotal evidence and arguments by theologians and apologists to back up my position. Now, I wanted to take a step back and test my assumption about the truth of Christianity itself by examining how Christians behaved, looking at their actions, not their words.

I wasn’t worried about what I would find. I viewed my own doubts as a symptom of my failings as a Christian, and not that something was fundamentally wrong with Christianity. I did feel a growing distance between God and me, but I knew this wasn’t an unusual condition for people of faith. I took solace in reading about St. John of the Cross, the 16th-century Spanish mystic who felt abandoned by God and experienced a crisis of faith, a period of time he referred to as the “dark night of the soul.”

“The soul perceives itself to be so unclean and miserable that it seems as if God had set Himself against it,” he wrote. The separation from God nearly drove St. John mad—that’s how badly the Spaniard wanted a relationship with the Lord.

I also identified with another beloved saint, St. Therese of Lisieux. Born in the 18th century, the sickly Carmelite nun known as the “Little Flower of Jesus” successfully petitioned the pope to allow her to enter a convent early, at age 15. She died after nine years of cloistered life, virtually unknown outside the gates of the small, anonymous convent of Lisieux in northern France. She wrote a spiritual memoir there called
Story of a Soul
, in which she described the “Little Way” by which she strived for holiness—through small acts of kindness, patience and understanding that she believed pleased the Lord.

“Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love?” she wrote. “Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love.”

The memoir, not written with the public in mind and published posthumously, became one of the best-selling religious books of the 20th century. St. Therese’s writings revealed in honest detail the spiritual crises she had gone through despite her great faith. “Jesus isn’t doing much to keep the conversation going,” she once said of her prayers. She also wrote about her uncertainty about the afterlife: “If you only knew what darkness I am plunged into.”

The doubts of St. John of the Cross and St. Therese were something that even Jesus experienced. While on the cross, he stunned witnesses and Christians through the centuries by shouting, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The doubts of holy men and women continue today. Mother Teresa was one of the most revered religious persons of our time, symbolizing for millions the beauty of Christian devotion, sacrifice, holiness and works. Yet she suffered excruciating doubt. Recently published letters in
Come By My Light
reveal that she felt absent from God for the last 50 years of her life. Not five days or five months or five years, but
five decades
. Frustrated, ashamed and sometimes in doubt about God’s existence, Mother Teresa kept her spiritual crisis a secret from everyone but a few spiritual mentors.

“Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself—for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead,” she wrote in 1953.

In another letter, she wrote: “I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God—tender, personal love. If you were [there], you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.’”

“Jesus has a very special love for you,” she assured one mentor in 1979. “[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak…I want you to pray for me—that I let Him have [a] free hand.”

These saints had struggled with faith just as I was now wrestling with it. I found comfort in reading about them, because honest discussions of doubt were rare commodities in the modern church. Today, many Christians—especially evangelicals—express doubt in catch phrases: “I’m in the desert right now,” “I’m going through a dry patch,” “I’m not walking with God these days.” Their doubts are treated with pat prescriptions: more prayer, more church, more Bible study and more bromides: “If you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot of faith and hang on,” “Stop running away from God so He can catch up,” “You just need to turn toward God and He’ll be there.”

I often heard a story called “Footsteps in the Sand,” in which Jesus shows someone who recently died how He had walked with him throughout his life, symbolized by two sets of footsteps side by side in the sand. But the follower of Christ points to a particularly rough time in his life when there was only one set of footprints.

“Jesus, why did you abandon me when I really needed you most?”

“I didn’t abandon you, my son. I was carrying you.”

Most Christians keep any deep spiritual crisis under wraps. I felt I was failing as a Christian because I was experiencing such feelings. Somehow I had let Satan disrupt my spiritual life. Maybe it was because I had stopped attending church. Or quit going to Bible study. Perhaps I wasn’t praying enough. It could be that the pat prescriptions were correct. Whatever the reason, I was sure it was my fault. God hadn’t moved away from me; I had moved away from Him. I refused to consider that my faith was evaporating.

Few people were comfortable talking about the subject, and many just didn’t understand what was happening to someone whose faith was slipping away. I wouldn’t have understood it myself a few years earlier. Like addiction or mental illness, it’s something that is difficult to have empathy for until you’ve gone through it yourself.

I wondered whether I was being tested like Job in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Book of Job is the only biblical story in which the curtain is pulled back to reveal the machinations of God’s world. The Lord tells Satan that Job will always stay faithful to Him. The devil responds that if enough were taken away from the prosperous Job, the once-faithful servant would turn on God. The Lord accepts Satan’s challenge and the game is on, with poor Job the unwitting pawn. In rapid succession, he suffers the deaths of his sons, daughters and servants, the loss of his fortune and the infliction of boils all over his body. But not once does Job forsake God. I identified more with Job’s wife, who witnesses all this and says to her husband (as he stoically scrapes off his boils with a shard of pottery): “Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!” Her position seems more reasonable than Job’s.

During one of our Monday-morning runs along Newport’s Back Bay, I confided to my best friend, Hugh, that I had entered a spiritual wasteland. I expected a heavy conversation, perhaps some disappointment and a mild rebuke for allowing myself to fall away from God. But Hugh, the eternal optimist, didn’t think much of it.

“It happens all the time, Billy,” he said. “It will come back, don’t worry. You can’t lose God. He’ll always be there for you.”

He advised me to get my butt back to church and to attend an upcoming men’s retreat run by his church. He reminded me that it had been more than a decade since my born-again mountaintop experience, and I hadn’t gone on a retreat with him for the past couple of years. He said it would be the perfect chance to recharge my spiritual batteries. I wanted to say no; a retreat with a bunch of gung-ho Christians wasn’t very appealing at the moment. But I knew Hugh wouldn’t let it rest until I agreed to go. He can be very annoying that way. I said yes.

On the second half of the run, we prayed, as usual. Hugh asked for the usual things: world peace, protection for his family, comfort and healing for those who are sick or in need. He always thanked God for my friendship, which made me feel good. Hugh also asked the Lord to strengthen my faith and reveal His perfect love for me. When it came my turn, what had felt as natural as breathing in years’ past now seemed awkward and tense. As the words came of my mouth, it no longer felt as if I was talking to my heavenly father who loved me unconditionally. Instead, I was talking to myself, and felt stupid doing it. It occurred to me that maybe this was again Satan’s work—or even a Job-like test from God—so I continued in prayer, but kept it short. My dialogue with God had changed. What had seemed like a two-way conversation had turned into a monologue. Now when I prayed, I started to feel a bit like a mental patient, babbling to myself.

The men’s retreat in the San Bernardino Mountains didn’t bring me closer to God. The difference between my first retreat and this one was striking. I wasn’t swept away by the music, the testimonies, the sermons and the small-group sharing. I felt like an outsider, watching the rituals of a foreign tribe whose language I didn’t understand. Anger unexpectedly welled up inside me at my brothers in Christ. Was it that easy for them? Were they just sheep? Didn’t anyone else feel the way I did? Why in the world would God make it so hard to follow Him? What was with all the mystery? It was depressing. When it came time to meet in small groups or participate in other retreat events, I snuck back to my cabin and read a book or slept. I wanted it all to go away. I couldn’t wait to get off that mountain.

On the drive home, Hugh and I talked about ways to rekindle my faith. I thought about using some accrued vacation time to head to Europe and walk the 1,000-mile “Way of St. James”—
El Camino de Santiago
. Millions of pilgrims had been making the journey to the cathedral in Santiago, Spain, for more than 1,000 years to visit what was said to be the tomb of St. James. I had read many stories of pilgrims who talked about the transformative experiences they had on the trail, particularly when they met other Christians along the way. It seemed like a wonderful way to unplug from the world, spend time with God and other Christians and pump up my faith.

My other idea was to go on a month-long retreat to a monastery that taught the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. The founder of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, developed rigorous spiritual exercises that involve deep meditation on specific verses of Scripture, visualizing oneself with Jesus during his three-year ministry. Ignatius used his imagination to place himself in the biblical scenes of Jesus, either as an unseen witness or as one of the characters. I talked with people who participated in the exercises. They said they felt as though they had experienced life with Jesus. They reported smelling the fish being caught on the Sea of Galilee, hearing Jesus’ words during the Sermon on the Mount and tasting the bread and wine at the Last Supper.

Ignatius was a late convert to Catholicism, so I always had been attracted to him. Born in 1491, he grew up in a wealthy family in Spain. He was ambitious, romantic, conceited and free-spirited—anything but religious. But at age 30 he suffered a leg wound in a battle against the French at Pamplona. While convalescing in the castle of Loyola, Ignatius had only two texts to read: a four-volume life of Christ and a book on the saints. The books left him with a sense of peace and tranquility, a marked contrast to the depression and emptiness he felt after reading his favorite books of romance and chivalry. The reflections helped ignite a conversion that led Ignatius to develop a systematic method of prayer, and to eventually found the Society of Jesus, in 1539. I thought Ignatius’s 500-year-old program could help me.

Hugh said both ideas, if I could afford the time and money, had promise. I thought so, too. But before I made the investment, I decided it wise to collect some evidence that showed me Christians were measurably different from others. Otherwise, a pilgrimage or retreat was just an extension of a fantasy.

It was discouragingly easy—though incredibly surprising—to find out that Christians, as a group, acted no differently than anyone else, including atheists. Sometimes they performed a little better; other times a little worse. But the Body of Christ didn’t stand out as morally superior. Some of my data came from secular institutions such as the Pew Research Center and the Gallup Poll, but the most devastating information was collected by the Barna Group, a respected research company run by an evangelical Christian worried about the health of Christianity in America. For years, George Barna has studied more than 70 moral behaviors of believers and nonbelievers. His conclusion: the faith of Christians has grown fat and flabby. He contends that statistically, the difference between behaviors of Christians and others has been erased. According to his data and other studies, Christians divorce at about the same rate as or even at a slightly higher rate than atheists. White evangelical Christians are more racist than others. Evangelicals take antidepressants at about the same rate (7 percent) as others. Non-Christians are more likely to give money to a homeless or poor person in any given year (34 percent) than are born-again Christians (24 percent). Born-again Christians are taught to give 10 percent of their money to the church or charity, but 95 percent of them decline to do so. The percentage of Christian youth infected with sexually transmitted diseases is virtually the same as the rate among their non-Christian counterparts. Ronald J. Sider, a professor at Palmer Theological Seminary and an evangelical, covers a lot of these statistics and more in his 2007 book,
The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience.