Fleecing the Flock (2011)

The Halo Halo! column from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Whether there is an Indian version of the Sunday Times rich list we don’t know but if there is you’re unlikely to find Lord Vishnu on it – even though the value of just some of his recently disclosed wealth is estimated at well over £12 billion.

 

You might imagine, considering the absolute poverty in India, that this would cause a certain amount of resentment but it doesn’t seem to have done. Lord Vishnu is very popular. What’s more, his method of accumulating wealth is entirely legal, tax free and doesn’t involve any risky re-investments of his capital. People just give him their money. So what’s his secret? Well Vishnu is no ordinary lord.

 

Lord Vishnu, you see, doesn’t actually exist. He’s a Hindu god. His treasure is real enough though. And the recent discovery of six vaults crammed full of gold, silver and precious stones resembles a fantasy story which could have come straight from the pages of the Arabian Nights.

 

Suspecting that the contents of the Padmanabha Swamy temple at Kerala, which contained the offerings made by devotees over the last 500 years, ought to be worth a bob or two, India’s supreme court ordered an inventory. What they found was a vast hoard estimated to be worth £12.6 billion; even before the last of the six secret vaults was opened. “All of Kerala is celebrating this extraordinary find,” said a temple official. And why not? Surely this could finance a few hospitals or schools at the very least?

 

However, as is always the case, the needs of the gods come before human needs. This windfall which appeared to have dropped literally from the lap of a god will probably be snatched, or rather handed, straight back to him. “It belongs to the Padmanabha Swarmy temple and will be preserved there,” said Oommen Chandy, Kerala’s chief minister, firmly rejecting the idea that it should be used for public benefit.

 

You have to hand it to religion – literally it seems. Unlike any other business, it simply convinces us to willingly hand over our money. Just to put it in context though, how does this act of generosity compare to the wealth given to some of the US TV evangelists by their gullible followers?

 

The vast Trinity Broadcasting Network run by Paul and Jan Crouch is said to be available on more than 3,200 television stations. It is also involved in religious movie production and owns a number of Christian theme parks.

 

According to Ministry Watch (an evangelical organisation which claims to review ministries for financial accountability and transparency) Trinity Broadcasting’s net assets are $ 859,188,000.

According to Crouch when you donate to Trinity Broadcasting you, in turn, receive a divine financial blessing. “When you give to God, you’re simply loaning to the Lord and he gives it right on back.”

 

A smaller outfit whose net assets are listed as a mere $62,118,000 is the Bible Broadcasting Network. And the list of multi-million dollar bible bashing factories goes on and on.

 

What’s that bit in the bible about it being better to give than to receive?

NW

Between the Lines: The Godfather Part XXVII (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Godfather Part XXVII

There is something perversely compulsive about watching American TV preachers. Perhaps it is that the rest of American TV is so indescribably awful—punctuated by adverts for ointments for piles and candidates for Governor—that the hideous nadir of the merchant-evangelists offers security in the knowledge that things cannot get any worse. Contrast the screaming apostles of instant salvation with those sleepy inhabitants of the god-slot on British TV: Thora Hird playing hymns to ancients hers and their budgies in Dorset: Harry Secombe standing on Welsh hills talking about Jesus as if he were still a member of the Goons: mass choirs of frigid little people with guilty squints and Hitler haircuts who sing about being joyful and look like they've just opened their poll tax demand and discovered that salvation is for the next life. British TV offers a dull dribble of religious platitudes. It is on because the law says it must be, and most of us switch it off because we were taught about the Bible at school and it makes us tired.

You do not fall asleep watching religious TV in the USA—not physically asleep, anyway. The Praise The Lord channel provides an endless parade of men who would fail the honesty test for the Used Car Dealers' Association. They are here to tell us that Jesus is alive and has a telephone number. You call the number and then discover that he also has a bank account. You pay a thousand dollars and wonderful things will happen to you. Watching one hysterical Jesus-pusher was almost a caricature of the genre. In the studio with him were a husband and wife whose marriage had only one year ago been on the rocks. The husband was ignoring his wife and getting into debt; she was depressed. Then she switched on the god slot and, hallelujah, delusion was mixed with depression to create a fatal concoction of witless optimism. She recounted the story of how she was about to throw her husband out of the house. The miserable looking husband confessed that life for him was awful and that he was broke and needed a van to start up a business. So what did they do? Why. what would any sane person do, buddy? They got right down on their knees and they said. "Lord, send us that van". The Lord—through his American TV interpreter— suggested that it would be a good idea to send their last thousand dollars to the TV preacher. (Why they did not spend the thousand dollars on the van was not explained. Then, neither was the virgin birth). And hallelujah, within a week a cheap van was purchased and since then the saved couple have been as happy as . . drug addicts in a state of mental oblivion.

"So", said the screaming presenter. "I want you people out there to make god your credit manager". God the credit manager— was George Bush watching, we ask ourselves. The presenter then went into a state which seemed to call for men in white coats. He ranted, raved, sang, cried, had visions, felt Jesus talking to him—and above all, remembered to repeatedly mention the telephone number. Important that; forget the men in white coats—bring on the boys with the truncheons. It was a spectacular act; “I see a poor single mother out there—I see the look of sadness on her face—I want her to know that god loves her—god loves you ma'am—yes, he loves you and he wants to tell you—you might only have your welfare cheque there—that might be all you have in the whole wide world—but god wants you to send that money to him—and here's the number to call right now . . ."

The new Broadcasting Act in Britain is to open the floodgates for such unscrupulous rogues to perform here. Watch out Harry, Thora and the Bridlington Middle-Aged Ladies' Choir: the Lord has a few more mysterious than usual ways in which his agents are about to make moves.

And so to Hell

Returning from the USA to Britain, back to the high culture of Neighbours and Opportunity Knocks, was a relief. As yet there are no thousand-dollar trips to Heaven on offer. On Sunday 13 May BBC's Everyman ran a documentary about hell. That is the place for the oppressed to be sent if they fail to show enough obedience to their oppressors during their lifetimes. One Christian, the Bishop of Edinburgh, referred to the ridiculous concept as "the smash-grab crush- your-testicles conception of Christianity". In short, it was based upon a form of psychological terrorism which threatened infinite mutilation to those who refused to adhere to their masters' morals—or in the USA. to wicked sinners who fail to surrender a thousand bucks as a sign of their fear. The images of hell shown in the documentary were the kind of pictures that would have frightened the average peasant into submission—and put the wind up quite a few aristocrats. In the concert in Liverpool to mark the tenth anniversary of John Lennon's death they showed film of him singing Imagine: Kylie Minogue and the gang singing about "no possessions" was just a little strange—but when they sang about a world where there would be "no religion" your reviewer joined in with all the enthusiasm of a boy scout in the back row of Songs of Praise. No religion, no possessions, a world without the need for illusions, eh? You may say I'm a dreamer, but it beats Thora Hird's vision of the Good Life any day.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: Viewing the policy reviewers (1989)

The Between the Lines column from the November 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Viewing the policy reviewers

Everyone at the Labour Party conference this year was on valium. Or some other, sense-dulling tranquillizer. Or maybe they were just faking it for the TV cameras. The reasoning is, presumably, that a party of people who look half asleep—like a conference hall full of stunned circus lions—will not look like a threat to anything, least of all the capitalist system. Watching the annual Labour conference ritual on the box, it was clear that the Tory reserve team is not only anxious to show the world that it has abandoned any principles it once claimed to hold, but that it has de-odourised the once lively atmosphere of the Labour conference so that all voter-unfriendly pongs of dissent are hidden. If you are going to try to beat the Tories at their own game, then it's best to run your conference just like the Tories do.

For most of the conference sessions it looked as if TV viewers had stumbled upon live—or maybe just semi-live—coverage of a small-time bankers' convention. The conference hall was dominated by a huge white platform, resembling a third-world watch-tower, on which sat the biggest bankers in the Broad Church; periodically one of them would pop up from behind the white blocks to defend odd bits of the infamous Policy Review. Old policies abandoned, back into the leadership tomb descended the men in grey suits. Roy Hattersley, who tended to look pretty tranquillized long before it became mandatory, clapped Neil Kinnock's speech in the sort of way that David Owen used to clap David Steel.

Kinnock droned on for sixty-seven minutes of undiluted reformist garbage. Like last year, he was still eager to get his hands on the market system and let it ravage him. Hattersley looked eager to go home to a hot water bottle, and Jim Callaghan smiled the smile of a bad father watching his son fall into his old ways. Interviewed after Kinnock's verbal equivalent of running the London Marathon wearing flippers. Lord Jim told the BBC nonentity who is doing Robin Day's old job that he was satisfied to see the Labour Party return to common sense after these past few years of silly talk about banning nuclear weapons and all that. One suspected that Jim was not the only satisfied Lord to have observed Kinnocks performance.

I have always tried to watch at least some of the Labour Party's conference on the TV. It used to have a bit of vitality about it, if nothing else. That was before Labour's new publicity boss, Peter Mandelson, who realises that what Wapping thinks matters a lot more than what the workers need to say, decided to clean up the environment by weeding out any signs of open discussion before the cameras. I shall not bother to watch them next year. If I want stage-managed displays of bad taste there is always the Miss World show this month; the audience there is automatically tranquillized by the wit and wisdom of the contestants: "I'm Miss Zaire and I hope to see the world and open my own dance studio". Has she ever thought of taking up speech-writing for Neil Kinnock if victory eludes her?

Labour v Labour

Sorry to dwell on the Labour Party, but Question Time (BBC1, 5 October. 10.45pm) did have two of them on the panel. One was John Smith, a fully reconstructed, Mandelson-moulded, slimline, camera-friendly Kinnockite, and the other was Arthur Scargill who still believes that the jury is out on the question of whether Labour intends to abolish capitalism. He said that he would like to see Labour take on the real problem which is the need to get rid of the capitalist system. Of course, what he means is that he wants to see more state capitalism (nationalisation). Also on the panel was Baroness Seear, who is the Deputy Leader of the SLD in the House of Lords. (Wow! That must have been a job she wanted since she was a little girl.) She accused Smith of not being a socialist. Scargill was an old-fashioned socialist, she said, but Smith was no kind of socialist at all. Scargill found this all very amusing—just as well for him there was no Socialist Party speaker on the panel to blow his credentials. Smith insisted that he was a socialist. Seear was not satisfied; if Smith was a socialist, she said, let him define what socialism means. Smith looked awkward. Lucky for him that Peter Sissons was there to move the discussion on to something more "relevant" Good grief, define socialism! Whatever next? They might even insist that Seear of the "Democrats" define what a democrat is and how it is such beings have "leaders" sitting in the unelected House of Lords. In fact, every time a Labour faker appears on the TV they should be asked to define what socialism is. The silence would be deafening.

Praise the buck

Meanwhile, over in the good old U.S. of A., where they have no Labour Party to pretend to be different from the Tories (there the parties have long ago abandoned such time-wasting pretences), other tricksters perpetuate other forms of fraud. When your reviewer (TV reviewer, not policy reviewer, you understand) was in the USA one of the big televangelists was a creep labelled Jim Bakker. He ran a TV show which told workers to love Jesus and send in money (plastic dosh readily accepted, God Bless You) to his Praise the Lord Ministry. Bakker was caught using the money for his own purposes: mansions, fast cars and an air-conditioned dog kennel for his pet. At the time of writing he was awaiting sentence which could be as much as 120 years in prison. Let's hope they leave a Bible in his cell. Now that his TV trickery is off the air there are plenty more fast-buck TV preachers telling the gullible God Squad to part with their dollars. Cable TV is expanding in Britain soon. Now, if the Pope and the Archbishop of Cant can get their act together, these guys could make a killing on their own Christmas show.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, 1 April 1987 (1987)

The Between the Lines column from the May 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx once called religion the opium of the people. In the late 1980s it could be argued that TV is the opium of the people. In the USA the synthesis has been achieved: religious TV is the opium of the people. Heroin would be a better metaphor, but whereas the latter is illegal, religious TV is available on tap and in doses of hugely mind-numbing proportions. You have to see TV religion in the USA — "televangelism" they call it — to appreciate just how easy it is to vomit without sticking your fingers down your throat. This morning I watched Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, a show watched daily by 468,000 viewers. Robertson is the sort of man who vacillates with ease between praying for people's souls and preying on their gullibility. When he is doing the former he aids the vomiting process, looking straight at you with the sincerity of a man who is convinced that sincerity is a good investment (and it is: Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network raked in $129 million last year); when he is preying on the ignorance of his audience Robertson shows himself to be a manipulator of the mind with an immunity to vertigo when it comes to the heights of audacity. “We are living in a greedy, lustful world” says Robertson, looking into the camera behind which one imagines a team of accountants to be standing: "Let me tell you, our society is too full of sinners asking, 'Hey, what 's in it for me?' Isn't it about time that we all just got on our knees and asked, what can we do for God? How can we be better people in the eyes of the one who made us?" Robertson's contribution to paying off the debt to god is to accept the nomination for Republican Presidential candidate in the next election. He is all in favour of nuclear weapons.

According to research carried out at the University of Pennsylvania. 13.3 million Americans regularly watch religious TV shows. There are now 221 evangelical TV shows on US TV and these collect well in excess of one billion dollars per year from subscribers who, conned by what they see, send in money to the TV tricksters in order to assist them in doing Christ's work. All too often this money is won from workers who can ill afford it, such as the 67-year-old widow in Altoona. Pennsylvania, who was threatened with having her heating cut off because she donated the social security money sent to her to pay the gas bill to Oral Roberts who had persuaded her that he needed it more (reported in Newsweek, 6.4.87). Roberts (not to be confused with Robertson who is another trickster working the same market) has a weekly broadcast which reaches 1.1 million households. He obtains annual donations of $58 million. In 1980 Oral tried to win the evangelical ratings war by claiming that he had seen a vision of Jesus 900 feet in height (everything in the US is bigger than life, and in this case even bigger than the fiction of the Bible). Money came flooding in to Roberts after this whopper penetrated the minds of the most stupid of the Americans: he was even sent $1.3 million by a 79-year-old greyhound track owner from Florida. But the proceeds of the 900-foot lie were not enough for our Oral, so earlier this year he announced on his show that unless the punters paid in 8 million dollars the Lord would take him away from them. You might have thought that this would be a good reason for writing out an immediate cheque for 8 million dollars to the Lord's bank account in appreciation of his intention (for a few million more could he take the rest of them?), but no. the suckers paid up and Oral is thinking of a new scheme at this very moment. The TV preachers are doing quite a bit of thinking right now, because at this moment there is a war of unprecedented ferocity going on as to who will win the largest number of viewers and. more importantly. saved souls, for which read four-figure donations. The war turned vicious when Jimmy Swaggart (would you be spiritually uplifted by a guy called Jimmy Swaggart who looks like a boxing promoter?) whose show is watched weekly by over 2 million Americans announced that Jim and Tammy Bakker (a husband and wife con-act, watched by millions weekly, pulling in a divine $129 million in 1986) were getting up to naughty things. Tammy was a drug addict and Jim had seduced a prostitute called Jessica Hahn after drugging her wine. Both have since confessed to the minor transgressions from the path of self-righteousness. Hahn received $265,000 from Bakker's lawyers in compensation for the ordeal — a fact which has led reporters to suggest that he did more than make neighbourly love to her. Now the evangelists are throwing more than pious comments at one another: a religious TV war has broken out. Richard Gaylord Briley, who has worked as a freelance fundraiser for several of the TV evangelists, describes the war thus: "This is hamburger wars. Wendy's fighting McDonald's. They are trying to maintain income and market shares in a declining market ". Or, to quote Bakker's lawyer, speaking in anger at Swaggart's revelations about his client. "Swaggart wants to be the only spokesman for God. the only one who receives the tithes for God". The shows themselves are hideously creepy, like allowing rapists to come on our screens to publicise country rambles for women. Would anyone buy a second-hand ideology from these fakers? The answer is yes, millions do, but the good news is that millions more are being emphatically turned off of the all-too-trans- parent madness of religion during the process.

What else have I seen on American telly? An ad for insurance which shows a man dying in a car accident because he didn't have the right piece of paper in his top pocket; a cartoon series for children featuring a goody called Rambo; and a soap opera in which a man with a patch on one eye tells the woman who runs the aerobics class that he doesn't see life the same way as her. Neither do I. The USA spends billions of dollars each year on nuclear weapons. I have seen no reference to that on TV. But then, why waste time on the ultimate madness of social reality when studio-directed good-for-the-soul madness abounds?

Steve Coleman