Oral Roberts : an American life PDF
Preview Oral Roberts : an American life
Page iii Oral Roberts An American Life David Edwin Harrell, Jr. Indiana University Press BLOOMINGTON Page iv © 1985 by David Edwin Harrell, Jr. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Harrell, David Edwin. Oral Roberts: an American life. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Roberts, Oral. 2. Methodist Church—United States— Clergy—Biography. 3. United Methodist Church (U.S.)— Clergy—Biography. 4. Pentecostals—United States— Biography. I. Title. BX8495.R528H37 8448484 ISBN 0253158443 1 2 3 4 5 89 88 87 86 85 Page v CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii Part One: The Mold, 1918–1947 Prologue: Ada, Oklahoma, July 1935 I. Roots 8 II. The Mold 25 III. Evangelist 35 IV. Pastor 55 Part Two: Miracles, 1947–1960 Prologue: Australia, January 20–February 10, 1956 V. Healing Revivalism 80 VI. Ministry 111 VII. The Price of Glory 146 VIII. Private Side 183 Part Three: Mainstream, 1960–1975 Prologue: Berlin, October 26–November 4, 1966 IX. Oral Roberts University 207 X. Beyond the Tent 253 XI. Mainstream 287 XII. Private Side 312 Page vi Part Four: Maelstrom, 1975–1985 Prologue: Tulsa and Palm Springs, February 1977 XIII. Maelstrom 336 XIV. Completing the Healing Vision 358 XV. Tightening the Family 397 Part Five: Meanings XVI. The Message 439 XVII. The Man 469 XVIII. The Ministry 485 Epilogue 497 Bibliographical Essay 499 Notes 505 Index 615 Page vii PREFACE Oral Roberts has been one of the most influential religious leaders in the world in the twentieth century. I did not set out to prove that point; I finished this book convinced that it was true. Of course, such judgments are risky and subjective at best, depending as much on the future as on the past, but it is altogether fitting that this remarkable story—filled with unlikely and startling turns—begin with the assertion that Roberts has influenced the course of modern Christianity as profoundly as any American religious leader. That judgment rests on three roles Roberts has played. First, and probably most important, are the leadership and publicity he has given to the pentecostal and charismatic movements since World War II. Pentecostal religion, with its joyful worship and emphasis on the miraculous, surged around the world in the decades after the war; the charismatic movement, pentecostalism's glamorous offspring, has had a profound impact on both mainstream Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. While such claims must be taken guardedly, a pentecostal spokesman in the 1980s claimed that fifty million people throughout the world had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and predicted that by the end of the century, half of the world's Protestants would be pentecostal. Of course, the pentecostal and charismatic movements were not the creations of Oral Roberts. The pentecostal churches, the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International, and, among individuals, David du Plessis played catalytic roles in the spread of spiritfilled religion. But Roberts stands nearer the head of the amorphous movement than any other man, commanding respect throughout it. He was the leader of the generation of dynamic revivalists who took the pentecostal message of healing and deliverance around the world in the years after 1947. He sensed the farreaching significance of the charismatic stirring in the mainline churches in the early sixties and brought traditional pentecostals and charismatics together in a series of dynamic conferences to explore the theology of the Holy Spirit. In the mid1980s he stood as a figure uniquely honored and listened to in the fragmented pentecostal and charismatic world. In his nearly four decades of healing revivalism, Oral Roberts has personally touched over a million human beings; several million more have answered his call to "accept Christ"; tens of millions more have heard him preach and pray on radio, television, and in films; hundreds of millions of pieces of literature have been mailed to every corner of the globe from his headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has ministered to, and sometimes influenced, an astonishing variety of celebrities, leading many into the baptism of the Holy Spirit and Page viii speaking in tongues. A generation of students has been trained at Oral Roberts University. Cumulatively, the impact has been staggering. In those expectant areas of South America, Africa, and Asia, where zealous Christians are seeking an abundant life while still clinging to a miraculous God that does the impossible, Oral Roberts's name is spoken, and revered, and young men fervently pray that God will give them a touch like that granted Brother Roberts. Roberts's second major influence on modern Christian history stems from his innovative use of the media, particularly television. His decision to film his healing crusades for television in the mid1950s was a huge financial risk. His programs shocked and outraged many Americans; they piqued the curiosity of millions more. Perhaps even more important was Oral's return to television in 1969 in a series of slickly produced primetime specials. He literally took his healing message to Hollywood, escaped the Sunday morning religious ghetto, discarded the traditional preaching format, and prepared the way for the modern electronic church. Finally, Roberts, as well as others, has often noted that his name has become inextricably linked with religious healing. It was healing that launched his ministry in 1947, and it is healing that is the foundation of the controversial City of Faith complex rising high over the Tulsa skyline. In the 1950s, Oral shamed the mainstream Christian community into thinking again about the relationship of Christian faith and physical healing. In the 1960s and 1970s, he searched—in ways not to be expected of a pentecostal revivalist—for the meaning of human wholeness. He stood ready both to listen and to lecture in a world increasingly aware of the limits of medical science and the intimidating compartmentalization of modern thought. At the end of the 1970s, Roberts launched the most audacious undertaking of his ministry, the building of a medical school and the City of Faith hospital and research center, which would combine medicine and prayer. By the time others had come to believe in wholeness, Oral had set out to find it. He believed that at the end of his quest lay major victories, including the conquest of that dread destroyer, cancer. Why, one must ask, have this extraordinary man and his ministry received so little notice from serious students of American religion and culture? Of course, Roberts is widely known by the public; his name is only slightly less recognized than that of Billy Graham. Roberts and his wife have written bestselling books about themselves, but those accounts are, of course, uncritical stories read mostly by supporters. Several exposés have been written about Roberts by former employees. They vary in quality and accuracy, but none attempts to deal comprehensively with his life and influence. Countless journalists have written about him, occasionally accurately and perceptively, but usually with reprehensible carelessness and bias. In all, there is an astonishing void. Perhaps most surprising is the lack of knowledge about Roberts in the scholarly community. No serious and objective book has been written about him; almost no articles have appeared in scholarly journals. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, in his justly celebrated 1,100page A Religious History of the American People, named Roberts one time in a sentence which erroneously reported his joining the Methodist church in 1965. Page ix Two reasons for this neglect seem apparent. The first has to do with the pervasive condescension of academics and intellectuals. It is hard to entertain the thought that an "Okie Holy Roller" should be taken seriously. Furthermore, in spite of his astonishing success, Roberts remained outside the pale of respectability, an artifact from the dusty past of brush arbors and camp meetings. God still talked to him; he had personally beheld Jesus, and he believed in miracles. To some he seemed dangerous, to others absurd, or comical. Even were he all of those, his omission from history is inexcusable. Roberts has contributed to the unbalanced public perception of him. He has often made himself inaccessible to reporters, and he has an abiding distrust of all popular writers. Like other celebrities, he has occasionally fallen totally mute. Oral's wariness has not been without reason; his lifelong struggle with bad publicity is a recurrent theme in the pages that follow. This book is a serious effort to overcome both of those prejudices and to place Roberts in perspective in the development of modern Christianity. I am not pentecostal or charismatic, though I have been intimately acquainted with both movements. I had kinfolks who were pentecostals, and I well remember attending a Roberts tent crusade in Jacksonville, Florida when just a teenager. The whole pentecostal subculture left me with an enduring incredulity and curiosity. It was that curiosity, partly, which led me in 1975 to write All Things Are Possible, a book about the independent pentecostal preachers who took their healing message to the nation and the world in the years after World War II. By the time I finished that study, I was convinced that Oral Roberts was a consummately important religious figure. I continued to do research on Roberts and slowly and tediously became acquainted with people in his organization and, finally, with Oral and his family. While discussing biases and judgments, I offer forthrightly several others which should help place into context what follows. First, I judge Oral Roberts to be a sincere and honorable man. I would not make such a sweeping statement about many of the religious leaders I have studied. My judgment does not imply that Roberts's methods have always been above question; they frequently are marked by an ingenious and inexorable pragmatism. But his faults, if faults they be, are rooted not in chicanery but in calling; he is motivated not by greed but by God, as he hears Him. Nonetheless, I suspect that some readers will be troubled by an objective biography of Roberts which does not conclude with a harangue against religious quacks and profiteers. The facts simply will not bend to such a clear and moral interpretation. I acknowledge the propensity of biographers to take on the causes of their subjects. Oral Roberts is charismatic in the broadest sense of that word; it would be easy to be captured by him. Those close to Oral repeatedly told me of his unpracticed power in private conversation to encompass and surround one, to rivet his attention on his interviewer and take him captive. Furthermore, it would be difficult to follow Oral's dogged upward climb and not admire his tenacity, his skills as a communicator, and the raw courage behind some of his decisions. That admiration, frankly admitted, surely shows through in the pages that follow. Page x Fortunately, two reservations have helped me keep Roberts in perspective and, hopefully, have contributed to a balanced treatment. First, he is not entirely likable. He is human, earthy, visceral, volcanic. He swings from Himalayan peaks to pitchblack deeps. Those who love him best have seen him at his worst. No one knows better than Oral the human frailties with which he has struggled, and he has confessed to faults profound enough to make him eminently human, though not bloodthirsty enough to satisfy his critics. My second reservation is personal and well confessed at the outset. I do not accept Roberts's theology. Nor am I convinced by the empirical evidence which I have seen. I regard the question of God's miracleworking power as a distinctly theological one, a question that has to do with one's reading of the Bible and one's faith. As we shall see, I believe that Roberts sees the question in the same way, and I have attempted to outline the major arguments for and against his beliefs. I have generally stated those beliefs in the words of the participants. Though I have not littered the text with allegedly every time I present the testimony of Roberts or some other believer, the reader should understand that such reports must be judged on their own merits. While it is well to get such biases before us in the beginning, I hope that none of them, positive or negative, will be apparent as one reads this story. This book is an effort to tell Oral Roberts's story, who he is, what he has done, and what he believes. That story did and does raise countless questions as to why some have regarded him as a charlatan and false teacher and others as God's man to bring healing to his generation. In keeping with my understanding of good historical writing, this book is an effort not so much to settle those questions as to fairly raise and explore them. When I wrote to Roberts in 1981 that I was about to embark on a "detached" assessment of his ministry, he replied that if I accomplished that feat it would be "something new relative to attempts made to comment on this ministry." If Oral has been surprised that someone would write objectively about him, I have been shocked by his cooperative spirit in dealing with me. He opened the doors for me to talk with everyone within his organization and his family. In an early interview, he told me: "Dr. Harrell, you're free to ask our people or me anything in the world." Furthermore, many of the interviews I conducted with people outside the Roberts organization could have been obtained only with his consent and, on occasion, with letters of introduction from him. Most important, I worked for nearly five months in the archives at Oral Roberts University amidst mountains of tapes and other materials. I was given free access to hundreds of thousands of pages of transcripts of Roberts's sermons, speeches, and lectures. In addition, I read transcripts of hundreds of public and private meetings in the various ministry organizations dating from the 1950s. The documentary record of the development of the ministry in the archives is varied and comprehensive. I have not had access to two types of materials, financial reports and healing case histories. In neither case did I consider that lack a major liability; this book is not an effort to verify claims in either area. There is much public information on both questions. While the press has been obsessed with Roberts's private Page xi finances, and Roberts has probably been overly defensive on that question, there are clearly no closets filled with skeletons of financial abuses. As the pages that will follow show, Roberts is not wealthy, though he lives extremely well. He spoke to me freely about his private finances. As noted earlier, I regard the validity of healing testimonials largely as a theological question. The ministry's case histories, many of which are public, are a record mainly of the faith of the subjects and a measure of the commitment and sophistication of the organization in verification. They certainly "prove" nothing pro or con. Perhaps the most serious difficulty in researching this book has been finding useful materials about Roberts from outside the ministry. Of course, there are thousands of newspaper stories and a few books and articles written by critics; but most of the critical assessments of the ministry are superficial and are based on little research. Many of Oral's bitterest critics know little about him; their objections are largely philosophical and theological. In many ways the most astute observers of Roberts have been his Tulsa friends who admire him but do not share his religious beliefs. They have been close enough to Oral and his organization to know its workings, while feeling free to criticize when they felt it was appropriate. But, at many crucial stages in this story, particularly in the portions about the early life of Roberts, I have been forced to lean heavily on the memories of Oral and his family and friends. The book includes notes, and the reader may make his own judgment about the reliability of the sources. Roberts's cooperation with my research has been so thorough that many inside the organization came to identify my book as his "authorized" biography. That, of course, is not the case; from the outset Roberts has understood my intentions to write an objective account. Nonetheless, I was startled during a conversation when Oral, after agreeing to arrange several interviews for me with his friends, cautioned me, "I think you should talk to people that don't believe in us. . . . You have to get the whole story." That statement comes from a mature and slightly mellowed Oral Roberts, a man hardened and sharpened by a life of controversy and struggle but one turned introspective and reflective in the autumn of his life. The "whole story" needs to be told. The whole story, it turns out, is two stories. The ministry and the man cannot be separated. A part of this book, the largest part, is about the ministry. The ministry is now bigger than the man, though it has not always been, and it will survive him. But it is permeated by him, it reflects him, it depends on him, and how well it will survive him is a question much on the minds of all interested parties. That is one story. But this book is also about a man and his family. The Roberts clan staked a claim in Indian Territory, survived the Oklahoma depression, and rose to worldwide fame. When the City of Faith opened in 1981, Tulsa publisher Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Sr. called the hospital "a new monument to the peculiarly American spirit of cando." On more than one occasion, Oral has expressed the same wonder at his ragstoriches journey: "Only in America could a little stuttering boy, born in the Indian territory of Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, the son of a poor preacher, . . . amount to anything, could start a school from scratch and build a university." Quintessentially, his is "an American life."
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