Oral Roberts, the Faith Healer
DECEMBER 16, 2009 TAGS:
Little mentioned among Oral Roberts many achievements – his multi-million dollar enterprises, the founding of his university, the pioneering of television evangelism and his rise from rural poverty to international fame – is the fact that before he was on TV he was a Pentecostal, tent-revival faith healer.
His hands, infused with Godly energies, cured the sick, made the crippled walk and inspired a fervor in religious communities across the country. Or, so Roberts and other Charismatic Protestants like A.A. Allen or Jack Coe would claim.
Roberts, who died on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at the age of 91, has not “healed” a sickly believer on camera since the 1980s. But before he became a healer, Roberts claims he was himself cured of tuberculosis by God. This revelation, at the tender age of 17, spurred him along the missionary path he led, and took him across the country to share the gift of faith healing.
Faith healers were hardly new by the time Roberts got into the game in the late 1940s. During the Depression and World War II the likes of Aimee Semple McPherson and William Branham were figures of local renown for the “laying-on of hands” to cure the sick. In the United States, these practices trace their origins to the Great Revival early in the 19th century.
What Roberts did, and what so much of his ascent in the forum of faith emerged from was expanding a movement that found its home in rural tent crusades and open air revivals to the mass markets and growing suburbs of the postwar boom. He brought what was a regional phenomenon to everyday believers.
With national attention came national scrutiny, especially because Roberts’ revivals rode on a steady track of dollar bills.
James Randi, a professional magician and a skeptic of religious faith, wrote a seething critique of faith healing in 1987, titled The Faith Healers. Randi claims that “the power of suggestion,” coupled with the natural ups and down of an illness – its progressions and regressions – can often account for the alleviation of symptoms believers who have been healed by faith experience. Add a heavy dose of good old-fashioned slight of hand and parlor trickery and you’ve got faith healing.
Randi is somewhat of an evangelist himself, preaching against the abuses of faith healers and the emotional and financial exploitation they peddle in. Oddly, his magician Bona Fides (his stage name is “The Amazing Randi”) give him credence in this inquiry.
For Roberts, faith healing was a stepping-stone. His natural charisma and ability to draw large crowds at tent gatherings translated to radio and then to television. He went so far as to reject the label of a faith healer. “God heals, I don’t,” he said, and eventually, he dropped the act.
The oft-repeated story of Robertson’s 1987 plea for eight million dollars from his viewing public lest he be delivered to his maker before month’s end was to support the City of Faith Medical and Research Center, a $250 million addition to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. The center would contain a medical school.
Had this medical school been built, would there have been a faith healing department? And if so, would courses be cross-listed in neurology, cardiology or psychology?
Here's a wonderful collection of photos of Oral Roberts at one of his tent revivals in Dallas, Texas in July, 1962.
by Francis Miller
His hands, infused with Godly energies, cured the sick, made the crippled walk and inspired a fervor in religious communities across the country. Or, so Roberts and other Charismatic Protestants like A.A. Allen or Jack Coe would claim.
Roberts, who died on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at the age of 91, has not “healed” a sickly believer on camera since the 1980s. But before he became a healer, Roberts claims he was himself cured of tuberculosis by God. This revelation, at the tender age of 17, spurred him along the missionary path he led, and took him across the country to share the gift of faith healing.
Faith healers were hardly new by the time Roberts got into the game in the late 1940s. During the Depression and World War II the likes of Aimee Semple McPherson and William Branham were figures of local renown for the “laying-on of hands” to cure the sick. In the United States, these practices trace their origins to the Great Revival early in the 19th century.
What Roberts did, and what so much of his ascent in the forum of faith emerged from was expanding a movement that found its home in rural tent crusades and open air revivals to the mass markets and growing suburbs of the postwar boom. He brought what was a regional phenomenon to everyday believers.
With national attention came national scrutiny, especially because Roberts’ revivals rode on a steady track of dollar bills.
James Randi, a professional magician and a skeptic of religious faith, wrote a seething critique of faith healing in 1987, titled The Faith Healers. Randi claims that “the power of suggestion,” coupled with the natural ups and down of an illness – its progressions and regressions – can often account for the alleviation of symptoms believers who have been healed by faith experience. Add a heavy dose of good old-fashioned slight of hand and parlor trickery and you’ve got faith healing.
Randi is somewhat of an evangelist himself, preaching against the abuses of faith healers and the emotional and financial exploitation they peddle in. Oddly, his magician Bona Fides (his stage name is “The Amazing Randi”) give him credence in this inquiry.
For Roberts, faith healing was a stepping-stone. His natural charisma and ability to draw large crowds at tent gatherings translated to radio and then to television. He went so far as to reject the label of a faith healer. “God heals, I don’t,” he said, and eventually, he dropped the act.
The oft-repeated story of Robertson’s 1987 plea for eight million dollars from his viewing public lest he be delivered to his maker before month’s end was to support the City of Faith Medical and Research Center, a $250 million addition to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. The center would contain a medical school.
Had this medical school been built, would there have been a faith healing department? And if so, would courses be cross-listed in neurology, cardiology or psychology?
Here's a wonderful collection of photos of Oral Roberts at one of his tent revivals in Dallas, Texas in July, 1962.
by Francis Miller
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