Friend of John Ashcroft, staunch supporter of Dubya and millionaire,
'homophobic' televangelist Paul Crouch is outed.
Does the hypocricy of the rabid RR ever cease?
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A holy fire-breather is embroiled in scandal over rumors of a homosexual
affair. Meet televangelist Paul Crouch.
By Max Blumenthal
Throughout his three-decade-long career as founder and president of the
world's largest religious broadcasting company, Trinity Broadcasting
Network (TBN), Paul Crouch has earned a reputation for preaching about
the wrath of God, even delivering holy death threats to his critics, as
he did in 1991 when he told them, "To hell with you! Get out of the way!
I say get out of God's way! Quit blocking God's bridges or God's going
to shoot you if I don't."
Yet when allegations surfaced in reports by William Lobdell of the Los
Angeles Times last weekend that Crouch had had a gay tryst with a former
employee, he stayed out of public view, delegating his eldest son, Paul
Crouch Jr., to appeared in his place as host of Behind the Scenes, a
show that focuses on activities within the TBN. Crouch Jr. limited his
discussion to an altogether different storm rocking the ministry:
Hurricane Ivan, which was threatening TBN affiliates in the Caribbean.
Meanwhile, the TBN issued a lengthy press release calling the gay-sex
allegations "salacious" and predicting that "[t]his storm will pass."
Crouch's accuser is Enoch Lonnie Ford, a former patient at a
TBN-affiliated drug rehabilitation center whom Crouch met in 1991 and
was later hired as his chauffeur. While working for the TBN, Ford
compiled a lengthy rap sheet for crimes including cocaine possession and
having sex with a 17-year-old boy, an act that constitutes statutory
rape in California. After Ford served a succession of prison terms, the
TBN rehired him, provided him with a free apartment, and even lobbied a
judge for leniency when he violated the terms of his parole.
Ford now claims that he and Crouch had sex in 1996, while Ford was a
guest at a TBN-owned cabin at Lake Arrowhead, a woodsy southern
California resort area.
In 1998, when the TBN fired Ford and he threatened to sue, the network
offered Ford $425,000 in hush money. Ford accepted, but he later penned
a manuscript about his affair with Crouch and, in 2003, threatened to
make it public unless the TBN paid him $10 million. Crouch's lawyers are
scrambling once again to keep Ford quiet, this time by requesting a
restraining order barring him from seeking a publisher.
But if Crouch's legal and public-relations strategy fails, he could lose
his role at the helm of evangelical Christianity's most powerful
instrument of global influence, a broadcast leviathan with 43 satellites
and more than 10,000 cable and local affiliates worldwide.
Crouch may also become a liability to political allies like Attorney
General John Ashcroft, his boyhood friend who benefited from the TBN's
support during a heated 2002 confirmation fight. The scandal could also
jeopardize the careers of some of the world's most popular and
influential Pentecostal ministers, who rely on the TBN as a platform for
their preaching and as a lucrative marketing vehicle for their books and
videos.
So far, Crouch has vowed to remain in charge of the TBN in order to
"answer God's call," though there's no telling what will happen if
Ford's memoirs make it into print. Already, the TBN has taken steps to
preempt the memoirs' release by personally discrediting Ford; it its
press release, the TBN made certain to point out his history of crime
and drug abuse.
Even if the TBN manages to silence or discredit Ford, however, it may
still have to tamp down on internal dissent. As the Los Angeles Times
reported on Sunday, Crouch's youngest son, Matt, was so shaken by
allegations that his father had an affair with Ford that he told a law
partner, "I am devastated; I am confronted with having to face the fact
that my father is a homosexual."
TBN's star preacher, Benny Hinn, was also quoted by the Los Angeles
Times, which overheard him gossiping about Ford and Crouch's affair on a
1998 bus tour. "Paul's defense," said Hinn, "was that he was drunk."
Crouch is not accused of breaking the law like his former business
partner, Jim Bakker, who admitted ripping off his own ministry to the
tune of $158 million during the 1980s. Bakker's affair with his
secretary, Jessica Hahn, disgraced him in the eyes of his followers and
hastened his demise. Though Crouch is far from the only evangelical
leader accused of engaging in homosexual dalliances, the charges against
him carry additional weight because of his prominence in the galaxy of
the religious right, which, through its collaboration with George W.
Bush's administration and the GOP leadership, has cultivated gay
marriage as a divisive election-year issue.
Over the years, Crouch's TBN has played host to an array of vehemently
homophobic figures including Hinn. In 1989, after prophesying that Fidel
Castro would die within the next decade, Hinn predicted, "The Lord also
tells me to tell you in the mid-90s, about '94 or '95, no later than
that, God will destroy the homosexual community of America. He will
destroy it with fire."
Crouch has been a member of the Coalition on Revival, an umbrella group
for evangelical Christianity's most militantly anti-gay, Dominionist
ministers. A 2003 press release Coalition on Revival member D. James
Kennedy's ministry issued on the dangers of "the homosexual agenda"
stated, "Thomas Jefferson authorized legislation to penalize sodomy by
castration."
While Kennedy left unstated whether he personally supports castrating
homosexuals, another Coalition on Revival member, theologist Gary North,
has written that homosexuals should be stoned to death.
Crouch's broadcast empire would not have been possible without his wife
and co-host, Jan, who is probably religious television's most
recognizable personality. When she steps onto the TBN's set with the
demeanor of an oversolicitous Sunday-school teacher -- clutching a
lace-embossed Bible, sporting an enormous, purple-tinted hairdo and
powder-cake makeup, along with frilly clothes -- it's almost impossible
for viewers to turn away. Nor is it easy to ignore the Crouches' gaudy
set, which fuses the kitschy style of a 1950s suburban living room with
that of a royalty-themed Las Vegas motel. To watch the Crouches is an
exercise in visual overstimulation.
For their devoted viewers, their appearance carries a deeper
significance. Every aspect of the Crouches' look is carefully calculated
as an aesthetic accompaniment to their Dominionist theology, which urges
Christians to acquire as much wealth, power, and influence as possible
in order to put the world's secular institutions under the control of
biblical law.
To earn the blind loyalty of their viewers, who are often poor or
working class and whom Jan Crouch routinely calls "you little people,"
the Crouches have cast themselves as spiritual aristocrats entrusted
with handling God's riches. Seated on purple thrones like the king and
queen of an alternate universe, the Crouches plead with viewers for
their "seed money," reassuring them that their donations will be planted
in heaven and blossom into anything they seek, from material wealth to
eternal salvation.
Though it's hard to know how much of this money has actually made it to
heaven (especially because the TBN keeps its financial records secret),
a good chunk of it has made the Crouches wealthy; in 2001, they bought a
$5 million home in Orange County, California, described by real-estate
agents as "a palatial estate with ocean and city views."
During their 30-year campaign to extend the TBN's signal to the farthest
reaches of the globe, the Crouches have cozied up to some of the most
repressive governments in recent history. According to Alfred Ross,
director of the Institute for Democracy Studies, a New York-based think
tank that tracks anti-democratic movements worldwide, in 1988, Crouch
met with the president of South Africa's apartheid government, P.W.
Botha, to finalize a deal for a TBN affiliate in South Africa. That same
year, the TBN completed work on its station in El Salvador, where Crouch
had traveled frequently and associated with officials from the "Treasury
Police," which oversaw the country's death-squad operations.
And as Sara Diamond reported in her 1987 book, Spiritual Warfare, in
order to get the TBN's signal into the Middle East in the early 1980s,
Crouch forged a close relationship with Israel's Likud Party government,
donating millions of dollars to it for unspecified purposes. Crouch also
held a joint press conference in 1982 with President-elect Bashir
Gemayel, leader of the Israel-backed, right-wing Phalangist militia,
which massacred thousands of Palestinian refugees during Lebanon's civil
war.
While the Crouches' transmissions aren't as overtly political as those
of fellow religious broadcasters like Pat Robertson and James Kennedy,
they have never hesitated to rally support for old allies like Ashcroft,
who attended a Pentecostal church with Paul Crouch as a boy in Missouri.
During Ashcroft's contentious battle for confirmation as attorney
general in 2002, the TBN hosted Doug Wead, who worked with his friend
George W. Bush to rally evangelical support for George Bush Senior's
1992 re-election bid.
On the TBN, Wead promoted Ashcroft's Christian credentials and explained
to the audience that the former Missouri senator had been demonized
throughout his career "by the whole left" with "very bigoted attacks
because of his religion =85 ."
In the TBN's newsletter, Crouch later told supporters to "pray for John
[Ashcroft] and pray for our President every day!"
Crouch hopes he can weather the storm over his personal life by
attempting to discredit the character of his accuser, to whom he has
paid hush money, according to the Los Angeles Times. For the religious
right -- and, ultimately, for the Bush White House -- a considerable
asset is at stake in the outcome.
Max Blumenthal is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. Read his blog
at: www.maxblumenthal.blogspot.com Copyright =A9 2004 by The American
Prospect, Inc.
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