...Anthony has waged a guerrilla war against televangelism-"a multibillion-dollar industry," as he describes it, "untaxed and unregulated, that preys on the elderly and the desperate." The United States has an estimated eighty million evangelical Christians, and about twenty-five hundred ministries that broadcast to them over radio and television. Dallas, the buckle of the Bible Belt, is one of their unofficial headquarters. Fifteen miles from Trinity's ramshackle homes, its opposite number, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, owns a gleaming office building that resembles the White House. Since 1973, TBN has created a twenty-four-hour lineup of religious shows that now go out over forty-six satellites to nearly seven thousand television stations worldwide. A few of its most popular ministers, among them local figures such as Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland, tend to preach what's known as the "Prosperity Gospel," which promises health and wealth to all true believers and generous donors. Twice a year, TBN hosts "Praise-a-thons," which raise an average of ninety million dollars each.

Anthony calls this the "Gospel of Greed" and has made it his mission to expose its excesses. Six Trinity members are licensed private investigators, and they have a network of informants and undercover agents in ministries across the country. Their most damning discoveries have led to prosecutions for fraud and to exposes on "PrimeTime Live," on "Dateline NBC," in the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Trinity's admirers like to think of the foundation as the conscience of evangelical Christianity. Its targets prefer to call it a godless, penniless, and deeply annoying cult. "The televangelist I worked for not only feared Ole-he wanted to do him physical harm," one of Anthony's informants told me. "These guys think he's Satan incarnate."

...Trinity's approach to detective work hasn't changed much since 1988, when it began to investigate Robert Tilton… Tilton had the fastest-growing ministry in the country by then, with more than eighty million dollars a year in donations. He owned or had personal access to several lavish "parsonages," one of which was worth four and a half million dollars, and a hundred-and-thirty-two-thousand-dollar yacht. Yet his ministry, like any other church, was exempt from most federal and state taxes…

Two months later, Anthony showed up at the offices of Response Media, Inc., the marketing firm in Tulsa that handled Tilson's mailings…he had been in contact with Diane Sawyer, the co-anchor of the ABC news show "PrimeTime Live." Sawyer had become intrigued by Tilton while watching his antics on cable one night. After vetting Trinity, she had agreed to collaborate on an investigation. On the day Anthony went to visit Response Media, he was accompanied by two "media consultants": a cameraman from "PrimeTime Live," who had a video lens hidden in his glasses, and a producer for the show, who had concealed a microphone and a video recorder in her purse. For the next two hours, they documented just how well the psychology of direct mail-with its crude manipulation of curiosity, expectation, habit, and obligation-was suited to religion.

"New names is the key. Just think, New names," Jim Moore, the president of Response Media, told Anthony. The firm began by gathering the addresses of hundreds of thousands of Tilton's followers. Then ghostwriters put together a series of direct-mail packages. Some packages contained prayer cloths (a red one for healing, a blue one for miracles, a green one for financial breakthroughs) that Tilton promised to anoint if they were sent back to him. Others contained plastic angels and outlines of Tilton's feet for donors to stand on while praying. Whenever someone sent in a pledge and a prayer request, he received a personal reply from Tilton, mentioning his problem specifically and promising to talk to God about it. Then he received a bill for the pledge.

As the letters from donors poured in, they were bundled together in Dallas and sent to a bank in downtown Tulsa, Moore explained. But he couldn't, or wouldn't, say what happened next. How did Tilton handle the prayer requests- thousands of them a day?

…Sifting through the pizza scraps, crumpled invoices, and coffee-stained spreadsheets, they slowly pieced together Tilton's "Wheel of Fortune," as Anthony later called it. The letters made their way from Dallas to the main bank to the branch bank, where they were opened and stripped of donations. The prayer requests were then read by Internal Data Management employees, who summarized their contents with a simple code ("JBS" for "job needed," for instance, or "BAR" for "barren wife"; "PCA" for "rebellious child" or "FON" for "Bob, pls call me"). The codes were entered into computers and used to generate personalized form letters from Tilton. Anthony and Guetzlaff found thousands of prayer requests in the Dumpster behind the branch bank. One of them, which Anthony keeps in his wallet, was from a woman whose son had lost his job. If he didn't find work, she said, he might commit suicide. "I couldn't believe the callousness of this whole mechanized operation," Anthony says.

"PrimeTime Live" aired a series of exposes on Tilton, based on Trinity's research. The minister fought back from his pulpit and on his own show…

Less than two years later, Tilton's show was off the air and his wife had divorced him…

…Robert Tilton has a new show on cable TV, and Benny Hinn recently held a crusade in India for nearly five million people. Even Jimmy Swaggart, whose visits to prostitutes once shook the religious right, now broadcasts his show to more than fifty countries

…After the wave of televangelist scandals in the early nineties, the Federal Communications Commission considered a truth-in-advertising clause for religious solicitations. If a televangelist declared, on the air, that he had cured a donor's cancer or tripled his bank account, that claim would have to be verifiable. Anthony made three trips to Washington to lobby for the change, and was told that it was certain to pass. Then, in 1994, the Republicans won control of the House, thanks in part to the religious right, and the measure was quietly tabled.

Ole Anthony's work, whatever one may think of him personally, is indispensable. His exposure of religious fraud and mind control paints a bleak picture of the gullibility and hypocrisy of a huge segment of our culture. One can only hope that Anthony's activities will at least make people reflect with intelligence when confronted with fakes purportedly speaking for God.

I am not optimistic.

Anthony's theology, at least as represented in this article, is idiosyncratic but not uninteresting. I am thinking especially of recognition that suffering, without ceasing to be evil, is nonethless an essential part of human existence -- and that it can sometimes be the vehicle of spiritual growth.

Such ideas were common in much of medieval Catholicism. They are not unheard of in the Reformation traditions -- as a Lutheran, I think naturally of Luther's "theology of the Cross." (And a similar idea is one of the Buddha's Noble Truths).

But this idea is utterly lacking in the "prosperity gospel" proclaimed by the charlatans one sees on television. Theirs is what Luther disdained as a "theology of glory," and which required the Reformation to correct. In a sense, then, these so-called "Evangelicals" are really preaching the same message that the Reformers identified as Antichrist. Hmmm.....

I am grateful for the work of people like Ole Anthony who expose "born again, holy ghost anointed swindlers." My mother, during her later years, fell victim to more than one such swindler, hoping in vain for a miraculous healing from diabetes. Did not Jesus warn his followers most urgently to be on the watch for false prophets?