Is it just me, or are we humans finally getting a little bit suspicious of this religion thing lately? There has been a rash of anti-religion books that were quite well received (both Cristopher Hitchen’s God is Not Great and Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation were on the NYT best-seller list), the movie Jesus Camp was nominated for an Academy Award last year (and, more importantly, had a successful run at the Bijou), and on a near-nightly basis Stephen Colbert offers up self-parodying explanations of his fervent belief in the inconsistencies of Catholicism.
In fact, as I write this, I’m watching a bitingly irreverent episode of South Park in which Stan is identified by the Scientologists as the Second coming of L. Ron Hubbard. In the episode, as the Grand Master explains the “real sacred truth” to Stan --that the emperor Xenu trapped frozen Thetan spirits on earth and they eventually inhabited the bodies of our primitive ancestors—a caption is displayed on the bottom of the screen that says “scientologists really believe this.”
As the heir to the Hubbard throne, Stan continues to write the story of scientology and notes innocently that “people shouldn’t have to pay money to be members.” At this point the Grand Master admits that scientology is a joke, derides his gullible followers for believing his lies, and calls Stan stupid for failing to see through the scam earlier.
Benny Hinn couldn’t have said it better himself. Who’s Benny Hinn? He’s one of the “prosperity preachers,” who stars, along with Gloria Copeland, Robert Tilton and Mike Murdock, in the new film Suffer the Children which was screened on Thursday and Friday during the Iowa City Landlocked Film Festival.
Do you remember that scene in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves when the Bishop of Hereford is greedily pocketing as much gold as he can before he ultimately falls through the stained glass window and dies in a terrifying explosion of blood and gems on the ground below? That’s kind of like Benny Hinn’s soul.
Mr. Hinn asks poor people for money. In return he, Benny, who has a special intimate relationship with God (we know this because he tells us so), will pray for them and they will be healed of various illnesses.
Naturally, lots of sick people want to take advantage of such an incredible offer (Wilma, take out a second mortgage on the house, the healin’ man’s in town), and cash flows like the Jordan River. It’s at this point that the film takes an unbelievable and shocking turn: it turns out many of these people (brace yourself) weren’t even healed.
What does Benny Hinn have to say for himself? Not his problem. He already prayed fervently for 10 seconds while holding a printout of hundreds of codes representing the people that sent him money. If THAT doesn’t work, well, then, he’s just plum out of ideas. Those silly invalids must have pissed off God by being the loathsome, sinful individuals that they are. There’s really no remedy for that.
And so the viewer is offered the primary conflict of the film: poor defenseless God-trusting citizens vs. big, bad God’s will-thwarting televangelists. The director, Trevor Glass, employs a wide array of tactics to frame the battle. There’s the comic—an animation of a preacher holding a sack with a dollar sign on it while preaching the Word; the tragic—a little blind boy who thinks God will cure him if he pays his money; and the tragicomic—the sick elderly woman who pays for a preacher to pray for her Powerball ticket to come through.
There are even Michael Moore-ish moments as we are offered some impressive helicopter shots of televangelists’ multi-million dollar compounds.
The most fun, however, comes while watching the footage of the preachers as they rant hysterically from their golden pulpits, which at times drew riotous laughter form the tiny audience in the Englert Theater. I can only imagine the kind of fun that Mr. Glass had in selecting the clips. So much buffoonery, so little time. In fact, there’s a rule in there for future documentarians: when trying to demonstrate the sleaziness of televangelists, nothing can really substitute for the televangelists themselves.
Though the audience spent a good deal of time howling at the clips, there were certainly times that the film lagged. For example, it seemed like a disproportionate amount of time was spent interviewing people who had sent Benny Hinn money and hadn’t received their instantaneous, magical convalescence. I considered this the “proof of fraud” section. Perhaps for those of us in the audience who needed to be convinced that Benny Hinn wasn’t actually a magical healer guy, this was helpful. For those of us who are skeptical of crazy wackos from the outset, the depth of this “investigation” seemed a tad unnecessary.
Some of the interviewees said things like “If these preachers can really heal people, why aren’t they in the cancer ward curing the sick?” Checkmate Mr. Hinn. Which led me to think, “If these preachers really can cure people, why aren’t they the joint rulers of the world?” Oh yeah, because they’re charlatan loons.
And I’d be thinking about a thought just like that when they’d display an image of a professional basketball stadium filled with tens of thousands of people hanging on Benny Hinn’s every word.
It’s a sobering image. One minute I’m feeling smug sitting in the theater laughing at the televangelist as he promises to spin gold from hay, the next I’m watching as thousands of people sing hallelujah when he wheels out a bail of hay. At one point my companion leaned over and asked, “Who are all these people?”
Who are they? They’re the victims of this charade and we get to meet them throughout the film. I’m pretty sure that we were supposed to sympathize with their plight, and to a certain extent, I did. They were old men with terminal illnesses or mothers with vegetative babies. It would take a heart of stone not to realize that these people had been unfairly taken advantage of.
But it’s tough not to notice that this kind of reaction is inherently condescending too. Poor, stupid people (sigh) they know not what they do. I get the impression that sometimes this is the reaction that the director is looking for. But it’s important to keep in mind that a lot of these people aren’t children; they are adults and they chose to do something monumentally stupid with their money. Is Benny Hinn really responsible for all this, or is something else at work?
And this is when, possibly unintentionally, the film transcends the bounds of a mere fraud documentary, and becomes a kind of case-study on the dangers of unquestioning belief. How could so many people so earnestly believe that this man was going to cure them through prayer? And they didn’t just believe, they believed so passionately that they were willing to throw down cold, hard cash to back it up. Economists, constantly claiming that consumers always act in their own best interest, would be pulling out their hair if they saw this film.
As I watched tale after tale of suffering and resentment, I was reminded this famous little quote from Kurt Vonnegut: “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
Benny Hinn and others counted on this capacity to make their fortunes. If it were up to South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, I’d like to think that, as the credits rolled and the music reminded us to be sad, this would be the final caption of this film: “They really believe this.”
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