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The following article is from the Secular Humanist Bulletin, Volume 23, Number 3 (Fall 2007).
“Fire!” bellowed the Pastor.
The usher, who had drifted off to sleep in the seat next to me, woke startled, and then, in order to cover her lapse in devotion, began to convulse “uncontrollably” for a minute or so. This is the kind of comedy I was looking for when I visited the Benny Hinn Holy Spirit Miracle Crusade on Saturday June 9, 2007, in Auckland, New Zealand.
My cousin and I had come to the 12,000-seat Vector Arena the previous night, half an hour early, to find the gates already closed, with thousands of people pleading to get inside, some sick, in wheelchairs or on crutches. Many were families from the Pacific Islands and India, enthusiastic born-agains. On Saturday I tried again, alone, this time arriving two hours early.
Walking past the crowded merchandise counter, selling anything from T-shirts to testimonial DVDs, I entered the main arena and was ushered upstairs. The lower level was already full. I tried to drown out the insipid orchestral with my Ipod blaring Kings of Leon and Grand National. I might have been accused of not letting myself be swept up in the “atmosphere.”
A boy of about sixteen (in gangster attire) glared at me. I smiled, he glared back. The show had not started and already I was uncomfortable. I moved a few seats closer to the stage, where I could see the throngs of sick and lame below, a man with his limping child walking away from the stage, a minder for a muscular dystrophy patient arguing with a Hinn associate, probably inquiring as to why there was no wheelchair access to the stage.
An hour before the sermon, people were already clapping, and the arena was almost full. As the four-hundred-strong choir belted out apparently well-known devotional songs, I viewed more wannabe gangsters who had been dragged along by their mums and girlfriends and wondered how many had actually bought into this cheap magic show of this placebo conjurer.
The buying-in would follow. One of Hinn’s fellow pastors whetted the appetite of the credulous 12,000 by telling us that we would be aired on television in two weeks to 22 million viewers, 6 percent of the U.S. population. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue to say that we, the audience, would be broadcast. For our free tickets, we would have to earn our keep, and, with the lights glaring on every section of the audience, it was clear that we were the performance. Pastor Benny, who emerged in his hygienic white celestial scrubs, was merely the director.
Hands went up everywhere when Pastor Benny asked who was from outside Auckland—a good thousand people. “You will all be saved tonight!” he promised all.
The irony was evident right from the start. “Jesus leads and Satan pushes” stated the Pastor repetitively. Familiar images of Pastor Benny “pushing” his raptured people over sprang to my mind. But, aside from this ill-considered slip, Pastor Benny was a memetic mastermind. Memes (an idea that passes from one person to the next and so on, like a virus) are best transmitted through repetition. Parables were repeated to us at least five times. The hypnotic effect of this mind-numbing experience would have been very powerful if it had not been so obviously contrived.
Hell, the Rapture, Muslim and Jewish conversions—all the favorites were covered in repetitive affirmations of Christian superiority. “Thank God that you are alive so you can choose Jesus Christ. Imagine all those millions of people burning in the fires of Hell, what they would give for the chance you have now!” said Pastor Hinn.
Looking around, I saw buckets stacked at the edge of the aisle. But the giving hadn’t started yet. Another pastor took the floor with a message that “We are on the crest of a great change in this country.” In his broad U.S. accent, this pastor informed us that New Zealand has a “Christian history” and credited much of this to Smith Wigglesworth, a Pentecostal minister who, among other things, claimed to have resurrected his wife on three occasions, attributed all illness to demons (and consequently advised his followers against modern medicine), and was gifted with glossolalia (a condition associated with schizophrenia and speaking in tongues).
This pastor’s final words were, “It’s time to change this nation!” They received resounding approval from the crowd, no doubt happy that the speaker has ceased his repetition of the phrase “Believe and receive.”
The rhetorical analysis of the following fifty minutes, if deconstructed, could fill a heavy book, but I will attempt to summarize this payment primer. In short, Pastor Benny told three stories (five times each) about people who gave money to their churches and synagogues under the assumption “Give, and it shall be given unto you” (Luke 6:38). His illustrations were of affluence infused with piety and celebrated both. The stories were of failure and redemption, with a twist: to give to a church is not holy—you must give to Jesus directly.
But how do you do that? Pastor Benny directed the audience exactly how to fill in the credit-card slips. As the envelopes and buckets circulated, no one was, any longer, questioning whether he or she would give or not. People were too busy thinking about exactly how they would give and exactly who they were giving to.
Pastor Benny assured the audience that people who give their money to Jesus don’t have to worry how it is used, because, he said, “Whoever misuses such money will be judged.” Pastor Benny is not deluded. He is simply a businessman, who, upon returning to his $9 million mansion, will have no fear of judgment.
The Pastor went further to warn against giving to churches, ministries, or even charities and followed up by asking all those who hadn’t been able to give to stand. He then directed those who had already donated to give those standing some money “in order that they can give to him” (Jesus). The black comedy got a little blacker.
It was about 10 p.m., and I was impatient to see some healing, but the Pastor kept up his repetition. The hypnotic effect was visible; everyone moved in unison. The light glaring directly in my eyes was blinding, and blue-purple light patches hovered around the glowing Pastor. As I stared from my seat, the room seemed to turn into a harsh grainy black and white film, the palms of the people raised to the speaker. Nazi rallies never tapped this kind of psychotropism.
“Fire!” The healing began. Pastor Benny rattled off a number of internal diseases (nothing visible of course) that had been miraculously cured, somewhere to his left or “at the back.” Then the shocker: HIV had been cured in someone to his right. Pastor Benny had previously applauded his ministry for its work in Uganda, and I had, at the time, thought that he would not be so irresponsible as to claim that he had cured anyone of AIDS. Now I wasn’t so certain. I don’t need to elaborate on the effect of such a claim for a country where a quarter of the population are HIV positive.
My eyes wandered toward a man being wrestled down the central aisle below by three security guards, one with a hand over the man’s mouth. As the people queue, a yelling match broke out between a minder and one of the Hinn associates. Pastor Benny was clearly not letting someone with muscular dystrophy onto the stage. The yelling was drowned out by Hinn’s own reaction to the miracle he had just performed: a young woman who, a year after she broke her leg in a car accident, was able to get up off her crutch and swing it around like a circus performer. Her quite obvious limp and reluctance to run across the stage ruined the illusion somewhat, but she did her best.
Other conditions represented include diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, ovarian cancer. One little girl had kidney damage. The diabetes sufferer and the ovarian cancer victim had both been given tickets to the Crusade by the same doctor. The multiple sclerosis patient claimed that the lights gave her a migraine, which lasted right up until Pastor Benny started healing people (about four hours into the event). The crowd remained convinced that her headache disappearance was a miracle. The Pastor’s parting advice to the young woman was to “read the Bible and don’t read anything else!”
The eight-year-old girl with kidney damage and her father were told that they “won’t have to visit a hospital ever again.” I guess Hinn was hoping that, for his own sake, that she didn’t visit a hospital again—at least until he was out of the country.
Pastor Benny continued in this fashion, invoking seizures and collapsing the willing members of the audience with the fire of the Holy Spirit to the point of fatigue. Leaving the Vector Arena, I declined an invitation to hear a church sermon with Henry Hinn (Pastor Benny’s brother) the following night. Humorless and exhausted, after surviving seven hours with conman par excellence Pastor Benny Hinn, I was ready to go home.
James Brown resides in New Zealand and is on the staff of The Learning Connexion, an international school of art and creativity.
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