There's been quite the ongoing scandal in the neopente dominionist world, for those not following the antics of televangelists: Oral Roberts University (which has been the alma mater of a mess of Assemblies preacher-men and other leaders in the neopente dominionist movement) is at the heart of a major funding and morality scandal and ORU itself is some 54 million dollars in the red due to scamboogery by the founders and directors. (ORU's troubles, in fact, have inspired a congressional investigation of the board of directors--almost entirely comprised of "name it and claim it" preachers like Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, Benny Hinn and the like.)
Or, more properly, ORU was $54 million in the hole. They've now gotten a $70 million dollar grant from the Hobby Lobby dominionist funding complex...the same one that is a major corporate sponsor of neopente dominionism in general.
The ORU scandal--"Cliff's Notes" version--and the latest development
When televangelists get in trouble, boy, do they get in trouble. And as is true in most things, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall".
Oral Roberts' media empire--including its own university--is pretty big, even among neopente "name it and claim it" empires; when you have other "big name" name-it-and-claim-it hucksters working for your board of directors for your university (which is but a part of your media empire)...well, that gives you an idea just how big a fish Oral Roberts is.
And it also gives a clue on why ORU is falling so hard now, what with the inevitable televangelist sex-and-money scandal (something literally as old as televangelism itself, all the way back to Aimee Semple McPherson).
Suffice it to say that practically the entire board of directors--including Oral Roberts' son Richard Roberts and his wife--have been caught with their hands in the collection plate (including some very suspicious "gifting" between televangelists) and Mrs. Roberts has also been noted in apparently trying to solicit statutory rape; Oral Roberts' son is claiming God is telling him to plead "not guilty". (Then again, the fruit doesn't fall all that far from the tree; Oral Roberts himself infamously claimed God Himself would strike him down unless he got a rush of donations to the tune of $8 million back in 1986 (of note, this was specifically fundraising for ORU and specifically the now-defunct, scandal-plagued City of Faith medical complex)--that is, when he's not claiming to bring back people from the dead.)
In addition to the filthy lucre of sex and money, it seems ORU's scamboogery extends to some rather explicit electioneering which threatens to revoke ORU's tax-exempt status. (Richard Roberts has taken a leave of absence in an attempt to "save the university".)
DailyKos writer Leumas has done a very good job so far in covering the ORU scandal in and of itself--so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel there.
What I am going to write about is the new development that seems to have come up, namely "Joel's Army" funders Hobby Lobby--and specifically a subdivision of the Hobby Lobby business empire--bailing ORU out, and then some:
TULSA, Okla. - Oral Roberts University, the debt-ridden evangelical institution riven by scandal, has been handed a $70 million lifeline.
Mart Green, founder of the Christian office and educational supply store chain Mardel, said Tuesday he would immediately give $8 million to the university, with the rest to come after a 60-to-90-day review of the university's financial records.
Green said his family must approve the financial review before the $62 million is given and is requesting at least two seats on the board of regents for his family members.
"Let's straighten the ship," Green said, four days after the school's president stepped down amid accusations that he misspent funds to support a lavish lifestyle. "Let's get integrity. Let's get trust built back and the rest will go away."
Green said he has never attended the university and had no ties to the Oral Roberts family. He said he has been following the university's story in the media in recent weeks and decided he wanted to help.
Not mentioned in that Associated Press blurb:
- Mardel is in fact a division of Hobby Lobby.
- Hobby Lobby...well, Oral Roberts University (and its gaggle of "name it and claim it" preachers on its board--including Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, and others who have now been directly linked to the financial misdoings of Oral Roberts and ORU) would fit right in with other stuff they've funded.
Some back-history regarding Hobby Lobby and its funding of neopente dominionism
I've written about Hobby Lobby before--it is not an exaggeration to note them as one of the primary funders of "Joel's Army" style neopentecostal dominionism in the US. Hobby Lobby explicitly funds and promotes things like Wallbuilders (a group that engages in dominionist historical revisionism), the Assemblies of God's international publishing wing (yes, you're reading this right--a portion of every purchase you buy at Hobby Lobby goes straight to the Assemblies, happily funding things like the horrific Holocaust-revisionist gay-bashing "Joel's Army" group Watchmen on the Walls--a group that already gets plenty of fairly high-level Assemblies support as is--and explicitly dominionist Bible transations in particular), neopente "Bible-based" kiddie boot camps and dominionist alternatives to legit mental hospitals and rehab, and an Assemblies-run group that explicitly targets Catholics and other "people of the book" for conversion to "Joel's Army" theology. Hobby Lobby also has connections with ongoing scandals targeting military servicefolk for conversion--they're one of the larger corporate sponsors of Campus Crusade for Christ, among others.
Mardel Bookstore is in fact a part of this empire, one of the two largest corporate funders of dominionism in the US (only AmWay gives more money directly to dominionists); here's the relevant portion from my old post:
There are still other groups they support that promote dominionism:
Mardel Bookstore is a "Christian and education" bookstore which is run by Mart Green (who is also CEO of Bearing Fruit Communications, above); as noted above, Mardel Bookstore and Bearing Fruit Communications are both officially seen as divisions of Hobby Lobby. Mardel Bookstores explicitly sell dominionist curricula packages including Bob Jones University's package. (BJU's curriculum, among several others, has been ruled as educationally insufficient by the University of California at Berkeley and students solely educated on BJU will not receive high school credit for courses in biology or history.)
Mart Green--David Green's son, and the guy who bequeathed the $70 million to ORU--not only runs Mardel Bookstore but another company in the Hobby Lobby complex of companies--namely, a media and motion picture company called Bearing Fruit Communications.
It's actually sort of odd this wasn't mentioned in the Associated Press release; Hobby Lobby promotes it on their website. There may be a reason Mart Green isn't much to publicise Bearing Fruit Communications outside of dominionist circles, though. From my original post on Hobby Lobby connections:
It turns out that Hobby Lobby's founder, David Green, actually runs a tract-handling industry called "Every Home for Christ" as well as funneling money into a religious movie business his son operates operating under the name "Bearing Fruit Communications" (and on Hobby Lobby's page, actively promotes movies his kid makes).
Oh, about those movies. Probably the best term for them is "Injun Exploitation"--the two movies produced by his son are "End Of The Spear" and "Beyond The Gates of Splendor", both of which focus on the religious conversion of the Waorani people of Ecuador. Sadly, the Waorani people are often used as a sort of "Wild Man of the Amazon" type show by dominionists (you know, the sort that went out of fashion at carnival sideshows back in the 40's) where they are pimped as "The Most Violent People In The World"; Ron Luce's "Teen Mania" group actually used the movie "End Of The Spear" as a lead-in for one of his "Wild Man of the Amazon" shows with a converted Waorani. (The truth about the Waorani people is far sadder. The Waorani are among the most endangered indigenous peoples on the planet, in large part due to missionaries invading their lands often in conjunction with oil companies; their population has declined rapidly, from 25,000 people in the 1950s (when originally contacted by missionaries and when they fought to remain uncontacted (outsiders are literally seen as cannibals by the Waorani)--the subject of the "Injun Exploitation" films) to only 2000 today.) Much of the efforts of Bearing Fruit Communications are aimed squarely at youth recruitment.
Yes, you read that right--Mart Green makes a healthy business witha movie company--a movie company whose entire theatrical output so far has consisted of portraying indigenous people as bone-in-their-nose cannibals and as "the most violent people in the world" who attack the oh-so-nice missionaries--and get converted and get used in "Oh, look at the nice Joel's Army member with a bone in his nose, feathers in his hair, and a loincloth who reminisces on how he'd eat 3 people a day before he found Jesus" shows at events that have been compared to Hitler Youth rallies for young neopentecostal dominionists. I can't imagine why he'd not want to publicise this. :D
And really, the scary thing is--ORU is probably among the tamer of things Hobby Lobby and its various subsidiaries fund on a daily basis.
I'd probably recommend you artistic folks to do business with Michael's or Dick Blick Art Materials for stuff you can't get at Michael's. That's just me, though. :3
Not entirely surprising
As strange as it may sound, yes, the ORU thing fits in with Hobby Lobby and its subsidiaries being Assemblies frontgroups in all but name.
Among other things, a whole flock of Assemblies preachers tend to be ORU alumni--the very church I walked away from has some connections there as well, and (during the brief period where a family member pondered getting into ministry before they regained their senses and discovered the joys of dancing in gay bars) one of my relatives almost ended up in ORU--before it was discovered the state would not pay for a largely unaccredited private college.
In fact, at least one of the board members in the present scandal--Benny Hinn--is a known Assemblies man. Heck, practically all of the televangelists on the board of directors are popular among Assemblies folks--Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, Kenneth Copeland, Paula White, Eddie Long, as well as Oral himself.
In large part this is because "name it and claim it" largely had its birth within the "Assemblies family" of churches--neopentecostal dominionism in and of itself can be seen as an extension of "name it and claim it", and many of the coercive practices in neopentecostal churches also stem from aspects of "prosperity gospel" including its political variants in neopente dominionism.
In fact, if anything, the coercive practices (including the increasing use of abusive "big brother"-esque "cell churches", the use of involuntary "exorcisms" that have resulted in PTSD, and general reliance on dominionist "parallel economy" sources to keep from being contaminated by "doorways allowing Satan into your life") have the effect of promoting the very "name it and claim it" hucksters running ORU--and, in turn, these same people promote many of the more abusive tendencies of these churches, causing a very nasty feedback loop of coercion.
As incredible as it may sound, many dominionist families do not get their primary source of news from secular outlets--Fox News may be the solitary "secular" outlet they get informed about the world from. There is a major emphasis in dominionist circles in avoidance of secular media entirely, including television; entire television networks and even digital satellite subscription services exist where stuff like Oral Roberts, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, and the like are not only the primary entertainment sources but also the primary informational sources. And practically all of these also teach rather explicitly that exposure to any non-dominionist vetted media will cause "Satan to steal your blessing"--that any doubt in the preachers themselves will cause "Satan to steal your blessing".
If it were televangelists alone promoting this, that'd be one thing. Unfortunately, it can't be dismissed as an abberation--for starters, the majority of televangelists are from churches in the "Assemblies family" of neopentecostal denominations and churches (and to this day, the Assemblies is still the dominant denomination among televangelists; not surprising, as the Assemblies and "independent fundamentalist Baptists" can be argued to have co-invented televangelism and two separate strains of Christian nationalism).
Secondly, this sort of stuff gets a lot of support from non-televangelists--it can be argued most of televangelists nowadays learned their theatre from two sources: Aimee Semple McPherson (who started out as an Assemblies preacher and eventually split her congregation off into International Foursquare, the first of many, many "Assemblies daughters") and Paul Yonggi Cho (who ran the Assemblies through most of the 90s, and since the 50s has been one of the primary "guiding forces" in Assemblies theology in general).
In fact, sad to say, you could very well argue that this is "business as usual". And, alas, so are bailouts in general of this sort from the "faithful".