As I’ve been making dinner this week, I’ve been listening to an NPR investigative series into televangelists and their millions, almost none of which, it turns out, are scrutinized by the IRS or anybody else for that matter. And thus, in April, I’ve been brought back to where, in January, I began the semester with my students in a course on Catholic social teaching: looking at oleaginous characters such as Joel Osteen, Marcus and Joni Lamb, Kenneth Copeland and others whose television shows have morphed into massive multimillion-dollar broadcasting networks raking in profits while preaching the heresy of the “prosperity gospel.” It truly has been a Lenten penance to watch these shady operators on Youtube.
I had never encountered most of them before December of last year, until reading an article in the New York Times discussed the death of Paul Crouch, a vulgar parvenu and founder of Christian Trinity Broadcasting Network. I read of Couch's lavish lifestyle with a kind of horrified fascination, much as one cannot look away from a car wreck on the side of the road.
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