The Preacher Hall of Shame

 Back in the day...when I was an undergrad...back when I had to stay up late finishing a hand-pecked, typewritten paper...my housemates and I would stuff our stomachs with bowls of Chicken Soup, down a few bottles of Double Cola, and play a steady diet of never-ending radio preachers to give us stamina to finish the job. 

We'd set up our typewriters on the dining room table- sometimes two or three of us- and ride the caffeine cola buzz as we spit out each painful page while entertaining our boredom with the likes of the Reverand Ike and lesser-known characters like Doctor Cross and "Rosie-velt Franklin, the Original Georgia Prophet."  

Between a maddening number of trips to the toilet and the blessings of Double Cola, we wrestled paragraphs out of our heightened memories, usually ignoring the "service in progress" on the radio. It was only at "break times" did most of us listen more than a few minutes. 

But the sequence of prosperity preachers, spiritualists, and downright wackos gave us comedic episodes in between our essays on Stoicism, Summerhill, and The Egyptian Book of the Dead. 

The Reverand Ike, who we knew from Fred G. Sanford, featured testimonies that usually included a woman in Harlem "getting a brand new pink Cadillac." Ike's show would go to "the service already in progress" a few minutes after the introduction, which was pure comedic genius, and became fodder for a series of late-night jokes.

Before midnight, Ike and the better-known radio programs ruled the airwaves before giving way to "Rosie-velt Franklin, the Original Georgia Prophet." Sure, there were other preachers, but Roosevelt, he was the greatest of all. "Remember, I'm the Original Georgia Prophet."

From midnight on, the "Preacher Hall of Shame" went into overkill, with Doctor Cross, who could "fix it, or unfix it for you." He talked about a woman throwing "goofah dust" on you. This "spiritualist" sounded more like a Voodoo practitioner than anyone who had darkened the door of a church building, let alone a seminary (or "cemetery," as we students used to call it).

The later it got, the stranger the preachers, the more deviant from any shade of Christian syncretism they proposed. The preaching became so non-sensical that it sounded more like bad actors trying to sell electrical healing units to Amish people than anything anyone sane would listen to and believe. But since our college town had a group of Hare Krishnas two streets away (Hare Ramen) and a couple of well-developed cults, we laughed off these crazy preachers rather than find them harmful. If we could scare off the Hare Krishnas, these wackos were juvenile in comparison. 

But the truth is that these preachers became wealthy enough to have churches and programs that enriched them, and they became more manipulative, when not just individuals, but the masses fell for their tricks. 

The world is full of strange and irrational preachers on every existing form of media, and while they are so simple I ignore them, there are too many out there who can fall for their age-old tricks, as long as there is one who doesn't know reality, one who doesn't know the truth, one who doesn't know The One these preachers should have been preaching about from the beginning.