Truth
Dr Eugene Scott
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 02 March 2005
No Obligation Christianity
You ever meet Christians? You wish you could shove a pipe in their mouth. Anything to shut them up.Gene Scott
Three cheers to that, but Scott was yet another millionaire Christian TV evangelist!
No shepherd need fear he overstimates the intelligence of his Christian sheep. Gene Scott did not! He took Paul of Tarsus to a logical conclusion. Paul offered Judaism to gentiles with few of its obligations such as food taboos and circumcision. Scott offered the supernatural benefits of Christianity without any of its pious obligations. He abrogated the Sermon on the Mount, telling his congregation, “I don’t ask you to change. I take you as you are.” Scott’s followers did not have to go to church on Sunday, and traditional Christian no-nos like homosexuality, adultery, abortion, profanity and drinking were all right.
He invented a new duty instead—“give all ye own to me”. Like Paul, Scott became immensely rich. To become member of his church, the essential qualification seems to have been a valid credit card, his aim being a church richer than the Vatican. He excomminucated an entire congregation for not giving enough.
A skinflint may get to heaven but what awaits him are a rusty old halo, a skinny old cloud, and a robe so worn it scratches. First-class salvation costs money.
Scott’s salvation cost 10 per cent of his followers’ income as a minimum. “I want 300 people to give $1,000 by June 30 to humiliate Satan’s efforts to destroy us. I also want 700 to commit to $10,000 by Christmas,” we could read on his website. Those who did not respond to his barked instruction “Get on the telephone!” were told to “vomit on yourself with your head up in the air.” His fund-raising efforts were spectacularly successful. Individual donations from his 15,OOO-strong congregation at the Los Angeles University Cathedral—a baroque Spanish-style former cinema—and from the estimated 50,000 contributors reached through his global broadcasting empire were said to average $350 a month. In a documentary, God’s Angry Man, made by Werner Herzog in 1980, Scott raised several hundred thousand dollars during a television show lasting half an hour.
Christianity as Showbiz
Scott was basically a gifted entertainer, outrageous, funny and inspired in his outlandish headgear and outfits, brandishing a fat cigar, we would contort in rage, mixing stripture and profanity in obscene monologues about the state of the world. During the Gulf War, he ended one tirade with:
Nuke ’em in the name of Jesus!
It all was accompanied by demands for money.
No gimmick was neglected. His television shows would feature “Scott’s Bunnies”, a bevy of female followers in thong bikinis. Scott boasted he could “probably teach Hugh Hefner a thing or two”. At church services a rock band would belt out such hymns of praise as “Kill a Pissant for Jesus”. When he found himself under investigation by the authorities for alleged fraud, he assembled a band of wind-up toy monkeys, and smashed them to pieces on TV with a baseball bat.
Scott’s lifestyle included several ranches, a mansion in Pasadena, a chauffeured limousine, 24-hour bodyguards, and a stable of 300 thoroughbred horses. He was an obvious charlatan, but in welljudged acts of philanthropy, he also used his skills for charitable causes. An example was when the Los Angeles Central Library was damaged by fire, and he organised a telethon that raised $2 million. Carefully schemed generosity with his follower’s money gave him powerful friends who would then support him. In show-downs with the authorities, dropping prominent names helped him out.
Scott had several run-ins with the authorities. In the 1970s, the California Attorney General’s office launched an investigation into Scott’s church and others for alleged financial malpractice. Supporters in the state legislature arranged a law to be passed barring prosecution of civil fraud against tax-exempt religious organisations, and the investigation was dropped! In 1983 the Federal Communications Commission stripped the church of three broadcast stations after he refused to hand over financial records. Later he frustrated attempts to scrutinise the church’s finance by instructing contributors to sign pledge-slips stating that he could spend the money however he pleased. Is God the god of bribery and corruption?
Eugene Scott was the son of a travelling preacher, born on August 14 1929, at Buhl, Idaho. After the death of a younger twin brother, young Eugene began to have convulsions, and his mother would later say she saw two angels come down a stairway from heaven, stopping before Gene. “Oh no, Lord, you can’t take Gene!” she exclaimed, and so the obliging angels took the surviving twin instead. The twin died but not Gene. The family moved to northern California where Gene’s father took over an Assemblies of God church after the previous pastor crucified himself!
Career
Scott was a good student, ending up at Stanford University, where he took a doctorate on the works of the protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1957. He taught at a Midwestern Bible college, helped Oral Roberts establish his university in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and then joined his father’s church, becoming a successful preacher and fund-raiser.
In 1970, Scott renounced his membership of the denomination to launch his own ministry. Five years later he was invited to take over an ailing evangelical enterprise, the Faith Center Church at Glendale, California, which had four broadcasting stations but a $3.5 million debt. He agreed on condition the church leaders gave him carte blanche to do what he wanted. To his surprise, they accepted, and he went on to build his huge evangelical empire.
Scott was diagnosed with cancer, and decided, before turning to doctors, to “give God the first shot”. God was no longer interested. He died on February 21, survived by his third wife.
Reporting: The Observer (UK)
