Oral Roberts, ‘godfather’ to Sarah Palin, dies

Oral Roberts, the backwoods fire-and-brimstone preacher who died yesterday at 91, was among the founding fathers of America's Christian extremism that today fuels the rise of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.

With fellow bible-thumpers the Revs Billy Graham and Pat Robertson, he discovered the power of the 'big tent' revival meeting after World War Two, invented the 'television ministry' in the 1950s, with its ability to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from the faithful, and forged the 'religious right' political movement.

The American media are doffing their collective hat at his death, hailing his charisma, his humble origins, and the power he wielded at the height of his career.

‘Build me a university,’ said God. ‘Build it on My Authority... Raise up your students to hear my voice’

But as a founder of the alliance between fundamentalist Christianity, big business and the Republican Party, his legacy includes the social polarisation and economic division which ultimately split the nation into its 'red' and 'blue' states. He enabled the cynical political exploitation of 'wedge issues', such as abortion, which resulted in the election of President Dubya Bush, the popularity of Sarah Palin and the beggaring of America's international standing.

Roberts's crowning achievement was founding the Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1963. He revealed that he was acting on God's command. "Build me a university," said God. "Build it on My Authority, and on the Holy Spirit. Raise up your students to hear my voice."

Oral Roberts University was opened two years later and is the largest fundamentalist university in America. Fully accredited academically, it preaches a "holistic" education of integrated mind, body and soul, with mandatory church and exercise as well as classes, much like a British public school of the Victorian era. It immediately became known for severe
dress codes, strict segregation of the sexes and a ban on homosexuality.

It is also noted for its architecture, often compared to the Jetsons cartoon, with a tower representing the Crown of Thorns looking much like an airport control tower.

In the 1980s, Roberts reported seeing a vision of a 900ft tall Christ who exhorted him to continue building, and to raise hundreds of millions more dollars. He complied. In more lighthearted moments, this ultra-tall Christ is deemed to be behind the success of the Oral Roberts basketball team.

Graduates include Michele Bachmann, the Congresswoman from Minnesota considered to be among the few Republicans to the right of Sarah Palin, and Ted Haggard, the 'family values' minister from Colorado Springs who confessed to paying a male prostitute for sex and drugs. He was class of 1978.

Roberts, who retired to a millionaire's lifestyle on a California Beach, was untouched by the sex and corruption scandals that have afflicted other multi-million dollar fire-breathers, from the sex-and-fraud "prosperity gospel" of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker to the prostitutes-in-motels of Jimmy Swaggart, rock legend Jerry Lee Lewis' cousin.

Roberts was instead caught up in disputes over Mammon. His Word of Faith doctrine took too far the gospel of self-promotion, free market dogma and the holiness of wealth, the idea that making money is a reward from God for good Christian behaviour. By the late 1980s, two of his own professors denounced him for excessive materialism and "heresy".

"The arc of his [Roberts's] remarkable life," writes Ralph Reed, who ran fellow televangelist Pat Robertson's presidential campaigns, "took him from backwoods churches to national prominence, an arc that corresponded to the larger movement of evangelicals from the margins of society to its vital centre."

Reed is right about that. The question is whether his God will forgive him. ·