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God doesn't need Ole Anthony
Televangelists have called him a cultist, a fraud, and the Antichrist. He says he's just doing what Jesus would want.

Ole Anthony is tall and gaunt, with a shock of white hair and searing blue eyes. He has a high, bony forehead and the pale, scraggy features of his Norwegian ancestors (his first name is pronounced "Oh-lee").

His many enemies, most of them televangelists, sometimes call him Ole Antichrist, and it's true that he has a certain familiarity with apocalypse. When he was an intelligence operative with the Air Force, he witnessed a nuclear blast at close range. A few years later, he was accidentally electrocuted.

Evangelists often claim that they've been "slain in the spirit"—possessed so completely by the love of Jesus that they've died to themselves—but Anthony, who is sixty-six, really looks as if he'd just stepped off a gurney. He looks the way Moses might have looked had he been born in Minnesota.

Anthony is the founder and president of the Trinity Foundation, a religious community in East Dallas that functions variously as a soup kitchen, a rehab center, a Christian publishing house, and a private detective firm.

Trinity's fifty or so active members (supported by some four hundred other donors) live in a row of creaky two-story bungalows with deep, shaded porches, along a dead-end street in a neighborhood known as Little Mexico. They take most of their meals in a communal dining hall and meet three times a week for Bible studies that have been closer in spirit, at times, to barroom brawls.

The problem with the modern church, Anthony believes, is the church itself. So he has patterned Trinity on the underground Christian communities of the first century, before denominations or cathedrals or the strict separation of Christian and Jew: a church before churches existed. ...

..."The televangelist I worked for not only feared Ole—he wanted to do him physical harm," one of Anthony's informants told me. "These guys think he's Satan incarnate." The opinion is not a new one. When Anthony was six years old, the family's Lutheran minister, in St. Peter, Minnesota, asked his mother not to bring him to catechism class anymore.

"He told her I was an evil child," Anthony says. "I was disruptive and asked too many questions."...

...Thirty years ago, Kenneth Copeland was a pilot for Oral Roberts, the godfather of the televangelist industry. When he and his wife began teaching Bible studies in Fort Worth, their small classes quickly blossomed into full-blown revivals, then weeklong assemblies at convention centers. Today, the Copelands preside over a mega-ministry of their own, worth a hundred and fifty million dollars.

Its headquarters sprawl across fifteen hundred acres of short-grass prairie forty miles west of Dallas, and include a television studio and a private airfield. The church has a sizable gift shop in the lobby, where books with titles like "No Deposit, No Return" sit next to pamphlets on "Bible cures" for cancer, ADD, and prostate problems....

...Recently, a call for donations appeared on Copeland's Web site: he and his wife require his-and-her Cessna Citation X jets, valued at twenty million dollars apiece.

"When God tells Kenneth to travel to South Africa and hold a three-day Victory Campaign, he won't have to wait to make commercial travel arrangements," the Web site explains. "He can just climb aboard his Citation X and go!" ...

...Trinity's cynicism is best exemplified, Brewer and other critics say, by its bi-monthly magazine, The Door. First published in 1971, by a Christian youth ministry in California, The Door was named after the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, on which Martin Luther posted the ninety-five theses that triggered the Reformation. When Trinity inherited the magazine, nine years ago, it was a favorite among seminarians for its subversive wit and its interviews with theologians. The current editor, Robert Darden, is a Trinity supporter who teaches writing at Baylor. He has tried to preserve the magazine's spirit, but Trinity's investigations sometimes introduce a strident, acerbic tone. Mild satires like "Harry Potter in the Lake of Fire" now alternate with cover stories on Pat Robertson, "Lifetime Loser," or on Charlton Heston as a "Christian Soldier of Fortune," dressed as Moses with a machine gun.

The low point, even Trinity members now say, came when The Door set its sights on W. V. Grant, a local faith healer who presided over a five-thousand-seat church. In 1996, after a two-year investigation by the foundation, Grant was sentenced to sixteen months in prison and ordered to pay three hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars in back taxes, in addition to a fine. Afterward, to celebrate the conviction, Anthony insisted on publishing a Playboy-style centerfold of a picture that a Trinity investigator had found. It showed Grant standing at a window, buck naked and uncommonly hairy. If Darden hadn't objected strenuously, Anthony would have added a caption in large print: "Even the hairs on his ass are numbered." ...

...All the old con men return eventually, he said, and some never really leave. After the wave of televangelist scandals in the early nineties, the Federal Communications Commission considered a truth-in-advertising clause for religious solicitations. If a televangelist declared, on the air, that he had cured a donor's cancer or tripled his bank account, that claim would have to be verifiable. Anthony made three trips to Washington to lobby for the change, and was told that it was certain to pass. Then, in 1994, the Republicans won control of the House, thanks in part to the religious right, and the measure was quietly tabled....