A Theologian’s Opinion

Professor Harvey G. Cox, a theologian at Harvard University, had a similar view of the faith-healing notion. In 1976, he wrote:What happens in the mass healing rally is a primal wrestling match. Its roots go back to a ritual that substantially antedates Christianity: the cosmic battle between the godly hero and the seething forces of chaos. For modern people irrational chaos expresses itself through the terrible mystery of disease—so resistant to rational planning, so fearful in its power.... The healing evangelists appeal to so many because they are enacting an ancient struggle. ... [The evangelists] represent the desperate hopes and cries issuing from millions of people who feel lost, sick and hopeless but who have not given up.... [Their] spirit is still expressed in the hymn they often sing as they surge down the aisles reaching out for health, salvation and dignity, “Only believe, only believe. All things are possible. Only believe.”

Behind the Scenes

Belief in faith-healers is not easily obtained from those who get a backstage view of the operations. John LeBlanc, a stagehand at the West Palm Beach (Florida) Auditorium, where W. V. Grant plays regularly, told me after Grant’s 1986 appearance there that the crew resented such healers and knew they were fakes. Though LeBlanc believes that some of the evangelists who play there are genuine, Grant “didn’t seem like it at all. He didn’t appear to be honest.” LeBlanc said that, following the services, the first-aid people at the coliseum helped the “healed” to find their canes and assisted them to their cars because they just couldn’t make it on their own. Said LeBlanc:The whole thing is money. Some people just want to be taken. It seems like they like to be taken.

When Grant offered the afflicted sheets of paper with foot outlines on them that were to be cut out and placed into the victim’s shoe to bring a blessing, and the faithful snapped them up—at $20 a shot—“all the people who work here were appalled,” LeBlanc told me. Former Grant TV cameraman Gary Clarke is similarly aware of the hopelessness of the situation. He was with the Grant crusade in Philadelphia when it all dawned on him. When I saw all these people doing all these crazy things, it just hit me. These people—they just don’t care! They’re looking for something. They’re looking for someone to guide them, to show them the way. I don’t know what they’re looking for. They don’t know what they’re looking for. And you just can’t talk to them!

Clarke once saw a very elderly woman and her two daughters marooned at the top of a staircase following one of Grant’s meetings. The mother’s two canes had been taken away from her and broken by Grant when he pronounced her healed. Now the three women were helpless, unable to move from where they were trapped. Yet they persisted in believing that the mother had been healed. “What do you think of this guy?” he asked one of the daughters. She replied eagerly: “I think he’s greal! He’s wonderful! We’re glad we came!” Clarke’s response was perhaps less than kind, but he was angered by the naiveté and blind belief of the women: “Your mother’s afraid to go down the steps and you’re telling me this? You’re going to have to help yourselves!” And he walked away from them. One must actually experience a similar situation in order to understand Gary Clarke’s reaction. You are facing people who refuse to recognize their own foolishness. They pet a dog. They get bitten. Nursing the wound, they again stretch out a hand to the dog. The rage one feels at such times is generated as much by the obstinacy of the victims as by the perfidy of the one who cheated them. Adding to Clarke’s anger was the feeling that he, too, could be as fat and rich as W. V. Grant if only he had the nerve and no integrity. He told me: “I got to thinking, I’ll just never get anywhere in life because I don’t think like these people. To get ahead, you’ve got to be one of these people!” It is a thought that has occurred to more than one employee of a faith-healer, and has been acted upon often, as we shall see. But what happens to the victims when the spell is broken, as it eventually must be when they get home, the euphoria passes, and they find that they are no better off, if not worse, than before? My team followed up on as many people as we could find after six Grant performances. We found a lot of unhappy, angry, and bitter people, some of whom had traveled hundreds of miles seeking cures. They complained that Grant had misstated and exaggerated their ailments. Some had been told that they had heart trouble that they hadn’t even suspected and didn’t really have—an ailment that Grant had thrown in as a bonus. Many had to buy new canes to replace those dramatically broken across Grant’s knee and tossed up onto the stage.