A note from the editor: As long as there are Christians in Tulsa, Oral Roberts University will loom large in their imagination. And so this story about the implosion of the Roberts family's televangelism empire, written by Kiera Feldman and first published in This Land, Vol. 5 Issue 18, will remain relevant for some time to come. Feldman's story was first published September 15, 2014 and is available for purchase in The Faith Reader from This Land Press.
The fall of the first family of televangelism came swiftly.
Two Oral Roberts Ministries employees crouched on a desk on their hands and knees, their heads sticking through a hole in the wall. The voices of the Oral Roberts University Board of Regents on the speakerphone conference call one floor below carried up through the thin ceiling panels. Patriarch Oral Roberts was urging Richard, his successor, not to go on Larry King Live that evening.
“I think I should,” they heard Richard tell his father. Oral thought Larry King would eat Richard alive.
A week earlier, a lawsuit hit the front pages of the Tulsa World, alleging that Richard and Lindsay Roberts, ORU’s president and first lady since 1993, treated the university as a personal ATM. The university’s finances were inadvertently cracked open by three professors who claimed they’d been fired for questioning Richard’s efforts to involve ORU in campaigning for Senator Jim Inhofe’s chosen candidate in Tulsa’s mayoral election. What’s more, the suit claimed Lindsay sent hundreds of text messages to “underage males” between the hours of 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. on cell phones expensed to the university.
ORU’s Board of Regents agreed: Larry King was a terrible idea. John Hagee, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar—ORU’s board was a who’s who of televangelists. Oral was the original pioneer of television ministry. He trained up a whole generation of jet-setting mega-church pastors who preached the prosperity gospel: Plant a seed—meaning, send a check—and God will reward you with health, wealth, and happiness.
The eavesdroppers could tell Richard saw the writing on the wall. “There was no exonerating himself at that point,” one remembers. “He just thought it would be cool to go on Larry King.”
Richard had been like a moth to the limelight since childhood, when he began singing in his father’s tent crusades. In the 1970s, at the height of Richard’s celebrity as a Christian singer, he was starring in prime-time television specials with the likes of Johnny Cash and Robert Goulet, reaching tens of millions of viewers. With his signature streak of white hair and big, telegenic smile, Richard was most in his element when the cameras were rolling. If anyone ever asked if Richard was ready to perform, he’d fire back, “I was born ready.”