In the early 1980s, we made the trek from Miami to Tulsa for the Oral Roberts Camp Meeting every summer. “You’ve gotta keep on casting your bread upon the water,” he sang from the dashboard tape deck, “it’s gonna come back home on every wave.” My mom has cast a lot of bread his way in the decades since then.Ĭopeland is far from the only televangelist she’s supported. His music and teachings entered my life in the late 1970s, when I was a kid and my mom became a holy roller. In 2018, Copeland’s net worth was estimated to be $760 million. Among secular people, he is probably best known as the owner of three private jets who in 2015 asked his viewers to help him buy a new one so that he could “ avoid demons” (which he believes his heathen fellow passengers would be riddled with, and could spread to him) on commercial air travel. In 2019, he pleaded with his viewers to donate to fund his jet so that he wouldn’t have to get a COVID vaccine, which he called “ the mark of the beast.” He avoids paying property taxes on his Fort Worth mansion by claiming an exemption for a “clergy residence.” Copeland wanted to be a pop star before he became a prosperity-gospel preacher. Even so, the show “still shocks me sometimes,” she says.

Several preachers led the crowd in reciting the “ Watchman Decree,” which opens with a pledge of allegiance to God, maintains “we have been given legal power from heaven,” decrees that Congress “will only write laws that are righteous and constitutional” and courts will issue only “biblical and constitutional” rulings, and moves into a promise to “NEVER stop fighting!” The same video appears on the Victory Channel Facebook page, which exhorts believers to “download and decree along with us.” Like me, my stepsister was raised with our parents’ iteration of evangelical Christianity. The host and his guests, she says, strategize “constantly about reversing the separation between church and state.” A live FlashPoint broadcast from Decatur, Georgia, that went viral on Twitter last year probably best encapsulates the vibe. I’ve watched as much FlashPoint online as I’ve been able to stomach, which isn’t much. My stepsister, who cared for our parents after our mom got out of the hospital, has been exposed to far more of it. Prayer is a constant on FlashPoint shows. A donation link at the upper right of the landing page leads to a description of the site as a streaming network “that reaches millions of people with the uncompromised Word of God 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” The fine print notes that viewers’ donations are tax-deductible. As an extension of the church, the network is a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) organization. But last summer when my mom was recovering in the hospital after a dangerous blood clot was removed from her brain, the two of them were unhappy with the cable offerings, and I learned that their actual news source these days is, in fact, another extreme televangelist operation: the viewer-supported Christian nationalist Victory Channel, which is owned and run by the church of self-proclaimed prophet Kenneth Copeland. He seemed offended when I joked that they probably got their updates on world events from John Hagee, a televangelist whose books fill my mom’s bookshelves and whose End Times “Blood Moon” posters have hung on her walls in the past, instead. “We don’t get our news from Fox,” my stepfather has been telling me for the past few years.

All about vibe pillow