Dr. Michael Korpi was working for Liberty University, capturing visual content on university-organized mission trips, when he witnessed a young girl die before his very eyes from sickness and starvation in a small home in Haiti.
Feeling disturbed and heartbroken at the sight, Korpi moved to turn off his camera – but as he did, he heard the fundraising consultant traveling with his team whisper in his ear.
“Oh, this is fantastic. Stay on this,” she said, directing his attention and his camera toward the child.
It was this experience, along with many others, that opened Korpi’s eyes to the corruption required to keep televangelism programs running.
Korpi, now a Baylor film and digital media professor, took on the job of capturing content for Liberty under the impression that most of the money being raised would go to the communities they were there to serve.
He soon learned that wasn’t the case.
In reality, most of the money would go right back to the university and to funding the university president and well-known televangelist, Jerry Falwell’s widely popular show, The Old Time Gospel Hour.
“Five percent maybe went to the actual charitable thing,” Korpi explained. “Everything else was just overhead. It was just running the church and keeping [The Old Time Gospel Hour] on TV and all that.”
Falwell, like many televangelists, would compel his audience to send checks in exchange for God’s favor.
In an episode of Old-Time Gospel Hour titled “25th Anniversary,” Falwell shared his goal to find 1 million members to join the “silver anniversary family.” He showed off a certificate with a shiny silver emblem and a case of seven books, which he said have been most helpful to him as a Christian on his journey. He told them that contributing $100 would not only earn them admission to the silver anniversary family but also the seven books.
“Maybe you can’t give the cash right now, but you can give $25 and then $25 for the next three months,” he goes on to say. “Just break it into four $25 gifts.”
He asks them to personally write to him and send as “big of a contribution” as they can.
Falwell, along with other televangelists, exploited an ideology known as the prosperity gospel, the idea that God rewards faith with material wealth and physical health, to secure the donations they needed to keep their programs running – and they would use any tactics necessary to keep their audience engaged, which is why Korpi was hired to capture Liberty’s mission trips on camera in the first place.
“The reason they were doing this was because people were getting tired of giving them money just to keep the television program going,” Korpi explained.
Korpi called it a bait-and-switch tactic. Falwell used compelling causes such as famine and earthquakes to raise money that was primarily used for the organization’s operating costs, and part of Korpi’s role was giving Falwell’s audience a visual to incentivize donations.
“The primary thing that got [Falwell’s audience] to give the money was … parasocial interaction,” explained Korpi. “They felt like they knew Jerry Falwell. They liked Jerry Falwell … He was a friend. They understood him. He understood them.”
Robert Darden, former editor of the satirical religious magazine The Wittenburg Door (The Door), said the prosperity gospel and television have been described as “one of the last great heresies of the church.”
Darden explained that televangelists tend to target vulnerable, isolated people – ones who would donate money out of sheer desperation, hoping to receive God’s favor in exchange, without anyone around to stop them.
“All these televangelists are being supported by a fairly limited pool of Americans who are primarily elderly, primarily financially unstable, a heavy degree of women, and a heavy degree of African Americans,” Darden said.
Television allowed preachers to capture the attention of millions of viewers directly.
“Television is a seductive media for a number of … reasons, because it is sound and sight, and it’s narrow in a dark room, and it closes you off so you’re not with other people like movies,” said Darden.
Darden added that it is far easier for preachers to reach mass audiences through television rather than radio programming or mail campaigns.
In 1987, as major media outlets began investigating televangelists’ exploitation, Korpi was given the chance to tell the world about everything he had learned behind the scenes while working for Jerry Falwell. He was interviewed on ABC’s “Nightline” in response to questions raised about why Falwell had resigned from the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability in the early 1980s.
And he kept speaking out. That same year, Newsweek reported that “Michael Korpi, a former photographer of Falwell’s ‘Old Time Gospel Hour,’ charges that the ministry [Falwell’s] raised more than $4 million through a 1979 appeal for Cambodian refugees but sent a mere $100,000 to aid the victims.”
Falwell later released a statement claiming that Korpi was never actually employed by his ministry, calling him a “former disgruntled student.”
“Nightline” later made an on-air apology for not contacting Falwell for a response to the charges brought against him by Korpi.
This behind-the-scenes look at how churches and Christian non-profits raise and manage money sparked Korpi’s academic interest in the prosperity gospel. Later, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa and used his dissertation to investigate televangelism. He found the findings to be so discouraging that he decided to end his research there.
However, he continued to make films about missionaries after joining Baylor’s faculty in 1982.
“Helping refugees is fantastic, if they actually get the money, if they actually get help,” Korpi told The Baylor Line in 1987.
Korpi wasn’t the only one who had a behind the scenes look. Shortly after Darden took over as editor of The Door, the magazine was acquired by The Trinity Foundation – an organization dedicated to uncovering religious fraud.
The Trinity Foundation saw first hand that the dangers of the prosperity gospel go beyond financial. Research from Baylor’s Wave 7 Religion Survey shows that a belief in the prosperity gospel tends to be correlated with poorer health.
The foundation sought out men and women who, rather than see a doctor or pay for medication, fell victim to the scheme and gave all their money to televangelists, hoping that in doing so, their demonstration of faith would heal them.
“[The Trinity Foundation] would go check on people that the family hadn’t heard from for a year and find out they were dying of gangrene, and the house smelled so bad from the rotted flesh,” said Darden.
“You keep hoping one more dollar will be the one that will cure me. And if you don’t get cured, [some televangelists said] it’s your lack of faith, it’s not me. The reason you’re not cured is that you don’t believe enough. Send 20 bucks instead of 10,” Darden explained.
This perceived relationship compelled the loyal audiences of prominent televangelists to make choices that seem irrational – debilitating not only their physical health but their mental well-being as well. Research from Baylor’s survey suggests that Americans who affirm the prosperity gospel are not only more likely to report poor health, but also to experience depressive symptoms.
“For women to die in pain and in self-loathing because this pretty boy with slick back hair convinced her to give her last dollars to him – You will be held accountable,” Darden said.
And holding those preachers accountable was an all-hands-on-deck situation.
Just as Korpi did his part by giving interviews to major media outlets, The Trinity Foundation also played a key role.
“[The Trinity Foundation] would go to monitor the different televangelists in person,” said Darden. “As they began providing this information to CNN and Time Magazine for their investigations.”
Media outlets recruited members of the Trinity Foundation to look through the dumpsters at recording studios for major televangelists in search of evidence to prove their fraud.
One thing they found was hundreds of discarded prayer requests, sent in by faithful viewers.
“They had rows of minimum wage people who took the check out and threw the letter and the prayer away. Then at the end of the day, those would all be in dumpsters,” explained Darden.
But it was more than forgotten prayer requests they found.
“Back in those days, before they knew we were investigating, they would put the printouts of their financials [in the trash] … Now, after we got investigating and stuff started getting the attention of the DA, then they could tighten that up. But by then it was too late,” said Darden.
Eventually, investigative stories came out exposing various televangelists for what they were: frauds.
Yet even after stories like these emerged and research continued to develop detailing the harms of the prosperity gospel, thousands of people continued to fall victim to the spiritual scheme.
“They believed until they died,” said Darden. “Others would deny their family rather than give up their televangelist friend.”
Televangelism is nowhere near as popular today as it was in the 1970s and 80s; however, according to Baylor research, the prosperity gospel still influences the beliefs of 25% of Americans.
“The appeal of the Prosperity Gospel is further amplified by media-savvy preachers and a culture shaped by American ideals of individualism, hard work, and divine reward,” the study reads.
But being media-savvy no longer requires paying for network time — a cellphone is all you need.
In a phenomenon known as “Celebrity Pastors,” religious leaders build massive media platforms that often glamorize their lives and wealth.
“In recent years, the line between who is a pastor and who is a celebrity has been blurred,” Sara Pulliam Bailey writes for The Washington Post. “…often Hollywood celebrities and preacher celebrities will be seen together in social media posts, such as [Carl] Lentz playing basketball with Drake, pastor Rich Wilkerson Jr. FaceTimeing with Justin Bieber or pastor Craig Groeschel hanging out with Kanye West at his ranch in Wyoming.”
“If you believe that God can be bribed, then it’s your ego that you’re bigger than God. That’s heresy to believe that God can be tempted by your money,” Darden said.
