Cinematic Sublimity: The Exclusion of Love in Contemporary Faith-Healing Media
With Ted Haggard’s recent fall from grace, Pat Robertson’s protein shakes, and Lahaye and Jenkins’ eschatological nightmares, televangelists and characters in Christian movies too often resemble spirit-filled frauds rather than spirit-filled savers. Christian media’s routine invocation of the sublime, a pivotal element in the genre of didactic Christian cinema, instills dread in its audiences, thus eliciting a contrived need for restoration and healing. In exploring this rhetoric of sublimity, we assert that many films with faith-healing themes (such as Six, Left Behind, and Time Changer) perpetuate the image of an exclusionary Messiah and His imminent exclusionary rapture. We also maintain that televangelist faith-healers correlate disability with sinfulness and doubt, thereby effecting the image of a distant Messiah and his exclusionary healing powers.
For this panel, we will examine what theologian Brian McLaren coins “the Christian rhetoric of exclusion” and its prominence in Christian media. We contend that typical heaven-and-hell dichotomies within evangelical pop culture obscure Christianity’s message of love. We also posit that Christian media’s embrace of extreme Arminianism—of personal agency and free will—portrays all physical ailments as the consequence of individual sinfulness. We further propose that such rhetorical Arminianisms equate religious experience to personal buying power. Healing and salvation are the commodities, and faith—by means of monetary donation—is the new currency within sermonic rhetoric.
We will showcase video clips from sermons and films, thus giving our audience a fuller sense of faith-healing rhetoric within Christian pop culture.
Speaker 1—Melanie Yergeau: “The New Thomases? Aimee Semple McPherson and the Rhetoric of Exclusion in the Sermons of Benny Hinn”
Rhetoricians and religious scholars often blame Foursquare church-founder Aimee Semple McPherson, with her fervent 1920’s radio evangelism and glamorous mega-churches, for Benny Hinn’s modern-day “miracle” antics. Excluded from feminist ministerial circles and demonized as the faith-healing Satan of the Great Depression, McPherson’s media legacy has been one of scandal—her faked kidnapping and her three marriages. Speaker 1 will compare McPherson’s book of sermons, This Is That, to the faith-healing rhetoric of Benny Hinn. While both evangelists commodify faith and healing with their pseudo-cultish, ableist rhetoric, McPherson’s depiction of “faith as currency” is often decontextualized when conflated with Hinn’s ministries.
Speaker 2—Lorelei Blackburn: “Cinematic Sublimity: The Exclusion of Love in Contemporary Faith-Healing Media”
Tom Sine, in “Who is Tim LaHaye,” declares that the Left Behind series “tend[s] to foster both an eschatology of disengagement and the politics of fear,” neither of which are core tenets of evangelical Christianity. Using Edmund Burke’s “On the Sublime and the Beautiful,” Speaker 2 will examine how some modern-day media evangelists use faith-healing propaganda to instill fear and false agency in their audiences. Speaker 2 will further posit that the use of the sublime, when manipulated by said evangelists, irresponsibly subjugates love as a minority discourse, reversing the primary foundation of Christianity, which places love at a premium.