WE KNOW THAT HE WAS NAKED

A leading American evangelist is caught in a sexual scandal.

Simon Hoggart casts the first stone Washington IT HAS been a mixed week for America's television evangelists. On Sunday we learned that Oral Roberts, probably the richest of the lot, had been spared to us. Roberts had announced on his television show that God had told him that unless he raised $8 million by 31 March, he would be 'called home', or 'die' as most people would put it. As a fund-raising technique this is no more disgraceful than most of the pitches used by the evangelicals, mainly unsubtle hints that a large donation will cure cancer, bring a windfall or straighten out a wayward son. But Roberts's appeal, with its image of God as a kind of Mafia capo calling in his debts, produced mostly ribald laughter. A popular bumper sticker in his home town, Tulsa, read: `L.O.R.D.', standing for 'Let Oral Roberts Die'. He also caused con- siderable anxiety among other television preachers who didn't want their own gol- den geese to be too closely inspected. By last weekend, Roberts had raised only $6.7 million and it was beginning to look as if he might not make it. Hopeful reporters descended on the Oral Roberts University campus and the City of Faith hospital complex.

At the last moment a Florida millionaire coughed up the remaining $1.3 million. For a God who apparently operates a cosmos- wide protection racket, it seemed suitable that the donor made his money trading dog tracks.

The bad news for the fundamentalists was that Jim Bakker, owner of the 24- hour-a-day 'Praise The Lord' religious television network and inspiration behind the world's largest religious theme park, had been paying blackmail for years after a fling with a secretary. Bakker (pronounced 'Baker') said he had paid over $115,000, though the long-term loss to PTL finances could run into tens of millions. Bakker's lawyer claimed that he had been 'set up', and that the incident had lasted only 15 minutes, making it possibly history's most expensive knee-trembler.

The greatest shock was to Bakker's born-again admirers, of whom more than five million a year visit 'Heritage USA', his religious theme park and retreat. I went there last year.

'Tell me,' the lady on my left at dinner asked, 'have you been washed in the blood of the Lamb?"No', I said firmly, 'I was raised an Episcopalian.' That shut her up. To a born-again believer, the Church of England, as a religion, ranks somewhere between atheism and the cargo cult.

We were attending the nightly 'Dinner Theater' at which clean-cut young men in blazers and girls in disconcertingly tight sheath dresses sang inspirational songs after the rubber chicken. The theatre is attached to the Heritage Grand, a 500- room hotel (1,000 rooms by this spring) furnished in astonishing splendour. I got in the lift with a young honeymoon couple, and as we gazed down on the brilliantly lit lobby, with its chandeliers, marble, rose- wood and its huge indoor swimming pool where baptisms take place, the bride said: 'I think Heaven must look like this.'

She'll know for sure soon if a planned new ride is ever built for the theme park: this will whisk you along to visit re-creations of Heaven and Hell. I asked Mr Neil Eskelin, a vice-president at PTL, if this might not be misleading; wasn't Heaven really a sense of oneness with ....hrist and Hell His absence? No, he explained pa- tiently, they were actual places. Precise descriptions, including the walls of Jasper and sheets of gold, could be found in the Book of Revelation.

The hotel is like any American luxury accommodation, only more so. No Gideon bible skulks in the drawers; instead a vast leather-bound volume sits on the table. A card asks you to observe the 11 a.m. checkout time so the room will be ready for the next guest, adding: 'Matthew, vii, 12, ('whatsoever ye would that men should do to you. . .').

The strongest drink you can get is iced tea. Bakker's religious cable network is on the television round the clock, and you can get care and counselling any time. There is night-life too — for example in the Upper Room, the replica of the place the Last Supper was held, they have communion every 2 a.m.

Before the scandal, the main attraction for visitors was the daily broadcast by Bakker and his wife, Tammy. It recently emerged that she had been addicted to prescription drugs since having her chil- dren. She is a tiny woman, even smaller than her husband, and isn't so much made-up as iced, like a cake. The layers of gunge on her face make her look a doll, and part of the Bakkers' appeal is their vulnerability. Whereas preachers like Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart and Oral Roberts look in command, the kind of people who would run your life, the Bakkers look as if they share your prob- lems — though, as we now know, they have rather more than most.

The studios were far more lavish than anything you would expect to see at a network here, and a world away from the BBC, Wood Lane. Even backstage looked like a set from Dallas. The 1,200-strong audience saw a stupendously over- decorated house, in which the guests sat silently, as if waiting for a Tupperware party to begin. The PTL singers perfamed with the aid of huge idiot boards: 'OH VIC- TORY IN JESUS. . ."MY SAVIOR FOREVER...'

When Bakker appeared the audience rippled and twittered with excitement. He said: 'We have a very special guest today, a man who's been dead for many years. . I thought this a bit rich, even for a television preacher, but it turned out to be an actor playing Dwight Moody, the famous evangelist. The advantage of having dead people on your show is that you can put what words you like in their mouths. Moody warned us against the press, which is full of lies about Christian folk, and against too much education. Tammy chip- ped in to agree: 'the problem with edu- cated people is that they have educated themselves right out of a relationship with the Lord.' The audience sighed with plea- sure. Few of them have been to university. so it's nice to hear that makes you morall!. superior to people who have.

The most startling part of Heritage USA, though, is the residential estates, where people actually live. They are quiet, wooded acres, effectively suburbs of the boom city of Charlotte, North Carolina. where many of the residents work. These streets, with their pastel-painted houses. neatly tended lawns, bikes propped UP against the porches, are a dream, a fantasy of morning in Reagan's America, a land where there is no crime, no drunkenness nor even crab grass. Before the scandal broke, the plan was to build 14,000 of these homes, creating a medium-sized town of 40,000 or so people, all of them born-again believers.

This was Bakker's response to the vast increase of wealth and power the television preachers have now accumulated. Their total income, mainly from donations, is reckoned to be around a billion a year. Robertson, who is standing for President, wishes to reach outwards and run the whole of America (though, for several reasons, his campaign is faltering). Bakker wanted fundamentalists to close in on themselves, and to shut away the unre- deemed world outside.

No doubt he will return, having worked out a defence involving Satan's evil machinations. He is good at turning events to his advantage: when the local Charlotte newspaper accused him of spending church funds on a luxury apartment and a boat, he appealed on television for support and had his most successful fund-raising drive ever. But the television preachers' real art has been the pyramid selling of salvation. Huge debts are serviced by means of the stream of donations from millions of view- ers, and if that dries up, each financial empire faces collapse. Roberts's 'City of Faith' hospital, for instance, is losing a million dollars a month.

Bakker may manage to save himself. But the television preachers face a worse threat. Thanks to Robertson's presidential campaign, Roberts's buffoonery and Bak- ker's unfortunate quickie, the rest of America — the majority who don't watch religious television, don't visit Heritage USA and don't believe that Mother There- sa is going to hell because she hasn't been born again — have begun to notice the evangelists and to examine what's going on. So far they don't care for what they see.

Simon Hoggart is Washington correspon- dent of the Observer.