BENNY HINN’S MEDIA EMPIRE: IMAGE AND PRESENCE IN GLOBAL TELEVANGELISM TRAVIS WARREN COOPER INDIANA UNIVERSITY [email protected]. Western world. He learned English by watching The power of charisma is precisely its infectious, non- films in the language with no subtitles. Based rational capacity to capture attention and to rivet it to on those visions of sounds and images he the person who radiates it–whether it is Luke absorbed via television, this essay will Skywalker or Darth Vader, good or evil; Princess Diana or Princess Leia, real or fictional. Television and demonstrate, Hinn also cultivated his identity in film are the visual mass media that make this happen. relation to them. “When we played cowboys They do this by enacting the enchantment of an and Indians in the yard,” he remembers, “I immediate connection.1 always pretended I was an American, and David Morgan bragged about my knowledge of the United States—even though it was limited to what I If that reality is so strong, so deep, and so personal, had seen on the screen.”3 After Catholic school then how real is the one who gives it? It’s a significant question. How real must be the messenger if the lessons on the weekdays followed by tutoring message is so real?2 sessions, the children “rushed to the television Benny Hinn set.” He and his brothers would finish the day out by watching a program before bedtime. n his autobiographical account, He Touched Western televised media, as his autobiography I Me (1999), Toufik Benedictus (“Benny”) attests, shaped the young Hinn and made an Hinn nostalgically describes his childhood to impression on his outlook.4 the reader. On Saturday mornings, his mother, Fast forward some two decades, from the Clemence, made sandwiches and lemonade for late 1950s and early 1960s to the mid-1980s. the family to take to Bat Yam, a famous beach The little Palestinian boy from Jaffa, religiously just south of Jaffa, Israel, where the children Greek Orthodox and Greek-Armenian by enjoyed the pleasures of the coast: swimming, heritage—the child who idolized the larger- sunning, and kite-flying. After returning home, than-life stars of American television, enacted in the afternoon, the Hinns viewed weekly Gunsmoke episodes with his siblings, and movies for kids including Laurel and Hardy, aspired to be an American—has, in a way, Hercules, Tarzan and The Lone Ranger. His achieved his goals. In 1967, after the Six Days’ dad, Constandi, served as the projectonist. War, the Hinn family immigrated to Toronto, “Glued to the screen,” Hinn reminisces, “I’d Ontario, where his father secured a job selling watch those movies and dream of leaving Israel insurance. Hinn gradually involved himself in and moving to the West. ‘That’s me,’ I would the local “Jesus Movement,” and began to say to myself. ‘There I am right there!’” attend Kathryn Kuhlman meetings. He worked American cinema first exposed Hinn to the with Kuhlman’s ministry between 1977 and 1981 and also began his own independent preaching ministry around that time. By 1983, 1 David Morgan, The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America (New York: Routledge, 2007), 224. 3 Benny Hinn, He Touched Me: An Autobiography 2 Benny Hinn, Good Morning Holy Spirit (Nashville, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 18-19, 22. TN: Thomas Nelson, 1990), 124. 4 Hinn, He Touched Me, 18-19, 22. Symposia 6 (2014): 1-19.© The Author 2014. Published by University of Toronto. All rights reserved. 2 SYMPOSIA “Pastor Benny,” as his audiences know him forms that allow Hinn to market novel around the world, established the World instructional services and prayer rituals via Outreach Church in Orlando, Florida; by 1992 it burgeoning technological apparati, including reached more than 7,000 members. Hinn also but not limited to smartphones and tablets. Such continued to travel widely as an itinerant devices and media expand the repertoire of the evangelist and healer, and claims to have televangelist in the service of the cultivation of preached the largest healing service in world presence. history, in which some 7.4 million people attended.5 In the 1990s, he achieved celebrity Sensational Forms and a Brief History of status in the world of Christian religious Televangelism broadcasting. Hinn became a performer on the silver screen. The categories of religion and media are After setting Hinn’s ministry in historical complexly interrelated constructs. As media context, this essay traces his meteoric rise to scholar Daniel Stout argues, “the elements of charismatic stardom and celebrity status, religion (i.e., ritual, deep feeling, belief, and focusing on the revivalist’s adoption of various community) are experienced through the media technologies and media forms for neo- of popular culture.”7 Before situating Hinn’s evangelical purposes. This essay proposes the experiential uses of popular media in the history categories of image and presence to elucidate of American televangelism, however, a brief both the ways technology and media have account the analytical scope of the essay will shaped Hinn as well as, more importantly, the aid the reader. Although the arguments posed in manner in which he implements the instruments the following refer frequently to religious into his ministry and outreach endeavors in an groups and/or subgroups such as effort to assist others in the experience of divine “evangelicalism,” “pentecostalism,” or “Protest- healing or the cultivation of empowering antism,” the primary interest here is on the ways presence. Television, this essay ultimately evangelical entrepreneurs use media forms to argues—conceptualized as a fluid, permeable, construct, facilitate, and embody both per- and connective medium in the minds of its formances and discourses as religious. In other users—serves well as a conduit of charismatic words, the intent is not to generalize the orality and operates as a highly compatible and following findings as equally characteristic to even complimentary system to that of the the above Christian categories, but to focus on “densely populated cosmology” or pentecostal- particular developments and themes within the experiential worldview of Hinn and his umbrella terms. followers.6 The essay concludes by analyzing a Further, one might describe the method- number of new Internet-enabled social media ological framing of this essay as falling under the rubric of what anthropologist Birgit Meyer describes as sensational forms, that is, “relatively fixed, authorized modes of invoking, 5 G. W. Gohr, “Hinn, Benedictus (‘Benny’),” in The International Dictionary of Pentecostal and and organizing access to the transcendental, Charismatic Movements, ed. Stanley M. Burgess and thereby creating and sustaining links between Eduard M. van der Maas (Grand Rapids, MI: religious practitioners in the context of Zondervan, 2003), 713-715. particular religious organizations.”8 Elaborating 6 The cosmological system of prosperity preachers, writes historian Kate Bowler, is populated by “unseen forces, spiritual power and supernatural beings, and expressed by ritual objects.” Ritual objects, in the case 7 Daniel A. Stout, Media and Religion: Foundations of of Hinn’s ministry, include television sets and Internet- an Emerging Field (Florence, KY: Routledge, 2012), 2. enabled devices. Blessed: A History of the American 8 Birgit Meyer, “Religious Sensations: Why Media, Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Aesthetics, and Power Matter in the Study of Press, 2013), 190, 160-161. Contemporary Religion,” in Religion: Beyond a COOPER / BENNY HINN’S MEDIA EMPIRE 3 on the concept, sensational forms also include: although the ideology of some evangelical i) social transmission and sharing; ii) groups tends to be “nostalgic and traditionalist,” practitioners carrying out practices; iii) the their methods have been “innovative and formation of religious subjects (or even technologically sophisticated”13: cultivation, as this essay will refer to the Preachers had been among the first process); iv) the production of certain feelings; Americans, back in the 1920s, to exploit and lastly, v) inclusion of the responses of radio. By 1950 they were also coming to penitents to religious objects and materials (e.g., terms with the new medium of religious architecture, iconography, or even television, and by the 1970s they had images).9 Central to the purposes of this essay, complemented televangelism with Meyer classifies televangelism’s production of satellite feeds, direct-mail fund-raising, televised emotion and the emotional experience and computers. Evangelists unself- of viewers as a new category of sensational consciously used the best technologies forms in which the technology encourages mass of their day to produce shows with audiences to participate, emotively, in the names like Charles Fuller’s Old- televised rituals.10 The following account, then, Fashioned Revival Hour on radio or narrows in on the methods by which religious Jerry Falwell’s Old-Time Gospel Hour institutions (and in particular, Benny Hinn on television.14 Ministries) produce not only “distinct sensory Itinerant revivalists or evangelists, including regimes” but cultivate “specific bodily and Benny Hinn, act as quintessential examples the sensory disciplines” as well as “particular entrepreneurial use of technology for evan- sensibilities.”11 gelical purposes, supporting historian Mark Hinn joins the ranks of historic Noll’s description of evangelicals as “culturally televangelism’s technologically progressive adaptive biblical experimentalists.”15 entrepreneurs. Historically, evangelical leaders Evangelicals, and especially pentecostals, have recognized the power of technology but have been at the forefront of this technological have put technology to use in varied ways, innovation that potentially solves the itinerant leading scholars to document a paradoxical preacher’s dilemma of reaching the masses.16 development in the history of American religion.12 As historian Patrick Allitt notes, 13 Patrick Allitt, Religion in America since 1945: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xii. For more on the ideologically powerful and Concept, ed.