TELEVANGELISTS DECRY LACK OF B-LIST CELEBRITIES

At a recent episode of The 700 Club, a number of televangelists complained publicly over the growing shortage of lower-level show business conversions.


"It used to be back in the 1970s, every week there was a new TV star or Top 40 one-hit-wonder convert," said Jackson "Jack" Hayferd of Clear HDTV Ministry, a television-based outreach. "Now all we can get is real people."


The evangelists, including Paul Crouch, Pat Robertson, and Benny Hinn, in a five-minute segment, showed film clips of famous new Christians from 1970-1988: The Golden Off B-Media Conversions, a documentary that chronicled the fervent—if sometimes brief—Hollywood/recording industry conversions of such accoladed celebrities as Kerry Livgren of the rock group Kansas, Gavin McLeod, captain on The Love Boat, B.J. Thomas, Kirk Cameron, and adult filmmaker Larry Flynt, who, in the words of the soundtrack, "was a Christian for a ten-day period in 1977."


There were also clips of more famous glitteratti like Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, "who may or may not have been converts, since it is difficult to know from the incoherence of their lyrics."


The public statements seem to be related to the appearance in the once-relevant magazine Christianity Today of an article "Do We Need More Celebrity Preaching?", which questioned the utility of celebrity testimony at the present time "because Baby Boomers are aging and other generations may be less susceptible to media-worship." The opinion piece also expressed a wistful yearning "for the days when Paul and Jan Crouch's show was made less tedious and boring by the nostalgic scheduling of an old character from Hogan's Heroes. But whatever the cause, there is undeniably a current lack of B-List celebrities."


Serious scholars also have recently questioned the efficacy of "evangelical celebrity-ism."


"Just because someone witnesses about being saved from depression attendant on losing out for a role on his favorite sitcom doesn't mean it will automatically be relevant to the average person's needs," said Lloyd Harold, a Professor of Popular Culture at UCLA's John Wayne College of Movie Star Studies.


No causes were assigned by any of the sources for the lack of these conversions, save for one media-watcher's reference to the "Culture Wars" and to "the fact that the Boomers appear to be moving on to other forms of narcissism, like health-worship and so-called organic foods."