It's a Revival

It wasn’t until I was older that I could really understand a lot of what happened when I was younger. I have this feeling a lot when I watch Seinfeld. This is a show my father loved and I remember watching it with him back in the late 80s and early 90s. It started in 1989, so when I was 12, and it was really the early episodes over the first few seasons that bring back a lot of memories for me.

 Seinfeld is one show that I still watch even though there’s a connection to my father. I tried to get rid of anything that would remind me of him, but not Seinfeld. I have always loved the show and still do. I think I’ve watched the whole series at least five times. 

Back when I was 12, there were a lot of jokes that I didn’t really get. And that is made by design. The writers of the show (I love Larry David also, and Curb Your Enthusiasm is a fantastic show) couldn’t explicitly say certain things because the show was on national television, so they would have to imply them. One episode comes to mind - The Contest. They never actually say at any time during the episode that it is a contest to see who can go the longest without masturbating. Instead phrases like “master of your domain” are used. I remember being confused by a lot of jokes in Seinfeld back then, but when I got older it made perfect sense and the jokes are even funnier just because they aren’t out in your face saying something that could actually be considered vulgar, but instead is saying it in a very skillfully subtle way. 

Seinfeld isn’t the only thing that I didn’t really get at the time that eventually came into clearer focus. So much of my father’s behavior and real reasons for doing things are much clearer now than they were when I was young. A lot of this comes from the fact that I just believed my father for many years. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I really started to think something was off. For the first 13 or 14 years of my life, if my father told me something, I believed him. If he said that God told him to do A or B, I took him at his word, believed he had a special ability to communicate with God, and didn’t question him further. 

This is for another post, but there’s a real difference in being born into a cult and coming into one as an adult. I didn’t know anything else for all my life. There was no frame of reference. There was no “normal” to look back on. All my life, since I was first able to talk, I was told about the supernatural ability of my father, that he was a prophet, that he spoke to God, that doing his will was the same as doing God’s will. I didn’t even question it when I was young. In fact, I believed it so resolutely that I actually felt that only our family, small church, and others who were in “the message” were going to go to heaven. 

When my father decided to have 40 days of revival services, I didn’t question his motives. He told our church in a sermon that we were all backsliding. That we needed to have a real Christian revival and the only thing that would cure us was to worship every day of the week for 40 days. I was young and grew up in this and thought that, okay, I guess we are all really big sinners right now so we need these 40 days of services. It turned out that there we wouldn’t just have services once a day, but twice a day. In the morning and night. We held services at 6 in the morning and 7 and night, early and late enough to make sure the congregation could attend and still work (a number of whom worked at one of my father’s companies). 

Shortly after we started these revival services, my father decided that we would have the morning services at our house. On the second floor of our house, my father had bult an addition over the garage and created one long, but narrow, room. He build a stage and tried to make the room look like a British pub, just with carpet and without the bar or alcohol. He used this room for his band practice (again, a post for another day) for a number of years, until he built a guest house connected to the main house with a tunnel and where the entire second floor was one big room with a stage. But at the time of the revival, the only room with a stage he had was this room on the second floor. It was right next to my bedroom (also over the garage). 

My father decided that we would have the morning services in this room. His reasons were simple - he is also a lawyer and runs a number of companies and needs the one hour that he would have otherwise spent commuting back and forth from our house to our church. Basically he was telling everyone because he was their pastor, his time was more important. After only a few days of having the morning services in church, they moved to this room in our house. At 6am every day, for 35 or so days, right next to my bedroom. Unfortunately I had no excuse to be late. 

It wasn’t until much later in life that I would realize that, like so many of my father’s actions, the revival services weren’t about a revival at all. I guess I should have been suspicious when he didn’t show up to his own revival services some days. We would all be at church on a weekday evening, for example, and the associate pastor would come out and say that my father had a vision that we were even worse off than he thought and that God told him that we didn’t deserve the gloriousness of his presence. Instead, we would think about our backsliding ways while we listened to a tape recording of one of his previous sermons. 

I remember actually feeling bad as the tape was being played. What did I do to earn the ire of God that our pastor and my father wouldn’t even darken the door of his own church that day, in the midst of a revival that he called for at the behest of the same God? People would weep and raise their hands, speak in tongues, and repent for their wickedness while my father stayed home. Even my mother would be there. The whole family and church, except for my father. 

If you’ve read any of the stories on this website, you may know that my father was a very poor money manager. As my grandfather said of my father, if he had $10 he spent $20. This was so true. I can’t recall a time in my life that we were not struggling for money. My mother desperately tried to reign in my father’s poor spending habits and complete lack of money management, but it was to no avail. When you are married to a mysogynist, in a cult that forces women to be subservient to men, and when your husband says they speak to God and that obeying him is obeying God, all the cards in the deck are stacked against you. 

My father always had one scheme or another going to try and overcome his poor financial choices. He was the worst role model in terms of finances a child could have. He was the ultimate grifter and it wasn’t until some years after the “revival” that I realized the 40 days of morning and evening services - 80 in total - had nothing to do with the congregation’s spiritual state. It had everything to do with money.

At every service, after the opening prayer was said and hymns were sung, the tithe plate was passed around. My father always made a point to tell his congregation that everyone must tithe at least 10% of their income, and that considering everyone was in a very bad state the more tithes they could give the better. He didn’t directly say that the congregation could buy themselves out of being sinners, but he sure as hell implied it. And every single time the tithe plate was passed around, people gave money. Many of these people were poor themselves, and here they were in a huge house with my father’s Jaguar parked outside, giving him money.

Thinking about it now really disgusts me and makes me feel very sorry for what happened. I wish I had known then what I know now and could have said or done something. At the time, our church had about 60 members, including minors. I don’t remember the exact number, but let’s say there were about 40 adults in the church, which is a fair estimate as I don’t ever remember there being as many as 20 children. Not everyone attended every service, but let’s say on average, 30 adults attended each of the revival services. Of those, let’s imagine that 20 gave at least $10 each time the tithe plate was passed around. 

This means for one service, my father would make $200. Given there were two services a day for 40 days, that means he would make $200 for each of the 80 services. This comes out to $16,000 and is a conservative estimate. There were likely more adults in attendance at each service and many of them likely gave more than $10 each time the tithe plate was handed to them. They were trying to get back in the good graces of my father and God, after all.

My father probably made at least $20,000 from those 40 days of revival services (this was in 1992 dollars, so equivalent to about $43,000 today), many of which he didn’t even attend. On the days he wasn’t there, we would go back home and find my father asleep, reading, or watching TV. So much for his concern for his congregation. He would claim he needed to rest because of all the stress he was under due to the backsliding of the congregation. I’m sure he was under stress, but it wasn’t because of the congregation. We had this series of services at a time when my father had another terrible financial strain. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he I do recall he got a second mortgage on our church building to construct the aforementioned guest house on our property and there was some issue. He was behind on the payments or needed the money for other nefarious purposes.

Today, when I think about how he used religion as a guise to grift the people in his congregation out of tens of thousands of dollars it turns my stomach. The fact that I was naive enough to believe his lies also makes me feel like I’ve lost part of my humanity and can never get it back. Like chasing it in a river, with the current keeping it just ahead of me and forever out of my grasp. 

Sometimes I also wonder if my father even believed his own lies and if he ever felt bad for what he was doing.

As the years have gone by, I’ve come to realize that there were so many things that happened that were not due to the reasons I thought they were. Like those Seinfeld jokes, my father did everything he could to mask his true intentions for many years. The 40 days of “revival” services is just one example of many. Coming to grips with them, and trying to forgive myself for not being able to do anything at 12 years old, is a continual reconciliation of my past and hope for the future.