I Remember Mammon

In my head, memories of the Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, known to one and all as Reverend Ike, are lodged in there alongside images of Pet Rocks and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Ike, who died earlier this week, was the son of a Baptist minister in South Carolina who found his own voice as a preacher in the mid-1960s, when he established a base in an abandoned Harlem movie theater. Within a few years, he was touring the country and broadcasting on TV and radio, and he was still at it until a couple of years ago, when he suffered a debilitating stroke. But in the mid-70s, Ike was briefly the subject of saturation coverage from the media, which seemed to regard him quizzically as a kind of fad. It may have been that some news outlets thought that Ike, who preached "prosperity gospel", talking about how reveling in earthly riches could be the best way of expressing a love of God, was a crook who just needed to be exposed, and that once that happened, he would come tumbling from his perch. But part of what made Ike seem such a man of that moment was that, to steal something Pauline Kael once wrote (about Paul Williams), he "reeked of the seventies mountebank's transcendence of satire." When a TV interviewer quoted him the line about how it was harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven, Ike, without blinking, replied that this was why he encouraged his flock to give him their riches, so that they could pass through that much more easily. Not the sort of man who stayed up night in fear of being caught in a contradiction, Ike could sometimes be heard spinning the line about the camel to his own purposes, insisting that its real point was that, since we all know that it's easier to do anything if you have money, it must be even more difficult for poor people to enter the kingdom of Heaven, since the gatekeeper will find them that much less impressive.

His would-be exposers couldn't lay a glove on him, of course. Ike was part of a classic tradition of bare-faced charlatans who were endlessly appealing to their marks, partly because they told their customer something that they wanted to hear, but also because their pitch was so entertaining that it felt to the marks as if they were getting value for money. The truth is, you can't really "expose" someone who's so openly a snake oil salesman, whether he's a W. C. Fields character or Jeff Koons or the four-time Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, much celebrated for having paid off his debts to Las Vegas casinos with suitcases stuffed with cash and for such bon mots as his boast that the only way his enemies could beat him in an election would be for them to catch him "in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." Such figures have a talent for making anyone trying to hold them to account look like a sanctimonious ass. Ike was also lucky in his timing. At his seventies peak, after Watergate and Vietnam, he was the beneficiary of a social climate so saturated with cynicism that a con man who made no bones about being a con man seemed, incongruously, to be the last honest person around.

He happened to arrive in Harlem the year after the death of Father Divine, to whom he was often compared, especially by white reporters who couldn't readily think of the name of another black minister. But it may have been more important that his breakthrough success overlapped with the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the blaxploitation era, when it became fashionable for black Americans to withdraw from political movements aimed at social change in favor of pursuing their own version of hip capitalism. At the same time, Ike had perverted ties to political activists of an earlier age; like the labor activists and other radicals of the 1920s, he had a particular, sneering obsession with the idea that poor Christians will get their reward in the next life--that, as an old folk song has it, "there'll be pie in the sky when you die"--but where Woody Guthrie mocked that notion as a way of encouraging people to fight for a better life for the workers, Ike was content to encourage his flock to fill the collection plate and live vicariously through him. He didn't introduce that concept to African-American church tradition; he was just more shameless than anyone else about spelling it out in big block letters. And he did offer personal services to improve people's lives. In the '80s, Ike sent out fund-raising letters that included a checklist of problems and ailments that might be plaguing the recipients. In exchange for a check, Ike promised to include in his prayers a request that God give the donor some relief in such areas as "back trouble", "foot trouble", "female trouble", "nervous", "bad habits", "past-due bills", "mental oppression", and "car (what make?)"

The tradition of social activism is strong in the black church, and for most of his career, Ike remained a singular phenomenon; it wasn't until the '90s that you began to really hear about religious materialism becoming widespread enough in black churches to become controversial. I've always wondered, though, if Ike's example had any effect on the development of the religious right in the late '70s, which would explode into a muscular, stubborn force in white American churches, until it became not just acceptable to talk about the poor as if they were being singled out for punishment by God, who showered material riches on those who had won His favor, but practically heretical to suggest that God didn't give a rat's ass who was rich and who was poor, let alone that He might smile on those who'd been fortunate in this lifetime if they spread it around a little. I doubt that the children of Ayn Rand needed Ike to come around to this line of thinking, but they might have harbored honest doubts about how many credulous God-fearing people they could sell it to, until they got a whiff of Ike's TV ratings. Who knows? Maybe the man who, for his own reasons, drained politics out of the black church was the great unacknowledged inspiration for the men who drained Christ's teachings out of white Christianity and turned it into a partially owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.