A Straight Blow with a Crooked Stick

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Picture the tent. Sawdust on the ground, folding chairs in rows, a preacher whose suit shines under the lights and whose arithmetic on the offering plate has never once survived an audit. Everybody in that tent has priced the man. The hair is a construction project; the Cadillac outside was bought with seed faith; the healing stories come pre-packaged from the last town and the town before that. And halfway through the sermon a woman in the third row starts to cry, walks the aisle, and goes home sober for the first time in eleven years. She stays sober. She gets her kids back. Multiply her by a career and you have the oldest scandal in American religion: the con works, and the conversions are real.

Here is the theory, and I hold it strongly: the conversion never ran through the preacher's character. It ran past it. The man is a pipe. A rusty iron pipe delivers clean water from a clean reservoir all day long, and you judge the water at the tap. The woman in the third row is no dupe. She arrived hungry, she heard scripture read aloud in a room full of music and need and witness, and the transaction happened between her and God. The conman supplied the room, the hour, and the nerve. The Holy Spirit supplied everything else. His cynicism is a fact about him; it says nothing about her.

Paul rejoiced

Paul worked this out from a prison cell. In Philippians he reports that some men were preaching Christ out of envy and rivalry, running their mouths specifically to make his chains itch, and his ruling on the matter is one sentence long: in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. Paul never ordered an audit of the preachers' motives. He understood that the message does not belong to the messenger once it leaves his mouth. A rival with a corrupt heart and a true sentence is still a man broadcasting a true sentence, and heaven keeps its own books on the heart.

The church already had this fight

The Donatist controversy of the fourth century asked the same question in formal dress: does a sacrament fail when the priest administering it is corrupt, lapsed, or a fraud? Augustine's answer carried the church. Baptism is Christ's act, not the priest's, and the water does not check the hands that pour it. The seminaries gave the doctrine a Latin name, ex opere operato; the tent circuit gives it a plainer one. God can strike a straight blow with a crooked stick. He has been doing it so long and so openly that the crooked stick ought to stop surprising anyone. Consider Balaam, a hired pagan seer who took money to curse Israel and delivered blessings instead, then received his correction from his own donkey. The ass is in the text for a reason. The instrument cabinet of the Almighty has never been stocked exclusively with saints.

The Spirit cons the conman

The prettiest part of the theory is the reversal inside it. The conman believes he is running the room. He works the crowd the way a card mechanic works a deck; he counts the offering; he leaves town congratulating himself on the performance. All the while he has been used, thoroughly and without his consent, as a delivery vehicle for the one thing he never intended to deliver. The Holy Spirit cons the conman. His stagecraft, his timing, his shameless nerve: every tool of the grift turns out to have been requisitioned. Elmer Gantry preached himself hoarse as a fraud and a lecher, and Sinclair Lewis still had to write the scenes where the words landed on people like weather. The words were never Gantry's. He was renting them out by the hour and the owner kept showing up to collect souls with them.

So I decline to grade the modern instruments. Russell Brand performs his Christianity in public, baptized in the Thames with the cameras rolling, and I love him as a performative Christian precisely because the performance is beside the point. Adam Curry carries the gospel into rooms full of men who would never sit in a pew, men who came for the podcast and stayed for the witness. Whether either man's interior life would pass an inspection is a question I am unqualified to run, and Paul says I do not need to. A weapon does not have to be sincere. It has to be aimed, and it has to be fired, and the aiming and the firing have a long record of being handled by hands other than the weapon's own. Crooked stick. Straight blow. The dupes keep turning out to be converts, and the conmen keep turning out to be delivery boys. I will take that trade every day of the week.

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