You know those beefy guys who stand on the stage at healing services and catch people who fall backwards after Benny Hinn blows on them or they get caught up in a paroxysm of Holy Spirit Fever and lapse into a coma? At Mike Sexton’s Lakewind Fellowship Church in Knoxville, they’re called “assigned catchers,” and they have periodic meetings to discuss catching strategy.
Alas, this wasn’t enough to help the luckless Matthew Lincoln, who was seized by the spirit on June 6, 2007, after being lightly touched on the forehead by visiting minister Robert Lavala, causing him to fall backward sans catcher, striking his head and back on a “carpet-covered cement floor.” Lincoln, age 57, was well known to church elders, having regularly received the spirit and fallen backwards since 1995, but since he had a pre-existing degenerative disc disease caused by a 1994 fall resulting in surgical fusion of two vertebrae, his 2007 tumble proved permanently disabling and disastrous for his music production company and recording studio, which had, among other things, been previously struck by lightning. Lincoln is asking the church for $2.5 million [1] to make up for its catcher negligence, and yet his wife Shirley Lincoln wants only $75,000 for “loss of consortium” with her husband, indicating that the recording studio was not the only thing previously struck by lightning.
Balance It Out With an “I Don’t Give a Flip” License Plate
South Carolina went where Florida feared to tread and approved an “I Believe” personalized Christian license plate [2] that looks exactly like the design that died in committee in Florida. What, they can’t do their own self-righteous plate in South Carolina? They have to call up Florida and ask them to email the PDF file? Anyway, the ACLU is experiencing the usual paroxysms of anti-clerical rage, and this augurs to be one of the top ten time-wasters of the next year. While they were at it, the legislators authorized some Ten Commandments monuments [3] in the public square, just to make sure the litigation goes on into the next century.
Noggins Askew
Turkey seems hellbent on ripping apart the entire society over the issue of whether adult women are allowed to wrap a scarf around their heads [4] while attending university classes. And they say we have culture wars.
The Anemic Commish
Apropos of the hand-wringing [5] at the recent Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis, am I a bad person if I don’t particularly care how many Southern Baptists there are (16.3 million), how many of them go to church every week (6.15 million), and whose fault it is that the numbers are declining every year? As we’ve pointed out many times, it only takes 12. When the numbers go below 12, call me, okay?
No Demons Allowed in D.C.
Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, is once again being raked over the coals for the story he told 14 years ago about participating in the casting out of a demon from a girl he knew in college, and this time the rationale is that, since he’s being considered as John McCain’s running mate, the public has a Right To Know whether he’s an exorcist or not. Obviously he’s not an exorcist. He witnessed an event that can be seen routinely at pentecostal churches everywhere.
He considers it an authentic event, part of “spiritual warfare” that has touched his own life. Unfortunately, to read his 1994 account of the group exorcism [6], you have to pay $1.50, so I’ll just sum it up: a girl he met through University Christian Fellowship at either Brown University or Oxford (he’s not clear on where it happened, perhaps to protect her identity) started sobbing uncontrollably, partly because she’d been diagnosed with skin cancer and a friend of hers had recently committed suicide. She then collapsed, having an apparent seizure, and was surrounded by her fellow Christians who started trying to cast out what they naturally assumed to be a demon. (If you’ve ever seen one of these prayer circles, then you’re so not amazed that they didn’t call for medical help.)
The hours-long group exorcism was full of ups and downs, profanity and prayer, commands to Satan, intercessory appeals to God, and it eventually was deemed a success when the girl smiled, said “Jesus is Lord,” and then professed not to remember anything that had happened. She was also apparently cured of her cancer. Jindal wrote the article for New Oxford Review, the conservative Catholic journal, although it reads like the sort of evangelical story you tell right before an altar call. It wouldn’t seem to be at all out of place in Louisiana, where there are far stranger wars among principalities and powers along the bayous than Jindal ever witnessed in the ecstatic churches of the Ivy League. Once again, what happened to the Mitt Romney Rule of leaving this stuff out of politics entirely? Were you guys just kidding?