Entertaining Dr Murdock

Spectator, The, Jun 10, 2000 by Wakefield, Mary

And then the piece de resistance, a bit of con-man logic from the other side of Alice's looking-glass: `And if there are any of you who still have doubts in your hearts, just look at me . . . I have a huge mansion, five beautiful cars, I take jets wherever I go. I couldn't have done this on my own. God chose to bestow a financial blessing on me and I promise he will do the same to you if you'll just have faith and sow the seed.'

Then it's time to be serious. Balcony Todd dims the lights. Mike's eyes squeeze shut. `Hallelujah, oh hallelujah, shabba kosorah babba baba korosobayeh rabbiinobbaba....'

Speaking in tongues is not Mike's forte. He runs out of cryptic-sounding consonants all too soon, lapsing into an embarrassing babbabbabbabbabb sound. So, well-trained Todd pumps up the volume and the organ music grows to fill the room. On cue, 150 voices launch into Mike's smash hit:

`When you speak, Holy Spirit, I will obeeeeeey, Oh, I will do things your waaaaaay.'

With the help of the Holy Spirit, Mike has written more than 5,000 religious songs. Within three lines, everybody is in tears. And while they sing and cry, the Mentor's burly assistants pass round gilded buckets and collect 150 $91 cheques.

When I started to work at the Wisdom Center, I was convinced that nothing could shake my cynicism about the televangelist racket in the United States. I was looking forward to exposing Murdock. I thought it seemed like a glamorous thing to do. Some 3,000 envelopes later, I began to think again.

After endless questions, check-ups and phone calls, the Wisdom Center administrative team had accepted that I was just a young Brit who'd been so impressed by seeing the Mentor on television, that I'd driven out to his ministry to volunteer. They put me to work in the warehouse, sending off thousands of thank-you letters and entreaties for more money, each one as identical as every donation was different. There were long letters and postcards - scrawled, stained, perfumed, business-like. There were letters with a pattern of bluebells printed around the edge of every cream-coloured sheet, each one carrying the hopes and prayers of Mike's lonely, pretzel-addicted television audience.

I drove for an hour every morning, slaloming past the road-rage wrecks of battered trucks, up the 135 from Dallas to Denton. Every morning I knelt with Mike's other minions and whispered my Prayer for Success in the Quiet Place. I filled in my `Schedule for Success' sheet in a cardboard cupboard called the `Administration Center' and trotted off to a decaying garage, the `Shipping Center and Warehouse', to stuff envelopes and dispatch tapes of Mike's sermons to his fans around the world. For two months I didn't even meet Mike Murdock, the man who was supposed to seduce me. I was desperate to speed up this process and prove to my television employers that I was a latter-day Mata Hari. I had to get this greaseball to pay me some attention.

Every week I practised my seductive stare on him from Todd's balcony, but to no avail. After every Thursday service, the Mentor would slide out of a side-door without a backward glance, followed by his entourage of 7-ft clones, and jump onto a plane to bleed another congregation in another state.