Tattooed "faith-healer" and scam artist Todd Bentley has announced that he's temporarily suspending his ministry because...wait for it...he got busted cheating on his wife with one of his staff. That sounds familiar. Bentley's organization, Fresh Fire Ministries, announced today that "the enemy has found a way into our camp" and that Bentley will be stepping down from his position on the Board of Directors and will be canceling all of his ministry activities for at least the rest of "the season". (Not exactly sure what they mean by that, honestly.) Bentley's thralls have been assured that "there has been no sexual immorality"* but that Bentley "entered into an unhealthy relationship on an emotional level with a female member of his staff". That peculiar choice of wording amuses me a little, because "unhealthy emotional relationships" don't generally result in terrible marital strife and the suspension of a lucrative ministry movement. I'm forced to wonder if they simply don't want to own up to Bentley engaging in extramarital humping.
Child molester Todd Bentley is taking a break from preaching.
The rest of the announcement basically boiled down to "stop asking questions and keep sending money." Weirdly, however, mention is also made of Fresh Fire Ministries' "Supernatural Training Centre". Apparently this is a program through which Bentley and his lieutenants teach other folks all of their magical powers. This is in reference to the "charismatic gifts", aka magical X-Men powers, that Pentecostals claim that Yahweh bestows on the most sycophantic of his followers, but according to the STC these gifts can brought out through spiritual "impartation" by Bentley and his goons for the lowly price of $3,600 tuition, $1,500 for a mission trip, and $450 a month as a dormitory fee. Oh, and a $50 application fee. Bentley claims to have raised almost two dozen people from the dead, so perhaps that's meant to be a bargain price, but considering the cost it should come as no surprise that the application fee includes a financial disclosure form. (Carrying the X-Men joke a little further, the SYC promotional material continually references one's DNA - Divine Nature Activated.)
Luckily for Bentley and disturbingly for the rest of the world, the faithful have tended to have short memories when it comes to this kind of scandal. Precedent indicates that we have every reason to expect Bentley to be back to his huckster ways in no time.
Thanks to reader Jak for bringing this to my attention.
*Except for that little boy Bentley molested when he was a teenager, of course. Jesus gave him a mulligan on that one.
Well, I unwittingly revealed yesterday that I haven't been keeping up with Swift from over on The Amazing Randi's page. Last week's issue included a scathing look at Todd Bentley and the suggestion that, if his miracles are as well-documented as he claims, he should just mosey down to Florida and collect his million dollar prize. The full article is here.
Oh, by the way, the more I read about this nutjob, the more I despise him. For one thing, Bentley is slightly more "vigorous" in his whole laying on of hands routine than other faith healers: sometimes he'll actually strike his postulants hard to "drive the diseases out". Embedded below is a video taken at one of his Florida shows during which he kicks a man with stage IV colon cancer in the stomach. You know, because kicking guys with advanced colon cancer square in the gut is good for them. What an asshole.
As I've mentioned before, it is a source of civic pride to many Louisville residents that a hospital in our city has performed, to my knowledge, every hand transplant ever in the United States. The current ongoing success story revolves around a fellow named Dave Armstrong, whose right hand was blown off when one of his guns misfired during target practice. As of Saturday, July 12th, Mr. Armstrong now has a functional, if slightly used, cadaver hand attached to his forearm. He's the forth person in the country to receive a hand transplant, and thus far Armstrong and all three of his fellow patients are doing well and still have their transplanted limbs. One of these transplant recipients, Matthew Scott, has had his transplanted limb for almost 9 years now. That's pretty freaking amazing.
I bring this up because I stumbled upon this front page article on Friday night after returning home from a showing of The Dark Knight, and my first thought, corny as it sounds, was something along the lines of "Doctors are real superheroes." (At that point a rainbow cut across the sky and a cartoon deer bounded through the foreground.) After reading through the article and then glancing through the rest of the national news, I made the foolish mistake of opening up the "Metro" section of the paper, which is normally reserved for glurge stories mixed incongruously with crime reports. In sharp contrast to the meaningful, dare I say uplifting, article about Dave Armstrong, the front page of the Metro proudly proclaimed that lunatic faith healer Todd Bentley had infiltrated my town, cleverly sneaking in under cover of Thursday while everyone was distracted by early reviews of Batman, and held a donation-fest revival before quickly moving on.
Bentley is a Canadian Pentecostal who, according to publications from his native country, has had some run-ins with the law for drug crimes and the sexual assault of a young boy, but now, of course, claims to be an utterly new person who has been endowed by the Creator of the Universe with magical X-Men powers that enable him to supernaturally heal anyone without an externally visible affliction. Bentley has been the subject of a recent Nightline report, which is embedded below, and has even run afoul of other religious oddballs, among them Intelligent Design advocate Bill Dembski, who currently "teaches" at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dembski has a personal ax to grind with Bentley - at one point he and his wife went to a Bentley service in the hopes of having their autistic son healed. According to Dembski their child wasn't even allowed to come near the stage to receive prayers. I wonder why...?
In any event, if there's a polar opposite of legitimate advances in medical science it's money-grubbing charlatan faith-healers. Hopefully this kind of lunacy will eventually be regulated with as much rigor as other false medical claims. (Which honestly aren't regulated with enough rigor themselves.) Some of my more cynical friends have claimed that the victims of these faith healers deserved what they get, but I disagree. Perpetrating this kind of fraud on innocent, trusting people is the very height of callousness. Even if they have been conditioned by their religions to believe bizarre claims with insufficient evidence, the responsibility for any specific act of fraud rests solely on the shoulders of the witch doctor who perpetrated it.
Child molester Todd Bentley is taking a break from preaching.
