Inspiring and frustrating

At the height of his renown, with a global ministry and a respected university to his credit, Oral Roberts told jokes on comedy shows like Laugh-In and Hee Haw. He chatted with Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett on late-night TV. He hosted celebrities on his popular television specials. He received over 6 million letters a year from petitioners and ­devotees, usually with contributions enclosed. He was second only to Billy Graham as a public religious figure, yet today few Christians know anything about him beyond the name attached to a university in Tulsa. But if “prosperity gospel” means anything to believers today, they have Oral Roberts to thank—or blame.

“The Roberts that will emerge in the following pages will both inspire and frustrate,” writes biographer Jonathan Root in Oral Roberts and the Rise of the Prosperity Gospel (Eerdmans 2023). His rise from hardscrabble beginnings is a classic American success story. His father Ellis felt called to be a traveling evangelist and church planter early in his adult life, and his mother Claudius was a fervent partner in the enterprise. She dedicated her youngest son, Granville Oral, to the Lord’s service before he was born. From their home base in Ada, Okla., the family traveled to revival meetings and lived on the uncertain largesse of local congregations.

Oral chafed under constant poverty. He ran away at age 16, hoping to make a name for himself as a high school athlete. But that ambition failed when he collapsed on the basketball court and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The boy returned home, where he ­lingered at death’s door where, it is said, the prayers of his parents healed him. With healing came surrender to Christ. After a brief lapse in faith and a nervous breakdown, Oral was again restored by prayer and never looked back. Licensed to preach by the Pentecostal Holiness Church, he gave his first sermon in August 1935.

Roberts overcame an early stutter and displayed a gift for preaching—and, his mother believed, for healing. But he wasn’t going to follow in his father’s footsteps. “I’d had it with poverty,” he wrote in his memoir. Early on, 3 John 2 gripped his imagination and became his lifelong theme: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.” The concept of “seed faith” formed the foundation of his ministry: that money sowed (contributed) in faith would yield a harvest of personal prosperity.

Root describes Roberts as humble and arrogant, innovative and reactionary, sincere and manipulative: “He could be honest with his failings but was prone to destructive levels of self-­deception.” He preached self-sacrifice but spared himself no luxury, and when his Pentecostal Holiness roots became a social detriment, he joined the United Methodist Church. His long marriage to Evelyn Lutman was a model of compatibility and faithfulness, but he was an absent father to his children, one of whom died by suicide.

Roberts’ self-deception harmed him most in his obsessive pursuit of an earthly kingdom. Oral Roberts University remains his most successful and lasting venture. But his ambition faltered on the City of Faith, a medical complex envisioned as the global center of cutting-edge medicine combined with faith-healing. His vision of the “900-foot Jesus,” spurring him to ­further fundraising heights when the contributions lagged, earned him widespread ridicule. But in 1987 what he called a message from God, threatening to “call him home” if he didn’t raise an additional $8 million, brought serious blowback across the evangelical world from which he never recovered.

Oral Roberts’ reputation may suffer today, but his influence lives on in ­second-generation prosperity preachers like Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, and Joel Osteen. It’s a sadly spotted legacy for a gifted and flawed preacher.