30 years ago: Disgraced televangelist Peter Popoff underwhelms Edmonton

This blogger first became aware of Peter Popoff early in 1979, coming across his weeknightly radio broadcast. Mr. Popoff was offering, and spending most of his time talking about, his book The Other Side of Life: An Astonishing Glimpse Into the Future; he was a few decades ahead of the curve when it came to books by people claiming to have gone to Heaven. I was just starting to read the Bible in those days, and the Lord protected me from falling for deception of the kind promoted by Mr. Popoff.

In the 1980s, Mr. Popoff became widely known as a televangelist, performing phony faith healings, ostensibly hearing directly from God. In 1986, secular humanist skeptic and magician James Randi exposed Mr. Popoff as a fraud, receiving his revelations from his wife, communicating through an earpiece. The exposure of Mr. Popoff as a fraud led to his declaration of bankruptcy in September 1987. However, you can't keep a con good man down, and Mr. Popoff wasn't one to let debunking and bankruptcy stop him. He started down the comeback trail, and on November 26, 1988, performed in one of the meeting rooms on the second floor of the Chateau Lacombe hotel in downtown Edmonton--a considerably smaller venue, with a considerably smaller audience, that he had attracted a few years earlier.

This blogger attended with fellow cultwatcher Chris Milner, and witnessed an entertaining, albeit bare-bones performance, with no miraculous healings, and no instant divine revelations. Although Mr. Popoff performed no miracles for his audience in Edmonton, he was able to tell stories about alleged miracles that he had recently performed elsewhere. My favourite was when he claimed that he had prayed that a recently-deceased man who was being transported for burial would be raised to life. According to Mr. Popoff, the man woke up in the hearse, and the driver of the hearse, a backslidden Pentecostal preacher, promptly pulled the car over, got down on his knees, and rededicated himself to the Lord. As they used to say in Get Smart, "I find that very hard to believe."

We weren't the only ones who weren't fooled by Mr. Popoff; on our way out, we met a discerning Christian named Steiner Bremnes, who perceptively observed that since Mr. Popoff had been exposed, he seemed to have lost his spiritual gift.

Mr. Popoff eventually found the prosperity gospel to be effective--for him--and within a few years he was back on television, raking in millions of dollars while using the methods that had made him notorious in the first place, and is presumably still going. Howard Cosell's comment about the "coaching business" can also apply to the televangelist business: "Bad apples seem to always float back to the surface of the barrel..."