When someone tells me they follow a particular preacher, I like to look into that preacher. Not because I think I know better — because I want to see who’s shaping the information that’s becoming someone’s beliefs. And what I keep finding, across decades and denominations and dollar amounts that would embarrass a Fortune 500 CEO, is the same machine running the same program. Different face. Different hair. Same grift.
This isn’t about whether God is real. This isn’t about whether the teachings of Jesus have value — They do. I think of Jesus like a big brother with solid advice for being here and present with truth. But I’m not on the “I’m a real Christian” team. I’m not worshiping anybody like a doofus. I’m standing outside the whole operation looking at the mechanics the same way I’d look at any scam — with amusement, with precision, and without handing anybody my money.
What I call Fox News Christianity isn’t limited to one network or one denomination. It’s an operating system. And the operating system goes like this: take something people already feel — fear, loneliness, uncertainty, the genuine human desire for meaning — wrap it in the language of God, add an enemy, add a prophecy, add a donation button, and broadcast it with enough production value that the packaging becomes the product. That’s the machine. Let’s look at who’s been running it.
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Kenneth Copeland is worth an estimated seven hundred and fifty million dollars. He lives on a 1,500-acre campus that has its own airport. Named after him. His ministry owns at least three private jets, including a Gulfstream V he bought from Tyler Perry. When a reporter asked him why he can’t fly commercial, he said — on camera, with a straight face — that he couldn’t “get in a long tube with a bunch of demons.” When the same reporter confronted him about it later, he snarled “Don’t you ever say I did!” — despite the fact that the original clip exists and has been watched by millions of people. He also reportedly owns a Mercedes Maybach and a Rolls Royce Phantom. He called poverty “a curse.” He’s a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory committee. And he’s been telling people for decades that God wants them to be rich while taking their money to fund a lifestyle that would make a Saudi prince uncomfortable.
The man who claims the power of the Holy Spirit — who casts out demons and commands mountains to move on television — cannot sit in seat 34B next to a woman eating Pringles because the spiritual atmosphere is too threatening. But he can sit in a Gulfstream that was paid for with donations from people who ride the bus to church. That’s not a contradiction the machine can see. That’s the bullshit machine working perfectly.
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Joel Osteen lives in a seventeen thousand square foot mansion in Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood. Six bedrooms, six bathrooms, three elevators, five fireplaces, a guest house, a pool. He bought it for ten and a half million dollars. His church — Lakewood, the largest in America — operates out of a former NBA arena that seats sixteen thousand. The church has a seventy-million-dollar annual budget. Osteen says he doesn’t take a salary from the church. He makes his money from book sales. The book that made him famous is called “Your Best Life Now.” He tells his followers “don’t focus on what you have or don’t have.” From inside a house with three elevators.
During Hurricane Harvey, when Houston was underwater, Osteen initially did not open his sixteen-thousand-seat former sports arena as an emergency shelter. People were drowning. The building was sitting there. The doors were closed. When the backlash hit, the doors opened. Then his church took a four-point-four-million-dollar PPP loan during the pandemic — a loan designed for struggling small businesses. The church paid it back. But the image is what it is: a hundred-million-dollar operation taking emergency small business funds while telling its congregation that God provides.
“Joel Osteen told his followers ‘don’t focus on what you have or don’t have’ from inside a house with three elevators. That’s not tone-deaf. That’s a frequency only the machine can hear.”
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Jim Bakker built a hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar empire called PTL — Praise the Lord, or as the prosecutors might have preferred, Pass the Loot. He and Tammy Faye hosted a daily television talk show that reached thirteen million households. They built Heritage USA, a Christian-themed amusement park. They sold “lifetime partnerships” — a thousand dollars for an annual three-night stay at a Heritage USA luxury hotel. The problem: they sold forty-three thousand memberships for a hotel with five hundred rooms. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a scam with a waterslide.
Then it came out that Bakker had paid his church secretary Jessica Hahn over two hundred and seventy-nine thousand dollars in ministry funds to keep quiet about a sexual encounter. Jerry Falwell — the guy who took over PTL — called Bakker “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in two thousand years of church history.” On CNN, Jimmy Swaggart called him “a cancer in the body of Christ.” Bakker was convicted on all twenty-four counts of fraud. Sentenced to forty-five years. Served five.
And then he came back. He came back. Founded a new ministry in Branson, Missouri. Started a new show. Started selling apocalyptic survivalist food buckets to a new audience. The bullshit machine doesn’t retire. It rebrands.
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Jimmy Swaggart was the loudest voice condemning Bakker. The most righteous. The most horrified. Told an interviewer he’d never even kissed a woman other than his wife. Then in 1988, less than a year after he helped bring down Bakker, Swaggart was photographed at a New Orleans motel with a prostitute. He went on television and delivered the famous tearful “I have sinned” confession. His congregation forgave him. He kept going.
Three years later, in 1991, he was caught again. With another prostitute. While driving on the wrong side of the road. This time there were no tears. He stood in front of his congregation and said: “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.”
And he kept preaching. Because the machine doesn’t need consistency. It just needs the audience to keep watching.
“Swaggart called Bakker a cancer in the body of Christ. Then got caught with a prostitute. Then got caught again. Then told his congregation the Lord said it was none of their business. The bullshit machine doesn’t need shame. It just needs a microphone.”
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Creflo Dollar. His name is Creflo Dollar. His actual, legal fiction, birth-certificate name is Creflo Augustus Dollar Junior. If you were writing a novel about a prosperity gospel preacher and named the character Creflo Dollar, your editor would send it back and say “too on the nose.” But reality doesn’t have an editor.
Dollar asked two hundred thousand of his followers to donate three hundred dollars each so he could buy a sixty-five-million-dollar Gulfstream G650 — the most expensive private jet available to civilians. The “Holy Grail” of luxury aviation, according to Bloomberg. When people criticized him for it, he told his congregation the devil was trying to discredit him. One of his church members, a woman named Mary Jones, planned to donate. She rides a bus twenty miles to get to his church every Sunday. She was going to give three hundred dollars toward a sixty-five-million-dollar jet for a man who owns a multi-million-dollar mansion and a condo and two Rolls-Royces.
Then in 2022, Dollar went on camera and admitted he’d been wrong about tithing for years. Told his followers to throw away every book, tape, and video he’d ever sold them on the subject. Which is a remarkable confession when the money is already spent and the jet is already in the hangar.
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Benny Hinn made his name doing “Miracle Crusades” — stadium events where he claimed to heal people on stage. Waving his jacket and watching people fall over. The Senate Finance Committee investigated him along with Copeland, Dollar, and three others over finances, private jets, Rolls-Royces, and a reported thirty-thousand-dollar conference table. Nobody went to jail. The investigation concluded without penalties. Because the tax code gives churches a level of financial privacy that would make an offshore banking executive jealous.
Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority and essentially merged evangelical Christianity with Republican Party politics. He took over PTL from Bakker, called Bakker every name in the book, then presided over the ministry’s collapse. His son, Jerry Falwell Jr., ran Liberty University until 2020, when he resigned over a sex scandal involving a pool boy. The dynasty continues. The machine is hereditary.
Billy Graham was the “respectable” one. The one presidents called. The one who filled stadiums without the same flamboyant grift. But Graham was also deeply embedded in the political machinery — the spiritual advisor to power, the face that made the merger of God and government look dignified instead of transactional. His son Franklin turned the brand explicitly partisan, aligning the Graham name with culture war politics in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. Same name. Different machine underneath.
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Chuck Missler was a different flavor of the same operating system. Not a prosperity preacher — a prophecy preacher. Aerospace background. Technical language. He’d take real scientific terms — information theory, quantum mechanics, mathematical patterns — and apply them loosely to scripture, implying that if you didn’t see the hidden codes he was showing you, you just weren’t smart enough. Critics call it credential laundering: using authority from one domain to claim authority in another.
Missler pushed the Y2K narrative hard into the church. Computers were going to crash, the grid was going to fail, prophecy was going to kick off. January 1st, 2000, arrived and nothing happened. He didn’t come back and say, “I missed that one.” He just moved on to the next mystery. And kept selling tapes. Because the bullshit machine doesn’t need to be right. It just needs to sound certain. And certainty, in a world full of uncertainty, is the most addictive product on the market.
The formula is always the same, whether it’s Missler, Copeland, Osteen, Dollar, or the YouTube prophet with forty thousand subscribers and a countdown clock in the corner: fear plus special knowledge plus an enemy plus a donation link. The end is near. They don’t want you to know. Only this teaching unlocks the truth. And if you give, God will multiply it back. The slot machine has a cross on it. The odds are worse. And the house always wins.
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One clean diagnostic question you can ask any of them — any of them: what specific prediction of yours turned out wrong, and what did you change afterward?
If they deflect, spiritualize it, or reframe the failure as success — you’ve found the bullshit machine. Every time. Without exception.
And if you’re sitting in a pew, or watching a stream, or holding your phone, and the man on screen is asking you for money from inside a lifestyle you will never have while telling you that God wants you to give more — that’s not faith. That’s a three-card monte dealer in a nice suit who figured out that the tax code gives churches more privacy than offshore banks.
The machine doesn’t need you to believe in God. It needs you to believe in the man who says he speaks for God. Those are two very different things. And the second one has a private jet.
Meta Bullshit Machine — the machine watching the machine.
The Book of Grifting Prophets
Also Called the Book of the Golden Microphone
Concerning the Preachers of the Airwaves, Their Jets, Their Tears,
Their Prophecies That Did Not Land,
and the Man Whose Name Was Literally Dollar
CHAPTER 1
The Rise of the Broadcast Prophets
1:1And in the latter days there arose prophets of a new kind. They did not wander the desert. They did not eat locusts. They did not wear camel hair. They wore Italian suits and teeth of blinding whiteness and hair that did not move in the wind, for it had been commanded to stay.
1:2And they built not temples of stone but studios of great expense, with lighting rigs that rivaled the glory of heaven itself, or at minimum a mid-tier awards show.
1:3And they opened their mouths and they spoke of Jesus. And then they spoke of money. And then of enemies. And then of money again. And the congregation could not tell where the gospel ended and the quarterly fundraising drive began. And this was by design.
1:4And the operating system went thus: take something the people already feel — fear, loneliness, the genuine human longing for meaning — wrap it in the language of God, add an enemy, add a prophecy, add a number to text thy donation to, and broadcast it with enough production value that the packaging becomes the product.
1:5And the packaging was very good. And the product was not.
Selah.
CHAPTER 2
The Book of Copeland: Concerning the Tube of Demons
2:1And there was a man named Copeland, and his wealth was seven hundred and fifty million, and he dwelt upon a campus of fifteen hundred acres, and the campus had its own airport, and the airport bore his name. For humility was not among his spiritual gifts.
2:2And Copeland possessed three private jets, and a Mercedes Maybach, and a Rolls Royce Phantom, and a mansion that was paid for by the church and exempted from taxes. And the taxpayers of Texas looked upon this and said nothing, for the machine had told them it was God’s will.
2:3And a reporter came unto Copeland and said: Why dost thou not fly commercial?
2:4And Copeland said, on camera, before witnesses and the internet: You can’t get in a long tube with a bunch of demons.
2:5And when the same reporter later asked him about these words, he snarled: Don’t you ever say I did! Though the recording existed. And the internet does not forget.
2:6And consider this: the man who claims the power of the Holy Spirit — who casts out demons and commands mountains to move on television — cannot sit in seat 34B next to a woman eating Pringles because the spiritual atmosphere is too threatening.
2:7But he can sit in a Gulfstream purchased from Tyler Perry with donations from people who ride the bus.
2:8And when asked if preachers should live in luxury, Copeland grinned the grin of a man who has never lost a negotiation with his own conscience and said: They’re wrong.
2:9And then he called the reporter sweetheart and prayed for her. And the internet watched. And the internet was disturbed.
Selah.
CHAPTER 3
The Book of Osteen: The Man with Three Elevators
3:1And there was a man named Osteen, and his smile was wide and his teeth were many, and he lived in a house of seventeen thousand square feet with six bedrooms and six bathrooms and three elevators, which he purchased for ten and a half million dollars.
3:2And his church was a former arena of basketball, and it seated sixteen thousand, and its budget was seventy million per year. And Osteen said: I take no salary from the church. And this may be true. For his book sales alone were sufficient to fund a lifestyle that would make a Roman emperor pause.
3:3And the book was called Your Best Life Now. And it sold millions. And the people who bought it rode the bus home and opened it in apartments with one bathroom and no elevator.
3:4And Osteen went on television and said: Don’t focus on what you have or don’t have. From inside a house with three elevators. And the machine saw no contradiction. For the machine cannot see contradictions. It can only produce them.
3:5And when the great flood called Harvey came upon Houston, and the people lost their homes and waded through water that reached their chests, the sixteen-thousand-seat arena sat empty. The doors were closed.
3:6And when the backlash came — from the internet, which does not forget — the doors opened. And Osteen said: We never closed our doors. Though the people had been knocking. And the people remembered.
3:7And then the church took four point four million dollars from the government’s pandemic small business fund. A hundred-million-dollar operation, taking emergency money intended for the struggling, while preaching that God provides.
3:8And God, presumably, was not consulted about this application.
Selah.
CHAPTER 4
The Book of Bakker: The Waterslide and the Hush Money
4:1And before them all there was Bakker, and Bakker was the architect. He and his wife Tammy Faye — whose mascara runneth over — built an empire of one hundred and twenty-five million dollars called PTL. Praise the Lord. Or, as the prosecutors preferred: Pass the Loot.
4:2And they built a Christian theme park called Heritage USA, and it was the third most popular theme park in the land, which is a sentence that should not be possible.
4:3And Bakker sold unto the people “lifetime partnerships” — one thousand dollars for a three-night annual stay at a luxury hotel. And forty-three thousand people bought them. And the hotel had five hundred rooms. And this is called fraud.
4:4And it was revealed that Bakker had paid his church secretary two hundred and seventy-nine thousand dollars in ministry funds to keep silent about a sexual encounter. And Jerry Falwell, who took over PTL, called Bakker the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in two thousand years of church history.
4:5And on CNN, Jimmy Swaggart called Bakker a cancer in the body of Christ. Remember this, for it will be relevant shortly.
4:6And Bakker was convicted on all twenty-four counts. And he was sentenced to forty-five years. And he served five.
4:7And then he came back. He came back. He founded a new ministry in Branson, Missouri. He started a new show. He began selling apocalyptic survivalist food buckets to a new generation of the afraid. For the machine does not retire. The machine rebrands.
Selah.
CHAPTER 5
The Book of Swaggart: The Tears and the Second Prostitute
5:1And Swaggart, who had called Bakker a cancer — Swaggart, who told an interviewer he had never so much as kissed a woman other than his wife — Swaggart, the loudest voice of righteousness in all the land —
5:2Was photographed at a motel in New Orleans. With a prostitute. Less than one year after helping to destroy Bakker for the same category of sin.
5:3And Swaggart went before the camera and wept and said: I have sinned. And the tears were abundant. And the congregation forgave him. And the show continued.
5:4Three years later, in the year nineteen hundred and ninety-one, Swaggart was found again. With another prostitute. While driving on the wrong side of the road.
5:5And the woman, whose name was Rosemary Garcia, said unto the press: He asked me for sex. That’s why he stopped me. That’s what I do. I’m a prostitute.
5:6And this time there were no tears. Swaggart stood before his congregation and said: The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.
5:7And he kept preaching. Because the machine does not need shame. It only needs a microphone.
Selah.
CHAPTER 6
The Book of Dollar: Concerning the Name and the Jet
6:1And there arose a preacher, and his name — his given name, his birth certificate name, the name his mother looked upon him and chose — was Creflo Dollar.
6:2Let that settle upon thee. Creflo Augustus Dollar Junior. If thou wert writing a novel about a prosperity gospel preacher and named the character Creflo Dollar, thy editor would send it back. Too on the nose, the editor would say. But reality does not have an editor.
6:3And Dollar asked two hundred thousand of his followers to donate three hundred dollars each, that he might purchase a Gulfstream G650, which cost sixty-five million dollars and was described by Bloomberg as the Holy Grail of luxury aviation.
6:4And one of his church members, a woman named Mary Jones, planned to give. She rides a bus twenty miles to reach his church every Sunday. Twenty miles by bus. Three hundred dollars toward a sixty-five-million-dollar jet. For a man who owns a mansion and a condo and two Rolls-Royces.
6:5And when the people of the internet questioned this, Dollar told his congregation: The devil is trying to discredit me. Which is a convenient diagnosis, for the devil cannot appear on camera to defend himself.
6:6And then, many years later, Dollar went on camera and said: I was wrong about tithing. Throw away every book, tape, and video I sold you on the subject.
6:7Which is a remarkable confession when the money is already spent and the jet is already in the hangar.
Selah.
CHAPTER 7
The Minor Prophets: Hinn, Falwell, Missler, and the Algorithm
7:1And there was Benny Hinn, who waved his jacket upon the stage and the people fell over, and he called them healed. And the Senate investigated his finances. And a thirty-thousand-dollar conference table was among the findings. And nothing happened. For the tax code giveth churches more privacy than offshore banks.
7:2And there was Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority and married the gospel to the Republican Party until the two could not be separated without a surgeon. And his son Jerry Junior ran Liberty University until he resigned over a scandal involving a pool boy. And the dynasty continued. For the machine is hereditary.
7:3And there was Missler, who spoke not of money but of codes. Who took the language of aerospace and mathematics and applied it unto scripture as though the prophets were writing white papers. And Missler said unto the church: The year two thousand will bring the collapse of the systems. And the year two thousand came. And the systems did not collapse. And Missler did not say: I was wrong. He moved on to the next mystery. And he kept selling tapes.
7:4And there were the YouTube prophets, who are Missler’s grandchildren and Copeland’s nieces and nephews in spirit. They shout about the end times with countdown clocks in the corner. They retrofit current events into Revelation. They make predictions that do not land and then quietly delete the video.
7:5And the algorithm of YouTube does not reward wisdom. It rewards fear, outrage, certainty, and the naming of enemies. A calm pastor exploring the mystery of grace gets fourteen views. A man screaming about the antichrist gets fourteen million. And so the algorithm selects for the loudest. And the loudest are almost never the truest. And clicks become the new tithes.
7:6And the Holy Spirit did not write the algorithm. Engineers in the Valley of Silicon did. And they optimized for watch time, not truth.
Selah.
CHAPTER 8
The Diagnostic
8:1And now hear the one question that will identify the machine every single time, without exception, across all denominations and production budgets and hair styles:
8:2What specific prediction of thine turned out wrong — and what didst thou change afterward?
8:3If they deflect — it is the machine. If they spiritualize the failure — it is the machine. If they reframe the miss as a deeper understanding — it is the machine. Every time.
8:4For a straight shooter admits when a call goes bad. And these are not straight shooters. These are salesmen who figured out that the tax code gives churches more privacy than offshore banks and that fear is a renewable resource and that a man in a nice suit quoting scripture with enough confidence can say almost anything and half the room will nod.
Selah.
8:5The machine does not need thee to believe in God. The machine needs thee to believe in the man who says he speaks for God. Those are two very different things. And the second one has a private jet.
8:6And Jesus — who walked everywhere, who owned nothing, who washed feet and cooked fish and told a rich man to sell it all — Jesus is not on that stage. He never was.
8:7But his name is. And his name sells very well.
8:8And that, if thou hast ears to hear, is the whole scam.
Selah.
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Meta Bullshit Machine — the machine watching the machine.
The Bullshit Machine 
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