I have said before that I analyze religion as an exercise in my speciality, which is conversion. Mine is political

conversion, but religion has a lot more history, so I pay a lot of attention to it.

A also look deeply into the history of theology. That is about what people BELIEVE and how our beliefs came about. Once

again, this happens to have been my JOB.

Billy Graham made the most succcesful job of revivialism since the 1920s with Billy Sunday. I am willing to bet that both

Hitler and Moussilini studied some films of evagnelists at work.

But Billy Graham only reached people who were ALREADY attending a revoival meeting. They were REVIVING as faith they

obviously already had.

On television inthe days when there were only three networks and a lot of people started watching because the other two were often so dull and so offensive politically to most people that Jerry Falwell was able to begin what would become the Religious Right. Now the religious right is just an Israel lobby and a

tool for leftists in white areas like Appalachia where the third world can’t get in. The Religious Right is pushing

interracial adoption, preferably from third world countries, in those places.

Few people have noticed taht you don’t hear a word about The Religious Right any more. It used to be a major power.

It’s gonenow, so let me do a little post-mortem on it.

Back when Jerry Falwell first appeared on television, many a child being raised in a hard-core revivalist household was frightened:

“Mommy, is that a PREACHER?”

“Yes, son, Jerry Falewell is a preacher.”

“But, Mommy, what is that on his FACE!?”

“Don’t be frightened, son, it’s called a SMILE.”

“But, Mommy, preachers don’t DO that.”

Let me explain. When I was coming up in the Bible Belt, you can tell someone who was about to lecture you on how he was going to Heaven by the fact that he spent most of his life with a look on his face like someone in a dentist’s office waiting for a root canal. That was considered very Serious and very Holy.

Falwell had a very novel idea. He felt that HE was going to heaven. He felt that his flock was going to heaven. So he was jolly, he was humorous. In short, he was the kind of person you wouldn’t mind loistening to for a while, whether you were already Christian or one of the people he was really after.

Like my mantra, most of successful conversion AVOIDS compliation or starting off trying to get people to read thick books, whether the book is the Old Testament or Jewish Supremacy. That comes LATER. Falwell got people, millions of people, into reading his Bible by smiling first and showing how fine it was to be going to heaven. He showed them that if they became of his faith they wouldn’t have to mope around and lecture everybody about how bad they were, the way all the Christians we saw did.

Naturally once this smile business became financially successful, the psychopaths moved in. Nobody but Bobis going to tell you what an innovation this smile was as an insrument, a new and ingenious means of conversion, but the psychopaths caught it.

So Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker always SMILED. Have you ever seen one of them SMILE? It gives me the creeps. My sister helped me think of this piece because she said once that when Pat Robertson smiles, it looks like the smile of a villain in the old movies, when he had done something particularly nasty and was gloating over it.