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Jesus for Sale

Meet the real Rex Humbard, the father of televised religious fraud.

By Denise Grollmus 

It was the moment Rex Humbard had been waiting for — his final day of judgment, the moment he'd come face to face with the Lord he'd so passionately invoked for more than 60 years.

Since 1953, Humbard had appeared on television sets throughout the world, reaching more than 25 million viewers on over 2,000 stations in 92 languages. Always sporting a perfectly tailored three-piece suit and a well-coiffed do, he challenged faithful viewers, with his gap-toothed southern drawl, to consider their own day of divine scrutiny. How would they secure their place in heaven?

Now, at the age of 88, it was Humbard's turn to find out.

It was a balmy Friday in September. Humbard lay in his Florida nursing-home bed and announced, before slipping into death, that it was time. "He was ready," says Alma Robinson, a close friend. "It was his time to go home."

A week later, Humbard's body was returned to Akron, where he invented televangelism 54 years earlier.

More than 600 people attended his funeral, held under a billowing white tent in Stan Hywet Hall's meadow. Between sermons from televangelist Goliaths like Benny Hinn and Inspiration Network chairman David Cerullo, the air swelled with Humbard's favorite gospel hymns, from "Swing Down Chariot" to his ministry's theme song, "I Am Loved." "There wasn't a dry eye in the place," Robinson says.

As Rex's brother-in-law, the Reverend Wayne Jones, spoke, amens were hollered and arms were stretched to the air, palming the invisible. "Rex wasn't a complicated man," Jones said. "He simply loved people, and he wanted everybody to have that more abundant life that God wants them to have. Rex was a soul winner. The scripture says, 'He that winneth souls is wise.' Rex Humbard was one of the wisest men I've known, because his focus was on winning souls."

The media echoed that same touching sentiment. The Dayton Daily News noted that he "had come closer than any other human being in history . . . to preaching the Gospel in all the world." The Washington Post and The New York Times cited a 1999 U.S. News & World Report article that deemed Humbard one of the greatest architects of 20th-century America. Everyone recalled that he was Elvis' favorite preacher and officiated at the King's funeral in 1977. An Akron Beacon Journal editorial made sure to set Humbard apart from more controversial televangelists by extolling the fact that he "steered clear of political involvement."

Perhaps it was out of respect for the dead. Perhaps the papers feared a backlash from evangelical readers. Everyone seemed quick to lionize a great, fallen religious leader. But it was revisionist history at its best.

Though no one can argue the influence Humbard had on the world, his life can be reduced to little more than that of a business-savvy preacher, a man who elevated old-school religious fraud to shamelessly profitable heights, pioneering televangelism as a way to separate his flock from its money.

Here's the other story of Reverend Rex Humbard.

Long before Ernest Angley's bad toupee and Tammy Faye Bakker's puppet shows, evangelism was alive and well. For Humbard, it was a family business.

The son of a traveling evangelist, Humbard spent much of his life on the road. He pitched revival tents on dusty lots across the Bible Belt, acting as his father's business manager, co-host, and second in ecclesiastical command, living off the generosity of those touched by their fiery performances.

By his own admission, he always thought big, especially when it came to Jesus.

Once, while working in South Bend, Indiana, Humbard watched as Barnum & Bailey rolled into town. Inspired by the spectacle, Humbard gave his family's transient chapel a makeover, buying a $21,000 circus tent and dubbing their show the "Gospel Big Top."

"Now God finally had a tent as big as the Ringling Brothers," he wrote in his 1975 autobiography, To Tell the World. "And even bigger, really, because this Gospel Big Top would give people, instead of temporary entertainment, the key to eternal salvation."

Humbard also adopted the theatrical faith healing of preachers like Oral Roberts, who filled donation baskets by claiming to rid people of ailments that modern medicine couldn't cure.

"It was all carnival scams," says James Randi, author of The Faith Healers and a leading expert on the tricks of the trade. "My former manager worked for Roberts when he was 14 years old, touring around the country as one of his plants. He was paid to walk up to the altar in a pair of crutches and then run down the aisle, all straightened out. It was an absolute racket."

Humbard's Pentecostal performances were just as dramatic. As he zigzagged across the country, he steadily packed his canvas walls with promises of healing and salvation in "Jesus' love." But nothing compared to the crowds in Akron.

On a sweltering summer day in 1952, the Humbard family pitched their tent on the airport grounds. Before the Sunday sun rose, all 6,000 seats were filled and more people were waiting outside. They stood 25 circles deep around the tent, a total of 18,000 waiting patiently for God's greatest show on Earth. The 36-year-old Humbard had seen nothing like it.

At 7:30 a.m., the Humbard family took the stage. Rex's wife, Maude Aimee, sang tambourine-filled gospel, while he and his father took turns preaching soul-saving and demon-hating. They were joined by Kathryn Kuhlman, a notorious faith healer who claimed to heal everything from paralysis to cancer, but was often dismissed as little more than a magician on the take. For five hours, she preached before the Akron crowd, bringing the tent to a frenzied pitch with promises of divine rejuvenation.

But not everyone appreciated the Humbards' visit. Nearby residents complained about the noise, congestion, and poor sanitation (thanks to a lack of bathroom facilities). They took an instant dislike to the Humbards, dismissing them as little more than hillbilly nonsense.

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