The Bible Went Down With The Birdie Jean

September 8, 2016 4:53 AM

"At twelve, my grandfather climbed into his Prayer Tower and said he’d die if he didn’t get $8 million; I was a gay kid living on a Pentecostal compound with an autographed photo of Ronald Reagan on my desk. At eighteen I left most of that behind, rarely looking back." Randy Roberts Potts, the grandson of Oral Roberts, is publishing a memoir on instagram
posted by bunderful (21 comments total)

I really miss people posting this sort of thing on blogs :( Reading lengthy, multi-part stories on Twitter, Instagram, even Facebook, really messes with my focus.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:03 AM on September 8, 2016 [22 favorites]

my grandfather climbed into his Prayer Tower and said he’d die if he didn’t get $8 million

In the course of that fundraising drive, one of my college friends hung on his door a wheel of fortune doohicky called something like "Today Oral Roberts will encounter ..." with the segments divided into things like "Death," "God," "Satan," "Money," "Penguin Lust," etc. The rule was, if you wanted to enter, you had to spin the spinner.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:37 AM on September 8, 2016 [12 favorites]

My great grandfather was a Pentecostal minister. As a small boy listening to his sermons, I remember feeling that the floor would open up, fiery and grasping, to drag me into hell if my thoughts were unclean. I can't imagine growing up gay in that environment.
posted by dozo at 6:55 AM on September 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

I'm looking forward to reading this. His mother is not much better than her father, but he depicts her, too, as a lifelong victim of a narcissist's abuse. That is kind of him, to recognize it. Imagine being so afraid of your father that you wet yourself when he seats you on his lap. She used exactly the tools she'd been given.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:11 AM on September 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm in a rotten mood today, due to various work and personal crap going on. Then I read this from Oral's wikipedia: "[His] elder son, Ronald Roberts, committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart on June 10, 1982, five months after receiving a court order to undergo counseling at a drug treatment center and six months after coming out as gay."

I think I'll go punch a wall or something.
posted by Melismata at 8:01 AM on September 8, 2016 [13 favorites]

I'm not an experienced Instagram user, and (as has happened every time before) I'm recoiling in horror from the UI. Am I just doing it wrong? I found first part of the story, 1/33, click on it, and... it wants me to read this giant story in a tiny window, scrolling every few sentences? Is that right? I'd like to read this, but... not like this.
posted by kprincehouse at 8:06 AM on September 8, 2016 [8 favorites]

my grandfather climbed into his Prayer Tower and said he’d die if he didn’t get $8 million

On one episode of the 80s high school sitcom Head of the Class, the kids were putting together a satirical newspaper, and their front page story was, "If God Doesn't Get $20 Million Dollars He'll Let Oral Roberts Live". That was probably that show's best moment.
posted by orange swan at 8:21 AM on September 8, 2016 [8 favorites]

I collect old yearbooks. One that I have is the 1947 "Southwesterner" from the "Southwestern Pentecostal Holiness College," which may or may not have become the Southwestern Christian University. In it is Oral Roberts' picture. Used twice, once crediting him as the Secretary of the Board of Education, and the other time as simply, "Religious Education." Definitely looks like the same guy, but I haven't found much in the way of information beyond that.

It's a particularly interesting and sort of terrifying specimen. Everyone in it, especially the faculty, seems to have either deep existential terror, gleeful psychopathy, or total vacuity in their eyes. The campus buildings are featureless, square buildings photographed in such a way that it looks like they're sitting on a featureless, infinite plane. It all makes my imagination run wild about the kind of stuff that was taught let alone what actually went on there.
posted by cmoj at 9:45 AM on September 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Southwestern Pentecostal Holiness College"

I'm reminded of Voltaire's remark about the Holy Roman Empire, that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
posted by octobersurprise at 10:08 AM on September 8, 2016 [8 favorites]

This is gonna be one of those things that I can't read because it makes me incandescent with impotent rage, isn't it?

I have a morbid (and probably unhealthy) fascination with charismatic narcissists, and the movements they spearhead. Sometimes they're religious leaders. Sometimes they're politicians. Sometimes they're...L. Ron Hubbard.

But, whatever specific form it takes, they leave breathtaking cruelty and misery in their wake. All in the name of feeding their voracious, all-consuming egos. Ordinary abusers ensnare individuals or families in their webs of malignance - these folks have figured out how to scale it up to the industrial level.

If we found a genetic basis for this kind of personality? And if the evidence for that genetic basis was clear, solid, and overwhelming? I think we might be able to make a moral case for eugenics. To be clear, that's a big and highly speculative "if". But it'd be hard to argue that humanity is better off with these kinds of vampires than without.

Wishful thinking, probably. This kind of monster will probably always be with us.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 10:17 AM on September 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

I'm not an experienced Instagram user, and (as has happened every time before) I'm recoiling in horror from the UI. Am I just doing it wrong? I found first part of the story, 1/33, click on it, and... it wants me to read this giant story in a tiny window, scrolling every few sentences? Is that right?

That's pretty much right, yes. Instagram lists things in reverse chronological order, newest first. And ordinarily, that giant story would only be a sentence or two – Instagram is for sharing photos. It's a poor choice of format for a lengthy text like this.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 10:53 AM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Great idea to publish a story. Worst vehicle used to publish it.

Think I'll wait for the PDF or the actual book.
posted by prepmonkey at 12:09 PM on September 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

Is there some magic app or website that can convert this into a format readable by human beings?
posted by Sangermaine at 12:20 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Per Roberts's autobiography, he didn't say he was going to die. He said he'd be "called home".
posted by themanwho at 1:06 PM on September 8, 2016

Wait, I've been following Randy R. Potts on Twitter without knowing he was the grandson of Oral Roberts?

Announcement on Medium from Randy R. Potts of The Bible Went Down With The Birdie Jean
posted by larrybob at 2:33 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

From the Medium post: Recently, The Guardian published an adaptation of Book VI — you can read it here.
posted by larrybob at 2:48 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Per Roberts's autobiography, he didn't say he was going to die. He said he'd be "called home"

On the off-chance anyone's curious in this vein, I had an AskMe a few years back about similar terminology.
posted by psoas at 4:54 PM on September 8, 2016

Announcement on Medium from Randy R. Potts of The Bible Went Down With The Birdie Jean

Oh wow - Carlton Pearson is in the second photo in larrybob's link - another former member of Oral Robert's inner circle. Previously.
posted by bunderful at 5:07 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Grar. I think I need to read this - but I expect it'll make me angry. Actually making some gay friends has undone most of the damage my fundamentalist upbringing did in regard to gay people (and if that didn't work, Metafilter would have done the trick.) But among Christian friends and communities I still see so much Fail.
posted by iffthen at 7:06 AM on September 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Potato Planet - eugenics is not the answer. (It feels ridiculous to have to say that.) The ethical option is to help people to be better parents. I can off the top of my head name five simple things that would have made my own upbringing less miserable, and compared to some things, they aren't too hard to translate into policy. There's some low-hanging fruit there, yet I don't really see politicians often highlighting parenting as such. That's dumb. Here in Aus we have Family First, and while it's a no-brainer to support families because they're the basis of society, FF has many issues in their platform that I find very problematic. In the US - I don't know about Clinton, but let's just say that I don't have much faith in Donald Trump to contribute much here. On that note, though:

She used exactly the tools she'd been given.

That is sadly, and frequently, the core issue.

(About Oral Roberts in particular, I have a slightly more nuanced opinion - but that's the point. I don't have to deal with the effects of his behaviour, and his grandson does.)
posted by iffthen at 7:25 AM on September 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Nthing no eugenics, thankyouverymuch. Narcissism is in fact healthy in proper doses. It takes a healthy amount to keep oneself alive, for instance. When it veers into unhealthiness, it's very often because society sets no real limits or consequences to bad behavior, which can then blossom into unchecked delusions of grandeur (see also: rapists and victim-blaming). For instance, have you ever heard of a woman heading up an abusive cult? Hm. Wonder why that is. Hint: society sets fucking hard-ass limits on women and authority. Note: not saying women aren't capable of it or aren't narcissists. Am saying that women aren't allowed by society the type of unlimited, unquestioned authority that men are. Thus, cult leaders so often being white men. Also thus, society in fact being capable of setting hard-ass limits that effectively keep a portion of society from destroying swathes of life. Naturally there is also a really crap flip side of that in that women have a hell of a time holding positive authority as well. But are we capable of setting limits? Yes. Clearly and without doubt. The questions then become "why" aren't we doing it equitably and "how" can we set healthy limits that allow for positive leadership while condemning destructive authoritarianism. A good start would be to look at structural racism and sexism.

Indeed, we really need to help people be better parents. Mine fell for fundamentalist evangelism in large part because the church basically acted as free babysitters four times a week and in summer (Bible camp anyone?). Bonus: easy-to-follow child-rearing guidelines. Absolutely not saying they were good guidelines, but were they easy to follow for 20-year-old parents who felt in over their heads? Heck yeah. Was there anything else easily available and free? Heck no. We can do better as a society.
posted by fraula at 9:14 AM on September 9, 2016 [1 favorite]