Oral Roberts Fails Examination

In 1955, when the $1,000 offer for evidence of any cures was being made to Oral Roberts by the Church of Christ, Roberts offered the press two of “the most striking instances of cures” he could muster. Both people believed themselves healed. However, one had never obtained a diagnosis from a physician and the other later underwent orthodox surgery to remove the tumor that had been “healed.” A Toronto, Canada, physician looked into 30 of Roberts’s healing claims and found not one case that could not be attributed to psychological shock or hysteria. At least one of the “healed” people examined by that physician had died. The following year, Roberts produced on his television program a California woman who testified that she had been healed of cancer. She died 12 hours later. In Oakland, California, one man dropped dead during a Roberts revival, and both a 3-year-old girl and an elderly Indian woman died at the same service. Then, in July 1959, a diabetic woman died after throwing away her insulin at a Detroit crusade. Wanda Beach, a diabetic from Detroit, also threw away her insulin as she watched an Oral Roberts show. She told her family that Roberts had “completely cured” her. That was just before she died. In January 1956, relatives and friends of Mary Vonderscher of Burbank, California, watched her taped appearance on the Oral Roberts television show giving the reverend an enthusiastic testimonial for her healing from spinal cancer. She was enthusiastic, cheerful, and thankful. Three days later, those viewers attended Mary’s funeral. In light of Roberts’s claims that he has resurrected several people who died during his services, it seems strange that he allowed these folks to perish. One wonders what claim he will next come up with. The mind boggles. Allen Spraggett, a Canadian writer who has fallen for even such transparent hoaxes as those of former “psychic” Uri Geller, failed to be deceived by the Roberts healing claims. He spent a harrowing ten days following the Roberts show around and concluded that there was not one cure effected in that time, while hundreds of cures were claimed by the Roberts office. (Because Spraggett considers himself a “psychic researcher,” he might have been unable to accept the Roberts claims because he could not find in Roberts’s performance any “paradigm” acceptable to parapsychology. The first thing to be sought by these researchers is such a paradigm, and when that is determined, all caution is discarded. As mentioned previously, when Spraggett looked into Kathryn Kuhlman’s performance, he accepted her claims because they matched his parapsychological expectations.) The Reverend Lester Kinsolving, who writes on religious topics for the McNaught Syndicate, looked into the Roberts ministry and its claims in an article titled “The Power of Positive Greed.” He examined cases claimed by Kathryn Kuhlman, A. A. Allen, and Christian Science as well. He found no cases of healing in any of these ministries that would withstand examination.