The Evidence for Healing

Though he was able to produce the usual mass of anecdotal material to try to prove his healing ministry, A. A. Allen proved only that he was operating on the same principles as all the rest. He crowed about 60-year-old Tom Jennings, a man in a wheelchair with a blanket over his legs, who Allen said had cancer that gave him “only six weeks to live.” Allen said Jennings had the “cancer demon” and promptly cast it out, then told Jennings to wheel him (Allen) down the aisle. The crowd cheered Jesus for yet another miracle. But Jennings had never been told that he had only six weeks to live, wrote reporters from Look magazine in a 1969 article. And Allen himself had seated Jennings in that wheelchair and supplied the blanket. Jennings not only was able to walk, but had years ahead of him. As Look said, Allen’s greatest miracle seemed to be separating bills from billfolds. He was very good at that. In his heyday, he claimed he sent out 55 million copies of his publications from his mail room every year. He sold water from his Pool of Bethesda in Miracle Valley to customers all over the world. Said Allen of this commodity, “People are being healed instantly while they sip it as an act of faith.” Containers of plain old dirt from the valley were also sold, though no instructions went along with them. The reverend displayed demons in glass mason jars, sealed up safely and looking very, very dead. Allen told the faithful that though those preserved specimens might look to some insensitive, unbelieving folks like ordinary toads, snakes, and spiders, they were actually disease demons. The faithful believed and marveled. But not all were enchanted by Allen’s Ozark baritone and pickled devils. A physician from the nearby town of Sierra Vista, Dr. Kenneth A. Dregseth, told an interviewer.I have seen no miracles. In fact, I’ve had to run diabetics to the hospital when they’ve stopped taking their insulin, believing they had been cured in Miracle Valley.

The Dream Ends

On June 14, 1970, listeners in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines were hearing a recorded message from A. A. Allen on his radio program saying: This is Brother Allen in person. Numbers of friends of mine have been inquiring about reports they have heard concerning me that are not true. People as well as some preachers from pulpits are announcing that I am dead. Do I sound like a dead man? My friends, I am not even sick! Only a moment ago I made reservations to fly into our current campaign. I’ll see you there and make the devil a liar.

At that moment, at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco, police were removing A. A. Allen’s body from a room strewn with pills and empty liquor bottles. The man who had once said that “the beer bottle and gin bucket” should have been on his family coat of arms was dead at 59 from what was said to be a heart attack but was in reality liver failure brought on by acute alcoholism.

The King Is Dead

During the scramble to fill Allen’s position, Miracle Valley went through a series of owners, none of them having his organizational genius. In 1975, more than 32,000 letters a month were still coming in when one of Allen’s acolytes, Don Stewart, a former Bible student from Clarkdale, Arizona, began running the operation. Stewart eventually established his own following in Phoenix, and is currently accused of arson and embezzlement by his church. Things came to a close in Miracle Valley amid bankruptcy proceedings in 1979, shortly after the all-black Christ Miracle Healing Center & Church was founded there by the Reverend Frances Thomas. The parishioners were blacks who went there—mainly from Chicago and parts of Mississippi—“because God told them to.” There had been immediate conflict with white residents and older residents of the area, who by now wanted to put such phenomena as A. A. Allen behind them. Riots, bombings, and murders followed the deaths of five church members. This was characterized by Reverend Thomas as “God’s will.” Authorities found it more difficult to believe that the agonizing death of 6-year-old Therial Davis from a strangulated hernia was also “God’s will.” Neighbors had heard the child’s screams for three days before the child finally succumbed, but they did nothing to interfere with the parents’ constitutional right to refuse medical assistance and wait for divine intervention. The spirit, if not the body, of A. A. Allen was still alive in Miracle Valley.

7

Leroy Jenkins and the $100,000 Challenge

Leroy Jenkins is currently making a comeback in the evangelist business after undergoing rather serious reversals. As recently as June 1987, he was announcing plans to buy the $900,000 Coliseum in St. Petersburg, Florida. He had just held a huge crusade there. The St. Petersburg Times reported that hemoved his audience to tears, to dancing, to shouting and to the front of the room. It was at the front of the Coliseum Ballroom where he accepted their money and laid his hands on each one.

But a security guard at the Coliseum was not deceived. Said he: “I think it’s all bull. I think he’s a con man.” Others who chose to believe in the colorful preacher were not at all fazed when the next day it was reported that he had been robbed of $900 in pocket cash and a $4,000 wristwatch. No one questioned why a preacher was walking about with that kind of valuable merchandise and “mad money.” A former antique salesman, Reverend Leroy Jenkins claims that he originally was converted to religion when he came to believe that he had been healed of a wound on his arm by none other than A. A. Allen. Thus discovering the faith-healing business, Leroy immediately lost all interest in the antique trade and took up the much more lucrative calling. The Reverend Jenkins is not known to use any very fancy techniques to perform his act. As with the early tent-show performers, he appears to rely upon spotting symptoms in those he approaches, giving them general guesses, and putting words in their mouths. He is one of the old-timers in the healing business, and along with Ernest Angley has served two generations of cartoonists as a model for their southern Bible-thumper characters.