The Pretending Game

Looking through the evangelist’s glossy periodical, Dawn of a New Day, we found names of many people testifying to their healings. One was a man from Erie, Pennsylvania, who stated, concerning his encounter with Grant 18 months before, that his healing was still in effect. He testified:For 20 years, I had sugar diabetes, and thank God I am healed.

(Grant often refers to diabetes as just “sugar,” as in his expression, “You’ve got the sugar, haven’t you?”) When I contacted this man by telephone, he was wary. He wanted to be assured that we weren’t trying to disprove Grant’s work. All I could tell him was that we were investigating the whole matter, with no prejudice at all. Reassured, he agreed to give me the name of his physician, adding that he was sure the doctor would disagree with him, but that he knew he no longer had diabetes. He admitted that he was still taking insulin (the standard treatment for this ailment), but the dose was smaller, he said. The impression I got was that he could not contemplate discrediting faith-healing and that he was clinging to his preferred—and comforting—belief. The fact remains that this man, despite his wishes, his faith, and Grant’s claimed intercession with supernatural forces, was not and is not healed. Others whose testimony appeared in that publication could not be found, even though some of the names were quite unusual. Whether they were legitimate, we do not know.

Not Blind Enough to Be Deceived

Back in 1982, Pearl Kidd of Racine, Wisconsin, had been angry enough with one of Grant’s deceptions to tell a reporter the whole story. A color photo of her husband, Morris, had been published in Dawn of a New Day with the statement that he had had his sight miraculously restored by Reverend Grant. The caption of that photo described the miracle:This Milwaukee man was blind all his life. After Rev. Grant prayed, he saw for the first time.

Fumed Mrs. Kidd: “What miracle?” Her spouse, she said, was still almost totally blind and she resented this lie being told in print. First of all, Mr. Kidd had not been “blind all his life.” His sight had been deteriorating for only a few years. The photo and caption were misleading. “It was just a hoax,” said Mrs. Kidd, and she suggested that Grant should be “put out of business for lying to people.” Mr. Kidd had been carrying a white stick when he attended Grant’s service. Suffering from an incurable, degenerative eye disease, he could see, but poorly. Grant had declared him healed and had thrown his stick up on the stage in a dramatic gesture. At the close of the meeting, Kidd had to ask for his stick to be returned to him so that he could find his way out of the auditorium. “[Grant] claimed to have healed him,” said Mrs. Kidd, “but he lied!”

The Media Attitude

The unhappy and injured victims of faith-healers are seldom in a position to be heard. Few media sources care about them, and most dare not take on any religious group. There are exceptions. The Cincinnati Enquirer, the Dallas Morning News, and the Oakland Press, among other newspapers, have run scathing articles about Grant’s chicanery. And at Grant’s 1986 Fort Lauderdale meetings that I attended, I was accompanied by a film crew from the CBS-TV news program “West 57th.” Grant, not knowing that I was with them, allowed them to film the service. When he later discovered that they were also filming and interviewing unhealed people who were leaving the meeting in the same state as when they had entered, he sent out his flunkies to warn the crowd by chanting loudly, “These people are not Christians! Pass them by!” The “West 57th” piece should have been devastating to Grant. CBS-TV aired it twice. On the screen, he was represented as a pretentious faker bringing in fabulous amounts of money with a strange, manipulated theology twisted to serve his purposes. And a new slant was given to the wheelchair trick when the interviewer questioned an elderly woman with a heavy European accent as she left the War Memorial Auditorium, walking under her own power and quite unassisted. She had risen from a wheelchair at Grant’s command, and the audience had applauded wildly as she walked. But we had seen her walk in and we’d seen Grant talking with her. The television interview went like this:Host: Now, I saw you get up out of a wheel chair. Was that a miracle? Woman: Not exactly, because I wasn’t crippled—I wasn’t completely crippled, but I—I only got difficulty to walk and so far I think I feel much better. Host You mean—whose wheelchair was that, that you got out of? Woman: That was from here. I didn’t come here with—no. Host: Do you own a wheelchair? Woman: No. Host: That’s not your wheelchair? Woman: No. Host: Don’t you think it’s kind of funny that you come here, sit in a wheelchair, and then he makes a big deal of getting you out of a wheelchair that you don’t even own? Woman: I—I can’t tell you. I believe in miracle anyway. Now I pray for this and I believe.

As might be expected, Grant responded to this television exposé by spouting scripture during a subsequent interview and warning the faithful against the danger of asking too many such questions:Let God fight your battles. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” You just spend your time witnessing to your neighbors and your friends about the power of God and don’t try to answer agnostics and atheists!

Beginning in April 1986, shortly after the wheelchair trick was exposed on “West 57th” and in Free Inquiry magazine, W. V. Grant stopped placing people in his wheelchairs. He now asks occupants of wheelchairs to verify that their chairs actually belong to them. He gives a brief and incorrect account of the accusation made against him and claims he has never done such a thing and would never stoop to such a pretense. He accuses secular humanists of spreading those lies. The truth is simply that one of his favorite deceptions has bitten the dust.