Ernest Angley

Akron, Ohio, is the home of Grace Cathedral and a squeaky-voiced faith-healer named Ernest Angley. In 1986, I attended a service at the cathedral accompanied by Buffalo philosophy professor Paul Kurtz. It was quite startling in many ways. The church is a meticulously kept, very attractive house of worship. The choir is excellent, and the musicians are top-quality performers. But the worship service can only be described as a pathological experience. By the time Kurtz and I had gone through four and a half hours of Angley’s squealing and bellowing, we were ready for a rapid retreat. Such an encounter is an exercise in endurance. Stuffed into a silk suit and a Rolex watch, Reverend Angley covers his pate with what appears to be a cast aluminum hairpiece. His heavy Southern accent gives him the flavor of a comic performing an impersonation of a preacher. He is often parodied by well-known comedians. In fact, he is the faith-healer most easily recognized because of his bizarre habits and appearance. His sermon was simply a mind-numbing, disconnected, rambling series of mild admonitions and folksy anecdotes. Two hours of that, and then the “healing” session began, with no surprises whatsoever. At one point, he got into trouble. A 10-year-old boy, in the company of his mother, stood in the healing line. Angley spoke softly with her. Suddenly beaming, he decided to let her tell her story. She enthusiastically recounted how her son had been suffering from a tumor on his head “big as a baseball,” and that she had brought him to Angley to be prayed for. The preacher put words in her mouth: “And today this little boy is healed of that cancer! Is that right?” he asked. “Yes,” said the mother, “and praise Jesus, he has no cancer or pain now after coming here to Grace Cathedral to be healed!” Then Angley put both his Florsheims into his open mouth. “So he was healed right here by prayer?” Said the mother, “Yes! You see, after the doctors cut off that tumor, he was feeling poorly, and you prayed for him to get better fast after the operation, and he did!” Angley quickly snatched the microphone away from the woman and went into a series of screechy hallelujahs, looking around for something to take the footprints off his tongue. Angley also uses the “shotgun” technique of pointing into the audience in a vague fashion and yelling to diabetics, high blood pressure victims, and migraine sufferers: “Receive the miracle!” He also does the “slaying in the spirit” demonstration, to which I subjected myself at his meeting. I stood before him and two huge “catchers” stood at my sides. He placed one hand at the small of my back, pressed the other to my forehead, and easily pushed me over. Kurtz was not such a “pushover.” He decided to resist, and though Angley pushed him hard three times, Kurtz remained firmly standing. Disgusted, Angley muttered to him, “Well, then, take the healing for your friend!” and went on to more pliant victims. The ritual that followed the healing portion of the service was really frightening. Kurtz and I saw how otherwise intelligent, quiet people could be manipulated into a frenzy by a sort of hypnotic, paralyzing repetition of a short phrase (“God is good!”) endlessly chanted, while Angley “conducted” the chant with a bemused smile. It went on for 26 minutes, as evidenced by my tape recorder. We regarded the Angley performance as more of a circus than a service. He is, to me, a ludicrous figure; to his parishioners, he is a God-inspired preacher. One thing surprised me greatly: We found that most of those in attendance at the church were accustomed to being there every Friday night. It was their “night out” in very much the way other folks go to the drive-in movie or the bowling alley once a week. Angley provides them with entertainment, essentially, and it is one of the community activities to be there when he is on stage. Two professors of philosophy from the University of Akron were with Kurtz and me, and they later commented in Free Inquiry magazine: If Angley were only in the entertainment business, the matter could be left there. But the remaining possibility is of a more serious nature—that he is taking money under false pretenses by claiming to do something that he doesn’t do and cannot do—heal the sick.

Ernest Angley appears to be a relatively harmless, probably sincere preacher. There has never been any complaint about his handling of money, and there is little in the way of serious objection from the community around him. Akron seems to like him and to tolerate any silliness that may rub off by association. Unless some major scandal descends on him, Angley will probably have little trouble holding onto his ministry. Two deaths are known to have occurred during Angley’s services. One was in Charlotte, North Carolina, and another in Zurich, Switzerland. For practicing medicine without a license in Munich, Germany, in July 1984, Angley spent a short time in jail. But no other accusation of any consequence has been leveled upon him—other than his bad wig—and he appears to be a relatively benign character in this otherwise rather seedy assemblage. Though he claims to have virtually a 100 percent rate of successful healing, that is obviously only wishful thinking. As other healers, he deceives himself and doesn’t know when to stop. We saw people at the Akron meeting who told us they were healed every week, and they saw nothing incongruous in that statement. I think the difference between us was in our definitions, nothing more. Angley is fond of invoking God’s wrath upon those who offend him. He gleefully tells his supporters that the city of Munich suffered a major hailstorm shortly after he was jailed there, and as punishment for the investigation that Kurtz and I did of his operation, he declared: “God’s likely to strike them dead. It’s just a mercy of God that He didn’t.” I rather think that God’s vengeance would be worse if I had had to sit through another hour of Ernest Angley. That would be worse than divine lightning, I assure you.