commentary by Patrick H. Moore
Bob Dyer of The Beacon Journal has written an excellent article in which he takes a hard look at certain questionable activities that have allegedly been going on for a very long time at a giant Cuyahoga Falls evangelical church known as Grace Cathedral which has been run for decades by a strange old man with equally strange hair, the legendary television evangelist Ernest Angley. Mr. Dyer writes:
Depending whom you ask, one of two things is happening at the big Cuyahoga Falls church run by legendary television evangelist Ernest Angley:
• The devil himself has infiltrated the church, and Angley, who is a prophet of God, has been working tirelessly to fight him off.
• Angley’s church is a dangerous cult where pregnant women are encouraged to have abortions, childless men are encouraged to have vasectomies and Angley — who preaches vehemently against the “sin” of homosexuality — is himself a gay man who personally examines the genitals of the male parishioners before and after their surgeries. They also say he turns a blind eye to sexual abuse by other members of his church.
It seems that thing have recently come to a head at the church. One longtime associate pastor has resigned and has informed family and friends that Pastor Angley had touched him inappropriately for the past seven years.
On July 13th of this year, Pastor Angley and two of his supporters addressed the situation in a lengthy open service. In response to the accusations that he is a homosexual and that he has abused both his associates and members of the congregation, Angley, who is 93 years old, stated:
“I’m not a homosexual. God wouldn’t use a homosexual like he uses me. He calls me his prophet, and indeed I am. …
“They called Jesus a homosexual, did you know that? And still do. Because he was with men. Oh, Mary Magdalene and a few women. But you can’t stop the people’s lies.”
With respect to his history of urging the males in his congregation to submit to vasectomies, the Pastor had this to say:
“I’ve helped so many of the boys down through the years. They had their misgivings. Sure, I’d have them uncover themselves, but I did not handle them at all.
“And I would tell them how that would work. And they’d have to watch it. I’d have some of them come back to me that I felt needed to. And I would tell them, I would look at them, their privates — I, so I could tell how they were swelling.
“And another one, one of his testicles fell out, absolutely fell out. ‘It’s dangerous, you should have a nurse.’ But I knew they wouldn’t get one.
“And men’s — I was a farm boy. We thought nothing about undressing. We didn’t know about homosexuals. We talked about women.
“And some of these turned against me.”
The Beacon Journal interviewed 21 former members of the church who insist that Angley has been running a cult, not a church, and that he “controls virtually every aspect of their lives, from deciding what they read and watch on TV to whom they will marry and when. The sheer amount of time they are urged to spend at the church — three- to five-hour services, multiple times per week, plus a host of other activities — enables him to limit outside interference.”
Angley and other top church officials naturally deny the accusations and say it is a conspiracy on the part of dissidents take control of the ministry.
Many ex members, some of whom left the church decades ago, scoff at the claims of insurrection.
Pam Cable of Akron left the church in 1988. She states:
“This man is a monster. He’s a monster. And I can’t understand why all these years have gone by and nobody’s ever really been able to do anything about him.
“The people in Akron, Ohio, have a Jim Jones sitting in their backyard. … These people in his congregation would drink the Kool-Aid if he told them to. They would.”
What’s just as disturbing as the accusations of improper touching and wholesale prurience is the Pastor’s predilection for persuading his followers to get abortions and vasectomies even when they didn’t want to.
“None of us have kids because he makes all the men get fixed,” said Becky Roadman, 32, who quit the church last year and now lives in Georgia. “You’re not allowed to have babies there.”
If these allegations are true, and I suspect they are, this is Spiritual Mind Control on a large and disturbing scale.
Angley and his late wife, Esther (he called her “Angel”), who died in 1970, never had children. When asked why, Angley said: “We didn’t want children. We wanted to give our lives to the work of God. … My wife really loved children, but she didn’t feel like that we should have them.”
Since Angel died 44 years ago, the Pastor has apparently spent the last many decades with no female voice on hand to check his allegedly wayward impulses, not that she necessarily could have anyway.
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I strongly suggest you read Bob Dyer’s entire article which is available here: http://www.ohio.com/news/local/ernest-angley-s-grace-cathedral-rocked-by-accusations-involving-abortions-and-vasectomies-1.531094
The emotional and sexual abuse of boys and young men is a topic we’ve often covered here on All Things Crime Blog. The sad truth is that it’s incredibly common in our society and along with its close first cousin, general child abuse, is, in my opinion, perhaps the most serious problem facing society today.
In a situation such as that which has allegedly been ongoing at Pastor Angley’s church for a very long time, the abuse — which in in this case appears to have been dishearteningly broad-based and affected couples to such a degree that many have gone through life childless — the fact of the matter is that none of the alleged abuse could (or would) have occurred if the members of Pastor Angley’s congregation had not been desperately seeking a firm guiding hand to tell them WHAT TO DO and WHAT TO BELIEVE.
So I would say that the underlying issue to be examined here is why are so many Americans willing to stop thinking for themselves in order to give their unremitting allegiance to a Strong Man, a Spiritual Dictator, if you will? Another way of asking this is why are we so eager to become sheep, metaphorically speaking?
Good question and I don’t have any easy answers. I do have one idea to toss out, though. Years ago I had a close friend named Black Bob Dunne. Black Bob was a complex and troubled soul and in listening to his opinions, it was necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. One area where I think he may have been on to something is the issue of public education. Bob said that the reason the huge upheaval of the 1960s occurred is because public education in the U.S. had gotten really good between the end of WWII and the early 1960s which means that our kids, for perhaps the first time in the history of this nation, were being taught not only to get the answers right but to think critically. Therefore, when huge numbers of these well-educated kids observed the Vietnam conflict and decided that it somehow didn’t “smell right”, society was thrown into turmoil.
The war eventually staggered to a close, the draft was ultimately rescinded and now we have our all-volunteer military which would have been unthinkable prior to Vietnam.
In describing his theory to me, Black Bob gave me the Black Bob stare and told me in no uncertain terms that the powers that be would never make this mistake again and that U.S. public education would never again make the mistake of teaching kids to think critically.
And it appears that Black Bob was right; with the exception of certain elite schools reserved for the children of the ruling classes, our children are not taught to think critically in our public schools. Fortunately, this changes to some degree at our universities, which are generally considered to be of superior quality.
I can state without reservation that my own daughter, who attended a large student friendly suburban high school here in suburban Los Angeles County was not taught to think critically at her high school. Because she was (is) a very stubborn child, I didn’t worry about this too much while she was still in high school and would tell my wife, “Hopefully, she will improve her mind greatly at the university level.”
I’m gratified to report that at her college, as part of her cluster program which is titled, “The Individual in Society,” she is now taking an entry level Intro to Philosophy class and she tells me that “it’s interesting”. Her professor began the course by asking the basic philosophical question, “What is the relationship of the mind to the body?” The students are required to write short answers to this and related questions. This is the jumping off place and from here the class will no 
doubt progress to other questions that require the kids to put their thinking caps on and engage in a bit of critical thinking. Next quarter she will take an Intro to Psych class and in the spring she’ll wrap up her first year by taking a Sociology class. By June her little head will not nearly as empty as it was after 12 years of Southern California public schooling.
Thus, the dumbing down of America could be alleviated to some degree if every graduating high school student was to attend a decent college where they would take at least some enriching courses, which while not practical in the way math, science, engineering and business courses are, would nevertheless help them learn to think critically.
To return to Pastor Angley and his decades of tyrannical dominance over his congregation, in a presentation on The Young Turks (TYT), Cenk Uygur breaks down some of the Pastor’s bizarre statements and counsels us all (I paraphrase): “Anytime anyone tells you to suspend your rational function and follow irrational dogmatic advice, no matter what it is, get out of there. Run like hell as fast as you can.”
Sage advice without a doubt. Here is Cenk’s presentation: