Rick Warren and Benny Hinn
According to a recent article on the Christian Post, the profitable prophet behind the Purpose Driven™ brand of Christianity has now surpassed Benny Hinn, one of my all-time favorite holy rollers, in household recognition.
The poll by the HCD was conducted less than 10 days after the inauguration, so surely Rick got a little bit of an Obama bump but still…
For those of you who don’t know about Benny, he is mostly TV and stadiums and he does waste a lot of time firing up people in Africa and South America. He probably doesn’t get the face time on TV that he had 10 or 15 years ago though. He’s not as cool as Benny Hill but he definitely has his own pizzazz.
Rick Warren also does the stadiums and his 30,000+ person megachurch but his biggest helper is WalMart, with its humble book section. More than 30 million copies of the Purpose Driven Life have been sold (and that’s as of 2006). In addition to that, he has sold millions of copies of his other book on how to put asses in the seats. Any clergyman worth his salt knows that more asses in the seats mean more money in the coffers, so of course thousands of churches are pushing his product.
Benny likes the theatric…
Where as slick Rick would rather blenderize 14 translations of the Bible into one new and improved version that he wrote.
To be honest, I’m a little sad that Benny got beat by an Oprah impersonator, but then again Benny Hinn doesn’t have the support of the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Barack Obama so what can you do…
