Lady Mae Checks In On Noah | Greenleaf | Oprah Winfrey Network Noah's wedding to his fiance, Isabel, is just around the corner, but Grace's return to Memphis has Noah confused and Grace's mother anxious. For her part, Lady ...
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(Feb. 10, 2020 - Daylight Atheism)
Billionaire media mogul Oprah Winfrey helped create a four-season television series "Greenleaf" about a black megachurch where worshipers whoop, sway, dance, wave arms, squeal, shout and shell out truckloads of money.
Some commentators say the series "shows the best and worst of Christianity," but I can't find much best, only worst.
The founder-preacher endlessly connives for money, and burned a previous church for insurance (accidentally killing a custodian). He trades his private jet for a sleeker one. He slept with his sister-in-law (played by Oprah), which angered his wife, who slept with a different man.
A middle-aged church manager rapes 15-year-old girls at the church's camp.
The star singer's husband is secretly gay and undergoes grotesque religious "conversion therapy" (through which God supposedly will make him "straight") but it doesn't work.
A married sub-preacher grabs one of the cast's few whites, a female secretary, for sex in anterooms.
A rival preacher gambles away church money.
All the while, episodes reverberate with "God is good!" and "Hallelujah!" and "Praise God!" and "Amen! Amen!" at almost every breath. It's a carnival of sanctimony and sin.
I suspect that Oprah and other producers deliberately hatched this series to make megachurches look like zoos of absurdity places more laughable than laudable.
My wife and I are watching the whole tale. Since one-fourth of all the world's Christians now "speak in tongues," we wonder if any Greenleaf worshipers will burst into glossalalia. They engage in all the rest of holy hoopla. Teen-age gospel singers leap like kangaroos. Worship services are Show Biz extravaganzas.
Actually, the series has plenty of intriguing romance, human struggles, teen puppy-love and other staples of fiction. But there's an underlying current: megachurches supposedly symbolizing successful Christianity - are frauds.
Lots of real-life evidence supports this claim. Here are some notorious examples:
Evangelist Bill Hybels was forced to leave his 24,000-member Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois after several women accused him of sex abuses.
