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Four years before Bakker began building his network, Robert H. Schuller decided to start telecasts from California's first drive-in church, which he had founded in Garden Grove. His optimistic Christianity won a ready audience, and the church boomed. Emboldened by a nationwide fund base, Schuller opened the Crystal Cathedral in 1980. U.S. Christendom had never seen the like. Designed by Architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee, it has a 128-ft.-high network of white steel trusses supporting more than 10,000 silvered panes of glass, which diffuse an effulgence of brilliant daylight. Sunday mornings at the cathedral have more the feel of sporting events or variety hours than worship services. Gold-jacketed attendants guide cars in the parking lot. Inside, caged canaries chirp and camera-toting tourists click away through worship. As the service begins, 90-ft. doors open to reveal twelve fountains, one for each apostle, and an 11-ft. by 15-ft. Jumbotron video screen, so the back pews can catch the preacher's every gesture. Schuller's sermons, taxing to neither spirit nor intellect, owe as much to psychology as to Scripture. They are peppered with greeting-card aphorisms for seekers of happiness and self-esteem. "Coping and hoping." "Turn your scars into stars." The cross is "a minus turned into a plus." Beyond that, his crystalline Gospel aims at a historic shift, purging Christendom of what Schuller sees as centuries of ensnarement in negative thinking. By preaching sin and judgment, he argues, the clergy "can be, quite accidentally and unintentionally, but nevertheless a destructive influence in the human personality and human life." Schuller gets no salary and lives off book and tape royalties and speaking fees; he lives in a restored farmhouse on 2.5 acres, complete with waterfall.
Jimmy Swaggart went on TV three years after Schuller and claimed his first No. 1 rating by 1982. Not that Swaggart was unknown in the South. He had long been a radio preacher and top country-Gospel singer (his cousin is Rocker Jerry Lee Lewis). The son of an Assemblies of God minister, Swaggart preached at his first street meeting at 19. "Son," said a policeman who was there, "you've got the fire." He has it still. Anyone who believes that TV has made the "hot" Gospel hell-raisers obsolete has not seen one of Swaggart's sweating, mike-toting, Bible-waving, Devil-thrashing performances. "Muhammad is dead but Jesus is alive," he intones. "He's alive. He's alive! GLORY!" He loves the sawdust trail and conducts a road-show crusade about once a month. "It has its own charm, spontaneity and electrifying power," he says. "There's really nothing in the world quite like it. It's like the Republican or the Democratic Convention every night."
Swaggart's self-contained studios bristle with top-of-the-line equipment, and his 15,000-sq.-ft. printing plant churns out 24 million items a year: books, pamphlets, posters, album covers. He has opened mission and charity offices in 53 countries and preaches regularly overseas. Swaggart and Wife Frances live next door to Son Donnie, 31, in Baton Rouge, La. The houses are worth at least $1 million; much of the materials and labor was contributed by followers. Swaggart insists that "we've never taken a dollar from people's donations." He pays himself a salary from book, tape and record royalties, and he admits, "The Lord has been good to me."