Paul Crouch said he began building the world’s largest Christian broadcasting network after a glowing apparition of North America appeared on his ceiling in the mid-1970s, as the word “satellite” was uttered by a heavenly voice. “I knew I had heard the voice of God,” he later said, “and I absolutely obeyed it.”
Crouch first started a campus radio station at a Bible college, said the Los Angeles Times, and continued deejaying after becoming a minister in Rapid City, S.D. He launched the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) in 1973 with the $20,000 purchase of a UHF station in Tustin, Calif. Crouch and his wife, Janice, presented the network’s first show with nothing but a “folding chair and a shower curtain from Sears as a backdrop.” Their telethon raised $30,000 in a single night. “I had put into motion one of God’s most powerful laws,” Crouch later wrote. “The law of giving and receiving, sowing and reaping.”
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But Crouch wasn’t just spending money on the Gospel, said ReligionDispatches.org. He and his wife acquired a multimillion-dollar fortune by “preying on the gullible,”as donors gave some $90 million every year. Crouch could dismiss charges of impropriety as secular media bias until 2012, when his granddaughter Brittany Koper sued TBN, claiming tax-exempt donations had been spent on extravagant dinners, luxury properties, and a $49 million private jet. The network has denied the allegations.