5

The "Cheats" Are Way Simpler Than You Probably Suspect

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"It's OK if we have to fake it a little bit," my mentor told me once, "because people need to see the power of God, and it's OK if we have to fudge things to make that happen."

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Our congregants would write their fears and problems down on a prayer card "for God" before each meeting. We'd read them in secret, and then repeat their prayers back to them word for word while we laid hands on them. It was easier for them to assume "miracle" than it was to think their trusted spiritual leaders were running a con.

4

Faith Healing Involves More Chicken Guts Than You'd Think

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We did something called psychic surgery. We'd have someone lay on a table, and beneath the table would be a bowl of chicken gizzards and livers mixed with blood. We'd lift the person's shirt up and act as if we were going to take out a tumor or an infected gall bladder or like, a possessed kidney or something. We'd pretend to cut the stomach open, putting a hand in front of our fingers to hide it, then pull out the gizzards and the liver, calling them "cancer" or "Yendik, the Kidney Demon." Applause and donations would follow.

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I wouldn't perform this sort of act until after the first year of faith healing. By then, I knew we were phonies, so it wasn't a big surprise when I learned that the surgery act was basically performance art. My pastor told me that an act like this bolstered the congregant's faith and "portrayed a deeper reality," which is a line I plan to use if the IRS ever audits my income tax returns.

My first psychic surgery patient was a teenage girl named Courtney, whom I had known for quite some time. She was a friend of mine, and her parents were devout members. This put a lot more pressure on me, which I think was my pastor's plan all along. If I was really in this "scamming the faithful" thing for the long haul, I'd need to get used to lying to friends. Courtney's family believed she was infested with a bad case of Demonitis. Her mood had changed lately and she'd been acting depressed -- almost like some sort of teenager. Instead of talking through her issues, her parents found it easier to have them theatrically ripped out of her, as if she was the frightened peasant from The Temple of Doom.

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3

More Tricks of the Trade

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Every now and then we'd have the opportunity to "talk shop" with other faith healers. Some of them were legit, in that they believed the crazy bullshit claims they made in front of the congregation. If someone did psychic surgery though, I knew they were straight-up frauds like us. I never hesitated to give these guys hard feedback on their performances.

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Once I commented on how a visiting pastor had blocked too much from the audience's view, and that if he placed a rolled-up towel in front of where he made the "incision," it would play much better. In exchange, he told me how he knocked all of his congregants down.

Not like, with a car or anything; I'd noticed that every person he touched dropped to the ground in a very dramatic fashion. He explained the key was pushing a person off-balance. He described his method of placing a hand on the individual's lower back while using the other hand to push their head ever so slightly. Eventually they'd fall, but they wouldn't necessarily connect their losing a fight with gravity to you tripping them in slow motion.

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2

We Blame Sick People for Being Sick

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So at this point, I know the question on most of your minds must be, "what happened to the people who were really sick?" Despite our best efforts, people with legitimate problems made it on stage from time to time. Thankfully, we had a method for dealing with these flies in the sacred ointment: we blamed them. "You don't have enough faith; that's why you're still sick."

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I remember one older guy got called up once. We assumed he had some random old man pain disorder that he wanted prayed away. That's normally an easy case, because the placebo effect of the cheering crowd works about as well as Vicodin ... for a few minutes, at least. But it turned out this guy had cancer -- actual cancer, not fake pastor-inflicted temp-cancer. He dropped that bomb on us when we were already too committed to just pick another person out of the crowd.

So we prayed over him and pronounced him cured and he left very happy. Then he went to his doctors, telling them that the hand of the Lord had cured him. His doctors, of course, checked up on this and found so, so much cancer.

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1

Surprise! Faith Healers are Also Just Common Thieves

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We brought in a lot of money doing this, because it was such a great show. People would come in to be healed because it was cheaper than going to a doctor, plus they got a little song and dance and a gory magic trick or two. Bonus. Some of those folks were so impressed that they would end up donating huge sums of money.

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We took it, obviously. We upgraded the church, making it all high-tech and adding a bigger sanctuary. Everything was going swimmingly until, one day, the pastor left and took the church's entire bankroll with him. The churchgoers blamed me for it at first. The 18-year-old kid. They didn't want to believe their holy leader was nothing more than a sacred Bernie Madoff.

I tried to track the pastor down a few years later. I knew he went to Ohio first. He told our congregation he'd been hired there. Earlier this year, I tried to track him down over there, but he was gone. I found out that he'd gone to Florida, since a church listed him on their website, but that church no longer exists. As best I can figure, David Lion's bled three or four more churches dry since the days when he was my mentor.

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There probably aren't many avid faith healing believers reading this article. But if there are, here's a tip: chicken guts are like a buck fifty a pound at your local Korean market, and falling on your ass is completely free.

Related Reading: We've talked to some fascinating folks in the last year, including this foreign aid worker and an honest-to-badness former terrorist. Have a story to share with Cracked? Reach us here.

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