Lifestyles of the rich and Christian

[Doubting Thomas]

Rev. James Eugene Ewing
Once a traveling tent-revival preacher, the Rev. James Eugene Ewing built a direct-mail empire from his mansion in Los Angeles that brings millions of dollars flowing into a Tulsa post office box. The approach reaped Ewing and his organization more than $100 million since 1993, including $26 million in 1999, the last year Saint Matthew's made its tax records public.

Ewing's computerized mailing operation, Saint Matthew's Churches, mails more than 1 million letters per month, many to poor, uneducated people, while Ewing lives in a mansion and drives luxury cars.

The letters contain an alluring promise of "seed faith": send Saint Matthew's your money and God will reward you with cash, a cure to your illness, a new home and other blessings. They often contain items such as prayer cloths, a "Jesus eyes handkerchief," golden coins, communion wafers and "sackcloth billfolds." Recipients are often warned to open the letters in private and not discuss them with others.

These are the same assholes who kept sending me letters over and over, offering "prayer cloths" if I sent them a big enough donation. After politely sending them back requests in their postpaid envelopes to take me off their mailing list since I was already an atheist, but even if I weren't I wasn't going to send them any money because their scam was transparent, I started printing out pictures from the nastiest porn sites I could find and mailing them back to them. Eventually the letters stopped, but I'm not sure if it was because they weren't getting any money from me or the nasty porn did the trick.

From what I understand they tend to target low-income neighborhoods and other people down on their luck, people who are desperate and gullible, and get them to send money in. Why they ever sent money requests to me I have no idea, since I lived in a decent, middle-class neighborhood.