We’ve got scandal in the heartland, bubbling up all over the campus of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Yup, scandal! There’s politics, lavish spending, text messaging, and the ever popular “underage males.” Woohoo! Richard Roberts, named Oral of the unfortunate name’s son, is thwe University President, and he’s pretty much at the center of what looks like a garden variety televangelism scandal. Here’s the lowdown from the AP:

_ A longtime maintenance employee was fired so that an underage male friend of Mrs. Roberts could have his position.

_ Mrs. Roberts — who is a member of the board of regents and is referred to as ORU’s “first lady” on the university’s Web site — frequently had cell-phone bills of more than $800 per month, with hundreds of text messages sent between 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. to “underage males who had been provided phones at university expense.”

_ The university jet was used to take one daughter and several friends on a senior trip to Orlando, Fla., and the Bahamas. The $29,411 trip was billed to the ministry as an “evangelistic function of the president.”

_ Mrs. Roberts spent more than $39,000 at one Chico’s clothing store alone in less than a year, and had other accounts in Texas and California. She also repeatedly said, “As long as I wear it once on TV, we can charge it off.” The document cites inconsistencies in clothing purchases and actual usage on TV.

_ Mrs. Roberts was given a white Lexus SUV and a red Mercedes convertible by ministry donors.

_ University and ministry employees are regularly summoned to the Roberts’ home to do the daughters’ homework.

_ The university and ministry maintain a stable of horses for exclusive use by the Roberts’ children.

_ The Roberts’ home has been remodeled 11 times in the past 14 years,

Come on, they’re always talking about misappropriation of funds, and televangelism has been plagued by sex scandals since before it became televangelism. Think of Elmer Gantry as a documentary, willya? So it’s text messaging now? With underage males? Who cares. We’ll end up seeing the whiney excuses soon on every outlet, like when Richard Roberts and his wife showed up on Larry King the other night. The 11 remodellings of their house? Evidently they had a BIG mold problem. The text messages to “underage males?” Lindsey is blaming that on her daughters. No excuses that I could see covering the private jet used for the daughter’s senior trip.

There are two aspects of this scandal that have nothing to do with speculation about how a televangelist (Oh my!) is involved and might be guilty of scandal. Seriously, it’s just not news when a televangelist gets caught dipping into the till, just as it is not big news anymore when a Republican gets caught with a wide stance. Two things strike me, though, one humorous and the other not so much.

First, the media overseas is so fun! The Irish Independent’s Ian O’Doherty is a total hoot with this item, titled “Praise the Lord and zip up your trousers,” in his, well, gossip column, that identifies, with a little hint, what that “innappropriate behavior” with “underage males” was on the part of Lindsey Roberts:

But it’s the actions of his wife, Lindsay, which are more interesting. She is accused of sending hundreds of “inappropriate” text messages to “under age males” as well as having a long-time employee fired to make way for another “under age male” while engaging in unspecified but “inappropriate” behaviour.

The scandal is just the latest to rock America’s religious lunatics but what exactly was her inappropriate behaviour?

Well, let’s put it this way, according to the interweb — which, as we know, is never wrong — the clue is in the name of the College –which is ironic, because it’s one of the many sex acts students are banned from engaging in.

The Age in Australia nails midwestern televangelism far more honestly than American media has done, though admittedly, that AP article is a bit over the top. According to Ian Munro:

OKLAHOMA-BORN evangelist Oral Roberts fits right in to that American tradition of perspiring, impassioned preachers who just happen to become very wealthy thanks to the generosity of their wide-eyed congregations.

Roberts began with a revival tent show touring the impoverished South, became a pioneering television preacher and founded a university in his name.

His ministry avoided the sex scandals that besmirched many other television preachers, but the self-proclaimed healer, now 89 and enjoying retirement in California, may yet live to see his life’s work undone.

OK, it’s fun to take a look and see how the Ians in all the other English Speaking countries view our petty little scandals here, but this one isn’t about just a religious leader and those followers stupid enough to fork over their money. This one is about education, the Roberts family having the audacity 44 years ago to start a university, then to run it as if the students were gophers backstage rather than students trying to get a good education. Let’s get it straight. Richard Roberts is qualified to run the family business. He’s sweaty enough, telegenic, knows televangelism inside and out, looks like a used car salesman, has a pneumatic wife. Yup, Roberts is qualified to be a televangelist in his own family’s tradition. But he is not qualified to run an academic institution.

A college education nowadays is too important for kids to let a university be run by a man who claims that God spoke to him and told him to deny all these charges. Yeah, you’ve got it right, that’s the identity of the head of the Roberts legal team, the big guy himself, God. Let me be succinct. Anyone who believes God is there for you to speak personally to you in the context of your legal troubles. . . if Richard Roberts really believes this, he’s a fruitcake.

Oh, this scandal has evidently been brewing a long time, and there are thousands of witnesses to the political misconduct parts of the charges, according to former student Adam Willard. Check his column out. I especially like the testimony he’s got from current and former ORU students.