Todd’s occult-tinged sermons spread widely despite his criminal past

Evidence

Todd was a shadowy fi gure who moved around frequently, but the basic outlines of his career as an evangelist have been reconstructed. He appeared fi rst as a storefront preacher in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1968. He was then nineteen and already claimed to have been a witch before his born-again experience. He appears to have been in the army from 1969 until sometime in the early 1970s. He had psychiatric problems in the military, though it is not clear whether they led to his discharge. He reemerged in the Phoenix Pentecostal subculture in 1973 with muchelaborated tales of his witchcraft days. He left for Dayton, Ohio, the next year, where instead of rejoining Christian organizations, he opened an occult store, the Witches Cauldron. He apparently engaged in sex with minors during this period, for which he received a sentence of six months in jail. Released after two months and placed on probation, he quickly violated his parole by returning to the Phoenix Pentecostal community, though he may have continued to dabble in the occult. He next appeared in California as a Christian evangelist. During at least some of this time, he appeared to gravitate toward fundamentalism and attacked Pentecostals. Within a few years, his itinerant preaching and tapes of his sermons began to spread widely among conservative Christians. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 307

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the chapter’s broader theme of how fringe superconspiracy narratives get seeded by eccentric individuals, echoing the provenance of other conspiracy movements.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did a convicted sex offender’s tapes become so widely distributed among conservative Christians? What was the media pipeline?
• SEED: A potential angle: the credibility gap between conspiracy prophets’ sordid personal biographies and the purity of the audiences who consume them.