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Although it has grown quite a bit over the past few decades, in the mid-1980s, Tulsa, Oklahoma was a much sleepier place.
In some ways, it reminded me of my hometown, Nashville: hot and ever-prayerful, with churches dotting the landscape and defining much of the community’s culture. In the case of Tulsa, that hegemonic Christianity was capped off by a 60-foot pair of bronze, praying hands outside Oral Roberts University’s “City of Faith,” a medical center built by the televangelist founder of the college, according to legend, after a 900-foot tall Jesus commanded him to do so.
No regular hospital, the center blended faith healing with medicine, operating under the impression that cancer would yield as readily to the power of heavenly entreaties as it might to chemo and radiation.
Which turns out not to be true, and which might help explain why the facility went bankrupt and closed a few years later. For those wondering, the 30-ton praying hands were then moved to the main campus of Oral Roberts University, a place where students must take pledges not to lie, curse, drink, smoke or engage in sexual activity, and where, therefore, a little divine intervention might well be needed.
