Disgraced religious figure Tony Alamo

Note: Child abusers, homophobes, racists, cult autocrats,dubious healers, clergy who bilk the elderly and the overly trusting, clergy who say one thing and do the opposite: such are the kinds of men and women who have, to one extent or another, sullied a noble institution, religion, as well as their own reputation. Their names and misdeeds surface in the news, they have an unwanted 15 minutes of fame, and then their names and faces begin to recede into dim memory.



The Clintons are by no means the only remarkable characters to come out of Arkansas in recent times. Another of a different sort is evangelist Tony Alamo, whose birth name was Bernie Hoffman.

Hoffman moved to Los Angeles as a young man, changed his name a couple of times and attempted a music career. He was a rough-looking fellow who looked as though he could hold his own in a bar fight.

The music thing didn't work out terribly well, but he and his wife started manufacturing and selling a line of denim jackets and decided upon a career as Christian evangelists. The couple had their own TV show in the 1970s. When she died of cancer, he reportedly told his audience that she would be resurrected and kept her body on display in a temperature-controlled glass coffin for half a year.

Alamo has waged a long war of words against the Roman Catholic Church and against the U.S. government, as well. During the 1980s, he told his followers that the Pope and Ronald Reagan were Satanic devils. In the 1990s, he served a prison sentence--his second--for tax evasion.

In 2008, Alamo was charged with transporting minors across state lines for immoral purposes; he was found guilty in July 2009.