Who was the addict in Pastor Gene Scott’s life?
I recently had a fascinating exchange of ideas with a friend of Pastor Gene Scott. I mentioned his February 2005 passing in the “Under Watch” section of the www.addictionreport.com in March 2005, for reasons mentioned in the exchange. Dr. Scott’s friend, Harry A. Van Twistern, gave me permission to publish our exchange without the usual altering of names and minor details.
Dear Mr. Doug Thorburn:
I found the following item in the Thorburn Addiction Report of March 2005:
“Televangelist Gene Scott who, as a young man, rebelled against the strict teachings of abstinence from alcohol that he grew up with as the son of a fundamentalist preacher and subsequently married three times, dead at age 75 from prostate cancer.”
I think you should know that Dr. Gene Scott, Ph.D. was never addicted to alcohol and that his rebellion against strict fundamentalism was far more of a broad based intellectual and principled rejection of the tenets of fundamentalist
Christianity across the board, not just a narrow rejection of abstinence, which I as a lifelong sober person in no need of addiction services also reject because I don’t need to practice it.
As to other details, number one, Gene Scott was never a “televangelist.”
Evangelists try to save souls. Dr. Scott taught God’s word, and let God do the saving of souls, and if you had ever read testimonials from some of the followers he had who were alcoholics and addicts, you would have discovered that many of them found the strength to quit their addictions after being taught by this man (and not preached at to quit, just finding the strength in them after trusting God to pull them out of addiction.) Number two, Dr. Scott did NOT die of prostate cancer. It was in remission and being suppressed by prescribed drugs that unfortunately caused hemorrhaging from which he succumbed. He had lived five years with a months-to-live death sentence from cancer that did not happen.
So I would appreciate it if you would print a retraction or correction of the item in your next Addiction Report.
Yours,
Harry A. Van Twistern
Hi Mr. Van Twistern,
You’re correct that I had my facts wrong on prostate cancer. However, as an apparent non-subscriber to my online newsletter and someone who has likely not read my books, you completely misunderstand my take on alcoholism and recovery.
Having the disease of alcoholism is not “bad” or “good.” Alcoholism causes misbehaviors in those with the active version of the disease (i.e., they are drinking). To recover from alcoholism requires not only abstinence, but also ego deflation. Ego deflation allows those in recovery to become not just decent human beings who misbehave no more frequently than do non-alcoholics, but also, often, some of the most wonderful and spiritual people alive.
Scott struck me as that sort of person. I occasionally listened to his genius. It was one that rarely comes naturally without some hard learning, which in turn is often rooted in recovery from alcoholism.
Clues to prior misbehaviors are scarce, but there are a few noted in the obituary I read (Feb 23 ’05 L.A. Times article by Larry B. Stammer). “As a young man he rebelled against the strict teachings of modest dress and abstinence from alcohol that he grew up with,” and, “Scott was divorced twice…” and married a third time. The fact that alcohol was even mentioned is suggestive that it may have been a problem early on. Roughly 40% of divorces involve an alcoholic on one side or the other. While we have no hard statistics, an increasing number of marriages is strongly linked to increasing odds of alcoholism, with as high as an 85% likelihood of alcoholism for those divorced four times.
Understand that alcoholism not only causes misbehaviors, it also explains them. We can reverse the idea: if there are misbehaviors, there is often alcoholism.
Because of the stigma created by the innumerable myths surrounding this all-too-misunderstood disease, gathering information on actual use by those under scrutiny is often difficult at best. That is the reason I use behavioral clues in looking for the likelihood of alcoholism, the probabilities of which I ratchet up or down as I learn more about the behaviors. The trouble in Mr. Scott’s case is that his recovery, if there was one, may have occurred decades ago. There are many who develop early-stage alcoholism, are active in their disease for a few years, and somehow “stop drinking.” That doesn’t mean there wasn’t alcoholism; there was. We were simply spared from its otherwise inevitable progression to the more obvious latter-stage version.
My “under watch” section of the online report is for those about whom I have no proof of actual addictive use of the drug, but in whom some behaviors were apparent. If the behaviors were simply those that can be attributed to human frailties, that’s fine. However, I give the benefit of the doubt when I assume alcoholism, which is the root cause of most destructive behavior.
Admittedly, even mentioning Scott was more of a stretch than I usually include in that section (I am far more certain of alcoholism in, say, Jesse Jackson and Elliott Spitzer). However, I did so more out of curiosity to see whether anyone had any early information on his actual use and misbehaviors that might have been linked to that use. And I was curious because I have rarely found the degree of spiritual brilliance in anyone who was not a recovering alcoholic, and wanted to see if I could trigger some memories in someone who could confirm or disconfirm my hypothesis.
BTW, I agree that “televangelist” could be misunderstood. I certainly didn’t intend to include him with the likes of Swaggart or Bakker (who were active alcoholics for much of their careers).
Now, do me a favor. See if you can find anyone who knew Scott early on. Tell them my idea and ask them to think about it. My work grew out of suspecting alcoholism where no one else thought it existed. The reaction in suggesting the possibility was always, “No way.” Six days or six months later I’d hear a retraction of that statement, with the question, “How the heck did you know?”
Doug Thorburn
Dear Mr. Thorburn,
I don’t really have to go to anyone who knew him in his youth; he was always very open about his childhood and youth, and those who have listened to his teaching over the decades can attest to that fact, as well as his utter and complete commitment to honesty and truth.
In that vein, I can testify that he has made the following statement: “I have never drunk so much that I didn’t know what I was doing.” Also, he was widely known and videographed as a wine connoisseur, a rather high risk hobby if one is a recovering alcoholic, don’t you think? He also taught on communion and practiced it with real wine, while offering grape juice in the studio to those preferring the non-alcoholic alternative. He was open and honest, even wry, about the missteps and adventures of his youth, his premarital sexual past (and then-intermarital present), his associations with people many churchgoers of his day would have considered “unsavory,” and what some would consider his “addictive” habit of smoking cigars. There is no reason to suppose that he would have hid an addiction to alcohol, and during all the years I watched him on television, watching him drink and enjoy an occasional glass of wine, with his life open to the camera for all of those years, I never saw him drunk. If there was any problem with alcohol in any of his three marriages, I’m sure that ex-wife vengeance being what it is, it would have been outed in the divorce documents, and he would have copped to it anyway just to short-circuit the media feeding frenzy that would inevitably ensue. His two divorces were indeed the result of addiction — his addiction to God, his need to be satisfied with the Word, and his putting God and his ministry and his congregation ahead of all other considerations in his life. His side of the story on the first wife is that she got angry about being put second place to the ministry. Now for a man who dedicated his life to the ministry of the Word, that was nothing short of the last straw in a marriage where, from what I’ve gleaned from his statements, her demands began to intrude too much into the work that he honestly believed God had chosen him to do.
Another thing to consider — if you have ever read or heard anything he has taught, such as A Philosopher Looks At Christ, you can see that in his every effort to communicate God’s word, he did his level best to make it relevant to his audience, which he knew included the full panoply of sinners, including me and himself, about which he echoed Paul the apostle, “I am the chiefest of sinners.” If there was anything he could use in his past that would have helped people on the street relate to God’s word, he used it selflessly. It therefore simply makes no sense to me that he would not have utilized his own addiction to alcohol, had he one, to help relate other alcoholics to their own wrestlings with faith. Instead, all he could really do was offer alcoholism as an analogy for the way that sin works, except that sin is worse, no amount of willpower without the power of God can overcome it. And everybody is an addict in that fashion, and he was more acutely aware of that and of his own failings than almost anyone else in the world. That may be what you are picking up on as “recovering addict” behavior, because a Christian, especially per Gene
Scott’s teaching and life example, is a “recovering sinner,” one who has taken God’s hand but is still in the process of being pulled loose of evil — not even abstaining, because abstinence from sin is humanly impossible.
So, that’s the straight poop in my realm of awareness of Gene Scott’s relationship with alcohol. I’m aware that for you as a recovery specialist, your view of a person from afar, like Dr. Gene Scott, is going to be very hinged on questions about alcohol, but when I said that his rebellion against tradition was very broad based, I really meant it. The fundamentalist, Assemblies of God background he came from was strict on everything from going to see movies, to wearing shorts, to wearing or not wearing ties, to cussing, to sex, to smoking, to gambling, to jazz music, to dancing, to just about everything you could imagine there was to do for fun in the western towns he grew up in in Idaho, Missouri, and California. He got expelled from a Bible college in California after being called into the dean’s office one day and having it explained to him that his weekend jaunts into San Francisco to stomp it up playing saxophone in a jazz club had come to their attention! His profs there recommended he go to a secular university like Stanford, because he was never going to fit in to the “atmosphere” of their school, and he took them up on it.
A few years later he graduated with a Ph.D. from Stanford University having written a brilliant doctoral thesis on the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. He then made what came to haunt him later as a career mistake, going into the Assemblies of God denomination to work as a minister, and wound up in the mission field for many years, traveling around the world and teaching, and coming to be known as the go-to man for churches in dire financial straits. Somewhere about 1964, he was elected President of the Assemblies of God denomination, and while continuing his itinerant world-parish ministry, rewrote most of the bylaws of the denomination and put it on a footing of exceptional growth that has continued to this day. His traveling speeches to the then nascent, struggling
Presbyterian Church of South Korea, I credit with similarly inspiring their growth and success until they have today become the largest religion in South Korea, and now send missionaries to and found churches in the United States!
Dr. Gene Scott was reelected for a second term, and around 1972 quit the post and the denomination — in good standing — over his personal frustration with the denominational attachment to what he called “will-worship,” “works of legalism,” and outright hypocrisy. He never looked back.
In 1975 he was called by Faith Center of Glendale, California to work his financial acumen one more time in their financial crisis — the church owed over
$3 million mainly to out of state creditors, and had only $19,000 to pay it on hand, and it was due. The rest, as they say, is history and is entirely documented from there on, as that church became the base from which the next and final phase of his life and ministry would play out, and all of it can be followed through the recorded teaching he did from 1975 onwards, through years in which he struggled with the government over church donor privacy rights, the beginning of the satellite TV network, the move to downtown Los Angeles, and finally the renovation and restoration of the United Artists Theater which became the University Cathedral, now famed not only for his teaching from there, but also for the largest and best quality Bible museum in private hands in the entire world. And through all of those years and accomplishments, ending up being able to count as friends people like Henry Kissinger, Thomas Bradley, Merle
Haggard, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Ed Masry (Erin Brocovitch’s boss), he was known for openly drinking a glass or two of fine wine with his restaurant meals, inviting his friends to join him, while becoming so well known as a wine connoisseur that articles were written about his collection of rare vintages. I don’t know how you hide alcoholism in plain sight like that — but knowing my best friend who is an alcoholic in recovery, I do know the only way she has to hide it is by being sober — ALL the time — or to drink completely out of sight, which actually has never been her style anyway, and my sense of Gene Scott and the kind of person he was, it would never have been his style either.
Yours,
Harry A. Van Twistern
Good morning Mr. Van Twistern,
Forgive me for being blunt, but you show a lack of understanding of alcoholism in two areas of your response.
First, “there is no reason to suppose that he would have hid[den] an addiction to alcohol…” Of course there is. Anyone in the public eye has every reason to hide it, and most of the time close persons assist in the keeping the secret. Just look at Michael Jackson and, I think, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson and others too numerous to count. If misbehaviors can be linked with heavy drinking, even the public would begin to get the idea. Misbehaviors without the link make the subject appear as an icon in the eyes of many. Consider the number of known alcoholics at whose feet the public has worshipped: Elvis, Marilyn, Liz Taylor, JFK, Michael Jackson and all-too-many others. The public worshipped them before they knew the secret, but the behaviors were there all along.
That does not mean he had anything to hide. If he drank a glass or two of fine wine at dinner and engaged in no misbehaviors for decades, he did not have the disease of alcoholism. It appears his early transgressions can be explained by his personality type, likely an NFP (see www.Keirsey.com), which type often rebels in constructive ways.
Second, “I never saw him drunk.” Many alcoholics never look drunk during most of their drinking careers. Non-alcoholics may appear inebriated at Blood Alcohol Levels as low as .04 per cent. Alcoholics may not show the classic signs of inebriation (staggered gait, slurred speech) at BALs as high as .24 per cent.
Third, “it would have been outed in the divorce documents…” Many ex-spouses have no idea the other spouse had alcoholism. For one, I didn’t until long after my divorce (I was inspired to learn about alcoholism because of an ex-fiancée; I was led to write my first book because I realized I had been offered a very special gift of knowledge; I was half-way through writing my first book before I even asked the question about my first wife). One of the ways my knowledge led to a book was suggesting to ex-spouses that the other party was an alcoholic and seeing the initial response of “no way” melt into “oh my God, it was there all along.”
The fact he was more aware of his own failings is very likely an NF response, which can easily be confused with recovering addicts. AA teaches NF behaviors, which is the reason so many of those in recovery act like and look like NFs, even if their true types are something very different.
My view of people is tainted by alcohol only because I’ve learned to rule out alcoholism first before looking for other explanations of misbehaviors. Scott’s misbehaviors, if any, were slight; it actually appears to me, from your letter, that they were not misbehaviors at all, but rather a rebellion against traditionalist types (see Keirsey’s SJs) rooted in his likely NF style (particularly likely when considering his weekend jaunts to a jazz club).
BTW, a good friend of mine viewed the exhibition of the Bible collection and absolutely raved about it.
And another BTW, I’ve long suspected Brokovitch is alcoholic. I vaguely recall reading something about her picking up her son in hyperbolic fashion, but do not remember the details. Hyperbole is a terrific clue to alcoholism. (Whether or not correct, this doesn’t make Brokovitch wrong in what she did, but could explain the semi-recklessness with which she did it. Again, however, this hypothesis is one of these stretches where, with limited information, I prove right only 25-50% of the time.)
Doug Thorburn
Dear Mr. Thorburn,
Well, I must say I like the idea of Dr. Gene Scott as a “constructive rebel” a whole lot better, that would describe him quite accurately. I’m not going to say he never had misbehaviors, only that I didn’t see any that I would consider related to alcoholism. The Keirsey category of Expressive Introspective
Friendly Probing (Champion) is not a bad description of his temperament, it seems to peg a lot of his personality characteristics right on, and even his “supernatural” gifts were Spiritual augmentations of many of the normal gifts in this area. (In my opinion, this also proves his teaching about Spirituality, where he emphasized that God makes you more of what you already are.)
As for Erin Brockovitch, I would not be surprised at all if she were a recovering alcoholic; she has many of my best friend’s personality characteristics, at least as she was portrayed by Julia Roberts in the movie.
If it does turn out that alcoholism was a factor in either of Gene’s divorces, my suspicion falls on the wife, not on him. If I find out I will let you know. As for his third wife, and our present Pastor Melissa Scott, nee Pastore, a.k.a. Barbi Bridges, she stipulates to everything that’s been said about her, shares with her late husband the honest conviction that “I am the chiefest of sinners,” and says “Whatever you’ve heard about me, I’m worse!”
Yours,
HVT
Dear HVT,
Since I no longer suspect Scott of having alcoholism, I would turn to the wives. And also, ridiculous fundamentalism is often rooted in alcoholism; I might suspect a grandparent. I relate a story in my first book of my attendance at an ACA meeting, where I learned that one member’s parents were not alcoholics.
I asked, “Then why are you here?” “My grandparent was an alcoholic.” “Oh,” I responded, “you must have lived with him for quite some period.” “No,” he protested, “I never lived with my grandparents.” “Then why are you here?” I repeated. “My father lived with my grandparents.” That’s when it dawned on me how powerful this disease can be.
And on a related note, I think we may end up agreeing to disagree: a fabulous speaker at a meeting last year of the Southern California Book Publicists association argued that man was innately sinful. I think this is where I disagree with most organized religion. It hit me that I hold the opposite belief: it usually takes a psychotropic drug addiction to cause misbehaviors, or sinful ones. While non-alcoholics may think of killing someone or committing adultery, we rarely act on such destructive thoughts. Because the neo-cortex (the human part of the brain) in alcoholics is damaged, its role as a restrainer of the impulses of lower brain centers is diminished. Hence, the pre-civilized behaviors found in many alcoholics.
BTW, I assume you are already familiar with Keirsey’s work? He was instrumental the progression of my ideas. He once said to me, “We cannot rely on the accurate self-identification of one’s type; we must observe behaviors.” I realized that, similarly (and for more compelling reasons), we cannot rely on accurate self-diagnosis of alcoholism, particularly when considering Vernon Johnson’s description of euphoric recall. I decided that in order to diagnose alcoholism, we must observe behaviors, just as Keirsey suggests in identifying type.
This has been a great series of letters, which I really appreciate. I wonder if you would mind if I post them on my blog (which hasn’t deserved an entry for quite some time)?
Doug Thorburn
Dear Doug,
Sure, you can post them.
By the way Dr. Scott hated his grandfather and told some stories about him that suggest to me that he could indeed have been either an alcoholic or that worst of recovering addiction breeds, the Dry Drunk. Of the ones that come to mind, one is about how Grampa Scott had a toothache, and refused to go to a doctor, but the pain kept getting worse and worse — so he took a hammer and knocked it out of his mouth! The other one was the time that he started complaining “Ohhh, I’m dying of cancer!!” and he didn’t have any cancer, the miserable old cuss lived another 20 years spouting hyperbolic hypochondria. He was a
hardline fundamentalist, a real thorn in the side of Doc’s father and mother, and terrorized young Gene with the horrors of hell that would ensue if he went to go see movies or go out with girls. If you pointed out where Grampa’s hypocritical perfectionism conflicted with actual scriptures in the Bible he would declare “Right there is where I differ with the Bible!”
We do disagree over how much sin there is, but I believe most of our difference is actually over definition — my perception of your view of sin is that it is pretty much like most people’s, that manifestation of surface behavior that most people would agree is bad would be sin. But, if you read the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, or if you go to Romans 7&8 or read Dr. Scott’s dissertation on Niebuhr about the nature of sin, you find the definition Gene Scott teaches is far different, involves a far more insidious entity that takes all mankind captive, and which forces humanity out of the orbit of God’s perfection (and that rather easily.) Rather than being about behavior we can see, sinfulness is really about the interior contents of the human soul, and the dark part of every one of us. I don’t want to get too deep into this, but this is part of why Dr. Scott rebelled against tradition, because traditional religion is obsessed with surface behavior modification which does nothing to cure the ills buried deep within. So as a pastor’s son he was able to watch people go through the exercises of doing “good works” after being “saved” and yet see that they had not really changed, they had only shined up their human performance a little. Doc taught something that had not really been taught to the church world since Martin Luther, that it takes the power of God, not oppressing from outside, but working outwards from within to change a person, and the evidence of that change is that the recipient of grace begins to find it natural to do things he would have had to fight himself to do before. It’s like the example
Dr. Scott oft cited of an apple tree — a crazy farmer would beat on the tree and scream “Grow apples!!” It’s called spiritual fruits for a reason. If it’s a good tree and well planted, eventually it will produce apples without any work on the farmer’s part, just enough of his trust to not cut it down.
So it isn’t like everyone is on a scale of 0 to 10, “how rotten are you?” We never ask the denizens of an ant colony how righteous each ant is and whether its performance is up to the Golden Rule — although some biologists would probably argue that social insect behavior is often better organized and beneficial for their species than that of humans. There might be lots of perfectly well behaved ants, by ant standards, in the ant nest in my kitchen. That’s not stopping me from calling an exterminator. The problem is they are where they don’t belong, and humanity is where it does not belong — in a state of sin, in a dimension separated from God. Behavior is practically irrelevant to salvation, whose object is to move us out of the state of separation from God into God’s presence. (Compare that with addiction recovery — is the main objective not just to remove the substance from the user, but to remove the user from the substance and into a realm where he finds life satisfying without it?)
So if by analogy I put a stick into the nest and a bunch of ants trust it enough to climb onto it, I can take them and put them outside where they won’t be killed. Anyway, I hope that gives you a clearer idea of where Dr. Scott and I are on sin, even if you still disagree with it, which I respect.
I perused the site enough to find Gene’s personality type and I may return to it to see if I can determine my own, but I think I remember taking an introverted/extroverted determination and foursome of main temperaments rings a bell. One thing that has changed about me, though, is I’ve struck a much better balance between
I/E than I used to have, so if I can find my old inventory and compare it to my new one, if I take it, it should be interesting to see if anything else has changed.
HVT
Dear HVT,
In regards to the grandfather story:
Power-seeking misbehaviors are an excellent indicator of alcoholism, and his grandfather was certainly one of the world’s great control freaks. Wow. Hypochondria is also common to some alcoholics, perhaps because it, too, is a way to control others. “Poor me, poor me.”
I’ll ponder your comments in the mid-two paragraphs.
The earlier inventory might have been Myers-Briggs. Ring a bell? However, we don’t fundamentally change, IMHO, even on the I/E scale. We may _appear_ to change because Introverts can become more loquacious when mature, but that doesn’t change the Introversion of our dominant mental function, which is an introverted one. People see the weaker extroverted mental function, putting Introverts at a bit of a disadvantage when dealing with others. Extroverts have it easier: because they extrovert their dominant mental function, people see their best side.
Doug Thorburn
http://www.galtpublishing.com
