In 2012, he told his followers to write in Jesus on the presidential ticket. He equated a vote for Mitt Romney with a vote for Satan. I found this funny. It seemed no one was immune to his wrath. In 2010, he opened a “9/11 Christian Center” at Ground Zero in response to the construction of an Islamic community center nearby.
I was amazed that I had never heard of this asshole. He had been on the Howard Stern Show three times. He preferred to appear on secular media, he said — as an evangelist, he had been called to reach non-Christians with the Truth of God’s Word. It occurred to me that I was now a part of this secular audience. I opened another Magic Hat and looked at the clock. It was four in the morning.
At first, my interest in Buck was perverse: I enjoyed hating him. I scrolled through old news stories with a sense of awe — that someone who harbored such hatred could call himself Christian; that he had accrued such a following; that he had amassed such wealth as to now live in what I assumed was a shiny mansion down in Naples. Maybe I was jealous.
I lived alone in a motel on 34th Street, a segment of US-19, a large highway that ran the length of the state north to south. My neighbors were drug addicts and homeless families paying with vouchers. It was the most I could afford for now, living by myself as a newly single freelancer, if I wanted to have both car insurance and health insurance. There was no Medicaid extension in Florida and I couldn’t find a full-time job, despite having a master’s degree and plenty of student debt.
I was divorced and had sex outside of marriage. I fell somewhere between spiritual and atheist in terms of faith claim, and I voted Democratic and drank alcohol, so I was everything Buck Hill preached against, and he was everything I preached against.
And yet, even as I hated him, Buck was familiar. He was a midnight preacher of the kind selling plastic pouches of holy water on late-night television. I’d seen his like while channel surfing through my teenage insomnia. I would land on a broadcast that commanded me to surrender my immortal soul along with my allowance, and the rise and fall of the huckster’s voice would soothe me to sleep on the sofa. It reminded me of my childhood when the only thing to do on a Wednesday night was tag along to a friend’s Bible study. Buck was every pastor who had ever pulled me aside for asking questions, and the sound of the Christian radio station playing in my friend’s mom’s car on the way to school. Most preachers at least tried to disguise their hatred, though. Buck washed himself in it like the blood of the lamb.
He had been simulcasting daily on his website, YouTube, and the Walk TV until two days after Trump’s election. Now his only signs of life were the Battles he continued to post on his website each day, which I quickly figured out were reproductions of previous Battles. He posted links to the Battles on his Facebook page, which only had a few hundred followers, most of them over sixty; the response was quiet. The posts received a handful of likes. He implored his readers, whoever they were, to “give generously” and “cover the ministry’s past two months of shortfalls,” at $65,000 each. He begged for one “ram in the bush” to cough up the $35,000 he claimed to need immediately, before month’s end.
Given that he wasn’t broadcasting anywhere, I knew that whatever pennies he was collecting on Facebook weren’t covering operating expenses. I searched the open records of Pinellas and Collier counties and discovered that he was being evicted from his Naples mansion. The eviction notice was dated two days after the election — the day he’d stopped broadcasting. His rent had been $8,000 per month. He owed his landlord $64,000, the equivalent of eight months.
A notorious televangelist’s fall from grace. His pitiful attempt at scamming people. Whether anyone was falling for the lie at this point was unclear. If no one were falling for it — if he wasn’t bringing in any money from the Battles — there would be no reason for him to continue publishing them, unless it was for existential reasons.
“Our spiritual free fall would be less if God allowed Trump to become president over Clinton,” he said in his last broadcast. I was eating my dinner from the gas station, watching the recording on my laptop. My dinner included beef jerky and a single-serving Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream. I made a tiny Ritz cracker — and — yellow cheese sandwich, and ate it with a mealy apple slice. Despite my greasy appearance, I was feeling gleeful. I had found someone worse off than I was, and more evil, and I was going to publicly shame him. “And that’s what happened,” Buck said. “The wrath and judgment is still coming, but I do believe it gives us a little bit of a reprieve.”
His eyes cast wildly about the small room. Behind him, cheap-looking gold curtains hung pleated from a tall window. He talked in circles and sniffled, rocking back and forth. I simply needed to uncover the reasons for his downfall. He wore a plaid shirt open at the collar. He strained to fit the election results into the tiny framework of his limited belief system, grasping for any justification he could find.
He based his “final conclusion” on Trump’s clean slate of a voting record and his recent reversals on the topics of gay marriage and abortion. He acknowledged that many believers considered Trump to be morally bankrupt, but explained that because Trump was in the entertainment industry, like God, we shouldn’t seek to understand why he does what he does.
In the end, neither candidate could alter the “spiritual course” of this nation, he concluded — and though in the end, “Trump might be just as bad” as Hillary, “at least he might not be.”
I called the number hovering at the bottom of the screen. Someone answered, then immediately hung up. I called back and stepped outside to smoke a cigarette on a folding chair chained to a dead planter. The rain had finally stopped and the air was now thick with foggy exhaust. The sky was a flaming sunset. Next door, a skinny girl leaned against a doorframe. The call went straight to voice mail. I left a message: “Hi... Buck? My name is Andrea Noble, I write for the Tampa Bay Times...”
My phone vibrated against my ear. I glanced at the screen. What is it that u need? it said. The sender had signed the text, BH.
I hung up the phone. Thanks for responding, I typed. I’m wondering when Live Crusade will be back on the air.
Hopefully back on tv in Sept... thnx, he responded.
Did you stop broadcasting because you’re working on a new project? Clive said you had outgrown Victory Motors.
Who is this?
The skinny girl greeted a ragged biker in a leather vest. The vest had a Confederate flag on it. He asked her something and she shook her head and looked away.
Andrea Noble. I’m a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, I said. I’m wondering if you can tell me what motivated your move down to Naples.
Email me so I have ur info, he said. Will get back to u later in the week.
The biker walked across the parking lot to the milky check-in window. The office didn’t have a door on it, just the window, and someone saw you there or they didn’t, and if they didn’t, then you waited. There was no bell. The bell would ring all night if there were one. The illuminated Gateway Motel sign flickered like a moth against a lightbulb.