CHAPTER FIVE
What is whispered in your ear, shout from the rooftops.
—MATTHEW 10:27
Avast range of figures professed their own versions of the New Thought gospel, and many succeeded in attracting readers and audiences. But a man called Frank B. Robinson holds a special place. From the onset of the Great Depression to the years immediately following World War II, this solidly built Idaho druggist used ads in newspapers, in magazines, and on the radio to craft nothing less than his own mail-order religious faith.
He named it Psychiana, and its ideas were bedrock New Thought, packaged and sold to an audience of unprecedented proportions. Indeed, by the time of Robinson’s death, he had amassed enough subscription-based followers—estimates ran as high as two million, with his lesson plans circulating through the hands of many more—to be able to claim stewardship over the eighth-largest religion on the planet. “And the best thing about it,” he bragged to a wire-service reporter, “is that we guarantee results or your money refunded. I guess it’s about the only ‘money-back’ religion in the world.”
For all the sensation Robinson caused when he was alive, the man and his movement are found in virtually no major work of American religious history written in the last forty years. And the college town of Moscow, Idaho, where Robinson began his rise to religious fame and ran his mail-order empire, now marks his memory only on the sign of a park he donated to the county.
But Robinson’s pioneering techniques as a media evangelist—particularly his early grasp of mail-order marketing and his ability to popularize mystical ideas—touched the nation in ways that have far outlived his organization. Indeed, the success of Psychiana revealed many Americans’ hunger for practical and therapeutic religious thought during a period in which traditional congregations were shrinking. And his well-attended speaking campaigns emphasized themes of social equality and religious pluralism in an era when many American churches remained racially segregated.
This is a story of triumph gained and quickly lost at the hands of a remarkably able and remarkably flawed religious leader. Within the folds of his successes and failures lies the history of the mystical religion that once swept America.
“I Talked with God”
Robinson’s method was disarmingly simple—so much so that advertising executives doubted it could ever work. Beginning in 1928, he began taking out a series of ads in American magazines. I talked with God, they boldly proclaimed. Yes I Did—Actually and Literally … You too may experience that strange mystical power which comes from talking with God, and when you do, if there is poverty, unrest, unhappiness, ill-health or material lack in your life, well—the same Power is able to do for you what it did for me.
Twenty dollars in cash bought twenty staple-bound lessons in the power of affirmative thought, one arriving every two weeks. Within several years of his initial ad, Robinson had sold more than a half-million lesson plans. Mainstream clergy had no idea what to think. Here was a heterodox teaching sweeping the American landscape, insisting that “God Power” existed inside every man and woman and was available at each moment through the harnessing of thought. By contrast, many Americans found mainline pulpits unable to provide help or guidance during the Depression, when churchgoing continued a slide that had begun in the 1920s. The promise of Psychiana was open to all—no services, no confessionals, and no strict dogma. The sole commitment was to follow Robinson’s densely packed, exclamation-marked lesson plans—which taught that through a focused thought you could satisfy “every right desire.”
Word of mouth went Robinson’s way, as many vowed that his mind-power system helped them find new jobs, sell or buy a home, or alleviate debt. “It’s so simple and easy,” one Robinson student reported. “If it doesn’t work, you can get your money back,” another enthused. As for the Psychiana theology, “I just take what helps me,” one said.
Robinson kept up with thousands of correspondents who wrote him with personal questions or requests for prayer. Moscow’s tiny post office was flooded with letters—sometimes addressed to only Psychiana, U.S.A., or Doctor Robinson, Idaho, or even The Man Who Talked with God, Idaho. He proudly escorted journalists on tours of his Moscow headquarters, showing them correspondence from towns and cities all over America. From random mounds, he would pull letters ranging from the touching tribute of a West Virginia homemaker who reported that she had purchased a new typewriter and refrigerator—“your wonderful teaching has blessed me with a typewriter maching i don’t know much about typeing so please excuse all unspelt words”—to heartfelt telegrams from men who had found work or recovered from illnesses.
Several years before World War II, Robinson received a note of tribute from the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. After the start of the war, Robinson publicly responded to the ruler, urging that he “refrain from joining Hitler in his crusade of madness.” There came no reply. As war clouds thickened, Robinson—ever adaptable to the needs of the moment—reconfigured Psychiana as a spiritual army for Allied victory. Rallying his flock to what he termed “A ‘Blitzkrieg’ for God,” the Idaho prophet mailed followers buttons with Hitler’s image coupled with the vow: I am helping to bring Hitler’s defeat by repeating hourly: the power of Right (God) will bring your speedy downfall.
In 1939, Robinson cabled Finland’s Prime Minister Risto Ryti with a plan for using mental affirmations to help repel Axis forces, proposing that Psychiana members—along with the Finnish cabinet and army—spend fifteen minutes daily affirming: The power of God is superior to the powers of war, hate, and evil. The embattled premier replied that he would enact Robinson’s plan as soon as “practicable.”
In the mail, in advertisements, in the news—everywhere one looked, it seemed—there was Frank B. Robinson.
The Gathering Storm
For all the love of his followers, Robinson attracted equal invective from his critics. They called him a “religious racketeer,” a “Mail Order Messiah,” and “a doctor of Bunk.” Indeed, Robinson’s “doctorate” was from the College of Divine Metaphysics, an Indianapolis correspondence school. He claimed other diplomas but could abruptly cut off questioners who dared to ask about them. “That’s none of your business,” he told one student in the question-and-answer column of Psychiana Weekly in 1941.
On the national stage, the postmaster general hit Robinson with two unsuccessful investigations for mail fraud. The federal government even began deportation proceedings after a rival publisher accused Robinson of lying about his birthplace on a passport application. But the ensuing hearings served only to build Robinson’s reputation as a fighter. “If you want to make anyone—persecute them,” he wrote in his 1941 memoir, The Strange Autobiography of Frank B. Robinson. Indeed, with every assault from the press and pulpit, his presence seemed only to grow.
By the 1940s, Robinson turned out articles, newsletters, books, and pamphlets at an incredible pace. Between direct-mail solicitations and print advertising, his Psychiana pitches reached an estimated twelve million homes a year, roughly a third of all American households. His lectures ran on more than eighty radio stations. It was, observed religious journalist Marcus Bach, as though “a prophet had spoken in his own country.” Whether a prophet, Robinson didn’t quite have “his own country.” In fact, Robinson’s murky origins formed the basis of a deeply troubled childhood and of problems that would haunt him later in life.
A Wandering Prophet
Nothing about Robinson’s birth is quite clear, except for the agreed-upon year: 1886. He was born to a hard-drinking English minister, though whether in England or America—where his parents were traveling—is a matter of dispute. Regardless of his native land, Robinson and his three younger brothers grew up in ice-hard circumstances. At eight years old, Robinson watched his mother, Hannah, die of pneumonia in the bedroom of their row house in Halifax, England. After Hannah’s death, Robinson’s father—a Baptist firebrand with a bad temper and a taste for liquor—turned on his sons with a vengeance. Punishments were frequent and brutal. But it was when the Reverend J. H. Robinson remarried, Robinson wrote in a rare understatement, that “the real trouble began.”
The Robinson boys fought so bitterly with their stepmother that arguments exploded into physical fights. Robinson’s father decided to enlist thirteen-year-old Frank in the British Navy—a fiasco that lasted about six months, when the youth jumped ship and fled back home. Determined to push him from the house, the elder Robinson then packed up fourteen-year-old Frank and his twelve-year-old brother, Sydney, put the equivalent of $5 in their pockets, and sent them off on a steamer to Canada. The only arrangement the minister made for them was a letter of introduction to a Baptist preacher who lived eight hundred miles from where the boys docked. Upon reaching their intended sponsor’s home one Sunday morning, the penniless, bedraggled boys were shooed away, left to sleep in a hayloft.
Eventually, Frank and Sydney found jobs in farming and livestock. When Sydney fell ill with the same disease that had killed their mother, the boys wired back home to their dad—and were told they were on their own. Sydney survived, but the years that followed were no easier. As time passed, Frank Robinson discovered a crippling habit: binge drinking. In what must be a record, the young Robinson earned the distinction of being kicked out of the British Navy, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and eventually the U.S. Army and Navy for drunkenness and bad conduct.
But friends and employers detected the spark of something unusual in the young Robinson: He was strikingly handsome and articulate, and came across as surprisingly educated for someone who had never made it beyond grade school. In his early twenties, Robinson captured the attention of a Toronto millionaire, who offered to put him through Baptist seminary. Under the sponsorship of a group of local businessmen, Robinson entered McMaster University’s Bible Training School in Toronto. But the Bible student immediately clashed with teachers and ministers. During a meeting with his benefactors, Robinson insisted that Eastern and pre-Christian religions had their own stories of humanity’s fall from grace and even of a crucified savior. Why, he asked them, should any one religion hold a monopoly on truth?
Other religions had their bibles too. They had a different “crucified god.” Some of these “crucified gods” were so similar to the Christian’s “crucified god” that logic and reason must admit that the story of the later “god” was either stolen or copied from the older “god.” I did not want the Christian “god.” I wanted the God of the entire universe.
When the meeting ended, Frank B. Robinson was once again on his own.
A Search Bears Fruit
Always a quick study, Robinson became a registered druggist and found steady work for the first time behind a pharmacy counter in Klamath Falls, Oregon. He married the well-regarded daughter of a circuit-court judge, and his new wife guided him into sobriety and a stable home life. In order for Robinson to accept a better job, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where they had a son. By age forty-two, Robinson finally seemed to be calming down. But his search for God had left him with a lasting sense of emptiness.
Then, one Sunday morning, everything changed. Robinson attended a Methodist service on Wilshire Boulevard. In the massively ornate church, with its plush carpets and oaken pews, he counted only twenty-six worshippers. Something in mainstream religion was dying, he thought. He returned home and sat alone in his room. Dejected with the Baptist faith of his youth and uninspired by the religious offerings of the present, the no-longer-young man felt his search for meaning had been a waste. On that day, he pleaded to be shown something more—challenging God to reveal himself.
“Oh, God,” he cried, “if I have to go to hell, I’ll go with the consciousness that I went there earnestly trying to find you, God.” Rather than feeling hopeless, however, Robinson found that a strange sense of peace settled over him. He felt powerful yet relaxed—as though lifted to some higher place. He later said that he sensed the spirit of God pulsing within him, as though it filled his veins and arteries. Robinson came to reason that, through the right exercise of thought, this holy power could be tapped as a limitless resource. He determined to spread his vision of “a workable, usable God.” It was do-it-yourself thinking taken to the furthest extreme—an audacious, heretical, and profoundly American approach to religion. And, however the jacket-and-tie-clad druggist viewed himself, his belief in harnessing the forces of an unseen world placed him, like other practitioners of mind-power metaphysics, directly in the steps of America’s occult tradition.
With plans bursting in his head, he moved with his wife and young son to the five-thousand-person town of Moscow, Idaho, near Spokane, Washington. Moscow’s nineteenth-century settlers had called it “Hog Heaven” for its abundance of flora favored by pigs. But by the time the Robinson family arrived, it was a bustling community with a neatly ordered main street and served as the home to the University of Idaho. Robinson’s sole purpose in moving there was to accept a job at a pharmacy that closed at six P.M. Punching out early allowed the Corner Drug Store’s new counter clerk to begin writing out the concepts of his “new psychological religion.” Beginning one Saturday night, Robinson sat at a borrowed Corona typewriter and pecked the keys for thirty-six hours straight. When he stopped, he had the lesson plan that would deliver the “God law” into the hands of ordinary people. But he needed a way to reach them. Now a family man, Robinson’s roust about days were behind him; he could no longer pick up and roam the nation. National advertising was a new enough medium to still seem revolutionary, and it struck him as the perfect vehicle: His would be a mail-order faith.
Approaching everyone from a local highway commissioner to a grocery clerk, he pulled together $500 and visited an advertising agency in Spokane, the nearest city. They told him not to waste his money. So, on his own, Robinson spent $400 and placed a single ad in Psychology Magazine: I TALKED WITH GOD—SO CAN YOU—IT’S EASY.
Even Robinson was surprised when the one notice attracted five thousand replies and ultimately netted $13,000 in cash. He wasted no time in seizing the momentum: In newspapers, magazines, and radio stations all over America, Robinson proclaimed Psychiana a “money-back religion,” promising unlimited potential—or a full refund—to any who tried it. Within the first decade, he secured six hundred thousand paying subscribers spanning sixty-seven nations. His direct-mail ads, consisting of detailed pamphlet-length espousals of Psychiana theology, began entering two to three million households a year. So was born a mass movement.
The Psychiana Method
Robinson took a bold tack on religion, insisting that its results should be measurable and provable. Hence, hopeful students and more than a few critics wondered: Did Robinson’s ideas work?
Religious historian Charles S. Braden knew Robinson and wrote about him in the 1940s. One of the few scholars to take any note of Psychiana, Braden remarked on how Robinson’s lessons had a way of “awakening, through the power of suggestion, a lively sense of expectancy in the student.” Enthusiasm, as Carl Jung once noted, is the hidden key to the effectiveness of any belief system. In his classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James found that a dramatic conversion could alter a person’s character, objectively changing the circumstances of his outer life. On a similar scale, Psychiana, like other positive-thinking philosophies, could awaken new thoughts, ideas, and options, with the results seeming veritably magical at times.
Even in the twenty-first century—surrounded by an endless stream of self-help programs and practical spiritual ideas—it is still possible for a sympathetic reader to get swept up in the tone of portent and certainty that permeates Robinson’s first lesson. In it, he encouraged the repeated use of his key mantra: “I believe in the power of the living God.” Other affirmations quickly followed—“I am more and more successful”—and Robinson prescribed simple, specific methods, such as closing one’s eyes at night before falling asleep and meditating on a “white spot”—the veil that he told students separates humanity from the Divine.
Although he would claim his ideas were wholly original, he stood on the shoulders of an already well-established spiritual philosophy: American-style New Thought. While freshly articulated, Robinson’s techniques were the same as those that had been attracting American seekers to the philosophy of affirmative thinking since the late nineteenth century. And, like New Thought, Psychiana had difficulty providing ethical depth.
“If just any need can be met,” asked the historian Braden, “does not that open the way to selfishness, which is the antithesis of the Christian ideal?” Indeed, Robinson tended to dodge most moral questions, insisting that if someone is in touch with the “God Power,” that person will naturally do what is good. Yet Robinson never defined his concept of the good life, at least not beyond Sunday-school injunctions toward “clean living” and general fair play. In so doing, he often sounded much like the mainstream religionists he had vowed to overthrow.
Of Money and Spirit
At times, Robinson’s own life begged questions of not only his ethics but of his ability to understand how critics saw him. In his autobiography, Robinson launched into a gleeful description of how he once snookered a drugstore client into purchasing gallons of useless mineral oil. He had related the same story several years earlier to a Time magazine reporter. The lack of moral embarrassment with which Robinson reported this petty con job could only leave a reader to wonder.
In the final analysis, did Robinson really believe in “the power of the Living God,” or was he, as the evangelical Bible Banner charged in 1941, “a pious fraud” out “to sell the gift of God for money?” There is no question of Robinson’s love for things material. Heavyset and more than six feet tall, he cut a dramatic figure on the streets of Moscow, Idaho, in mink coats, fancy suits, broad-brimmed Stetson hats, a chain watch, and a pipe. He proudly posed for photographs standing beside the latest-model cars. But surviving financial records reveal a subtler story than most critics understood.
Psychiana never made millions. Most of its receipts (which were in the hundreds of thousands annually) flowed back into the business for the constant postage and print and radio advertising needed to keep the operation afloat. While financial documents show bountiful growth early on, Psychiana sustained a cycle of boom-and-bust years and was losing money toward the end. Time magazine reported in 1938 that Robinson’s operation had amassed record sales of $400,000 in 1934—more than doubling receipts from two years earlier, according to records archived at the University of Idaho. But by the end of that decade, sales had dipped to about one quarter of their high mark. A 1939 profit-and-loss statement reproduced in The Sunday Oregonian showed receipts dropping to a modest $46,331 for the first seven months of that year, exceeded by expenses, mostly in advertising, of $54,556.
Robinson himself never collected more than a good white-collar salary. Records show that his compensation rose significantly between 1932 and 1939, when it climbed from $500 to $750 a month. For 1939, the last year that partial figures are available, his annual pay would have amounted to $9,000, the equivalent of $130,000 today. By contrast, many times that amount flowed yearly to another religious controversialist and quasimystical figurehead named Arthur Bell, known to followers in the 1930s as “The Voice.” Bell founded the California-based Mankind United, a prosperity cult and conspiracy club that foretold the rise of a social–spiritual utopia in which all chosen men and women—Mankind United members—would live in material comfort and bliss. Bell told of being directed by a council of unseen “Sponsors,” who secretly waged war against “Money Changers” and “Hidden Rulers,” who would enslave humanity. Thousands of lonely, directionless, and often elderly folk took his bait and plied Bell with membership fees, life savings, and often free labor in his roster of businesses. In the process, the handsome Bell, a frequenter of nightclubs and owner of multiple apartments and mansions (outfitted with swimming pools, wet bars, and draped Oriental love seats), amassed millions in assets, tax free. Nothing like that existed for Robinson, who lived with his wife and two children in an understated brick colonial in Moscow.
So, if Robinson was not profiting at quite the level detractors suggested, what drove him? Did the man derided as a “doctor of Bunk” believe in his own message? There is good reason to conclude that he did. The sheer volume of Robinson’s writing—a mixture of unmitigated passion and arguments over fine points of theology—suggests a figure motivated by deep conviction. In his twenty-three books and thousands of pamphlets, flyers, and articles, Robinson was constantly on the lookout for new ways to verify his ideas, searching for ever-sharper means of codifying his system.
Robinson was unafraid of showing emotion. He wept openly in front of visitors to his Moscow home while playing them his favorite gospel hymns on his personal pipe organ. He argued intensely about the shortcomings of the mainline faiths, one night debating a living room filled with ministers to a standstill for a full three hours. Among the most moving testaments to Robinson’s convictions came from his son, Alfred, an Ivy League student and Navy bomber pilot in World War II. Journalist Marcus Bach remembered their encounter:
I met Alfred, Robinson’s son, after his graduation from Stanford. When he told me he was joining his father in the Psychiana movement, I asked him if he would be using the affirmations in his own work. “I was brought up on them.” He smiled. “One of my earliest recollections is that of my father taking me for a walk in the woods.” He went on intently: “When we reached a secluded spot Father would stop and say, ‘Let’s be still. Listen! You can hear the presence of the Almighty.’ Often when he was alone he would shout in a loud voice, ‘I believe in the Power of the Living God!’ ”
The critics were wrong, at least on this count: Robinson really did seem to believe in his ideas. And his way of thought went beyond Psychiana theology alone. At a time when Hitler’s blitzkrieg threatened to engulf the world, Robinson—in a short-lived collaboration with Science of Mind founder Ernest Holmes—displayed a deeply felt and even prophetic instinct for religious tolerance and plurality. It would become the New Thought movement’s finest hour.
American Spiritual Awakening
There is one known surviving photograph from an event now forgotten in the annals of American religion. It shows two men—Ernest Holmes seated on the left, Frank Robinson seated on the right—smiling gently at each other across the stage of the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles. A packed crowd of 3,500 looks on. While not visible from the photograph, a banner draped across the stage proclaims Robinson’s key aphorism: I Believe in the Power of the Living God. The year was 1941, and the two spiritual teachers were rallying the faithful for a series of five meetings that Robinson called the “American Spiritual Awakening.”
It was a kind of spiritual booster rally before America’s entry into World War II. But the resulting program turned into something more: an affirmation of the universality of all religious beliefs and national backgrounds, moving one columnist for the West Coast African–American newspaper The Neighborhood News to write: “If it does for you what it has done for me, you would not take a hundred dollars for attending this meeting.”
Looking back on a moment in history when ethnic hatreds and fascist ideology were plunging nations into war—and many American churches remained segregated—the message of plurality that pervades the surviving transcripts of the Robinson–Holmes mission seems pioneering. Ernest Holmes opened the first meeting on Sunday, September 21, 1941, leaving no mistake as to his feelings for his cospeaker:
Dr. Robinson calls his work “Psychiana,” which means bringing Spiritual Power to the world. I happen to belong to a movement called “Religious Science,” which means the same thing. Some of you may go to a Jewish Synagogue; you may be a Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, but there is but one God. We meet here today not on a theological background, but upon the foreground of a spiritual conception, the common meeting ground of every race, every creed, every color, every philosophy, and every religion on the face of the earth.
Calling their racially mixed audience “Beloved,” Robinson extended Holmes’s remarks the next day:
Now, Beloved, when the Almighty created the human race, He created black, white, yellow, and every other color which exists on earth, in one creation. He did not make three or four special jobs of creation, nor did He make several different attributes, one for each nation. He made them all flesh and blood—every human soul that has ever lived on the face of this earth. We are all brothers, regardless of our religious affiliation, our race, or nationality.
While known as a political conservative—Robinson ardently opposed the New Deal and supported each of the Republican challengers to Franklin Roosevelt—here was a religious leader who, together with Holmes, was making social statements that would not become common fare for at least another twenty-five years.
The five-day series was so popular that Robinson made a return engagement three weeks later. And he and Holmes drew up arrangements for Holmes’s seminary, the Institute of Religious Science in Los Angeles, to offer graduate training to students who had already passed through the Psychiana lessons. It was the start of a plan to certify Psychiana teachers and practitioners for a nationwide congregational mission that would take Psychiana beyond its reliance on mail-order lessons or the pronouncements of its charismatic chief. Joint advertising literature was printed, featuring Robinson and Holmes together with the headline When You Have Decided to Enroll for This Teacher’s and Practitioner’s Course, both Ernest Holmes and Dr. Robinson will Help You.
In the end, however, the Holmes–Robinson partnership became little more than a reminder of what might have been. Robinson showed little interest in the face-to-face management of a congregation, preferring instead to work privately on his books, lessons, ads, and radio addresses. Holmes had a growing flock and network of churches and was easily engulfed in his own organizational affairs. The two men drifted apart.
It is one of the more intriguing “what ifs?” of twentieth-century religious history to consider the possibilities had they remained together. Between Robinson’s millions-strong reach and Holmes’s well-established seminary and churches, it is possible that Psychiana might have survived the death of its founder, perhaps becoming the galvanizing force of New Thought’s disparate flock. But by the time of Robinson’s death—about seven years from the day that he and Holmes first spoke together—the organization foundered and then collapsed.
Remains of the Day
A large, athletic man, Robinson nonetheless had a weak heart. A series of cardiac failures in the mid-1940s caught up with him on October 19, 1948, when he died at sixty-two. Shocked followers flooded the Psychiana offices with telegrams of condolence, mourning the man who many said gave them a fresh start in life. Where, some wondered, would the movement find its new voice? Robinson’s son, Alfred, stepped forward to run the operation, but he lacked the obsessive passion that drove his father. With new students dwindling and bills mounting, the family closed Psychiana’s doors by the end of 1952.
The memories quickly faded. When the Daily Idahonian—which the Robinson family partly owned—ran a history of the town of Moscow in 1961, not one word appeared about Frank B. Robinson or Psychiana. It was as if neither had ever existed. What caused Psychiana’s abrupt fall? Several factors seem paramount.
With the exception of his son, Robinson cultivated no deputies. And, in the absence of independent congregations, no leaders emerged naturally. He was a messenger without apostles.
Unlike figures such as Ernest Holmes and Wallace D. Wattles, Robinson had self-published all his own books and pamphlets. Hence, no outside organization stood to benefit from the sale and maintenance of his written work after he was gone.
And the last factor is perhaps the most important: Robinson succeeded to the extent that other, larger religious movements copied his outreach methods and self-help message and eclipsed his one-man operation. “It was no longer a sin,” journalist Marcus Bach observed, “to personalize the faith and make it serve the needs and wants of man.” In the end, the times had caught up with the “Miracle Man of Moscow.”
Robinson, perhaps more than any other figure of his day, understood that mainstream Christian churches either had to address the problems of daily existence or risk irrelevance. Sounding a lot like Robinson, ministers and religious commentators of the late 1940s and early 1950s began to discuss the possibilities of advertising and the importance of serving the everyday needs of congregants. In 1946, Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman published the first religious–therapeutic classic of the postwar era, Peace of Mind. Within a few years arrived Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Where Robinson had called for “a workable, usable God,” Peale wrote, “Christianity is a practical, usable way of life.…” And the trend was set. The American pulpit was now expected to address workaday concerns. Indeed, the books and sermons emanating from the twenty-first century’s “megachurches” abound in the how-to appeal that marked the Robinson approach. Life coaching, prosperity lessons, marriage counseling, and even weight-loss programs are standard fare in the nation’s largest congregations.
In his revolutionary use of radio, print, and mail-order marketing to spread a religious idea, Robinson was arguably the first media evangelist of the twentieth century. But he was more than just that. He was, perhaps, a figure possible only at a certain moment in American history—someone with a deeply held conviction, a few hundred dollars in ad money, and a fresh vision of spiritual life that spoke to a vast, neglected flock. Robinson believed—and lived out—his message, rising from decrepitude to achievement, providing not just a set of ideas but a personage in whom people from all walks of life could vest their hopes.
Writing in 1963, at a point by which Robinson’s name had already faded, historian Charles S. Braden captured the heart of the mail-order prophet’s work:
He used to advertise in the most unlikely places—on match covers, for example, which might be found in a saloon, or a brothel even. And many a man and woman found some new hope when they answered the ad of the man who had “talked with God.” He more nearly followed the injunction of Jesus to “go out into the highways and hedges and bring them in” than probably any other man on the contemporary scene.