The ‘Hell’ hustler
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Fraud, Spirituality, Religion, Christianity, Life

The ‘Hell’ hustler

Mary K. Baxter made a killing on a trip through the afterlife.

She’s an underground Christian superstar, selling over a million books, with millions of hits on YouTube for her interviews. She has a thousand stellar Amazon ratings for her sizzling 1993 masterpiece, A Divine Revelation of Hell. Who needs Oprah? She had Jesus writing a blurb!

She’s toured the world, spoke in countless churches, giving her message for the human race: better shape up or God will fry you too.

“Time is running out!” is her tag line of thirty years. She was shown Hell in its fiery terror, and she’s back to tell you: Repent!

You’d only wish Jesus had chosen a prophet with better hair?

Let’s talk about that lunatic legend, Mary K. Baxter

Infoformation on her isn’t easy to get. The ‘biography’ page of her website is an ocean of vaugueness. “She has a mother’s heart to see all people come into the kingdom of God…”

I’m picking through her books for details. The lead endorsement of her 2003 follow-up, A Divine Revelation of Angels, is from David Yonggi Cho. He’s more famous for embezzling $12 million from his church in South Korea.

You’ll know them by the company they keep?

But the detail that really sticks out is her books are copyrighted to ‘Dr. T. L. Lowery’ or ‘Lowery Ministries International’.

This would be the ultra-racist Tenneseee pastor who transplanted to Washington D.C., and died a few years back. Thinking of him is quite a trip down the white supremacy memory lane: “When man tries to overstep the purposes of God and break down the barrier between the races, he only brings trouble, discord, confusion, malice, and murder,” he says, as quoted by Mickey Crews in The Church of God: a Social History (1990).

A ‘detailed biography’ of him, upon his death in 2016, doesn’t mention Mary K. Baxter, curiously. If owning her books, he must’ve become fabulously wealthy. They must’ve been close. As “Dr. T.L. Lowery,” he’s listed as a co-author on several of her later books.

Sometimes when researching I pick a detail and go with it

Where did his doctorate come from?

A 1979 newspaper story cites five institutions of higher learning he attended, getting a “Doctor of Divinity” from West Coast Bible College. Except their admissions department emails back to me: “I can confirm we DO NOT have anyone by that name in our system.”

I write his church and publisher asking for confirmation this was his claimed source for a doctorate. No reply.

He was a hustler from Georgia without any religious education. Sometimes he says he’d “pastored” four churches by age 25 then got the “call” to be an evangelist. A 1979 news story has a different history: “In the midst of a highly successful career as a sales executive, Lowery decided to become a minister…”

He took his show on the road. Throughout the 1960s, he packing up to 10,000 Christians like sweating sardines into a big tent, city after city, with ads promising miracle healing and the presence of God. In 1963, a reporter covers a Lowery event, more noticing the appeals for cash.

“I know you all would listen if the Lord directed you to sell your house today — and give all to Him. You’d do it.”

He looks around. “How many believe that giving is worship?”

A report on a 1967 speech to a church event finds him waxing apocalyptic. “The last hour of this age is drawing near and ‘ye know summer is night’.”

The end of the world is what they wanted to hear about. They never liked this one—but somehow God is giving them an upgrade?

In 1969 Lowery became pastor of a Church of God church in North Cleveland, Tennessee. In 1981 he opened the National Church of God in Washington D.C. — just when Ronald Reagan rode into town — and leaves D.C. in 1996.

During his time in D.C. he oversaw huge building projects, from a 4000-seat sanctuary to a vast apartment complex.

As Jim Bakker discovered, they can be a chore to pay for.

“In March 1976 while I was praying at home, I had a visit from the Lord Jesus Christ.”

I’m reading A Divine Revelation of Hell. The savior shows up, and off they go together on a tour through the afterlife.

“Instantly, my soul was taken out of my body. I went with Jesus up out of my room and into the sky. I knew all that was going on about me. I saw my husband and children asleep in our home below.”

She says in the preface she worked on the manuscript for years. “Finalizing the book took the best part of the winter of 1982 and the year 1983.” So it took seven years to write.

Her biography does have one fact. She was “ordained as a minister in 1983 at the Full Gospel Church of God in Taylor, Michigan and received a Doctorate of Ministry from Faith Bible College, an affiliate of Oral Roberts University.”

Faith Bible College is a shack out in Independence, Montana and was founded in 1997, so that was a much later development, if she ever went. For such a prominent alumnus, it’s odd their website doesn’t mention her? I write asking when she graduated. No reply.

Early copies of her book have it published by ‘Kathy Baxter Ministries, Inc.’, a corporation she files for in 1987, out of Florida.

In 1989, there’s advertisements for several appearances at churches in California. In Chula Visa, she’s promised to “tells her story weeping.”

In a 1990 report, however, she gets a sweet upgrade—a minister at Lowery’s National Church of God in D.C., and then they’re listed as coordinating her publicity.

I think over her story, and wonder if she made a deal with the devil?

She was a local kook with a weird book, but Lowery saw the potential. He gave her a high-profile pastor gig, a P.R. office, and his publisher.

I bet she also got a slick re-write and a contract for more books—that he’d help her crank out! And he got the copyright.

She doesn’t mention Lowery anywhere on her website.

I bet she’s still pissed.

It’s all a useful reminder that Christians never really liked the Bible.

If it had what they wanted, which is a book full of fiery punishments, they wouldn’t need cranks like Baxter.

There were efforts from the start to do what she did: try and scare everyone with afterlife torment. An early Christian text called the Apocalypse of Peter offers a vision of a nightmare afterlife (i.e. “women and men gnawing their own lips,” etc.).

Over the years there were many more—from Dante’s Inferno on down.

The Jesus thing never made sense to Christians. Love one another? Mystifying.

But here’s facts: In the Bible there is no threat of eternal punishment if you misbehave, and “repentance” simply means to change your mind. God “repents” all the time. It doesn’t mean you did something bad.

And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. (Gen 6:6; cf. Exo 32:12; 1 Sam 10:11, 35b, etc.)

“Repentance” is not a concept that means everyone should be horrified at ordinary behavioral problems, and stop doing them. In the Bible, it’s an idea that the divine plan has changed. The purpose of John the Baptist’s “repent” language was to induce baptism, a religious act of immersing the body to create ritual purity.

The mythology of Hell was always a later invention. It has no Biblical references.

For such an astonishing and vivid idea, only one passage in the Bible seems to apply: the ‘Rich Man and Lazarus’ scene in Luke 16:19–31.

To read it as about ‘Hell’, however, is a gross misreading. As the scholar Richard H. Anderson notes, all the references in the story pertain to the High Priest of the Jewish Temple that stood when Luke wrote.

If Christian readers trample all over the details, when scholars look at them they clearly speak to a Jewish situation. The purple robes in the passage, for example, clearly point to the High Priest.

‘Lazarus’—the name in Jesus’ story—was the name of the High Priest serving from 16–17 A.D., deceased at the time Jesus is speaking. This Lazarus had five brothers, according to the historian Josephus, “all of whom served as high priests.” Jesus is speaking about real people.

Anderson writes: “The parable’s vivid descriptions of the gross discrepancy in social conditions is viewed as a critique against the rich who exploit the poor, live in luxury and are unmindful of the dying beggars at their gate.”

But that does sound familiar, somehow. The horrifying Mary K. Baxter asks for donations with every other breath.

And now I’m thinking of another Bible verse, James 5:3:

“Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire.”

The heat she’s feeling is her own venality, greed, and evil.