Faith Healers: Getting Back Double from God

On a wet winter night, the neon signs of Crouch Temple glow with a lonely halo in the Los Angeles mist. Central Avenue, not far from the scene of the 1965 Watts riots, is quiet. But inside the temple, a converted theater, the night is alive. Some 2,000 people—black, white and brown—are turned toward the stage, crying "Hallelujah" and "God be praised!" For more than an hour the tension has been building up. Testimonies, gospel songs, pledges, blessings, and more songs—a writhing, Presleyan, shirt-open gospel rock driven home by an organ, drums...