Robert Tilton, Legend of the Faith
A bold minister of the Word.
I first discovered the ministry of Robert Tilton at a point in my life where I had just about given up. I was in a dark place searching for a light, wherever that may be. It was in a hotel room late at night flipping through channels that I stumbled across Success-N-Life and from there, it all turned around for me.
I’m kidding. It was on a website called Stupidvideos.com and for several years, I only knew him as the Farting Preacher. My brother and I found “Farting Preacher 1” and as you probably gathered, this meant there were multiple Farting Preacher videos. As far as we were concerned, every single one of them a home run.
I don’t know if Stupidvideos.com is still around and I’m afraid searching for it’ll give me a virus. But these videos were around long before I saw them on Stupidvideos.com, so thankfully they continue to live on over at YouTube.
I got a TikTok account sometime around the beginning of the pandemic and that’s a very interesting fact about me. It sounded dumb for a while telling people that I had a TikTok but if you scroll through it, there’s millions of other people sharing their different interests and insights about the world and assuming you’re not a psychopath with an algorithm, that can be an enriching experience. It’s the kind of thing youth pastors were born to rail against in a Wednesday night sermon. Speaking of algorithms, check this one out.
I’ve tried to work my algorithm as best as I can to keep any unpleasant1 stuff out of my feed. You’re probably wondering why I started talking about TikTok in the middle of a post about Robert Tilton. This is where those two intersect. I want to take a moment and thank nativ3_t3xan70 for making this TikTok2 .
I showed my seven-year-old daughter this video and now we’ve watched it several times in the last 24 hours, much like my brothers and I did with my dad when we came across it on Stupidvideos.com. It’s interesting which things get passed down to the next generation. But as touching as these moments were, I can’t imagine this is the legacy Robert Tilton saw for himself.
I’ll end with another story about the Farting Preacher videos. My brothers and I were staying with our grandparents in St. Louis. We were sleeping in their basement and using their computer to look at the internet3 . At this point, we’d about exhausted our enjoyment of the FP4 videos that were available to us. Then we made a discovery that was so important we had to call our parents. At the time of our discovery, Mom and Dad were rushing through the Mexico City airport trying to catch a flight. They answered an expensive international phone call from their children, assuming it was an emergency, to hear us shouting:
“THERE’S A FARTING PREACHER 5!”
Usually racist.
I haven’t done a deep-dive on this account, so if there’s anything wildly offensive in it, I rescind my implicit endorsement of native3_t3xan70.
I’m 32 years old, that’s why I said it weird.
FP stands for “Farting Preacher.”