Ministry of Evil: The Twisted Cult of Tony Alamo
BBC4
If you want evidence that Susan Alamo might not have been a prophet of God and a conduit to divine wisdom, the fact that her husband, Tony, kept her body on display in his church for a year after she died from cancer in 1982 may suffice. He ordered his brainwashed followers to pray over her night and day to bring her back to life. Instead of resurrecting she rotted.
And if you think you have heard everything about hypocritical Christian fundamentalism, the cruelty, venality and greed that burst from this unsparing four-part series will take, if not the biscuit, then certainly the communion wafer.
The Alamos were two decidedly unsavoury individuals who preyed on young people and their parents for decades. At first they lured late-1960s hippies and dropouts, persuading them to follow their fire-and-brimstone ministry while administering beatings and other depravities. And somehow, for years, they escaped detection.
TV loves stories of cults for their shock value and the availability of wounded survivors to give honest testimonies, and in many ways the pattern here was familiar. We had the slightly hammy reconstructions and the intrusive incidental music in a story that didn’t need embellishing. It worked best with the red-raw accounts of those who were sucked in, isolated from their families and made to believe that this ghastly pair possessed supernatural insight. If you say a beating is God’s will and preferable to an eternity of hellfire it’s astonishing what you can get away with.
Advertisement
When Susan, with her bottle-blonde hairdo and long, sharp red fingernails, met her maker, Tony became even more disgusting and violent, his greed more insatiable. He launched a profitable clothing range, and quickly took a new wife who was soon, yep, subjected to his fists. Just when you thought you had heard the worst, other shocks piled in. We heard from a man who was adopted as a boy and blithely told that his mother was burning in hell for her sins. And there was a sweet man called Justin Miller, who as a boy thought he was being rescued from a deprived home. Soon he was being publicly beaten with mighty thwacks from a paddle by grown men working on Tony’s orders. The assailants had to work in relay because they were so exhausted by their labours. Justin’s friends were forced to watch as blood seeped from his trousers.
You need a hard stomach to listen in later episodes to Tony’s self-serving videotaped deposition, in which he cockily justified taking girl brides. Earlier, archive footage showed that the journalist Alan Whicker came calling and beneath his debonair Man from Del Monte delivery seemed to have an inkling that something was amiss.
Bill Clinton (one of many famous people who visited the Alamo’s Arkansas restaurant) compared Tony to “Roy Orbison on speed” in his memoir, which doesn’t exactly capture the man’s true hideousness. The reason that Tony initially came to the attention of law enforcement wasn’t because of the sex or violence but for not paying his taxes. He died in jail in 2017 having spent just eight years behind bars.
Still, there were flickers of hope. After so many did their best to relay their hellish experiences in halting, broken testimony, Christhiaon Coie, Susan’s daughter and Tony’s stepdaughter, was a deeply impressive, clear-eyed voice of reason and decency who swiftly cottoned on to the wickedness of her parents and fled as quickly as she could. Her wisdom and resilience were impressive, but she was smart enough to reflect with terrifying plausibility on what many people damaged by these monsters will be feeling. “No matter how they sound like they are just fine, don’t kid yourself. They go home at night and they beg God to forgive them.”
★★★★☆
Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows , the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer , the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don’t forget to check our critics’ choices to what to watch this week, the best shows of 2024 so far and browse our comprehensive TV guide
