c. 1999 Religion News Service
RALEIGH, N.C. _ Scott Strong is a ball of energy _ whether he’s conducting his church’s 35-piece orchestra, giving piano lessons in his home, or playing Big Band jazz with a group of fellow musicians. No one would guess he’s got a tumor the size of a golf ball growing in his skull.
Yet he says he has never felt better. Since last May, when an MRI scan found the tumor and three smaller ones, Strong, the instrumental music director at Raleigh’s Providence Baptist Church, has taken a radical approach to healing. Instead of surgery, he has opted for an all-natural vegetarian diet he is convinced is God’s will for everyone.
More than a century after Seventh-day Adventists linked diet and doctrine and 30 years after the hippie generation discovered organic foods and herbs, evangelical Christians are turning on to a healthier, natural way of life. Unlike the hippies, they’re looking to the Bible for guidance on how to lead a healthy life _ and they say it’s working miracles.
Across the South, evangelicals are juicing carrots and eating raw fruits and vegetables as God’s way to prevent or treat heart attacks, cancer, diabetes and a host of other illnesses.
They call it the Hallelujah Diet.
The premise is a verse from Genesis 1:29:”I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth and every tree bearing fruit which yields seed; they shall be yours for food.” George Malkmus, the Western North Carolina minister who created the Hallelujah Diet, says the Bible contains more than spiritual truths.”It has physical answers we’ve never been taught to look to,”he said.”We’ve been turning to the world for answers about our physical problems, and it’s killing us.” Malkmus says it’s his mission to bring the diet to the church, and he has found plenty of converts. His book,”Why Christians Get Sick,”has sold 200,000 copies. He was invited to speak at 75 churches last year. And he has trained 1,042 people in the philosophy that the body, properly nourished, can heal itself.
Doctors say that while plant-based diets are nutritious and may help prevent some disease, it would be foolish to abandon conventional medicine or traditional therapies. No study has shown that diet can single-handedly cure cancer, for example.
But for Strong, 40, who underwent brain surgery 10 years ago for a benign, life-threatening tumor, Malkmus’ message is particularly appealing.”I’ve come to the conclusion that God has given us the tools to fight off disease,”Strong said.”These tools are from nature. They’re not from pharmaceutical companies.” So Strong is boning up on nutrition, consulting a naturopathic doctor and monitoring his biorhythms.”The church has been deceived by the devil,”Strong said.”It has been led into a way of being inept physically. If we sit down and feel tired and overwhelmed, we can’t go out and do evangelistic crusades. We run at 50 percent of our potential when we could run at 90 or 100 percent of our potential.” For centuries, shamans, healers and followers of other faiths, as well as many Christians, have extolled the virtues of raw fruits and vegetables. The Hallelujah Diet aims to adapt that message to evangelical Christian theology.
It suggests that when God created Adam and Eve, he gave them a fruit and vegetable diet that would allow them to live forever. Humanity thrived on it until the time of the Flood _ often living to be 900 years old, according to the Bible. Illness was introduced, the diet’s proponents say, only when meat became a staple in the human diet.
Malkmus says mankind has strayed so far from God’s diet that prayer alone won’t help people heal.”I was very concerned with people getting sick in my churches,”he said.”I was finding the Christian community just as sick as other communities _ despite all the prayers.” The diet is not a cure, Malkmus acknowledges, but if faithfully followed will nourish the body so it can fight off disease.
There’s no doubt the diet is healthy: one to two quarts of carrot juice each day mixed with barley green powder, lunch and dinner of raw salads with an occasional baked potato or brown rice. No meat. No dairy. No coffee. No sugar. And absolutely no processed food.
Doctors say the Hallelujah Diet, like other low-fat, high-fiber diets, may be good preventative medicine, but it won’t kill cancer cells.”I’ve seen no data whatsoever that eating fruits and vegetables will cure cancer,”said Joel Tepper, the chairman of the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Tepper said studies have shown that most people who benefit from alternative therapies, such as diets, have also been treated by conventional medicine as well, so it’s hard to tell where the cure has come from.
The Rev. George Malkmus was converted twice in his life: first by Billy Graham in a 1957 crusade in New York City, and again by a Texas preacher, who introduced him to a radically natural diet in 1976. The first conversion made him a church pastor. The second has turned him into a health-food fundamentalist.
Malkmus said he was pastoring a Baptist church in upstate New York in 1976 when he says a chiropractor told him he had developed a cancerous tumor in his colon. Malkmus says he could feel the tumor underneath his rib cage and found blood in his stool. But having watched his mother die of colon cancer after repeated rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, Malkmus, then 42, avoided the medical route. Instead, he sought out a Texas evangelist named Lester Roloff who had a reputation as a”health nut.”Roloff recommended a strict raw fruit and vegetable diet, including one to two quarts of fresh carrot juice each day.
He resigned from his church and devoted himself to health and healing. Within a year, Malkmus claims, his tumor was gone _ and so were his allergies, his hemorrhoids and his dandruff. He began a journey into the counterculture world of alternative health, becoming an organic gardener for the Shangri-La Health Resort in Bonita Springs, Fla., and a few years later bought 50 acres of mountain land in Tennessee, where he lived as self-sufficiently as he could. He pumped water from a spring and used a compost instead of a flush toilet.
Malkmus said he felt great but was discouraged when he tried to reach Christians with his newfound recipe for health.”My preacher brethren turned a deaf ear to me,”Malkmus said.”I said, `This message goes back to God. It’s in the Bible.’ I wrote a book, but nobody wanted to buy it.” In part, that may have been because Malkmus’ convictions were so radical. The author of”The Hallelujah Diet”refuses to see a physician, has not owned health insurance in 23 years and says all pharmaceutical drugs _ including vitamin supplements _ are toxic and may be addictive. As for childhood vaccinations, his latest newsletter suggests they are unsafe.
But in 1992, Malkmus bought a small restaurant in Rogersville, Tenn., and started selling fresh juice and salads. The restaurant was an instant success, and in time, people began listening to Malkmus’ message and buying his books, and his ministry began growing. Two years ago, he moved his operation to an old Bible college in Shelby. He now owns a 23,000-square-foot cinder-block building and 17 acres he wants to farm _ Hallelujah Acres.
The diet minister won’t say just how much Hallelujah Acres is making. He says he doesn’t earn a salary from the ministry and lives off his book royalties and the”love offerings”churches give him when he speaks.
But clearly, the diet sells. Hallelujah Acres employs 25 people who staff the phones and ship his books, tapes, videos, jars of barleygreen and juicers all over the world.”If this ever gets out _ if we get on `Oprah’ or `Larry King Live’ _ we wouldn’t even be able to keep up with it,”he said.”This is literally going to change the world.”
DEA END SHIMRON
