Televangelism is nothing without its prophets. And on Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world’s largest evangelical TV conglomerate, it has something more than a prophet, it has a S*T*A*R:

The Cher of God TV, the pink-haired Lady of Galilee – Jan Crouch.

I’ll admit I make repeated pilgrimages to TBN, usually late at night when I’m frustrated with all the infomercials and text-messaging hookup ads. I tune in and fall under Jan’s dizzy, drunken spell.

Jan’s garish image is kaleidoscopic, never the same woman twice. There she is dressed in cotillion white while ministering to the drug-addled Born Agains in Houston. Jump Cut: There she is a disheveled, frighteningly sleep-deprived Jan cuddling black children in the slums of Haiti. Jump Cut: Back to the bright lit Rococo TBN studios where Jan sits on her throne chair and shares tales of how Jesus touched her life personally: He once raised her pet chicken from the dead. Someone in the audience cries “Praise the Lord!”

Regardless of time, place or intense aqua-marine eyeshadow, the 67-year-old Jan is always a happy-weepy whirl of typical fundamentalist contradictions. “Thank you father,” she’s apt to interject in her trembly little-girl voice at any given moment. Not since Tammy Faye Baker have we seen a preacher-ette who can pray, laugh and cry all at the same time.

Jan rules over the wildly dysfunctional, bi-polar (all that laughing and crying) atmosphere of TBN: The all-gold, almost-Papal living room set; the incantational Watusi-like preaching; the endless begging for “love-gift$.” And just when you think the singing and the Jesus-shouting can’t peak any higher, there, steadfast in the center of the maelstrom, stands Jan clutching a Kleenex.

Isn’t it odd how her startling appearance seems to stun and disarm you? How can someone so daft possibly be dangerous, you wonder. And Jan’s voice — that hushed, weepy twang as if she’s about to dissolve into a puddle of tears — that couldn’t possibly be the voice of an ice-cold, money-grubbing harridan.

Jan Crouch is Christian television’s supreme smokescreen.

Sophisticated viewers will scoff, but those of us under Jan’s druggy spell may find to our horror that we’re reaching for the checkbook and filling out the triple digit amounts like robots.

And hey, low on cash? Not a problem. Weeping, Jan entreats her flocks to reach deeper into their pockets with the promise of heaven’s bounty to those who make the biggest sacrifice. In fact, she callously encourages the poorest of the poor to send her their grocery money. All for God’s Blessings.

And what does God’s Blessings buy?

The most techno-savvy and extravagant New Millennium Christian TV network, that’s what. Where there is a positively pagan celebration of the buzzing bells and blinking lights of television programming.

Gone are the ploddingly paced days when Holy Ghost champion Kathryn Kuhlman (middle, left) dominated the godwaves with her Baby Jane perm and feel-good, self-amazed proclamation “I believe in … mir-a-cles …”

Now its Christian hip-hop, Christian extreme sports and Apocalyptic End-of-the-World thrillers that eat up TBN’s airtime.

Here is a glitzy Christianity even more over the top than Catholicism. And like Catholicism, it has its own much too hot-blooded sex scandals. Correction, homosex scandals! The one I’m referring to involved Jan’s husband and TBN founder Paul Crouch.

In 1998 Mr. Crouch fought off the accusations that he had engaged in a homosexual relationship with a member of his congregation. With all the frothing mania of a rabid dog, he raged that “most” of the charges against him were works of the Devil and that the accuser would “burn in hell for eternity.” His snarls and hunched-over rants made for some of the most unnerving TIVOing I had ever witnessed.

As Christian McLaughlin explained in The Advocate, Paul’s near-debacle coincided curiously with Jan’s ascent into a more dominate role within the world of electronic Jesus-ry. Amid Crouch’s “various lawsuits, payoffs, and gag orders” aimed at his male accuser, the formerly timid Jan “underwent a startling metamorphosis: Suddenly her makeup thickened, her wigs became fuller and more elaborate, and she was sporting a newly tight, varnished face and an enormous bust. Plus her attitude took a turn for the sassy.”

Yes, the memory of Tammy Faye Baker paled as a newly Dolly Parton-ized Jan Crouch came to rule the Jesus-sphere as vice-president and program director of TBN, finalizing her signature pink-haired look as a sort of garish clown painted by John Wayne Gacy. Truly, a beacon of God’s good grace for the needy and confused, she was a special inspiration to make-up challenged drag queens looking for some shock-and-awe beauty tips.

Jan’s transformation was classic Ibsen, circa The Doll House. A weak husband falters, deflates and fades into the background while his suddenly empowered mouse-wife gobbles up the testosterone juju and emerges bigger, badder and way much larger than life. Jan Crouch suddenly discovers the shamanic power of lavender and pink hair tints and lifts TBN unscathed from the ashes of what might have been an empire-toppling gay scandal.

Watching Jan minister to her flock brings to mind Little Bo Peep reenacting a Bible tale for the barnyard critters under her care. But as I study her face in slo-mo, courtesy of TIVO, and catch all the hidden snarling and vile contempt in her expressions (right), it uncovers the truth behind Jan’s brand of malignant televangelism.

It’s as if the God of Love were being used as a cover for the Economics of Greed and the Psychology of Hate. It brings to mind something Carl Jung noted during World War II when he was assessing the situation in Nazi Germany.

“Sentimentality,” Jung wrote, “is a super-structure built atop brutality.” Jung was addressing the bizarre behavior of captured Gestapo warlords who, if pressured in just the right way, would start bawling at the mention of their mothers or the Motherland. In every other way, they were vicious human beings without a conscience, but imagined themselves as people of great, in fact superior, feeling. They connived to keep themselves purposely out of touch with their actions.

Jan too maintains this elaborate Beatific Vision of herself in which she is pious and full of human feeling, weeping over slum children as she raises money to build a new TV tower. In fact, Jan has about as much human feeling as a cash register.

And it’s ringing up No Sale.

Can there ever be enough Jan? We don’t think so:

Jan’s first video production, No More Tears (left) is still available!

Speaking to us from the banks of the Sea of Galilee Jan recounts how the Lord brought her through a serious time of depression. Priceless, though only 50 cents on Amazon.

Anxiety’s Toxic Snowglobe’s Official Jeezus Jan page.