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Ole Anthony is the founder and president of Trinity Foundation in Dallas.

For decades, Trinity Foundation has been the leading "watchdog" of religious media, uncovering fraud and abuses by televangelists and other prosperity gospel ministries and working with major news organizations around the world.

Trinity Foundation

Trinity Foundation began in 1973 as a religious, charitable and educational non-profit foundation for promoting the public interest in the State of Texas by producing Christ-centered communications projects.

"An early skepticism about the way religious programming was bought and sold prompted Trinity to conduct a controversial research project on the audience demographics and ratings of religious broadcasting," the foundation's website explains. "By the time scandal rocked the religious television industry in the 1980s, the foundation was already monitoring religious programming and reporting abuses of the public trust. By the 1990s Trinity had become the leading 'watchdog' of religious media, conducting investigations and providing information used to expose fraud and abuses committed in the name of God."

For a number of years, the foundation has maintained a private investigative agency license to aid in its investigations.

The foundation also published The Wittenburg Door, a magazine of Christian satire, from 1996 to 2008.

The Christian community of around 50 members that formed under the umbrella of the foundation over the years established itself in 2010 as Community on Columbia, a church congregation separate from the foundation's oversight, but still in friendly cooperation and agreement with its goals. The church took over the longstanding ministry of helping the homeless that the foundation began.

Bio

Ole Anthony (born October 3, 1938) is a native of Minnesota. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1956 until December 1959, as a "special weapons maintenance technician" and had top-secret clearance receiving the Good Conduct Medal and two "outstanding unit" awards.

Anthony was successful businessman and briefly a political operative and legislative candidate before his atheism was challenged by a simple message he heard from Bible teacher Norman Grubb in the 1970s-- "All striving is futile. Die to self."

Investigations

Anthony's investigative work into the fundraising tactics of big-money televangelists first came to national attention in 1991 following a Primetime Live hidden-camera look at televangelist Robert Tilton. Anthony and Trinity Foundation were instrumental in providing evidence for the many state and federal investigations of Tilton in the years that followed.

The foundation has worked in other investigations with most of the country's major news organizations.

Senate Finance Committee Investigation

Trinity Foundation was directly involved in Sen. Charles Grassley's Senate Finance Committee investigation of abuses by a number of televangelist ministries. Beginning in 2005, after being asked to help by the committee’s general counsel, the foundation submitted over the next six years 38 separate reports on abuses by religious not-for-profit organizations, which were incorporated into the committee’s final report.

The foundation recently criticized Sen. Grassley for turning to the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) for suggested solutions instead of acting on tough legislative proposals from his staff for policing abuses by religious organizations. The foundation claimed the ECFA's recommendations were too lax and were compromised by close ties to the very ministries they were proposing to oversee.

Other Controversy

Some former members of the group have been critical of the foundation and Anthony.

Relevant Links

"God's Work: Ole Anthony wants both to take down the world's largest Christian TV network and to make better waffles" -- D Magazine article November 12, 2012.

Radio interview with Ole Anthony - Pilgrim Radio Network - interview by Bill Feltner, November 2012.

"The Trouble with TBN" - November 8, 2012 Christianity Today article on Trinity Foundation's work in exposing the TBN scandals and the quandary that poses for mainstream ministries.

God Doesn't Need Ole Anthony--The Antichrist of East Dallas: The man televangelists hate (Reprinted from The New Yorker, Dec. 6, 2004).

"Televangelist watchdog group questions ECFA response to Sen. Grassley investigation" - Trinity Foundation Press Release, March 13, 2013.

"Nailin' it to the Church" - Excerpt from a documentary on The Wittenburg Door.