Righteous Buckeyes: Inside the Life Surge scam taking America by storm
"Surging your life God's way" is where a get-rich-quick scheme meets the Holy Scripture, and numerous Ohio State legends helped funnel financially illiterate Christians into the predatory scam.
If you are even somewhat familiar with the teachings of Jesus Christ, you might view His going beast mode in the money-changing temple as a seminal event in the Bible.
“My house shall be a house of prayer,” Jesus said, presumably before suplexing a financier through a table. “But you are making it into a den of robbers!”
The message couldn't be clearer about Hell awaiting Christians who use their religion to profiteer on the poor. Jesus’ disciples might as well have written that part in crayon.
But Life Surge, a self-described “non-denominational, global church planting movement" that recently descended on Columbus, told attendees who paid between $27 and $997 for a ticket that it’s Godly to horde resources.
“The resources that were in the ground, including gold, were put there to provide for [your] family and future generations, and to promote God's kingdom agenda on Earth,” explained David Benham, the elder half of the identical twin Benham Brothers, whom the emcee described as being the “first victims of cancel culture” because they once had an HGTV series canceled due to their virulent anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim bigotry.
“Sin simply entered the picture and perverted our motivation for getting [gold] and our intention on using it, but we were still called to cultivate,” Benham said.
“… The problem's not wealth. The problem is our motivation for getting it and our intention on using it. And like I said earlier: There's bad theology on both sides.”
Multiple speakers at Life Surge proclaimed they weren’t preaching the Prosperity Gospel, which they described as falsely claiming that everyone can become millionaires through Jesus' teachings.
Life Surge contends that the true secret to wealth comes from paying an additional $97 to attend separate three-day real estate and investment classes, where the ostensibly Christian organization can presumably sink its hooks into the most desperate believers.
Three times during the nine-hour agenda, Life Surge speakers summoned literal money-changing tables to the arena floor to solicit sign-ups. They also sent mobile card readers into the concourse to solicit customers in the concession lines.
Speakers urged the assembled masses to take control of their future by securing their spot in the coming Columbus-area classes taught by the organization’s “top instructors.”
To further push the sign-ups, speakers teased that 25 lucky customers would receive a photo-op with Ohio State national champion coach Urban Meyer and national-champion players, safety Caleb Downs and Jeremiah Smith.
Joe Johnson, a graduate of Ashland University and Pat Robertson’s surprisingly accredited Regent University, founded Life Surge in 2019. It seems to be raking money from Christians looking to better their lives through the teachings of Financial Jesus.
The racket is easy to see from the website.
Life Surge functions as a nationwide tour with fixed headliners, ranging from Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow, Donald Trump’s former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, the “top-podcast host” who thinks he gets 21 days in a week in Ed Mylett, and Nick Vujicic, the limbless Australian Evangelical and self-described “No. 1 motivational speaker in the world.”
If you’re not aware you’re at a Republican-coded event, it becomes evident quite early. The Benham Brothers praised Elon Musk and DOGE for giving the federal government an enema.
Vujicic threw any pity you might have for his predicament in the trash can when he claimed that Child Protective Services uses “fake domestic violence charges against men” to “kidnap and human traffick” children.
The fascistic Vujicic, who himself has been mired in anti-LGBTQ controversy, also hilariously claimed in that we live in a “disgusting” society with one breath before proclaiming himself as a “proud American citizen” in another, even if we don’t do enough for our veterans and first responders.
James Smith, an unbilled speaker who doubles as a boomer comedian and financial con artist, bragged about carrying a lifelong vendetta against his high school guidance counselor for her moral failures of driving a Mazda and renting a “windowless apartment” in a shitty neighborhood—all because she dared to tell him he wasn’t college material.
Smith boasted about embodying the difference between “knowledge” and “education,” which you, too, could learn if you had the smarts to pay $97 to attend the three-day classes about real estate and the stock market.
And in Smith’s defense, who needs college when you can sneer at hell-bound “fruit cups” and make money by convincing financially illiterate Christians that it’s easy to build generational wealth with no money or credit?
At every city where Life Surge stops, the organization seemingly contracts local personalities—usually famous athletes—to entice people who don’t identify as hardcore Republicans or Evangelicals.
In Columbus, that meant all-everything football commentator Kirk Herbstreit, Meyer, and three current Buckeye football players.
By comparison, an upcoming event in Philadelphia features the Super Bowl-winning Eagles coach Nick Sirianni and players Saquon Barkley, Cooper DeJean, and Brandon Graham.
Despite the appeal to the casual sports fan, Meyer, Herbstreit and the Buckeye footballers were billed as “champions of faith” in the short propaganda film that played before they joined the stage:
The push for class sign-ups notably ended before Tebow, Herbstreit, Meyer, and the current Buckeye footballers appeared.
And while their name, image and likeness were used to draw Ohioans to the event and spur them to join the classes through a photo-op raffle, none of them directly pitched the classes, either.
The Benham Brothers orchestrated softball interviews that you would find on any daytime Christian television programming, albeit with some unintentionally hilarious moments.
The Benham Brothers asked Meyer if he preferred coaching in college, where he won three national championships, or the NFL, where the Jacksonville Jaguars fired him before the end of his inaugural season, in no small part due to that famous lapdance story The Rooster broke.
Meyer unsurprisingly said he preferred college football, where he could emphasize recruiting players from faith backgrounds. That must have been after the Aaron Hernandez saga at Florida.
Seemingly unsatisfied with awkward moments, the Benham Brothers also asked former Ohio State wide receiver Roy Hall about injuring then-teammate Ted Ginn after Ginn returned the opening kickoff in the 2007 BCS title game against Meyer’s Florida Gators.
Most interestingly, Meyer detailed how he installed Bible study classes and church services at Ohio State. Meyer claimed they circumvented an Ohio State lawyer’s concerns about the Constitutionally mandated separation of church and state by calling the services “reflection.”
Hall, who currently serves as football team chaplain under head coach Ryan Day, lightly chided Meyer for spilling “the secrets.”
In my opinion, the nine-hour agenda is intentionally segregated from the headliners who purposely pitch the additional three-day classes and the athletes who don’t.
It would seem to give those coaches and athletes additional legal protection should former students ever sue Life Surge for fraud.
You can almost hear Meyer’s lawyers arguing that their client only signed a contract to discuss his faith and never actively touted the classes.
It might prove to be an important distinction, because it’s hard to envision Life Surge not ending a class-action lawsuit, even if that probably won’t happen under Trump’s Justice Department.
Because multiple motivational speakers who touted the classes pushed the “money-back guarantee,” the exact language prominently featured on the sign-up forms.
But that money-back guarantee is anything but, according to one highly detailed account of the classes.
After the Life Surge instructor failed to upsell the student on $14,000 worth of more classes, the instructor booted the student from the conference center rather than issue their “guaranteed” refund.
These types of financial scams have always existed, and they’re easy to spot to anyone with an elementary understanding of finances, making it perturbing that Ohio State’s athletic department rented Value City Arena to this cabal of grifters.
Because it wasn’t surprising to see Meyer and Herbstreit on that stage, pretending that they had stumbled into an impromptu discussion about their loosely defined love of Jesus.
Sure, maybe their lawyers could successfully argue that they weren’t aware of the predatory financial aspect of the event. But I’ve been around Columbus long enough to know that their appearance at this low-rent shakedown was hardly an anomaly of their character.
It’s especially galling because neither man needs the money. They’re both multimillionaires. And yet there they were on Saturday, debasing themselves and the university they claim to love, all to play their part in the predatory scheme.
But hey, it’s not like either will go to prison for promoting a blatant swindle in broad daylight.
Why would they care if any attendee eventually loses their life savings? It’s not like they put a gun to somebody’s head and forced them to do that. And besides, only a fool would think that the secret to financial success could be obtained in a three-day seminar in a hotel chain’s barren conference room off the interstate.
That’s the free market at work, baby!
And thanks to Life Surge, we know that Jesus loved nothing more than unfettered capitalism, which is why those communist fruit cups had to kill Him.
THOSE WMDs. The small actions that become your legacy… The TSA just banned lithium-battery power banks from checked luggage… The world’s longest train ride is epic—but nobody’s ever taken it… DOGE is building a surveillance state… Honor Thy Father: A story of youth and passion, obedience and trust, insanity and murder.
The Rooster was built for days like this.
Haven’t these people heard of trump university? The hypocrisy of Urban Mayer. I am beginning to despise the university for all their bs. Thanks for sharing this information.