We are taught not to speak ill of the dead, these now including 64-year-old Marcus Lamb, the anti-vax, pro-ivermectin televangelist who died of COVID-19 last week.
But what of the still living who may join the dead if they listen to the falsehoods about the virus and the vaccines that were being aired by Lamb’s television network even as his funeral was held at a Texas megachurch on Monday?
Among the shows available for streaming on the Daystar Christian TV network, valued at more than $1 billion and capable of reaching 2 billion viewers, is one from last Mother’s Day in which Lamb actually insisted that his opposition to the vaccine was an effort to save lives. That, and to thwart the devil.
“The devil can take people out before they fulfill destiny and purpose,” Lamb said. “That’s what he wants to do because he hates God. So the only way he could get back at God is by trying to attack God’s children.”
At the end of the show, co-hosted by his wife, Joni Lamb, and featuring fellow anti-vaxxers Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Del Bigtree, the televangelist advised viewers to place their faith in two unproven drugs as well as God.
“You don’t have to live in fear, you can look to the Lord as our source of health,” Marcus Lamb said. “But again, get ivermectin, get hydroxychloroquine... Joni and I have taken it and we haven’t gotten COVID-19. You can use it to treat COVID-19.”
Lamb and his wife both nevertheless tested positive last month. She seems to have quickly recovered, but he was critically ill on Nov. 23, when their son appeared on the network to say it was the work of Satan himself.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a spiritual attack from the enemy,” Jonathan Lamb said. “As much as my parents have gone on here to inform everyone about everything going on in the pandemic and some of the ways to treat COVID—there’s no doubt that the enemy is not happy about that. And he’s doing everything he can to take down my dad.”
On Nov. 30, Joni Lamb made a tearful announcement on Daystar.
“This morning at 4 a.m., the president of Daystar and the love of my life, went to be with Jesus,” she said.
She described being in the hospital room when “his heart gave out.”
“They tried to resuscitate him and he did not,” she said. “I was sure that he would.”
But she insisted that Marcus Lamb “100 percent believed in everything that we’ve talked about here on Daystar and helped so many people around the world with early protocol treatments for COVID.”
“We still stand by that, obviously,” she added.
She described her husband as a “general in God’s army” and recalled a day in 1983 when the two of them were visiting the Mount of Olives in Israel. She said that the Lord had spoken to him.
“Even though he knew nothing about television, [God] told him to build a television station,” she said.
On the screen as she spoke was the telephone number for the “Daystar Ministries’ prayer department,” which prompts callers to “for prayer, pledge, or placing an order, press 1. For payments, press 2.”
Marcus had once called such donations “God’s money” and over time that money had bankrolled a private jet and a mansion. It had also allowed him in his final months to aggressively wholesale untruths about the proven vaccine while proselytizing discredited treatments.
The family has not come out and said whether Marcus Lamb ever got the jab. A spokesman told The Daily Beast, “The Lamb family believes that vaccination status is a matter of privacy and personal choice for every individual.” But that had not prevented the Lambs from aggressively seeking to influence that choice by others, saying it was a matter of God versus the devil.
If Marcus Lamb 100 percent not only believed but also followed everything that was said on Daystar, he did not get the jab. He otherwise might have been preaching on Daystar on Monday afternoon instead of lying in a shiny black coffin set before the stage at Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas.
The senior pastor, Robert Morris, had attended the October 2020 reception at the White House honoring Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett that proved to be a superspreader event. And his church had also experienced an outbreak.
But there were no apparent COVID precautions at the funeral. And Morris had declined to comment on Marcus Lamb’s opposition to the vaccine. A spokesman told The Daily Beast that Morris “has not and will not engage in the medical debate or dialogue regarding vaccines.” He also called the matter “a personal choice.”
The result of Marcus Lamb’s apparent choice was much the same as hundreds of thousands of others who have succumbed to the virus. Grieving family members. Tender memories of better times. Searing recollections of the final hours.
But it seemed clear that the shiny black coffin had not caused the mourners to reconsider the deadly untruths that the network had continued to perpetuate. Jonathan Lamb told the mourners, “The best days for Daystar Network are just ahead.” One of Marcus Lamb’s two daughters, Rebecca Lamb Weiss, said the family would continue to be guided by what had guided her father.
“The Holy Spirit,” she said. “The spirit of truth.”
Joni Lamb recounted on a video how she and her husband started with nothing at a tiny TV station in Alabama and built a broadcast empire. She vowed that the horrors of the last days at the hospital would not cause her and her family to reconsider and change course.
“We will not back down from exposing the devil for who he is and what he is doing,” she said.
At the funeral’s end, a lone bagpiper strode up to the coffin playing “Amazing Grace.” He then led a procession from the church. The son was the lead pallbearer, and when you saw the heartbreak in his face, you had to remind yourself not to speak ill of the dead.
You then thought of the still living who may suffer the same fate as Marcus Lamb as a result of the falsehoods now being broadcast along with that phone number where you press 1 for prayers and pledges, 2 for payments.
