About
The Spirit of Truth is a series of video clips taken from the Los Angeles area public access program “One Man Show,” which features the coarse religious rantings of a televangelist Reverend X. The program was originally filmed in the late 1990s, but taped episodes have begun to resurface on YouTube and Google Video in 2006.
Origin
One Man Show was a television show broadcast for approximately five years on Los Angeles public access during the late 1990s. A segment called “The Spirit of Truth” featured the self-proclaimed deity and foul mouthed evangelical preacher Don Vincent (credited as Vincent Stewart). The show was eventually canceled when Vincent dropped his pants on the air and requested that viewers “look for sin”.
Tapes of the show were recovered and episodes started to appear online in early 2006. YouTube comments suggest that the original uploads of the show have since been deleted. The earliest found upload is dated April 25th 2006 on Google Video by user victah. The current oldest iteration on YouTube was uploaded by user stinkendefakkinturk on May 13th 2006.
On May 14th 2007, YouTube user paramicium07 uploaded an extended version of the original uploaded episode followed by the same episode uploaded by stinkendefakkinturk and an additional eleven videos of other episodes and various clips over the following months. More clips as well as some older clips were uploaded to YouTube by user emacc32 on a sporadic basis starting in April 2007, one of the most notable being “The Healing Dance”:
Spread
During the initial spread of the videos, Vincent’s real identity was still a mystery. Many radio shows discussing the video referred to him as “Reverend X”. Vincent’s identity was revealed on July 27th 2006 when he made a call in appearance to The Howard Stern Show.
He was later played on the Florida-based radio show “The Hideout” on April 4th 2006. The broadcast date supports evidence found on YouTube that the original upload may have been deleted. Radio stations in Detroit, Dallas, and naturally Los Angeles have also played sound bytes on air.
Heavy.com named The Spirit of Truth one of the 10 Craziest Public Access Shows in America.
Vincent is also slated to appear on season two of Tosh.O for the weekly Web Redemption segment but a broadcast date of the episode was not been listed in the press release.
ReverendX.org is an entire website dedicated to The Spirit of Truth, and contains an archive of all the videos.
Derivatives
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Vincent has spawned a series of animated GIFs and image macros featuring some of his more famous quotes from the show, dance moves, or other hilarity.
YTMND sites:
Search
Both spikes in search traffic correlate with the first set of episode uploads but quickly die out. Traffic from aggregation sites like EBaum’s World and remixed content from YTMND also contributed to searches.