Why do evangelists-ah sound-ah that-ah way-ah??

[Liberal]

No, not at the top of your lungs, but without breathing. It isn’t about volume alone, but about the body’s insistence that you breathe.

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It’s caused by failure to breathe properly while orating. Preachers who end up sounding that way usually start out ordinary enough, but as their adrenaline begins to flow and they talk faster and longer and louder, their diaphrams start squeezing hard to empty their old breath so they will breathe new air. What you hear is this expulsion of breath through the preacher’s vocal chords.

It’s been a phenomenon for a long time. C. H. Spurgeon wrote for the July, 1875 Sword and Trowel, “Hints on the Voice For Young Preachers”:

It is an infliction, not to be endured twice, to hear a brother, who mistakes perspiration for inspiration, tear along like a wild horse with a hornet in its ear till he has no more wind, and must needs pause to pump his lungs full again; a repetition of this indecency several times in a sermon is not uncommon, but is most painful. Pause soon enough to prevent that “hough, hough,” which rather creates pity for the breathless orator than sympathy with the subject in hand. Your audience ought not to know that you breathe at all—the process of respiration should be as unobserved as the circulation of the blood. It is indecent to let the mere animal function of breathing cause any hiatus in your discourse.

[The_Surb]

It’s the “Jesus hair” that makes them do it. Ever notice they all have the same hair?

[Miller]

Literally, the same hair. Although it’s not really hair; it’s actually a type of resin. Televangelists pass it around on some sort of a time-share program.

[Sampiro]

Worst offender is that fat-ass hypocrite and “retard shearer” John Hagee. He also tells jokes that wouldn’t have made the cut to get on HEE-HAW and gets huge chortles, in spite of the “AH” on every word.

The placement of the “AH!” is almost like the “ding!” on a typewriter when it gets to the end of a line. You wait for it. I think it might be a mesmerist trick.

I don’t know who I loathe more: the Hagees of the world or the people who make them rich. I think it’s the Hagees: I have contempt but pity for the poor idiots who send them their last food stamp, while I only have contempt for the televangietubbies.