Regular readers of Fluid Imagination may remember that I am a graduate of Green Mountain College and own a home and am raising my child in the town where the GMC campus anchors the west end of Main Street; which is to say, I am heavily invested in what happens with the campus of my now-defunct alma mater.
For most of this decade, that campus was privately owned by a millionaire named Raj Bhakta, who bought the old girl at auction for about $15 million less than it was assessed. I’ve already written about the various ways Mr. Bhakta dreamed and failed and pissed off the town in the process.
I’ve also written about where his story wound up: a decision to abandon the campus and flee to the south, donating the campus to a non-profit Christian organization “aligned with the revival of the United States and Western Civilization.”
In early July, the town received word that Mr. Bhakta was…selling?, donating?…the campus to a man named Tommie Zito, a Florida-based itinerant evangelist who plans to re-open the campus in 2027 as Z University, a Christian training school for up to 1,000 students.
Now, as of this writing, the transfer of the campus from Mr. Bhakta to Mr. Zito has not formally happened; no deed has been filed with our town clerk. A spokesperson for Mr. Bhakta said the transfer is planned for this October, pending legal and financial arrangements. The terms of those arrangements remain unclear. Some outlets have called it a “sale,” but others report that it is a continuation of Mr. Bhakta’s plan to gift the campus to a Christian organization.
Where I’m Coming From
Let me state at the outset: I am a progressive demotheist who was raised a Catholic and educated into a democratic socialist. Generally speaking, I distrust the motivations of evangelical preachers (though I am willing to be proven wrong by individual preachers) and tend to be wary of Floridian businessmen whose financial health depends on donations from the faithful.
On the other hand, I live in a town with roughly 3,500 people and dozens of small businesses, some in storefronts, others with garages, cottages, and farmstands. A regular influx of dollars from 1,000+ new individuals originating from outside of town would be appreciated. This is not to mention the food service, janitorial, and other staff jobs that could open up again on campus.
So, with that balance in mind — personally wary, communally hopeful — let’s begin.
Who Is Tommie Zito?
I’ve never met the man, so everything I’m about to write is based on my ability to use the Internet.
Prosperity Training
Tommie Zito, about 52 years old, is a traveling Pentecostal evangelist based in Florida (maybe Fort Lauderdale; probably Boca Raton). He dropped out of West Virginia University, but in the 1990s, he trained at the Rhema Bible Training Center. The center was founded by Kenneth Hagin, Sr., “the father of the so-called prosperity gospel.”
I’m no expert, but the prosperity gospel connects the health and wealth of Christians to positive confessions of their faith. The cynic in me wants to highlight that tithing one’s income to your prosperity-preaching church is a positive confession of your faith, as is making offerings in the collection plate. As the TV Show Black Jesus satirized it, “He gave you all His love, gave you all His divine grace, gave you all His salvation. And He deserves all your money.”
That same cynical side also wants to highlight that the broader corporate-Christian-libertarianism movement that industrialists funded to fight the New Deal shares the prosperity gospel’s basic move of moralizing free enterprise. They consciously connected capitalism and free enterprise to the individual’s salvation and successfully characterized social services such as welfare and socialized medicine as the work of godless communists and their sympathizers (like me); see also social gospel.
However, the romantic in me wants to note that its adherants see the prosperity gospel as an empowering theology that runs counter to the suffering mythos that animates much of Catholicism and other mainstream Christian faiths. It interprets the Bible as a contract between God and his believers, and so if the believers hold up their end of the contract, then God will, as promised, reward them a hundredfold. This interpretation puts the health and wealth of every believer in their own hands, for only they can uphold their end of the contract.
So yeah, in an institution funded by the tithings and offerings of that community and based on the teachings of one of the fathers of that theology, Tommie Zito received his training.
A Spiritual Awakening
In 1999, Mr Zito and his wife, Kimberly (whom he met at Rhema Bible Training Center) founded Tommie Zito Ministries, whose mission is “to implement infrastructures and strategies to help reach the lost, to grow congregations, and to help facilitate revival in cities across the nation by gathering regional and city leaders.”
In 2005, Mr. Zito published a book, A Spiritual Awakening: How to respond to the emerging HUNGER FOR GOD, where he writes:
When is the last time you surrendered and completely yielded yourself to God, allowing him to use you, your gifting, your abilities, and your dreams? Once you realize your significance and your value to God, you leave room for the extraordinary. Once you yield yourself to God, you will see his own dreams unfold in your life….
And if one yielded vessel can make such a difference, then imagine what one yielded church can do… Can you imagine what it would be like if each individual church came together and yielded themselves as a whole unit to the leadership of their pastor who in turn was yielded to the leading of the Holy Spirit? You would have a church that was unstoppable, a church that throbbed with the heartbeat of God.
A whole church yielded to the the leadership of their pastor, who claims to be channeling the will of God through the Holy Spirit? Sounds like fascism to me, but I’m not a big believer in the One True God, so what do I know?
The Mentor
The foreward to Mr. Zito’s book is written by Dr. Rodney M. Howard-Browne, whom Mr. Zito has called his mentor. Mr. Howard-Browne’s Wikipedia page describes him as “South African-born American evangelist and a conspiracy theorist.” A 1999 article in the Tampa Tribune, hosted on the website for the Cult Education Institute, describes him as a self-proclaimed “Holy Ghost Bartender.”
He serves the new wine of Christ, and they get drunk with joy. It’s not uncommon for worshipers to break into uncontrollable “holy laughter,” shaking with mirth, dancing in the aisles or falling to the ground. Some are so affected they feel physically unable to get up, stuck in what they call “Holy Ghost glue.” These believers say they are “slain in the spirit.”
Critics paint a different picture. They say he’s a world-class hypnotist. A manipulator leading followers into a cult. A circus ring leader making a good living.
The article above was centered on his plan to bring his revival to New York City, where his ministry had rented out Madison Square Garden for six weeks. Contemporaneous reports said it flopped, “averaging about 3,000 in an arena that can hold 20,000.” Mr. Zito said he was one of the directors of the project, and the experience showed him how hungry people were for Jesus.
Circuses and holy laughter are all good and fine — after all, who doesn’t like to laugh? — but Mr. Howard-Browne has a bit more in his past. From his ties to a multi-level marketing company (i.e., “a “legalized scam” that benefits only a few kingpin executives”) to his claims that people in Hollywood sacrifice children and drink their blood (“They sacrifice children at the highest levels in Hollywood. They drink blood of young kids. This is a fact…The human sacrifice and the cannibalism has been going on for years.”), Mr. Howard-Browne is not what you might call uncontroversial. You may remember in March 2020 when Mr. Howard-Browne was arrested and jailed for continuing to hold church services during the COVID-19 shutdown.
I should also note that Mr. Howard-Browne was one of the evangelical preachers who laid hands on President Trump in 2017. A few days later, he revealed that high-ranking members of the government had told him there was a secret plot to attack the President, and he praised God for giving America a “Rambo” who would fight off the Antichrist’s one-world-government: “God brought [Trump] in to be a wrecking ball.”
So yeah, that is Mr. Zito’s mentor.
ZOE
In 2010, Mr. Zito founded a small bible school, ZOE South Beach (Kenneth Hagin wrote that ZOE “means the God-kind of life”). ZOE South Beach ran out of a church building in the Miami area, where Mr. Zito trained missionaries and preachers.
In 2014, he put out a press release for a planned reality TV series, “The Evangelistz,” that would follow his ministry on its “Stars & Stripes Tour” to be built around a 10,000-seat traveling tent. The TV series seems to have only “aired” on its own Facebook page, and the URL for “The Evanglistz” is now defunct. Meanwhile, the only reference on the entire Internet that includes both “Tommie Zito” AND “Stars & Stripes Tour” is the press release.
Sometime in 2016, Mr. Zito “felt to push pause on” the ZOE South Beach bible school because he sensed something “legitimate” was coming. The GMC campus is, apparently, that something legitimate.
But what about the years between 2016 and 2026?
The Great Awakening
For the past ten years or so, Mr. Zito seems to have been doing straight itinerant revival preaching under his American Awakening Inc. Reported revenue shows an average net income of about -$730 over the years between 2011 and 2021 (on revenues reaching as high $299k). I couldn’t find any more filings after 2021, and the IRS revokes your nonprofit if you don’t file for three years, but I also couldn’t find a notice of the revocation, so I’m not sure whether American Awakenings Inc. is still a nonprofit or not.
Anyway, the company’s low average income makes sense because it costs money to travel the world sharing the good news. If you look at his event calendar for 2026, he bounces back and forth between Canada and Italy, with stops in the United Arab Emirates and throughout the United States, including Georgia, Arizona, Vermont (obviously), and New York/New Jersey (for the World Cup). That’s a pricey itinerary.
All of this travel is because his ministry is committed to giving rise to a new Great Awakening.
Here’s a quick history lesson:
The First Great Awakening occurred in the middle of the 18th century, when a protestant revival swept through the U.K., Ireland, Scotland, and colonial America. It was a reaction against what its faithful saw as a cold, formal, rationalist church. They pushed for personal conversions, an emotional “new birth” experience, and a direct relationship with God, unmediated by an educated clergy. Some (but not all) historians give it credit for planting the seed of “individual conscience over heirarchy” style of thinking that fed into Revolutionary-era politics a generation later.
The Second Great Awakening peaked in the early 19th century and gave rise to a whole host of reform movements, from Joseph Smith’s Mormonism to William Miller’s Adventism to the circuit-riding preachers of Methodists and Baptists. Generally speaking, these reforms preached a theology closer to free will, where people could choose salvation and work to perfect society in preparation for Christ’s return.
Now, revivalist preachers over the past two hundred years have all called for or claimed to be leading the next Great Awakening. Some historians attribute the Third Great Awakening to the social gospel I mentioned above and others give the Fourth Great Awakening to the resurgence in conservative Christianity, evanglism, and other fundamentalisms in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Mr. Zito’s Great Awakening seems to have four layers to it.
The base layer is classical Pentecostal revivalism, with its crusade-like mission, its “fire of God” healing, and its prioritization of direct spiritual experience over institutional mediation.
But under that sits something more specific: the Word of Faith theology he received at Kenneth Hagin’s training center, which teaches that believers can speak health and financial prosperity into being through a faith-filled declaration. Distortions of this theology can treat suffering as a failure of faith rather than as something that is normal to the human experience.
The third layer includes his discipleship under Rodney Howard-Browne, which is an even more specific subculture of charismatic revivalism. It’s much more manifestation-focused and theatrical than mainstream Pentecostalism, and from the videos I’ve seen online, it’s more descriptive of a Zito-led revival meeting than what you might find in another Pentecostal service.
The fourth layer is political. In April 2024, Mr. Zito was a guest on Truth & Liberty’s call-in show, which was hosted by a prominent anti-abortion political organizer whose organization has been designated as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Truth & Liberty was co-founded by Lance Wallnau, who coined the Seven Mountain Mandate (7M) and has been called “the father of American Dominionism.” The 7M calls for Christians to actively take dominion over seven spheres of society — government, education, media, business, arts, family, and religion — rather than confine themselves to soul saving.
Mr. Zito has said that Z University’s curriculum will includes schools of evangelism, leadership, business, government, and digital media, which maps suspiciously well onto the seven spheres framework.
Another co-founder of Truth & Liberty was David Barton, a career Christian-nationalist activist whom NPR called “the most important evangelist you’ve never heard of.” As one critic said, “David Barton is offering an alternative vision of American history which places God, the providence of God, Christianity, at the center.” He’s one of the men who advised the Texas Board of Education’s rewriting of its history textbooks.
Christian-nationalism maps wells onto Mr. Zito’s words that the American Awakening calls for the country to be re-esstablished as “One Nation, Under God” and his connection to Mr. Bhakta’s desire to deliver the campus to an organization committed to “reviving the United States and Western Civilization.”
In His Own Words
“He that calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how can they call unless they believe? What you believe affects what you do. But how can they believe unless they hear? What you hear affects what you believe. But how can they hear unless somebody preaches? Somebody has to preach something for somebody to hear something for somebody to believe something for somebody to do something different. And then it goes one more… And how can they preach unless they are sent?
“And that’s what we’re doing here [in New England]. We gotta send them.”
How Might Z University Affect Poultney
An article in VT Digger uses a word to describe what happens to towns likes mine, towns dominated by a shuttered campus. They use the word reincarnated.
As most people reading this know, seven Vermont colleges have closed or reorganized since 2018: Green Mountain College, Southern Vermont College, College of St. Joseph, Marlboro, New England Culinary Institute, Goddard, and Sterling. The state talks about all seven the way you’d talk about Lazarus: dead, and then…maybe not.
The word admits that a closed campus is a body, and that the question of what comes next is really a question about whether something is being brought back to life or just propped up long enough to be photographed.
So let’s ask it plainly: Will Z University be a resurrection or a sucker’s séance?
The Math
The campus has 115 acres and twenty-six buildings, and there are costs to keeping them from falling down. In his interview with the New York Post, Mr. Bhakta estimates roughly $1 million a year in operating costs, plus another $1.5 million a year in ongoing upkeep. Let’s call that $2.5 million a year just to keep the grass mown, the lights on, and the roofs sound, before a single class is taught.
Now look at what Mr. Zito’s ministry has actually raised in a year, going back as far as the IRS has records. American Awakening Inc.’s revenue from 2011 through 2021 averaged out to about $164,000 a year. Its best year, 2018, brought in $298,685. Its worst, 2020, brought in $78,047 (let’s blame COVID-19). I already mentioned the average net income over that stretch is about -$730; the organization spent almost exactly what it raised, year after year, for a decade. This same ministry is about to inherit a campus that costs roughly fifteen times its average annual revenue just to stay afloat.
Mr. Zito does have one real number behind him. He told the NY Post that he put as his down payment a $1 million personal gift he’d received from a donor, which he frames as proof he’s putting his own resources on the line. I’ll grant that this seems a genuine show of commitment.
But a down payment is a single transaction. It says nothing about April 2027, or the April 2027, or any of the Aprils in which somebody has to make payroll for the janitorial and food-service staff that Z University will need to actually function. “People give toward vision, they don’t give toward debt,” Mr. Zito told a Vermont TV reporter who asked him directly how he’d fund it. That’s a statement of faith in future donations; it’s not a budget.
Then there’s the accreditation gap on top of the money gap. Larry Schall, who runs the New England Commission of Higher Education, the body that would actually have to bless this school, told a reporter he knew nothing about Z University. Accreditation from that office typically takes years, not months, but Mr. Zito wants a charter class by August 2027. He says the school will “host” up to 1,000 students. I’ve slept in several of GMC’s dorm buildings. On its best day, it sleeps 850, and several dozens of those were dirty hippies having funky sex in the same bed.
What Vermont Does With Its Dead Colleges
The GMC campus has already run this exact experiment, just with a different ringmaster, and that should worry Poultney more than Mr. Zito’s theology does.
Before there was a preacher, there was a whiskey man. Mr. Bhakta arrived with his own grand vision, and it foundered on precisely the two obstacles Z University will now approach: a lack of outside financing, and the ability to clear Vermont’s Act 250 land-use process. Mr. Bhakta is still fighting that process. As of this writing, Vermont’s Land Use Review Board has pending violations against Mr. Bhakta’s development company for an unpermitted private school, an unpermitted distillery and tasting operation, and an unauthorized remodeling of one the campus’s historic buildings.
Let’s look across the rest of the state. Southern Vermont College is becoming a planned luxury resort, backed by a real estate development company with actual capital behind it. Goddard and Marlboro became arts nonprofits with philanthropic funding models built for exactly the modest, grant-dependent operations they run. The Vermont College of Fine Arts campus is now home to Greenway Institute, an engineering school being built debt-free from the ground up by a founder who’s done this before with institutional funders lined up. Every one of these survivor stories has a financing structure sized to the ambition.
Poultney is being offered instead a man whose ministry has averaged $164,000 a year, trying to run something that costs $2,500,000 a year, on faith that the money will show up because the vision is righteous.
What Actually Changes on Main Street, and When
Wary half and hopeful half both included: if Z University works, if it actually gets accredited, actually opens, actually keeps 1,000 students fed and housed and enrolled for more than a semester, it would have a significant impact on Poultney. Food service jobs. Janitorial jobs. Construction, plumbing, and electricity jobs. Landscaping jobs. Landlords with empty apartments. A diner that could use a bigger breakfast rush. My own kid growing up in a town with a functioning campus again instead of beautiful, empty buildings decaying at the end of Main Street.
But none of that will arrive on a timeline that changes what we plan for this year, or probably next year either. The deed still isn’t filed, and though the transfer is targeted for October, October often becomes January or April in stories like this one.
But even in the rosiest version, where the money to restore the campus materializes and the accreditation board moves faster than it ever has and nobody in Montpelier blinks at the Act 250 mess, the earliest students can’t show up until the fall of 2027, and I’ll bet my house that the date slips to at least 2028, if it arrives at all.
On top of that, assuming Z University opens as a nonprofit, Poultney loses the taxes that come from the campus (just as Bhakta threatened we would).
So, we can hope for a resurrection. But come March 2027, we gotta make sure we don’t budget for one.