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Pat Robertson: Was he an influential religious broadcaster or some kind of 'evangelicalist'?

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Pat Robertson: Was he an influential religious broadcaster or some kind of 'evangelicalist'?

I must admit that I have not had the time to dig into the 666 million words or so (that’s an estimate) of news and commentary dedicated to the death of the Rev. Pat Robertson. It’s hard to do much reading when at the wheel of a car for about 1,400 miles (and that was the return trip).

But I do have some thoughts on the passing of the charismatic quote machine that journalists loved, loved, loved to hate (see my 2005 commentary for the Poynter Institute). If Robertson didn’t exist, blue-zip-code pundits would have created him ex nihilo.

Truth be told, I never met the man — even though, technically speaking, I briefly worked for him during a failed 2000 attempt to build a D.C. beltway-based master’s degree journalism program for Regent University.

How to describe Pat Robertson?

First and foremost, he was a media maven and entrepreneur, creating the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1960. Years later, he sold the Family Channel for something like $2 billion. Love it or hate it, the niche-news and commentary DNA of The 700 Club can be found all over the place on cable television.

For journalists, he was mainly a political activist — playing a major role in the creation of the Christian Coalition. In 1988 he made a surprisingly relevant attempt to win the White House, seeking the Republican nomination. He was the son of a U.S. senator and, before jumping into media work, graduated from Yale Law School and New York Theological Seminary.

The media entrepreneur poured millions of dollars into academica, with the creation of Regent University — which only offered graduate-school degrees in subjects that Robertson considered culturally significant (such as law and mass communications).

Robertson was a bestselling author, with the help of numerous ghost writers (including a major gay-rights pioneer).

I would argue that his most significant achievement was helping merge the charismatic movement into mainstream evangelical Protestantism, adding doctrinal elements of Pentecostalism into the rapidly growing world of post-denominational Christianity in America and around the world.

But here is the big journalism question: Why do so many mainstream journalists call Robertson an “evangelist,” even though crusades and public preaching of that style were never part of his life and work?


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Pentecostalism from soup to nuts: A (near) complete history of this movement in America

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Pentecostalism from soup to nuts: A (near) complete history of this movement in America

In early January, The Conversation, an academically oriented website affiliated with Religion News Service, ran an explainer with this headline: “What is Pentecostal Christianity?”

That’s a big, complicated question. While I appreciated the article’s emphasis on how Pentecostals are a little-noticed component in American Christianity, it was very much a Cliffs Notes version of a complex, 123-year-old movement. And it didn’t even mention the Charismatic Renewal movement, a massive spiritual shift in the 1960s that brought millions of mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics into the wider Pentecostal fold.

Pentecostalism has hit the news in recent years with revelations of the “Trump prophets,” but their rise has a long back story that few journalists understand. For many years, pentecostals have been seen as evangelicalism’s crazy sister and media coverage has hardly been incisive.

Thus, tmatt suggested that we post the following comprehensive look at the history of the movement here in the United States. I wrote this as a backgrounder for a meeting of religion reporters at the University of Maryland in 2000. I have updated it twice because the movement keeps on shifting. Some of this will sound very basic, but it’s important to know who the main players have been.

———

Without a doubt, the portion of Christianity known as Pentecostalism was — by far — the fastest-growing movement of the 20th century, going from zero members on Jan. 1, 1901 to 644 million adherents worldwide now. It is the primary expression of Christianity in the Global South. It is the one form of Christianity to mount a serious challenge to the growth of Islam, mainly because of its appeal to the very poor and its reliance on the miraculous.

During my travels in places like India and Egypt years ago, I was told by religious leaders that the heavy hitters in evangelism in Hindu and Muslim contexts were the Pentecostals. When I was in Israel researching a piece on the country’s messianic Jews, my sources told me half of them, at least, were charismatic. The world’s largest churches in Korea and Nigeria are Pentecostal.


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What happened when this 2022 Final Four hero was asked to explain his heart, mind and soul?

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What happened when this 2022 Final Four hero was asked to explain his heart, mind and soul?

OK, faithful GetReligion readers, you know the drill.

Especially those of you who are among the small circle of our readers who join millions and millions of ordinary Americans in caring about sports news and personalities. In this case, we are talking about March Madness, the NCAA hoops festival that — taken as a whole — is a much more symbolic and emotional sports event than that whole SuperBowl thing.

Sure enough, the final act of this year’s tournament features a sports hero-coach who wasn’t supposed to be there, at least not this year, at this stage of his career. Here is the top of a typical news story about him, care of the always secular USA Today team:

NEW ORLEANS — Kansas coach Bill Self had a positive opinion of Hubert Davis long before North Carolina staged a thrilling run to the national championship game.

Self ran into Tar Heels' All-American big man Armando Bacot when both teams were in Fort Worth two weeks ago for the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament.

"I went up to Armando and said, 'congratulations: are you having fun?' And the first thing he said: 'I love playing for Coach Davis.' That's the first thing he said to me," said Self, who had a relationship with Bacot from coaching him on the FIBA U18 team back in 2018. "So I think right there is a testament to how good (Davis) is, how special, and the relationship he has with his guys."

On April 5 of last year, Davis was named as the replacement to legendary UNC coach Roy Williams. For parts of 2021-22, it looked as if it would take time for Davis to transform the blue-blood back into a perennial power. Then the Tar Heels found another gear – starting with a March 5 road upset of rival Duke, an outcome they replicated in this Final Four to send Blue Devils coach Mike Krzyzewski into retirement.

So what makes this man unique? What does he have to say when he is asked to explain who he is, why he does what he does and what Makes. Him. Tick. as a man and a coach?

Consider this quote, in one of those high-profile press conferences before the Final Four:

"My faith and foundation is firmly in my relationship with Jesus. It just is.


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New podcast: Did the mainstream press ever figure out why Pat Robertson was important?

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New podcast: Did the mainstream press ever figure out why Pat Robertson was important?

If you look at the headline and the art for this post, it’s obvious that this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on media coverage of the Rev. Pat Robertson’s retirement as host of the “700 Club.”

Try to forget that. Work with me here, for a moment.

What if I told you that the man at the heart of this story grew up in Washington, D.C., as the son of a U.S. Senator. Then he did his undergraduate work at a quality school known for its academic rigor, graduating magna cum laude while studying history at Washington and Lee University.

Later, he earned a Yale Law School degree. After that — think low New York bar exam scores and a big religious conversion — he earned an MDiv degree from New York Theological Seminary.

Somewhere in that mix, he served in the U.S. Marines. Later, he founded a multi-million-dollar broadcasting empire and started a graduate-school university and a law school.

Does it sound like someone with a pretty good shot at having an impact on American life and culture?

Well, that’s Pat Robertson — sort of. It's clear that, for most journalists, this resume doesn’t have much to do with the man’s life and work. This is, after all, the religious broadcaster (as opposed to televangelist) who, for decades, served up “spew your coffee” soundbites that launched waves of embarrassing headlines and late-night TV jokes. He was important because this was the kind of wild man who helped lead the Religious Right further into the heart of Republican Party politics.

The minute anything crazy or scary happened in the world — from politics and pop culture to hurricanes and earthquakes — the press turned to Robertson for what was billed as semi-official “evangelical” reactions, even as his words frequently left mainstream evangelical leaders sad, puzzled or furious.

Robertson was one of the official alpha-male media voices of evangelicalism, even after he women and men had emerged who had more clout and connections in the movement.

I was never a Robertson fan. However, it was always clear to me — thinking in terms of church history — that he wasn’t really an “evangelical,” strictly defined, even though he was an ordained Southern Baptist minister. The key is that he was a leader in the rising tide of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity in America and the world at large (see this Pew Research Center resource page).

Does that matter? Well, Pentecostal Christianity very diverse, in terms of race and class, and is the fastest growing for of religious faith on the planet.


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Holy baptism as photo op: Do journalists know anything about Kim Kardashian's faith?

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I don’t follow the Kardashians at all –- but you’d have to be on Mars not to notice all the photos out there about Kim Kardashian’s trip to Armenia for the baptism of her three youngest children. I wasn’t aware she was particularly devout.

But she has named her kids Saint, Chicago and Psalm. All were baptized at the Etchmiadzin Cathedral in Vagharshapat. There are Armenian churches in this country (such as this one in Evanston, Ill.), so I’m not sure why she felt the need to fly back to the old country, other than to bring attention to the Armenian genocide (by the Turks) a century ago.

This being the Kardashians, much of it was on camera and the mother’s Instagram post of being “baptized along with my babies” the event got 5 million likes. Even though she’d previously had an older daughter, North West, previously baptized in Jerusalem, was Kardashian herself ever baptized? And by whom? No one seems to know.

Here’s what CBN said:

Socialite and business mogul Kim Kardashian West visited her family's homeland of Armenia to get baptized with her children at what scholars say is one of the oldest churches in the world.

"So blessed to have been baptized along with my babies at Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, Armenia's main cathedral which is sometimes referred to as the Vatican of the Armenian Apostolic Church. This church was built in 303 AD," West wrote in an Instagram post.

West is pictured lighting candles in the cathedral, an orthodox tradition that symbolizes Jesus being the light of the world.

I’m curious if the Kardashians had to jump through hoops to get their kids baptized like most people have to do. This article notes that most believers have to apply months ahead of time, have their baptisms approved by a religious council and other requirements.


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In Iowa, a federal judge fines university officials for anti-religious discrimination. Where's the ink?

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I’ve been following a strange case at the University of Iowa where officials have gone after –- with a vengeance — about a dozen religious groups that have the temerity to appoint like-minded people as their leaders.

That is discrimination, the university said, before it kicked these groups off campus because some of them were not allowing sexually active gay students as their leaders. One of the groups –- Business Leaders in Christ –- sued and won.

Just this week, up came a second case: InterVarsity v. University of Iowa, after InterVarsity likewise sued for being ejected from campus after 25 years.

When I first wrote up these cases in February, I trashed the coverage in Inside Higher Education, which vilified the conservatives and exonerated the university even though the judge was telling the university it was dead wrong. Thus, I looked to see how media covered the most recent decision to get handed down and was surprised at how little there was outside state lines.

Even inside Iowa, the coverage wasn’t overwhelming. From the Iowa City Press-Citizen:

A second University of Iowa student group that promotes Christian beliefs has won a court ruling saying that UI acted unlawfully in deciding its standards for leaders' religious beliefs violated school policy.

U.S. District Judge Stephanie Rose also ruled that — because UI administrators should have understood after her rulings in the previous case how to be fair to the groups — at least three university officials will be personally liable for any damages awarded to the plaintiffs.

Wait — does that mean the erring university officials must pay for all this out of their own pockets? That’s a very interesting news hook.

Apparently so, says CBN:


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When the Southern Poverty Law Center implodes, why is no one surprised?

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I’ve been complaining about the Southern Poverty Law Center for a long time and how it makes all the wrong moves in eviscerating conservative and often mainstream evangelical targets in the name of ferreting out hate. Only when it turned its focus on a British Muslim and got his story horribly wrong — resulting in a lawsuit filed against them by the aggrieved Brit — was it obvious to lots of media people that the SPLC was seriously off base.

With the recent dismissal of its co-founder Morris Dees, followed by the resignation of its president, Richard Cohen, various media, almost all of them on the left side of politics, have been piling onto the SPLC with cartloads of venom.

You’d think it was them who’d been tarred with the hate brush. But it wasn’t.

As religious liberty specialist David French, a Harvard Law man, reminds us at National Review:

For those who cared about truth, the SPLC’s transformation from a valuable anti-Klan watchdog into a glorified version of Media Matters for America was plain and obvious. It steadily expanded its definition of “hate groups” to include mainstream Christian organizations such as my former employer, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and it labeled as “extremists” men such as American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray.

These decisions had serious real-world consequences. Corporations and employers cut off relationships with groups and individuals targeted by the SPLC, and violent people used SPLC designations to justify attempted murder and assault. Remember the man who tried to commit mass murder at the Family Research Council? He found his target through the SPLC’s list of alleged “anti-gay groups.” Remember when an angry mob attacked Murray at Middlebury College and injured a professor? Because of the SPLC, those protesters thought they were attacking a “white nationalist.”

Recent articles that go after the SPLC include this lengthy read in the New Yorker. The critique majors on the organizations less-than-diverse racial make-up, its finesse as a “marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals” and its place as a “highly profitable scam.”

Although there’s very little about this mess that is directly about religion, there is an emphasis on morality or at least morality that got lost along the way. Part of the problem was the incessant appeals to blue-state America to contribute money so the SPLC could kill off the bogeyman of the Religious Right, along with racism.


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Yes, there are strange religion stories out there: Here's a brief reminder of what GetReligion does

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Rare is the day that I do not receive an email or two from readers who want me to write a GetReligion post making fun of something strange that happened in the news.

Some of these letters come from the cultural right. More of them come from the cultural left, asking this blog to blow holes in this or that statement by a Religious Right type.

The key is that they want me to comment on the craziness of the story itself, not whether this news story was handled in an accurate and professional manner. The letters usually include a statement to this effect: If GetReligion was really interested in religion news, you’d be writing what I want you to write about x, y or z.

The problem is that, most of the time, the URLs included in these messages point to perfectly normal news stories about a statement that may or may not be crazy, depending on your point of view. There’s nothing there for your GetReligionistas to note, in terms of really good or really bad religion-news writing.

The key, as always, is this: GetReligion is not a religion-news site. This is a blog about mainstream media efforts — good and bad — to cover religion news. There’s no need for lots of posts that say, in effect: Hey! Look at this absolutely normal news story about something that somebody said the other day.

With that in mind, let’s turn to this question: Did God want Donald Trump to be president?

Let’s start here:

MT. OLYMPUS (The Borowitz Report) — Partially confirming Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s theory of divine intervention in the 2016 election, Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos, discord, and strife, revealed on Friday that she had wanted Donald J. Trump to be President.

Speaking from her temple on Mt. Olympus, the usually reclusive deity said that Trump was “far and away” her first choice to be President in 2016.

“I’d been following his career for years,” the goddess of disorder and ruin said. “The bankruptcies, the business failures. There was a lot for me to love.”

Actually, that isn’t a news report. That’s a piece of satire from The New Yorker. However, that sort of demonstrates the tone of lots of the emails that I’ve been getting.

Here, of course, is what that blue-zip-code bible is mocking (care of a Holly Meyer report from The Tennessean in Nashville). The headline proclaimed: “Sarah Huckabee Sanders says God wanted Trump to be president. She's not the only one who believes that.” And here’s the overture:


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Here's the non-news direct from Seattle: An abortion activist video for kiddies

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I was scrolling through Twitter when I saw a feed belonging to Dae Shik Kim Hawkins, Jr., a Seattle writer who specializes in religion and homelessness. That’s an unusual combo.

In one tweet, he was applauding a video he helped produce that aired Dec. 28. It markets abortion to kids; a job he called “the Lord’s work.” Only in Seattle is abortion seen as a kids ministry.

So what is the journalism question here? This is another one of those cases in which we are dealing with a story worthy of mainstream coverage, which GetReligion would then critique. However, that would assume that mainstream newsrooms have produced mainstream news coverage of a topic this hot and, to my eyes, controversial.

So what kind of coverage is out there?

Sure enough, conservative media have been fuming about it all. CBN said:

A YouTube channel for kids is facing controversy after posting a video of a pro-choice activist working to convince children it's ok to have an abortion.

Amelia Bonow, the woman who started the social media hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion, appears in the video talking with children about her abortion experience and sharing her views on the issue.

The popular organization known as HiHo Kids has more than 2 million followers on YouTube. HiHo published the video online on Dec. 28 entitled "Kids Meet Someone Who's Had An Abortion." It's already been seen by more than 200,000 people.

In the eight-minute video, young children squirm as Bonow tries to indoctrinate them with her pro-abortion worldview. She compares having an abortion to a bad dentist appointment and a bodily procedure that's "kind of uncomfortable." She also tells one child that she believes abortion is "all part of God's plan."

HiHo Kids, known as a “children’s brand” produced at the Seattle offices of Cut.com (where Hawkins works), provides edgy programming that features different cuisines kids can try plus the occasional Interesting Person kids can meet. The abortion activist was one of a lineup that included a ventriloquist, a gender non-conforming person, a transgender soldier, a person who’s committed a felony, a ballerina, a hypnotist, a deaf person, a drag queen, a gynecologist, a teen mom and, well, you get the idea.

I guess the idea is that by familiarizing these kids with these various life choices or conditions, the youthful listeners will quickly learn to accept them all. Think they ever get to meet a rabbi, priest, pastor, a nun, imam or Mormon elder? I doubt it. That would not be newsworthy. Then again, the production of this video appears to be “conservative news” — period.


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