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When the news broke earlier this week that several senior members of the Cabinet were holding weekly prayer meetings, few noticed the exclusive source behind the scoop: Jennifer Wishon of Faith Nation, a new Facebook Live news magazine — and arguable mouthpiece for Trump propaganda — from the Christian Broadcasting Network, or CBN.
While Faith Nation may be new, CBN is anything but. With a long and controversial history particularly when it comes to its founder, Pat Robertson, CBN has been at the forefront of the culture wars since the network’s inception in the early 1960s.
The network that would ultimately become CBN was founded in 1960 by 30-year-old Marion Gordon Robertson (he chose to go by “Pat,” disliking the feminine connotations of his birth name), son of former US Sen. Absalom Willis Robertson.
Pat Robertson, then a recent born-again Christian, began broadcasting religious programming in late 1961. He funded his project through small-scale individual and local church donations in the Portsmouth, Virginia, area where the station was based.
The funding appeals were initially unsuccessful, and Robertson held a telethon, setting a goal of convincing 700 viewers to each donate $10 a month: enough to keep the station going. The appeal worked — and the name for Robertson’s faithful, “the 700 Club,” became the name of the network’s flagship show: a Christian religious variety show that blended preaching, interviews, and religious music, including hymns and gospel.
The 700 Club became increasingly political in the late 1970s, and news segments were added to the purely devotional program. Meanwhile, CBN brought in enormous revenue with wider family programming, including CBN Cable. Rebranded as the Family Channel in 1998, the channel was later sold in a package with Robertson’s other media properties for $1.9 billion to News Corporation and renamed Fox Family, then was bought by Disney and renamed ABC Family in 2001; the channel is now known as Freeform.
Yet as part of Robertson’s savvy original conditions of sale, which required the channel’s new owners keep the show in syndication, The 700 Club remains an integral part of the programming, even though the branding now tends more toward Pretty Little Liars than Protestant evangelicalism.
This means that today, The 700 Club, and Robertson, remain wildly popular. CBN estimates that a million people a day watch The 700 Club either in syndication or in its current format on CBN.com.
But CBN itself is entering the Trump administration in a new format. Unlike the staid, older-leaning 700 Club, its latest political show, Faith Nation, is more obviously geared to younger, social-media-savvy viewers. It airs on Facebook Live, one of its on-camera anchors is a self-described social media expert, and the show frequently exhorts viewers to like or tweet their support. It represents a new era for CBN: one in which the network actively seeks to mirror and respond to the secular world’s influencer-led, highly curated internet landscape.
CBN is helmed by Robertson, a household name for his controversial views and a bold sense of conservative activism
Throughout his tenure with CBN, Pat Robertson, now 87, has proven a controversial figure, one whose rhetoric helped kindle the culture wars of the ’80s that have carried into the 21st century. Alongside other prominent televangelists and conservative media personalities like Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly, Robertson has been integral in both using the media to galvanize a Christian evangelical voter base and advocating for a more direct role for his understanding of Christian values in (conservative, Republican) politics.
Among them, however, Robertson has remained particularly inflammatory.
His most infamous statements include a claim that gay people wear sharp-edged rings to deliberately cut strangers to infect them with AIDS, a prediction that God would send hurricanes to punish Disneyland Orlando for hosting special days for LGBTQ families, and that a series of 2012 tornadoes that raged through the Midwest was the result of Americans’ failure to pray enough. Still, Robertson’s popularity was sufficient to propel him into politics; in 1988, he launched a failed bid to win the Republican nomination for president, ultimately losing to George H.W. Bush.
Robertson has since channeled his political aims into advocacy for conservative policy influenced by his reading of Christian doctrine. In 1988, after losing the Republican primary, Robertson used the remainder of his campaign funds to establish the Christian Coalition, a voter mobilization effort for conservative Christians based on the mailing lists of Robertson’s original campaign. That coalition devolved into a number of state chapters, the Texas branch of which gained tax-exempt status as a social welfare charity.
After the initial coalition lost its tax-exempt status as a result of its political campaigning, the Christian Coalition of Texas rebranded as the Christian Coalition of America, which still functions as a grassroots advocacy group for what they call “pro-family” policies, which include anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ platforms. Robertson is also the founder of the ACLJ (American Center for Law and Justice), which advocates in court on issues it sees as threats to religious liberty.
Robertson and his organizations have increasingly become associated with Trump and his administration. One of Trump’s personal lawyers advising on the Russia scandal, Jay Sekulow, is the chief counsel of the ACLJ. Robertson himself has interviewed Trump sympathetically several times since his inauguration, and was Trump’s choice for an exclusive sit-down interview shortly after the Russia scandal intensified.
Robertson’s perspective has specific political implications
Theologically speaking, Robertson is associated with a particularly American evangelical reading of the Bible known as premillennial dispensationalism. This means he subscribes to the idea that human history is divided into particular “eras” according to God’s plan, culminating in a second coming of Christ and a thousand-year reign of peace. This is particularly important insofar as it means that, to a far greater extent than Christians of other persuasions, Robertson and his followers are likely to see the particular shape of geopolitics as a manifestation of God’s divine plan (and, as I have argued previously, to see potential political chaos as an ultimate “good” because it helps to bring about the end of days).
Understanding Robertson’s theology helps contextualize some of his more extreme-seeming statements. The idea that gays cause hurricanes may make more sense to people who see world history and divine action as a constant, active dialogue.
But it also spells an uncomfortable conflation of faith with facts. It’s difficult, when it comes to hybrid news-religion shows like The 700 Club and Faith Nation, particularly in today’s unstable political climate, to separate analysis from theology. The 700 Club’s longstanding pro-Israel stance, or even Faith Nation anchor Richard Brody’s reminder to viewers that “those who stand with Israel are blessed,” aren’t opinions that are based on political analysis from either a conservative or liberal perspective. Rather, they’re based entirely on theological analysis, even as the news format (present in The 700 Club but an even bigger part of Faith Nation) suggests to viewers that what they’re getting is actual reporting, however slanted.
Instead, CBN operates within its own cross-genre paradigm of “faith news,” offering viewers not predictions or analysis, but prophecy. And because it uses the lens of faith to cast doubt on the mainstream media more generally — implicitly playing into the idea that all news is, to an extent, “fake news” — it makes it all the easier for CBN to abandon traditional standards of journalism, or to justify conflating reporting with theological opinion.
