| It's the first Tuesday
of April. In Washington, D.C., the magnolia trees are
blooming, tourists crowd the sidewalk cafés, and
Congress has just returned from its spring recess. CBN
News has chosen this time to unveil its new and greatly
expanded Washington bureau in the Dupont Circle area,
where many major networks have their local headquarters;
the three-story brick fortress that houses the Washington
operations of CBS News is less than a block away.
CBN's new digs are abuzz with activity. The Republican
Senator Trent Lott came by for an interview earlier in
the day, as did Jim Towey, who directs the White House
office of faith-based initiatives. Now Lee Webb, the CBN
anchor in from Virginia, sits behind the desk in one of
the studios preparing to deliver the network's first half-hour
nightly newscast from this gleaming set. Behind him is
a floor-to-ceiling world map illuminated in violet and
indigo and a screen emblazoned with CBN's logo. At his
side, just beyond the camera's view, sits a squat pedestal
that holds a battered American Standard Bible. Webb lowers
his head and folds his hands. "Father, we are grateful
for today's program," he says. "We pray for
your blessing. We ask that what we're about to do will
bring honor to you." Then the cameras roll.
To many people - especially in blue-state America - God,
news, and politics may seem an odd cocktail. But it's
this mix that fuels much of CBN's programming.
CBN's flagship program, the 700 Club with Pat Robertson,
is familiar to many Americans. But
few outside the evangelical community know how large the
network is - it employs more than 1,000 people and has
facilities in three U.S. cities as well as Ukraine, the
Philippines, India, and Israel - or how diverse its programming.
And CBN, or Christian Broadcasting Network, is just one
star in a vast and growing Christian media universe, which
has sprung up largely under the mainstream's radar. Conservative
evangelicals control at least six national television
networks, each reaching tens of millions of homes, and
virtually all of the nation's more than 2,000 religious
radio stations. Thanks to
Christian radio's rapid growth, religious stations now
outnumber every other format except country music and
news-talk. If they want to dwell solely in this alternative
universe, believers can now choose to have only Christian
programs piped into their homes. Sky Angel, one of the
nation's three direct-broadcast satellite networks, carries
thirty-six channels of Christian radio and television
- and nothing else.
As Christian broadcasting has grown, pulpit-based ministries
have largely given way to a robust programming mix that
includes music, movies, sitcoms, reality shows, and cartoons.
But the largest constellation may be news and talk shows.
Christian public affairs programming
exploded after September 11, and again in the run-up to
the 2004 presidential election. And this growth shows
no signs of flagging.
Evangelical news looks and sounds
much like its secular counterpart, but it homes in on
issues of concern to believers and filters events through
a conservative lens. In some cases this simply means giving
greater weight to the conservative side of the ledger
than most media do. In other instances, it amounts to
disguising a partisan agenda as news.
Likewise, most guests on Christian political talk shows
are drawn from a fixed pool of culture warriors and Republican
politicians. Even those shows that focus on non-political
topics - such as finance, health, or family issues - often
weave in political messages. Many evangelical programs
and networks are, in fact, linked to conservative Christian
political or legal organizations, which use broadcasts
to help generate funding and mobilize their base supporters,
who are tuning in en masse. Ninety-six percent of evangelicals
consume some form of Christian media each month, according
to the Barna Research Group.
Given their content and their reach,
it's likely that Christian broadcasters have helped drive
phenomena that have recently confounded much of the public
and the mainstream media - including the surge in "value
voters" and the drive to sustain Terri Schiavo's
life, a story that was incubated in evangelical media
three years before it hit the mainstream. Nor has evangelical
media's influence escaped the notice of those who stroll
the halls of power. They've been courted by the likes
of Rupert Murdoch, Mel Gibson, and George W. Bush. All
the while, they've remained hidden in plain sight - a
powerful but largely unnoticed force shaping American
politics and culture.
Christians have been flocking to broadcasting ever since
the first radio programs began crackling across the airwaves
in the early 1900s. By the 1930s, evangelicals were lobbying
for policies that would ensure their dominance in the
religious broadcasting realm. Their activism was catalyzed
by the fact that early on, the big-three networks donated
rather than sold airtime to religious organizations. The
Federal Council of Churches, which represented the more
liberal mainline denominations, favored this system, which
it believed would help keep the religious message from
getting corrupted. But evangelicals worried that networks
would lavish mainline churches with free airtime while
giving their own ministries short shrift. In
1944, they formed the National Religious Broadcasters(NRB),
and that organization lobbied federal regulators. The
strategy worked; the government eventually decided to
let religious organizations purchase as much airtime as
they could afford. Evangelical preachers were soon flooding
the airwaves, while mainline broadcast ministries all
but vanished from the radio dial.
In the sixty-one years since its founding, the NRB has
grown to represent 1,600 broadcasters with billions of
dollars in media holdings and staggering political clout.
Its aggressive political maneuverings have helped shape
federal policy, further easing the evangelical networks'
rapid growth. In 2000, for instance,
the Federal Communications Commission issued guidelines
that would have barred religious broadcasters from taking
over frequencies designated for educational programming.
The NRB lobbied Congress to intervene, at one point delivering
a petition signed by nearly half a million people. Legislators,
in turn, bore down on the FCC, and the agency relented.
At least one mainstream media mogul has taken note of
religious broadcasters' political might. In 2002, Rupert
Murdoch met with NRB leaders and urged them to oppose
a proposed Echostar-DirecTV merger, which they did. After
the FCC nixed the deal, Murdoch's News Corporation bought
DirecTV and gave the NRB a channel on it.
The NRB has taken a number of steps
to ensure it remains a political player. The most dramatic
came in 2002, after Wayne Pederson was tapped to replace
the network's longtime president, Brandt Gustavson. He
quickly ignited internal controversy by telling a Minneapolis
Star Tribune reporter that he intended to shift the
organization's focus away from politics. "We get
associated with the far Christian right and marginalized,"
Pederson lamented. "To me the important thing is
to keep the focus on what's important to us spiritually."
That didn't sit well. Soon members of the executive committee
were clamoring for his ouster. Within weeks, he was forced
to step down.
Frank Wright was eventually chosen to replace Pederson.
He had spent the previous eight years serving as the executive
director of the Center for Christian Statesmanship, a
Capitol Hill ministry that conducts training for politicians
on how to "think biblically about their role in government."
Wright acknowledges that he was chosen for his deep political
connections. "I came here to re-engage the political
culture on issues relating to broadcasting," he says.
"The rest is up to individual broadcasters."
As the NRB has grown larger and more powerful, so have
the broadcasters it represents. Over
the last decade, Christian TV networks have added tens
of millions of homes to their distribution lists by leaping
onto satellite and cable systems. The number of religious
radio stations - the vast majority of which are evangelical
- has grown by about 85 percent since 1998 alone. They
now outnumber rock, classical, hip-hop, R&B, soul,
and jazz stations combined.
Despite their growing reach, Christian
networks still lag behind many secular heavyweights when
it comes to audience size. About a million U.S.
households tune in daily to each of the most popular Christian
television shows; about twenty times that number watch
CBS's top-rated program, CSI. Likewise, Christian radio
stations draw about 5 percent market share, on average,
while regular news and talk stations attract triple that
percentage. But more and more people
are tuning into Christian networks. Christian radio's
audience, in particular, has climbed 33 percent over the
last five years, thanks in large part to the emergence
of contemporary Christian music. No other English-language
format can boast that kind of growth.
The goal of a more diverse program lineup is to attract
larger audiences. CBN's founder, Pat Robertson, who started
this trend in the late 1970s by converting the 700 Club
into a 60 Minutes-style magazine, says he originally considered
making it a music showcase. But he decided news and talk
would bring more viewers. "News provides the crossover
between religious and secular, and it bridges the age
gap," he explains. Robertson continues to see news
and current affairs as a means to an end. "If you
buy a diamond from Tiffany's the setting is very important,"
he says. "To us, the jewel is the message of Jesus
Christ. We see news as a setting for what's most important."
After remaking the 700 Club, Robertson went on to launch
the first Christian radio news network, called Standard
News, in the early 1990s. It was later purchased by Salem
Radio. Over the next several years, American Family Radio,
USA Radio, and Information Radio Network unveiled news
operations. All of them, except
American Family Radio, syndicate their news programming.
And they've been picking up affiliates at a lightning
pace, even as regular news has been dropping off the radio
dial. Salem Communications, which started with around
200 stations, now airs on 1,100 - seven times as many
as broadcast National Public Radio programs. USA Radio,
which in the beginning had just a handful of news affiliates,
now has more than 800. Its news also can be heard on two
XM Satellite Radio stations and Armed Forces Radio. USA
Radio's rapid growth is due, in part, to the fact that
many mainstream stations are picking up its programming.
Christian radio news networks experienced
their largest growth spurt in the months after September
11. That was also when CBN launched NewsWatch, the first
nightly Christian television news program. The
show is on three of the six national evangelical television
networks, as well as regional Christian networks and the
ABC Family Channel. FamilyNet TV, part of the Southern
Baptist Convention's media empire, followed suit in 2004
by hiring a news staff. And at the 2005 NRB convention,
Christian television networks from around the world joined
forces to form a news co-op. They intend to pool footage
and other resources as a means of improving coverage and
helping more Christian stations get into the news business.
Many Christian broadcasters attribute the success of
their news operations to the biblical perspective that
underpins their reporting in a world made wobbly by terrorist
threats and moral relativism. "We don't just tell
them what the news is," explains Wright of the NRB.
"We tell them what it means. And that's appealing
to people, especially in moments of cultural instability."
It's Good Friday. The NewsWatch anchor Lee Webb is sitting
behind his desk in CBN's Virginia Beach headquarters,
describing the events of the day to people across America.
Webb - a wiry man with dark eyes and a white kerchief
peaking out of his breast pocket - spent much of his career
in local television. He delivers the news with an air
of cultivated neutrality.
Today he begins with a story on Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged
Florida woman whose story not only riveted America, but
was seized by Congress and the White House. Her feeding
tube had been pulled a week earlier and, Webb tells his
viewers, she's succumbed to the ravages of dehydration.
He says she has "flaky skin," a parched mouth,
and "sunken eyes," and now resembles "prisoners
in concentration camps," according to her brother.
Whether or not her lips and skin have actually dried out
will become a matter of debate in the mainstream media,
with Schiavo's parents contending that they have, and
her husband's lawyer insisting that they haven't, and
that she is not suffering. But this debate will never
enter CBN's coverage.
Next, NewsWatch cuts to an interview with Joni Eareckson
Tada, a wheelchair-bound woman whom Webb bills as a "disability
rights advocate." She warns that the Schiavo case
will "affect thousands of disabled people whose legal
guardians may not have their best wishes at heart."
Tada, in fact, runs an evangelical ministry and hosts
a popular Christian radio show. Webb closes the segment
on a revealing, if lopsided, note, announcing that "the
pro-life community says the Terri Schiavo case is proof
positive that the country has a problem when it comes
to activist judges."
The CBN report echoes hundreds of others that have run
on Christian radio and television networks. While
Terri Schiavo's name appeared in the mainstream national
media only sporadically before this year, her case has
been a top story on Christian news and talk programs for
much of the last three years, as it combines two issues
that are of critical importance to religious conservatives
- the power of the courts and the "sanctity of life."
Much of the coverage on Christian networks has distorted
Schiavo's condition by indicating she retained the ability
to think, feel, and function. Some newscasts reported
as fact her parents' contested claim that she tried to
utter the words "I want to live" before her
feeding tube was pulled for the last time. Others, like
Janet Folger, host of the radio and TV call-in show Faith2Action,
described Schiavo as actually sitting up and talking.
Evangelical pundits also demonized Schiavo's husband,
Michael, and the Florida judge George Greer, who presided
over the case, referring to them as murderers and invoking
holocaust rhetoric. Indeed, Christian broadcasters seemed
to set the tone for the emotional language that would
burst into the mainstream media and the halls of Congress
during Schiavo's final days.
Schiavo's parents welcomed the Christian broadcasters'
attention. Months before they became the stuff of nightly
news they were blazing a trail through the Christian talk
show circuit. They also attended the NRB's 2005 conference,
held in mid-February, to help build momentum for a grass-roots
campaign to keep their daughter alive. By then they had
already seen proof of the Christian broadcasters' power.
D. James Kennedy - who, in addition to hosting several
talk shows, heads a lobbying organization called the Center
for Reclaiming America - boasted at one point that he
was collecting 5,000 signatures an hour for a "Petition
to Save Terri Schiavo." Other leaders, including
James Dobson, perhaps the most influential evangelical
host, shut down phone lines within Governor Jeb Bush's
office by urging their millions of constituents to call.
After the Schiavo story, NewsWatch carries one about
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to China.
Rice is shown climbing off the plane in Beijing, posing
for grip-and-grin shots with President Hu Jintao, and
responding to a reporter's question about China's record
on religious freedoms. Then the report veers into the
plight of China's house churches. The narrator details
how those "who worship in places other than state
churches continue to suffer severe persecution."
Images on the screen show people singing hymns in a dusty
courtyard, then a man preaching to a crowd of people who
sit huddled on a living room floor. The front door is
flung open, and the light pouring in lends the scene an
otherworldly glow.
Evangelical networks focus a great
deal of attention on stories involving persecution of
the faithful. They have, for instance, kept a close
eye on the conflicts that have rocked Sudan, including
its Darfur region. Government-backed militias there have
been marauding villages, driving millions of black Africans,
many of them Christians, from their homes. More than 200,000
people have died as a result. Mainstream coverage has
been sparse, given the conflict's human toll.
Christian broadcasters also tend to home in on stateside
skirmishes involving Christians that are off the mainstream
media's radar. This includes the case of eleven evangelicals
who were arrested in 2004 while picketing Outfest, an
annual gay pride event that sprawls across eight Philadelphia
city blocks. The protesters, led by Michael Marcavage,
a confrontational evangelical crusader and founder of
"Repent America," were told by the police to
leave. When they refused, they were arrested. Four of
the eleven were charged with, among other things, fomenting
a riot, criminal conspiracy, and "ethnic intimidation"
- as Philadelphia calls hate crimes.
The story got virtually no mainstream national coverage.
But Christian news networks picked up on it promptly,
and a number of evangelical talk show hosts discussed
it at length. Much of the conversation
revolved around the potential pitfalls of hate-crime laws,
which stiffen penalties for offenses that are motivated
by race or sexual orientation. Evangelical pundits argued
that such laws threaten to "criminalize" Christianity,
especially when they're extended to speech.
After the segment on Chinese house churches comes a special
Good Friday package. This includes a tour of Jerusalem
and an interview with Mel Gibson, who released a less-bloody
version of The Passion of The Christ several
weeks earlier. Webb tells viewers, "In light of its
re-release CBN News visited many of the places where The
Passion actually took place." He then introduces
the reporter Chris Mitchell, who works out of CBN's only
international bureau, in Jerusalem. Mitchell - perched
on the Mount of Olives surrounded by sweeping views of
the city - invites viewers to tour the sites of "the
biblical drama that changed the world." Soon he's
strolling through the Garden of Gethsemane, the dense
olive groves where Christ is said to have prayed on the
night of his arrest, and touring the Sisters of Zion Convent,
which houses the paving stones where some believe Jesus
stood before Pontius Pilate. He continues on to the Via
Dolorosa, down which Jesus carried the cross. The narrow
street, which wends its way through the old Jerusalem,
is now thronged with tourists. Mitchell interviews some
of them about the "profound experience" of visiting
Jerusalem after seeing The Passion. "When
you see the movie, you internalize it," says one
woman, who weeps as she speaks. "Then you come here
and see the street where he walked, the place that he
was, and you're just thankful. You're just so thankful
for his grace and his mercy, his forgiveness and for the
price that he paid."
Such intimate expressions of faith are scarce in mainstream
media, even though faith underlies many global conflicts
and guides the choices made by millions of Americans.
Religion coverage tends either to focus on institutions
or to reduce religious practice to a curious spectacle.
This, Christian network executives say, is part of the
reason they felt compelled to enter the news and public
affairs arena. They also feel that their viewers needed
a "family friendly" alternative to regular news,
which sometimes leans on lurid descriptions of sex and
violence. The Michael Jackson trial and other sordid stories
get a bare-bones treatment on Christian networks.
Christian news networks devote an enormous
amount of airtime to Israel, and their interest has theological
underpinnings. In addition to being the place where many
biblical events unfolded, Israel plays a pivotal role
in biblical prophecy. Most evangelicals emphasize that
God granted Israel to the Jews through a covenant with
Abraham. They believe that the Jews' return to Israel
was biblically foreordained, and that Jewish control over
Israel will trigger a cascade of apocalyptic events that
will culminate in Christ's second coming. Israel's strength
is vital to their own redemption.
Such beliefs explain the unwavering
support for Israel expressed by some evangelical talk
show hosts. Among them is Kay Arthur, whose radio
and TV program, Precepts For Life, offers audiences biblical
solutions to everyday dilemmas such as divorce and addictions.
She took to the stage at the Israeli Ministry of Tourism
Breakfast, held in conjunction with the 2005 NRB conference,
and told the hundreds of broadcasters in the audience,
"If it came to a choice between
Israel and America, I would stand with Israel." Janet
Parshall, host of a popular political program that also
runs both on radio and TV, implored the Israelis in attendance,
"Please, please, do not give up any more land."
Lest anyone think her alone in her zeal, she urged all
those who believed "in the sovereignty of Israel"
to stand. Virtually everyone in the room got up.
Some influential evangelical hosts - among them Arthur,
Parshall, and Pat Robertson - sometimes broadcast live
from Israel and urge listeners and viewers to visit the
country. Their pleas have helped persuade thousands of
American Christians to brave the bloody Intifada for a
chance to savor the sights and smells of Christ's homeland,
while supporting Israel's battered economy.
The Israeli government has responded
with gratitude. Senior officials meet regularly
with evangelical broadcasters. Former Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu sent Pat Robertson a taped message for his seventy-fifth
birthday, thanking him for his stalwart support. In addition
to staging lavish events in the broadcasters' honor, the
country's tourism ministry rents one of the largest booths
at each year's NRB conference. This year's event also
featured a number of other Israel-focused exhibits, including
the burned-out hull of a Jerusalem city bus that was struck
by a suicide bomber in January 2004. Part of the roof
had been ripped off and all that was left of the rear
seats was a jumble of twisted steel and charred upholstery.
Near the bumper hung a poster with images of bomb-laden
Palestinian boys. It read: "When Palestinians love
their children more than they hate Israel, then there
will be peace in Palestine."
The turmoil gripping the Middle East has proven to be
a particularly appealing topic for shows like the International
Intelligence Briefing and Prophecy in the News, which
interpret world events - be it the rise of the European
Union or the Asian tsunami - in light of biblical prophecy.
This approach tends to cast events that flow from controversial
human choices as the natural and inevitable march of destiny.
Prophecy-focused shows suggest that the war in Iraq was
foretold in the Bible, for instance.
Some political talk shows go even further out on the
apocalyptic edge. Among them is the 700 Club, which airs
on numerous mainstream stations and reaches about a million
U.S. viewers each day. Its February 25 edition featured
an interview with a man named Glenn Miller, touted on
the 700 Club Web site as a "proven prophet."
A scholarly looking man, Miller
sat nestled in an armchair, a faux-urban skyline glittering
in the background, and explained why God had sent America
to war with Iraq. "It has nothing to do with terrorism,"
he told Pat Robertson's son, Gordon. "It has nothing
to do with oil. It has everything to do with that there's
1.2 million Muslims that have been deceived by the false
God Allah, and that the God of heaven, Jehovah, is now
in the process of doing war if you will against that spirit
to . . . break the power of deception so those people
can be exposed to the gospel." As Miller spoke, Robertson
nodded in sympathy. At one point, Robertson chimed in
with the tale of a CBN reporter who was embedded with
one of the first infantry divisions to march into Baghdad:
"He said there was a sense among the troops - and
he had this personal sense as well - that this was a spiritual
victory, that this was a movement in the heavenlies."
Some evangelical talk show hosts see more conflict on
the horizon in the Middle East. For instance, J.R. Church
of Prophecy in the News recently predicted that the United
States would attack Syria, probably with a nuclear bomb.
As proof the host pointed to a passage from Isaiah, which
warned that Damascus would be reduced to a "ruinous
heap."
Once NewsWatch's Jerusalem tour is over, Mel Gibson appears.
He's sitting on a dimly lit sound stage opposite the reporter
Scott Ross. The walls are covered with posters for The
Passion, and throughout the interview images from
the film flash across the screen. Gibson talks about the
making of the movie, which he calls "the culmination
of a fifteen-year journey of faith," and about how
America "is a huge nation based on Christian principles
from the Constitution."
Gibson began appearing regularly on Christian news and
talk shows in the months leading up to the The Passion's
original release - part of a well-coordinated marketing
campaign that leaned heavily on Christian radio and TV.
Christian networks ran hundreds of promotional spots and
behind-the-scenes specials on the film. It was a fruitful
partnership for Gibson, who has watched The Passion
become the highest-grossing R-rated film in U.S. box office
history. As he told those at the 2005 NRB conference,
"It was largely because of the people in this broad
organization that the film was able to get out there and
be seen."
Gibson's words notwithstanding, it's difficult to know
just how much of The Passion's success can actually
be attributed to Christian broadcasters, since it was
also promoted through other channels. But the story of
The Omega Code, a 1999 apocalyptic thriller,
provides a clearer illustration of the broadcasters' power.
The film's release wasn't accompanied by the standard
flurry of marketing. No advance press screening, no reviews,
and minimal advertising. But the family of one of its
producers, Matthew Crouch, owns Trinity Broadcasting Network
(TBN), the largest of the Christian TV networks, which
promoted the film tirelessly. The result: The Omega
Code was the tenth highest-grossing film on its opening
weekend, with a per-screen average of nearly $8,000 -
higher than that of any other movie that weekend.
The film's success stunned the mainstream media, Hollywood
insiders, and even TBN executives. "We had no idea
we had that power in America," says Robert Higley,
the network's vice president for sales and affiliate relations.
In the years since The Omega Code's release,
Christian broadcasters have brought their power to bear
in the political arena as never before. This
began a few months after the 2000 presidential election,
when President Bush invited the NRB's executive committee
to join him and Attorney General John Ashcroft for a meeting
in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. After the gathering
the NRB's board chairman wrote an exuberant message to
members, saying there was a "new wind blowing in
Washington, D.C., and across the nation . . . . The President
has surrounded himself with a wonderful staff of people
of faith. And it's obvious that people of faith are being
welcomed back to the public square." The message
also urged members to seize the opportunity to "make
a difference in our culture" - which in the parlance
of religious conservatives generally means effecting political
change.
In the months that followed the Roosevelt Room gathering,
the NRB executive committee continued to meet periodically
with senior White House staff members. On occasion, Bush
himself attended. And monthly NRB-White House conference
calls were established to give rank-and-file NRB members
a direct line to the Oval Office.
George W. Bush also attended NRB's 2003 convention and
gave a speech, much of it dedicated to promoting the looming
war in Iraq. At the event, the NRB passed a resolution
to "honor" the president. Though the NRB is
a tax-exempt organization, and thus banned from backing
a particular candidate, the document resembled an endorsement.
The final line read, "We recognize
in all of the above that God has appointed President George
W. Bush to leadership at this critical period in our nation's
history, and give Him thanks."
Many evangelical networks and program producers are also
tax-exempt nonprofits. But while most were careful not
to endorse candidates by name, they openly pushed the
Republican ticket in the run-up to the 2004 election.
During his last pre-election broadcast, the International
Intelligence Briefing host Hal Lindsey told audiences
that liberals were determined to "bring about our
literal annihilation," and that "a vote for
the conservative cause . . . is a vote to . . . reverse
America's decline and restore her to the path of morality,
conscience, and strength of character. It's a vote to
continue America's return to her rightful place as the
strongest beacon of hope in a terrified world." Other
broadcasters went further, launching and promoting massive
voter-registration drives with the apparent goal of helping
Republicans clinch a victory. The host James Dobson held
pro-Bush rallies that packed stadiums and told his 7 million
U.S. listeners that it was a sin not to vote.
During the pre-election frenzy FamilyNet, the television
arm of the Southern Baptist Convention's media empire,
added a political talk show to its formerly entertainment-heavy
lineup. It was also during this period that it established
its news department. The network, which reaches 30 million
homes, reported live from both parties' conventions, and
ran evening coverage on election day - all of it salted
with pro-Bush commentary. Several
other Christian networks also ran continuous, live election
coverage for the first time. Much of it carried a clear
bias. USA Radio Network, for example, ran pieces produced
to sound like news stories, but with a single conservative
perspective. One segment, based solely on an interview
with the former CIA analyst Wayne Simmons, reported that
Osama bin Laden spent years laying plans to destroy America,
only to have them thwarted by a tough-talking Texan. "He
never planned on running into a president with the strength,
character, and conviction of George W. Bush," Simmons
said. "If George W. Bush wins the presidency, his
fate - meaning Osama bin Laden's fate - is sealed. If
John Kerry wins, he'll go back to business as usual because
he knows he'll have another administration in there where
he did nothing and let them plan attacks on us."
The role that evangelicals are credited with playing
in the recent election seems only to have improved broadcasters'
access to power. During the opening session of the 2005
NRB convention, Wright described a recent lobbying excursion
to Capitol Hill. "We got into
rooms we've never been in before," he said. "We
got down on the floor of the Senate and prayed over Hillary
Clinton's desk." He also explained that the
NRB was lobbying to get its handpicked candidate appointed
to the FCC - although he refused to identify the person
by name. At the convention, the NRB also unveiled its
new "President's Council," a committee dedicated
to strengthening "relationships with men and women
in positions of influence and power," according to
the glossy brochure. The council's next event, scheduled
for September, is to include a private, after-hours tour
of the U.S. Capitol, a special White House policy briefing,
and a hobnobbing session with lawmakers.
Meanwhile, the broadcasters have turned their attention
to what has become the front line of the culture wars:
the courts. Conservative Christian pundits have long proclaimed
that our nation is in moral tatters, and blamed a series
of court decisions - among them Roe v. Wade and the 1962
ban on school prayer - for unraveling our mores. But the
raging battle over President Bush's judicial nominees
and the prospect of a Supreme Court vacancy have pushed
the issue of the "out of control" judiciary
to the top of their agenda.
In recent months, evangelical
broadcasters have dedicated program after program to bemoaning
"judicial tyranny," and urging audiences to
agitate for the "nuclear option" - changing
Senate rules so Democrats can no longer filibuster and
thereby block nominees they oppose. The judiciary
was also front and center during opening week at the network's
new Washington bureau. A parade of senators - all of them
Republican - made their way into the studio, to go on
camera advocating the nuclear option. During his interview,
broadcast as part of NewsWatch's inaugural Washington,
D.C., program, Trent Lott stood with studio lights glinting
off the American flag pin on his lapel, and held up a
scrap of paper with a list of senators' names and how
they intended to vote on the initiative. The tally seemed
to be stacking up in his favor. Pat Robertson, who interviewed
Lott, asked no tough questions and offered not even a
passing nod to opposing viewpoints. Instead, Robertson
scored Democrats for trying to "eliminate religious
values from America" by blocking the appointment
of conservative judges. All the while, the dizzying blend
of God, news, and politics that he has crafted and honed
was bouncing off satellites, winding through thousands
of cable systems, rippling over the airwaves, and glowing
on television screens across America. |
