University of Virginia Library

THE TALKIES

The success of Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" has inspired several religious versions of the talk show. Jim Bakker, in his autobiography Move That Mountain! , recalls getting the idea for the format after coming home late at night from a revival meeting. When he went to work for Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network in 1965, he began developing plans for such a program. "The 700 Club" premiered on local television in Virginia Beach in November 1966, and Jim Bakker was its original host. Since then the talk show has taken a permanent place as a major vehicle of religious broadcasting. A quick look at three of the "talkies" follows.

Jim Bakker

"It's not listed in the Bible," said Jim Bakker in a 1979 article in Christianity Today, "but my spiritual gift, my specific calling from God, is to be a television talk-show host. That's what I'm here on earth to do. I love TV. I eat it, I sleep it." Bakker (pronounced "baker") is host of "The PTL Club," a daily talk and variety show distributed by satellite to stations and cable systems all over the country. PTL means both "Praise the Lord" and "People That Love. " The show emanates from a building at the PTL Network's multiacre Charlotte, North Carolina, complex.

On the outside the building looks like a huge colonial church. Inside is a modern multimillion-dollar TV studio.

The live audience is composed of tourists and guests at PTL's campground. Before the show they are warmed up by a speaker who leads them in rousing songs and coaches them on when to applaud during the two-hour show. During the warm-up volunteers are recruited to staff the banks of telephones on the set.

Jim Bakker is introduced in Johnny Carson fashion. He even has a sidekick like Johnny's. Jim's Ed McMahon is Henry Harrison, a robust man several years Bakker's senior, who is usually addressed as Uncle Henry, a sobriquet he acquired when he assisted Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker with a puppet show during Bakker's CBN days. A parade of guests and singing stars moves through the taping session. Jim interviews them about miracle healings, faith success stories, and their own religious lives or ministries. The proceedings are punctuated with lots of exclamations of "Glory!" and "Praise God!" On occasion Jim Bakker preaches a sermonette—especially if PTL is experiencing one of its regular financial crises—and breaks into tears if matters are grave.

Tammy Fay Bakker is also a regular on the show, talking with Jim and singing. Her singing career is getting a big push these days; her records are being distributed to radio stations all over the country in the hope that she will catch on in the burgeoning gospel music market.

Jim Bakker's predilection for speaking in tongues and faith healing is soft-pedaled on camera, although Uncle Henry has been known to break into unknown tongues a couple of times on the air.

Bakker preaches, and presents through the guests he selects, a gospel of shiny-eyed success in the spirit. His health-and-wealth theology holds that God wants to bless believers materially as well as spiritually. He is convinced that Christ can make life work and that his gospel will bring people to higher standards of living. He thought it significant, when he traveled through India and Africa, that the Christians' homes were bigger and more comfortable than the non-Christians'. He preaches a Christianity that is not just a religious experience, but a life-style of success. This life-style is reflected in the extensive PTL Heritage USA, a

1,200-acre campground and vacation complex. PTL also began a full-fledged Heritage University but has had to limit its courses of study to evangelism and communications.

"The PTL Club" has a history of financial mismanagement and crisis, which is perhaps now being brought under control by business managers who have taken the financial reins out of Bakker's hands. The show's finances have received so much publicity that a Charlotte radio station broadcast a parody called "The Pass the Loot Club."

Some of this must at times seem strange and distant to Jim Bakker, the son of a Michigan factory worker. Jim was a poor, extremely shy child. He was small in stature but had a large inferiority complex. As a young adult he once had the misfortune to run over a child. The child recovered completely, but the fright of the accident caused Jim to take seriously his parents' Assemblies of God religion. He entered North Central Bible College to prepare for the ministry but dropped out to marry Tammy Fay. He was ordained anyway, and he and Tammy Fay lived the life of traveling evangelists for several years. Their puppet show for children eventually got them on Pat Robertson's struggling young TV station, where Bakker starred for several years. After leaving CBN, the Bakkers went to California and worked with Paul Crouch at the fledgling Trinity Broadcasting Network station. Bakker claims that relations with Pat Robertson were always good but frankly admits that he and Paul Crouch fell out. It wasn't long before Bakker accepted the invitation of North Carolina laymen to come to Charlotte to be president of PTL. Thus, Bakker became the only person to be involved in the beginnings of all three of America's religious broadcasting networks—not bad for the scared little kid from Muskegon Heights, Michigan.

Indigenous versions of "The PTL Club," using local hosts who engage guests from the countries in which the show appears, are being produced for Japan, Thailand, Australia, France, Italy, Brazil, Haiti, and Mexico, and for distribution in Central and South America and Africa.

Pat Robertson

Marion G. "Pat" Robertson is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of

Washington and Lee University, was a Marine captain in Korea, graduated from Yale Law School, and was formerly a businessman. He is also an evangelical preacher of the first rank, a faith healer, a speaker in tongues, and a hearer of direct revelations which he calls "Words of Knowledge" from God.

Robertson is the host of "The 700 Club," a ninety-minute daily religious talk show. More than that, however, he is the president and chief executive officer of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which owns four television stations and five radio stations, has a staff of 800, and aims to become, through satellite distribution, this country's fourth commercial television network. CBN already programs a channel twenty-four hours a day with old family sitcom reruns and a variety of religious programs from many sources. The channel is distributed by satellite to any cable TV system in the country that will accept it. But CBN means to stake out a 10-percent share of the total U.S. TV audience with a full schedule of news, drama, sports, game shows, soap operas, variety shows, and commercials. The difference between CBN and the other three networks is that CBN plans to do all this from an explicitly Christian perspective. CBN people have even been developing a Christian soap opera, "The Inner Light"—their answer to "The Guiding Light" and "As the World Turns."

By his own admission, Robertson was a tortured man after finishing Yale Law School. He failed to pass the New York bar exam, claiming his heart wasn't in it. He was engaged in an electronics components business when he felt called to go into the ministry. He chose Biblical Theological Seminary in New York, where he was part of a tongues-speaking fellowship. After graduation in 1959, he was still unsettled and uncertain about his life. For several months he and his wife and children existed in a charismatic commune in a Brooklyn slum. Later that year, Robertson heard about a defunct UHF television station for sale in Virginia Beach. Incredibly, he arranged to buy it for a fraction of its value. Even that was a venture of faith, however, for Pat had no money at all. Somehow he managed to survive for several months by preaching in Virginia churches, and he finally corralled enough donations to put the station back on the air on October 1, 1961. The first broadcast day lasted two and a half hours.

On a 1963 fund-raising telethon, Pat asked for 700 people to pledge $10 a month to meet the monthly operating budget of WYAH. That was the birth of the 700 Club. (Dues today have risen to $15 per month.) Sometime later, CBN employee Jim Bakker started a talk show that was named "The 700 Club." The rest is history. CBN today occupies a $50-million headquarters complex and has an annual budget of about $55 million. All this growth has been accomplished through the generosity of viewers who give according to Pat's "Kingdom Principles," which Pat frequently explains. Basically, the more you give to God, the more God will give back to you. The best and quickest way to get the process started is to send a gift to "The 700 Club."

Robertson is a gentle-voiced, smiling fellow. He teaches more than he preaches, and he prays often on the program. His guests tend to be evangelicals who have stories to tell of miracles in their lives or of ministries they are carrying out with decisive effects on the lives of others. Many are Christian authors touting their books on the salvation circuit, or singers with religious records to hype.

Pat's co-host of "The 700 Club" is Ben Kinchlow, whose role is much like that of the sidekick of secular talk shows—cheer leading and picking up the ball if he senses the host is about to have a lapse. He also sets Robertson up with questions when he thinks that his boss has not yet finished expounding on some particular topic. When Robertson is absent, Kinchlow, a tall, handsome man whose deep black hair is turning gray, hosts the program himself. Kinchlow could one day become the first black to host a syndicated talk show. That this may be in the offing is suggested by the fact that in 1978 CBN asked a sample of regular "700 Club" contributors what they thought about the idea. Robertson's popularity and the still shaky financial foundation of the ever expanding CBN enterprises are not likely to make this a reality soon, however.

Pat Robertson is easily the best educated of the video vicars. So incredible is his command of facts in so many areas that a skeptical viewer would find it difficult to believe that Robertson doesn't work from cue cards after extensive briefings. He is briefed about his guests, but he does his own homework. His spontaneous lecturettes on all sorts of subjects amaze both his

guests and his staff, who have worked closely with him for years. Robertson's political and economic views are conservative, and more frequently than not his guests share his conservative philosophy. By late 1979 Robertson was talking and writing in his newsletter, Perspective, like a man who was about to make a move into politics. But he came back from his yearly retreat and told his closest associates that God wanted him to back away from politics.

That wasn't an easy task. He was already committed to being program chairman of Washington for Jesus, a two-day rally for prayer and repentance, which aimed at attracting a million participants. As the rally approached, he worked hard to disavow any political agenda for the gathering. The organization did reject some of the more overt political activities that had earlier been a part of the schedule. Still, everyone knows that no one brings a crowd to Washington, save the chaperones of the droves of high school students who descend on the nation's capital each spring, without a political purpose.

Robertson was clearly uncomfortable with the overtly political agenda of the National Affairs Briefing in Dallas in August 1980. Shortly thereafter he quietly resigned from the Round able, the organization that had sponsored the gathering, and canceled an appearance at a meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters when of the three presidential candidates only Ronald Reagan agreed to appear.

His efforts to withdraw from politics notwithstanding, Robertson cares deeply about the direction in which this nation is moving economically, socially, and politically. He tells his audiences that the best thing they can do about the nation's problems is to pray. Indeed, he proclaims that prayer is the only thing that can be done, but almost in the same breath he encourages his listeners to write their congressmen. It is by no means certain that God will not one day tap Pat Robertson, the son of a once powerful United States senator, on the shoulder for a more overtly political assignment.

Paul Crouch

Jim Bakker started the "Praise the Lord" show for Paul Crouch's Trinity Broadcasting Network after Jim left Pat Robertson. When

Jim and Paul agreed to disagree, Jim took at least the initials PTL to North Carolina.

But Paul and Jan Crouch have made their show peculiarly California. No three-piece suits here; more sport shirts and bright California breeziness. The breezes do blow in a bit of religious ecstasy now and then, but mostly Paul and Jan do a lot of stand-up chatting (and kneel-down praying), with the usual run of guests and musical numbers.

The Trinity Broadcasting Network is trying hard to expand and take its place alongside CBN and PTL. In addition to the base station in Los Angeles, TBN owns stations in Phoenix, Oklahoma City, and Miami.

It all makes Jan shriek and cry for joy. When she announced that Paul had gone to Miami to close the purchase of Channel 45, she called Miami's large Jewish population "Little Israel" and exulted, "God has given us twenty-four-hour-a-day Christian television to reach the little Jewish people!"