religious broadcasting

RIP Charles Stanley, a Southern Baptist media pro (and a megachurch preacher, too)

RIP Charles Stanley, a Southern Baptist media pro (and a megachurch preacher, too)

There’s an old saying in the Sunbelt that goes like this: When Jesus makes his glorious return on the last day, He will still have to fly through Atlanta.

I will visit that giant airport myself, today, on my way home from speaking at a Poynter Institute conference — “Telling the Stories of Faith and the Faithful” here in Los Angeles. One day featured meetings with West Coast reporters, including many that don’t work the religion beat, and the second day focused on talks with a circle of faith-group leaders. There were great questions and lots of dialogue.

Thinking about the Atlanta airport reminded me of what I think was as highly symbolic encounter with the Rev. Charles Stanley, a pivotal Southern Baptist leader and preacher who died this week. See this Associated Press report: “Charles Stanley, influential Baptist preacher, dies at 90.

The leader of First Baptist Church of Atlanta was elected SBC president in 1985 during what was, in my experience, one of the most intense, even angry, national conventions ever (and that’s saying something) during the near life-and-death Southern Baptist civil war of that era.

To get to that meeting in Kansas City, working for The Charlotte Observer, I had to (#DUH) change planes in Atlanta. I ended up on the same plane with Stanley, who was rumored to be a candidate for SBC president. He was in First Class, obviously, and I was not, obviously. After we had been airborne for an hour or so, I walked up front to give Stanley my card and to request an interview before the election.

Seeing that he was reading a document, I confess that I looked it over before I alerted him to my presence at his right shoulder.

Trust me — I wish I had a photographic memory. Why? Because he was reading a professional set of public-relations guidelines describing (#WaitForIt) how to deal with journalists after his election as SBC president.


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New podcast: Are news reports 'dunking' on the late religious broadcaster Marcus Lamb?

New podcast: Are news reports 'dunking' on the late religious broadcaster Marcus Lamb?

If you search for the word “posterized” in up-to-date online dictionaries, this is what you find: “A slang term depicting a play in basketball. In said play, a player dunks the ball over top or in front of another player, making a play so picturesque that it may appear on a poster, hence the term, posterized.”

Clearly, this is linked to another term frequently used in the nasty verbal wars that are common on social-media sites, with Twitter — dominated by liberal and conservative voices in elite zip codes — being the best example.

That term is “dunking.”

“Dunking” is relevant to the main topic discussed in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) about media coverage of the death of religious broadcaster Marcus Lamb, who died of COVID-19 after using his Daystar Television Network to criticize vaccine mandates and other anti-pandemic rules and guidelines, while advocating alternative treatments.

“Dunking” is defined, sort of, in this Slate article: “ ‘Dunking’ Is Delicious Sport — But it might be making Twitter even more terrible.” Here is a relevant passage:

Since Twitter rolled out the feature a couple of years ago, the quote-tweet has evolved into something like a pair of magic high-tops dispensed to every user on the service: Anyone can botch a tweet, and anyone can leap over him or her to score a couple of points—or a couple thousand likes and retweets.

The basketball term is apt: In a Twitter dunking, someone has made his point or said her piece, and instead of responding to it with a direct reply, perhaps in the spirit of equal-footed debate, the dunker seizes it like an alley-oop on his or her way to the basket. Maybe another player gets the unwitting assist, but the point is yours to be liked and retweeted not just as a reply but as a worthier tweet in its own right.

What does this look like in practice? Consider this example from the blitz of tweets about Lamb’s death. This dunk comes from the creator of the “America’s Best Christian” brand:


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

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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The life of Howard E. Butt, Jr.: What do most readers think 'evangelist' really means?

As many GetReligion readers may know, I grew up in Texas. One of the unfortunate side effects of my heritage is that I know more than my share of jokes about the family that built all of those H-E-B grocery stores that are a part of Lone Star state culture.

Yes, the patriarch of the family was named Howard E. Butt.

Butt was quite a man and, no matter what you may have heard, his daughters had perfectly normal names -- like Mary Elizabeth. The Butt family was known for many positive things, including the fact that under his leadership the H-E-B chain gave as much money to charities, year after year, as federal law would allow it to give.

This brings us to the second generation, led by Howard E. Butt, Jr., who died the other day. The Religion News Service obituary for this well known Texan opened like this:

(RNS) Howard E. Butt Jr., the Texas evangelist and radio personality who was expected to take over his family’s successful grocery business but instead devoted his life to Christian causes, has died. … He was 89.
Butt was the former head of the H.E. Butt Foundation, which takes as its mission “the renewal of the Church,” and runs retreat programs and a Christian camp for children. He was perhaps best known, though, as the fatherly voice of one-minute radio spots, called “The High Calling of Our Daily Work,” in which he gently preached that people should make Christianity the cornerstone of their life’s work.

Once again, we are dealing with a very strange use of the much-abused word “evangelist,” a topic that has been written about more than once here at GetReligion

The bottom line: There is no question that Butt was, like his father, an “evangelical.” But was he an “evangelist”? Does that word help readers understand this man's life work?

Be honest. When you read the word “evangelist,” what images appear in your mind? For some, they think of images like the movie clip at the top of this post As I wrote nearly a decade ago, concerning this term:


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