News
Marcus Lamb’s career and anti-vax message speak to the power of Christian broadcasters (Opinion)
Marcus Lamb, an evangelical evangelist who founded the Daystar network and is a the source of Covid-19 misinformation, died after being hospitalized for the disease. Lamb’s son, Jonathan, describes his father’s diagnosis as “a mental attack from the enemy… Just as my parents came here to keep everyone informed of everything going on in the great world. epidemic and some ways to treat Covid, Surely the enemy is not happy about that, and he is doing everything to bring down my father.” ONE declare from Daystar Television Network said: “The family asks that their privacy be respected at this time as they grieve this difficult loss and would like to express their deep love and gratitude to the family. all those who prayed during Marcus’s health battle. Continue to lift them in prayer in the days to come.”
Those concerned about the impact of misinformation and misinformation have devoted a lot of attention over the past two years to addressing the issue, especially as it relates to the pandemic and the Covid vaccine: important Their focus tends to be on stores like Fox News, Newsmax and One America News, as well as the right-wing radio show that clog up national wave.
This parallel communication network is both popular and profitable. Daystar, the Lamb network co-founded in 1993, declare $233 million in assets in 2011, and shipped on most major cable and satellite TV providers in the US. Among peer-to-peer stores, it’s not alone in its scope: The Trinity Broadcasting Network is even bigger, and Pat Robertson’s Christian Television Network produces some of the most popular Christian shows in the country, including The 700 Club. Add to that a group of national and local radio programs dedicated to conservative Christian broadcasting, and you have a media network that appeals to a large American audience. consume on a regular basis, and most political authorities tend to ignore.
There are reasons this conservative media sector has been overlooked. The first is history: conservative Christian radio broadcasts with political leanings have been around for nearly a century, with their roots in the Father Charles Coughlin, who had moved on the political spectrum before deciding to follow a new, anti-radicalist politics in the late 1930s. During the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of preachers anti-communist on hardline radio, with shows like Billy James Hargis’ Christian Crusade and Carl McIntire’s 20th Century Reform Hour.
The program arise Along with more traditional right-wing radio that focused more closely on politics, programs such as the Manion Forum and the Dan Smoot Report debuted in the early 1950s and became increasingly influential throughout the 1960s. But while the ideas and audiences of religious and political shows overlap—all warning about the twin evils of Soviet communism and American liberalism—the institutions they build with the influence they use very distinctly. Religious broadcasters are associated with conservative churches and evangelical organizations, while political programs develop ties to the Republican Party and more secular activism.
They also rely on different forms of power. Political representations often base their arguments within ideological frameworks rooted in assumptions about the interests of traditional hierarchies, conservative interpretations of documents, and ideas. as well as the fundamental correctness of Christian and Western values. For religious performances, the appeal is more spiritual: preachers claim to have spiritual gifts and have a direct connection with God.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of an active and organized religious right within the Republican Party began to blur the lines between religious and secular broadcasters on the right. No one has represented that gray area more than Pat Robertson, whose Christian Media Network represents one of the earliest and most successful forms of televised evangelism in the United States. Entering cable television in the 1960s, Robertson created a missionary empire that made him rich, famous, and politically powerful.
The son of one of Virginia’s staunch segregationist senators, Robertson is no stranger to politics. However, his decision in 1987 to run for President of the Republican Party had the power to tear down the walls between Republican evangelism and politics.
But voters – even the increasingly evangelical Republican base – do not support the argument that preaching is the path to the presidency. He had trouble overcoming what TV host John McLaughlin called the “eccentric element,” the mixture of unusual religious practices and outrageous political statements that Robertson made performed for many years. In addition to speaking in tongues and engaging in faith healing, he recently Is called pagans “terminate” and said only Christians and Jews are eligible to hold office in the US. Plus a series of the messenger Scandal in the 1980s that had nothing to do with Robertson but was dull his profession – and both Robertson and religious broadcasting slipped out of the mainstream and into a subculture that was barely visible to non-Protesters.
However, just because few people pay attention to religious broadcasters doesn’t mean they’ve lost influence – or their interest in politics. Christian Media Network take Press release of the White House in the 1980s, and officials from the George W. Bush, Obama and Trump administrations appeared on its shows. In fact, for all the focus on the cozy relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News, he and his team fostering had close ties to the Christian Broadcasting Network before he ran for president. In his first year in office, Trump Sat for more interviews with the network than with CNN, ABC, or CBS.
The Trump administration regularly turns to media figures such as Christian broadcasters, who take in Trump’s message while relying on a different kind of authority than the mainstream press or, in times of pandemic, , trusted scientists. Conservative religious broadcasters were perfect for this: because viewers often understood the show as an extension of worship practice, they trust preachers as a matter of faith and divine intercession..
That’s true both when preachers like Marcus Lamb encourage viewers to vote for Donald Trump (on the grounds that Trump is willing to appoint conservative judges who could overturn abortion rights and same-sex marriage laws) and when he began told them in the summer of 2020 to be suspicious of any Covid-19 vaccine. Over the course of the next year, the network developed a substantial archive of Covid disinformation that not only broadcast anti-vaccination misinformation but also promote Unproven prophylactic drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to replace vaccines.
Conspiracy misinformation has long been a part of radio and television preaching, from Coughlin’s false statements about a Jewish conspiracy all over the world in response to McIntire’s objection to water fluoridation strange arrival by Pat Robertson warning of a “new world order” run by the Illuminati and the Freemasons under the direction of Satan. Against this backdrop, Lamb’s pandemic misinformation seems predictable, even mildly. But for him, it comes at a much more expensive price: a life ending at 64 because of an illness he convinces himself – and many of his followers – cannot harm him. as much as the vaccine could have saved his life. .
.
