TV Empire : Satellites Spread the Scriptures

The programs are beamed around the clock from a nondescript studio complex in an Orange County industrial park. Distributed in the United States through a network larger than that controlled by any other Christian evangelist, the signals go overseas, too, carrying a stern anti-communist message to Central America and encouragement for the government of South Africa.

To finance this massive, virtually debt-free network, the evangelist raises millions--perhaps as much as $44 million during 1988--with telethons that bring in almost as much as is raised by Billy Graham.

But this is not Billy Graham, nor is it Pat Robertson or Jimmy Swaggart or any of the other big-name evangelists whose broadcasts have become familiar to the American public. This is the work of Paul F. Crouch, the son of an Assemblies of God missionary who has risen from an impoverished Midwestern childhood to put together a Christian broadcasting empire worth, by his account, an estimated $500 million.

All But Unknown

And although Crouch and his wife, Jan, are all but unknown to most of the American public and are accountable to no denomination or independent governing board, their Tustin-based Trinity Broadcasting Network owns more than 100 television stations, the largest number controlled by a single owner in the United States. The network also owns more than 20 stations overseas.

Unlike other major religious broadcasters, TBN maintains no college, cathedral or amusement park. What the network owns, and continues to acquire and build at an accelerating rate, are television stations and studios, adding at least 40 new ones in 1988 alone. While TBN is carried on fewer cable systems than Robertson’s CBN and the PTL network founded by Jim Bakker, it owns most of its stations and pays cash for whatever it buys.

Thanks in large part to Crouch’s reputation for fiscal integrity and his self-effacing, on-screen personality, TBN reported a 10% increase in donations from the network’s thousands of small contributors in 1988, a year in which most television evangelists saw a decline in contributions, attributed largely to scandals involving Bakker and Swaggart.

Great Institutional Dream

Crouch maintains that television is his church and mission. The network does support various social welfare projects: a homeless shelter in Anaheim; soup kitchens in downtown Los Angeles and at some of his stations, and thousands of toys and Bibles distributed to children in the Third World. But these projects, Crouch acknowledges, account for only a fraction of TBN’s budget and play no significant part of his great institutional dream.

“The purpose of TBN,” Crouch said in an interview, “is to turn every available dollar into expanding the hardware and the ministry and the media to reach as many people and to fulfill the ‘Great Commission.’ . . . I keep coming back to what Jesus said at the end of the Book of Matthew: ‘Go into all the world preach the Gospel to every living creature.’ ”

Crouch said during an October broadcast that his ultimate goal is to “dispossess the Devil of the airwaves.”

“Every channel, every satellite, every radio, every television ought to belong to God’s people,” he told viewers. “We should have possessed it many years ago. But we let the Devil have it. And, oh, he took it, yes he did. He was glad to have it. Satan has been using the airwaves with impunity for many years to curse and damn the souls of men and women, boys and girls . . . and we let it happen.”

To orchestral music and enthusiastic applause, an attractive, middle-aged couple--silver-haired and dressed like prosperous Southern Californians--sweep down a staircase into what appears to be a spacious living room, the walls lined with paintings.

On one side of the room is a blazing fire in a large fireplace; on the other, a large white Bosendorfer piano. As the music and the applause fade, the smiling couple move easily, arm-in-arm, to a pair of padded armchairs before a marble coffee table.

This is “Praise the Lord,” hosted by Paul and Jan Crouch, the centerpiece of the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Their talk show is broadcast live, coast to coast, every weeknight for two or three hours at 7 o’clock Pacific Standard Time, and rebroadcast twice more during the next 24-hour period.

Image Change

In 15 years of polishing his delivery and appearance, Crouch, 54, has developed a fondness for double-breasted blazers with elaborate, embroidered crests. The clean-shaven face and crew-cut pictured in early newsletters have given way to a salt-and-pepper mustache and a full head of hair, held perfectly in place by what he calls “my hundred-mile-an-hour hair spray.”

Jan Crouch, 50, with her trademark bouffant hairdo, is her husband’s constant on-screen companion and the bubbly counterpoint to his sometimes staid manner. Prone to tears and fits of giggling, Jan is referred to by her husband as “my little spark plug.” He says she was cured by God of severe depression 15 years ago.

TBN’s 24-hour programming features an eclectic mix of upbeat Christian music and videos, soap operas, aerobics, game shows and, most recently, John Jacobs and the Power Team. This crew of bulky weightlifters and athletes blow up hot water bottles until they explode, snap baseball bats over their thighs, break out of handcuffs, rip phone books and break concrete blocks with their foreheads--all in order to demonstrate the power Jesus gives them.

The message that emanates from TBN is conservative, Christian and evangelical. Like other Pentecostals, the Crouches believe in speaking in tongues and faith healing, but evangelical figures who may not share those beliefs remain welcome on his “Praise” program. Crouch tries to steer clear of doctrinal disputes with other religious figures, including those who do not buy time on TBN, and he is occasionally sought after as a peacemaker.

Crouch maintains that he is not political, although on the day Pat Robertson announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, Crouch voiced his support and asked Robertson what TBN viewers could do to help him win. Crouch also often uses his program to attack Marxist and leftist regimes, and guests on “Praise” and other TBN shows have vociferously supported U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Although he says he opposes apartheid, Crouch and his guests regularly defend the regime of South Africa’s P. W. Botha, calling on viewers to pray for the nation’s president and to oppose U.S. economic sanctions against Pretoria.

Today the network is the largest holder of Federal Communication Commission-issued television licenses in the country, with 14 full-power, commercial UHF stations, including two owned by a subsidiary, National Minority Television Inc., three full-power educational non-commercial outlets and another 125 low-power outlets--inexpensive stations that cover a small geographic area--on the air, under construction or in prospect within the year, according to the ministry. Scores of other independent stations are affiliated with TBN. The ministry would not say exactly how many, but in a recent newsletter Crouch claimed that “we could have 170 stations on the air by the end of 1988!”

(The major commercial networks, such as NBC, own fewer stations than TBN, but because their stations are located in the largest cities and there are scores of affiliates, they reach many more potential viewers than any religious network.)

The network is carried on about 580 cable systems, whose operators are offered an annual incentive of 25 cents per subscriber. A program exchange with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network puts Crouch’s “Praise” show onto 7,000 more cable systems. In addition, independent ministers such as Swaggart and Schuller, along with Oral Roberts’ son, Richard, buy regular blocks of time on TBN.

Number of Viewers Unclear

Despite its wide reach, it’s not clear how many people watch TBN on a regular basis. Crouch’s only claim is that the network is available to 70% of the homes in the United States, a total potential audience TBN estimates at 100 million. But because TBN does not subscribe to Arbitron or A. C. Neilson, the two major audience monitoring services, there is no accurate way to gauge the number of viewers.

In Central America and the Caribbean, Crouch has been building more outposts for his broadcasting empire, which already includes a relay tower in Key West, Fla., that enables TBN to beam programming from its Miami affiliate directly into Cuba. One of his goals in acquiring stations in Central America, Crouch told viewers, is to “surround the Sandinistas with pincers, pincers of love.”

With the encouragement of the South African government, Crouch has already built Southern Africa’s first Christian television station, in the nominally independent black homeland of Ciskei, and has signed an agreement with a second homeland, Bophutatswana, to build a station there that will beam into the Johannesburg-Pretoria area. He also has met with Botha to pursue plans to establish South Africa’s first nationwide Christian broadcasting network.

Crouch’s relationship with the South African government is a source of controversy.

Neither Ciskei nor Bophutatswana are recognized by the U.S. government, which considers them part of Pretoria’s scheme to strip the country’s black majority of South African citizenship and assign it to barren, poverty-stricken outlying areas.

Crouch was sharply criticized by Randall Robinson, the head of TransAfrica, a Washington lobbying organization that focuses on isolating the South African government.

“I don’t think you can more grievously and more measurably support apartheid than he has,” Robinson said. “To lend massive television technology to the legitimizing of this forceful warehousing on these remote parcels of land amounts to the most important, significant support for the apartheid system that one can give, particularly in the United States.”

Paul F. Crouch was born in 1934 on an Iowa farm. His father died in 1941, his health broken during service as a missionary in Egypt, where the family, including young Paul, lived. In Springfield, Mo., the headquarters of the denomination, Crouch’s mother worked as a seamstress to support the family.

“We had no real means of support,” he recalled. “The church was not really able to care for us. For a while we got I think $20 a month from a kind of minister’s retirement fund or something, for my mother, and there was a little period of time where the state of Missouri actually stepped in and paid a small stipend of child support and child care for my sister and me.

“The difference between, you know, turning lights off and on in the house was the difference between whether we had adequate food to eat sometimes,” he said, “so I’ve always been very, very careful with finances. It was just absolutely ingrained in me from earliest childhood to be scrupulously honest with everything that we were entrusted with.”

Introduced to Ham Radio

As a 15-year-old, Crouch’s life was changed when a Linotype operator named Lawrence Bake-well, the husband of the woman who was giving him free piano lessons, introduced him to the wonders of ham radio.

Within a few years, Crouch, by then an Assemblies of God seminary student in Springfield, went on to form a ham radio club. He built a small campus radio station because “before long it really dawned on me that this electronic tool called radio and later television would really be the way to get the Gospel that we preach out in a mass way.”

After graduating from the seminary and marrying Jan--the daughter of a prominent Assemblies of God minister--in 1953, Crouch accepted a job as associate pastor of a tiny church in Rapid City, S.D. The post paid so little that he moonlighted at a local radio station.

“I earned my living being a disc jockey and then working in the church after hours and on weekends,” he said.

The radio work led to the opportunity to build and help run one of the first television stations in the area, an NBC affiliate.

After a few church jobs in the Midwest, Crouch was invited to Burbank to work with the Assemblies of God’s new motion picture and television division. In 1973, with $20,000 of his own savings and pledges of support from a few supporters, Crouch bought what became KTBN Channel 40, a struggling UHF station in Tustin.

It was at this point, Crouch said, that he had the vision that motivated him and shaped what became the Trinity Broadcasting Network. It was the nearest thing in his life he can recall to a dramatic, born-again experience.

“I’d heard the old-timers talk about dreams and visions and seeing things ‘in the spirit’ so-called, but I’d never really had an experience like that,” he said. “But I did this afternoon. I was conscious (and) awake. . . . It was as though the ceiling of my den completely turned into a giant TV screen and I saw . . . the outline of the entire North American continent as though I were out in outer space, and as I watched, really transfixed by it all, I saw a great light emerge right over the center of the North American continent and from that light began to issue bright streams of light and I saw it strike major geographic parts of the United States--New York, Miami, the tip of Texas, California, the Seattle area.

“As that stream of light would strike the New York area, for example, a secondary light was illuminated and from that secondary light, little thin pencil threads of light began to emanate out in little dots of light, until the whole map of the North American continent was just covered with this network of light. And I said, ‘Lord, what does this mean? What am I seeing?’ Again in my spirit, I don’t know if it was an audible voice or not, but I heard one word: ‘Satellite.’ ”

In retrospect, Crouch said, “I knew I had heard the voice of God, and I absolutely obeyed it and had no second thoughts or qualms.”

From then on, Crouch replicated the KTBN pattern, buying UHF stations in small and medium-size markets--many of which suddenly became affordable when cable appeared to be the wave of television’s future--for as much cash up front as he could raise. By the early and mid-1980s, TBN’s acquisition began to accelerate, until the network reached the ownership limits set by the FCC--12 commercial stations. Crouch then turned his attention to establishing subsidiary and affiliated companies that added stations. He also started acquiring licenses for low-power stations that are exempted from FCC ownership limits.

Although he proudly points to his own organization as a bastion of frugality and strict financial accountability, TBN is ineligible for membership in either the voluntary Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability or the National Religious Broadcasters. The NRB’s new membership rules require organizations with annual incomes of more than $10,000 to have a majority of board members from outside the family.

All of TBN’s corporate structures are dominated by Crouch, his wife, his brother and TBN employees. Crouch, who voluntarily gave up his Assemblies of God preaching credential in 1973 when he began TBN, is not subject to that denomination’s discipline.

“Accountability is the watch-word for the church, for TV ministries, as well as industry and government,” Crouch told an Oct. 7, 1987, hearing of the subcommittee on oversight of the House Ways and Means Committee, noting that TBN reports to its supporters and the IRS that the ministry spends less than 8% of its total revenues for fund raising.

TBN’s budget for 1987 was about $40 million, Crouch told the committee, with just under half the total earmarked for building new stations. The monthly satellite bill is $140,000.

According to material provided to The Times and the IRS by TBN, Crouch is listed as president and voting director of all 10 boards that make up the network’s enterprises, and each board is controlled by Crouch family members and employees.

Relatives on TBN and related payrolls and their salaries, according to the ministry, include:

- Crouch’s wife, Jan, ($42,200), who is co-host of “Praise” and is the TBN program director, set designer and editor of the 500,000-circulation monthly newsletter.

- Their son, Matthew, ($33,800), who serves as producer-director of “Praise” and other TBN shows.

- Matthew’s wife, Laurie, ($10,400), co-host with Matthew of a TBN show.

- Crouch’s brother, Philip A. Crouch, ($36,400), TBN’s chief of staff, and Philip Crouch’s wife, who works in the TBN’s public affairs office in Tustin.

- Also, Crouch’s sister and brother-in-law manage TBN’s Oklahoma City affiliate, and Jan Crouch’s sister and brother-in-law manage the Miami station.

Crouch himself is paid modestly by religious broadcast standards. He took a combined salary and housing allowance of $70,542 in 1987, with no deferred income or retirement plan, according to documents filed with the IRS. He writes no books, makes no records and accepts no commercial speaking engagements. He says he receives no clothing allowance and he lives in the same Corona del Mar home he bought in 1971 for $44,000, although it might sell for seven or eight times that today.

In addition to a number of trucks, service vehicles, vans and high-tech transmitters, TBN’s fleet includes two private jets, a 1987 BMW sedan, a 1984 Cadillac and a 1984 Lincoln, as well as a 1972 Jaguar sedan--which are made ailable to the Crouches for their personal use and for guests on the show. The ministry also purchased the home next door to the Crouches for use as an office and guest house for more than $300,000.

Only two of the more than 400 non-family employees on TBN’s 1987 $4.8-million payroll had salaries above $40,000, according to information provided by TBN to the IRS. As with Crouch family members, none of the employees receives any pension or retirement benefits, and no loans are made to any director, officer or employee.

“We try to see that employees’ needs are met,” Crouch said, “but it is just my personal philosophy, born of a zeal and a desire to get the Gospel out as far as I can with the least amount of expense possible, to keep salaries lean and mean and to keep overhead and expenses down, even in the area of buying equipment.”

This kind of careful economic management, combined with steadily rising gifts from viewers and Crouch’s own canny sense of broadcasting, has yielded dramatic results.

Although the worth of TBN was listed for Congress at $75 million, its market value is thought to be much higher. At one time, Crouch said, TBN was offered $150 million for the Tustin, Phoenix and Miami outlets alone by one of the home-shopping television networks. In all, Crouch estimates the market value of TBN at $500 million.

And who has paid for this? TBN says more than 80% of its budget comes from its twice-yearly “Praise-a-Thon” appeals, each of which lasts a week. In 1987, about $38 million was raised, $2 million more than was raised in 1986, according to TBN figures. The network reports that it will get about $44 million from the two 1988 telethons, making them among the most lucrative fund-raising appeals on U.S. television.

Crouch’s long and steady success, says the Rev. Robert Schuller of Garden Grove’s Crystal Cathedral, can be attributed to the fact that “Paul has avoided the temptation to be negative and divisive.”

And, unlike other televangelists who have built broadcasting empires, Crouch is not on camera at every opportunity. He and Jan host their own show only two nights a week (guest hosts appear the other three nights) and Crouch prefers to exercise his control in the board rooms and behind the scenes.

But some critics charge that Crouch’s control of TBN is iron-fisted and tailored to his own beliefs. These critics say that some broadcasters who differ with Crouch on the finer points of faith are priced off the network or not sold time at all.

“The final court of appeal is Paul’s theology,” said Walter Martin, author of “Kingdom of the Cults” and director of the Christian Research Institute in Irvine, a Christian think tank. “One man has the right to keep any program off the air if he chooses, and he exercises it regularly,” in the process creating “a mom-and-pop operation masquerading as a nonprofit corporation.”

Others also complain about the lack of accountability.

“They have taken millions of dollars from millions of people out there, and have used that to further their own interests . . . to acquire properties over which they alone preside, with no accountability,” said Dave Hunt, author of “The Seduction of Christianity” and who said he has been banished from TBN for years. “If you take other people’s money you should fairly represent them. They are using their stations to present a fanatical, fringe element of Christianity.”

Crouch responded to Martin’s and Hunt’s charges in a conciliatory letter to them, by saying that “everyone has a ‘little heresy’ in the opinion of another teacher, so why not preach salvation . . . and let the Holy Spirit work it out?”

TRINITY BROADCASTING NETWORK IN WESTERN HEMISPHERE

COMMERCIAL, FULL-POWER, UHF STATIONS

1. KTBN-TV, Channel 40, Tustin

2. KPAZ-TV, Channel 21, Phoenix

3. WHFT-TV, Channel 45, Miami

4. KTBO-TV, Channel 14, Oklahoma City

5. WTBY-TV, Channel 54, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

6. KTBW-TV, Channel 20, Tacoma-Seattle, Wash.

7. WKOI-TV, Channel 43, Richmond, Ind.

8. KNAT-TV, Channel 23, Albuquerque, N.M.

9. WLXI-TV, Channel 61, Greensboro-Winston Salem, N.C.

10. WDLI-TV, Channel 17, Canton/Akron/Cleveland, Ohio

11. WCLJ-TV, Channel 42, Bloomington, Ind.

12. KDTX-TV, Channel 58, Dallas

RADIO

13. KGHO-AM/FM, Aberdeen, Wash.

NATIONAL MINORITY TELEVISION, INC.

Operated by TBN under special Congressional provisions to promote minority involvement.

14. KTDZ-TV, Channel 24, Portland, Ore.

15. KMLM-TV, Channel 42, Midland-Odessa, Tex.

COMMUNITY EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION

16. KITU-TV, Channel 34, Beaumont, Tex.,

17. KLUJ-TV, Channel 44, Harlingen, Tex.

18. KETH-TV, Channel 14, Houston

TBN operates an additional 125 low power stations throughout the county.

FOREIGN OPERATIONS

TBN is either broadcasting or planning new operations in the following countries.

Grenada

St. Lucia

El Salvador

Guatemala

Honduras

Italy

Taiwan

Finland

South Africa

People’s Republic of China

Source: TBN, Federal Communications Commission

TRINITY BROADCASTING NETWORK’S FINANCIAL PICTURE

TELETHON PLEDGES (In Million of Dollars) Trinity Broadcasting Network: $44.0 Jerry Lewis’ Labor Day Weekend Telethon: $41.0 United Cerebral Palsy’s “Star-athon ‘88”: $21.0 Billy Graham Evangelical Assn.: $54.5 Source: Individual Telethons TBN SPENDING: 1987

How they spent an income of $40,482,183.

General and Administration: 17.0% Salaries: 11.9% Programming, Production and Engineering: 13.1% Fund raising: 8.3% Building of new stations and outreach: 44.4% Satellite: 5.3%