Asia to Africa : Crouch Takes His TV Gospel Worldwide

As the sun was setting one day last spring in the San Joaquin Valley, the Rev. Paul F. Crouch, founder and president of the Tustin-based Trinity Broadcasting Network, began to preach his gospel of globalism.

Crouch told the congregation in a sweltering sanctuary in rural Selma about TBN’s plans to build a television station in Finland to broadcast into the Soviet Union. The 54-year-old minister then revealed that an agreement had been reached to exchange programming with the Central Television Authority of China.

“The bamboo curtain is coming down!” Crouch told the cheering crowd of farmers and townsfolk gathered for the revival, as a mobile studio and satellite linkup outside the Cathedral of Light transmitted the message live across the country and, delayed, around the world.

Crouch, whose tax-exempt TBN television stations in the United States alone are worth an estimated half a billion dollars, is one of the hottest names in Christian television in areas as far afield as southern Africa and Central America, broadcasting in at least eight languages.

Besides these two regions, TBN viewers around the United States, who pledged $56 million last year during the ministry’s two major fund-raisers, have also helped Crouch build and operate 10 television stations in Italy, including a powerful VHF outlet in Milan.

Crouch explains that his motivation in building television stations abroad is inseparable from his acquisition and construction of scores of outlets in the United States.

“Christ said simply to his disciples, ‘Go into all the world and preach this gospel to every creature, or every human being.’ And common sense I guess tells you to use whatever means is at your disposal to do that, the most efficient way,” Crouch said.

Throughout Central America and the Caribbean, Crouch has been building outposts for his broadcasting empire, which is based in a modern studio and administrative complex in Tustin. Crouch also uses his live, coast-to-coast U.S. program to attack Marxist and leftist regimes abroad and their supporters in this country.

TBN has television stations operating or under construction on the islands of Grenada and St. Lucia and in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The silver-haired Crouch, who has repeatedly boasted that his plans are to “surround the Sandinistas with pincers, pincers of love,” is regularly pictured in TBN’s newsletter with military and right-wing figures in these countries, including some like El Salvador’s Roberto D’Aubuisson, who have been charged with human-rights abuses.

In Central America, as in Italy, Protestant evangelicals like Crouch and Jimmy Swaggart have been challenging the primacy of the Catholic Church, particularly where the Catholic Church has aided those opposed to the established order.

On a recent broadcast, Crouch said that the “liberation theology” espoused by some Catholics in Latin America is “basically a front for communism.” Guests on Crouch’s “Praise the Lord” talk show and other shows on TBN are vociferous supporters of U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan Contras.

TBN’s impact in Central America is still limited, according to Dennis Smith, coordinator of the Latin American Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies in Guatemala City, mostly because the stations are UHF and require an antenna attachment for reception.

In Guatemala, TBN’s influence is largely confined to middle-class, urban evangelicals, considered the fastest-growing segment of the population, Smith said. Although Swaggart appears on TBN, his influence in the region comes largely from buying commercial time on local VHF outlets, Smith said.

In mid-August, Crouch went to South Africa with a full TBN crew for a 3-day revival and a meeting with the country’s president, P.W. Botha, to pursue plans to establish that country’s first nationwide Christian broadcasting network. Encouraged by the government, Crouch has already built southern Africa’s first Christian television station in the nominally independent black homeland of Ciskei.

Groups as large as 10,000 people--some of them schoolchildren bused in by the government--took part in the televised Ciskei revival.

“There is no apartheid in this room tonight!” Crouch told the mostly black crowd. “The partition has been broken down.”

Crouch has repeatedly condemned apartheid as wrong and destined to end, while cautioning on a recent broadcast that “the way to end it is not burn the country down and promote terrorism and disinvestment. . . . The way to end apartheid is for the Christians to arise.”

$1 Million Invested

Crouch has invested $1 million, including a $50,000 donation from an unidentified “Hollywood film producer,” in a million-watt UHF television station that was built and dedicated in Ciskei, one of several so-called tribal homelands set up by the South African government but not recognized by most other governments.

Beginning in the 1970s, South Africa attempted to sell as a solution to white minority rule a policy of uprooting and “resettling” millions of black South Africans in tribal homelands like the Ciskei, Transkei and Bophuthatswana, which were to be granted nominal independence.

But because few blacks agreed to move voluntarily to these areas, which were often barren and remote, the government unilaterally declared them aliens, forcibly removing them in large numbers from areas of South Africa where they had been born and lived for generations, and dumping them in the homelands.

Yet Crouch told viewers recently: “The reason the little African homelands were developed by the South African government was to give a particular African tribe a piece of territory.”

To which his wife, Jan, added, “like the American Indians.”

Crouch has established a close relationship with the Ciskei government, addressing the Cabinet in 1985. In December of 1986, Cabinet members were flown from South Africa to Orange County to appear with Crouch and his wife on “Praise the Lord” during TBN’s semiannual fund-raising telethon. Because the United States does not recognize the Ciskei, the government officials had to travel with South African passports.

Crouch’s actions in support of the Botha government and the homelands policy were sharply criticized by Randall Robinson, head of TransAfrica, a Washington lobbying organization.

“The great earmark of apartheid is not the petty apartheid discrimination in white areas, but the grand apartheid of the land mass . . . the forcible relocation of rightful residents by the millions,” Robinson said.

On the Ciskei station, local black ministers are invited to come in and tape a series of seven messages, according to Bernard Roebert, the white South African station manager. But the only two regular local programs are broadcasts of services of two of the largest and most conservative white churches in South Africa, one in Johannesburg and the other in Pretoria.

Roebert said that daytime programming on the station has been reserved for use by the Ciskei government--considered corrupt and repressive by international human-rights organizations--ostensibly for educational purposes.

After returning last year from a televised crusade in Ciskei, Crouch told subscribers of the TBN newsletter that officials there “confirmed the fact that racial unrest and acts of terrorism had declined significantly” since the station went on the air.

Since establishing himself in Ciskei, Crouch has set his sights on gaining entry into South Africa’s tightly controlled television market. He recently presented the government with a proposal for a $16-million nationwide Christian television network, linking the major cities of Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth.

In mid-August of last year, Crouch told his U.S. viewers, he met with President Botha and the minister of information to push for government approval of the network. Botha was receptive but noncommittal, Crouch said, at one point urging him to broadcast his message to the black-ruled nations known as the “frontline states,” which surround South Africa to the north.

Crouch said he replied, “We will be happy to do that,” asking: “Will you let us put our transmitters on safe South African soil and beam it up there under the protection of the armed forces of South Africa?”

Botha said he would consider that, as well. Results were more definite when Crouch met with leaders of neighboring Bophuthatswana, who agreed to allow TBN to build another complete station, in exchange for providing regular time for the government to produce news shows.

Homeland officials also implied they would permit the network to use other bits of territory scattered across South Africa to build relay towers to extend their signal. In the interim, the government agreed to air Crouch’s “Praise” show once a week on BOP-TV, just as the state network in Transkei does.

“There’s a keen interest by a number of the churches” in the Crouch proposal, said Peet De Pontes, who represents the city of East London in South Africa’s Parliament, mainly because Trinity is nondenominational and because Trinity “will in fact give time to any recognized church that seeks it.”

This equality of access, however, will be “purely on religious grounds,” De Pontes said. “No political propaganda will be allowed, because it doesn’t fit in with Trinity’s philosophy.”