I don’t have any reason to doubt Mike Huckabee’s version, as related to Ariel Levy in the June 30th New Yorker. But I was publisher of D Magazine in 1979, and I don’t remember a thing about the incident he describes (below the jump). Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Can anyone else confirm this story? Perhaps an old hand from those days at WFAA?
In 1976, after college, Huckabee was enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Texas, when he came into contact with the televangelist James Robison. It was Robison who famously declared that he was “sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the Communists coming out of the closet,” and was ready “for God’s people to come out of the closet” and take back the nation. Despite Huckabee’s inclination toward a forgiving Christianity, Robison’s passion drew him in. He dropped out of seminary after one year to take a job as Robison’s director of communications.
“The way the Moral Majority movement was actually started was there was a rally that James Robison did in 1979 that I helped coördinate,” Huckabee said. “It was all because of the local television station in Dallas throwing him off the air, because, in a sermon that he preached on television, Robison said homosexuality is a sin. Think: 1979, it wasn’t really an outrageous statement. Anyway, they got some complaints and they told him he couldn’t be on television. Well, Texas? Are you kidding me?” More than ten thousand Christians came to a “Freedom Rally” at the Reunion Arena, in Dallas, to protest Robison’s expulsion. “There was this amazing energy coming up from these evangelical Christians,” Huckabee said. “I remember almost being frightened by it. If someone had gotten to the microphone and said, ‘Let’s go four blocks from here and take Channel 8 apart,’ that audience would’ve taken the last brick off the building.”
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I think I found an indirect reference to the incident. I searched the DMN archives for “robison 1979″. The archives seem to only go back to 1985, but the search did turn up an article about Oral Roberts’s show being dropped by WFAA in 1987.
The fact that a search for robison 1979 came up with an article about another televangelist getting kicked off WFAA makes me think the Oral Roberts article probably has a reference to the earlier incident.
But I’m too cheap to spend the three bucks to get the full article and find out.
Here’s the reference:
26.) FUND-RAISING METHODS LEAD CH. 8 TO DROP ORAL ROBERTS
management, objecting to evangelist Oral Roberts’controversial methods of raising money for his Tulsa, Okla.-based ministry, has decided to drop his Sunday morning program, station General Manager Dave Lane said Tuesday.
Author: Staff Special to The News The Dallas Morning News (DAL) + _____
Publish Date: February 18, 1987
Word Count: 304
Document ID: 0ED3CF1AF288AF0E
WFAA-TV (Channel
Roberts’half-hour show, scheduled at 10:30 a.m. Sundays, will be replaced on March 29 by another religious program, Lane said. Roberts’show has been telecast on Channel 8 since March 1984.
Channel 8 had been
» Purchase this article
Well, let’s start here: Reunion didn’t open until 1980.
My old gray matter ain’t what it used to be, but I do remember Robison being booted off local TV and a protest being held. However, I’m not sure it was in ‘79. Reunion opened in the summer of 1980.
Also, it wasn’t one thing per se that did Robison in on local TV. He’d gotten increasingly didactic, and was very controversial. In fact, it wasn’t too long after he left the local airways that he convinced Cullen Davis to destroy his extensive collection of pre-Columbian art and artifacts, valued in the millions. They did it together, the Elmer Gantry preacher and the sinner/murderer, on Davis’ driveway.
The folks at the DMA were sick about it, since they house the largest collection of pre-Columbian art in the country.
It says a lot about the Huckster that he actually quit seminary to go work for that Elmer Gantry mountebank who, I noticed not long ago, is selling some hocus-pocus diet and health food drink along with the Lord.
It was at the Dallas Convention Center…my dad remembers it well although he did not attend. Robinson broke off from the SBC and embraced a more “charismatic” theology (wealth/prosperity, healing, speaking in tongues). Robinson was wildly popular in Dallas area churches for about 10 years, but cause huge divisions in many congregations. Today, he sells vitamins on informercials for a MLM company.
And, just to clarify…the Moral Majority was another organization that was started by Jerry Falwell, not Robinson, but it did start in 78/79.
I was there at the rally as a kid (’National Affairs Briefing’?). I was made to volunteer and pass buckets for fund raising. It was Criswell, Page Patterson, Robinson, maybe even Reagan I as I recall. (’79 or ‘80). And yes, It appeared to be the beginning of the whole far right movement.
http://books.google.com/books?id=0SV1ydDftR4C&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=robison+kicked+off+air&source=bl&ots=Xs-4xXzaGt&sig=_Ba6icb7L0jcW_WTzmIKznuIMvA&hl=en&ei=L31ATKj_B4K78gbu3akF&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=robison%20kicked%20off%20air&f=false
Sorry for the long link, but the book confirms the 1979 date and the fact it was the dallas convention center, not reunion.
The New Yorker is famous for (among other things) its rigorous fact-checking process. I’m surprised that error made it to print.
Seems like Robison’s troubles went back earlier than 1979. On May 28, 1977, The News ran a story about Robison agreeing to make an apology after his show was canceled because he made controversial statements during a show on Feb. 13.
Here’s the story from May 28, 1977:
A local evangelist’s television show, seen weekly in about 70 U.S. cities was reinstated on WFAA (Channel 8 ) this week after the station had canceled the show because of the evangelist’s controversial statements.
The station told Southern Baptist evangelist James Robison his attacks on homosexuals and “Playboy” magazine publisher Hugh Hefner were in violation of Federal Communications Commission regulations.
But after a Tuesday meeting between Robison and the station’s management, Robison agreed to apologize on his Sunday broadcast in exchange for returning the show to the air.
Station president Mike Shapiro said the cancellation resulted solely from the FCC regulations, although a Robison spokesman said Channel 8 was the only station to cancel the show.
“The FCC language is very specific that you can’t attack personally anyone on the air,” Shapiro said. “If you do, you must notify an individual in advance.”
Mike Huckabee, Robison’s media assistant, said the 33-year-old evangelist had been warned by Channel 8 in the past about violating the regulation.
Robison produces his show in Channel 8 studios, and while taping a show scheduled to run last Sunday, Huckabee said Robison began making statements about Hefner, Production personnel stopped the show. The station decided to cancel the show after the incident.
That portion of the show was filmed again, and in the version that appeared in other cities Robison stated his show had been edited.
Shapiro said the station had received numerous telephone calls and “letters are coming in by the bucketful” in support of Robison. However, he said the station reinstated Robison after he agreed to abide by the regulations rather than because of viewer response.
Robison said he was not upset with the station, but with the manner in which the FCC regulation is enforced.
“There seems to be to be inconsistencies in that particular law because of certain talk shows and certain editorial comments on television people are attacked constantly by entertainers,” Robison said. “Anita Bryant has been made fun of on several late night talk shows because of her stand against homosexuality.”
Robison ran into problems with the homosexual community about a Feb. 13 show. In the program, a rerun of a show aired last September, he attacked homosexuals.
The Agape Metropolitan Community Church of Fort Worth, which ministers to homosexuals, demanded and received equal time from Channel 8, which paid for the production and ran the homosexual show in Robison’s time slot.
— Bill Kenyon (reporter)
There was a show called The Homosexual Show?
Yes Daniel, it was inserted forcefully in Robison’s timeslot.