Media Transparency

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Bill Berkowitz
March 11, 2005

James Kennedy's Christian Crusade

TV Evangelist's ministerial and media empire claim US a 'Christian nation', don't believe in the separation of church and state, and aims to extend political reach

Although not nearly as well-known or flamboyant as the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Focus on the Family's Dr. James Dobson, or Pat Robertson, Dr. D. James Kennedy, who was recently inducted into the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB - website) Hall of Fame, has created a media and ministerial empire that is packing a powerful political punch.

As Senior Minister of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida's Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and the president of Coral Ridge Ministries (CRM - website), Dr. Kennedy's media outreach began in 1974 with radio. These days, his media empire -- with programs such as Truths That Transform, which was named the NRB's "Best Radio Teaching Program" for 2004, The Kennedy Commentary, a daily 90-second, radio feature, and The Coral Ridge Hour, the NRB's 2003 "Television Program of the Year" -- reach millions of people around the world.

Dr. Frank Wright, the current President of the NRB -- the world's largest association of Christian communicators, with over 1,700 member organizations -- said that Kennedy was being honored in recognition of his "invaluable contributions to the field of Christian communications, all the while exhibiting the highest standards of conduct and evidence of faithfulness in Christ." Dr. Wright was formerly the executive director of Dr. Kennedy's Washington, DC-based Center for Christian Statesmanship and had worked with CRM for more than 20 years. (For more on the NRB's recent convention see Media Transparency's Air Jesus: With the Evangelical Air Force").

Reclaiming America for Christ

In early February, Dr. Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries held its 10th annual political training event, the Reclaiming America For Christ conference, sponsored by the Ministries' Center for Reclaiming America. "America can be returned to moral and spiritual sanity," Dr. Kennedy said in a pre-conference press release:

"But that will only happen as Christians return to the public square -- something already happening in the last 25 years to great effect. This conference will enlist new recruits and recharge those already engaged in the great task of reclaiming this nation for Christ."

"As culturally concerned Christians, we were energized by last year's battles to defend marriage and vote like-minded public servants into local and national office," said Dr. Gary Cass, Center for Reclaiming America executive director. "I trust the energy of recent victories will infuse our efforts to reclaim America for Christ, and I am eager to meet conference attendees willing to make the long-term commitment to impact America for generations to come."

Speakers at the two-day conference included some of the major movers and shakers on the Christian right: Christian historian David Barton, the head of WallBuilders; columnist David Limbaugh, author the bestselling book Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity; Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty commission; Dr. Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee; Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association; Alan Sears, president of the Alliance Defense Fund; Wendell Bird, constitutional attorney and author of The Origin of Species Revisited; recording artist and former homosexual Stephen Bennett; Dr. Daniel Dreisbach, author of Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State; and Dr. Rick Scarborough, president of Vision America.

The controversial 5,280-pound granite Ten Commandments monument installed by Judge Roy Moore at the Alabama state courthouse -- and later removed by court order -- was on display at the conference. Dr. Kennedy has been a reliable supporter of Judge Moore, having organized a number of petition campaigns and fundraising efforts on his behalf. Judge Moore's tapes, including the seminal Liberty, Tyranny, And The Land, are available at the CRM Web site.

Taking Prayer to Washington

In 1995, Kennedy established the Washington, DC-based D. James Kennedy Center for Christian Statesmanship (website), in order to offer spiritual counsel to members of Congress and their staffs. Among the Center's projects are:

Slowly but surely, Dr. Kennedy's activities have begun to get some media attention. Recently, a Center press release pointed out that Bill O'Reilly, the host of the Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor, had been surprised to discover that the 10 year-old operation existed. O'Reilly then mentioned it on his program, claiming that he was interested in finding out "which political leaders had been influenced by the Gospel message the Center proclaims."

Dr. Kennedy told O'Reilly that they don't give out that information; "We talk to them," he said, "and ascertain if they understand the Gospel, if they assuredly know that they have eternal life, if they have trusted in Christ for their salvation." Dr. Kennedy added that "There are thousands of lobbyists in Washington who are trying to get something. We're trying to give people something. We give them something that's free."

Radical and Right Wing

"Dr. D. James Kennedy's multidimensional empire is a direct challenge to mainstream Christianity," said Frederick Clarkson, a veteran journalist who has been following and writing about right wing movements for more than 20 years.

"Kennedy was one of the leaders of a schism that created the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) 30 years ago. In addition to his mega-church and international broadcast ministry and political operations, Kennedy also is chancellor of Knox Theological Seminary, and he runs a religious prep school called the Westminster Academy," Clarkson told Media Transparency in an e-mail interview:

"The PCA has been the denominational home to many leaders of the Christian Right, including some of its most influential theocrats, like Christian Reconstructionist authors Gary DeMar and George Grant. In fact, Grant was the executive vice president of Kennedy's operations for a number of years."

Although he may not be as well known as other Christian right leaders, Dr. Kennedy has been involved in multiple projects with his radical right colleagues. He was a member of the first board of directors of the Moral Majority. He also served on the initial executive board of the Coalition for Religious Freedom (CRF), an organization established by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church while Rev. Moon was in prison in 1984. According to Sara Diamond, "the organization was financed primarily by the Unification Church, which gave an initial donation of $500,000." The CRF's executive board included Jerry Falwell, James Robison, Rex Humbard, Jimmy Swaggart, Kennedy and Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the popular 'Left Behind' series of books" (Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right, South End Press, 1989).

Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, along with more than 30 Christian groups, was involved in the founding and funding of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), an organization formed to pursue "religious liberty" and "family preservation" lawsuits. In her 1996 book, Facing the Wrath: Confronting the Right in Dangerous Times (Common Courage Press), Diamond presciently wrote that "the ADF represents a serious escalation in the Christian Right's legal action project."

According to a People For The American Way Right Wing Watch report on the organization, the ADF's major activities include:

What distinguishes Dr. Kennedy from the more colorful, media-genic, and reconizable religious right figures such as the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Dr. James Dobson is that "Kennedy has shepherded his flock in a more orderly, and Presbyterian style into the Christian Right," Clarkson pointed out. "For many years, Kennedy did a fundraising cruise called The Bible Boat to the Caribbean in the winter. In 1994, this was replaced with the annual Reclaiming America for Christ conference. Although he had lent his name and involvement to Christian right groups in the past, this was his first foray into forming his own political network. Extending his operations to Washington, DC, through The Center for Christian Statesmanship appears to be a logical outgrowth of this process."

Dr. Kennedy is also founder of Evangelism Explosion (EE), a lay witness training program through which the ministry claims that 4.5 million people came to Christ last year. Kennedy launched Evangelism Explosion International in 1967. According to a profile of Kennedy in the Institute for First Amendment Studies' Freedom Writer, the program is "a sophisticated 13-week training seminar in discipleship." EE training "is the most intense evangelism training in the world. It is used by hundreds of conservative Christian churches across the country, and has made inroads into every single country in the world."

The Evangelism Explosion is one of Kennedy's primary youth outreach and indoctrination operations, said Clarkson. "I attended one of their events some years ago, and it was full of loud Christian rock music as a warm up to a talk by David Barton, [the head of WallBuilders] whose talk twists American history to make kids believe that the U.S. was founded as a 'Christian nation.' Kennedy believes this too, and has sermonized on the subject. It is this false, historical revisionism that is central to the ideology of the Christian right -- it's a critical part of their justification to restore an idea that never was," added Clarkson, whose up-to-date takes on these and other issues can be found here.

In an April 1999 article appearing on the website of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rob Boston argued that Dr. Kennedy didn't believe in the concept of the separation of church and state:

"Kennedy's 1994 book, Character & Destiny: A Nation In Search of Its Soul, is riddled with attacks on the constitutional principle. Among other things, Kennedy calls church-state separation 'diabolical,' a 'false doctrine' and 'a lie; propagated by Thomas Jefferson. Kennedy also lapses into Red-baiting, writing, "This phrase does not appear in the United States Constitution at all, but in Article 52 of the Constitution of the Soviet Union -- now the Soviet disunion. Defunct, because they tried to get rid of God."
'A 1996 Kennedy tome, The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail: The Attack On Christianity And What You Need To Know To Combat It, coauthored with Jerry Newcombe, calls the wall of separation a 'great deception [that] has been used to destroy much of the religious freedom and liberty this country has enjoyed since its inception.'"

Between the years 1998 and 2003, Dr. Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and Evangelism Explosion received more than $7.2 million in grants from conservative foundations. The most generous donors, according to Media Transparency, have been the Orville D. and Ruth A. Merillat Foundation and the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which alone ponied up nearly $6 million earmarked as "unrestricted grant[s]" to the organization's "general fund."

Dr. Kennedy has recently been getting involved in a number of hot-button political issues:

His Center for Reclaiming America has been sponsoring an online petition on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the 41 year-old Florida woman who suffered severe brain damage in 1990 following a heart attack and has been kept alive via life support ever since.

Addressing the more than 900 attendees at the recently concluded "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference, Kennedy pointed out that there was a "crack in the Jericho wall of naturalistic evolution. I'm sure some of us will be around when the walls come tumbling down." Dr. Kennedy went on to say that "Communistic evolution, according to the Senate committee that examined it, is responsible for 135 million deaths in peacetime. There's no religion that has a tiny fraction of that many deaths on it conscience."

Dr. Kennedy is not going to rest of his laurels. The Center for Reclaiming America's Dr. Gary Cass recently unveiled four ambitious new initiatives intended to expand the impact of its work. They include the establishment of Liberty's Voice, a lobbying office in Washington that is expected to open in March; developing an entity called the Strategic Institute, a think tank that will "add intellectual muscle" to the Center's pro-family efforts; launching the National Grassroots Alliance, an initiative to boost the Center's existing grassroots network of 400,000 evangelicals up to one million; and Reclaiming America Media, an effort aimed at better communicating the Center's message.