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Programming changed, too. In 1981 the network, which had always broadcast a high percentage of "family-oriented" material, eliminated all weekly religious broadcasts except the 700 Club. Reruns of popular shows such as Gunsmoke took their place. By 1982, CBN had enough advertising revenues to make a profit. By 1987, it could begin charging cable networks for its broadcasts. Eventually, the cable operation made so much money it endangered the tax-exempt status of CBN and was spun off as International Family Entertainment, a separate corporation, which owns the Family Channel with a contractual commitment to broadcast the 700 Club daily. (In the process of this transition, Robertson personally made millions of dollars, much of which he has donated to his various ministries.)

The secularization of programming dismayed many Robertson followers. In reality, it reflected Robertson's original concern for reaching the irreligious. Several published critiques had severely questioned the audience claims of religious television. CBN took them seriously. "What impact are we really making in response to the Great Commission?" was the question raised, according to Michael Little. They were ready for radical change in order to reach the lost.

It's a great story, how Robertson took a defunct TV station and by faith created the thing we call "religious television." It's also a retelling, with different technology, of the story told again and again in evangelical history. In the 1820s, Charles Finney rewrote the rules of revivals, with extraordinary results. Billy Sunday, D. L. Moody, Billy Graham did the same in their own ways. Still, you are left with a nagging doubt: What does it amount to? Certainly it comes to less than Robertson dreamed in the beginning.

"Frankly, only a masochist would want to watch religious shows all day long," Robertson told CHRISTIANITY TODAY last year. To attract wider audiences, CBN produced soap operas, game shows, and tried to start a worldwide news network. But costs were high, and none of the shows proved sustainable. The television market, Little emphasizes, has fractionalized into niche markets, and it is very difficult to gain enough advertising revenue to pay for original programming.

The 700 Club is now almost the only regular program CBN produces for the United States. Its ratings are down. Income from cash donations has plateaued at just over $100 million. (High-water mark was in 1987, when cbn took in gifts of $135 million.) The show is well made, it covers a wide variety of topics, it is not relegated to believers-only times and channels, but it nonetheless serves a religious niche market. Consequently, the evangelistic focus of CBN has turned overseas, where Robertson hopes to see 500 million conversions before the year 2000.

"In the last couple of years I'm shifting emphasis," Robertson told me. "I don't think America is going to have a revival. I just don't see us turning away from the wholesale slaughter of young people, of unborn babies, some of the bizarre sex of the motion pictures;

I don't think we're going to see it. I think there'll be revival in church, but I think that we're going to see essentially two cultures."

Robertson described some hopeful signs among American Christians, but when I asked him to compare these with his experiences as a seminarian in New York, he said, "I don't see the desperation. Frankly, the church has too much today. We're just too comfortable. The concept of staying at ease in Babylon is very real, and all of us have become extremely materialistic. We are so wealthy, our nation is so wealthy, and the churches are so wealthy. It's very hard in the midst of that just to say, 'God, we're desperate.' "

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August 12 1996, Vol. 40, No. 9