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Evangelists have been a fixture of television since the 1950s, and there’s a reason politicians stayed away for so long. Almost from the start, TV preachers carried a unique whiff of tawdriness. There were the preferences for gaudy sets, big hair and absurd stunts, for one. Oklahoma televangelist Oral Roberts once told viewers that unless he received an extra $8 million by the next month, he would die. (The ensuing wave of donations spared him.) Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker opened their own theme park in the 1970s, and TBN, with its own roster of flashy preachers, still maintains its Holy Land Experience park in Orlando, Florida. Then there were the waves of legal disgrace. The “Gospelgate” scandals of the 1980s, implicating big-ticket televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and the Bakkers with a series of sexual and financial misdeeds, seemed to permanently tar the whole enterprise.
Not all Christian television is televangelism, and not all televangelists are corrupt or even tacky. But American presidents have nonetheless mostly steered clear, preferring to select their religious advisers from more sober ranks of pastors and writers. (Billy Graham, spiritual adviser to many presidents, preached on television but had roots and connections far beyond the airwaves.) Presidents occasionally granted interviews, especially with the powerful Robertson, founder of CBN, with whom President Reagan sat down on the network’s “The 700 Club” in 1985—but they have done so carefully and rarely.
Trump had none of that caution. He started showing up on Christian TV years ago, giving his first interview to Brody back in 2011, when he was toying with a run for president that no mainstream network took seriously. Trump discussed his “conversion” to opposing abortion, his respect for the Bible (“THE book”) and his churchgoing habits (“I go as much as I can”). Most Republican candidates make occasional stops by CBN to woo conservative Christians. But Trump seemed to take a real shine to Brody, and he must have known he would need to put in overtime to bolster his credibility with religious voters. As his 2016 run gained momentum, a steady stream of staffers and surrogates, including Kellyanne Conway, former Representative Michele Bachmann and televangelist Paula White, appeared on the network to vouch for Trump’s Christian credentials. White told Brody in June 2016 that Trump had first discovered her ministry by watching Christian broadcasting more than a decade before. “Mr. Trump has always been a huge fan,” she said. “He’d always watch Christian television.”