CBN and ARE as Persuasive Organizations

?People say ?[CBN] want[s] to turn America into a church,‘? Regent employee Ben Johnston protested. ?We don‘t. My God, we want separation of church and state? (Johnston interview, March 30, 2006).

Woven into Johnston‘s protest, however, is a defensiveness based on public perception of CBN as threatening the neutrality of the secular. Far more than ARE, CBN relates to what Smith describes as the ?Protestant establishment? that was ?routed from social power? (2003:26). Robertson‘s visions of challenging the government and reinterpreting the Constitution‘s stance on religion do resemble a throwback to the nineteenth century when there was separation of church and state, not separation of religion and state. As one CBN interviewee protested, ?It's absolutely clear our founders did not want to separate God and government…The Declaration of Independence on four occasions refers to God and that created our government? (Strand 2010). Some of what Robertson and others at CBN protest about the secular could possibly be understood as frustration over losing political control in government and the public sphere. In contrast, most people I spoke with at the ARE were strong secularists in that they wanted to preserve a distance between public forms of government, science, and education and private forms of religion, some even holding up CBN as a model of how not to be. However, both CBN and ARE perceive in the secular a veiled hostility against and sometimes heavy-handed control over expressions of faith—a hostility that CBN and ARE perceive underlies most of their critiques against secular institutions of government, law, science, medicine, academia and education, and media.

CBN and ARE draw attention to the lack of neutrality by (1) inserting revealing terms into public dialogues that parody or critique secular terms (Activist Judges, Creation ?Science?), by (2) adopting secular forms of information distribution in media, internet, education, by (3) adopting/borrowing secular knowledge, systems of knowledge production, and forums for political power (scientific data and modalities, voting & public referenda).

This is not to argue that CBN and ARE are in any way ?neutral? in opposition to the secular. Both groups engage in persuasion, like any other organization that has a hold on the truth, whether it‘s the CDC trying to persuade people to wash their hands to prevent the transfer of disease or the Holocaust Museum trying to persuade people of the accuracy of their historical record regarding WWII and the Holocaust. There is nothing inherently bad in persuasion, it can be used in earnest or to manipulate. However, CBN and ARE are frequently called to task on their persuasion because of their statuses as religious or spiritual organizations, even (especially?) from within their organizations. Regent student Sara Peroni, for example, expressed a wish that ?Christians would stop acting like a special interest group? in their self-promotion, particularly in partisan governmental politics, as, Sara believed, people who truly have God in their heart should be in all levels of government regardless of political affiliation (author‘s notes, September 2006). The CDC and Holocaust Museum, on the other hand, as secular institutions, are expected to promote a neutral, objective, and universal truth, a promotion that typically isn‘t even thought of as persuasive.