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The Gospel of the Self

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 I write today in the line of my Jamesian interest in the varieties of religious experience. 

 Terry Heaton, once executive producer at the Christian Broadcasting Network, the man responsible for getting Pat Robertson's The 700 Club on the air throughout the 1980s and early '90s, has a new book out. I haven't read it (and don't plan to) so I speak here only from mediating sources. But the book seems to be a memoir, a reflection, and at least in some part a recantation. 

 It is called The Gospel of the Self: How Jesus Joined the GOP.

 There's an interview of Heaton on Vox. After discussing one of the editing decisions on which Robertson overruled him, Heaton says:

 "I knew that Pat’s rationale for all of this is that you don’t want to do anything on TV that will interfere with anybody’s faith. But I think you can take that to an extreme — and that’s what we did. We always showed people getting healed, overcoming the odds. The strong impression that the viewer would get from the program was that if you just followed the formula, you would be blessed!"

. And so, the Bible is edited into a self-help manual, Christianity becomes how to win friends and influence people, etc. The charge is that this editing made Christianity palatable for the Reagan era, though it did little for  Robertson's own campaign for the presidency.

More here: http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/gospel-self-terry-heaton/


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