bad TV, nostalgia, religion

How Pat Robertson managed to touch my life…

The featured photo is a screen grab from a news story about Pat Robertson.

Yesterday afternoon, I was dozing after lunch and noticed breaking news. Pat Robertson, an evangelist and wannabe conservative politician, has finally croaked. He was 93 years old. It strikes me as kind of awesome that Robertson died in June– the month during which we celebrate gay pride! I don’t know if there really is a being known as God, but if there is, I’d say this was pretty good timing.

Pat Robertson (nicknamed by his older brother, who used to pat his cheeks and say “Pat, pat, pat”…) was born Marion Gordon Robertson on March 30, 1930 in Lexington, Virginia. Lexington, as some of you know, is a place near and dear to my own heart. Both of my parents grew up within about ten miles of Lexington. My dad was a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, which is located in Lexington. Several of my family members either went there, or to neighboring Washington & Lee University, which is where Mr. Robertson earned his first college diploma. Bill and I got married at VMI, too… So yeah, Pat Robertson’s birth place is special to me.

And Pat Robertson died yesterday in another place near and dear to my heart– Virginia Beach. I grew up in Gloucester County, which is maybe about an hour’s drive from Virginia Beach (when there’s no traffic). We moved to Gloucester in 1980, when I was eight years old. In those days, we all watched television instead of hanging out on the Internet. Although I’m not a very religious person, Pat Robertson still managed to have kind of a profound effect on my life when I was growing up. It was all because of his television empire.

A very old WYAH sign off!

Gloucester was within the viewing area of Pat Robertson’s television channel, WYAH, which he purchased for $37,000 in 1960. WYAH was not a cable channel, but it was the place where Robertson’s Christian television empire, much of which was disseminated on cable TV, was born. WYAH– named for Yahweh– was located in Portsmouth, Virginia. I remember being kind of fascinated by the city of Portsmouth as a little kid, because before we moved to Gloucester, we lived in Fairfax, Virginia on Portsmouth Road. 😉

Although I grew up attending the local Presbyterian church, my parents weren’t super religious. I think church mainly served as a social outlet and place to perform music. My mom was a church organist, although she usually played at churches other than the one I attended with my dad. My dad sang in the church choir, but also in local ensembles. I sat in the pews with a lady whose husband was also in the choir and was a fellow VMI graduate. That was about it for church stuff for me, personally… but I was still heavily influenced by religion, because I happened to live in the Tidewater region of Virginia, where Pat Robertson’s independent TV channel was offered.

Example of WYAH’s ads… at the 3 minute mark, there’s an ad for the 700 Club. At 2:10, there’s an ad for Mother Basilea Schlink, a German Lutheran writer. I see she was from Darmstadt, which is very close to where I currently live.

In earlier blog posts, I wrote about how, back in the 1980s, I was kind of obsessed with television. Back then, things weren’t so syndicated, so local channels had more of a local flavor. In Fairfax, we had the big three networks, PBS (public television), and two independent channels– WTTG and WDCA– both of which were secular. When we moved to Gloucester, we had WYAH and WTVZ. WTVZ was secular, while WYAH was religious. But they showed similar programming– sitcoms that were in syndication, old movies, westerns, cartoons, and other lightweight viewing fare that was pretty kid friendly.

Cartoons on WYAH in 1986!

WYAH had a very annoying announcer with a distinctively high voice who introduced the afternoon cartoons– Tom and Jerry or Scooby Doo. Sometimes I’d watch them, if I didn’t have something else to do. As an 8 year old, I could go play with the other kids in my neighborhood, most of whom didn’t like me much, or I could watch Pat Robertson’s TV channel, WYAH, or WTVZ… or maybe play with my Barbies. A lot of times, WYAH won out, and I’d watch old sitcoms like The Jeffersons, Benson, Wonder Woman, Diff’rent Strokes, or The Brady Bunch.

Most of the stuff WYAH aired was already pretty tame, but any curse words were edited out. I don’t remember if they edited out the racist epithets that were occasionally on sitcoms in the 70s. For instance, on The Jeffersons, one might occasionally hear the n-bomb dropped, usually by George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) himself. I don’t think they edited that, but if he said “damn” or “hell”, that would be silenced.

Love the ad for the party line, for the low price of 89 cents a minute!

What I remember most about WYAH, though, were the religious PSAs and ads for a huge variety of Christian religious organizations of varying legitimacy. The channel also offered many religious shows by evangelists, like Jack Van Impe, Ernest Angley, and Star R. Scott, who is a Northern Virginia based pastor.

On Saturday nights, WYAH showed The Rock Church Proclaims, a program featuring services at The Rock Church, which is a huge church based in Virginia Beach. In the 80s, it was led by John and Anne Gimenez. Sometimes, I’d watch the show, not because I was religious, but because I’d never seen a church that had a full band, complete with electric guitars and drums, and pastors who danced. The Rock Church is Pentecostal, and they do things very differently than the stodgy Presbyterians. Below is a clip from a Rock Church “praise break”.

John Gimenez liked to get down when he preached. Presbyterians didn’t do this kind of stuff… I kind of like the organ on this.

Of course, Robertson’s famous show, The 700 Club, was also aired. WYAH is the birthplace of The 700 Club. It’s still going strong.

“Men have a tendency to wander…”

As I was growing up, I didn’t really think too hard about how weird WYAH was, and how I was being influenced by all of the religious stuff on that channel. In 1987, there was a huge scandal involving Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, a couple who had gotten their start on WYAH before they founded the PTL cable network. I never watched PTL, though, because it wasn’t offered on our cable subscription. I remember during that time– I was about 15 years old– Jim and Tammy Faye were constantly in the news.

That scandal probably had something to do with Pat Robertson’s decision to sell WYAH in 1989. By the time I graduated high school in 1990, that channel I had watched all through my childhood, had become secular and was owned by a national company. Gone were all the weird religious programming, ads for religious organizations, books, and music, PSAs for religious groups, and censored sitcoms. Robertson also unsuccessfully tried to run for president in 1988, but he dropped out of contention when it became clear that George H.W. Bush was going to get the Republican nomination.

Pat Robertson asks you to listen.
Busting on communism…
Is your child having an abortion without your permission?

Years later, I learned more about Pat Robertson, as he continued to try to influence politics and continued to build his empire very close to where I grew up. He founded Regent University, and maintained his Christian Broadcasting Network, which was basically a cable version of WYAH, minus the Tidewater flavor. He sold CBN in the 90s.

Yikes! He said some pretty terrible things… and some things were really not very Christian at all.

As a young woman, I started paying more attention to the things Pat Robertson said… some of which I found surprisingly hateful. Like I said, even though I watched his channel, I didn’t pay much attention to the religious stuff. I just wanted my daily George Jefferson or Tom and Jerry fix. But as he got older, Robertson said things that were more hateful, polarizing, and just plain weird. He was famously homophobic, and said many crazy things that infuriated liberals and condemned people in the gay community.

He was kind of disarming, wasn’t he? He sounded gentle and decent, but then he used words like “homo”.

Robertson got right wing Christians involved in politics, marrying far right politics with evangelicals. He was a fan of Donald Trump’s– although Trump is about as unChristian as a person can get. Robertson joined in the chorus of idiot Republicans who claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen because Trump didn’t win. Later, Robertson turned on Trump. A lot of people saw Robertson as either laughable or damnable.

Toward the end, he really was a doddering old fool…

I’m sure Pat Robertson will be missed by many people. He did manage to do some pretty amazing things during his lifetime. And even though I despise his politics and am not into his brand of religion, I can’t deny that he did manage to touch my life and influence it, somewhat. I know people who attended his university, and most of my childhood friends who grew up with me in Gloucester watched WYAH, too. So… there is that.

I never hated Pat Robertson. He was an interesting character. I wish he hadn’t played a part in destroying the separation between church and state. I wish he hadn’t championed Donald Trump, whose disastrous time in the White House has seriously fucked up American politics. And I wish he hadn’t said so many hateful, awful things about the LGBTQ community, which includes people I love. But, I’m sure that some people are mourning him today, and as an admittedly less than devout Christian, I do have some regard for them as fellow human beings. So… I suppose I can wish for Pat Robertson to rest in peace, wherever he is– be it looking down from Heaven, or looking up from Hell… or just rotting in a casket.

As I close today’s post, I realize that my sisters in law– Bill’s sister and her wife– were celebrating their LEGAL marriage yesterday, the day of Pat Robertson’s death. They got married in Florida in 2015. Seems very fitting to me that Pat Robertson exited the mortal coil on their anniversary! It’s almost like an anniversary gift from God! Isn’t that awesome? I think so.

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nostalgia, religion

Repost: When religious television isn’t that wholesome…

Every once in awhile, I like to repost content from my original blog that means something significant to me, even if my readers aren’t all that interested. After I wrote about Jerry Falwell Jr. yesterday, I was reminded of a religious cult in Virginia that I blogged about in June 2018. I’m going to repost that content today as/is, just so it’s easily available for the future.

Yesterday, I was perusing RfM and noticed a thread about a church in Virginia that encourages members to shun their children.  Since I’m originally from Virginia, I opened the thread and found a Washington Post article about Calvary Temple, a Sterling based Pentecostal church led by Star R. Scott.  I immediately, recognized the pastor’s name, and not just because it’s unusual.

A few months ago, I wrote a post about WYAH, an independent Christian television channel that was owned by Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, and operated in southeastern Virginia.  WYAH no longer exists today, but it thrived in the era of over the air and basic cable television.  I grew up in the 80s and watched too much TV.  I often watched WYAH, not because of its wholesome and/or sanitized programs, many of which were religious, but because despite being a religious channel, they did air some funny sitcoms.  I remember WYAH played shows like Diff’rent StrokesWKRP in CincinnatiBensonThe Jeffersons, and my personal favorite, The Brady Bunch.  They also aired some of my favorite cartoons in the afternoons. When I wasn’t riding my horse, I’d tune in.  The censors would dutifully blank out any swear words.  Can’t be listening to any cussing if you’re a good Christian, right?

Another thing that WYAH had plenty of were religious ads.  In my last post about the network, I included some clips of ads that aired regularly on WYAH.  The videos I shared included some folks I had completely forgotten about, including Star R. Scott.  His ad for Calvary Temple and the weekly television show that used to air on WYAH on Sunday nights at 11:00pm had a memorable musical track that stuck in my head.


This is the show that aired on WYAH.  This particular episode is from 1986.  Check out Star R. Scott’s hair.


Skip to 4:26 and you can see the ad for Star R. Scott’s show, “Sword of the Spirit”.  It uses a vital, energetic soundtrack.  The music suggests the show will change your life for the positive.  The graphics suggest space… the future…  Listen to this message and your future will be vital and powerful.

In 1989, WYAH was sold and the programming turned secular. The call letters are now WGNT and the channel no longer bears any resemblance to what it was during my childhood. I’m actually kind of sad about that. I like independently run TV channels. They’re more interesting than channels that are part of a huge conglomerate and show the same programming.


I read the article in the Washington Post about Star R. Scott’s church, Calvary Temple, which was regularly advertised on WYAH. To be honest, although I didn’t know about weird religions when I was a kid and wasn’t raised in a weird religion myself, I always kind of got creepy vibes from some the religious shows WYAH broadcasted. Sometimes I used to watch The Rock Church Proclaims, which aired at about 10:00pm every Saturday night. The church was kind of local, since it was based in Virginia Beach and run by Anne and the late John Gimenez. The pastors used to sing and dance behind the pulpit to the music, which included a lot electric instruments… nothing like the organ and piano used at my very conservative Presbyterian church. For some reason, it gave me the willies.

A clip of a service at the Rock Church from 1990, which is kind of like what WYAH used to air.  Lots of speaking in tongues, swaying to music, and dancing.  I’ve never heard anything bad about the Rock Church.

According to the Washington Post’s article about Calvary Temple, Star R. Scott’s church is quite abusive.  The story, written by journalist Britt Peterson, follows the experiences of several former members of Calvary Temple.  Ex churchgoers report that they were expected to shun anyone in their family, including children, who left the church.  In one case, a mother was ordered to send her 15 year old non-believing daughter away from the home because church leaders feared she would influence her 13 year old sister.  In another case, a mother decided to leave the church and four of her five children shunned her.

Scott is also accused of other kinds of abuses.  Former members report that they were required to send their children to Calvary Temple’s privately run school.  Although corporal punishment in public schools was banned in Virginia back in 1989, it is apparently still alive and well at Calvary Temple’s school.  Cynthia Azat, whose mother shipped her off to live with her grandmother at the behest of church leaders, reports that when she was attending the school in the 1990s, she would be paddled regularly.  At one point, she’d be paddled as often as daily.  Sometimes, she didn’t even know why she was being punished.  The paddlings were painful and humiliating; if a student moved during the strikes, he or she would get more.  Moreover, parents were expected to sign legal paperwork that would allow church leaders to discipline their children whenever they wanted to.

Here’s a Washington Post article about Calvary Temple from 2008 with more detail about Scott’s leadership.  Ten years ago, people were calling him toxic and dictatorial.  Below is a snippet from the 2008 article, detailing more abuses by Calvary Temple leaders.

About 400 members remain and are at the church most days for services or activities including fellowship breakfasts and student basketball games, former members said. Families are expected to send their children to Calvary’s school, which has classes from kindergarten through high school.

…others who attended the school say punishments ranged from spankings with a thick wooden paddle to spending the day outside digging, filling and redigging holes.

Charm Kern, a nursing student and mother, says she was traumatized by Calvary teachers telling her in her early adolescence that she was too overweight to be on the cheerleading squad. As punishment for being a “glutton,” said Kern, who is 20, she was tied by a rope to faster children and pulled during runs. She and her brother, who was also overweight, would be required to run while other children ate lunch, she said. By ninth grade, she was rebelling against her teachers, and pastors tried to place her and her brother with another family. Her parents pulled the family out of Calvary.

And further, from the same 2008 article,

Michelle Freeman, 48, left in December 2007 after church leaders and other members urged her to reject her son and her husband, who was not a member. Her son, Channing, had left Calvary as a high school sophomore, setting off heated debates between his parents, leading to their separation.

Channing, 18, wrote an essay this year at his public school describing terrifying dreams about God and Satan he had while in the church. Calvary, he wrote, has “stolen so much of my life. For eleven years I’ve been devoid of a real life. I don’t know what it’s like to live.”

Now, Michelle Freeman is among more than two dozen former members who gather for support. At a Loudoun Starbucks recently, Freeman cried as those around her talked about their wounded families.

In 2002, Star R. Scott’s wife, Janet, was dying.  Rather than mourn for his partner, Scott remarried two weeks after her death.  His new bride was a 20 year old woman named Greer Parker.  Scott was 55 years old and had told his congregation that the book of Leviticus forbade “high priests” to mourn; instead, they were to “take a wife in her virginity.”  He brought Parker up from the congregation after he finished delivering his sermon.

Six years later, there was another scandal within the church, when Scott’s son, Star R. Scott, Jr., and his then-wife sent an email to Scott Sr. accusing him of molesting his two nieces.  The email was circulated among church members.  Other allegations of Scott’s sexual proclivities toward young girls came out, although there were never any criminal charges brought against him.  Although Scott has claimed that the email was full of inaccuracies and “gossip”, he never expressly denied the accusations.

Star Scott is also not above wringing money out of his congregants.  Not only are they expected to tithe ten percent, they are also expected to give money to other projects, some of which never materialized, even when they’re barely able to scrape by.  Meanwhile, Scott owns several expensive cars and motorcycles, which he shows off regularly.  According to Peterson,

Scott started a race car ministry that, to this day, holds shows to display his collection of expensive cars and motorcycles. Around the same time, he led the church leadership to vote for independence from Assemblies of God, which had required that pastors tithe to the umbrella organization. Scott then rewrote the Calvary constitution to eliminate the traditional voting process and end financial transparency, according to several former members.

I could go on about what was in the Post’s article, but I think it’s best for people to read it for themselves.  I did find a few interesting YouTube videos about the church, including one posted by someone who is mentioned in Britt Peterson’s article.  Below, you’ll hear Pastor Scott preaching, sounding very belligerent as he refers to Mormonism as a cult…


“Okay, we’re a cult.  Now go on with your life.  What’s your problem?  What is your problem?  Go grab a Mormon and hassle him!”  

Pot… meet kettle!  Although to Scott’s credit, he does admit that his church is a cult.  Then he says that Christianity is a cult.  

I find cults fascinating.  There’s always a charismatic leader who convinces people to submit to strict rules and makes high demands of the cult members.  Those demands keep the members busy and prevent them from thinking about what they’re doing and how they’re being sucked dry and abused.  

This is an excellent video about cults.  I highly recommend taking the time to watch it because it very clearly illustrates what cults are and how they damage people. 

I guess the hinky feelings I used to get while watching WYAH were genuine.  For all of their sanitizing of sex and profanity from their programming, they were actually encouraging abusive cult leaders like Star R. Scott.  But since that channel was owned by Pat Robertson, I guess I can’t be too surprised.  Robertson himself is a bit of a nut.

You might get AIDS in Kenya…

And demons can attach themselves to clothes… This man once ran for president… I suppose he’s no worse than the man who is in the White House now.

Anyway, I’m grateful that I survived a childhood watching Channel 27 without being sucked into a cult.  But then, I did marry a man who was sucked into Mormonism, so there you go…


Another video about Star R. Scott and how his church has damaged families…  Be careful about the church you join.  It might be a cult.

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musings

Damn, I miss the 80s…

I didn’t grow up in Oakland, California. I’ve never even been to California. Thanks to YouTube, I can watch old clips of a puppet duo called Charley and Humphrey. They had a show in the 70s, but then after the show went off the air, the duo starred in one minute PSAs. Voiced by Pat McCormick, Charley (the horse in the sailor’s cap) and his sidekick, Humphrey (a bulldog), would deliver quick lessons of life to children in the San Francisco Bay area on KTVU, a local channel.

Here are a few Charley and Humphrey clips I found this morning:

The library is a good place to be.
I like the jaunty little intro. And I like how McCormick doesn’t really change his voice between these two characters.
No, I didn’t do any exercise…

We did kind of have this kind of thing in Virginia. Back in the early 80s, most areas had independent television stations. Where I lived, we had WTVZ channel 33, which was secular, and WYAH, which was owned by Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network. I remember WYAH, in particular, had morals lessons like the ones above. They had this one feature called “Squeaky’s World” that was Christian and involved puppets. The one clip I can clearly remember was about the evils of lying. Squeaky was washing himself in the shower, singing about washing away his sin with a little bit of soap. The punchline was that he was using “lie soap” (lye soap). I doubt I can find “Squeaky’s World” on YouTube, although a thorough Web search finds a mention of it in a Virginia Beach newspaper from 1979. My sister was annoyed with me once because I was watching it.

I haven’t watched a lot of network TV lately. I have a feeling that the stuff we used to love watching when we were growing up would be considered totally lame today. I loved the weird commercials and diverse messages that were aired on independent TV and radio stations back in the day. I remember how, back in the late 70s, I could be listening to a top 40 radio station and they would play Led Zeppelin, then follow it with Earth, Wind, & Fire. Or I’d hear Heart followed by the Bee Gees. It was like that throughout the 80s, until radio stations became a lot more automated. Now, radio basically sucks, and television has become nationalized. It used to be you could really get a sense for an area based on what was on the local stations. Now, not so much…

I didn’t realize it when I was a kid, but southeastern Virginia in the early 80s was very Christian focused. Or maybe it just seemed that way because I always watched WYAH, which was a very religious channel. They were always airing Pentecostal stuff. I find it fascinating now, especially as I’ve gotten older and started learning about cults. On my old blog, I wrote a well received post about Calvary Temple, a church in northern Virginia that has come under fire for abusing its members. Star R. Scott, pastor of Calvary Temple, used to host a weekly television show called “Sword of the Spirit” that aired on WYAH. I remembered the theme for it. They’d advertise it between ads for “Benson” and “Brady Bunch” reruns.

This is what we had on our local channel.

Thank God for YouTube. It’s where I love to go and remind myself of what used to be. A lot of relics from my past are long gone, but on YouTube, they are still preserved. And this Star R. Scott character is a creep.

Yikes! I think I’d rather watch Charley and Humphrey.
A lot of people were hurt by this church that was so heavily promoted on WYAH.

I’m sure if I had grown up in Utah, I would be totally flooded with memories about stuff put out by the LDS church. Or if I were growing up in New York, there would be a lot of Catholic or Jewish based PSAs. I’m glad I grew up when and where I did. Virginia was an interesting place in those days.

Even my hometown had a channel for a short time. I found it mostly unwatchable.
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