That’s the subject line of a fundraising email I received this week from Robert Schuller Ministries. I conducted a lengthy interview with ministry leader Robert A. Schuller, the eldest son of Crystal Cathedral founder Robert H. Schuller, and I was struck by how radicalized the pandemic had made him. (His words, not mine.) When we talked in August 2021, he insisted that COVID-19 vaccines were causing mass deaths and injuries that were being suppressed by the government and the media. That was not just a private belief, it was was a belief that he shared with his Orange County congregation and on social media. (Of course, it was the spread of such misinformation that contributed to many thousands of unnecessary deaths in the United States.)
I opened “Soul Winners” with the pandemic because it was a useful window into how evangelicals think and act. The mistrust of science runs deep in evangelical history, which helps explain the widespread opposition to masking and vaccines. There’s also an ingrained skepticism of government mandates, which are seen as threats to religious liberty. (This explains the vilification of Dr. Anthony Fauci, both a career government employee and a scientist.) And the movement values individualism over collective action, which undermines efforts to address a public health crisis.
As a younger man, Schuller had the reputation of being a bland version of his flamboyant father. The son was seen as a steady but starchy presence in the pulpit. After finally taking the reins from his ailing father, Schuller was pushed out by his family for trying to instill standard accounting practices for nonprofits. The ministry soon went bankrupt and the Catholic Diocese of Orange bought the Garden Grove campus.
Schuller dabbled in business and hosted a radio show before returning to ministry when the pandemic took hold in early 2020. The closure of churches angered Schuller, and he responded by conducting drive-in services in Newport Beach — much like his father did when he moved to Orange County in the 1950s. Robert A. Schuller integrated his personal political beliefs into his sermons to a degree no one in his family had done before. Robert H. Schuller was undoubtedly conservative, but he largely kept his opinions to himself in favor of spreading his upbeat “possibility thinking” message.
Schuller’s email, coming just a week before the midterm elections, mentions the pandemic as a wake-up call for him. “In this election year it is more important than ever that we vote for candidates of faith. We are in a war against religion,” he writes, with the second sentence highlighted in yellow. The message continues with a broadside against modernism in all of its forms:
The battles are ones of ideology; Faith vs Science; Planet vs Humanity; Mechanistic vs Vitalistic Health; Propaganda vs Free Speech; Woke vs Awake; Technocracy/Dictatorship/Socialism/Totalitarianism/Communism vs our Republic, the United States of America. Before they can take the world, they have to take down the one thing that is stopping their plan, The Constitution of the USA and its foundation on GOD!!
As the World Economic Forum, The United Nations, and The World Health Organization, are pushing their agenda, they are using every tool at their disposal; Critical Race Theory, Gender Identity, The Green New Deal, The Digital Gulag, ESG (Ecology, Social, Governance) financial scores, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), Corporate Marxism, Medical Tyranny, Technocracy, Mass Formation Psychosis, Eugenics, Ordination of Sin, Transhumanism, Propaganda, Speech Suppression and DNA manipulation, and the list goes on.
But all of God’s creation was created for YOU!! Globalists hate that. They see humanity as a scourge on the planet. They want to reduce world populations through infertility, abortion, starvation, war, and any other means necessary.
Schuller discussed some of these themes in our interview, but to see his worldview laid out in such detail is stunning. The tenor of it resembles unhinged emails I’ve received for years as news editor that end up in a junk folder. The most obvious inaccuracy is the idea that the Constitution has its “foundation on God.” The document pointedly does not reference God or Jesus or Christianity. Instead, the framers wanted a free marketplace for religion where no sect would dominate, thus they did not establish an official religion. The Constitution also bans religious tests for public office, which runs counter to Schuller’s call to “vote for candidates of faith.”
Schuller’s statement is shot through with paranoid thinking rather than possibility thinking. His warnings against “Globalists” and the U.N. evoke Pat Robertson’s apocalyptic screeds against “the new world order” and the coming of “a world government” in the 1980s and 1990s. The ideas that God is under attack and that America must be saved echo the sermons of evangelical figures of the past such as Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell.
And yet Schuller’s message is very much of the moment. His references to the “Green New Deal,” “Critical Race Theory” and “Gender Identity” are pitched to consumers of Fox News and right-wing social media. His crusade to “fight for truth” puts him squarely in league with conservative leaders who are always summoning their followers to the ramparts. The “truth” that Schuller is peddling consists of discredited conspiracy theories. His overheated rhetoric about cultural embattlement is untethered to reality. Schuller’s swerve to the right may be profitable for his ministry, but it fuels the polarization plaguing our country.