The Family Life Network and the Further Degeneration of Evangelical Radio

Recently I've had the opportunity at work to listen to the radio during the noon hour, something that has largely eluded me for the past year. The Family Life Network (FLN) based in Bath NY continues to expand its listening area and unfortunately this includes the region of Pennsylvania where I live. A typically Evangelical organisation, its theology is light and is mostly geared toward therapy and entertainment-based 'ministries' complimented with copious amounts of trite and terrible Christian pop music.

Usually the only thing I bother with is their news show. And yet having listened very little over the past year (I only occasionally listen to their teaching programmes and I cannot stomach the music), I was struck by how much the organisation has shifted to the Right.

There was a noteworthy shift that took place with the advent of Donald Trump but now with Biden in office the network is quite open in its opposition. Every story is spun, every mainstream report receives a follow-up FOX clip or other Right-wing gloss. The network has never been as bad as some out there like WDCX out of Buffalo, AFR, VCY, or even some of the stuff I hear on Moody Radio which I pick up as I head in the direction of Ohio. That said, FLN is awful and getting worse. From the clips of Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin to the blatant attempts to spin stories and promote disinformation, the once tepid and lightweight Evangelical organisation has experienced a Right-wing awakening – a different kind of woke-ness that's just as (if not more) problematic.

But this is combined with the confusion that all too typically reigns in Evangelicalism. Like many of the leaders within the movement, the radio station has fraudulently engaged in revisionist history and attempts to appropriate the legacy of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. As February is 'Black History Month' they run profiles on Black Church leaders, which indiscriminately includes profiles of women preachers. It's surprising, but on one level it shouldn't be as feminism is embraced and encouraged, and women's ordination has slowly been creeping into an accepted position within those circles.

Generally speaking, just trying to listen to the network has become intolerable. The music may be popular but it only displays the lack of discernment within Evangelicalism. A great deal of it is rooted in emotionalism, psychology and in particular the psychology of self-esteem. Even in much of the network's programming, rhetoric, and promotions, the Sufficiency of Scripture is clearly denied and even met with hostility. The Scriptures are not enough. They would deny that this is their position, but their messages concerning piety, Christian growth and character building, and certainly worship and ecclesiology all stray far beyond and are often in direct contradiction to Scriptural teaching. All of this is combined with an endless and insufferable chain of sacrilegious jokes and promos. They don't mean them to be offensive but as the God of Scripture is largely unknown to them they treat Him as trite, and doctrine and Biblical history as something of a game. Their Madison Avenue mentality and casual attitude towards holy things is foreign to Scripture.

From their sacrilege to their Right-wing politics, to their functional rejection of Scripture, and their disinformation and revisionism – the experience is one of revulsion and yet it's popular and continues to grow. It tickles the ear it would seem. The network has been fairly awful for decades but in just the past year it's made an even worse turn. The fact that no one else seems to notice is maybe what concerns me most of all.