Gary North

September 5, 2007

D. James Kennedy, the pastor of Coral Rridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale, died today at the age of 76. He had suffered a heart attack in December, 2006, and never returned to the pulpit. His daughter announced his retirement on August 26.

Kennedy was a Calvinist in a Calvinistic denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, which separated from the liberal Southern Presbyterian Church in 1973. His congregation has 10,000 members, the largest in the denomination. He started it in 1959.

He was the only Calvinist television evangelist. He was also the only Protestant televangelist who delivered sermons in ecclesiastical robes, a tradition still common though not universal in Presbyterian circles.

His national ministry was part of the evangelical Protestant re-capture of the airwaves. It came as a result of the 1960 decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC-1) to allow radio and television stations to fulfill their requirement to broadcast religious programming by accepting paid broadcasts. The 26-year sweetheart deal between FCC-1 and FCC-2, the theologically liberal Federal Council of Churches, which let FCC-2 screen the preachers, collapsed. As soon as radio and TV stations could get paid for the time devoted to religion, free time ended. Subsidized indirectly for decades by the Federal government, Protestant liberalism never learned to compete for an audience on the air.

[It was altogether fitting that the ruling came in 1960, the same year that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., died. He had been the primary donor behind Protestant liberalism since about 1920, as his father had been since about 1900. Senior had put up money to launch FCC-2 in 1908, which after 1950 was called the National Council of Churches. The primary liberal radio preacher, 1927-1946, was Harry Emerson Fosdick, Junior's pastor, who was on the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1917 when Junior took over, and which his brother ran after 1920.]

His influence would have been extensive even if he had not gone on TV. He was the developer of the widely used evangelism program known as Evangelism Explosion. He also founded Knox Theological Seminary, which trains men for the ministry, primarily for service in Presbyterian circles.

His weekly television broadcasts were sometimes followed by hour-long specials on political, historical, and economic topics. I was on one of them that dealt with inflation. He was politically conservative.

He believed the obvious: the United States was originally a Christian nation, which is reflected in the trinitarian oaths required by most of the states in the period of the Articles of Confederation. These oaths were extensions of the oaths required by the British crown for colonial officer-holders. He also believed that the United States remained officially (covenantally) Christian under the United States Constitution, a far more difficult thesis to maintain, due to the Constitution's explicit forbidding of any religious test for an office-holder of the United States government (Article VI, Section III). I have explained this problem elsewhere.

Kennedy lived in a modest home. There was never a hint of scandal regarding his ministry.

The church's organist, Diane Bish, became nationally famous through his broadcasts. She has been featured on numerous PBS shows.