The expanding CBN empire - Christian Broadcast Network

Christian Century, July 27, 1994

Robertson's most successful venture has been his cable television station the Family Channel. Launched in 1977 under the name CBN Satellite Service, the Family Channel boomed as the nation's first satellite-based basic cable network. After 13 years it became so large and lucrative it risked the wrath of the Internal Revenue Service, which prohibits business operations from becoming bigger than their nonprofit parents. So in 1990 CBN sold the Family Channel to a company headed by Robertson and his son, Tim, for $250 million. CBN remained a stockholder. Two years later Robertson took the company public.

The benefits to CBN go beyond the sale of stock. In all, CBN says it has received 600. million in cash, notes, stock, debt assumption and guaranteed air time for The 700 Club. Family Channel stock enabled CBN to give Robertson's Regent University a $117 million endowment, the largest gift ever given to a private school. Proceeds from the Family Channel deal have also been used to invest in more businesses, including Kalo-Vita, the vitamin and cosmetics company in which Robertson invested, with CBN as his partner.

Art Davis, executive director of the Business Coalition for Fair Competition, said his organization opposes such arrangements. CBN can use tax-exempt donor money to secure "venture capital," Davis noted, while other entrepreneurs have to borrow from banks. "It's the ability to underwrite a venture for a longer start-up time and to devote more resources than the competition can," Davis said.

Robertson has his own theological and personal justification for his religious-business practices. In his 1982 book The Secret Kingdom, in which he lays out his principles of life, Robertson wrote about the responsibility to invest, calling it "the Law of Use." He based that law largely on Jesus' parable in which a shrewd investor was praised and a timid one condemned. "Despite our preconceived attitudes toward social justice," Robertson wrote, "God's Law of Use controls the ultimate distribution of wealth. We must be willing to take the world as He made it and live in it to the fullest. For He says, in fact, that if we are willing to do that - if we are willing to use what He has given us - we will have more. But if we are not willing to use what He has given us, we will lose it."

In a 1993 interview with Investor's Business Daily, Robertson said, "I am by nature an entrepreneur and have enormous faith in God and in the future." He also told Cablevision magazine last year that "my special skill is with stocks and bonds and financial deals."