James Robison — a fiery Southern Baptist evangelist who became a Pentecostal TV personality — died May 17 at age 82.
Robison began preaching as a teenager, growing up mainly in the Houston suburb of Pasadena. His official biography tells of being born in 1943 as the product of rape and put up for care by anyone who would take him. A Southern Baptist pastor and his wife took the child in and raised him to age 5 and then again after age 15.
After graduating from Pasadena High School, he briefly attended East Texas Baptist University but already was preaching revivals across the state. In 1965, he and his wife, Betty, began a daily television show that expanded in 1968, reportedly with the help of Billy Graham.
In a 2016 interview, Robison spoke with Jimmy Draper, a longtime Texas Baptist pastor who was an SBC president and then led Lifeway Christian Resources, the SBC’s publishing arm. The two spoke openly about the role SBC conservatives played in forming the Moral Majority and beginning the marriage of evangelicals to the Republican Party.
James Robison preaching at a crusade early in his career.
Had Robison remained a Southern Baptist, he likely would have been among the series of biblical inerrantists elected SBC president in that political movement that launched in 1979. But in 1982, Robison left his Southern Baptist roots and became a Pentecostal.
In that era, Southern Baptists wanted little do with the so-called “charismatic movement” that was sweeping evangelical churches.
In his memoir, A Hill on Which to Die, Paul Pressler recounts that Robison was present at the 1979 SBC annual meeting in Houston that launched the “conservative resurgence.” Not only did Robison preach that year at the SBC Pastors’ Conference, he “led the discussion” at a private meeting Pressler organized at a cafeteria in downtown Houston the night before. That group drafted Adrian Rogers of Memphis, Tenn., to run for SBC president that year — the first of the string of conservatives who would reshape the convention.
Robison was present at the 1979 SBC annual meeting in Houston that launched the “conservative resurgence.”
The next fall, Robison was invited to lead a Bible conference on the campus of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. — one of the key targets of the conservative movement. He was invited by seminary President Duke McCall, whom SBC conservatives deemed a “liberal.”
More importantly, Robison worked with Memphis layman Ed McAteer — a toothpaste salesman who was a member of Rogers’ church — to organize a Public Affairs Briefing in Dallas in August 1980.
This event was pivotal in cementing the relationship between evangelicals and the Republican Party. It was at this gathering that presidential candidate Ronald Reagan famously told the pastors, “I know you cannot endorse me, but I endorse you.”
It also was at this meeting that SBC President Bailey Smith said, “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.”
And Robison himself said at this event: “I’m sick and tired of hearing about all the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the communists coming out of the closet. It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet, out of the churches, and change America!”
Betty and James Robison with Mike Huckabee
Robison’s communications director at the time was Mike Huckabee, who later became governor of Arkansas and today is Donald Trump’s appointed U.S. ambassador to Israel.
Robison’s co-organizer of the Dallas event, Ed McAteer, had been influential in helping Jerry Falwell found the Moral Majority the year before — a follow-on to Falwell’s “I Love America” rallies that happened in 1976, the bicentennial year.
Also in August 1980, Robison appeared uninvited before a U.S. House subcommittee considering the school prayer issue, claiming testimony the previous day by Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs did not represent Southern Baptists.
A Baptist Press report from that day says Robison “was allowed to speak, though that is irregular for uninvited participants, when William Bright, president of Campus Crusade for Christ, referred one of his questions to Robison to answer.”
At that same time, Robison organized and spoke at a “Wake Up! America” conference at a Baptist church in Tulsa, Okla., where he said: “We need to get people in office who believe in biblical principles and have the competency to lead. I don’t believe you are a real American if you have sold your soul to either party. We’re trying to get information into the peoples’ hands to tell them what to do.”
In 1981, Texas Monthly published a profile on Robison headlined, “God’s Angry Man.”
However, Robison’s influence with Southern Baptists came to a screeching halt when he embraced the charismatic movement in 1982. Early the next year, 1983, prominent Houston pastor John Bisagno published a book titled Charismatic Theology Under the Spotlight, which gave a standard Southern Baptist retort to Pentecostalism.
Robison was undeterred, however. His preaching style remained flamboyant and emotional, as seen in a 2010 video from his LIFE Today program where he tells about being “set free” by Pentecostal evangelist Milton Green and then taking that message of Holy Spirit-fueled freedom across the land, including to Baptist churches.
His television and preaching ministry eventually consolidated under Life Outreach International, based in Fort Worth, Texas. His TV program LIFE Today, aired around the world on various television networks and was streamed online.
More recently, James and Betty Robison have been members of Gateway Church, the megachurch founded by Pastor Robert Morris, who confessed to and served prison time for sexually abusing a girl beginning when she was 12. Robison, however, condemned Morris’ actions.
Betty and James Robison
Robison’s political influence continued and eventually reconnected him with Southern Baptists. In 2010, he convened a meeting of about 40 conservative Christian leaders to consider how to oust President Barack Obama from the White House just like the earlier group had replaced Jimmy Carter with Ronald Reagan.
Southern Baptist leaders attending the meeting included Richard Land (president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission); Richard Lee (pastor and editor of The American Patriot’s Bible); John Meador (Draper’s successor as pastor of First Baptist Church of Euless, Texas); and Paige Patterson (then president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary).
In 2024, after Trump won the presidency a second time, Robison went on air and declared: “The enemy was about to grip freedom by the throat. Only a miracle could have broken that grip.”
The evangelist said he had Trump’s personal cell number and could call him anytime. Trump, he said, only “wanted the best for everybody” and his family has been relentlessly attacked by evil forces.