Politics & Power Quote by Tony Campolo

Campolo’s line lands like a pastor’s lament disguised as a media inventory. The repetition of “thousands” does more than underline scale; it frames an ecosystem so vast that neutrality becomes implausible. He’s not describing a fringe. He’s describing an industry. And once religion is an industry, “programming” starts to look a lot like “messaging.”

The intent is corrective, aimed inward at American Christianity rather than outward at secular culture. Campolo is calling attention to how easily the language of faith gets bundled with a partisan identity until the two feel indistinguishable. His phrasing quietly dares the listener to test it: tune in, sample the dial, notice the pattern. The claim is blunt enough to provoke pushback, but pastoral enough to imply a deeper worry: that Christian media’s default political posture isn’t merely an editorial choice, it’s a formation pipeline shaping believers’ instincts about power, patriotism, race, and economics.

Subtext: if the public face of Christianity is consistently “politically right,” then Christianity itself starts to be heard as “politically right,” collapsing a spiritual tradition into a voting bloc. That’s not just a branding problem; it’s a theological one. Campolo, a prominent evangelical with progressive leanings, is implicitly arguing that the gospel’s moral imagination is wider than the culture-war bandwidth it’s been assigned.

Context matters here: post-1970s religious broadcasting boomed alongside the Moral Majority and its heirs, turning airtime into a political mobilization tool. Campolo isn’t shocked that politics shows up on Christian airwaves; he’s shocked at the near-total lack of ideological diversity, as if God only speaks in one register.