For Troy Miller, president and CEO of National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), faith and journalism go hand in hand. That’s been clear to him throughout his 20-year career at NRB, an organization representing more than 1,100 Christian broadcasting groups. “Truth is a number one top tenet of the Christian faith,” he told The Media Line President Felice Friedson in an interview. “The truth will set you free. That’s what Christ said.”
Mainstream secular journalism, Miller said, has underperformed when it comes to spreading the truth. “Most legacy media, mainstream news media today are really nothing more than propaganda and really opinion pieces,” he said.
“They’re not journalism. They’re not reporting the whole facts and letting people make decisions on their own. They’re really steering these conversations and these opinions.”
Entertainment media, too, promotes a bias, Miller said. “You would watch media and think certain things in the culture today are normal, are just widespread,” he said, noting that the actual rates of LGBTQ identity, for example, are significantly lower than what mainstream media would suggest.
In response to these long-standing trends, NRB has devoted itself to promoting excellence in Christian communication and advocating for legal policies conducive to religious broadcasting.
“We can fix it by being involved,” Miller said. “We can’t shrink back and just complain about the media. We need to get involved. We need to have our voices heard. We need to be bold enough and brave enough and care enough to stand up and speak in the culture. And I’m happy to say that lots of Christian media are filling in the gaps.”
Media infused with Christian values
Miller said that some Christian groups are focusing on producing entertainment media infused with Christian values.
“We have seen so many new studios pop up out there that are trying to bring wholesome, family-valued entertainment, and great entertainment, too, done at the highest quality. We’ve seen Christian movies over the last several years have had great box office success, great success on streaming platforms,” he said.
Social media is another platform where exciting Christian communication is taking place, Miller said. “In the US we have this whole idea of banning TikTok, but we have some ministries and some young adults who are just doing some great work supporting the Judeo-Christian values, supporting Israel, getting the truth out what really happened on October 7, as well as what’s really going on in Israel and the Middle East today,” he explained.
He pointed to the X social media platform’s community notes feature as another technological advance that’s been positive for Christian communicators. “We at NRB work really hard to keep our fingers on the pulse of what’s going on in these different areas,” he said.
Miller, who served in the US Navy in information technology and later worked in Silicon Valley, has a keen understanding of the intersections between technology, business and communications.
“Today’s communications industry and media is just a constant sort of tidal wave of change. We have traditional media and broadcasting still, we have kind of a middle ground of streaming in those, and then we have just all kinds of new digital frontiers that are going on out there,” Miller said. “And so I think the key for us is to make sure that we’re always involved.”
As part of that mission, NRB also provides young people with tools for broadcasting based on Christian values. “The key is, how do we come alongside and support them?” Miller said. “How do we help make their voices louder, and how do we get more people involved?”
One project involves the promotion of journalism programs at Christian colleges and universities. “We’re going to push that even harder this year to advance their journalism programs, to help students understand what it means to actually be a journalist,” Miller said.
Looking forward to the annual NRB convention, which will take place February 23-27, Miller is focused on making advancements in the field regarding technology, policy, and regulation. The group has its eye out for any potential government threats to Christian broadcasting. “We look at anything that’s going to inhibit the First Amendment, the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, which you might think sounds strange, but remember COVID, they shut a lot of churches down,” Miller said.
“The weaponization of both government and corporate entities against media has been off the charts, especially in the new frontier media, the digital platforms out there,” he said. “We had a radio television station here in the US, they were kicked off. Their YouTube channel was shut down for some very vague public policy violation there, and YouTube just completely locked them out of all of their programming. We’ve had a number of stories that have been buried because of the algorithms and Google searches and those things.”
He said that a sitting head of the House Commerce Committee told major conservative networks that they would be investigated if they continued to carry certain programming. “If that’s not intimidation to shut down programming, I don’t know what is,” he said.
A key struggle for NRB relates to an attempt by car manufacturers to stop including AM radios as a standard feature in cars.
“There were a lot of groups, progressive groups, that were lobbying for this, pushing for this, because the two top genres on AM radio across America are conservative talk and Christian talk and teach. And the third one is the Spanish language, and a lot of Christian talk and teach and conservative were reaching Spanish audiences,” Miller said. “And so I think there was a real effort. They would have loved to have seen AM radio shut down across America.”
He said that another motivation for the removal of AM radio is the control of access to information, which would also be a financial boon for the car companies. “If AM radio is shut down, and then all you have now is these connected cars, all these cars are connected through the cellular network to the Internet, then they can control the subscriptions to that car,” he said. “And so the subscriptions for you to get Internet service, the subscriptions for what apps you get access to. And so they were looking at a big revenue stream and also control of information to the car.”
At last year’s NRB conference, President Trump committed to mandating AM radios in all cars. “If Congress gets it finished and it gets to his desk, he will sign this act. And we really think we’re going to get this done in this round,” Miller said.
Support of AM radio is just one of President Trump’s stances that NRB members are excited about. Miller described Trump as “a man of faith.” “He understands that the Judeo-Christian values that this country is founded upon are just that, they’re the foundation. If they erode and if they go away, then the rest of the government, it doesn’t matter what you do, you’re not going to really have a society that works,” he said.
Miller said that President Trump has been loyal to his Christian supporters. “So far, I feel like we’re on warp speed here in the Trump administration for the first three weeks,” he said.
Earlier this month, President Trump established a White House Faith Office and appointed evangelist Paula White to lead the office. He also signed an executive order vowing to eradicate anti-Christian bias.
President Trump’s plan for Gaza has also been received favorably by NRB members. Miller said that the Trump plan addresses the problem in Gaza at the root, rather than creating a scenario where Hamas could take power once again.
He said that many Christian organizations that had funded hospitals and other humanitarian work in Gaza have come to realize that their donations were functionally funding terror. “They realize now that underneath all of that were these terrorist groups that were subverting things,” Miller said. “And we look at this plan—and we’ll keep an eye on it—as a way to save lives, not just Israeli lives, but to save Palestinian lives as well.”
“If what the president is proposing really works, look, for us, I’m going to be very blunt and say this is an opportunity for Christian organizations to help and to advance the gospel to the Palestinian people,” Miller continued.
NRB has also been involved in a campaign calling for the US to adopt the phrase “Judea and Samaria” rather than “the West Bank.” Miller said that President Trump is behind the bill, which Republican lawmakers in both houses recently introduced.
A similar bill was introduced in the Knesset earlier this month to mandate use of the term “Judea and Samaria” in Israeli government documents that refer to the region.
As part of NRB’s campaign, the group worked to educate Christian media organizations about the terminology. “We did a search recently for ‘the West Bank’ across over a dozen Christian media outlets and couldn’t find it over the last seven, eight, nine months. So we see Christian media picking this up, using these terms, helping people to understand this,” he said.
“Christians now understand this is the land Jesus walked in. This is Israel,” Miller said. “This is not some place that was there forever and now Israel has occupied it. So that education has, I think, been key, because that’s put the pressure on the policymakers to recognize what this land is and who it really belongs to.”
He said that the October 7, 2023, attacks have changed the way many Christians relate to Israel. Christians have long been most interested in relating to Israel’s biblical past and its role in the end times, Miller said, but in the wake of the attacks, “the Christian community is starting to really look at Israel in the present, looking at Israel right now.”
“That is really shifting the way the evangelical church thinks about Israel and thinks about the relationships and the initiatives that are going on with Israel, the Jewish people, the religious community within Israel, and really changing a lot of the pressure on government policy and public policy toward Israel,” he said.
Jews and Israelis are also changing their attitudes toward evangelical groups. When NRB began running conventions, few Jews or Israelis attended, but now Jews and Israelis are a common sight at NRB events.
Miller said that as far back as the 1970s, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin met with NRB leaders.
Part of the reason behind improved relations between Jews and evangelicals is that evangelicals’ propensity to proselytize has become less of a sticking point for Jews. “This seems to be a big issue or used to be a big issue across the community there. But look, Israel has opened up,” Miller said. He said that many Christians are able to frame conversations with Jews more respectfully than they did several decades ago.
“As Christians, we’re called to share the gospel, go there into all of the world, right? That’s what we’re called to do. We share the gospel with people. But we do respect people as well,” he said.
The Christian community has also broadened its understanding of Israel in a religious sense, Miller said. “Christians are starting to see that different side of Israel than just that religious side from an evangelical religious view of Israel, to even an Israeli Orthodox Jewish view of Israel,” he explained. “And so that has really helped in starting to grow relationships between both entities.”
While working to promote Christian values, Miller is intent on doing what it takes to restore journalism in the US. “A free press, a press that is not manipulated politically or not manipulated economically, is so important for the future of this country and the future of democracy around the world,” he said.
“Journalism has to come back alive if we’re going to survive,” Miller said. “We talk about it here in the US as being the fourth leg of government. It has to come back alive.”
This article was originally published at www.jpost.com
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