TBN Headquarters Is No More -- The Fate of an Orange County Eyesore

Originally built as the headquarters for the “Full Gospel Businessman’s Fellowship,” this garish facility became the Trinity Broadcast Headquarters in 1996. It was eventually sold in 2017, several years after TBN founders Paul and Jan Crouch both died. The building—in the opinion of many—was the ugliest in the county. It was located on the south side of the 405 fwy, across from Orange County’s famed South Coast Plaza shopping center. If you’ve driven by it, you’ve seen it. It can’t be missed. I’ll bet your first impression was that it was completely out of place in a largely residential neighborhood. Your second thought was the question, “there’s a Las Vegas casino in Orange County?” or “is the circus in town?”

The image below—the staircase leading down to the TV sound stage—is evidence that it doesn’t get tackier than this. Now, thirty years later, it is a pile of rubble. Whatever legacy the Crouch’s left behind it won’t be in Costa Mesa.

I have written previously about Orange County as the new burned over district and spelled out my take on TBN’s massive national influence on American religion (especially Pentecostalism) in the 1980s-early 2000s. Looking through the photos provided by the Orange County Register of the bulldozers demolishing it, I think of the waste. And I wonder (as I did when I wrote my series on OC as the Burned Over District), why do dirt poor Bible Belt folk (like the Crouch’s) end-up spending so much money on a garish facility like this when success finally comes? What makes such folk think an over-built and ostentatious building is the legacy they wish to leave behind?

One reason is that the Crouch’s prosperity gospel of “giving to get” was a huge factor in “moving on up” from a state of the art, if workman like TV headquarters in Tustin (nearby and also in Orange County), to purchase and remodel this monstrosity. One local critic described the campus and the building’s interior as looking like a New Orleans brothel. Another reason—one which plagues prosperity gospel types—is that if you don’t look mega-successful, people won’t believe your give-to-get formula actually works. You’ve got to make your followers believe you made it and they can too. By sending them your money, you are led to believe that you are sowing the seeds of your own future prosperity—caveat emptor surely applies here. Finally, there is the competition factor. As I describe in my essay above, Orange County was home to other huge national ministries. Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral was near Disneyland and visible across much of the county, Calvary Chapel’s large but rather plain church was a mile or so from TBN’s headquarters across the freeway, and there was Rick Warren’s sprawling church campus in South Orange County, along with a host of others.

All of them are gone or now in free-for-all. Surely, there is a lesson to be learned here.