Fundamentalist Exchange: The evangelical pipeline between New Zealand and the United States.

Part 3: Geoff Botkin - Part 1

Source | Geoff Botkin

Geoff Botkin is a man with many titles, labels, and accolades you could attach to his name. With a significant portion of his career lost to the pre- and early-internet times, his various biographies have, strangely enough, become more vague and even benign with time compared to the increasingly conservative and right-wing projects he either develops or becomes involved in.

When one reads about Botkin, his spiritual beliefs are not obvious. In many ways, it is because what we do know about his spiritual and religious beliefs is not very distinct from his evangelical peers and collaborators; pick a right-wing, conservative Christian view of the world and you will find an essay or video from Botkin (or one of his children) on that topic.

Rinse, Dry, Repeat.

What does make Botkin an interesting figure is this unstoppable drive to be a leader in the reformation of culture. It sometimes gets to the point that you feel that any claim he makes to having any influence outside of the local CrimeStoppers is utterly outrageous.

But, as I have come to find out, there is more than a few grains of truth to Geoff's CV, if maybe a few points of exaggeration liberally dusted throughout.

In 2020-2021, under the STAND UP AND LEAD PROJECT, his biography was as follows:

GEOFFREY BOTKIN is a grateful American, husband, father of seven and grandfather of ten. Eight years ago he moved his family out of a city of two million to small-town, rural Tennessee. He is involved in the life of his local community, local church, and local business; he serves on the board of T. Rex Arms. He also serves on a national consortium of business executives, entrepreneurs, military and government officials, computer professionals, academicians, state and local law enforcement, all of whom share an informed interest in hardening the vulnerabilities in America's critical infrastructure.

In 2014-2015, this was his bio:

… is an internationally-sought after speaker, historian, cultural analyst, and filmmaker. He has been studying cultural change, geopolitics, and education for the last 40 years, and has been sought as an expert in publications, books, and films. Over the last 25 years, he has produced over 100 public-affairs documentaries, and his work has been seen by thousands throughout the United States, Russia, Europe, and Australasia.

Geoff is currently the Senior Consultant and board member for the Western Conservatory of Arts and Sciences, a worldview think tank and cultural depository, producing films and materials that help families and culture changers develop long-reach visions. He is also an advisor to the humanitarian agency Strategic Initiatives and Interdiction Group. Geoff and his wife Victoria reside with their family in rural middle Tennessee.

Potentially taking inspiration from the growing popularity of Duck Dynasty, Geoff (or one of his kids) writes his 2013 bio like an overconfident undergraduate:

Since his children have known him, he's been an artist, cultural analyst, political consultant, documentary filmmaker, writer and lecturer. Before that he worked on seismic oil exploration exploding dynamite, and for a season with ducks and duck hunters as a wildlife biologist.

In 2010, his bio leaned more on his academic and media connections:

… currently serves as a senior consultant to the Western Conservatory of the Arts and Sciences. He is the creator and primary author on the Battle For Civilization television project.

For the last five years Geoffrey Botkin has been probing the connections between national culture, public justice and personally-held theological belief. Mr. Botkin has lectured on philosophy and history at Hillsdale College, on political media at the Heritage Foundation, and theology for The Witherspoon School of Law and Public Policy.

His works include some of the most controversial and widely watched public affairs films of the last twenty years, reaching viewers across the US, Russia, Europe and Australasia. He has produced or executive-produced more than 100 documentary films, television productions and other media projects.

In addition to time spent as CEO of an experimental international print/broadcast/internet media conglomerate, Mr. Botkin has invested many years in the training of young media professionals, primarily at Deerwood Studios in the US, the Family Television Network of New Zealand, and at the San Antonio Christian Film Academy, where he has served on the faculty.

That's right. Geoff Botkin spent several years in New Zealand and at one point this country had a place of prominence in his religious and personal plans.

But despite his everchanging bio, who is Geoff Botkin, exactly? Depends on who you ask. The heyday of interest in Geoff Botkin occurred when he was aligned with Vision Forum in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Cynthia Kunsman's website, Under Much Grace, remains the best resource on the Botkin's although one often has to visit the Wayback machine to bring some dead links back from the dead. It is Kunsman's article “Who is Geoffrey Botkin” that provides much of the information we have on Botkin's early years.

Geoff Botkin was one of four children born to John and Halcyon Botkin. While his parents were god-fearing Christians, Geoff would claim that (somehow, somewhere) he was trained to be a Marxist and he made much about being an ex-Marxist around 2008.

And maybe he did dabble in touting some Che Guevara merch during his youth, no one knows for sure. What is known is that Geoff, his brother Gregory, and both of their future spouses were student at the University of Oklahoma campus when they were swept up in Jim McCotter's Great Commission Ministries (GCM) group. GCM is a network of independent evangelical churches founded in 1965 by McCotter in an attempt to grow an authentically new testament church. McCotter came form a Plymouth Brethren background and believe that God had shown him a strategy to plant churches and spread the gospel in order to win the world for Christ. GCM became best known for its “blitzes” of university campuses in the early 1970s: two or three day conferences with signing, tract distribution, and canvassing. The activities of the movement eventually drew the attention of cult awareness groups.

During his time with GCM, McCotter caught flack for his controversial beliefs on disciplining children and on dating. In 1983, McCotter moved GCM operations near Washington, D. C. to Silver Spring, Maryland where several members of the GCM from Oklahoma. Geoff is known to have followed McCotter as he is identified as an administrative assistant for the GCM in a 1986 article. While in Maryland, GCM attempted to influence local politics and formed a short-lived lobby group called Americans for Biblical Government.

In 1986-87, McCotter parted ways with the GCM and asides from a one-off event in 2003, had no association with the organisation he founded. He would go so far as to claim that while he went to church, he was not involved in any movements. The KANE report from 1990 had doubts as to whether McCotter had truly cut ties with GCM.

We do know that he didn't cut ties with Geoff Botkin, but we will get back to McCotter in a moment.

Back to Geoff. It is unclear if he completed his university education once meeting McCotter - he doesn't advertise that he has any formal tertiary education.

What we do know of his activities in the 80s and 90s is a bit piecemeal: an occasional, digitised newspaper article and crumbs provided by his son Isaac Botkin on a couple of podcasts.

In 1985/86, when Isaac was 5 years old, Geoff started his own video production business (possibly called Prime Time Design) in D.C. which meant he worked on a lot of stuff that wasn't documented, such as commercials, campaign ads, and political documentaries. Sometimes it would be the speaker of the house who would call Geoff to pull something together on a particular topic, other times it could be doing camera work for local affiliates of the major news networks.

Isaac noted that many of these videos could be purchased via an 1-800 number. One of these documentaries from this period was called “Justice on Furlough”, an anti-Dukakis piece. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly was involved in the project and members of her support group, Eagle Forum, were thought to be the main target; Geoff, on the other hand, had bigger ambitions for the video to be aired on national networks despite Schlafly's doubts. He also produced a 1992 film called “The Guiding Hand - Inside Clinton's Mysterious OBE Laboratory”, and anti-Clinton film about a residential summer programme for high-achieving high school seniors in Arkansas.

Geoff was a big home-schooling proponent and in 1997 co-founded Exodus 2000 with one Rev. E. Ray Moore, a project which promoted the withdrawal of Christian students from the United States public school system. Geoff would maintain his connections with this project and produce a documentary titled IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America in 2010.

Geoff seems to have kept this work steady through to the late 90s when his attention turned to New Zealand.

In a June 1999, article by Josie Clarke for the Nelson Mail, we have evidence of Botkin doing paid speaking tours in New Zealand about the Y2K problem. Clarke writes that Botkin is the author of a book titled What Will Become of Us? Counting Down to Y2K that was published in 1998. However, the only book with that title to be found is edited by Julian Gregori with none of the chapters being credited to any specific authors. The book does have a doomsday prepper feel with religion interspersed so it is possible that Geoff did contribute to this work.

In July 1999, Geoff was profiled in the Nelson Mail about his concern regarding the Y2K bug. In the profile, Botkin is reported to believe that it was impossible to find and check all embedded chips that had the two-digit year data in them, particularly in the time remaining before the clock struck midnight on January 1st, 2000. Botkin is alleged to have consulted companies and governments facing disruptions caused by the bug and began to question whether the United States was the place to be. Botkin, through his television company Deerwood Studios, had made a documentary on Y2K

Through his professional connections to congressmen and their aides, Botkin claimed to have had knowledge about geopolitics that made NZ seem appealing. He visited in February and March of 1997 to research the move and was initially impressed with the Nelson region and the possibilities it had for becoming more self-sufficient. He brought his wife and seven children to settle temporarily in Mapua in March 1999 on a Visitor's Visa but, at the time of the 1999 article, was applying for a long-term business Visa with the intent to start a company called First Pacific. Botkin makes the odd set of statements that implied that while NZ was not nearly as computer dependent, NZ was the best place to be if you wanted to be on the cutting edge of technology. The role that he envisioned for his company would look beyond January 2000 and rebuild whatever needed to be rebuilt.

However, we know that the future Botkin planned for never came to be. First Pacific Information Technology was established with his two sons eventually becoming company directors but in archived versions of the website from 2009, the company appears to just be a webstore for the family's Christian-centric publications.

Despite their dreams of being on the bleeding edge of a societal rebuild, the Botkins as a clan found other ways to keep busy. Both Geoff and his eldest son Isaac worked in NZ television. Both are said to have worked in Christian-oriented businesses owned by Trevor Yaxley: the Family Television Network and Lifeway College. In 2001, Geoff was listed as one of the trainers of Lifeways' 100 wave army. This programme appears to be a Christian boot-camp/outdoor adventure camp to train upwards of 500 people to “shake the gates of hell and set up the Kingdom of heaven on earth”. Isaac, then aged 20-21, seems to have worked in more humble roles for Yaxley including advanced training of photojournalists, high-end graphic design and live news production at Lifeway. Isaac also worked as a senior animator at the Yaxley-owned HuHu studios but whether he helped “... design and build one of the most advanced studios in the southern hemisphere…” or assist “...in recruiting talented animators from Russia, Japan, France, Canada, Argentina, England” has not been verified.

While some online critics seem to question Isaac's bona fides with animation, it is not out of the realm of possibility that being home-schooled offered additional opportunities to build skills in animation and video production and to get work. In one podcast, Isaac acknowledges that he had access to some fairly advanced editing hardware and software and was able to score some of his early contracts (including the 1995 project with the US Naval Office of Undersea Warfare) with the help of his father and his father's contacts.

But Geoff's big business move began in November 2000 when Jim McCotter arrived in Christchurch. In March 2001, McCotter purchased Canterbury Television for $500,000, launched a new, thrice-weekly newspaper called the Christchurch Citizen in July that same year, and started a magazine in January 2002 called Entertainment and Style. Geoff Botkin was alongside, placed as the CEO of McCotter's New Zealand Media Group.

Back in 1983, McCotter preached about the “Media Mandate”. As part of their goal to win the world for Christ, the GCM had a fundamental tactic of providing neutral material of interest to general consumers in order to draw them in and make them open to the teachings and viewpoints of McCotter. In May 2002, Matt Conway of the NZ press called out Botkin and McCotter for their extreme right-wing leanings. Despite some minor attempts to give direction on articles, it seems that they were initially successful with their trojan horse. But McCotter left NZ in late 2001 and by early 2002, Botkin had resigned from his CEO role.

But despite these business setbacks, Geoff was about to gain a second wind: His two daughters, Anna Sophia and Elisabeth, were about to become rising stars in the stay-at-home daughter movement and a profile-raising partnership with Doug Philips and Vision Forum was on the horizon.

Come back next week to learn how success in New Zealand isn't totally off the table for Geoff Botkin, including plans for a Botkin as Prime Minister.