The Flaming Context of Televangelism
Such data leave no excuse for anyone to doubt that we are well
into a religious storm of considerable magnitude. The crude, bold
revivalists who invade our homes through the tube are but one
indicator of the larger phenomenon. We in the media, however,
tend to be like park rangers who report specific blazes in our local
field of vision. We do not put various reports together to tell us
that the forest is burning. In my case, an unholy fear of standing
alone and being misunderstood or laughed at has made me
cautious about trying to spell out the general evidence of total
religious turmoil. When I try to describe the new decade as the
Ecstatic Eighties, I still cannot ignore the fear and trembling that
come with knowing that mystical terrors are moving under the
surface of everyday events.
My purpose here is to suggest that you read this book on
television evangelists with a conscious sense of the broader
religious struggle. The stakes are high. If we are headed into a
New Reformation, as some theologians argue, it may have a
reformation's customary quota of bloody civil strife and of holy
wars against fundamentalists of other faiths. That warning does
sound shrill, I know, but it only points to obvious potentials.
Anita Bryant's war on Florida homosexuals gave the country a
foretaste of how savage a political skirmish can get when one side
crusades against the personal sins of the other. On the world
stage, the Shiite fundamentalists who played ayatollah tricks on
fifty-two helpless hostages may have lit the fuse for nuclear war
in the hearts of Christian true believers. To ignore such
possibilities implicit in religious ferment would be irresponsible.
Such concerns leave no room for the cheap partisanism that has
tended to rule both sides of the fight over the "electronic
church." Especially during the 1980 presidential campaign, it
has been hard to find honest and serious information about the
prime-time preachers and their followers. But the authors of this
book have a different ax to grind: their emotion, like their wit,
arises from scholarly passion, not from partisan politics or church
schism. So stop reading now if you are hunting for somebody to
confirm your prejudice against the Reverend Jerry Falwell, or on
the other hand to help you make a slick case for Moral Majority.
Both authors have been deeply involved in this crisis for many
years, one as a top sociologist of religion and the other as a
leading Christian communicator and Ph.D. researcher in
communications. Dr. Charles E. Swann is a former president and a
director of American Protestantism's professional broadcasters
(the North American Broadcasting Section of the World Association
for Christian Communication). He has also served as an officer of
American Catholicism's broadcasting association, Unda-USA.
An ordained Presbyterian minister and a Doctor of Sacred Theology,
Dr. Swann now manages WRFK-FM, the fine-arts radio station in
Richmond owned by Union Theological Seminary. He has fought for
serious research in religious communication and been known as an
internal critic of mainline church broadcasting.
Dr. Jeffrey K. Hadden earned his Ph.D. in the sociology of
religion from the University of Wisconsin and is now professor
of sociology at the University of Virginia as well as former
president of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.
To Jeff, the biblical admonition to speak the truth with love
translates into the passionate objectivity of the dedicated
sociologist. So does his need to spot underlying trends that
escape the quick-study reporter. Now forty-four, Jeff has
devoted his professional life to rigorous research on the
belief and behavior of religious groups. By 1968, when I first
persuaded him to work with me on a nationwide survey of changing
student values, he was just completing one of his six major books,
The Gathering Storm in the Churches. It was a prophetic
analysis of exactly how the civil rights struggle was leaving
liberal clergymen morally isolated from the laity. Jeff's knowledge
of the literature on religion let us go directly into the hidden
beliefs of the protest generation, and one discovery eventually
led us both to the underlying theme of this book.
