University of Virginia Library

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.