 | Chapter 2 The Video Vicarage Prime Time Preachers: The Rising Power of Televangelism |  |
THE SUPERSAVERS
The elder statesmen of fundamentalist religious telecasting are Billy Graham,
Rex Humbard, Oral Roberts, and Jerry Falwell. Collectively, they may have as
many viewers as most of the other TV preachers combined. They are all
fundamentalist in theology, but there are important differences in their
approaches to television and in the messages they preach.
Billy Graham
According to legend, William Randolph Hearst sent out a two-word memo to
his nationwide chain of newspapers: "Puff Graham." The year was
1949, and young Billy Graham was conducting an evangelistic crusade in Los
Angeles. Reporters and editors obliged Mr. Hearst, and Billy hit the big time.
During the thirty-three years of Billy Graham's worldwide evangelistic crusades he has spoken to 90 million persons face to face. The number who have seen or heard him on television and radio may total in the hundreds of millions. He is unquestionably the most highly visible and preeminent religious figure in the United States. He has his critics, but year after year he appears on the list of America's ten most respected men.
Billy Graham has been so long identified with religious broadcasting that some casual observers are surprised to learn that he has never had a regular long-term television program. Graham's televised crusades are all specials. They appear on an irregular basis in prime time, which Graham purchases on stations around the country for each broadcast.
As a typical crusade telecast opens, cameras pan a rapidly filling stadium or auditorium. Other cameras have caught footage of crowds streaming into the entrances. Song leader Cliff Barrows directs several hundred people in a volunteer choir. Invariably, the choir sings "How Great Thou Art," which has been called the national anthem of revivalism. Warm-up activities have traditionally included solos by George Beverly Shea and by commercial recording artists, with testimonies by those artists and by other famous people.
Finally, Billy preaches. The message is always the same: "You must repent. You must be born again." Billy seldom speaks of social ills, except to point them out as the fruits of sin. He has been criticized by some who would like him to use his enormous influence to address them. His reply is that he was called to be a New Testament evangelist, not an Old Testament prophet. Graham's is a personalistic, privatistic gospel that never wanders from the necessity of individual transformation through accepting Jesus Christ as Savior.
Some critics consider Graham's theology shallow and his methods anachronistic, but they exempt him from the indictment of competing with local churches. Graham will not conduct a crusade in any city unless that crusade is sponsored by the churches; the churches must furnish droves of people to handle local arrangements, supervise the collections, and be responsible for follow-up activities. Lots of local people are also needed to act as counselors at the crusades.
Counselors serve more than one purpose, according to David L. Altheide and John M. Johnson, who studied a Graham crusade in Phoenix: "At the moment of Graham's invitation to ‘come forward to Christ,’ counselors and choir members begin moving forward . . . . To a naive member of the audience or a television viewer, this movement creates an illusion of a spontaneous and mass response to the invitation. Having been assigned seating in
Graham is a fundamentalist, at least to the extent that he has organized his life and ministry around the literal truth of the Scriptures. But he has never displayed any interest in the battle cries of fundamentalism. He is just not an "aginner." Graham is a Southern Baptist but downplays denominationalism. His wife is a Presbyterian, and their home is in Montreat, North Carolina, a Presbyterian conference, vacation, and retirement center.
Graham typifies the evangelicalism that the more traditional and conservative members of nearly all U.S. mainline Protestant denominations have in common. He is the TV preacher of choice for evangelical mainliners, who number many millions.
The finances of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association have been scrutinized many times. Graham has come out clean, but he was embarrassed in 1977 when the Charlotte Observer discovered an undisclosed $23-million fund in Texas, apparently not mentioned in the accountings of the Minneapolis headquarters. Since then, anyone who requests a copy of the BGEA audit is mailed one. Graham's business manager led the formation of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability after Graham said on a national telecast, ". . . there are some charlatans coming along and the public ought to be informed about them and warned against them."
Oral Roberts
Many Americans still remember Oral Roberts as the man with the "world's
largest gospel tent" who traveled from city to city from the late 1940s
through the early 1960s. During the twenty years of his tent meetings, he
established a reputation as a spellbinding preacher and faith healer. Roberts
is still a spellbinding preacher, but the healing is much less flamboyant, as
he now heals only in
Granville Oral Roberts, son of a Pentecostal Holiness minister, grew up in poverty in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma. His father's ministry, according to Oral's own account, was sporadic, and the family was sometimes hungry. In his book The Call, Roberts tells of running away from home, only to return when he was stricken by tuberculosis. He also describes a miracle cure, both of the tuberculosis and of the stuttering that had plagued him till then. He certainly doesn't stutter today. He is a powerful preacher with many followers, who send him more than $50 million a year for the support of his TV show, his university, and his hospital.
Oral was licensed to preach as a Pentecostal Holiness minister in 1935. He attended a few college courses but has had no formal theological training. He was pastor of a church in Enid, Oklahoma, in 1947 when he rented a local auditorium and conducted a crusade. In 1948 he conducted his first tent meeting.
Oral's first television program, on January 10, 1954, was broadcast on sixteen stations. It was filmed in a studio, but in early 1955 he began filming in the tent. For a time his sermons were done in a studio, healing lines in the tent. Changing times in TV led to changes in Roberts's approach, however. Seeing that the medium was growing more sophisticated, Roberts dropped his program in 1967, when his tent came down for the last time.
Roberts was seeking new styles in more than one way. By 1966 he was seriously considering joining the Methodist Church. He did so in 1968, although not at the highest level of Methodist ministerial orders. He returned to the air in 1969 with new ecclesiastical credentials and a new television style.
His new television program was at first taped in the NBC studios in Burbank, California, but it is now done in Roberts's own multimillion-dollar studios on the campus of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. The production facilities at the university are considered to be among the best in the country. The Miss Teen-age America Pageant, country music programs, commercials, and other shows have been produced there when Roberts's own taping schedule permitted renting out the facilities.
Roberts's new program bore no resemblance to those of his sawdust-trail days under canvas. He had adopted the look and the techniques of modern television entertainment programming. Oral's son, Richard, became the singing star of the show, backed up by the World Action Singers of ORU. Guest stars were scheduled frequently on the weekly program, and always on the periodic prime-time specials. Before each taping, a warm-up session helped the audience to relax and clap with enthusiasm. During the warm-up, cameras recorded applause and smiling faces as cutaways to be edited into the program later. Opening and closing program shots featured scenes from the beautiful, ultramodern campus of Oral Roberts University, Roberts's showcase in Tulsa. Recent programs have also featured shots of Oral's huge City of Faith medical complex, which is under construction but in serious financial trouble. The medical center has been attacked by the Tulsa Hospital Council, which complains that the hospital isn't needed because Tulsa already has a surplus of a thousand hospital beds, and the City of Faith would put other hospitals out of business.
In early 1980 "Oral Roberts and You" was being shown on 165 TV stations and had the largest audience of any syndicated religious program. Yet this audience has diminished since Roberts's heyday, as Oral's tremendous financial problems have driven him to devote much energy and program time to fund raising. He preaches and teaches about "seed faith" stewardship, in which money planted in the Oral Roberts ministries will bear fruit in the form of multiple blessings from God. He pleads for financial support so that he can finish his hospital. He proclaims "financial emergencies" that can be met only by immediate gifts from his viewers. It remains to be seen whether he can get more money from fewer viewers, but his audience appears to be shrinking because of his deemphasis of entertainment in favor of fund raising and a more traditional worship service format.
Rex Humbard
The choir and orchestra soar into the theme song, "You Are
Loved." Graphics swirl on the screen, followed by a visual
extravaganza of colored lights from the stage set. A beaming,
bouncing announcer appears and asks the audience to "give a
The atmosphere is Nashville "countrypolitan," right down to the coatless orchestra members in open-neck shirts and unbuttoned vests. The closing credits of the program include stores that have furnished gowns and suits to the fourteen members of the Humbard family. Together, these brothers, sisters, spouses, and grandchildren form various singing ensembles; Rex occasionally strums his guitar in accompaniment. He also engages in patter with family matriarch Maud Aimee, whose middle name was bestowed in remembrance of female evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Guests are introduced, who perform or chat with Rex. Humbard's sermons are brief and personal, and they seem barely to interrupt the flow of entertainment. Rex invites letters and prayer requests and usually prays over a pile of them in each program. Professionally produced spot announcements offer to viewers "You Are Loved" pins or some other trinket designed to acquire names for the mailing list. Each Christmas he carries the names and prayer requests of all his friends to Calvary, from where his holiday program is beamed back to the United States by satellite.
Humbard's program is normally videotaped at the first church ever designed specifically for the requirements of television. The 5,000-seat Cathedral of Tomorrow is a round building with a domed roof. It contains a huge electronic organ with three sets of pipes—but the organ is never used on the TV show. It doesn't seem to fit the format, for no traditional church hymns are sung on the show. The mood and the music are strictly upbeat contemporary gospel.
Beneath a 100-foot-long cross illuminated with 5,000 light bulbs, the stage is large enough to accommodate TV cameras and crews, choir, orchestra, and the Humbard family. No pulpit can be seen, although Rex sometimes takes his place behind what appears to be a Plexiglas music stand.
Until 1952, Alpha Rex Humbard was one of the Humbard Family Singers in his itinerant preacher father's traveling tent revival entourage. After a successful revival in Akron, Ohio, he
Rex Humbard had no formal theological training and was ordained by his father. Humbard writes in To Tell the World, however, of having studied courses in Bible and religion and being ordained by the International Ministerial Federation, an association of independent, nondenominational ministers. The frantic pace of revival meetings which he and his family conducted, always on the move from one city to the next, makes one wonder just where and when Humbard had time to study. He has never been a member of any denomination.
The church he established in 1953, Calvary Temple, was nondenominational. It met for the first few years in a defunct movie theater purchased by Humbard. Calvary Temple grew until five services had to be conducted every Sunday to accommodate the crowds. In 1958 the Cathedral of Tomorrow was completed.
Humbard's first television broadcasts, live from Calvary Temple, went on the Akron airwaves in 1953, not long after he had observed the crowd watching television in front of O'Neil's. In the days before videotape, programs not on motion-picture film could not be distributed to other TV stations, and motion-picture film production is tedious and expensive. Oral Roberts was willing to bother with it in those days, but Rex Humbard wasn't. Consequently, distribution of his program was limited to a few relatively close stations in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. But with the arrival of videotape in the early 1960s, Humbard began to branch out. He had reached, by his own account, 68 stations by 1968. That number grew to 115 by 1970, to 175 by 1975, and today he is on 207 U.S. television stations.
Rex Humbard is a simple man with a simple message, which he still delivers with a soft Arkansas drawl. He may not succeed in carrying the gospel to all the world, but more than any other syndicated televangelist, he has taken up the challenge. His program is translated into seven languages and shipped to eighteen foreign countries, where it is broadcast on more than 400 television and shortwave radio stations. The Rex Humbard Ministry maintains offices in Canada, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, Brazil, and Chile. The Humbard family also travels the
Jerry Falwell
Jerry Falwell grew up listening to Charles E. Fuller's "Old-Fashioned
Revival Hour" but had little religious modeling in his youth. His father
was a self-made man, successful in a variety of hometown entrepreneurial
ventures. He had little interest in religion and little time for his family.
A drinking problem resulted in Carey Falwell's premature death at age fifty-five.
Helen Falwell, unable to get Jerry and his twin brother to get up and go to
church, would leave the radio in their room tuned to the Reverend Fuller's
program. Those years of listening to Charles Fuller must have made at least
a subliminal impression. After Jerry Falwell became a religious broadcaster
in his own right, he called his program "The Old-Time Gospel Hour."
Although something of a hell-raiser in his youth, Falwell experienced a religious conversion at the age of eighteen. Initially it was pretty girls, not religion, that attracted him to the Park Avenue Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. Several years later the piano player, Macel Pate, would become Mrs. Jerry Falwell. After his conversion, Falwell dropped out of engineering studies, which he was pursuing at Lynchburg College. Upon graduation from Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, in 1956 he returned to Lynchburg and started a church.
The Thomas Road Baptist Church was started with thirty-five members in an abandoned Donald Duck soft-drink bottling plant. The church grew by leaps and bounds almost from the beginning, and today its congregation of 17,000 is the nation's second largest. As a reminder of his modest beginnings, a bookshelf that lines one side of Falwell's office prominently displays a dozen bottles of Donald Duck soda.
One week after organizing his church, Falwell started a radio program. Six months later he went on Lynchburg television. In those early days Falwell's sights were not on the national scene, but on building a solid local church. This he accomplished in a decade. By the end of the 1960s, Falwell began to have more ambitious goals, having already established a Christian academy
Today, Liberty Baptist College enrolls 2,900 students, and there are plans for 200 new independent Baptist churches to be founded by graduates of the seminary. But that is just the beginning. During the 1980s Falwell projects that his graduates will found 5,000 new churches, and he envisions that a Liberty Baptist University will one day enroll 50,000 students.
For all the inflamed rhetoric surrounding Falwell's latter-day political activities as leader of the Moral Majority, one might tune into his program expecting to see a fire-eating preacher. But Falwell is far from it. His program is a surprisingly conventional worship service. The music, as the title of the program suggests, is old-time gospel, attractively presented, but not upbeat mod, latter-day music that mimics secular successes. Falwell speaks in measured tones of self-assurance, more like a corporate executive than a thundering, Bible-thumping, fundamentalist preacher.
Nonetheless, Falwell is a self-proclaimed fundamentalist. His doctrine is Baptist, but he is not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention or any other denomination. "The Old-Time Gospel Hour" is a bastion of frontier fundamentalism moved uptown. It presents an old-time religion seeking to call a sinful people back to their senses and to their God-inspired beginnings. On his program he may preach about a variety of topics, ranging from "signs of the soon coming of Jesus" to the God-mandated rightness of U.S. support for Israel. Falwell understands Internal Revenue Service rules about political statements made by nonprofit organizations, and he saves his best political rhetoric for other platforms. So also is he careful not to attack certain people or segments of society on the air; to do so might leave him vulnerable to a Fairness Doctrine charge before the Federal Communications Commission.
But make no mistake about it; his regular listeners are aware that Jerry Falwell's Bible is against immorality, liberalism, communism, the welfare state, pornography, abortion, sex education
| Chapter 2 The Video Vicarage Prime Time Preachers: The Rising Power of Televangelism | |