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Televangelism in America
1. THE ORIGINS OF TELEVANGELISM
The electric church and the multibillion-dollar enterprise of televangelism did not arrive overnight, born full-blown like the goddess Athena from the head of Zeus. Television preaching has organization and strategic roots over a century and a half old.
Out of the great American nineteenth century urban revivals and the sweeping cultural transformation that historians term religious Great Awakenings arose new groups to plan, promote, and stage evangelistic crusades. These groups were different from existing churches and denominations. They were totally independent and autonomous. But they crossed sectarian boundaries and drew their support from Christians who belonged to a wide variety of churches. They were parachurhes.
The modern electric empires of the Pat Robertsons, the Jerry Falwells, the Billy Grahams, and the Jimmy Swaggarts are the direct descendants of these parachurches. Modern televangelists have the revivalists of past generations to thank for the ways they run their ministries. The original parachurch revivalists devised deliberate strategies for manipulating conversions and staging huge, impressive public crusades. They built great organizations and improved techniques to raise money and mobilize believers by the tens of thousands.
Most importantly, the skills and managerial savvy they accumulated was not lost. Indeed, it was preserved and passed down through generations of evangelists.
Three giants of parachurch revivalism stand out in particular; Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875), Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899), and Billy Sunday (1862-1935). As Razelle Frankl (1987) has shown, these three men honed the skills of swaying large audiences into highly sophisticated and consciously rationalized techniques of modern organizational efficiency. Though each made separate contributions to the growth of the parachurch phenomenon, it is helpful if we think of them as part of a cumulative process. Each revivalist (and dozens of lesser ones like them) built upon the wisdom of his predecessors.
Unlike those before him who saw revivals as a gift from God, Finney (a former lawyer) saw individual conversions as humanly organized and orchestrated products. He developed rational techniques and wrote a manual on how to conduct successful revivals. Moody (a former business man) improved on the organization, the public relations, and financial dimensions of conducting crusades. Sunday (a former professional baseball player) took their accumulated knowledge one step further by development of even more efficient organizational division of labor and the ingredient of entertainment and flamboyant shownmanship.
There is little that is different between the city-wide revivals staged by Charles Finney (and improved upon by successors Moody and Sunday) and the "crusades" organized by contemporary counterparts such as the Rev. Billy Graham. Graham has the added assistance of electronic communications technologies. But, in principle, his crusades follow the rationale first pioneered by Finney more than a century-and-a-half ago.
Thus, when the electronic technology became sufficiently advanced the modern preachers already had their strategies in place. Had these developments in staging revivals and building parachurch networks not been pioneered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, religious broadcasting would not be in the important position in American life that it is today. And the prospects for politically oriented preachers launching national moral-political crusades, even possibly a presidential campaign such as that of Pat Robertson, would have been still more remote.
Then in the 1920s the technology emerged. The free enterprise economic philosophy has shaped radio and television broadcasting more decisively in the United States than in any other nation. This distinctive, though nearly taken-for-granted, character of broadcasting in America has had a profound impact on the development of religious broadcasting there. Broadcasting is regulated, but compared to other nations the U.S. Federal Communications Commission gives local stations and networks a great deal of liberty in setting their own polices and procedures.
It is unequivocally assumed that broadcasters have a right to pursue policies which will render them a profit. So long as some small proportion of their broadcasting is devoted to the "public interest", and if they do not engage in programming that is judged grossly offensive, stations and networks can pretty much broadcast whatever they wish.
Almost from the inception of regularly scheduled broadcasting in the 1920s, religious programming has been considered to be "in the public interest". Most stations and networks offered some air time on a sustaining (tree) basis for religious groups to present programming. From the very beginning, the demand for air time by evangelists and religious advocates exceeded that which broadcasters were willing to devote to this purpose. Therefore policies to determine who would be granted access had to be developed (Jennings: 483).
The first national radio network was the National Broadcasting Company, formed in 1926, followed by the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1927. From the beginning, NBC offered no commercial time for religious broadcasting and allocated what time it chose to offer tree through the aegis of the old (liberal) Federal Council of Churches (Ibid: 484).
CBS, of financial necessity, did offer commercial time, but switched to gratis time only in 1931 as a means to get rid of the outspoken Catholic priest Father Charles E. Coughlin (Ibid: 489). Thereafter, CBS selected persons to appear on the CBS Church of the Air. They retained their own advisory board but also relied heavily on the Federal Council. By 1934 the Department of National Religious Radio of the FCC with twenty-four cooperating denominations had some oversight over six regularly scheduled network programs (Saunders: 20).
The Mutual Broadcasting System was the only network to offer commercial time without restriction from 1935 to 1944 (Ibid: 22). Two of the more notable programs it broadcast (although not for this entire time period) were Charles E. Fuller's Old-Fashioned Revival Hour and The Lutheran Hour sponsored by the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod and featuring Walter A. Maier.
The Christian Century, the leading liberal Protestant periodical, published an attack on "religious racketeers" who "use radio preaching as a medium of exploitation" (cited in Murch: 1913). The author accused Mutual of tolerating programs like the Lutheran Hour because they were financially lucrative. He called for the termination of all paid religious broadcasting and, failing this, a "rule of the Federal Communications Commission against the sale of time for religious broadcasting."
James DeForest Murch, a towering figure of evangelical Protestantism during this period, accused Frank R. Goodman, Chairman of the Federal Council of Churches 'Department of National Religious Radio of leading a campaign to squeeze evangelicals off the air. Goodman, he claimed, had "signed up fifty or more radio stations ' with ironclad contracts obliging them to use the Federal Council approved programs and no other'", (Ibid: 174).
The Federal Council of Churches', and later National Council of Churches' officials have always denied that they had any role in pressuring networks to develop programming under their aegis to exclude evangelicals. But the evidence is clear that evangelical Protestants did nor share in the free time granted by the networks and, further, that there existed a campaign to pressure Mutual into the "no commercial time" policy.
In March of 1944 Mutual announced changes in their paid-time broadcasting that severely curtailed access. Among the restrictions adopted by Mutual were (1) restriction of broadcasts to thirty-minutes, (2) a prohibition against the use of air time to solicit funds to pay for the broadcasts,
Evangelicals understood what was happening and had been mobilizing to fight back. Their first major effort toward developing cooperation among evangelicals occurred two years earlier, in 1942, at a National Conference for United Action Among Evangelicals. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) was formed as a direct result of this convention, and evangelical religious broadcasts took a prominent role in this meeting (Armstrong: 49).
In April, 1944, just a month after Mutual announced its policy changes that restricted evangelical access, 150 evangelical broadcasters met in Columbus, Ohio and formed the National Religious Broadcasters (Jennings: 317). Their first official act was to retain a Washington based communications attorney to provide "counsel in the preparation of a Constitution and Bylaws and a general policy and program" (Murch: 175). And from that moment forward, the tide began to shift. They convened again in Chicago in September for a Constitutional Convention.
With the creation of the National Religious Broadcasters, the collective fate of evangelical broadcasters began to change. In time, they would become a decisive factor in the shift of the balance of power from liberal Protestants to conservative evangelicals. NRB launched an aggressive public relations program to promote their case. They adopted a Code of Ethics which they declared was a "veritable Declaration of Independence from radio racketeers". They called on the Federal Communications Commission to help ameliorate the maldistribution of air time. They also petitioned the networks to reconsider their policies.
At least some results were forthcoming in pretty short order. That same year, Mutual allocated six and a half hours of free time to NAE (Jennings: 312). NBC's Blue Network, which would become the American Broadcasting Company, also offered time to NAE on a restricted basis.
After an early burst of visible successes, NRB lost some of its thrust and vitality. This is a typical pattern with virtually all social movement organizations. Visible signs of success are likely to be interpreted by participants as evidence of victory. Perceiving victory in success, participants lose their sense of zeal and enthusiasm. They slacken on financial contributions and ignore appeals for redoubling of mobilization efforts. As a result, a movement organization becomes vulnerable at the very moment its supporters appear to have won, or are about to win.
This vulnerability was not missed by the liberal Protestants, now reorganized as the National Council of Churches. When television expanded rapidly in the early 1950s, the NCC pursued an initiative to assure exclusive representation with the networks. CBS, leery because of earlier conflict with evangelicals, added the Southern Baptists to its consortium of liberal Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. As the Southern Baptists were not members of NRB, this conciliatory gesture was hardly welcomed with enthusiasm by NRB affiliates. Other networks developed interfaith programming also, but evangelical Christians were basically excluded from access to the time available.
Because of his phenomenal popularity, Billy Graham was able to cut through the liberal church monopoly and acquire network television time, both gratis and purchased. But the rank-and-file NRB evangelicals were effectively locked out of network television time. This access policy has not changed even today; religious broadcasters must contract for programming on a station-by-station basis.
A new initiative of opposition to paid religious broadcasting developed at the state level. This campaign was endorsed by the Broadcasting and Film Commission of the National Council (Murch: 179). These renewed hostilities with liberal Protestants and the failure to get in on network television served to invigorate the National Religious Broadcasters.
Since 1956 the NRB has held its annual meetings in Washington. Being in Washington paid dividends that were sufficiently obvious to NRB leadership. They have established lobbying and liason relationships. They have an annual Congressional Breakfast that is better attended today than it was a few years ago when there were fewer conservatives in the Congress. They get on well with the Federal Communications Commission and hold an annual luncheon in their honor. They retain counsel to represent them before the FCC -- Richard Wiley, former chairman of the FCC. The presidents of the National Association of Broadcasters and the networks have accepted their invitation to speak. And in recent years, the convention has been highlighted by the appearance of Ronald Reagan. In a word, the members of NRB have learned their way around Washington.
The success of the National Religious Broadcasters and its constituent members has been a gradual process. But if there was a single development that turned the tide in their favor it was a policy directive from the FCC in 1960 which ruled that no important public interest is served by differentiating between gratis airtime and commercially sponsored programming.
To grasp the significance of this ruling, we need to consider the Communications Act of 1934 which authorized the FCC to grant broadcasting licenses. The granting of a license, in effect, constitutes a monopoly to use a scarce commodity, namely a specific airwave, to transmit messages. In short, it has always been presumed that stations "owe" some proportion of their broadcast time to general "public interest" in exchange for this monopoly right. From the beginning, religious broadcasting has been designated as public interest broadcasting. And hence, the argument of the National Council of Churches that the stations and networks are obliged to give free time for religious broadcasting.
The implication of the 1960 ruling was that local stations could sell airtime for religious programs and still get "public interest credit" in the eyes of the FCC overseers. Several important developments followed. First, the ruling buoyed the evangelical broadcasters commitment to buy commercial time. Second, in their resolve to buy time, they began a cycle of fierce competition with each other. This competition enhanced the value of the time slots with the result that many local stations, which had previously followed network policies of not selling air time for religious broadcasting, decided to cash in on the new demand.
Evangelicals bought their way onto the air in unprecedented numbers. While this was happening, a technological innovation further enhanced their
The video tape permitted mass production of a program which could be sent out and aired during the same week all across the country. By videotaping a few weeks early, programming could be scheduled to correspond to the calendar, something that was virtually impossible with films. The latter would be aired on one station and then shipped to another for airing the following week, and so on. With videotape, Easter services could be broadcast on Easter, Christmas services at Christmas, etc. This synchronization of broadcasting with the calendar greatly enhanced the appeal of programs.
The implications of the FCC policy directive were devastating for programs that had been carried on a sustaining basis. Why should local stations give time to broadcast religious programs when syndicated broadcasters were bidding against each other to buy air time? As a business proposition it didn't make any sense. Local station managers did see the dollars and cents of it and, as a result, they dropped sustaining-time programs produced both by their own network and by individual denominations.
The collective impact of these market decisions is dramatically demonstrated in a report by the Communications Committee of the U.S. Catholic Conference to the FCC in 1979 (cited in Horsfield: 89). In 1959, fifty-three percent of all religious broadcasting in America was paid-time programming. Following the FCC ruling, that proportion increased to nine-two percent by 1977.
Televangelism, now fully in the hands of the evangelicals and fundamentalists, has arrived in force.
2. TELEVANGELISM'S "GOSPEL OF PROSPERITY"
What all television ministries have in common, which would in time revolutionize religious broadcasting, is their relationship to their audience. Whereas commercial broadcasting sells advertising to support programming, the electric church sells Jesus, itself, and usually some wonderful project.
These "bricks and mortar" projects are frequently schools and universities (such as Oral Roberts University or Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist University). Pat Robertson began with the development of a television network and then expanded into a graduate university (CBN University). Jim Bakker's Heritage Village, USA has become a religious amusement park on the order of a spiritual Disneyland -- an extension of missionizing work and, hence, deserving of charitable contributions.
Televangelists solicit support from their audiences for their projects, offering premiums in exchange for donations. Over time, their solicitation tactics have become increasingly refined. While some electric church organizations utilize professional fund raising organizations, many have developed sophistication that exceeds the capabilities of many professional fund raising
With increased competition, air time has become very expensive for televangelists. And with costs increasing faster than audiences, there is an ever present prospect that the logic of the whole process could crumble. Broadcasting seems to have become an instrument to pay off bills incurred in the pursuit of their many projects rather than an end in itself. Billy Graham biographer Marshall Frady found this inverted process at work with the crusades. In the beginning, Graham's crusades came to exist for the purpose of saving souls. Then, over time, they came to exist "for the sake of their own self-propagation." But with the passage of still more time they "existed for their televised reproductions." Hence, "the television event... existed to produce more television events" (Frady: 314).
The reason is clear: Theology is not done in a vacuum. It is done in a medium, a context. And the values and pressures of the context help shape the theology. The medium is not neutral to the message.
The fundraising tactics of televangelists such as Pat Robertson, no less than his colleagues, are a prime example of this truism. These have been undoubtedly the most controversial aspect of the electric church. Indeed, the relentless pressures of broadcasting costs which televangelists face, and their ambitions to engage in other brick and mortar ventures, have made their appeals for cash more than just necessary elements of their ministries. Fundraising has become an integral part of prime time religion's theology.
There are an assortment of variations on a common theme, but most televangelists end up at a common point: the Gospel of Prosperity. According to this theology, God wants you to be financially prosperous and content. Poverty or ill-health are not really in God's providence; they are problems in your Christian attitude and understanding. Sacrifice and suffering have little to do with the contemporary Christian message.
Many televangelists say the keys to financial success are actually embedded in the New Testament. By supporting their particular ministries with donations, they assure viewers, anyone can learn what these keys are.
Pat Robertson calls these rules "Kingdom Principles," taught by Jesus Christ and "as valid for our lives as the laws of thermodynamics or the law of gravity." They are there in the Bible, but for them to be discerned you need the Virginia Beach televangelist as a guide. Then the Christian Gospel becomes a potpourri of information that can be applied to all sorts of secular situations. Says Robertson: "The Bible, quite bluntly, is a workable guidebook for politics, government, business, families, and all the affairs of mankind" (Robertson, 1982: 44).
In particular, God works on a principle of reciprocity. The more money you send to Him (presumably, in Robertson's case, through his "The 700 Club" television program) the more God will return materially on your investment. Robertson writes in The Secret Kingdom:
If we want to release the superabundance of the kingdom of heaven, we first give... I am as certain of this as of anything in my life. If you are in financial trouble, the smartest thing you can do is to start giving money away....Your return, poured into your lap, will be great, pressed down and running over (Ibid: 108-9).
Oral Roberts refers to his twist on the same theme as seed-faith. Contributions to his ministry have the potential to return mighty dividends, spiritual and material, within this lifetime. (He once wrote an article in his Abundant Life magazine entitled "You Sow It, Then God Will Grow It.") While the concept can be applied to various aspects of life, it gives viewers a special justification for contributing to Roberts since he claims to have uncovered the dynamics of how God apportions miracles.
In Miracle of Seed-Faith (1974 -- the 24th printing) Roberts discusses Three Key Principles of seed-faith and how to make "blessing-pact convenants" with God. There is, for example, the Law of Sowing and Reaping ("Remember, only what you give can God multiply back.") and his frank admonishment: "If you want God to supply your financial needs, then give SEED-MONEY for Him to reproduce and multiply" (Roberts: 21,27).
Dallas, Texas based Kenneth Copeland, Roberts' pupil, on the other hand, preaches "Prosperity Theology" based on biblical laws. He has written a string of best-selling books on the subject, including The Laws of Prosperity. His wife, Gloria, recently wrote one entitled God's Will is Prosperity.
Televangelists have probably received their greatest criticism because of their fundraising tactics. It may be that successful televangelists are on a collision course with an eventual backlash against their very strategies for success. Even Billy Graham has been known of late to criticise televangelists', 'endless projects, money-raising campaigns, and tearful warnings of bankruptcy'.
Yet what is so remarkable in all of this enterprise is how so many of the televangelists, because of pressures to meet their payroll, pay their bills, and finance their ambitious building projects have found it irresistible to integrate fundraising appeals into sermons and theologies.
Sociologist Razelle Frankl studied video telecasts of Oral Roberts, Robert Schuller, Jim Bakker, Rex Humbard, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, James Robison, and Pat Robertson in 1981 and found that no preacher used less than 10 percent of broadcast time for direct fundraising appeals. Two-thirds of the televangelists' appeals for money were targeted at the personal needs of the viewer.
"In addition", she discovered, "television preachers made funding appeals that were integrated into the program content and were not as easily distinguished as commercial appeals." The result was what Frankl termed a "hybrid" of traditional revivalism and television. "The ministries are combining religious norms and broadcasting norms" (Frankl, 1984: 137).
Thus have the financial exigencies of the televangelists become part of the Great Commission. The theology of a television preacher such as Pat Robertson is closely intertwined with the budget of this electronic empire. Electric Christianity is not simply traditional Christianity broadcast across cable channels and beamed around the globe by satellites. It is a transformed message, befitting the needs of those who purport merely to serve it.
What essentially happened was that technology has circled back on the televangelists' broadcasting. These preachers have found that their enormous broadcasting costs dictate that they run constant fund-raising campaigns. The "saved" and "born-again" have to be continually cajoled with new incentives to give to these ministries. Using computers, word-processors, and toll-free telephone banks, the electric ministers have developed sophisticated ways of
The subtleties of theology do not carry well over television. This medium is fundamentally visual, not cerebral. It is not an easy medium to master. Perhaps that is why many liberal critics of Pat Robertson and other televangelists are so quick to mistakenly dismiss what they preach as raw hucksterism. Robertson and his colleagues have successfully adapted to their environment by packaging a message in terms.
3. TELEVANGELISM'S AUDIENCE SIZE CONTROVERSY
"The Great Audience Size Debate" has preoccupied both televangelism's supporters and critics. In its early years the electric church's televangelists made sweeping, even fantastic claims of broad viewer support with minimal evidence. For example, in the early 1980s the Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed to have a total viewership for the Old-Time Gospel Hour of 50 million. Such exaggerations have been common coming from televangelists.
At the same time, the A.C. Nielsen Company and the Arbitron Company are the two major organizations in the United States that monitor television viewing habits. In principle Nielsen and Arbitron have the technological capability to measure all radio and television audiences in the country on a continuing basis. For the top programs, television networks and advertisers desire to have more or less continuous information because a small proportional shift in an audience share can warrant a change in advertising charges. Thus, for the very largest programs, and the largest audience markets, Nielsen and Arbitron are more or less continuously monitoring audience size.
Using data from these respective companies, social scientists Hadden and Swann (1981:47) and Martin (1981: 11) demonstrated that the audience size for the syndicated religious broadcasters was much smaller than the claims that had been made by many of the ministries. Martin reported an audience of 13.8 million for the top ten programs in the Nielsen ratings for November, 1980 (Ibid). Hadden and Swann reported a total of 20.5 million for Arbitron's 66 syndicated programs, with a total of 14.9 millions for the top ten programs -- a mere discrepancy of eight percent for data gathered nine months apart (Hadden and Swann: 50).
The infusion of such facts into the controversy did not settle the debate about audience size and trends. If anything, it added fuel to the flames. The reason this was so that lots of people have vested interests in how many people are watching and how the numbers are interpreted.
It should not have come as a surprise that religious broadcasters themselves were not happy with these numbers -- particularly those who had public ally claimed vastly larger audiences for themselves than the Arbitron and Nielsen syndicated, religious, program analysis showed.
Ironically, some of the electric church's strongest adversaries also challenged these smaller audience estimates. For example, if the number of persons watching Jerry Falwell and other politically minded televangelists was
Meanwhile, another group of adversaries argued that the Arbitron and Nielsen figures overestimated the "real" audience size of the televangelists (Fore, 1981: 940). These figures, they argued, do not take into account the duplication of audience when the same person watches more than one religious program.
Debate about how many people are watching religious programming was one factor which led to the creation of an ad hoc committee to investigate the effects of religious television. The ad hoc committee grew out of the Consultation on the Electronic Church sponsored by the National Council of Churches in February, 1980.
From the beginning, the project was conceived as bipartisan and the composition of the committee consisted of a coalition of evangelical religious broadcasters and the "mainline" church traditions. It was co-chaired by William Fore, Director of the National Council of Churches Communication Commission, and Ben Armstrong, Executive Director of the National Religious Broadcasters (Hadden and Frankl).
The ad-hoc committee on Religion and Television raised over $150,000 and commissioned The Annenberg School of Communications and The Gallup Organization to conduct the research. Even before research had commenced, the Religion and Television Research Project was heralded as "the definitive" investigation of religious broadcasting.
In the Spring of 1984 the long awaited study on the electric church appeared (Gerbner, et. al.). Throughout the duration of the study, the two investigative teams worked independently. George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School, was responsible for coordinating and integrating a final report.
As it turned out, there was little integration of the two investigations. "De facto", they became two studies, with the Gallup study appearing as an appendix to the Annenberg study. The findings of the two studies were at odds on several critical points including the important question of how many people are watching.
The two research teams used different methods to measure audience size and, with hind-sight, it is not particularly surprising that they came up with radically different conclusions. Piggy-backing on Arbitron "sweep" data, the Annenberg term came up with a figure of 24.7 million total viewers. Then, going to viewing diaries kept by a sample of Arbitron respondents, they concluded that the non-duplicated audience was 13.3 million. In contrast, the Gallup survey asked people if they had watched a religious television program during the previous month. Thirty-two percent, which would represent approximately 70 million viewers, claimed that they had.
The Annenberg measure was for one week, the Gallup measure for a month. Certainly, if there was duplication during a week, the amount of duplication would increase over the course of a month. Thus, the discrepancy of over five hundred percent -- 13.3 million versus approximately 70 million -- was even greater than it appears to the eye.
Naturally, the audience figures were disputed by the religious broadcasters who wished to see them larger. So the great audience size debate seemed to be back to where it started.
But not quite. There remained the puzzlement of why some adversaries of the electric church, who had earlier bought into the myth of huge audiences, had abruptly changed their minds and became adamant in pressing the case for even smaller audiences than those measured by Arbitron and Nielsen.
For example, Williar Fore, the chief spokesperson of the National Council of Churches, wrote in a July 1980 TV Guide article that "some 47% of Americans see at least one religious program a week on TV" (Fore, 1980: 15). Later, when the Annenberg team reported the weekly "unduplicated" viewing audience for religious programs at 13.3 million, Fore whittled the number down to a mere 7.2 million (Fore, 1984: 711).
Why this great reversal? We think that the "mainline" Protestant communications leaders now see their chances of tapping into sustaining (free) time as enhanced if they can "prove" that the current syndicated broadcasters are not reaching nearly as many people as they claim. Given the confusing nature of the data, and the absurdity of claims made by others, why not claim that the electric pews are empty -- or nearly so?
If hardly anyone is watching the current offerings, so this logic goes, then stations and networks should give the liberal churches free time so they can produce programs that are more in keeping with the tastes of "mainline Protestants". It follows that this programming will attract much larger audiences.
In pursuit of this strategy, the liberal church leaders have created another myth which is just as exaggerated and misleading as the myth of exaggerated audience size which was debunked in 1981 by Hadden and Swann and William Martin.
We call this new fabrication the myth of the tiny and insignificant remnant. It seeks to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If nobody believes that anybody is watching, then perhaps nobody else will tune in. And if nobody is watching, according to purveyor of the myth, how can broadcasters ethically justify selling airtime to the televangelist charlatans?
Part of the source of the confusion over audience size lies in the fact that measuring a television audience is not as simple and direct a task as counting how many people attend church services in a local congregation or how many people go through a turn-stile at a football game. In these instances, we are satisfied with the notion that people are either present or not present.
The question of presence or non-presence is not so easily determined with a television audience. Most people don't watch television the way they attend a church service or an athletic contest. They tune in late and depart early; they switch channels and they leave the room. In front of a television set, people generally feel at greater liberty to talk with one another than they do in church. They may do lots of other things while they are "watching" television -- accept an incoming phone call, prepare breakfast, eat, do dishes, get ready to go out, etc.
Undoubtedly the most reliable study to date is one conducted in 1985 by the Nielsen Company for televangelist Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (Clark and Virts, 1985). CBN's The 700 Club, hosted by Robertson, is broadcast five days a week for 90 minutes, or a total of seven-and-a-half
- The cumulative audience sizes were significantly larger for the ten programs studied than were the average quarter-hour audiences.
- The average quarter-hour audience size for The 700 Club, using Nielsen's conventional measure, was 424,500 households. The cumulative 90 minute daily audience was 2,547,500 households. The weekly total was 7,216,500, and the monthly grand total of viewers came to 16,300,000. In a word, the daily cumulative audience is 6 times larger than the average quarter-hour, the weekly audience 38 times larger.
- Pat Robertson's 700 Club program had a weekly audience of 12 million viewers, or 29 million cumulative viewers in a single month. On any given day 4.4 million Americans watched hi show -- many times more persons than Paul of Tarsus ever witnessed to in the First Century A.D. after he left the road to Damascus as Christianity's most famous missionary.
- The top 10 television programs had an average quarter-hour audience of just under 8 million. The cumulative figure for a week comes to 27 million and for the month it is measured at 68 million!
The CBN/Nielsen study also confirms the suspicion that a significant proportion of the audience estimates, regardless of the method of measurement, consist of duplication, that is, multiple counting of people. Still, the total cumulation of religious television viewed is far from insignificant.
The cumulated monthly audience for the top ten religious programs was 67.7 million households, but the unduplicated cum is 34.1 million households. On a monthly basis, thus, the duplicated cum is 98% larger. Nielsen estimates a total of 85.9 million TV households in America (Washington Post11/13/85). In essence, the unduplicated figure for an average week is 21%.
The answer to the question "Is anybody listening?" is an unequivocal YES! The audiences are not as huge as some of the televangelists and their supporters were maintaining prior to the introduction of Nielsen and Arbitron. But just as certainly, neither are the audiences as small as some of their adversaries would like the American public to believe.
And this brings us back full cycle to the politicized nature of religious television audience statistics. In 1980 it was the perceived potential of mobilizing viewers for political purposes that made Americans conscious of audience size. Now, beyond just the infighting of liberals and conservatives, audience size has taken on a political significance of its own.
4. TELEVANGELISM AND THE COMING CULTURAL REVOLUTION
IN AMERICA
The electronic communications revolution, of which televangelists are a part, is reshaping American religion. This technological supertrend inundates the country's images, presented in alluring new packages that are both fascinating and yet superficial. The result is a cultural revolution, altering the values and lifestyles of many Americans and yet also creating the undercurrents of a backlash.
One specific effect is political mobilization. In this sense televangelists have played an important role, for they have taken advantage of the decontextualized nature of much mass communications information to help crystallize a partisan constituency.
Television, transistors, microchips, videotapes, computers, and space satellites have made the phenomenological construction and managing of news, according to professional journalistic norms and commercial requirements, a series of disjointed happenings without contexts. Pace and depth of news coverage are too rapid and shallow, respectively, to deal adequately with much of the flow of events. The recurring and significant images of television, in particular, pivot on impressions and relatively little substance.
Mass media does not expand our knowledge about particular subjects nearly so much as it selects certain issues and events upon which to focus, however transiently, viewer attention. Whatever else, the images on the telescreen must sustain interest so that the viewer does not switch channels. To guard against boredom, the images must be fast-paced, thus building in the inevitability of superficiality.
This pessimistic evaluation of American's mass media news coverage is not ours alone. Indeed, it is the consensus of virtually all social scientists who have researched journalism and television (e.g., Altheide, 1976; Badikian, 1971; Epstein, 1975, 1974; Gans, 1980; Parenti, 1986; Schwartz, 1983; Tuchman, 1978). Added to it are the religious indifference and even irreligion of the average media professional (see, e.g., Hadden and Shupe, forthcoming) which renders he or she unable to appreciate news in any but a secular, skeptical perspective.
The result is that, faced with new religious events or trends unfolding, many media communicators react with a mixture of professional cynicism, ignorance, and bemusement. And American evangelical/conservative Christians have had to confront a mass media which presents news devoid of any meaning for the religious values which otherwise permeate all aspects of their lives.
The usual break-neck speed of the electronic media's handling of news is one important reason why twentieth century conservative Christians in the U.S. have had to wait until recently to be mobilized for social change. Secular television in particular has dealt with many moral and political topics, usually out of context and certainly not in any explicitly Christian perspective. This fact worked against evangelical Christians crystallizing their sentiments and opinions about national and international developments.
Until now evangelicals who did persist in interpreting their world along Christian lines (e.g., putting a biblical slant on issues such as prayer and curriculum content in public schools, national economic policies, or U.S. military presence in the Middle East) found themselves estranged from the secular news establishment. Previously, these were difficult times in which to maintain a coherent Christian worldview when the mass media offered no worldview at all.
The ultimate political significance of American televangelism is that it has served as a crucible, or rallying point, within (or around) which the grievances, concerns, and worldviews of evangelical Christians could coalesce. Televangelism has provided conservative Christians with entertainment, worship, news and interpretation without depending on the secular mass media. Grassroots supporters can be tapped directly through telephone lines and by mail. Consciousness-of-kind can be raised and reinforced on a daily basis, and it can all be done within a religious context not accountable to established churches or denominations.
5. THE FUTURE OF TELEVANGELISM
Televangelism, largely an American phenomenon, has two features:
First, various televangelists have been aggressively expanding their broadcast ministries around the world. Pat Robertson, for example, has his programming beamed to 43 countries, five days a week. Many of these are Third World nations where the biblical apocalyptic and millenial themes of many conservative televangelists are popularly received.
Expansion of the electric church in the USA has shown no signs of slowing, particularly since the widespread availability of cable television. As satellite communications become more common, even in the world's more remote regions, it is likely that "electronic religion" will grow, perhaps taking on indigenous forms when local regions incorporate it into their own developing communications systems.
Second, televangelism deals with the ultimate values and grievances of life, and inevitably it becomes a critic of the secular status quo as well as a prophetic voice of change. It can become the center point towards which individual discontent can gravitate. And televangelists -- who are so adroit at building commitments for financial support -- can channel such discontent for political purposes. The political potential of televangelism is only now beginning to be realized in North America. That too may change with its expansion around the globe.
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