University of Virginia Library

Chapter 4
The Evolution of a Revolution

Religious broadcasting was controversial from the onset. Secular broadcasters were highly suspicious of evangelical preachers giving Mainline Protestants an inside track to accessing the airwaves. Ironically, they were ambivalent about the role of broadcasting. In contrast, Evangelicals saw the airwaves as a God-given technology to reach the masses. This chapter examines the long struggle that eventually culminated with Evangelical dominance of the religious airwaves.

J. Howard Ellens,
Models of Religious Broadcasting

Religious diversity has always been a characteristic of American society. Each colony on the eastern seaboard attracted a different group of people who found there a congenial religious climate. The Pilgrims had made New England a land comfortable for Congregationalists. British Baptists fit into the middle colonies. Scottish and Irish Presbyterians found Pennsylvania and the Carolinas to their liking. Methodism was exported from England to all parts of the country. There were religious enclaves—and occasional persecutions—but for the most part diversity and tolerance became American principles, and after a while just about any religious group could be found anywhere in the states of the new republic.

The Presbyterians and Episcopalians tried to keep up with the expansion of the frontier, but their insistence on a properly educated ministry left them undermanned for frontier work. They sent learned and literate preachers wherever they could, but the unlearned settlers on the frontier sometimes found them too highfalutin.

The Baptists, already a substantial part of the population, had no such hang-ups about education. Godly men who had the call to preach were ordained as needed. The Baptists suffered few staffing problems and kept right up with the westward and

southward expansion of the young nation. Besides, they found revivalism congenial, and they grew rapidly during the Great Awakening (religious revivals) of the eighteenth century. Methodism, born as a pietistic movement within the Church of England, came to America and threw itself into the expanding frontier. After its split from the "head" religion of Anglicanism, the "heart" religion of Methodism was downright suspicious of theological education until the end of the nineteenth century. a.m.thodist preacher's theological library had to fit into his saddlebags.

The Methodists, Baptists. and others who considered theology subordinate to religious experience succeeded on the frontier where the intellectuals failed. On the edges of civilization, the ability to call sinners to repentance was inspired by God, not inculcated by education.

Those early evangelists gave the United States two important religious traditions. The first was that educational preparation is not prerequisite to preaching. The second was that warmhearted religious experience is the right and due of true believers, and that, if necessary, they ought even to separate themselves from the establishment churches to get it.

If a man (rarely a woman) felt called to preach, who could deny the calling? On the frontier, anyone who got the call got his chance. If he seemed to his hearers to "divide the Word rightly," his calling was confirmed. He could be ordained as a pastor by a congregation or a bishop, or he could travel from town to town as an evangelist.

Not only on the frontier, but in the grubby cities as well, life was hard and diversions were few. Religious services, not always held on a regular schedule, offered a respite from the rigors of life, a chance to sit, to hear a man describe the fiery punishments of hell and the beauty of heavenly streets paved with gold. The traveling evangelists, in the absence of a church, might construct a "brush arbor," a rude shelter offering protection from the sun. Families brought lunches in their wagons. On occasion they might stay for several days and sleep in the wagons. In the cities the evangelists preached wherever they could—in churches, in halls, in homes, or in the open air. If a man could preach at all, he

was assured of hearers. For the poor, there was little else to do except go to a tavern.

Religious revivals swept whole regions of the country periodically during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mainliners experienced revivals, too, and establishment preachers often earned fame with the power and eloquence of their oratory.

By the latter part of the nineteenth century, there was no more frontier. America had been settled. But the evangelists kept right on moving. They pastored churches in some cases; but they maintained tradition by holding periodic revival meetings in those churches. Some continued to travel and still do today. Jim Bakker, of "The PTL Club," was such a traveling evangelist. So were Oral Roberts and Rex Humbard. Many of the lesser lights of the electronic church today are still itinerant preachers on the stump who go wherever an evangelistic meeting can be organized. They are the modern-day gypsies of the gospel. And the pastors of the churches in which they preach are fellow heirs of their common evangelical tradition.

Whether in a rural brush arbor or a city church, every evangelist sought to draw a crowd and preach to it. The larger the crowd, the more opportunities there were to convert sinners. Most evangelists were sincere in wanting to bring the comforts of Christ to the unconverted. There were occasional charlatans, but not many. Elmer Gantry was the creation of a twentieth-century novelist, not a realistic depiction of the evangelical movement. Most evangelists beat the drum for offerings only as a matter of economic survival—of course, some were more accomplished drum beaters than others.

The evangelical tradition placed a heavy emphasis on preaching. Platform oratory was the measure by which the assembled crowd determined whether a preacher was "mightily used of God." Evangelical religion was felt in the heart, not exercised in the intellect. The preacher's job was to call sinners to repentance through graphic descriptions of what would happen to them if they didn't heed the word. But the preacher also had to comfort the converted with glowing descriptions of what awaited the redeemed.

Although many preached in fiery fashion against Demon Rum

and other evils of the flesh, there was little effort to connect the teachings of the Bible to any larger social concerns. Indeed, the Bible was used often to justify what was going on in society. Preachers of the frontier and of the established churches had no difficulty finding texts to support the institution of slavery, for example. The purely subjective, personalistic nature of the evangelical religion of the period is reflected in its hymns, a type still popular among the followers of the tradition. Modern church musicians call them the "I-Me-My" hymns because they are filled with first-person pronouns describing an individual relationship to God. There is also a heavy emphasis on the cross and Jesus' blood, by which the believer is transported into the blessedness of salvation.

Protestantism always has had a tradition of lusty congregational singing, encouraged by the early reformers as one means of transferring worship from altar to pew. Charles Wesley wrote several thousand hymns, many using popular tavern tunes of the day. The easy rhythms, catchy tunes, and subjective joy of such music became an important part of revivalist services. Song leaders, introduced to ensure that singing was enthusiastic, became part of the evangelistic traveling team, a tradition continued today and exemplified by Cliff Barrows, Billy Graham's song leader.

Relationships between revivalist religionists and establishment churchmen were never good. The revivalists tended to be scornful of the rational establishment approach to religion. The establishment felt the same way about the unrestrained emotionalism of the revivalists. But deeper issues underlay the hostility between the two groups. The establishment churchmen were beginning to toy with new ideas of science, historical studies concerning the writing of the Bible, and a blasphemous new theory called evolution. The evangelists rejected all these things out of hand and began swearing eternal enmity against all persons and ideas not in accord with a plain, literal reading of the Bible. This theological division gathered steam in the late 1800s and erupted into open warfare after the turn of the twentieth century. Thus battle lines were drawn when radio was introduced in the early 1920s. The history of religious broadcasting in the United States is in part the history of the fight between evangelical

fundamentalism and the more liberal establishment churches. Radio—and today, television—became the battleground of a religious war.

Credit for launching the first nonexperimental regular radio broadcasting service goes to Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company for KDKA in Pittsburgh. The station went on the air on November 2, 1920, to broadcast the Harding-Cox election returns, followed on succeeding days by regular evening broadcasts of musical programs.

Westinghouse wanted to stimulate audience growth so that it could sell more radios. It was decided to broadcast a church service. Although the U.S. Signal Corps had broadcast a service from the Trinity Church of Washington, D.C., on August 24, 1919, such a program would be a first for private broadcasting. A Westinghouse engineer was a member of the choir at Calvary Episcopal Church of Pittsburgh. The rector, the Reverend Edwin Van Etten, agreed to the experiment. On Sunday, January 2, 1921, with three microphones installed in the church, two Westinghouse engineers donned choir robes and put the church's evening vesper service on the air. The rector had previously arranged for his associate, the Reverend Louis B. Whittemore, to conduct the service. He thus unwittingly accorded to Whittemore the distinction of being the first man to preach on a radio station.

Van Etten said of the occasion, "The whole thing was an experiment, and I remember distinctly my own feeling that after all no harm could be done! It never occurred to me that the little black box was really going to carry out the service to the outside world. I knew there was such a thing as wireless, but somehow I thought there would be some fluke in the connection, and that the whole thing would be a fizzle! The opportunity had come to us rather suddenly and in this dazed sort of mood we did not prepare any special service or sermon for the occasion."

Within a few months, many more radio stations followed KDKA on the air. The success of the KDKA church broadcasts was noted and widely emulated by new stations all over the country. In the beginning there were few regulations, anyone could have a station license just by asking for it, and a station could be built for a few hundred dollars by any talented radio experimenter. Popular Radio magazine said in January 1925 that

of 600 stations on the air, 63 were owned by churches and other religious groups. Those stations came and went with dizzying suddenness. The shortest duration on record for church ownership was for WHBQ in Memphis, which the Men's Fellowship Class of the Methodist Episcopal Church South owned for one month in 1925. Other periods of ownership lasted from six months to a few years. Religion was destined from the inception of radio to be an important part of broadcasting. The Department of Commerce had noted in 1922 that the wavelength of 360 meters (approximately 830 kilocycles) was assigned for the transmission of "important news items, entertainment, lectures, sermons and similar matter."

If getting into radio was easy, staying in it was much more difficult. Today, just eight of the ninety-five noncommercial educational and religious stations licensed in the 1920s are still in noncommercial hands. There are several reasons why the churches were not able to maintain their early foothold in broadcasting.

Commercial broadcasters, who had established stations in the beginning either for public relations purposes or to promote the sale of radio receivers, discovered the business of selling time in 1924. Now the newspaper or department store which had established a radio station merely to publicize its own name had a new source of revenue that promised to be a gold mine. The commercial broadcasters exerted heavy pressure to get rid of the noncommercials with which they had to share time. In many cases they succeeded in capturing legally all the air time and forcing the noncommercials off the frequencies. In other cases they simply bought out the noncommercials, a practice that increased rapidly in 1930 after churches and educational institutions began to feel the financial crunch of the depression.

But if the experiments in church ownership ended in failure, there were other visions of religion on radio that did not. If one could not successfully operate a radio station, why not simply preach over someone else's station?

Chicago's mayor, William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson, set up a radio station on top of the Chicago City Hall in 1922. Lacking program material, Mayor Thompson issued a general call for volunteers. He hoped that professional entertainers would

respond, but they were suspicious of radio and refused. Among those who did respond was evangelist Paul Rader, who brought along his musicians and reproduced a typical evangelistic service on the air. Rader, a Chicago pastor, was typical of the fundamentalist evangelists of the day whose styles had evolved from the itinerant preachers of the nineteenth century. Evangelical broadcasters were thoroughly and almost universally imbued with the evangelistic meeting concept, which attempted to draw the largest possible crowd to hear the word. Revivalists saw radio as a way to reach even greater numbers of people.

The revivalists and the churches that first used radio for religious broadcasting saw it as a way to extend what took place in the meeting or the church to people who could not or would not attend. But even this altruistic and seemingly benign utilization of the airwaves met with some criticism. Some churchmen wondered aloud whether the practice would entice people to stay home from church and listen to the radio services instead. This question is the oldest one in religious broadcasting, and it is still being asked by critics of the electronic church.

The controversy heated up even more when some preachers actually used the airwaves to invite people to come to their churches. And indignation rose to new heights when some radio preachers asked for donations to help them pay for their broadcasts.

Although Ben Armstrong is credited with coining the term electric church (electronic is now generally used), he was not the first person in religious broadcasting to think of the concept of a church existing over the airwaves. According to Armstrong himself, pioneer Omaha evangelical R. R. Brown may have been the first to envision the radio audience as a new form of congregation. Listeners to Brown's "Radio Chapel Service" in the 1920s were invited to join the World Radio Congregation, which issued official membership cards. The notion of an electronic church was also prefigured in the early broadcasting efforts of Herbert W. Armstrong, head of the Worldwide Church of God, who launched his movement in 1934 as the Radio Church of God.

California's legendary Aimee Semple McPherson, who established a radio station in her Angelus Temple of the International

Church of the Foursquare Gospel in Los Angeles, even took in members through a combination of radio broadcasting and telephone conversation. McPherson's disciples set up tents in cities around Los Angeles, where crowds listened to her broadcasts and converts responded to her by telephone, thus being received into membership. McPherson applied for a television license in 1944, but she died that same year. It is interesting to speculate whether, if she had lived, she might have speeded up the development of the electronic church.

For the most part, only the names of the successful and controversial have survived to be entered in the history books. But in every city and town in the country with a radio station, there were preachers who wanted to broadcast. Many did. Ministers of mainline churches usually contented themselves with broadcasting their Sunday worship services or devotional programs, usually presented by the stations and not by the preachers invited to appear on them. As is true today, however, for every one of those mainline types there were a dozen evangelicals.

Local religious broadcasting was, by the end of the 1920s, in a troubled state. In 1927 Christian Century magazine headlined an article "Should Churches Be Shut Off the Air?"

The unfettered and troublesome development of religious broadcasting in the first few years of radio did not go unnoticed by those who were thinking seriously about the future development of the medium. NBC, the first radio network, was determined to avoid some of the problems. The network did not want to be bothered by requests for time from many different sectarian broadcasters and denominations. Its solution to the problem in 1928 had a permanent and profound effect on the development of religious broadcasting in the United States.

NBC asked the Federal Council of Churches (predecessor of today's National Council of Churches) to take responsibility for all Protestant religious broadcasting on NBC. The Federal Council, then representing twenty-five Protestant denominations, agreed. NBC subsequently made similar arrangements with the National Council of Catholic Men and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, but those groups lacked the organization by which they could move as far and as fast as the Protestants.

Charles F. McFarland, general secretary of the Federal Council, was a member of the NBC Advisory Committee on Religious Activities which shaped the following policy: (1) Religious groups should receive free broadcast time but pay for program production costs. (2) Religious broadcasting should be nondenominational. (3) Network broadcasts should use one speaker for continuity. (4) Broadcasts should use a preaching format, "avoiding matters of doctrine and controversial subjects."

But the Advisory Committee policy that caused the greatest strife and led directly to the present-day mainline-evangelical division was the committee's first principle: "The National Broadcasting Company will serve only the central national agencies of great religious faiths, as for example, the Roman Catholics, the Protestants, and the Jews as distinguished from

individual churches or small group movements where the national membership is comparatively small."

Some of the influence of the NBC-Federal Council partnership was moderated by the formation of the CBS radio network in 1927. But CBS also adopted a policy in 1931 of refusing to sell time for religion.

The Mutual Broadcasting System network, formed in the mid-1930s, followed a policy of providing only purchased time to religious broadcasters for a few years. Charles E. Fuller of "The Old-Fashioned Revival Hour" was Mutual's biggest customer in the early 1940s, when more than 25 percent of the network's revenue came from religious accounts. But in 1944, Mutual shifted all religious broadcasting to Sunday morning, cut down program length and—most important—forbade the solicitation of funds on the air. Mutual's religious billings plummeted.

The ABC network, which was originally one of the two networks operated by NBC, followed NBC's lead in refusing to sell time for religious broadcasting and giving time only to the mainline faith groups. The network stance was adopted widely by local station managers. The explanation seems simple enough. Evangelical broadcasters were both multitudinous and troublesome. Their programs and sermons often were hotly sectarian. All things considered, it was simply a lot easier to give the time to the mainline groups that were certain to be inoffensive. It also is obvious that the network officials and local station managers felt a much greater degree of personal identification with the mainliners than with the evangelicals. The broadcasting executives were mainliners, if they had any religious inclinations at all. William J. DuBourdieu, a scholar who classified Protestant broadcasting into "conventional," "fundamentalist," and "irregular," said in 1932, "The Conventional Protestant group is the one which has been chosen by radio stations and chains [networks] to be their agent in supplying religion to the Protestant section of the nation. "

The future course of nonmainline religious broadcasting in the United States was set: it would of necessity be entrepreneurial. Fundamentalists would have to buy time, and their audiences would have to furnish the money. This was their only avenue to radio, and they would fight to keep it open.

That the Federal Council of Churches encouraged local and state councils of churches to produce better-quality religious broadcasting around the country is unquestionably true. That they went much further than that, as evangelicals alleged, and tried to drive evangelicals off the air cannot be proved. Eugene R. Bertermann, longtime president of the evangelical National Religious Broadcasters, claimed at a Senate hearing in 1947 that the Federal Council did so in 1929, sending a representative on a tour of the country to sign up stations "with ironclad contracts obliging them to use the Federal Council's religious programs and none other...." Lowell Saunders, an evangelical who sympathizes with the NRB, searched unsuccessfully for documentation of this charge. Rather, he found a good deal of testimony and evidence that the charge was not true: "From the vantage point of today, such charges against the Federal Council can only be considered hearsay." He also concluded that if Federal Council pressures ever were exerted to stop the sale of time to evangelicals, they certainly did not work. Saunders found, instead, a high correlation between the economic health of the broadcasting industry and the willingness of stations to sell time to evangelicals. When stations and networks needed evangelical money, they sold time to evangelicals.

Ralph Jennings, media watchdog for the United Church of Christ, who studied religious broadcasting during the same period, said that "there is no evidence that the Federal Council of Churches was guilty of any overt acts against any religious programs." Jennings, however, who is very much a mainliner, has stated that the Federal Council's policy of requesting time for itself alone as the central representative of Protestantism was unfair to some evangelical groups, notably the Southern Baptists and Missouri Synod Lutherans.

What matters most is that many evangelicals believed there was a conspiracy against them. Most realized that they would never have significant access to free time, and they gradually arrived at a position of constant vigilance against what they perceived as threats to their right to buy time. Evangelical literature and pronouncements from the period suggest high levels of paranoia.

Broadcasting stations, under the Communications Act of 1934,

are not common carriers; they are not obliged to sell time just because someone wants to buy it. As radio stations grew prosperous, many adopted policies of refusing to sell time for religion and giving it only to ecumenical groups. Unfortunately, many evangelicals saw in each instance of this the hand of the hated Federal Council of Churches.

Since the turn of the century, American fundamentalists have been involved in a holy war against liberalism. That the liberals have seldom noticed the war against them, or bothered to retaliate, has not taken the fun out of the fight for the fundamentalists. To most of them, the worst features of liberalism were collected and embodied in the Federal (now National) Council of Churches. The Council has served as a convenient focus for evangelical militancy for decades. The development of religious broadcasting in the first twenty years of radio played no small part in intensifying that focus.

The National Association of Evangelicals was organized in 1942 specifically, in part, to counter Federal Council activities and influence. The NAE's organizational purposes include the words ". . . to raise up a witness against the apostasy of groups claiming to represent Protestant Christianity without such loyalty to the historic Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ." The list of the NAE's "fields of endeavor" included radio, and the new organization quickly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Radio Committee "in order to help in securing a fair and equal opportunity for the use of radio facilities by evangelical groups or individuals."

When the NAE was unable to devote time and resources to radio, it invited evangelical broadcasters to form a separate association under its wing. The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) was born in 1944. Although it was officially separate and independent, it remained subservient to the NAE for many years. As Lowell Saunders puts it, "It remained captive, for fifteen years, to the idea that its main purpose was to combat the Federal Council and later the National Council of Churches. " Gradually, the NRB outgrew its obsession with the Federal/National Council. It discovered its own agenda, which was still largely protectionistic, but came to see that the liberals actually had very little power in the media.

At the same time, evangelicals were beginning to achieve power of a different sort through buying and building their own stations. The modern religious stations, unlike the church-owned stations of the early days, were strictly commercial ventures, organized to make a profit. A new generation of religious broadcasters had emerged—men who understood that the fundamentalist gospel had to be undergirded by capital investment and business management. The NRB had only 104 members in 1968. In 1980 it had about 900. Members of the NRB produce at least 70 percent of all the religious broadcasts in the United States.

The growth of the NRB parallels the growth of fundamentalist entrepreneurial religious broadcasting which occurred explosively in the 1970s. That growth could not have taken place without a massive evangelical move into television. Television did for the movement what radio never could do.

Television is one of the most powerful social forces in human history. Radio was a marvel, but television is a miracle. Radio was a table of mental snacks; television is force feeding for the brain.

The first religious telecasts took place on Easter Sunday, 1940. The Protestant telecast was presented in cooperation with the Federal Council of Churches and the Catholic program, presumably, in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men. A Jewish service for Passover, most likely under the aegis of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, was presented a month later.

By 1948 video was established and more than forty stations were on the air. TV sets began to come off the assembly lines by the millions. TV stations were springing up all over the country, and by 1950 coaxial cable links were completed which made possible nationwide TV networks. An estimated 10 million receivers had been sold by 1950, and by 1958 the number of TV sets roughly equaled the number of households in America.

The man who gave preachers all over the country a fever for television was a Roman Catholic bishop. He was baptized Peter John Sheen but renamed himself Fulton J. Sheen. He went before the cameras for the first time as the speaker on that historic Easter Sunday, 1940, Roman Catholic religious telecast. When he

returned to television in 1952, he astounded the world of religious broadcasting with his audience ratings.

Sheen was no stranger to religious broadcasting. He was the first speaker on "The Catholic Hour," presented by NBC radio in cooperation with the National Council of Catholic Men, in 1930. He remained the speaker on that program until he went on television in 1952. He was the most outstanding public speaker of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Sheen's program, called "Life Is Worth Living," originated from the Adelphi Theater in New York before a live audience (everything in television was live in those days). Sheen was consciously and clearly Catholic, but his messages were designed for people of all faiths or of no faith. He spoke about common human problems and aspirations—and millions watched his prime-time presentations.

Sheen began in 1952 on the old DuMont television network, and the first telecast was carried by seventeen stations. DuMont began receiving more than 10,000 letters a week, and Milton Berle's ratings dropped about ten points. Realizing that it had a winner, Sheen's sponsor, the Admiral Corporation, quickly moved the program to ABC (NBC and CBS turned it down), where Sheen immediately attracted an audience of millions.

Sheen was not a young man at the time. He had become a priest in 1919, a monsignor in 1934, and an auxiliary bishop (under New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman) in 1951. He was fifty-seven years old when he went on the DuMont network.

But Sheen was a spellbinding speaker and a master showman. He was visually impressive. On television he wore a black cassock with a wide red sash, a red skullcap, and a flowing, floor-length red cape. His stage setting was austere, consisting of little more than a Bible and a blackboard.

He was well educated and had been practicing public speaking all his life. His voice was resonant, and his diction was perfect. He opened his program with a courtly bow and a word of thanks "for letting me come into your home again." His voice could lull like gentle waves or crash like breakers. His eyes were underlighted in order to emphasize his piercing gaze. Sheen was made for television, and television was made for him. When he received an Emmy Award on the same night as Bob Hope, he

quipped, "I'd like to thank my writers—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John."

Under pressure from Cardinal Spellman, with whom he carried on a running feud for years, Sheen left television in 1957. He returned in 1959 to produce two more series which aired in the early 1960s, but he could not recapture the magic of the early years. Sheen was appointed archbishop of Rochester, New York, in 1966, but served only three unhappy years there before retiring.

Sheen's success in television probably was the single most important factor in persuading evangelicals that television—far more than radio—was the medium best suited to their purposes. TV could bring back the evangelistic face-to-face meeting in which a powerful and charismatic preacher could sway audiences and enlist followers. It probably was for intuitive reasons—certainly not because of his theology—that Sheen's appearance at the 1977 convention of the National Religious Broadcasters was greeted with thunderous applause.