University of Virginia Library

Chapter 6
This Business of TV Religion

The financial structure of religious television is unique in that individual broadcasters fund their telecasts through direct solicitation of funds from their audiences. The fund raising success of the top broadcasters have provided resources to also build great cathedrals, universities and Christian theme parks. The techniques and strategies employed to build expansive religious empires are examined in this chapter.

Rex Humbard

The Prayer Key Family Book is Rex Humbard's directory of sinners for whom Rex and his family will pray. You get listed there by contributing to his TV ministry. Once you're in the good book, Rex is pretty patient with you. He'll keep right on praying and sending you letters—more opportunities to contribute—for quite a spell before he sends you the whammy letter quoted above.

Rex never quite says you'll go to hell without his prayers. The letter just goes on to tell how prayers are answered, homes put back together, bodies healed, and failures overcome. All these good things can come to you, and the Devil be defeated, if you get your name back in the good book so that Rex can stand up for you the way he wants to do. A few dollars in the envelope isn't much to pay for all that, just to be dead certain that the Lord does what you want Him to do for you in your daily struggles right here on earth, not to mention the hereafter.

This basic pitch, embellished differently by the various televangelists with offers of freebies and hints of togetherness, finances most prime-time preaching. The fundamentalists prosper on TV precisely because they're not afraid to make the sales pitch so blunt. Liberals mumble around, never quite willing to claim

that they've got God's own cleansing power right there in their hands, but television's evangelicals have tested every form of promise, semi-firm and yours-for-the-asking. Not since Vatican officials sold papal indulgences—written protection from the wages of sin—has there been such a public marketing of Christian favors. And never, surely, has any religion found a mass market like TV's many-channeled auction block.

Peter Cartwright, the legendary circuit rider, must be in heaven turning green with envy. He wore his bottom down to solid bone and callus taking Methodism to the frontier, single-handedly cherishing up the roughnecks in the Northwest Territory. But in all his life Cartwright never reached a tenth of the folks that Rex Humbard talks to on just one television broadcast.

Both Rex and Peter mastered the blunt sales pitch, and they never got so smug in their intellect as to put too much distance between the altar and the snake-oil wagon. Both had hard-sell competitors to keep them down to earth where the sinners live. Both understood the lonely soul's need for the sure cure and for a guaranteed reservation in the heavenly motel at the end of this earthly haul. And so today's televiewers are tapping directly into the lusty tradition of frontier Protestantism with hellfires burning hot just down the hill. Jesus loves me . . . just as I am. The foot-stomping, gut-busting hymns that the choirmasters and theologians just about censored out of the Cokesbury Hymnal have come thundering back full bass in the biggest revival tent ever, prime time.

For all the talk about television, however, the tube makes up less than half the technology that supports the new social movement of fundamentalism. The other half comes in the form of the ubiquitous computer. Like an invisible spirit, the computer allows the prime-time preacher to come down out of the television and listen to you alone, or seem to, and to pray with you, or seem to, and to call you by name when he holds out the collection plate. From the broadcast image in the studio, the preacher comes down to the narrow-cast of the junk-mail letter that is designed to go directly to your heart, as you've divulged it in mail or on the phone, and to let you know that Brother Jim or Brother Rex knows all about you. For one thing, he knows something that many a pulpit preacher would give his stained-glass voice to

know: who has, and (more important) who has not, put green paper into the plate. "Your name was not there," Humbard writes to the delinquent sinner in need of prayer. Then he quits wasting stamps and paper on a prospect who never pays.

While driving through the mountains of Tennessee with the radio tuned to a local religious broadcast, it is not uncommon to hear the preacher mention by name persons he "hasn't heard from for some time." That's a polite way of saying, "You haven't sent me any money recently." Chances are that the preacher can identify by name virtually everyone who has contributed to his radio ministry for the previous five years.

The mailing lists of contributors and potential contributors of the major electronic church operations number quite literally in the millions. Like the contributors to the radio ministry of the Reverend Mr. Smith in the back ways of Tennessee, the potential contributors to the electronic church ministries have to be lured and then periodically prodded if they are to be reliable sources of revenue.

The computer provides a sort of technological equivalent of the Book of Judgment. It lets the preacher divide the sheep from the goats, those who offer golden fleece from the stubborn goats who don't grow any or won't share it. Its practical value is that it allows the preachers to mount a giant direct-mail campaign, sending out millions of fund-raising letters as if passing one huge collection plate. And it allows the preachers to run economical direct-mail systems by concentrating on the names and addresses that pay off well enough to support their multimillion-dollar programming costs.

The future of the computer in its service to religion may best be suggested by the computer-written letters that drop a listener's name into the body of the text once or twice. Whole paragraphs of advice respond to troubles that someone has asked the preacher to pray about, either in calls to the free in-WATS, the 800 lines, or in a letter asking for a free gift. The preacher writes standard paragraphs that his assistants can drop into any letter with a push of the computer's efficient buttons. Out of the pleas for help, prime-time preachers are building monumental data banks on the most intimate personal problems mentioned by the millions who phone in.

In the specialized trade of direct mail, promoters constantly test different sales pitches, different words and themes, to sell anything from coins and sexy lingerie to pottery and magazines. The pros gather once a year to hand out Golden Mailbox awards to the most successful marketers. They can compare one sales pitch with another down to a thousandth of a percentage point of response. If the preachers recognized the precision of such testing, it would open a whole new frontier for them to talk about the highly personal concerns of target audiences.

As of now, the preachers have not pushed the uses of the computer's cheap memory much beyond the standard ones. But this is beginning to change as parapersonal communication techniques are perfected. As preachers, the televangelists can go more directly into personal matters, and their theology lets them assume considerable power to influence people's lives. In the summer of 1980, for instance, uncertainty was running high. Unemployment had hit 7.8 percent, but economists were nervously guessing that the recession had bottomed out. Oral Roberts was into reruns, so he was airing the most profitable of his previous shows. His guest one morning was a former Miss America, Cheryl Prewitt, the charismatic who believes that her crushed leg was healed by a miracle. As the time came for the invitation to write or call in, Oral asked Cheryl to pray for all those in the viewing audience in need of a miracle.

Then on the television screen appeared a young mechanic who was being laid off work. His boss was apologetic. The young man assured him that he understood times were tough. He went home and was met at the door by a consoling wife. This scene was followed by a pitch for a free copy of Oral Roberts's book Don't Give Up. Then the camera returned to the young man who was again being greeted, this time by a seemingly jubilant wife. No words were spoken, but the implication was that the man had found another job. And the obvious message was to trust in God in time of financial need.

Then Oral Roberts returned to the camera with the following message: "If you have something on your heart, if you're hurting, if you're ill, if you have a great need, or a little need, if you just need to write to someone, I'll be so glad to hear from you. I'll pray with you and write you back. And I'll expect a

miracle of God to happen in your life. My address is Oral Roberts, Tulsa, Oklahoma. God bless you." People do write Oral Roberts. Wayne A. Robinson, a onetime associate of the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, claims that Oral was receiving in excess of 6 million letters annually by the mid-1970s and that immediately after a prime-time special the postal service would deliver 100,000 a day. Other prime-time preachers receive mail in proportion to their audience size. Billy Graham claims to receive 40,000 to 50,000 pieces of mail a week, but immediately after his prime-time crusades it is not unusual for him to get that much in a single day. Who reads all this mail? Oral Roberts gives his viewers every indication that he does, but even working a fourteen-hour day, which he claims to do, Oral would have to read twenty-four letters a minute just to get through his mail—and that doesn't leave any time for him to respond. Instead, it is the thinking machine that plugs in names, thanks Martha or Ray for the $10 contribution, tells John that the Lord will see him through unemployment, and asks Jim one more time if he won't make a special sacrifice for the glory of God.

On television, one of the most common cries that brings in the mail is that the foreclosing banker is on the doorstep. Many are the times that the stars of the cathode church have stood in front of the cameras and made urgent pleas to their audiences to bail them out before they have to cut back on the number of stations on which they are seen. And most of the majors have, on more than one occasion, quite literally been on the brink of financial insolvency. But each time this has happened, to date, their faithful followers have heard their pleas, and their empires have been snatched from the threat of oblivion.

If their operations have frequently lacked a sound set of business principles for planned growth, their faith and hard work have thus far gotten them through adversity. From their perspective, this deliverance is abundant evidence of God's providential involvement in their ministry as well as a sign that the Lord expects yet bigger and better projects for the glory of His name. And this is all the encouragement they need to launch even more ambitious projects that seem destined to put them out on a limb yet another time.

The logic of the evangelical success formula demands reaching

as many people as possible, a requirement that many critics attack as a principal cause of corrupt acts. In order to pay for the increased production costs of reaching larger audiences, one needs—an even larger audience. It's a fiscal Catch-22. The compulsion this predicament creates translates into getting on a lot of stations, at the most desirable time slot possible, and with a program that catches and holds a large audience. Each of these requirements brings its own special agonies. In the final analysis, all the TV ministers have to ask themselves whether the contributions received from a particular market and market area are equal to or greater than the costs of broadcasting to that market.

This necessity of examining the profit and loss columns, market by market, creates a dilemma of conscience. On the one hand, the raison d'être of the ministries is to reach out and spread the gospel message. On the other hand, they can't carry a ministry in a market very long if they don't attract an audience of sufficient size to cover the costs. Presumably those areas where it is most difficult to cover costs are also those most in need of the gospel. Those that easily pay their own way, in contrast, can probably be judged to be less in need of the gospel message. Since few markets are exceptionally profitable and, thus, most are running somewhere close to the break-even point, there is constant pressure to drop unprofitable markets and replace them with markets where the televangelists might fare better.

The syndicated television ministries compete with one another, first of all, just to get on the air. But inasmuch as audience size and revenues are dependent, in considerable measure, on the time in which a program appears, the competitive pressure can become pretty fierce. In a word, this competition has triggered a fundamental free-enterprise principle of supply and demand. The greater the demand for air time during a particular time period, the greater the price tag it can demand.

Getting on the air at the right time is critical to developing an audience of significant size, but the right time slot is insufficient if the program itself does not hold the audience—thus the final compulsion to produce a show that can compete on commercial television's terms. Mike Nason, executive producer of Robert Schuller's "Hour of Power," strongly asserts that the quality of religious television is paramount. "What are they asking us to

do?" he asks. "Get black and white, adjust our glasses before we read a Scripture, shuffle up to the camera? By that time we've lost our viewer. He's gone to watch Bugs Bunny."

And this, of course, brings us back to that old nemesis, money. By almost any standards, the ability of the electronic churches to raise money is impressive. The top four programs on television collectively took in over a quarter of a billion dollars in 1980. The next five largest took in more than $100 million. That's a lot of money. Even more impressive is the fact that most of it comes in $5, $10, and $15 contributions.

There is no question that raising this money is costly. Most of the major TV ministries eventually turn to direct-mail fundraising organizations. Many fund raisers do not work on the principle of how many cents out of each dollar must be used for fund raising. Rather, they sell clients on the idea of investment for the purpose of acquiring a donor base, just as one would lay down capital to build a store. They may begin with the notion of a break-even acquisition—you spend a dollar to get a dollar back.

Suppose you invest $100,000 to acquire 5,000 donors who give an average of $20 each. That's a break-even acquisition. But once you have the donors, you can expect a fairly large proportion of them to be repeaters. So the second year, the cost of obtaining a contribution from those who have already given once is much lower. Assume that an organization retains 3,000 of the 5,000 donors, or 60 percent, for the second year. Amortizing in this way, it takes ten years for the list of 5,000 donors to diminish to a mere 500. But each year the average gift goes up a little—say, an average of 5 percent—and each year the cost of raising that money declines.

Let's look at how fund raising works in the concrete context of a religious television program. Let's assume you wrote in for a free book, which you read and thought was pretty interesting. You have also become a fairly regular viewer of the program. Along about the third or fourth time you receive a letter appealing for money to support the ministry, you decide that the religious telecast really is worthwhile and that you ought to be doing your share to support it.

Once you have become a donor, the organization pursues

several techniques to retain you as well as to upgrade the level of your giving. Many organizations attempt, even as they try to get you to make a first contribution, to retain you as a regular contributor by getting you to join their organization of regulars. Rex Humbard has his Prayer Key Family members, Pat Robertson his 700 Club members, Oral Roberts his Faith Partners, and so forth. as an obligation to contribute. Some require a specific amount per month; others, only the expectation that you will make a regular contribution commensurate with your capacity to give. So the goal of all these organizations is not simply to get a one-time contribution from you, but to capture your ongoing commitment.

Once they can count on you as a regular contributor, they endeavor to increase your contribution. This may be done in a variety of ways. For one, you can simply be asked to contribute more than you did the last time. Computers can keep better track of that sort of thing than individuals, so subsequent appeals often include a reminder of the amount of your last contribution. Or you might be reminded that inflation is driving the cost of everything up, including religious broadcasting, thus implying that if you are to remain even with your level of giving, you should give more.

In addition to regularizing and upgrading, almost all television ministries make special add-on appeals. They may ask you to respond to a specific financial crisis, which may or may not be real. Or they may ask for a seasonal sacrifice or a contribution to some special project or event. At least one reason almost all television ministries have building projects is that they have learned that people like to contribute to bricks and mortar—to something vaguely immortal.

At the heart of a successful direct-mail operation, of course, is the appearance of highly personalized communications, those friendly computer mentions of your name in letters. (If you look closely, you'll probably find that all that first-naming is done on the first page; it's cheaper to personalize one page and duplicate the rest.) The reader may also find mention of his or her hometown or state in the body of the letter. To the unsophisticated, the letter has every appearance of having been written

especially for them. It is, of course, computer-produced, using technology unavailable until only a few years ago.

As the organization acquires more information about you, that information may be stored in computers and automatically recalled to be scattered through future communications in the same manner as name and residence may be inserted in initial communications. How much you gave the last time, when that was, and whether it might have been for some special cause are all easily retrievable facts that can be blocked into form letters that are going out to thousands of others who share with you the fact that they are contributors.

One of the functions of telephone counseling services and prayer request calls is that future mass mailings can recall your requests along with the expression of hope or trust that prayers have been answered. Furthermore, if you've called to request special prayers, let us say, for someone who is about to die, you are likely to receive a pamphlet or sermon about dealing with bereavement. Or you may receive a letter in which appropriate paragraphs have been selected from hundreds in storage for use in dealing with a particular problem.

Many people take a highly cynical view of this kind of high-technology response to real people with real problems. But as Jim Bakker has admitted, there is just no way that he and all the other television ministers can respond personally. In one sense the practice is highly deceptive. On the other hand, the system is set up so that many people get responses to problems that trouble them. And to the best of their abilities, the direct-mail organizations are trying to respond as Rex or Oral or Jim would respond if there were enough hours in the day for them to do so. Again, the paradox of technology: the greater the skill of the organization in promoting parapersonal communication, the more likely it is to establish rapport with its followers, and, in turn, the more likely these people are to become even bigger contributors to the ministry.

A small proportion of the television audiences become genuine communicants of particular ministries. They give a great deal, some beyond their means, and they communicate frequently both in writing and on the phone. Not unlike charitable organizations, the electronic church organizations are on the lookout for these

types of people and do go after them personally for bequests. They have trust departments that can arrange for deferred giving, life insurance policies, guaranteed income if someone wills his or her estate to the organization. Personally, we find this more distasteful than any other aspect of the electronic churches' fund-raising practices. But it would be less than fair to the TV ministries that engage in such practices to fail to note that almost every organization in our society that seeks charitable contributions uses essentially the same techniques.

A few programs never solicit funds on the air. Some feel that the mood of the religious program should not be interrupted by solicitation. On the other hand, others have a more practical reason for this policy: they say that indirect techniques are more effective. "Day of Discovery," for example, offers Bible study materials to its viewers with the assurance that if you write for the free offering, your name will not end up on "another mailing list." And this pledge is honored. When the offer comes, you receive a card that you can check and return if you want to continue to receive materials. If you return the card, you will receive Bible study and daily devotional materials, along with the opportunity to contribute to the ministry. But there is no hard pressure to do so.

At the other end of the continuum, a few ministries devote a significant proportion of their air time to solicitation. Often there is a direct correlation between the amount of time spent appealing for money and the current cash-flow troubles of the ministry. Oral Roberts normally rattles the cup for only a few minutes during each telecast, but his overextension with the City of Faith medical complex has forced him to lengthen his solicitation talks. In late September 1980 he mailed to everyone on his mailing lists "Special Announcement" postcards that said to be sure and watch on October 5. The message in Oral's handwriting read, "This may be the most important news I've ever announced on national television." On that morning the television cameras were moved outside, and for a significant portion of the program Roberts stood in the midst of his unfinished City of Faith, pleading for money.

Oral Roberts's solicitation pivots on the concept of "seed faith." "You Sow It, Then God Will Grow It" is the title of an

article by Oral in a recent issue of his Abundant Life magazine. His approach is always that giving to God, through the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, will earn you personal rewards. It's for your own good that you contribute.

Most television preachers push the self-interest idea, but some pursue giving as a matter of duty. Dr. Eugene Scott, a Pentecostal preacher with a doctorate from Stanford University, presides over a program called "Festival of Faith" on the Faith Broadcasting Network which broadcasts in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Hartford, Connecticut. When it's time to raise money, he goes after his loyal followers with a righteous fervor, a fervor in defense of a preacher's duty to solicit funds:

Following a videotape of a singing group that appears regularly on "Festival of Faith," Scott comes back on camera and says he doesn't know whether to be glad or sad. He counts the pledge slips, announces that he still needs another $2,800, and enjoins his viewers to "get on with it while they sing again." The same tape is played again, Scott comes back on camera and preaches some more about giving as worship, then he orders the control studio to "track that up again." And to the audience he says, "You got six minutes."

All of this, mind you, is a videotape filmed at some earlier date and perhaps rerun several times. The daily talk shows, "The 700 Club" and "The PTL Club," utilize a modified telethon format to raise money. In their own way they can be nearly as

heavy-handed as the Reverend Dr. Scott, although neither Pat Robertson nor Jim Bakker would see his techniques in that light.

As in all telethons, the appeal to make a pledge is more or less continuous and not infrequently nauseous. What differentiates the religious from the secular pledge is the holding out of the promise of healing, miracles, special personal blessings from God, claiming the whole earth for Jesus, and so forth. The televangelists go for the heartstrings in a pretty obvious way. And the 800 toll-free number makes it easy for the viewer to call in a pledge.

On the night the 700 Club concept was conceived, Jim Bakker, who had joined Robertson's organization only a few weeks earlier, appeared on camera just before the scheduled sign-off and told the audience: "Our entire purpose has been to serve the Lord Jesus Christ through radio and television. But we've fallen short. We need $10,000 a month to stay on the air, and we're far short of that. Frankly, we're on the verge of bankruptcy and just don't have the money to pay our bills." Robertson recalls in his autobiography, Shout It from the Housetops, that Bakker's voice broke and that he cried. He continues: "The cameraman in the studio held steady, his camera focused on Jim's face as the tears rolled down and splattered on the concrete floor.... Immediately the phones in the studio started ringing until all ten lines were jammed. Those tears had touched the hearts of the people all over the state. People called in weeping . . . . By 2:30 a.m. we had raised $105,000."

Beyond any shadow of doubt, Robertson and Bakker believe that this was God's way of delivering their budding television station from bankruptcy. Their critics might doubt that the tears flow at God's behest, but on that evening Bakker clearly found a winning formula that made contact between people's hearts and pocketbooks on the one end, and the religious broadcasters' telephone lines on the other. Many people who are old enough to remember that "The Tonight Show" has not always been hosted by Johnny Carson refer to Bakker as the Jack Paar of the religious networks. But whereas Paar's bawling on the air contributed to his demise as a talk-show host, tears are possibly Bakker's greatest asset. They show him to be human, someone who is moved by the things that move other people, a person worthy of

trust and support. Some of Bakker's financial scrapes are enough to make any man cry, but when he does it on camera, it's like money in the bank.

Bakker carefully shed a token tear at the end of his January 1981 interview with President-Elect Ronald Reagan, then brushed it away. "Let's keep those pledges coming in," he said briskly while the call-in numbers blazed across the screen under his picture: "Pledges 1-800-331-1702, Prayers 1-704-554-6000." With the phone-answering forces lined up on camera, Reagan paid back his campaign debts fast in money raised for PTL.

No matter how emotional the appeal, some people just don't get sucked into impulse giving. So the televangelists use a variety of other methods to raise the cash they need to sustain air time. Besides direct appeal on the air, there are three other categories: the offering of gifts; the sale of books, records, tape recordings, religious art, and other items; and prayer and counseling services. Many of the programs utilize all these techniques to some degree, but there are distinct differences in their approaches to fund raising. As we have seen, direct appeal on the air can vary from the straightforward pitch to the emotional plea to a duty/ obligation rap. Perhaps the most widely used technique for getting names and addresses for the solicitation lists, however, is the offering of gifts. The staples of this approach are printed matter and inexpensive but attractively presented jewelry. But all sorts of other things are offered as well—cassette recordings of sermons, records, prayer cloths, decals, bumper stickers, and even samples of earth from the Holy Land.

The printed materials come in all sizes, shapes, and quality, ranging from basement mimeograph machine products to four color commercially printed jobs. They include sermons, monthly Bible study and devotional materials, pamphlets, magazines, and books (both hard-and soft-cover). Magazines have been around for quite a while, but high-quality four-color magazines have only recently exploded on the TV religion scene. One is reminded of the sudden appearance of airline magazines; once they existed, every airline had to have its own.

Lapel buttons and necklaces are the most frequently offered types of jewelry. Often the jewelry identifies the program, with

logos such as "PTL" and "700 Club," but necklaces in the shape of stars, crosses, and brief messages are among the repertoire of offerings. Medallions with inscribed messages are also popular. Robert Scholar preached a sermon entitled "Turn Your Scars into Stars" and offered a five-pointed-star necklace on which that message was inscribed.

During the summer of 1980, James Robison offered a "Vote" lapel pin with the letter T enlarged and in the shape of a cross. If you wrote or called, you also received a bumper sticker with the same word and a message from Robison extolling the virtues of Christian citizenship.

Two principles underlie the offering of free materials. The first is the principle of reciprocity. Although there is indeed no contractual obligation in accepting the gift, the psychological theory of reciprocity holds that when someone does something for you, it is proper that you respond by doing something in return. We don't feel comfortable being in the debt of others. Giving to someone who has given to us restores the balance of interpersonal relations. This, of course, is paradoxical to the urge to get something for nothing, but the human psyche is complex and sometimes contradictory.

Charities have understood this principle of reciprocal giving for a long time, but perhaps it has not been so fully exploited as in recent years by the electronic church ministries. As early as the 1940s, the Easter Seal organization sent out those beautiful stamps, knowing people would be tempted to affix them to their mail. But to do so would conjure up a bit of guilt unless one had contributed to the charity. And for years veterans' organizations sent out miniature license plates, imprinted with the individual's own license number, which were designed to fit on a key ring. They came with the request to return them if you didn't want them, but obviously one's own license number was of no value to anyone else. So in order not to feel guilty about sticking the little license on the key ring, millions of people stuffed a dollar or two in the return envelope that came with the gift.

Most of the gifts sent out by the electronic churches are inexpensive, usually costing less per unit than the handling and postage. Ideally, the total cost, including handling, is less than

the monies received, and the net gain goes to pay for television program production costs and the purchase of air time.

In reality, a lot of people accept the gifts but do not reciprocate as the theory of reciprocity says they should. This leads to the second principle underlying the offering of gifts. The names of persons who take the time to write a note or call a toll-free number to get a gift automatically go onto the computer list for direct-mail solicitation. Such people are more likely to contribute than people on a random list. They have watched the program and are apparently not negative in their attitudes or they likely would have turned off the program before the offer was made. The task is to transform these interested parties into contributors to the ministry—preferably regular contributors.

The offering of gifts has become the most successful way of attracting people to the television ministries. "You can't just preach the gospel and wait for the money to come in," Carl Wallace, director of administration of Robert Schuller's "Hour of Power," told us. "It doesn't happen that way. You've got to offer some incentive for people to communicate with you. The minute we stop offering gifts, our revenues go down dramatically." The money Schuller's program raises is a lot less than that of the other major religious programs, perhaps just because he uses a less aggressive approach to fund raising. That revenues fall when he stops handing out the freebies is as good as any indication of how important the hard sell is.

The offering of religious items for sale—rather than giving them away—is another important way in which both radio and television ministries support their operations. This is done both over the air and through the mail once an individual is on a mailing list. Actually, the items are usually not identified as being for sale but are made available for a donation of a specified amount. There are two basic strategies in this approach. The first implicitly acknowledges that although the item being offered does have some real monetary value, it is not equal to the price for which it is offered. It is rather a gift sent in exchange for a donation. For example, Jerry Falwell recently offered a boxed set of the seven books that had most influenced his life in exchange for a gift of $100 to Liberty Baptist College. They were

paperback books that were obviously worth only a fraction of the offering price, but the contributor knows that he or she is making a donation, not purchasing an item of great value. The items are intended to be an inducement to give. Jim Bakker's PTL Masters' Art Collection is a clear case in point. In the promotional material Bakker writes that the painting of Jesus as a baby is so moving that "Tammy cannot look at it . . . without crying."

A different strategy is to offer items at what is, generally speaking, a fair market value. Because the radio or television ministry produces the items itself, or buys them in bulk, there is a net profit in each transaction. Jimmy Swaggart, more than any of the other television ministers, uses the hawking of religious merchandise as a mainstay of his fund raising. Swaggart is a successful gospel recording artist as well as a television evangelist, and his records are one of his most important offers.

Those who get on Jimmy Swaggart's mailing list receive a monthly magazine entitled the Evangelist. The September 1980 issue consisted of forty-four pages, twenty-eight of which were devoted to "advertising" things one could receive for a donation of a specified amount. More than forty record albums were offered, which were also available on eight-track or cassette tapes. In addition, there were cassette recordings of Swaggart's sermons, Bibles, books, photo albums, calendars, Christmas cards, song books, and "Jesus Saves" pen sets.

In effect, this is a mail-order catalog business in which items are offered for a fixed donation, which makes it a tax-deductible transaction. In itself, the mail-order business is inadequate to cover the costs of putting Jimmy Swaggart on more than 200 television stations, but it does help pay the bills. A lot of radio and television ministries have utilized this technique of fund raising, but the hard-selling Swaggart has done so more extensively and successfully than any of the others.

Another fund-raising technique that is utilized by even some of the smaller radio and television ministries is the promotion of travel. Trips to the Holy Land, of course, are the most popular. That September 1980 issue of the Evangelist promoted a trip with Jimmy and Frances Swaggart to Israel, with stopovers in Jordan and Egypt, for $1,449. But Swaggart apparently found another lucrative travel route. Readers of the Evangelist were invited to

join him for the Second Annual Hawaiian Crusade in the dead of winter. They reserved the best rooms in the "exquisite" Hilton in Honolulu, and the promotional copy claimed that "thousands will be coming." The advertisement then went on to say: "The warmth of Hawaii will strengthen you physically and the spiritual experience will be priceless." If the spiritual experience itself was priceless, the base price tag for surf and salvation in the sun was $999 from Dallas, per person, double occupancy. If, indeed, thousands of Jimmy's followers did follow him to the land of aloha, the travel agent's commissions to the Jimmy Swaggart Evangelistic Association were considerable.

All of these operations are, of course, quite legitimate ways of raising money. Professional organizations, alumni associations, automotive clubs, and other groups promote travel packages as a means of bolstering revenues, and there are very few sacred shrines in America where a gift shop for the hawking of religious merchandise doesn't exist.

It's hard to draw the line between the fair and the shoddy. For example, some radio ministries have offered items of real value at less than the going retail price. One Texas radio preacher offered video-cassette recorders for about $200 less than retail. The giver, thus, not only got a bargain, but also received the bonus of a nice tax deduction for a charitable contribution. And the minister, because he had purchased the recorders at wholesale discount rates, netted a profit on each transaction. Critics, however, might object to such discount retailing under God's banner.

Soliciting prayer requests and offering religious counseling is the fourth way the television programs draw people into their ministries. Oral Roberts and Rex Humbard encourage people to write, but they also offer telephones for the receipt of prayer requests. Both "The 700 Club" and "The PTL Club" strongly encourage the use of the telephone and prominently display their phone counselors on the air. The new CBN facilities are equipped with fifty-four incoming telephone lines for twenty-four-hour counseling. In addition, CBN has seventy telephone counseling services in metropolitan areas around the country. Fifty of those centers have paid staff members, and telephones are manned by a total of 10,000 volunteers. "The 700 Club" broadcasts intermittently

flash the telephone numbers of both the local and the national centers on the screen, and during the broadcast viewers are repeatedly encouraged to call.

The rationale for "The 700 Club" telephone ministry is grounded in Scripture. Matthew 18:19 reads, ". . . if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven." Telephone counseling, thus, is a way of yoking volunteers to persons in need of a prayer partner. If two shall agree, God will answer their prayers. Counselors at both "The 700 Club" and "The PTL Club" are mostly charismatic Christians. Their sense of God's personal, intimate involvement in life is quite foreign to most mainline Protestant and Catholic traditions.

But the prime-timers are sensitive to the thin line between counseling and the use of the prayer lines to build their mailing lists. A television documentary on the electronic church entitled "The Gospel According to TV" filmed a PTL counselor receiving a phone call from a person who needed a house with three bedrooms and a fenced-in yard for not more than $200 a month. Without any hesitation the counselor said, "OK, let's go to the Lord in prayer." The counselor prayed that the caller would be led to the right realtor, that guardian angels would protect the house until he could claim it, and Satan was commanded not to interfere in the transaction. We asked PTL personnel about this film clip. Did they find it offensive and feel that it was intended by the producer of the documentary as a put-down? They did not object to anything—except the fact that the sequence included the counselor taking down information about the caller.

This scene, of course, strikes at the heart of the paradox and dilemmas of evangelism, servitude and solicitation. In 1979 "The 700 Club" and its local counseling affiliates received 1,397,000 telephone calls. According to Pat Robertson, 75,000 of those persons made a "decision for Christ" and were referred to a local church. How could you pass their names and addresses along if you didn't write them down? And as long as you've got them down, how can you pass up the opportunity to merge them into your direct-mail list?

In addition to the prayer requests and spiritual decisions, every month produces tens of thousands of calls from people with

emotional problems, family problems, drug and alcohol problems, and so on. "700 Club" counselors deal with more than 250 suicide calls and a whole catalog of other personal troubles per month.

The nature of the counseling offered by the various electronic church organizations varies, but the total volume is considerable. There is plenty of room for those with different training and values to question the adequacy and appropriateness of all or most of the counseling that occurs. The burden of proving the assertion that these people are doing more harm than good, however, rests with the accusers. There is solid research that suggests that sensitive laymen can help anxiety cases more than Ph.D. psychologists.

For whatever reason a person may call, counselors obtain sufficient information to get that caller on the organization's mailing list—if he or she is not already there. The one exception we found to this was the telephone counseling service affiliated with Robert Schuller's "Hour of Power." People who call NEW-HOPE do not get cycled into the mailing list unless they explicitly request to have their names placed there. Other organizations told us they would honor a caller's request not to be placed on a list.

People don't normally call an anonymous counselor unless they experience loneliness, anxiety, or hurt that cannot be relieved by family or friends. For many callers, the opportunity to become involved in a television ministry is exactly the kind of support they need to deal with a problem. In many cases, this involvement does lead them to a local church. In others, the transformation of counseling into an opportunity for solicitation is a betrayal of a trusting relationship and the epitome of a religious hucksterism.

However an individual becomes known to a TV ministry, his or her name goes onto a computerized list for direct-mail solicitation. How long a name remains on the list, and what the person can expect to receive, varies from organization to organization. Generally speaking, a name remains on a list longer if some financial contribution has been made than if the individual has only requested a gift.

In December 1979 those on Jim Bakker's direct-mail list received a letter describing the importance of the PTL phone lines over the Christmas holidays, which for many people is a time of loneliness and despair. The previous December, 20,000 people had called. The letter stated that there was an average of sixteen suicide calls a day. A gift to PTL, thus, could help save lives. Later that same month, a letter described the 1980 PTL Club Devotional Guide, filled with photos, testimonial materials of PTL guests, and 366 pages designed to bless and help the reader grow closer to the Lord each day of the year—yours "when you send a gift of $15 or more to help support the PTL Club and all its programs." January brought an offer of a collection of religious art. February informed the potential giver that a contribution could help keep "The PTL Club" on the air in his or her city. March provided the opportunity to contribute to the building of the Heritage USA "Barn."

And so it goes each month, or with each mailing. If you're not attracted to contribute for one reason, perhaps another pitch will appeal to you. Jerry Falwell may ask you to give to a special project, the Liberty Missionary Society one month, Liberty Baptist College the next, and to join in cleaning up "smut" in America the following.

A few of the TV preachers, usually those of the minor league, effectively hang out "Givers Only" signs. One of our inquiries resulted in a straightforward message: "If you can't give to our ministry, you won't receive anything from us"—except, we were promised at the conclusion of the letter, the prayers of the TV minister. In another case we were informed that the free book that had been offered was out of print. We followed up with a request for the same book using a different name and enclosing a contribution; the book was promptly mailed. Most television ministries deny that contributors and noncontributors receive different treatment in the processing of requests, but our research revealed that this simply is not always the case.

Some organizations, however, send the same materials to contributors and noncontributors alike. This is likely to include magazines, newsletters, devotional materials, as well as letters of solicitation. Others hold out the promise of these things if you become a contributor. Letters of solicitation may be spaced as far

apart as every three months or arrive as frequently as every ten days. Some organizations drop a name after only a few attempts if no contributions are forthcoming, but others seem never to clean their mailing lists.

One thing that is fairly standard in direct-mail solicitations is the fact that they are systematically varied. Key codes hidden on the response cards let the junk-mail experts compute the exact level of response from each pitch they test.

To date, the government has been reluctant to become involved in the regulation of financial matters of religious organizations, and religious organizations have not been very eager to open their books for inspection. By the end of 1976, only 13 percent of the fifty-five most inquired about religious organizations had provided audited financial information to the Better Business Bureau. Two years later, that figure had nearly doubled to 24 percent, but that still leaves three-quarters who offer no financial accountability.

In 1977 Senator Mark Hatfield informed a group of evangelical leaders that if they did not assume responsibility for regulating themselves there was every likelihood that legislation would be required. In fact, Congressman Charles Wilson of Texas had already introduced a bill that would have required disclosure "at the point of solicitation." In December 1977 representatives of thirty-two evangelical groups met in Chicago to discuss cooperative efforts. Thomas Getman, chief legislative assistant to Senator Hatfield, told the group, "Legislation is not important; disclosure is." Getman encouraged "a voluntary disclosure program . . . that will preclude the necessity of federal intervention into the philanthropic and religious sector."

Almost two years later Dr. Stanley Mooneyham, president of World Vision, acknowledged, "There is no denying that this threat of governmental action was one of the stimuli" that produced the December meeting and the subsequent activities which led to the founding of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.

In early 1980 the ECFA listed 115 charter members, but the television ministries were conspicuous by their general absence. Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church and Related Ministries

was the only charter member among the regular syndicated TV ministries. Also among the charter members were the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which broadcasts specials rather than weekly programs; Mooneyham's World Vision, which produces telethons to raise money for its international ministries; and Bill Bright's Campus Crusade for Christ.

It is still too early to determine whether the ECFA will provide the kind of self-regulation that Senator Hatfield and others hope for. Our own efforts to gain information that would permit us to evaluate the financial status of these organizations left us with doubts, although we concede that it may be a matter of their getting organized and clarifying policies. In addition, the apparent reluctance of all but one of the major television ministries to join the ECFA can only raise concern about their financial operations.