 | Prime Time Preachers: The Rising Power of Televangelism |  |
Introduction:
Spiritual Terror
in the
Ecstatic Eighties
George Harris, a distinguished journalist locates the significance of television evangelists in the broader context of religious ferment in American culture.
In The Lady's Not for Burning, Judge Tappercoom glared out at a
religious riot and fretted over the intrusion of spiritual terrorists and
witch burners into the prudent business of the practical world. "Religion
has made an honest woman out of the supernatural," he huffed, and did
not want her out in the street again.
Religious institutions in our day—the standard-brand temples and churches—do seem like the most honest of women, even antiseptic, like a public health nurse, there to inoculate the children against today's epidemics of spiritual turmoil: against Moonie-style cults, Jesus freaks, meditation movements and body mystics, invading squads of Indian gurus, humanistic psychologists chanting uplift slogans without benefit of collar, est-like seminarians in secular disguise, crusading national organizations of fundamentalists, proud witches and trembling exorcists, tribal shamans and extraordinary believers in Gurdjieff, charismatics speaking in tongues in thousands of Catholic prayer groups, hands-on healers in rich Episcopal parishes, Rosicrucians and out-of-body tourists, dream cultists and psychics of all flavors, and hard-sell evangelists raising millions in cash on TV while claiming decisive power through personal prayer and national politics.
Today's Sunday school boom—Catholic, Jewish and Protestant—owes much of its success in numbers to nervous
Such parental worry is understandable. Since parents have raised the kids in a germ-free environment, wherein spiritual fervor is rarer than scarlet fever, the entire population seems to lack immune defenses against just about. any religious germ that happens to pop up. And as parents we are seldom prepared to discriminate among the various forms of live spirit so as to reject one and feed the other. One Harvard professor who was a disciple of a ribald black healer felt acute distress when his youngest daughter married into a Jesus sect.
Prudent persons in charge of the establishment in any era have tended to fear sudden change in the routine mixing of religion with the politics of everyday life. They sense, like Judge Tappercoom, that great writhings of the spirit, if allowed to break out of their confining institutions, soon wreak havoc upon the social order. It's been so long since we watched religious fires bend our country's structures that we have only a vague memory of how it happens, but the memory makes us uneasy. As T. S. Eliot reminded us in Notes Toward a Definition of Culture, political and economic institutions are but the surface expression of a culture's spiritual base. Religion defines culture, and religious change redefines everything in sight. So the shifting of the spiritual base, either by slow decay or by sudden upheaval, shuffles all the surface structures; spiritual turmoil soon builds up like the early shock waves of an earthquake.
And each new shock hits us without warning. There's nobody much to watch over religion's violent landscape—except those who are trying to sell us some particular piece of it. Our intellectuals are out to lunch. Blinded by the fads of twentieth-century thought, writers and talkers in the universities and in the media are mostly spiritual innocents, as unaware of religion's danger as of its hope. The national data are clear: the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center (NORC) has found through opinion polling that our paid brains, more than any other group, are buried in dogmatic materialism. Most suffer
Chicken Little Panic, Then Silence
Our highly secular academics and journalists tend to flock
together and run, now and then, to cover a single spiritual story.
When some religious activity at last forces itself upon media
leaders, they tend to flock like Chicken Littles in panic over a
single raindrop . . . the sky is falling! The authors of this book
recount such a cackling in the last months of the 1980 presidential
campaign. Having rushed out to scream that fundamentalists
were backing Ronald Reagan's bid, months after the main story
had been clear, most major-media journalists then ignored the
story after the votes were counted, having never scratched below
the surface of TV evangelism's giant social movement.
The pale secularists of the press simply have failed to deal with the vivid new spiritualism. And I have to confess my own share of such failures in forty years as a working reporter and editor in national media. My sins of omission are uncommonly serious, since I could often see the fire but generally could not figure out how to explain it clearly enough to sound an effective call or alarm. Indeed, a few of my personal failures serve as a partial checklist on the rising religious turmoil since World War II. Samples:
- Having covered most southern and northern race riots, I somehow failed to explain the profound church involvement (especially from Little Rock onward) clearly enough for us to expect that inevitable confrontation at Selma. There, fired-up white and black ministers risked death to march against Alabama's segregation machinery.
- Black friends more or less forced me to visit Chicago's Elijah Muhammad in the 1950s and to recognize the unique promise of Malcolm X (before the autobiography). But my secular blinders almost made me miss doing the first national report on the Black Muslim sect just when it was becoming the critical new force in American ghettos.
-
Theologian Paul Tillich's End of the Protestant Era,
plus his direct admonitions to me, alerted me to the prospect
of "post-existential"
agonies like the rise of the radical right and the violence on college campuses. He spent our last talk just before his death comparing notes with me on the early stages of such movements. Although Tillich's religious analysis drove me to do the first national expose on the John Birch Society, I was far slower than I should have been to see us heading into the generational riots over fundamental values at Berkeley . . . Columbia . . . Kent State . . . The spiritual crises that flamed up in those struggles have yet to be resolved in years of apparent peace.xvi
- By the mid-1960s, fundamentalist leaders like Billy Graham and Gabe Payne and born-again writers like Keith Miller (author of The Becomers and of Please Love Me) had shown me the struggles ahead. The Christian right would be far more powerful than the Christian left had been. I did warn in a 1965 article that prudent Americans might yet know "why the prudent Romans fed their lions on Christian meat." But my conviction that religious movements would forge the new political majorities did not lead me to spell out the specifics in time to help anyone understand the situation any better.
-
In my long, happy years as the editor of Psychology Today
magazine, I tracked down and published dozens of systematic
probes and surveys that defined a historic shift in U.S. values
and beliefs. Theologian Sam Keen helped the editorial staff to
patrol the cutting edges of this transformation through the
work of seminal thinkers—from mythologist Joseph Campbell
to mystic Carlos Castaneda, from the stern Rollo May to the
despairing Ernst Becker, from porpoise admirer John Lilly to body
mystic Mike Murphy. Researchers helped us trace the new realities.
The University of California's sociologists of religion helped us
measure the broad shift toward body mysticism, what I called a
sense of "God in the gut." Dr. George Gallup helped us
identify the mystical beliefs rising inside the standard denominations.
Father Andrew Greeley, priest-sociologist at NORC, startled me
with his data on the broad public belief in mystical powers: 58
percent of American adults say they've experienced ESP, 27
percent say they've talked with one or more dead friends, and 6
percent have undergone profound mystical encounters very much
like St. Paul's blinded fall on the road to Damascus. Some unseen
power now unseats our rationalistic certainties. Daniel Yankelovich, soon to publish his most perceptive study of our changing values, has led me through year after year of carefully measured evolution toward today's religious upheaval. Precise as ever, Dan finds about one out of three people rebelling against the cold "instrumental" values that obscure the sacred worth of the whole man or woman.xvii
The Flaming Context of Televangelism
Such data leave no excuse for anyone to doubt that we are well
into a religious storm of considerable magnitude. The crude, bold
revivalists who invade our homes through the tube are but one
indicator of the larger phenomenon. We in the media, however,
tend to be like park rangers who report specific blazes in our local
field of vision. We do not put various reports together to tell us
that the forest is burning. In my case, an unholy fear of standing
alone and being misunderstood or laughed at has made me
cautious about trying to spell out the general evidence of total
religious turmoil. When I try to describe the new decade as the
Ecstatic Eighties, I still cannot ignore the fear and trembling that
come with knowing that mystical terrors are moving under the
surface of everyday events.
My purpose here is to suggest that you read this book on television evangelists with a conscious sense of the broader religious struggle. The stakes are high. If we are headed into a New Reformation, as some theologians argue, it may have a reformation's customary quota of bloody civil strife and of holy wars against fundamentalists of other faiths. That warning does sound shrill, I know, but it only points to obvious potentials. Anita Bryant's war on Florida homosexuals gave the country a foretaste of how savage a political skirmish can get when one side crusades against the personal sins of the other. On the world stage, the Shiite fundamentalists who played ayatollah tricks on fifty-two helpless hostages may have lit the fuse for nuclear war in the hearts of Christian true believers. To ignore such possibilities implicit in religious ferment would be irresponsible.
Such concerns leave no room for the cheap partisanism that has tended to rule both sides of the fight over the "electronic church." Especially during the 1980 presidential campaign, it
Both authors have been deeply involved in this crisis for many years, one as a top sociologist of religion and the other as a leading Christian communicator and Ph.D. researcher in communications. Dr. Charles E. Swann is a former president and a director of American Protestantism's professional broadcasters (the North American Broadcasting Section of the World Association for Christian Communication). He has also served as an officer of American Catholicism's broadcasting association, Unda-USA. An ordained Presbyterian minister and a Doctor of Sacred Theology, Dr. Swann now manages WRFK-FM, the fine-arts radio station in Richmond owned by Union Theological Seminary. He has fought for serious research in religious communication and been known as an internal critic of mainline church broadcasting.
Dr. Jeffrey K. Hadden earned his Ph.D. in the sociology of religion from the University of Wisconsin and is now professor of sociology at the University of Virginia as well as former president of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. To Jeff, the biblical admonition to speak the truth with love translates into the passionate objectivity of the dedicated sociologist. So does his need to spot underlying trends that escape the quick-study reporter. Now forty-four, Jeff has devoted his professional life to rigorous research on the belief and behavior of religious groups. By 1968, when I first persuaded him to work with me on a nationwide survey of changing student values, he was just completing one of his six major books, The Gathering Storm in the Churches. It was a prophetic analysis of exactly how the civil rights struggle was leaving liberal clergymen morally isolated from the laity. Jeff's knowledge of the literature on religion let us go directly into the hidden beliefs of the protest generation, and one discovery eventually led us both to the underlying theme of this book.
Narcissism or the Heroic Self
While Dr. Hadden and I were probing student beliefs,
Harvard's David Riesman talked to me about his concept of
"privatization." As author of the noted book The
Lonely Crowd and of Individualism Reconsidered,
Riesman worried about lonely individuals who rely less and less
on social institutions yet expect more and more of themselves.
Such "privatization," as he called it in an interview for
Psychology Today, exposes the private man or woman to
more of a burden than one soul can stand without wobbling.
In the years since then, as you know, major national studies show a strong trend toward still more lonely individualism. Americans are losing faith in corporations, government, schools, churches, medicine, political parties, the press, marriage, parenthood—all the traditional institutions. But while giving up faith in institutions, studies show, they continue to demand more and more of themselves in terms of both achievement and that new obsession with self-fulfillment.
In marriage, for instance, a woman now expects herself to be an accomplished bedmate, an intellectual equal, a wise and loving mother, perhaps a fellow jogger and tennis partner and smart tourist, one who continues to grow, a community organizer and co-host, often a co-professional, and almost always a fellow breadwinner. We expect similar miracles from ourselves at work; aside from earning the highest pay ever known, we expect to be sensitive to co-workers, enlarge our education, make a social contribution, and do very little damage to the environment. The average education of the active worker is now that of a college freshman after Christmas, and still going up.
Social critics have tended to look upon such activities as indicators of rampant selfishness. Tom Wolfe's famous essay on "The Me Decade" and Christopher Lasch's book The Culture of Narcissism warned of a hard trend toward such primal selfishness. But there's less selfishness than loneliness in the American psyche today, along with the feeling, of being called upon to do heroic things without warm support from good old reliables like the Democratic party, the Catholic Church, or Good Mother Company. The organizational man who lived and died inside
It's as if some idiot had raised the ante on what it takes to be a normal human being. Without noticing the overnight change, most of us strive for the new norm. Sexual behavior provides a sensitive indicator of this revolution in nonmaterial expectations. The true sexual revolution has come, not among the public swingers, but in the privacy of the family bedroom. Princeton studies show that American wives make love to their husbands 21 percent more often than they did five years earlier. Yet many feel that they are doing less than their share, not because they feel deprived but because they fear that they are not living up to the norm. As the country expression puts it, Americans by the million feel sent for and can't get there.
The lonely striver comes to feel that the only resource he or she has to develop in this life is the body and mind, that collection of tissue and talent that's often strained to the limit. It's no accident that jogging has become a national obsession—in what Gallup calls the sharpest behavior reversal he has ever studied—or that the drive for health and physical well-being stays at the top of the rising-demand list identified year after year in the Yankelovich monitor of changing values. Nor is it strange, in a nation turned inward to demand heroic effort from the self rather than outward toward reliance on institutions, that today's mystical surge should focus upon the possible interior powers of the God-given body/ mind and especially upon healing. As life comes to feel more and more like that supreme test of self, the marathon run, our national behavior moves further into the "privatization" trend.
Television becomes the inevitable tool for the lonely striver's worship. Just as media campaigns have taken over from the political party, so the prime-time preachers in their powder-blue suits and cocky smiles have stepped proudly up to deliver the church's sermons. They are smart and tough. Ever more sophisticated in their use of the computer as well as of television—the paired technology that raises millions by its combination of exciting programs and direct mail—the preachers have now gained an earthy new sense of power through their Reagan
But the research laid out clearly in this work by Dr. Hadden and Dr. Swann points more to the future than to the past. Man proposes; God disposes. But whatever turns our spiritual turmoil takes in the Ecstatic Eighties, these celebrity preachers will be a national force to reckon with for years to come.
| Prime Time Preachers: The Rising Power of Televangelism | |