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I. INTRODUCTION: OF TELEVANGELISTS, SCANDAL, MARKET
PRESSURES AND GOVERNMENT

The movement of a few television preachers into politics during the early 1980s led to the widely held perception that the televangelists had trespassed the serpentine wall that has traditionally separated religion and politics. [1] As tormented money and sex scandals unfolded--not in the supermarket tabloids but on the evening television news and on ABC's Nightline, millions of Americans concluded that the televangelists were living beyond accountability. [2]

If ever the time was ripe for the government to step in and regulate religious broadcasters, it was in the late 1980s. But religious broadcasters had not taken orders from worldly authorities in the past, and the misdeeds of some of their broadcast colleagues were not enough to temper their fierce independence. When called before the oversight committee of the House Ways and Means Committee in October 1987, several of the nation's leading religious broadcasters told Congressman J. J. Pickle (D-Tex.) and his colleagues that they were quite capable of regulating themselves. While religious broadcasters spoke softly, if sternly, the executive director of their trade association, the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), went on the attack. Ben Armstrong labeled the Pickle hearings an "insidious" attack and "the beginning of a new 'inquisition,'" against religious broadcasters. [3]

The new inquisition never materialized. Congressman Pickle's subcommittee has kept a watchful eye on religious broadcasters, as has the Internal Revenue Service. But the pattern of federal government agency monitoring has been one of quietly seeking information and, where questions of compliance with government regulations arose, of privately seeking compliance. [4]

Critics of religious broadcasters complained that the cozy political alliance between the televangelists and conservative White House incumbents effectively squelched inquiries by federal regulatory agencies. While this proposition would seem

to have some prima facie merit, the argument advanced in this article is that market forces should be the primary instrument for the regulation of religious broadcasting. The conclusion reached is that notwithstanding the encroachments of some religious broadcasters into the arena of politics, and the scandals and shame that befell some broadcast ministries, governmental and market structures for policing religious broadcasters appear to be in place and working well. The future, however, may be more problematic. This uncertain future stems from underlying structural developments in the communications industry and in the changing legal character of the culture, not from the scandals that rocked religious broadcasting in the late 1980s.

To date, policing of the religious airwaves has taken place at two levels. First, religious broadcasters have been subjected to essentially the same regulatory principles that govern all broadcasting in America. [5] If the radio and television preachers sometimes appear to be operating in a relatively unfettered manner, it is because broadcasting in the United States operates with greater latitude and freedom from government interference than broadcasting in any other nation. Although not the subject of this piece, it is interesting to note that religious broadcasting is, in many ways, a macrocosm of the broadcast industry itself.

The second level of regulation of religious broadcasters is a complex web of informal social controls. These informal social controls operate most effectively on the level of the broadcast networks, the level of local radio and television station managers and owners, and the level of the viewing and listening audiences which support the access of religious broadcasters to the airwaves. This Article takes on the task of exploring the history of how these informal social controls evolved and worked.

Notwithstanding the general effectiveness of informal social controls, the trend of the modern welfare state is toward the involvement of government in virtually every aspect of public and private life. This portends a similar fate for religion in general and religious broadcasting specifically. In the concluding section, this paper will explore the implications of this development.