Christianity and the Mass Media in America: Toward a Democratic Accommodation

Chapter 4: CONVERTING TO CONSUMERISM: EVANGELICAL RADIO EMBRACES THE MARKET

4 Converting to Consumerism: Evangelical Radio Embraces the Market P P P When Everett C. Parker conducted the first major study of religious radio broadcasting in America, he had no idea what he would discover .1 It was 1941, and World War II was drawing the nation’s attention to Europe as the commercial radio networks already garnered large national audiences. Parker sent questionnaires to the management of all commercial radio stations in Chicago, hoping to gain a snapshot of their religious programming, including how much of it they aired, which types of religious programming seemed to hold listeners’ interests, and how station management funded such broadcasts. Parker also sent questionnaires to the sponsors of each religious broadcast. The results of Parker’s research showed conclusively that Chicagoans liked religious radio broadcasts. Commercial stations aired seventy-seven different religious programs, from the National Catholic Hour to Religion in the News, the Old-Fashioned Revival Hour (Rev. Charles E. Fuller), Call to Youth, and the Hebrew Christian Hour. Approximately 3 percent of all commercial radio time in the city was dedicated to religious broadcasts, primarily on Sundays. The two most frequently aired types of broadcasts were sermon or talk shows (fifty-seven programs) and church services (thirteen 139 programs). Most were Protestant broadcasts, especially what Parker dubbed “fundamentalist” programs. Moreover, only two of the seventyseven programs were aired with the endorsements of a denomination. Unaware of the eventual commercialization of religious radio in America, Parker began his report with a paragraph that in retrospect was prophetic, “Within the last ten years radio has become a powerful force in the life of the people of America. It has affected every phase of that life, and religion is no exception. Religious programs have emerged upon the air without any concerted plan on the part of the great Christian bodies of the nation and today are competing with soap, cigarettes, cosmetics, gasoline, food products, symphony concerts, world-views—and even with churches—for the attention of and, in many instances, for money contributions from the listening public.”2 Broadcasting offered religious tribes a means of building their own local and national speech communities in the expanding industrial nation. But religious broadcasting also challenged the government to clarify whether any of the nation’s limited electromagnetic spectrum, presumably a public resource, should be dedicated to tribal interests. In the United States regulatory agencies tried to articulate broadcast policies that would protect the “public interest, convenience and necessity,” as both the Federal Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934 put it.3 Along the way, however , the regulatory agencies both hindered and facilitated the broadcasting of different Christian tribes. Emphasizing the importance of the free market even for a regulated medium, American broadcasters and regulators inadvertently tipped the scale in favor of those religious groups that could function most effectively in a market system—the evangelicals. The history of American radio is a fascinating case study in both the rhetoric of governmental regulation of religious broadcasting and the rhetoric of the various religious tribes that used radio to gain a public voice in the expanding industrial nation. Although evangelicals legitimized tribal use of radio with a rhetoric of conversion that emphasized preaching the Good News, over time evangelical radio began converting its tribes to consumerism. The first section of this chapter reviews the explosive growth of early religious radio as a local, grassroots phenomenon across the country. Evangelicals and various fringe religious groups championed the new medium, first as an evangelistic tool for converting the nation to their own beliefs and second as a means of elevating their social status in a national culture that favored mainline Protestantism. Feeling increasingly exiled in secular society, evangelicals looked to radio as a means of legitimizing their beliefs 140 Quentin J. Schultze and creating a powerful public voice. Before the government seriously began to regulate the new medium, evangelicals had already established a significant presence in local radio markets across the nation. Radio helped these tribes to forge unified identities across geographic space in the midst of rapid urbanization and industrialization that otherwise challenged and attenuated the role of traditional religious institutions in society. The second section describes how evangelicals tried to develop program formats in a market system. Since there was not yet any public consensus about regulation of the new medium, the U.S. Congress granted the authority to regulators to determine...