The Lord's Radio: Gospel Music Broadcasting and the Making of Evangelical Culture, 1920–1960 by Mark Ward Sr. Jefferson (review)

In The Lord's Radio, Mark Ward seeks to tell the story of the rise of evangelical popular culture from the context of radio. Ward makes the case that during the golden age of radio, gospel radio music helped create an evangelical interpretive community comprising an audience bound together by the shared interpretation of radio. He supports this in his historical analysis of the period between 1920 and 1960—a period of evangelical popular culture that has received little scholarly attention; however, Ward argues, it is key to understanding "the subculture that midcentury evangelicals created and that became the foundation for the evangelical 'parallel universe' of today" (13).

The book is written as a historical ethnography, an achievable end given the abundance of materials from which Ward had to draw. Ward draws on oral historyinterviewsofgoldenageradioevangelistsfromtheBillyGrahamCenter Archives, vintage radio programs available online and from the host organizations, songbooks from evangelical radio programs, liner notes from LP record albums, and, finally, his own personal collection of songbooks from the Old Fashioned Revival Hour, Youth for Christ, and Young People's Church.

The story of the development of evangelical subculture tells the story more broadly of why "the siren song of a comfortable cultural separatism" proves to be irresistible (13). Understanding this "siren song" feels particularly relevant given the current cultural landscape in which media are "breaking up audiences into smaller and smaller fragments that have less and less interaction" and "public discourse often amounts to little more than talking past one another" (13).

The chapters are divided by decades: the first chapter covers the 1920s, the second chapter covers the 1930s, and so on. Chapter 5, instead of progressing to the 1960s, addresses the popular evangelical musicians who did not fit neatly within the prior chapters because their best-known work was popular before 1920; however, they remained popular within the era covered by this text.

Ward's manuscript largely seeks to observe and understand the phenomenon of evangelical radio during this era, but the author does not shy away from criticism of some of the darker moments of evangelicalism. Ward notes that religious broadcasting got its start during the era of his analysis, but it steeply declined in the wake of the sexual and financial scandals of Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Oral Roberts. Furthermore, he notes the broad changes the Telecommunications Act of 1996 brought for religious radio. He notes that "the effects of the law were immediate as nearly 2,200 stations changed hands in 1996 alone," and by 1997 "ownership of radio stations was concentrated in the hands of a relative few number of broadcasters" (259). This recent development made religious radio mirror the rest of the radio industry, "dominated by a handful of evangelical media conglomerates" (260).

Ward recognizes what few others have in the academy: that this midcentury evangelical music was conceived of as "entertainment-plus" (261). This places the current evangelical music of Contemporary Christian Music in stark contrast given the format's emphasis on creating a devotional experience for listeners. The text provides other lessons for understanding contemporary evangelicalism, especially given the divisions in the movement during the past decade. During the 1940s, evangelicals looked to mass media to gain a greater voice in society. At the time, Harold Ockenga, pastor of Park Street Church in Boston, complained that "evangelicals 'are a very large minority, perhaps a majority in America,' but are 'discriminated against because of the folly of our divided condition'" (107). Fundamentalist leader William Ward Ayer similarly thought evangelicals needed a "common voice" and "common meeting place" that radio could provide (107). If provided those things, Ayer said that evangelicals could "exercise under God an influence that would save American democracy" (107).

Examined on its own terms, The Lord's Radio is an insightful volume. Readers looking for a more normative text to interrogate...