TELEVANGELISM

TELEVANGELISM. As television became a staple of American culture in the second half of the twentieth century, a growing number of Protestant preachers embraced the new mass medium to deliver their messages. Catholics, too, took to the airwaves, most famously in the person of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who utilized the new medium of television to demonstrate the compatibility of American culture and Catholic faith. Televangelism emerged after World War II as an outgrowth of evangelicalism, a type of Protestant religion based on the idea that people needed to open their hearts and redirect their wills toward Christ, not only to secure an eternal place in heaven, but also to better their lives on earth. While evangelicals point to the New Testament story of Jesus commissioning disciples as the origin of their movement, modern evangelicalism emerged in eighteenth-century Britain and North America in the context of a burgeoning market economy. Preachers skilled at awakening religious feelings in their audiences used open-air stages to promote their beliefs and to enact the emotional process of repentance for sin and heartfelt commitment to God.

The foremost evangelical predecessor of televangelists was the Anglican preacher George Whitefield, an actor before his conversion, whose combination of religious fervor, theatrical flair, and marketing genius made him the most celebrated figure in America in the decades preceding the American Revolution. One of the first entrepreneurs to cultivate publicity for his performances through the fast-growing newspaper medium, Whitefield drew large audiences to his sermons, which included tearful reenactments of the lives of biblical characters. These gatherings, where rich and poor, slave and free, men and

women rubbed shoulders, exerted a democratizing force, although Whitefield himself never condemned the institution of slavery and was a latecomer to the cause of American independence.

As evangelicalism developed in America, African Americans contributed elements of African religious tradition, such as spirit possession, call and response, and the five-tone musical scale, to the repertoire of evangelical performance. In nineteenth century America evangelicalism was often associated with social reform, especially antislavery, education, and temperance. In the early twentieth century, however, evangelicalism became increasingly tied to conservative politics, fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible, and hostility to liberal forms of Protestant theology and social reform. When Billy Graham began to make use of television in the 1950s, evangelicalism was almost as closely identified with anticommunism as it was with personal salvation.

The most famous televangelist of the twentieth century, Graham turned from radio to television to broadcast his message. Combining fervent preaching, heart-melting music, and personal testimonies from successful people, Graham's crusades traveled around the country and eventually around the world, carrying the evangelical mix of religious outreach, theatrical entertainment, and creative entrepreneurship to new levels of sophistication. Graham's evident personal integrity and continual prayers for the spiritual guidance of political leaders led to his visibility as a respected public figure and to his role as counselor to several American presidents.

Televangelism boomed in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) changed its policy of mandating free time for religious broadcasts to allow stations to accept money for religious programs. This regulatory change inspired more than a few preachers to use television as a means of funding their ministries. Oral Roberts sought funds for the development of the City of Faith Medical and Research Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by introducing the concept of "seed faith," a means by which viewers might reap miracles from God in their own lives by donating to Roberts's ministry. In The Hour of Power, broadcast from the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, Robert Schuller preached about the power of positive thinking, offering viewers the chance to purchase membership in his Possibility Thinkers Club along with a mustard seed cross as a sign of their faith. Pat Robertson's success in introducing a talk-show format to showcase interviews with people testifying to the power of faith led to the purchase of his own network, the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which funded his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988.

Televangelists' power to generate money contributed to the formation of conservative political constituencies, like Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition led by Robertson and Ralph Reed, which influenced public policy and political rhetoric in the United States. At the same time the money in televangelism stimulated various forms of corruption and scandal, leading to deepening distrust of televangelists on one hand and to more rigorous forms of accounting on the other.

In the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century televangelism grew along with communications technology and the increasing pluralism of American religious life. Satellite, cable, and Internet technologies offered new opportunities for evangelical outreach and made increasingly sophisticated forms of presentation readily available. This technological expansion fostered the development of niche programming—shows devoted to biblical prophecy, for example—as well as the extension of televangelism's mix of entertainment, self-promotion, and missionary outreach to other groups—for example, Catholics advocating devotion to Mary through dramatic reenactments of their own piety. As televangelism diversified, the distinctively Protestant character of its message blurred. Televangelism's success compromised Protestant evangelicalism's exclusive claim to salvation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Bobby C. Televangelism Reconsidered: Ritual in the Search for Human Community. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1994.

Balmer, Randall. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. Expanded ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Schmidt, Rosemarie, and Joseph F. Kess. Television Advertising and Televangelism: Discourse Analysis of Persuasive Language. Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Publishing, 1986.

Schultze, Quentin J. Televangelism and American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1991.

Stout, Harry S. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991.

AmandaPorterfield

See alsoEvangelicalism and Revivalism ; Protestantism ; Religion and Religious Affiliation ; Television: Programming and Influence .

TELEVANGELISM

The Great Commission

Christians from the beginning were committed to using all means to carry out the Great Commission of Jesus, to go to all the world and preach the gospel. When electronic communication systems were developed in the twentieth century, preachers used the radio and then television to broadcast their good news. While Charles Fuller's Old Time Gospel Hour did not make the transition from radio to television, such successors as Billy Graham quickly recognized the potential of the new medium. The pattern set by Graham and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen in the 1950s dominated religion on television for nearly twenty years.

Governmental Incentive

In the 1960s evangelists began to adapt to the potential of television. When the Federal Communications Commission ruled that stations did not have to provide free time for community service, including religion, television companies began to sell their religious time to anyone who wanted it. Buyers turned out to be primarily conservatives and Pentecostalists; most were men, although Kathryn Kuhlman had a successful ministry until her death in 1976. These evangelists began to recognize that television ministries were more effective if they employed the entertainment aspects of the medium.

Oral Roberts

In 1969 Oral Roberts modified what had essentially been a film of his services and adopted the trappings of show business with religious overtones. He became the most popular minister on television. An estimated twenty-five million people saw his Thanksgiving show in 1975, and by 1979 he was appearing on as many as 170 stations. He also became a talk-show guest on commercial television, a show-business celebrity.

Pat Robertson

The potential of television was also recognized early by Marion ("Pat") Robertson, who carried out God's message to him and purchased a failing UHF station in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He began full-time religious broadcasting in 1961 and later in the decade created the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), buying time for his programs on other stations and tying them together in a network system. In the 1970s Robertson was joined by other religious networks, including Paul Crouch's Trinity Broadcast Network and Jim Bakker's inspirational PTL Network. These networks not only provided airtime for their owners but also rented time to other evangelists.

Expansion

As more and more homes were tied into community cable systems, which could carry more than the usual three or four local broadcast channels, the religious networks expanded their reach and audiences could watch religious programs all the time. At the end of the decade CBN and then PTL leased satellite time and were able to reach their national audiences simultaneously rather than through the use of delayed film as in the past. As these television ministries grew, they also expanded into other parts of the world with their broadcasts. By 1977 television ministries including those of Bakker, Robertson, and Robert Schuller had acquired formidable audiences, although those audiences were never as large as claimed by the various ministers. In 1979 Jerry Falwell claimed he had as many as 20 million viewers, but more-cautious observers estimated he had only 1.5 million in his audience then.

Fund-raising

The television ministries required enormous sums, not only for equipment and production costs, but also for the purchase of broadcast time. The only way these costs could be met was by constant appeals for financial support from their viewers. Following Oral Roberts's example they used computers which generated personalized mass mailings that kept the ministries in regular contact with their viewers. But this equipment too was expensive to buy and use, so more funds were needed. The frantic appeals for funds aroused scrutiny from critics who wondered why more money was always needed and where the funds actually went. While Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry (1927) was in the past, Marjoe Gortner's evangelical fakery was a part of the decade.

Rising Concern

As the television ministries grew, so did their incomes, and secular and Mainline denominations expressed their concern about these independent ministries' constant pleas for money and overall lack of accountability. In 1977 the state of Minnesota forced the Billy Graham Evangelical Association to open its books for the first time since the early 1950s. While Graham was able to give a clear accounting for the money given to his ministry, the growing questions about accountability led him to help create the Evangelical Council for Financial Responsibility, an organization that reassured contributors that their money was used as claimed, in 1978. Not all ministries joined the council, but this did not seem to affect contributors until the spectacular scandals in the following decade.

Sources:

David Edwin Harrell, Jr., Oral Roberts: An American Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985);

Harrell, Pat Robertson: A Personal, Religious, and Political Portrait (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987);

Peter G. Horsfield, Religious Television: The American Experience (New York: Longman, 1984);

Larry Martz with Ginny Carroll, Ministry of Greed: The Inside Story of the Televangelists and Their Holy Wars (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988).

Televangelism. Televangelism, the propagation of religion over the airwaves, extended Evangelicals' long role as pioneers in mass communications: George Whitefield's open‐air preaching in the eighteenth century, Charles G. Finney's use of newspapers in the nineteenth, and the radio programs of Aimee Semple McPherson and Charles E. Fuller early in the twentieth. When Billy Graham emerged at midcentury he turned first to radio and then to television to reach the masses. The Roman Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979), though not an evangelical, won a vast television audience in the 1950s with his program Life Is Worth Living.

Changes in the television industry gave evangelists an even larger influence on the medium in the 1970s. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had mandated that all local stations allocate time to religious broadcasting, but network policy had forbidden affiliates from charging for such programming. With the increased independence of local stations, however, and with the blessings of the FCC, they began charging for religious broadcasts.

Seizing the opportunity, evangelists solicited donations that more than paid for the inexpensive airtime available in the Sunday morning “religious ghetto.” Religious programming now changed dramatically. Whereas the liturgies and messages of Roman Catholicism and mainline Protestantism had once dominated religious broadcasts, Evangelicals, drawing on a long tradition of mixing religion with entertainment, now translated the Gospel into show business. The “electronic church” took many forms: the Pentecostal and divine healing emphases of Kathryn Kuhlman, Oral Roberts, and Ernest Angley; the positive‐thinking, Jesus‐will‐make‐you‐rich‐and‐successful message of Rex Humbard, Robert Schuller, and Robert Tilton; the inimitable theatrics of Jimmy Swaggart; the conservative political cant of James Robison and Jerry Falwell; the talk‐show format of Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker.

Televangelism became immensely profitable, with many televangelists drawing in millions of dollars every year, far exceeding the budgets of entire denominations. Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) became a formidable organization, providing the foundation for his 1988 Republican party presidential campaign and his later conservative political lobby, the Christian Coalition.

By the mid‐1980s, however, scandal enveloped many televangelists. Bakker's flamboyant lifestyle and dreams of empire led to sexual and financial improprieties that eventually sent him to prison, Swaggart was caught in several dalliances with prostitutes, and Roberts declared that God would “take him home” unless God's people ponied up several million dollars to save his flagging empire. Early in the 1990s, Tilton faced an ABC News exposé that questioned his integrity.

The scandals severely reduced ratings and, consequently, revenues. Many of the larger televangelist organizations cut back their operations, but the proliferation of cable television opened doors for new televangelists and new networks as the century ended.
See also Fundamentalist Movement; Missionary Movement; Moral Majority; Pentecostalism; Revivalism.

Bibliography

Quentin J. Schultze , Televangelism and American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion, 1991.
J. Gordon Melton, Phillip Charles Lucas, and Jon R. Stone, eds., Prime‐Time Religion: An Encyclopedia of Religious Broadcasting, 1997.

Randall Balmer

tel·e·van·ge·list / ˌteləˈvanjəlist/ • n. an evangelical preacher who appears regularly on television to preach and appeal for funds. DERIVATIVES: tel·e·van·gel·i·cal / ˌteləˌvanˈjelikəl/ adj. tel·e·van·ge·lism / -ˌlizəm/ n.

televangelist chiefly in the US, an evangelical preacher who appears regularly on television to promote beliefs and appeal for funds.

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