The Triumph of Televangelism and the Decline of Mainline Religious Broadcasting
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Notes Introduction: The Triumph of Televangelism and the Decline of Mainline Religious Broadcasting Notes to Pages 1–2 1. Razelle Frankl (Televangelism: The Marketing of Popular Religion [Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987], pp. 6–8) attributes the hybrid term—televangelism—to Jeffrey K. Hadden and Charles Swann, Primetime Preachers: The Rising Power of Televangelism (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Pub., 1981). 2. See Mark Silk, Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1995), particularly chapter 7: “Hypocrisy,” pp. 80–90. See also, R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford, 1994), especially chapter 5, “The Marketplace for Religious Controversy,” pp. 118–145. 3. Ben Armstrong of the National Religious Broadcasters preferred the term “electric church” while William Fore of the Broadcast and Film Commission preferred the term “electronic church.” 4. See Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1955). 5. For a clear summary of classical and neoclassical sociological thought on the issue of secularization see Karl Dobbelaere, “Secularization: A Multi- Dimensional Concept,” Current Sociology 29:2 (March 1981): 3–153. For a per- sonal view on the decline of the secularization theory see Peter L. Berger, “The Descularization of the World: A Global View,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, edited by Peter L. Berger (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 3–18. 6. On the debate over the decline of the mainline denominations and the rise of conservative churches, see Dean Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (New York: Harper and Row, 1972) and Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, 122 Notes to Pages 2–5 The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 7. Daniel Dayan, “The Peculiar Public of Television,” Media, Culture and Society 23 (2001): 743–65. 8. Martin E. Marty and R. S. Appleby, The Fundamentalism Project, Vols. 1–5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993–2004). 9. Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: Why The Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It: A New Vision for Faith and Politics in America (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), p. 346. 10. This is in and of itself rather interesting given that Wallis appears regularly on talk radio, edits a magazine (Sojourners), and wrote a New York Times best- seller. 11. See Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 12. See, for example, B. Alexander’s study entitled, Televangelism Reconsidered: Ritual in the Search for Human Community (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1994), which discusses the ritual aspects of the televangelist audience or Janice Peck’s The Gods of Televangelism: The Crisis of Meaning and the Appeal of Religious Television (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1993), which focuses on the rhetoric of religious television, in both cases the medium is largely unques- tioned. At the other end of the spectrum, Steve Bruce in his study Pay TV (London: Routledge, 1990) and Frankl in her book Televangelism (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987) both make the common assumption that “Television is not a neutral medium” (p. 145) and from that point suggest that the conservative Protestant message because of its simplicity (in contrast, of course, to the “complexity” of the liberal Protestant message) is better suited to the television and the mass media in general. Frankl and Bruce rely upon a variation of medium theory or what Claude Fischer calls “impact analysis” or “soft” forms of technological determinism (America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992], p. 12). 13. See Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992); Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, [1974] 1992) for examples of this dialogical approach. 14. Fischer, America Calling, p. 5. 15. Raymond Williams, Towards 2000 (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 146. 16. Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 17. See, for example, Peter G. Horsfeld’s pioneering book Religious Television: The American Experience (New York: Longman Inc., 1984). Notes to Pages 7–9 123 Chapter 1 American Protestantism and the Television: A Paradoxical Relationship 1. On contemporary evangelicals’ approaches to communication see Quentin J. Schultze, “Evangelicals’ Uneasy Alliance with the Media,” in Religion and Mass Media: Audiences and Adaptations, edited by Daniel A. Stout and Judith M. Buddenbaum (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), pp. 63–64. Despite the fact that mainline Protestants are less “evangelistic” they also approached and conceived of new media (like the television and radio) as tools for evangelism. 2. Martin E. Marty, “Protestantism and Capitalism: Print Culture and Individualism,” in Communication and Change in American Religious History, edited by Leonard I. Sweet (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 100. 3. Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1982), p. 6. 4. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 125. 5. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, p. 124. 6. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 15. 7. Ibid. 8. See D. Dayan and E. Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) and E. Rothenbuhler, Ritual Communication: From Everyday Conversation to Mediated Ceremony (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998). 9. See B. Alexander, Televangelism Reconsidered: Ritual in the Search for Human Community (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1994); Stewart M. Hoover, Mass Media Religion: The Social Sources of the Electronic Church (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1988); and Janice Peck, Gods of Televangelism: The Crisis of Meaning and the Appeal of Religious Television (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1993). 10. E. Katz described Israeli television viewing as equivalent to the tribal campfire. 11. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, Vol. 1 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 310. 12. See Robert W. Scribner, “Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas,” History of European Ideas 5 (1984): 237–256 for a critique of Eisenstein’s thesis and also S. Ozment’s Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 46. 13. Ozment, Protestants, p. 46. 124 Notes to Pages 9–12 14. Ibid., p. 66. 15. Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 440. 16. Ibid., p. 78. 17. Mark Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), p. 7. 18. Marty, “Protestantism and Capitalism,” p. 93. 19. Ibid., p. 102. 20. Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Career of George Whitefield,” in Communication and Change in American Religious History, edited by Leonard Sweet, (MI: Eerdmans, 1993), pp. 122–124. 21. Lambert Frank, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 64–94. 22. Ibid., p. 44. 23. Ibid., pp. 226–231. 24. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Career of George Whitefield,” pp. 122–124. 25. Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity, p. 94. 26. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, pp. 125–127. 27. Ibid., p. 127. 28. William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 29. On televangelism see Bobby Chris Alexander, Televangelism Reconsidered: A Ritual in the Search for Human Community (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994); Steve Bruce, Pray TV: Televangelism in America (London: Routledge, 1990); Razelle Frankl, Televangelism: The Marketing of Popular Religion (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987); Jeffrey Hadden and A. Shupe, Televangelism: Power and Politics on God’s Frontier (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1988); Hoover, Mass Media Religion; Peter G. Horsfield, Religious Television: The American Experience (New York: Longman Inc., 1984); Peck, The Gods of Televangelism; Quentin J. Schultze, Televangelism and American Culture: The Business of Popular Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991). 30. Horsfield, Religious Television, pp. 15–23. 31. For a summary of the debate over audience size see Stewart Hoover, Mass Media Religion: The Social Sources of the Electronic Church (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988), pp. 63–72 and Stewart Hoover, “The Religious Television Audience: A Matter of Significance or Size?” Review of Religious Research 29 (December 1987): 135–151. While the National Religious Broadcasters estimated the audience at 100 million, critics claimed the true number was closer to 10 or 20 million viewers. 32. In the earliest research of religion and television