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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.