Redeeming the Dial

Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America

Tona J. Hangen

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807863022
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Radio

Blending cultural, religious, and media history, Tona Hangen offers a richly detailed look into the world of religious radio. She uses recordings, sermons, fan mail, and other sources to tell the stories of the determined broadcasters and devoted listeners who, together, transformed American radio evangelism from an on-air novelty in the 1920s into a profitable and wide-reaching industry by the 1950s. Hangen traces the careers of three of the most successful Protestant radio evangelists--Paul Rader, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Charles Fuller--and examines the strategies they used to bring their messages to listeners across the nation. Initially shut out of network radio and free airtime, both of which were available only to mainstream Protestant and Catholic groups, evangelical broadcasters gained access to the airwaves with paid-time programming. By the mid-twentieth century millions of Americans regularly tuned in to evangelical programming, making it one of the medium's most distinctive and durable genres. The voluntary contributions of these listeners in turn helped bankroll religious radio's remarkable growth. Revealing the entwined development of evangelical religion and modern mass media, Hangen demonstrates that the history of one is incomplete without the history of the other; both are essential to understanding American culture in the twentieth century.

1

Broadcasting Discord Religious Radio before 1939

A pair of strange guests joined the choir of Pittsburgh’s Calvary Episcopal Church one frigid January morning in 1921. Donning choir robes to blend in, two engineers from Westinghouse monitored the “wireless telephone receiving apparatus” installed for the occasion of the nation’s first religious radio broadcast. Calvary’s Sunday service was sent out for a thousand miles over the jerry-rigged facilities of the first radio station in the United States, KDKA, which had been broadcasting since November to the handful of Pennsylvania folks with crystal receiving sets. The radio station received enough favorable response to its broadcast of Calvary’s service that the weekly program became a regular feature of KDKA’s schedule.¹ Thus radio and radio evangelism were born together. The Westinghouse engineers in choir robes—one Jewish and the other a Roman Catholic—provide an enduring image of the decentralized, even haphazard, entrance of religious organizations into the brave new world of radio in the early twenties.

There were those, such as fundamentalist Presbyterian Clarence Macartney, who worried that church services “sent indiscriminately abroad into all kinds of places” would be “grotesque and irreverent.” Some Christian fundamentalists’ distaste for every aspect of popular culture led them to reject radio altogether or to caution that the radio airwaves were the devil’s own province with which good Christians should not tamper.² Such views might be expected but were surprisingly scarce. Within just a few years, religious groups almost universally acknowledged that the radio was just another—and particularly well suited—form for the spread of God’s word.³ Individuals and denominations scrambled to get in on the new market as the public appetite for radio broadcasting grew. By 1924, a church or religious organization held one out of every fourteen licenses; the number of stations operated by religious groups climbed from twenty-nine in 1924 to seventy-one in 1925.⁴ In that year churches or other religious organizations controlled 10 percent of the more than six hundred radio stations in the United States.⁵

In the early 1920s most radio stations were locally owned by private individuals or corporations, such as churches, newspapers, or department stores. Broadcasting was a vibrant experiment. Hobbyists across the nation delighted in picking up the signal of distant stations, and broadcasters tried to be heard by installing larger or more powerful transmitters, broadcasting at unused frequencies, or even using those allocated to another station. William Ward Ayer, the first president of the National Religious Broadcasters, remembered his introduction to radio in 1922, when he was a young pastor in Valparaiso, Indiana: “While visiting the home of one of the officers of the church I was asked by a young son if I wanted to listen to the radio. He took me to his room, which was filled with radio gadgets, put a set of earphones over my head and worked with an old-fashioned crystal set. After the squeals and screeches died away, I heard a voice speaking and then some music being played. I was told it came from Chicago—fully fifty miles away—there were no wires to conduct it, just picked it out of the air. I thought it was marvellous, but I had no conception of the place that radio would occupy in the years ahead.” ⁶

By the middle of the decade, radio broadcasting was a chaotic industry, poorly regulated by the Department of Commerce.⁷ Religious broadcasters had no clear or organized strategy in these years: some took time whenever it was offered from stations or bought it when they could afford to, while others started their own stations and tried to keep them financially afloat. A dual cultural struggle underlay the effort of churches to find a place on radio. First, religious people wanted to make their beliefs available to the American public; second, Protestants were engaged in a mortal battle for leadership of the American religious establishment, with both modernists and fundamentalists eager to use radio to put forward their own views.

The inauguration of networks and the passage of the Radio Act in 1927 limited some religious broadcasters in their efforts to preach on the air. The first radio network was launched in 1926 when the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), a subsidiary of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), began broadcasting. Executives at NBC decided that their nationwide programming ought to include religion, and they made two decisions with long-reaching consequences. First, NBC chose not to sell airtime for religious broadcasts. Second, the network developed a policy of donating a block of time to representatives of the three major faith groups in the United States: Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant. For its Protestant group, NBC contacted the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, which represented twenty-five mostly liberal mainline Protestant denominations and whose New York Federation office was handy to the NBC studios. Network executives formed a twenty-member advisory council in the interest of fair and nondiscriminatory broadcasting and invited the general secretary of the Federal Council, Charles S. Macfarland, to serve on the board.⁸ The relationship between the Federal Council and NBC was a cozy one; network executives made it their personal business to make sure, for instance, that Macfarland had a top-quality RCA radio in his home.⁹ From its inception, the network sought meetings with and advice of Federal Council leaders to “determine clearly the attitude of the Protestant Churches to radio activities” and to address what General Secretary Macfarland called “the broader and larger problems of national nonsectarian services for the country as a whole.”¹⁰ Macfarland himself went on to act as chairman, at the same time, of the Federal Council’s National Religious Radio Committee and of the religious activities of NBC itself.¹¹

From this cooperation emerged several long-running standard Protestant services on NBC, produced by the Federal Council’s Department of National Religious Radio and broadcast during time slots donated by NBC. The flagship program was the National Radio Pulpit, a suitably nonsectarian and widely heard forum for liberal Protestant preachers such as Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, the Reverend Ralph Sockman, and Harry Emerson Fosdick.¹² Catholics and Jews, the other members of the triumvirate of religious “insiders,” had free time on network radio with programs such as Catholic Hour and Message of Israel.¹³ The National Religious Radio Committee also sponsored programs of general religious boosterism—for example, a 1928 broadcast of President Calvin Coolidge’s reflections on “religion as the basis of national life.”¹⁴

While liberal Protestants were favored by the emerging national radio networks, conservatives found that their cause was not championed by the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), established by the Radio Acts of 1927 and 1934. The FRC (which became the Federal Communications Commission [FCC] in 1934) had authority to grant and renew station licenses and to allocate broadcast frequencies and transmission strengths, all according to a new legislative standard: “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”¹⁵ To the FRC, religious broadcasting was one of seven categories of programming in the public interest, a beneficial “good” to be encouraged and fostered.¹⁶ License renewal applications required broadcasters to account for religious programming in their schedules. But at the same time the commission also took steps to limit too much of a good thing, by reallocating broadcast frequencies in favor of stations with well-rounded programs over those broadcasting the ideas of a single denomination or group. Within a few years, many of the smaller radio ministries could not support time on the air. The number of religious stations dropped from sixty-three in 1927 to thirty in 1933.¹⁷ Added to NBC’s exclusive dealings with the Federal Council, the shuffling of stations and frequencies by the FRC had the net effect of limiting the access of fundamentalists and other “controversial” speakers to nationally heard airtime.

Getting time on NBC became nearly impossible for all but the Federal Council’s speakers, and some religiously owned stations went under—but there were still venues for religious radio broadcasting in the twenties and thirties. On independent stations, or during times when stations had local discretion over programming, the situation was far more fluid. Some individual station owners sold or donated time to religious broadcasters. Other networks had their own policies, too. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) began broadcasting in 1927, Mutual in 1934, and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) was formed from the NBC Blue network in 1945. All three newer networks initially made some airtime available for sale to religious broadcasters, and this enabled those who could raise the funds to be heard on national network radio—most notably Father Charles Coughlin on CBS from 1926 to 1931, although he was certainly not alone.¹⁸

Nevertheless, most conservatives became firmly convinced that their version of broadcasting was an endangered species, being hunted to extinction by the Federal Council of Churches. In 1928, the Federal Council, with its prominent place on NBC’s advisory council, moved to consolidate control over the sustaining time granted it, as a free public service, by the network. The advisory committee of the Federal Council drafted “five fundamental principles of religious broadcasting” to “assure the radio public of a constructive ministry of religion, unencumbered [by] sectarian considerations and free of all divisiveness.” The five points, adopted without change by NBC, were:

1. The National Broadcasting Company will serve only the central [sic] of national agencies of great religious faiths, as for example the Roman Catholics, the Protestants and the Hebrews, as distinguished from individual churches or small group movements where the national membership is comparatively small.

2. The religious message broadcast should be non-sectarian and non-denominational in appeal.

3. The religious broadcast message should be of the widest appeal—presenting the broad claims of religion, which not only aid in building up the personal and social life of the individual but also aid in popularizing religion and the Church.

4. The religious message broadcast should interpret religion at its highest and best so that as an educational factor it will bring the individual listener to realize his responsibility to the organizational Church.

5. The national religious messages should only be broadcast by the recognized outstanding leaders of the several faiths.

After this high-minded catalog were printed what can only be described as fighting words: “The Federal Council’s Committee is pursuing an inquiry as to the local services conducted from the various centers of the country at the present time.”¹⁹ In other words, the Federal Council appeared not to be content to monopolize free airtime on NBC network stations but apparently was mounting an investigation into time on unaffiliated local stations —presumably, thought some fundamentalists, with the aim of cleansing the temple of those who bought and sold airtime for religious purposes.

The truth was, however, that an “inquiry” represented the outer limit of the Federal Council’s ability to wrest control from the fundamentalist broadcasters who bought time on their unaffiliated locals, not the beginning of a powerful campaign of suppression. If anything, the threat was in the opposite direction. The familiar doctrines, old-time hymns, and folksy backwoods rhetorical style employed by most conservative radio preachers tapped deep nostalgic strains in American religion. Intellectuals and cynical eastern critics might dismiss the old-time religion so handily castigated in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Elmer Gantry, but among the vast American laity and ordinary clergy, revival religion still stirred loyalty. As Thomas Reeves has put it, “Most Christians knew and cared little about such intellectual matters. Their faith survived in spite of the professors, and their penchant for fundamentalism remained powerful.”²⁰ The mass audience for religious radio cut a broad swath through American society—people could easily demonstrate a lingering conservatism not by openly affiliating with fundamentalist churches but by integrating and assimilating diffuse cultural strands through their reading and listening habits.²¹ The grand tones of the Federal Council’s ecumenical five points suggested not a firm hold on the listening audience but their deep fear of losing it.

The debate among religious groups focused on whether religious programming should be broadcast as sustaining-time programs or as commercial broadcasts, sold at market value. The view of the Federal Radio Commission left the issue open to interpretation, recommending in its third annual report that “doctrines, creeds and beliefs must find their way into the market of ideas by the existing public-service stations.”²² Religious broadcasters could be forgiven their confusion at the FRC’s juxtaposing “market of ideas” and “public-service stations” in the same sentence, for as long as religion was aired as a part of the overall broadcast schedule of radio stations, the FRC would not rule on what kind of religion or whether broadcasts should be sustaining time or commercial. The solution, in other words, had to come from religious organizations themselves.

But by the end of the twenties those religious organizations were no closer to consensus than at the decade’s start. The Greater New York Federation of Churches, a Federal Council regional chapter, argued in 1931 that religious radio was a “public utility” entitled to sustaining time, pledging “every effort” by the council “to keep away from theological controversy and to offer a clear and understandable presentation of religious truth”—in other words, a truth that was generic rather than specific.²³ Since “frequent and persistent applications” were being made by various denominational and sectarian agencies “for the broadcasting of their own religious programs,” the federation went on the record opposing any particular denomination’s request, “however worthy,” to keep from setting a “dangerous precedent.”²⁴ General Secretary Macfarland, addressing the nation by radio, condemned any religious “iconoclast for vituperous and defamatory tearing down.”²⁵

For their part, fundamentalists rejected the Federal Council’s claim to speak for all of Protestantism, citing what they called a damaging inclusivity that undermined t...