TV-radio preaching: a controversial billion-dollar industry
> Striding beside a quintuple-tiered bank of telephones, affable Pat Robertson, 49, tells his viewers, "For 50¢ a day you can change the world," while his sidekick Ben Kinchlow hands him reports on the latest contributions. It is fund-raising telethon time on the 700 Club, and by week's end an audience watching 140 TV stations has pledged $10 million in the coming year to keep Robertson's daily "Christian talk show" coming from its Virginia Beach, Va., studios.
> Flanked by Wife Tammy, baby-faced Jim Bakker, 40, implores his 213-TV-station audience on the PTL Club,* a Charlotte, N.C., clone of the 700 Club, to write President Carter and their Congressmen protesting "bureaucratic backroom harassment." Referring to a Federal Communications Commission probe of PTL finances, Bakker segues into a half-hour documentary on the club, the narration donated by Actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
> In the mammoth Washington Hilton ballroom, Rex Humbard, 60, and his family tape their down-home variety show of song and gospel patter for his 236 TV outlets in the U.S. and 414 in other nations. The set: a rotating stage carpeted in black velvet with a ramp bordered by flashing lights.
Those were three episodes last week in the continuing drama of TV-radio preaching, one of the most successful and controversial enterprises in American religion. Humbard's program was performed for the 37th and splashiest annual meeting of National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), a trade association for 900 programmers. As if to underscore their clout, President Carter dropped by minutes before Humbard's tapes rolled to mend election-year fences with his fellow Evangelical Protestants. He thus became the latest presidential contender to seek NRB members' favor. But, mostly, the NRB convention air hummed with talk of stations bought and sold, minicams, marketing and satellite transmissions; less frequently, God cropped up.
This new outlet of religion is controlled almost totally by the Evangelical-Fundamentalist-Pentecostal wing of Protestantism. It is a chicken-or-egg question whether broadcasters foster the Evangelical tide or vice versa, but they now own more than 1,400 radio stations and 35 TV stations. Four religious "networks" feed programs via satellite to stations and to thousands of cable-TV hookups. The network organizers dream of the day they can offer a total "family-centered" and "wholesome" alternative to commercial TV, complete with "Christian" soap operas and newscasts. Their talk shows already draw on a gospel celebrity circuit (Anita Bryant, Art Linkletter, Boxer George Foreman, born-again Watergate Felon Charles Colson).