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To get time on commercial stations, religious producers spend at least $600 million a year, reports Ben Armstrong, savvy executive director of NRB. If production, promotion, fund raising and operation of their own stations are added in, religious broadcasting is easily a billion-dollar industry. Marvels one secular TV expert: "There is no apparent saturation point in sight. These programs are popping up at an incredible rate, and they are finding audiences." In his 1979 book The Electric Church, Armstrong claims that each week at least 14 million Americans watch a religious TV show and 115 million listen to a radio gospel program, vastly more than go to church.
That is precisely why many local pastors are shouting anything but hallelujah. They fear that with worship-by-tube, the living room sofa is supplanting the pew, and gifts mailed to televangelists are taking the place of Sunday offerings. Defenders of the TV faith deny this. There is also rivalry among competing brands of belief. Last year Herbert Chilstrom, Minnesota leader of the Lutheran Church in America, complained that broadcast preachers were infecting his parishes with Fundamentalism. NRB's Armstrong, a onetime Presbyterian pastor, asserts that broadcasting is shifting power from the clergy to the layman "with his hand on the dial." Says Armstrong: "It is a change in the power structure of American religion."
Mainstream Protestant, Catholic and Jewish broadcasters, who shun hard-sell evangelism, rely on free time in television's low-audience "Sunday morning ghetto" for their largely nonsectarian programs produced with the commercial networks, or on syndicated shows. But local stations are increasingly unwilling to give away public-service time when they can sell it to the independent evangelists. Because of those concerns, the National Council of Churches and U.S. Catholic Conference are sponsoring a symposium in New York next week on the "electronic church."
There are some conservative critics of cathode Christianity as well. Philip Yancey of the Evangelical Youth for Christ writes that the Old Testament prophets would draw low ratings on TV, a medium designed for "packaged promises and easy-to-grasp answers." Terry Hill of Cross Roads Publications, a religious book publisher, says, "If you're not fed spiritually you will die as a born-again Christian," and he finds little nourishment in the broadcast diet. Other gospel strategists fear cornball shows will turn off potential converts. But for every critic there is a listener ready to profess that he received help, wellbeing, spiritual renewal or even miraculous healing by broadcast.
The NRB includes international shortwave stations and a vast number of domestic radio programs, but most of the attention nowadays goes to high-budget TV personalities: Bakker and Robertson; Virginia's Jerry Falwell; the Ohio-based Humbard; Louisiana's bayou-brash Jimmy Swaggart; and Californian Robert Schuller. Others are Michigan's Richard De Haan, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts and Fort Worth's fast-rising Baptist evangelist James Robison, 36.