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Curious, and even worried, about the impact of Gospel TV, evangelists and mainline critics joined in a rare cooperative gesture in 1984, commissioning an extensive study by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications and the Gallup organization. The three conclusions: surprisingly, although the evangelists raise their funds to reach the "lost," they mostly reinforce people already committed to evangelical religion. Contrary to understandable fears, Gospel TV does not undercut attendance and contributions at local churches. The competing church factions face a common, all-powerful enemy: secularized general TV.
The Rev. William F. Fore, communication secretary at the National Council of Churches, asserts that the televangelists "have been willing to buy enormous popularity, power and income at the expense of their own integrity." Measuring Christian teaching by the popular acclaim it wins, writes Australian Protestant Minister Peter Horsfield in Religious Television: The American Experience (1984), "has been rejected from the earliest beginnings of the Christian faith." Other critics say that TV subordinates the reflective aspects of Christianity to emotive material that affords instant gratification and entertainment. Political differences underlie some of the sniping, of course. Liberals are upset because their criticisms of U.S. policy and ( culture are far less popular than the Christian right's simplified affirmations of American success.
The power of positive TV thinking is especially evident in the "faith message" or "prosperity Gospel," a major Pentecostal variant in the 1980s. Its chief exponent is Kenneth Copeland, 49, platform maestro of the bustling Eagle Mountain Chapel outside Fort Worth. Urging viewers to give a tenth of their income to the Lord, Copeland asks himself rhetorically, "Well, Brother Copeland, are you tithing to get?" His answer: "Yes, yes, yes! A thousand times yes! I want to get healed, I want to get well, I want to get money, I want to get prosperous!" Other advocates include Frederick Price, 54, the black pastor of a huge Los Angeles church, and Robert Tilton, 39, of the Dallas-based Success-N-Life cable network.
The prosperity preachers build on the Pentecostal faith in here-and-now miracles, citing bits of Scripture to proclaim that God has already guaranteed not only spiritual comfort but material prosperity and physical healing. Believers who pronounce their wishes in true faith have already received them, the preachers maintain, even though it may take time for the miracle to be realized. The shorthand version: "Name it and claim it."
The movement deeply disturbs more traditional Evangelicals and Pentecostals (Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson, however, are among outsiders who are friendly). The Rev. Russell Spittler of California's Fuller Theological Seminary thinks such nice-sounding but strange messages show that his fellow Pentecostals are "theologically impoverished." Theologian Charles Farah Jr. of Oral Roberts University asserts that "there are hundreds of thousands of wounded Christians for whom it didn't work." The current best-selling Evangelical paperback The Seduction of Christianity, by Dave Hunt and T.A. McMahon, charges that this TV-borne movement is a slide into occultism and a sign of the End Times.