Stars of the Cathode Church

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-c- 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).

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.

With such preachers drawing sums that surpass the national budgets of entire denominations, there are inevitable questions about financial practices. The gospel broadcasters make no apology for pitching for funds on the air, since they need to raise lots of money from their audience to produce the shows and buy air time. Says William Fore of the National Council of Churches, a questioner of electronic faith: "These people are not building up wealth in Swiss banks, but the system brings them the things money buys: power and prestige."

Still, broadcast preachers until recently have often had compliant boards of directors and little outside scrutiny over their personal dealings. Though he sometimes begs gifts to fend off PTL's bankruptcy, Jim Bakker and his wife draw $90,000 in salary and perks, plus a clothing allowance and use of a $200,000 home provided free by a supporter. Not much by secular TV standards, but exorbitant in traditional church terms. Bakker's organization has also been shaken by mismanagement during a giddy empire-building phase.

The FCC is currently investigating charges that Bakker and another evangelist, California Station Owner Eugene Scott, sometimes raised money on the air for one purpose and used it for another. Scott is also being pursued by the California attorney general. Whether or not any of the allegations stand up, religious-broadcasting-industry leaders are privately alarmed by the sleazy image such allegations convey. The NRB has toughened its internal code of ethics for members, and a new Evangelical Council on Financial Accountability is accrediting Protestant organizations to protect their image with contributors--and head off government controls. Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell are the first TV stars to win the council's approval. Some big operators, including Eugene Scott, apparently have no intention of applying.

More than ever, this year's NRB convention was animated by a new purpose: using its access to millions to influence public opinion and policymaking, generally from a conservative position. Falwell, most politically inclined of the lot, thundered last week to an appreciative audience: "255,000 secular humanists have taken 215 million of us out in left field. The time has come to take the crowd back to right field."

The next morning over breakfast at the White House, a delegation of preachers, including Falwell, Bakker and Oral Roberts, got down to business with President Carter and came away reassured on two matters close to their hearts. Carter said he did not oppose prayers in public schools if they were truly voluntary, and left the impression he would support an antiabortion amendment to the U.S. Constitution if it passed Congress. One participant, Rex Humbard, seemed less than comfortable with the new-fashioned political Christianity that some of his fellow broadcast evangelists have begun pursuing. "If I got into politics," he allowed, "I'd be like a blacksmith pullin' teeth."

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