The last year or so has brought exceedingly high visibility to the TV evangelists who rocketed to superstardom with the rise of the "New Christian Right" and advanced computer technology (for fundraising) in the late 1970s and early '80s. In March 1987, it may be recalled, Oral Roberts warned that God would "take him home" if his fans did not deliver eight million dollars by the end of the month. About the same time, the now infamous sex and money scandal involving Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the PTL Network broke, followed by a media-enhanced fight between the Bakkers and Jerry Falwell for final control of the network after the former's sudden resignation. Later in 1987, Pat Robertson, who had given Jim and Tammy Faye their start on his 700 Club TV show, to no one's surprise, announced his candidacy for the U.S. presidency. Robertson tried hard to dissociate himself from the Roberts-Bakker revelations, but they continued to haunt his candidacy nevertheless. Then the situation worsened early in 1988, when the most popular televangelist of them all, Jimmy Swaggart, admitted to a longstanding fascination with pornography after being caught with a prostitute by a fellow evangelist.
Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe, highly regarded sociologists--and admitted liberals--begin their latest book, Televangelism: Power & Politics on God's Frontier, with a castigation of the secular media for an inordinate focus (including several Time and Newsweek cover stories) on the sinks of these celebrity clerics and a total lack of understanding about the roots and rightful place of televangelism in the history of American Christianity. "For more than 200 years," say Hadden and Shupe, "America's great evangelists have been colorful and controversial. And a few of them have been rascals. But most have been honest men and women, doing the best they could by the means available to them to preach the gospel." Thus, the authors begin their account of the vents of the last year by criticizing the sensationalist interests of the secular media, which inevitably overlook the historical context of the evangelical tradition. To their credit, they make their assessment in a scholarly, sane, and rational manner.
Televangelism provides a useful introduction to the theory and significance of modern mass media, a minihistory of religious broadcasting, and an account of the antics and controversy surrounding America's greatest evangelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--Charles G. Finney, a lawyer; Dwight L. Moody, a businessman; and Billy Sunday, a baseball player. In a chapter entitled "We're Mad As Hell...," the authors locate the ideological origins of the New Christian Right in resentment against the rising power of an elite class of liberals (i.e., the "secular humanists") who are the root cause of today's social ills: the demise of the nuclear family, legalized abortion, rampant promiscuity, drug abuse, a permanent underclass subsidized by taxpayers--all those forces and "values," in short, that are destroying America and its greatness.
But exactly who are the New Christian Right, the mass of conservative Protestants whose spokesmen are the TV evangelists? Hadden and Shupe present survey research data that challenge older data identifying Protestant conservatives--the "born again"--as mainly poor, uneducated women in working-class occupations, and mostly Southerners. They note at least some change in this profile of conservative social status in recent years, with conservative Christians moving into the ranks of well-paid entertainers, athletes, beauty queens, and prominent national politicians. Less than
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