Televangelism
The Story the Media Missed¹ 

The electronic communications revolution is a technological megatrend that is reshaping not just America, but our entire planet. Its marvels of instant global communication inundate us with massive quantities of new information and images in alluring new packages, challenging and even overrunning traditional values as it alters lifestyles around the world. It is transforming our allegiances. Yet few recognize its impact; fewer still understand.

It is a fundamental truth of our era that leaders who don’t know how to use the mass media effectively see their movements stop dead in the water. Mass media can lend or withhold the publicity needed to attract members, achieve responsibility, or stave off ignominy, by focusing attention on certain causes and crusades to the exclusion of others, by identifying this movement as "newsworthy" or that one as hopeless.

Television in the first two decades following World War II played a major role in mobilizing black Americans for the civil rights movement. Despite control over books, newspapers and libraries, southern whites could not stop even illiterate blacks from seeing nightly television broadcasts of civil rights activity on the "Huntley-Brinkley Report."

Nor could the Pentagon, with all its image-making propaganda machinery, contain or stifle the news of unrest over the escalating Vietnam conflict during the 1960s. There is even good reason to believe that the archetypal American Demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was in large measure brought down by television coverage of his Senate hearings.

Almost without our recognizing it, the communications revolution is re-shaping American religion. And American religion, in turn, is using this electronic communications technology to reshape the country–and beginning to reach out to reshape the world.

How on earth could this be? The answer is simple. Evangelical Christians have developed the most sophisticated communications system on this planet. They have done so in full view of the American public, but nobody was paying any attention. Radical social activist Jeffery Rifkin is among the few who were taking note. In The Emerging Order, a book that deserved much more attention than it received, Rifkin documents the development of evangelical political power in America and concludes thus:

But skeptics remain aloof from the evidence. And while they continue to snarl at any suggestion of ascending political power among evangelicals, those who would change America are going about the business of mobilizing their resources, unmolested by the ideological opponents of the New Christian Right.

The typical mass media commentators–newspaper, journalists, television’s roving reporters and anchor persons, and most editors–are captive to a secular mindset that is predisposed to exclude religion from news except when it is bizarre or sensational. Compare, for example, media attention devoted to covering the Jonestown suicides in 1978 or the recent Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker debacle with analysis of major currents of religious change. Pope John Paul II has been the subject of much news because of his unprecedented globe-trotting. But there has been relatively little analysis of the meaning or implications of the Pope’s aggressive leadership.

Nor is the typical communicator well-equipped to assess what information about religion may cross his or her path. There are only about 250 religion newswriters in the entire United States. To the extent that religion is covered, the majority of journalists find themselves covering it between assignments to report on natural disasters, crime sprees, traffic accidents, garden shows, and country fairs. And when a significant religious story does break, editors tend not to assign their religion reporters. For example, of the 270 members of the press corps registered at Jim and Tammy Bakker’s Heritage USA for the news conference following the second meeting of the Falwell board, only five were members of the Religious Newswriters Association, the professional organization if religion writers in the secular media.

Not surprisingly, news coverage of religion tends to be superficial and lacking context. Reporters are ill prepared to probe beyond the surface of events. One result is that mass media communicators tend to portray religion in a skeptical or even negative light, particularly if the newsmakers in question do not reflect the establishment. Faced with new religious developments, reporters tend to display a mixture of professional cynicism, ignorance, and bemusement, and an off-hand dismissal of the possible widespread or profound implications of religious change.

"At least since the Enlightenment," writes Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge in The Future of Religion, "most Western intellectuals have anticipated the death of religion." They continue:

This belief in the inevitable demise of religion is anchored in a sweeping world-view known as secularization theory. In a nutshell, secularization theory holds that the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance set in motion the forces of modernization which swept across the globe and loosened the dominance of the sacred. The technological, industrial, scientific, and cultural revolutions of the Western world are the result. In due course, the theory holds, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.

Western scholars have long assumed that this view is the product of rational analysis and objective research. Perhaps, but growing numbers of social scientists are no longer so sure. Notwithstanding, secularization theory has permeated Western culture, trickling down from the mandarins at the apex of higher education until virtually everyone who has passed through any but the most parochial of colleges and universities has been indoctrinated with its assumptions.

When confronted with evidence that religion persists as a vital force in the hearts and lives of men and women in the modern world, scholars, intellectuals, and opinion leaders become incredulous, clinging stubbornly to the fixed notions of the past quarter-of-a-millennium.

It is primarily through journalism that we have the opportunity to see the effects of the secularization paradigm in everyday though. The world is filled with events beyond our first-hand experience, of which we are afforded glimpses through the lens of the mass media. What we know about the world is largely determined by the reporters and editors who define what is news and by commentators who decide what is worthy of analysis.

In a very profound sense, as Michael Schudson concludes in Discovering the News, "the daily persuasions of journalists reflect and become our own." The media gives us more than a disembodied message about some event they have judged to be "news." In subtle, and sometimes not so subtle ways, they provide a perspective–a way of looking at and thinking about what they report.

Only in recent years has there been any systematic data to assist in understanding the attitudes, beliefs, and values of American journalists. Stanley Rothman, professor of government at Smith College, is the architect of a study initiated in 1977 to investigate elites in the public interest movement, the federal bureaucracy, and media.

"The typical journalist," write Rothman and his Lichter colleagues, "is the very model of the modern eastern urbanite." Journalists are politically liberal and aloof from traditional norms and institutions, as are most people who possess their demographic and educational profile.

On a broad range of social and moral issues, journalists express more liberal views than the "man in the street." A few examples of personal morality issues: Whereas 71 percent of the general public believed homosexuality to be morally wrong, only 38 percent of the media elite agreed. Sixty-five percent of the general public, compared with 35 percent of the media group, believe abortion to be morally wrong. And by a margin of 57 percent to 22 percent, the general public was more likely to view smoking marijuana as morally wrong.

Almost twice as many people in the general public (47 percent to 24 percent) believe that living with someone of the opposite sex outside of marriage is wrong. And, by approximately the same margin (52 percent to 27 percent) the general public believes that divorce should be more difficult to get.

On these and a number of other moral issues, only about half as many journalists as members of the general public expressed a socially conservative point of view. Media elites would likely interpret these data as evidence that they are more tolerant of individual choice in a pluralist society. But through the eyes of conservatives who feel strongly that abortion, premarital sex, and drug use are morally abhorrent, the data provides proof positive of the press corps’ tolerance of immorality.

The study also shows that media elites are on the average much less active religiously and less orthodox in what they believe, confirming another suspicion of evagelical conservatives. Furthermore, it is quite probable that the average person of deep religious conviction will attribute the media’s "intolerance of immortality" to a lack of religious values.

Comparing the religious behavior of the media elite with a national survey conducted by the Gallup Organization during roughly the same period reveals further dramatic differences. Whereas half of the media sample professed no religious affiliation, 68 percent of the national sample reported being church or synagogue members. More than nine out of ten in the national sample express a preference for a religious group. In an average week in 1981, Gallup reported, 41 percent of the national population attended church. Only 8 percent of the media elite report that they attend religious services weekly; 86 percent report they seldom or never attend.

These figures add up to some whopping differences between the values and behavior of media elites and the general public. But the data doesn’t prove that the generally more liberal values of media elites on social issues and high levels of alienation from traditional institutions and authority result in a distorted presentation of these issues in their reports. Nor does their low level of religious involvement mean that they are either overtly or subtly biased against religion in a way that would affect their ability to objectively assess the role of religion in the political process.

The media, according to Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter, try to uphold two contradictory self-images that are not easily reconciled. On the one hand, they see themselves as cool, non-partisan reporters struggling to get the news. But beneath the veneer of the objective reporter exists a social reformer.

The problem is not just that journalists all went to the same schools, read the same newspapers and, hence, all operate from the same narrow liberal paradigm. "Probably just as important, " is that a fair proportion "desire to exert moral power, as patrons of outsiders and victims with whom they identify, against traditional restrictions and institutional authority" (emphasis added).

This is a subtle but consequential characteristic. Even Walter Cronkite, perhaps the most beloved broadcaster in the history of television, has failed to recognize its power. Once asked whether journalists were biased toward a liberal perspective against established institutions, he said no but added that his profession was prone "to side with humanity rather than authority."

One may reasonably ask, so what? The answer rests in an understanding of how these beliefs and behavioral patterns affect the way religion is reported in the news or analyzed as an element of the political process. Journalists are not, as a group, very religious; some of them even disdain religion. Furthermore, they interact daily with colleagues who also feel indifferent or negative about religion. Thus, living in a subculture that shares their ambivalence or hostility toward religion, they come to believe their viewpoint is normative, and widely shared by the general public.

There are many reasons why the media have misunderstood and misreported the story of an ascending New Christian Right. Clearly their liberal bias is an important factor. But if Lichter and his colleagues have correctly characterized journalists as "closet reformers," we have added a crucial ingredient. Like-minded reformers can be championed. Reformers with different but not antagonistic goals can be tolerated. But reformers of a different stripe pose a threat of immeasurable proportions.

When Jerry Falwell was discovered by the mass media and believed to have a huge following, he was terrifying. Only after his image was trimmed back down to size were his presence and message tolerable within a pluralistic society. The dissonance was reduced by the information that Falwell didn't really have the television audiences and Moral Majority following he claimed.

Now comes Pat Robinson, and the mechanisms for reducing cognitive dissonance are being summoned anew. But it will be more difficult this time. The media's interpretation of the resources Robertson has available to launch a significant campaign clashes badly with the overwhelming evidence. Journalists assess religion in terms of their own preconceived, and mutually held, notions of its irrelevance in the modern secular world. From this follows the belief that the New Christian Right couldn't really be a force large enough to upset the status quo. And because these views are reinforced in interaction with other media people, they are inclined to ignore, discount, or reject evidence that would suggest the contrary.

The media has focused on two questions. First, how big is the movement? Lacking any background on the movement, the media first tended to accept the claims of its leaders, especially Falwell, uncritically. And he assured them that the answer was very big. Falwell claimed television audiences in the range of seventeen to fifty million for his Old-Time Gospel Hour, three to five million members of the Moral Majority, and took credit for registering four million voters. When the election was over, he claimed credit for the Reagan landslide and the defeat of liberal congressmen and senators who lost re-election.

Every social movement that is perceived as powerful can be expected to face organized opposition, both from pre-existing organizations and, almost always, new organizations that emerge specifically for the battle.

People for the American Way and Americans for Common Sense were the most visible of a dozen new organizations created to battle the right-wing threat of the Moral Majority, The Christian Roundtable, and Christian Voice. Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union were the most visible existing organizations to turn their attention to "saving America from religious zealots."

Just as the New Christian Right had a vested interest in persuading the media that they were very large, so also did the counter-mobilization organizations. Unless the Moral Majority was really a serious threat to society why would anyone give money to People for the American Way? So they repeated Falwell's claims and made up some statistics of their own to show that the threat was real.

Implicit in the formation of a counter-mobilization effort is a second question, namely, how unconventional is the threatening movement? And the answer (no matter what the cause or the nature of the group's activities) is always very unconventional. If not, there would be no need for a counter-movement, since they could simply be accepted as one of the many competitive interest groups in the political arena. By labeling them unconventional in the extreme, the opposition aims to brand new movements as illegitimate. If allowed to operate unchecked, the argument goes, they would constitute a grave threat. In this case, the New Christian Right is a threat to the very stability of the political system.

The perception of the New Christian Right as very large coupled with the perception that their beliefs about religion and politics were very unconventional led to a brief period of hysteria, when it seemed as though America was in grave danger of being overrun by fundamentalists. Gradually, the exaggerations became evident. When that happened, the media radically restructured the "born-again Christians-turned-politicians" story to make it consistent with the new evidence that they were not so dangerous after all. Jerry Falwell was recast as a bit player rather than a star.

But Jerry Falwell has refused to get off the stage. On a pretty steady basis, he does things and says things the media cannot ignore. So, the media flip-flops between warning Americans about the dangerous zealot from Lynchburg and announcing his important or imminent fall.

When Pat Robertson got the attention of the national media with his prospective presidential bid, the media returned to the same questions they had earlier asked of Falwell. First, how big is his audience? Or alternately, how many evangelicals are there in America? And, second, how unconventional are his views about religion and politics?

On the face of it, the answers are again the same. Robertson has a large audience (or, there are a lot of evangelicals) and his religious and political views are highly unconventional. But, as with Falwell, these are the wrong questions. Or, at the very least, they are questions of misplaced emphasis.

The number of viewers of Robertson's The 700 Club is not unimportant. But it is secondary in importance to the total array of resources–of which his television audience is only one part–he might bring to bear on a presidential bid. Similarly, the question of how many evangelicals there are in America is relevant. But more important are his prospects for coalescing those evangelicals into a solid voting bloc.

What about Robertson's unconventional beliefs? Compared with the media's, there can be no question that his theological and political views are unconventional. Very unconventional. But comparing Robertson's views with those of the media can be terribly misleading. As we have seen, the views of the media are not very representative of the public at large.

Obviously, it makes much more sense to examine Robertson's beliefs (theological and political) in light of the views of the general public than through some standards of conventionality established by the media and by Robertson's adversaries.

If the press were to take that task seriously, a door would open to the understanding that they are more out-of-step with the general public than Pat Robertson is. He's done some serious thinking about how to mobilize Christians for a march to the White House. It may turn out to be a march of folly. But on the other hand, it could be the media who, failing to properly assess persistent evidence, are the ones on such a march.<