Evangelical radio forms a distinct sub genre within religious radio, referring primarily to programs with a teaching/preaching format, often incorporating hymns or other kinds of sacred music. The intent of evangelical radio programming is to convert unbelievers or to reconvert lapsed Christians by stressing the Bible's call to repent and accept Christ as a personal savior.

It is difficult to be precise about what comprises "evangelical radio" as distinct from other forms of religious radio, because in some sense every effort at putting religion on the air constitutes an invitation to learn more about the principles being presented-and because radio itself, as an advertising-saturated medium, is built around an evangelistic pattern. Nearly everything on radio, from ubiquitous 60-second car sales spots to public radio fund drives, has something of an evangelical ring to it.

In addition, the term evangelical religion means different things to different groups of people, and the meaning has changed over the course of the 20th century. An evangelist can mean any person who seeks to convert another to his or her own religious beliefs. In the popular mind, many tend to link the terms evangelical and fundamentalist, because both offer a Bible-centered worldview with an emphasis on personal conversion. However, the two are not coterminous. The modern evangelical movement had its roots in the fundamentalist movement of the 1910s and 1920s and maintained ties to fundementalism through Bible colleges, summer camps, publishing, and radio, but a group of so-called neo-evangelicals decisively broke with fundamentalism by the late 1950s under the leadership of Billy Graham. Contemporary evangelicals occupy a middle ground between liberal religion and fundamentalism. Today, evangelicalism refers to a loose coalition of conservative Protestant groups in North America, including Baptists, Holiness-Pentecostalists, nondenominational evangelists, and charismatic Protestants.

Although not all of these traditions have been equally involved in media evangelism, the media have been an important tool of American evangelicals in their quest to fulfill the so-called Great Commission, the instruction of Jesus Christ to his followers: "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark 16:15). The preaching of the Christian message in or to every country is considered by many evangelists to be a necessary precondition for the second coming of Christ (e.g., Matt. 24:14), and radio was touted as a providential means to accomplish this important end.

Origins

Revivalism-that is, religious meetings that work through music, word, and emotional appeal to encourage conversion in those attending-lent itself naturally to the new medium of radio in the 1920s. Revivalism grew out of the highly successful late 19th- and early 20th-century mass-audience revival campaigns of Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday and traveling revival movements such as Chautauqua. As promoters of radio evangelism were fond of reminding potential donors, a single broadcast could reach more people than even Dwight Moody had been able to reach in a lifetime. Because folk and camp- meeting revivalism was centrally an aural experience-the spoken and heard word being experientially more powerful than the written and read word-the format of revival sermons and meetings made it onto radio with little adaptation.

In fact, radio evangelism is one of the medium's oldest program genres. In the largely unregulated early years of radio broadcasting in the United States, municipal and private stations alike were in search of material to fill time. Evangelists, ever on the lookout for ways to speak to larger and larger audiences, stepped in to fill the need and never left the air-waves, though their presence was not always so sought after by station owners and broadcasters. In addition, some evangelistic denominations and religious organizations developed their own stations to promote gospel on the air: WMBI Chicago (owned by the Moody Bible Institute), KFUO St. Louis (Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod), and KFSG Los Angeles (International Church of the Foursquare Gospel) were three of the earliest, all coming on the air within two years of each other in the mid-1920s; in 2003, all three were still broadcasting as Christian radio stations.

However, once network radio was firmly entrenched, evangelicals found it harder to access airtime, even with donations from loyal listeners and supporters. Their often strident "hell-fire and damnation" message worked against both networks' desire for mass audiences and advertisers' appeals for consumer spending, making evangelical radio a risk for network broadcasters. Additionally, airtime became more expensive, and evangelical radio was largely dependent on listener donations for the funds to purchase airtime. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) early on developed a policy of donating a block of airtime for religious broadcasting to representatives of the major religious groups in America. As a fragmented and largely grassroots movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, American evangelicalism found itself unable to obtain this donated airtime from the networks.

Instead, evangelical radio focused on buying time on individual stations or developing its own small-scale independent networks. Although Christian benevolent organizations (e.g., the Gideons and the Christian Business Men's Association) made regular and sometimes substantial donations to evangelical radio efforts, most broadcasters relied heavily on individual donations to pay for airtime. Listeners sometimes proved creative and resourceful in scraping together small amounts of money to send to support their favorite broadcasts.

Mutual Broadcasting System-the only national network that then sold time for religion-collected over $2.1 million for its religious broadcasts in 1942. In 1944 this amount had jumped to $3.5 million, a full quarter of the network's income. By 1943, reported Variety magazine, an estimated $200 million was "rolling into church coffers each year from radio listeners," allowing racketeers and "religious pirates" to get rich quick without adhering to standards of accounting. Broadcasters' appeals for funds proved increasingly controversial; Mutual eventually prohibited on-air appeals for funding. In the late 1940s, for example, the vigilant director of religious activities at Mutual Broadcasting, Elsie Dick, insisted that Walter Maier (speaker of the Lutheran Hour on her network) refrain from using even relatively vague statements, such as "if you want these broadcasts to continue, write to us to assure us of your interest." Broadcasters on Mutual could not follow a request to "pray for the work of this broadcast" with the pro- gram's mailing address, as this would violate Mutual's policy against the solicitation of funds. Individual stations that accepted religious broadcasts sometimes also established similar policies. Broadcasters sometimes circumvented these restrictions by offering "free" merchandise such as Bibles, tracts, calendars, or commemorative pins. Through the written requests of listeners for promotional items, broadcasters could build a mailing list for direct-mail appeals instead of using air-time for financial appeals.

Examples of Evangelical Radio

Although it is impossible to be exhaustive in listing all evangelists and their programs throughout the years, a few examples illustrate the genre and its approach to missionizing America and the world: the Back to the Bible Hour, the Radio Bible Hour, the Lutheran Hour, and the Old Fashioned Revival Hour.

Started in 1939 by Theodore Epp, the Back to the Bible Hour was a daily gospel broadcast and Bible-study program originating from Lincoln, Nebraska. By the mid-1950s, Epp could claim that the "sun never set" on Back to the Bible, which was heard somewhere in the world at any given minute through AM, FM, or shortwave. The ministry had its own large two-story building in downtown Lincoln, where half a million letters were received annually and where some 300,000 copies of the Good News Broadcaster and the Young Ambassador (the latter aimed at teenagers) were printed and mailed each month. A staff of over 150 workers and volunteers provided music and choir direction for the broadcast, sorted and answered mail, taped and shipped out recordings to stations, staffed a round-the-clock prayer room, and coordinated appearances of Epp and his field evangelists at rallies and meetings. Epp authored 70 books, started a Bible correspondence school, and founded a Back to the Bible Missionary Agency (now International Ministries). At his death in 1985, the program was continued with speakers Warren Wiersbe (1985-92) and Woodrow Kroll (1992-present); it is currently syndicated on over 385 stations and on-line.

More controversial and colorful was the stridently fundamentalist Radio Bible Hour of the Reverend J. Harold Smith, which began in 1935 in South Carolina but for some years was forced off American stations after its pugnacious attacks on the Federal Council of Churches. In 1953 Smith moved the Radio Bible Hour to a Mexican border station, XERF, in Ciudad Acuna, just south of the Texas border, where he continued to broadcast until Mexico banned English language religious broadcasts from superpower border stations. The program can still be heard over 50 stations and on-line.

The Lutheran Hour, sponsored by the International Lutheran Laymen's League of the conservative Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, is the most widely syndicated evangelical radio program. Still heard on 1,200 stations worldwide and on-line, the Lutheran Hour was hosted from 1930 to 1950 by Dr. Walter A. Maier, a professor at Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis. His successors continued Maier's sermon-and-song format and its nondenominational approach to Christian outreach.

Finally, perhaps the best-known evangelical radio program was the Old Fashioned Revival Hour, the creation of southern California evangelist Charles Fuller in 1934. Recorded for many years in front of a live audience at the long. Beach Auditorium, Fuller's Revival Hour combined lively choral and barbershop-style revival hymns with energetic preaching; the program pulled audiences of 20 million listeners weekly by the mid-1940s. Fuller was also active behind the microphone in bringing together evangelical broadcasters in the 1940s and 1950s to advocate for paid-time programming through the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Religious Broadcasters.

One important thrust of radio evangelism-and a strategy employed by each of the media evangelists noted above-has been to extend religious broadcasting worldwide in the various languages of each nation. Clarence Jones, who worked in the late 1920s on broadcasts from the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle, was one of the pioneers of long-range overseas religious radio. He founded radio station HCJB in Quito, Ecuador. Many North American evangelists, while securing time and broadcast airspace on the AM spectrum, also quietly used shortwave or mailed transcription discs to overseas stations in order to be heard by as wide as possible a swath of the globe. The Lutheran Hour, for example, broadcasts in over 130 countries in a multitude of languages, from French to Quechua to Zulu.

Although reaching the far corners of the globe was one goal of radio evangelists, reaching the hearts of listening individuals was the other and related goal. In other words, massive broadcast coverage mattered only as far as that coverage would convert people one at a time.

Trends since the 1960s

Billy Graham's evangelistic mass-media campaigns beginning in 1957 helped catapult evangelicalism back to a position of cultural influence. His Hour of Decision program was the first religious broadcast to be carried as a paid-time evangelistic broadcast on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) radio network. And since the 1960s, the Christian media industry has literally exploded in growth, with television, publishing, music, and internet being added to radio. In 1971 there were 400 stations airing religious programming; in 1999 there were over 1,730 such stations, with 1,400 of those considered "full-time" religious stations airing 15 hours or more of religious programming per week.

Despite the dynamic growth, the format of evangelistic programs on radio has changed remarkably little. In stark contrast to the secular end of the contemporary radio industry, most evangelical radio programs are sponsored by a single organization or ministry. Although some are widely syndicated, nearly all evangelical programs are confined to Christian-format radio stations, in keeping with the radio industry's trend toward niche marketing. Gospel-oriented preaching programs continue to thrive within the world of Christian media, but since the 1960s, some religious broadcasters have expressed concern that evangelical radio is a religious ghetto, serving its own rather than reaching new converts.

As early as 1961, liberal Protestant Charles Brackbill, member of the Broadcasting and Film Commission of the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, criticized what he described as radio evangelism's tired format: "the loud and the sad and the intense voices pouring out on the faithful with their 'heartfelt' pleas for 'letters,' pictures, or books or blessed handkerchiefs." Evangelism, Brackbill argued, should seek to reach the unchurched through proven commercial broadcasting techniques: a quick first impression, a catchy "hook," and lots of repetition. In 1964 the Mennonites tried 30- and 60-second ad spots for the gospel message, criticizing traditional radio programming for attracting "an audience which already has some tendency toward spiritual orientation,'' in the words of Dr. Henry Weaver, the developer of the series. HCJB founder and director Clarence Jones lamented in 1970 that missionary stations tended to drift in the direction of speaking to believers-who, after all, were the source of any station's continuing funds (incidentally, many of these same concerns would surface over televangelism, where the audience numbers, production costs, and cultural stakes were even higher).

Some scholars expressed concern that evangelism as a type of radio program would be replaced by magazine or talk-format programs or by Christian music programming. In the late 1980s, for example, one study suggested that only 37 percent of all programs on religious stations focused on preaching or teaching. However, according to the 2000 Directory of Religious Media, "teaching/preaching" is still the largest category among religious radio station formats, followed by "inspirational," "gospel," and "Southern gospel." This same directory lists hundreds of individual evangelistic programs, some syndicated or beamed by satellite to over 1,000 radio stations. Many of the radio programs are also broadcast on-line through the radio stations' websites, expanding the notion of "evangelical radio" far beyond the physical reaches of a radio signal. Perhaps internet broadcasting will prove another fruitful growth area for religious broadcasting. How successful evangelical radio is in reaching unchurched people, for whom the "good news" is "news" indeed, remains an open question. But there is no doubt that radio evangelism is, and has been throughout the century, a popular and profitable genre that is in no danger of vanishing from the American scene.