Until the 1960s, religion on television followed the pattern devised earlier by radio broadcasters. Broadcasters provided time and production facilities free of charge for programs produced by mainline Protestants (the National Council of Churches and, in the South, the Southern Baptist Convention); Catholics (the United States Catholic Conference); and Jews (New York Board of Rabbis). This arrangement enabled broadcasters to satisfy their license requirement to donate time for “public interest” programs, while allowing them to choose religious programmers whose material would not motivate viewers to change the channel. The result was programming with ecumenical appeal, including the award-winning Lamp Unto My Feet (CBS) and Frontiers of Faith (NBC).

Fundamentalist and evangelical groups wishing to express their unique perspectives received neither time nor access to production facilities. They had to produce their own programs and buy air time, usually purchasing the little-viewed hours of Sunday morning. Nevertheless, the evangelical imperative and the persuasive power of television compelled pioneering televangelists forward. The Lutheran Hour and Youth on the March both debuted in 1949, and the first of Billy Graham’s prime-time crusades aired in 1957.

The cozy relationship between the networks and mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews began to erode in 1960, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that broadcasters need not give away time to earn public interest credit. Once paid, religious broadcasts counted as much as donated religious broadcasts in the FCC’s public interest accounting, broadcasters lost their incentive to give time away. When the mainline groups chose not to include expensive television productions in their budgets, the non-denominational, Christian evangelical direction of paid religious programming was set: American religious television would be dominated by personality-driven “television ministries” such as Oral Roberts and You, Jerry Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour, and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. These three programs were so remunerative that their founders were able to create universities with their proceeds. Oral Roberts University began in 1963; Falwell established Liberty University in 1971; and Pat Robertson founded Regent University, originally CBN University, in 1977.

In the 1980s, critics worried that powerful televangelists were reducing church attendance and income and influencing national politics, but these fears subsided after academic studies showed that the audience for televangelism was a small subset of churchgoers, news reports exposed the sexual misdeeds of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, and a Republican primary ended Pat Robertson’s bid for president. The lesson many televangelists learned was to spend more time on ministry and less on politics and fund raising.

Televangelism continues to dominate religious programming today, whether in individual programs or in cable services like the Family Channel, which mixes G-rated network reruns and movies with straightforward evangelical programs. The leader is Trinity Broadcasting Network, a 24-hour, commercial-free service founded in 1973 that appears on thousands of television stations and cable systems as well as dozens of satellites around the world. TBN far overshadows its mainline Christian and Jewish counterpart, Faith & Values Media, whose programming appears on cable’s Hallmark Channel mostly on Sunday and early morning, or in some prime-time holiday specials.

But religion has not simply been relegated to fringe time and the odd televangelism cable channel; from the beginning of television, it has appeared in the popular hours of commercial prime time. Most notable in this regard is Bishop Fulton Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living (1952–57), the only explicitly religious program ever to be commercially viable. For most dramas and comedies, however, the principle of least-objectionable material applied in the first few decades of television. In order not to offend any viewers, God was seldom mentioned, and even more seldom connected to any particular faith. Characters sometimes attended church or participated in weddings or funerals, but religious specifics were glossed over. A priest may have worn a collar and a nun a habit, but their clothing rarely communicated more than vague humanitarianism.

This blandness began to disappear in the 1980s, when the broadcast television networks began to compete with cable and then satellite channels. Programmers began to look for distinct characters and themes to set them apart from run-of-the-mill competition, and one underused source was religion. NBC found success in Highway to Heaven, in which an angel is assigned to help people through tough times. CBS followed with Touched by an Angel, in which three angels help human beings understand that God wants to be involved in their lives. Other shows explored religious themes in particular episodes. UPN’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine delved into the religion of the planet Bajor; CBS’s Picket Fences took up the issues of biblical literalism, miracles, and prayer; and HBO’s Oz portrayed complex questions of faith faced by a Muslim leader and a prison chaplain. On the WB network 7th Heaven is a family melodrama constructed around a family in which the father is a minister. Significantly, the series, which began in 1996, continues to be one of the most popular programs among teenagers, often attracting more teens than any other program airing at the same time. At the beginning of the autumn 2003 television season, Joan of Arcadia was among the very few new programs to attract a substantial audience. In this series God appears to Joan, a high school student, in the personae of “ordinary” people she encounters in everyday settings. Their exchanges, in conventional conversational manner, usually lead to the exploration of some generally “religious” aspect of personal or social engagement.

Network news sometimes addresses religious topics and issues. ABC World News Tonight hired Peggy Wehmeyer as a full-time religion news correspondent from 1994 until 2001. Religion & Ethics News Weekly, a weekly half-hour of news about religion and ethics, began on PBS in 1997. And in 2002, PBS’s Frontline broadcast the provocative Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, in which a number of clergymen and -women explored the question of God’s presence or absence during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

However attentive television can be to religious issues and practices, most Americans view these treatments of religion only occasionally, a situation not likely to change with a medium governed by visual appeal and commerce.