Doctoral Dissertation Research: Globalizing the Gospel: The Technology of American International Religious Broadcasting, 1931-1980

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

In the three decades following WWII, American evangelical broadcasters rose to positions of global prominence, supplanting commercial firms and passing state-run services in the number of program languages, transmission hours, and letters received. Drawing on archives that scholars have not consulted, this STS Dissertation Improvement Grant, provides a previously untold history of this phenomenon. The project begins with the establishment of the first Protestant station overseas in 1931 and charts the rise of four major evangelical broadcasters from the early 1950s to the dawn of the global era. The dissertation compares missionary radio with the activity of the Voice of America, which adopted religious broadcasts in 1950 for propaganda purposes. Contrary to widespread conceptions, evangelical broadcasters did not function as backward-looking reactionaries, but acted as dynamic technological users, selectively appropriating modern technological systems to creatively proselytize their traditional message around the world. Employing a social constructivist approach, the project demonstrates how evangelical and VOA broadcasters constructed listening audiences in the 1950s through projects to build and distribute pre-tuned "Portable Missionary Receivers" in remote rural areas of developing countries. Engaging a collection of letters from listeners in broadcaster archives, the study provides insight into the how broadcasters perceived their listening public and how radio broadcasts were publicly received by an important subset of enthusiastic listener converts. "Globalizing the Gospel" shows how evangelical American broadcasters responded effectively to changing political and technological conditions in the developing world beginning in the 1970s by localizing their mission and practice. Rather than build a single global "virtual" community, evangelical world radio in the late twentieth century fostered a mosaic of communities based on overlapping religious, national, and ethnic identities. Setting missionary radio against the backdrop of the global revival of the church in Asia, Africa, and Latin America which began in the 1970s, the project demonstrates the "stamina of local culture" against the hegemony of Americanized religion and the distancing effects of global technology. This study will add significantly to existing scholarship on international broadcasting by exploring new subject matter, examining hitherto largely unused source material, and adopting a novel private/public comparative framework. Working at the intersection of religion and radio, the project will open up an under-appreciated but important source of American cultural influence abroad, American evangelical religion, tracing its effects on institutions and individuals overseas. This project will use international religious broadcasting as a case study to broaden scholarly understanding of the ways in which traditional groups accommodate modern life through the appropriation and mediation of technology.