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But for faithful listeners like Mrs. Huffman, with their regular habit of tuning in, their gratitude and prayers, and their humble contributions, religious radio itself might have been a passing fad of the experimental early years of broadcasting. Instead, commercial religious broadcasting hung on through the consolidation of nationwide radio networks; changes in the regulatory structure of broadcast signal allocation; the lean years of the thirties, when donations thinned; and the "golden age" of American broadcasting, when many radio programs were thinly disguised commercials for cosmetics or automobiles—always remaining a genre apart and above all persisting on the air.

That Mrs. Phoebe Huffman listened to a religious radio program during milking suggests that radio permitted some changes in the devotional practices of ordinary Americans. The private uses to which radio programming could be put suggest, in turn, that media messages—and perhaps particularly religious messages—are always subject to reinterpretation by their consumers. It is important, then, not only to know what was said and sung in religious radio programming but also to try to understand what Mrs. Huffman and her contemporaries heard. The growth of a vital industry purveying religious messages, objects, and ideas can be explained only by understanding its appeal to the millions who listened. Media and cultural historians Jes£s Martún-Barbero, Stewart Hoover, Justin Lewis, and Frederic Jameson have insisted that audiences make the meaning, that unintended messages are always possible, and that interpreting the mass media is a process of negotiation and historical contextualization.[2] Recognizing the power of "alternative readings" of cultural texts, Mark Hulsether argues that "postmodern cultural theory highlights how the residual power of religious traditions can be expressed and contested—not merely defeated and trivialized—within a society that communicates through commercial mass media."[3]

Looking at the narratives constructed through mass media, therefore, is only the starting point for understanding the role these media, and particularly radio, have played in building identity and constructing cultural boundaries. The next step is to explore the agency exercised by the audience for religious radio and the social frameworks within which listeners "read" radio as a cultural text.[4] To achieve a multidimensional analysis, I not only use traditional organizational, biographical, and rhetorical evidence but also rely on listener correspondence and other sources of information to get at the meaning of religious broadcasting for its audiences and for the nation as a whole. Very seldom can we access ways the media served as a bulwark against the co-optations and degradations it simultaneously effected. The story of religious radio broadcasting is one way to get at that "other" story. Mass media, after all, channeled messages that were conservative (orienting, placing) as well as transformative (disorienting, displacing). Typically radio services have been seen as a way to avoid attending church; an example that comes to mind is an Aberdeen, South Dakota, listener who sat through Sunday night sermons "until time to take up the collection when we got busy elsewhere."[5] But radio also made it possible to begin going to church or to rethink entirely what church was and where worship could take place.

I hope this book will represent another voice in the current secularization debate and offer a historical perspective to those who study the interconnections between media and religion in modern America.[6] Simply put, some historians and sociologists had assumed that with the growth of modern society and the separation of churches from the structures of political power, society in general would become more secular, religion would fade away, or it would become completely privatized. Whether that is true for Europe, on which many of the secularization arguments were based, is beyond the scope of this book. But clearly, in the United States, it was another story, and this book will help explain how that story unfolded. Religion, even the kind that bills itself as "traditional" or "old-fashioned," found a ready place in modern mass media, enhancing and strengthening certain forms of religious behavior and practice.

The recent scholarly notion of mass media as a new form of an older, human need for aurality/orality interlaces neatly with my observation that Protestant religion is a religion of the heard word.[7] Radio introduced new narratives and voices to the American public, piercing the mystique of places and people previously less accessible. Potentially, religious experience could have been watered down, marginalized, or supplanted by the public's engagement with new forms of mass entertainment. Walter Ong and Mircea Eliade have informed my thinking about the unexpected way religion was enhanced by the mass media's "desacralization" of the world and how the sound of radio fostered the "personalist loyalties, strong social or tribal feelings and responses, and special anxieties" of an older oral/aural tradition.[8] Radio served as a pulpit for evangelism on a scale impossible only decades before. Charles Fuller, for example, could reach in just four half-hour messages "more living people on this earth than the greatest evangelist of the nineteenth century, D. L. Moody, was able to reach, with long journeys, fatiguing travels, and sometimes three meetings a day, in his entire forty years of Christian service."[9] Neither Fuller nor anyone else trying to launch a worldwide media ministry ever forgot the vast scale of possibility.

Despite that vast scale, a radio sermon—unlike attendance at an enormous mass meeting—could be experienced by a single listener like a personal chat. Radio religion often made best use of the medium's ability to speak to listeners as if in a one-on-one conversation. Shouting to a large crowd had been the staple of revival religion since before Benjamin Franklin spent an afternoon in 1739 calculating the number of people who could hear the famously loud George Whitfield sermonizing on the Philadelphia Court House steps.[10] But when Father Coughlin practiced the same kind of vocal dynamics in the 1930s, it merely drew attention to his delivery, often to the detriment of his message. "He harangues the microphone," complained Raymond Gram Swing, editor of The Nation, in 1935. "And if you shout and orate at a man in a small room, he will not listen to you as he would if you speak to him quietly and personally. . . . The microphone is the doorhandle into a man's living-room."[11] Likewise, "radio is the only medium capable of delivering the natural, personal, powerful persuasive spoken word directly into the midst of the American family where it can be considered, discussed, and acted upon immediately," argued an ad for the promotional capability of radio station KGVL in Greenville, Texas.[12] People often mentioned in fan mail to radio preachers how they felt singled out for personal attention by a message and how close the experience of listening to radio was to having an actual religious adviser sitting by their side. Radio shrunk distances, collapsing time and space with unseen power. Today, of course, we take the simultaneity of the mass media for granted, even demand that it deliver an immediate, emotionally satisfying (i.e., "true" or "authentic") representation of a faraway reality. Until television, radio was the only means for the immediate experience of a remote event, and that experience—partly because of its sheer novelty in the early years—could be jarring, epiphanic, even life changing.

Part of the appeal of conservative Christian broadcasting—or, to critics, perhaps its most maddening feature—was its absolute self-certainty. As John Roach Straton, pastor of Manhattan's Calvary Baptist Church and an early entrant in religious radio, put it in 1931, "The people will not get any doubts or negations or question marks from the Calvary pulpit."[13] Effective and commercially successful religious broadcasting polarized issues into right and wrong with confidence, wrapping assertions in language claiming biblical authority and divine approbation.[14] To many, the radio was what Paul Rader called a "new witnessing medium," and it offered clear evidence not of the entrepreneurial streak in American Protestantism but rather of the hand of God, rolling forward his divine plans.[15] Fundamentalist radio broadcasters gave a national voice to the folk religion of their listeners—expressing their millennial hopes, their faith to be healed, and the cadences of their oral worship. They believed religion could, and should, speak to the everyday, concrete realities of life—sickness, trouble, the search for peace of mind. Conservative listeners' apparent delight in radio illustrated their eagerness not only for their beliefs to be heard by those outside the fold of believers but also for their internal and personal concerns to be addressed by a God who could be accessed, heard, and spoken to in a modern and technologically complex world. To them, he was a deity as close as the dial on a radio, hard at work for his faithful, who themselves were dedicated to furthering his righteous causes. Combative preachers encouraged radio audiences either to ally with or against their teachings. Fundamentalist broadcasting illustrated the dynamic tension in conservative Protestantism between turning inward and reaching outward.

That tension is far from new in American religion. Nathan Hatch, Harry Stout, R. Laurence Moore, and Frank Lambert all have written extensively about the promotion of religious ideas through mass meetings, print, and other means in colonial and early America.[16] Protestantism's position as the dominant religious mode in the nineteenth century and the de facto civil religion of the whole nation was owed to the popular marketing of revivalism, and so in that sense the embrace of the mass medium of radio in the early twentieth century should not be surprising.

However, in other ways, the twentieth century seemed barren ground for old-time religion to take root and thrive. The early years were, as Richard Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears have written, a time of doubt and "cultural consternation," when "the old religious sanctions for the moral life, a life of sacrifice and toil, had begun to disintegrate in the face of both Darwin and the liberalization of Protestantism itself."[17] As the United States became more modern and secular in the early twentieth century, Protestants found that religious institutions seemed to have less authority to articulate values embraced by the entire nation.[18] Revivalistic, doctrinally conservative Protestants in the 1910s sought both to reclaim the authority they perceived they'd lost and to uphold the core ("fundamental") doctrines of the Christian faith. Key among the doctrines conservatives emphatically defended were the inerrant and literal truth of the Bible and premillennialism—the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ prior to a prophesied millennium of peace.[19] They founded Bible institutes and colleges to train people in these essential doctrines, held conferences and retreats to celebrate and defend conservative Christianity, and published scores of periodicals to promote this reinvigorated orthodoxy, including an influential pamphlet series, The Fundamentals, which gave their movement a handy nickname.

The fundamentalist movement, over the course of the twentieth century, became a dense network of interwoven denominations, parachurch organizations, educational institutions, and publishing outlets.[20] Mass media bound the network together, permitted its growth, and, to some extent, reflected its image and values. Radio—paradoxically—prevented the decline of old-fashioned religious belief. As Bruce Lawrence has noted, historians today seldom invoke Max Weber's thesis of Protestant religion as a modernizing force.[21] Without resurrecting Weber's thesis entirely, it does seem high time we acknowledge that without the institutions of modern mass culture religious fundamentalism could not have taken its present shape—and that mass culture, in turn, owes something to religion's aggressive advance in the twentieth century.

For a moment in the mid-twenties, however, modern science seemed to have vanquished Bible-thumping religion. Symbolic of the moment was the live radio drama of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925, convicting a high school teacher of teaching evolution contrary to state law. The trial's oral arguments and verdict were broadcast on radio as well as covered by hundreds of print journalists, and they sounded, in the opinion of some, the death knell to fundamentalist religion. Or, at least, the widely held view has been that after Scopes fundamentalists retreated in confused humiliation, reappearing suddenly and without precedent in the mid-1970s.[22] In contrast, new studies, such as those of Joel Carpenter and Jon R. Stone, revisit evangelical and fundamentalist institutions in the decades after Scopes and portray fundamentalists and other evangelical Protestants as actively creating parachurch organizations and a thriving network of religious institutions—and engaging popular culture through the media as early as the thirties.[23] Although for several decades fundamentalism ceased to exist as a tightly organized movement, the ideas and practices, and the core doctrines, did not fade away. Rather, some became diffused throughout Protestantism—Robert Wuthnow estimates that as many as 10 million Americans in the late forties could be considered "fundamentalist" if the criteria were a person's beliefs in "the divinity of Jesus, the literal historical reality of miracles, and the verbal inerrancy of the scriptures."[24]

By portraying their radio heroes, exploring their letters, and examining institutions they founded, this book taps a vast, protean, and largely unstudied segment of the American population. These were people whose conservative Protestant religion served to mediate in their encounter with the increasingly urban, secular, and impersonal world in which they found themselves.[25] What came to be called by the 1940s "evangelicalism" provided (in Peter Berger's term) a "plausibility structure" to interpret the discontinuity between the "old human conditions for encounter and the new dehumanized context—telephone, phonograph, wireless, film—in which they were increasingly embedded."[26] Evangelicals were energized by their difference from the sinful world around them, filled with fervent hope for change and restoration that could come only from divine intervention. As one example, the words of a 1947 Bible lesson published in the Christian Beacon illustrate the perspective most fundamentalists took toward modern life. It held out little hope for human-made solutions to the great problems of the day: "Our nations are too full of pride, nationalism, politics, covetousness, and kindred sins to humble themselves before God, and so they all continue to wallow and toss in uncertainty, doubt, and often despair and distress, and threats of bloody war hover over the sinful world. But we as individuals can be revived by wholly surrendering ourselves to Jesus Christ our Lord. . . . The revival must begin with us, but there is no limit to its extent. . . . Pray for a revival to start in yourself—expect that it will come and then spread it on to others."[27]

Hopes for a revival infused evangelicalism throughout the period covered by this study—and have not been lost entirely, although twenty-first-century evangelicals place far more trust in political solutions to moral problems than they did in the 1940s. The key point here is that neither modernity nor scientific rationality extinguished old-time religion; rather, they established the only environment in which it could be clearly delineated.[28] Bruce Lawrence has called fundamentalists "moderns, but not modernists." He means that, in Marshall Berman's terms, moderns see their world as a maelstrom, without solidity or footing, but they do not find themselves at home in that world.[29] Bobby Alexander noted that "religious conservatives . . . feel the constant pull of their religion, which is their center of gravity."[30] Their insistence on a transcendent reality builds on their belief that reality is not to be found in their temporal surroundings. Antimodernism depends on modernism against which to define itself. "The context frames the text; fundamentalists are products of modernity."[31]

The "maelstrom" of modernity has been attached to the rise of media and consumer culture by many cultural historians of late, among them William Leach, T. J. Jackson Lears, Stuart Ewen, and Susan Strasser.[32] Advertising in the mass media carried and encoded new myths, messages, and images in all their ambiguity, thereby complicating cultural boundaries.[33] Emerging scholarship on radio and other broadcast media in America has begun to explore the media as contested sites, social locations that reflect, interpret, and magnify broader cultural struggles. Yet none of the major works in the field discusses religion at all, even though during the first decades of the twentieth century a person's religion (or avowed nonreligion) probably determined his or her place in the cultural contest as much as any other identifiable trait. Typically this historiography takes the form of a declension narrative: the media broke down gemeinschaft relationships, standardized longings for mass-produced items, and transcended the local in unpleasant and disruptive ways.[34] Rural life, especially, appeared besieged by the loss of community that mass media such as magazines, movies, and radio fostered, although urban communities could also be segmented by the mass-produced qualities of network radio, as Lizbeth Cohen has shown in her study of Chicago industrial workers.[35]

Religious radio resonated with this nostalgic longing for better times and used the language, inflection, and metaphor of rural life. Radio evangelists connected to audiences beyond the immediate locale, thus hastening the nationalization of American folk religion and the involvement of mass media in even those parts of life formerly seen as private and sacred. At the same time, with their relentless criticism of modern, sinful life, they drew attention to the "worldly" structures of contemporary media and entertainment outside of which they claimed to operate. In my view, the introduction of the mass medium of radio cannot be wholly a woeful tale of loss and community breakdown; I agree with those who place mid-twentieth-century rural communities not as the antithesis of but as situated within—even shoring up—consumer networks and the industrialized, corporate, consumer world.[36] Paula Nelson's poignant account of South Dakota farmers in the twenties and thirties has suggested that the mass media had a complicated impact on rural life, which was itself in a time of painful transition. She writes, "The collapse of the agricultural economy in the immediate aftermath of the boom years of World War I initiated a trend of regional decline amidst national prosperity and cultural change. The rise of radio and mass culture during this period increased rural folks' awareness of national trends and tastes, a development which paradoxically increased their sense of remoteness and isolation."[37] In their study of "modern American culture," in the paradigmatic small town of Muncie, Indiana, Robert and Helen Lynd listed the radio among the 1920s inventions that were remaking leisure and had given rise to "ingenious manipulative activity" through the active listening it promoted. Moreover, radios were commonplace in the homes of both wealthy residents and those in working-class neighborhoods.[38] Even rural homes without electricity had radios that ran on battery power; by 1931 more than half of all American households had at least one radio.[39] Ubiquity became the medium's hallmark. For example, in 1938 a survey of the rural radio audience in Kansas found that between 80 and 90 percent of families living in towns owned at least one radio, as well as 68 percent of families on farms, for an estimated total of 360,000 radio homes in that state alone. A similar survey in Iowa found even less of a gap between rural and town radio ownership: 83.8 percent of farm families owned a radio, as compared with 89.4 percent of families living in towns.[40]

The programs that each of those millions of radios could access fell into two categories useful for our discussion of religious radio: sustaining time and commercial. Programs aired on time donated as a public service—often by an entire network of stations—were "sustaining-time" programs.[41] Because religion was thought to provide a public benefit by its mere presence on the air, stations offered sustaining time slots to religious organizations (predictably, sometimes the least profitable time slots). In contrast, commercial radio programs, which constituted most of the fare on radio, were sponsored by a corporation or paid for by an organization that bought the time at market rate. There were successful religious radio programs in both categories but important differences between them that I hope this book will make clear. Programming that was dogmatic or controversial or that clearly promoted a single faith almost never received public-service sustaining time. Consequently, religious radio evangelists with a firm conviction to convert others to a particular faith became commercial broadcasters of necessity. Thus, exploring the level of rapprochement between sustaining time and commercial time reveals an important underlying cultural conflict in American religion between doctrinally and socially liberal churches and doctrinally and socially conservative ones. Religion in the mass media sorted itself into two opposing and distinct realms, the extremes of which represented diametrically opposed modes of religious thought and opposing ways of using the medium to influence ordinary Americans and achieve their organizations' goals. In the following chapters I explore the conservative end of the spectrum, with glimpses into how those conservatives were perceived, resisted, and accommodated by groups at the other end, represented primarily by the Federal Council of Churches (reformed in 1950 and renamed the National Council of Churches).

Along this spectrum, the ends of which I have labeled "liberal" and "conservative" for the sake of convenience, lie the many varieties of American Protestantism, called and self-described by many names. I recognize that fundamentalists were generally evangelicals but that not all evangelicals were fundamentalist, that "conservative" carries all sorts of political as well as theological connotations, and that the terms religious groups used to describe themselves were often quite different from those historians and sociologists like to assign. However, the nature of mass-syndicated religious radio, in which the listenership of the programs I write about far exceeded the number belonging to conservative Protestant congregations, suggests that this programming succeeded in surmounting denominational and perhaps even sociological boundaries between the many and contentious denominations of American religion.

How lasting, and how meaningful, these coalitions and connections were is a question I hope this study will begin to answer. Some might argue that the community engendered by radio was somehow less than authentic, a "hollow yowling" that was incapable of true interactivity or connection. "The new electric sensibility," as Catherine Covert articulated it, "would range far more widely, but less contemplatively. It would accommodate the discontinuous more easily, but concentrate less effectively. It would extend relationships, but pursue them in less depth."[42] Yet throughout this book we will encounter those who believed otherwise; they argue persuasively that radio made possible coalitions and personal relationships that permanently changed individual lives, shaped the cultural and political life of the latter half of the twentieth century, and revitalized a set of religious traditions that seemed on the verge of extinction.

This work is, at the core, a story of what Dan Morgan has called the "counterforces that are steadily at work against the processes of homogenization."[43] For all today's talk casting "the media" as the pervasive enemy of civil society and decency, I hope to remind readers that the broadcast media have always spoken with many voices—that, far from being a cultural monolith, the media have been as much a tool to build religion as to undermine it. This is because, as Denis McQuail put it, broadcasting was "a social innovation as much as a technological invention, and turning points in media history are marked by, if not caused by, major social changes."[44] The invention of radio and its rapid development into an international mass medium constituted just such a social innovation, and if media historians have consistently overlooked the way that religious broadcasting was involved in that development from the first, there is no reason to perpetuate that omission any further.[45]

Religious radio broadcasting, as opposed to televangelism, has received fairly light treatment by scholars. There are a number of broad overviews of the history of religious radio broadcasting, as well as some biographies of individual radio preachers.[46] Quentin Schultze, William Martin, and Dennis Voskuil have provided the most thoughtful scholarship on the subject, albeit in article form.[47] Most of the published scholarship on radio preaching takes a very traditional approach, focusing exclusively on the preachers themselves and their rhetorical strategies without much attention to the broader cultural framework. Notable exceptions include Howard Dorgan's ethnographic study of Appalachian AM-radio evangelism in the 1970s, Alan Brinkley's account of Father Coughlin and Huey Long during the Great Depression, and the recent contemporary evaluation of Dr. James Dobson's radio ministry by Paul Apostolidis.[48] My aim is to portray revivalistic radio and its listeners as embedded in a rich and rapidly changing culture—illuminating their strategy of trying to provide stability and certainty as itself a product of the age in which conservative Protestant radio began to flourish.

Chapter 1, "Broadcasting Discord," establishes the cultural and regulatory context within which we can understand evangelical radio ministries. Unlike print media, the finite spectrum of broadcast frequencies meant a limit to the number of possible outlets. Scarcity, in turn, forced decisions about the relative priority given to certain kinds of programming in the way the frequencies were divided. National radio policy encouraged religious programming on the radio but did not specify how it was to be aired. As it happened, liberal mainline churches tended to receive free airtime for their programs, while most fundamentalists and evangelicals bought airtime. Despite the apparent discrimination, doctrinally conservative programming demonstrated genuine staying power and generated financial support, surpassing mainline programs in popularity.

The second chapter, "So I Sow by Radio," examines Paul Rader as one of the first revivalists to utilize radio. He became a Chicago radio institution during the twenties and thirties and brought his folksy Breakfast Brigade program to a nationwide audience before his efforts were scuttled by the depression. His career illustrates the early enthusiasm of an independent venture, as well as the uncertainty inherent in purchasing time outside the networks. In Chapter 3, "The Live Wire of Los Angeles," I turn to Aimee Semple McPherson's radio ministry from 1923 until her death in 1944, looking not only at the paradoxes in her antimodernist stance and her Hollywood-style celebrity status but also at her urban celebration of rural values and embrace of midwestern migrants in her congregation. Owning her own radio station freed McPherson to develop her own innovative and distinctive programming without accommodating to "secular" station management. In Chapter 4, "Pastors of the Old-Fashioned Gospel," we examine the radio ministry of one of the most successful and widely heard evangelists of the twentieth century, Charles Fuller, who with his wife, Grace Payton Fuller, aired the Old Fashioned Revival Hour for decades across the nation and around the world. Their enduring success on radio legitimized their other ventures at midcentury, including establishing Fuller Theological Seminary, building an evangelical coalition, and helping to launch the career of Billy Graham.

In the last two chapters, "We Must Not be Muzzled" and "Mainstreaming the Good News," I explore the strategies that kept religious broadcasters on the air, including fund-raising and publicity structures within the growing evangelical subculture, the development of a religious radio advertising and marketing industry, and the centrality of media as a motivation for conservative Protestants to create formal organizations (the National Association for Evangelicals and the National Religious Broadcasters, for example) in the postwar period. With the advantage of hindsight, the biographies in the first half of the book represent the best of many possible strategies for sharing religious beliefs through mass media. Radio evangelists who achieved financial success and became cultural celebrities over the radio airwaves—as did Rader, McPherson, and the Fullers—represented a bastion of "old-time" religion in a world that increasingly celebrated the new and the modern. This makes their use of the thoroughly modern mass medium of radio all the more interesting. Many paths could lead to a financially solvent radio ministry—but outside the realm of this study lie as many or more paths, through shaky fiscal houses of cards or unfortunate scheduling, that pushed disappointed religious broadcasters out of radio almost as soon as they had gotten in.

As for their listeners, from whom we will hear throughout the book, the act of tuning in—like that of frequent Bible reading and other everyday "checks" against their religious worldview—kept evangelicals on the straight and narrow way. As David Morgan rightly stresses, the everyday has been undervalued as helping to shape personal and institutional identity but may play a more formative role than the rarer "hallowed rites and dramatic events."[49] What believers do over and over again not only reinforces their perceptions of reality but comes to constitute their reality as well.

At the outset of this journey, I propose three observations about the impact of religious radio on popular culture. First, the persistence and growth of evangelical radio during radio's golden age provide a good measure of the strength of conservatism in this period. Evangelical radio nourished, legitimated, and enlarged the boundaries of evangelical Protestantism throughout the period covered by this study. The relationship of fundamentalists to their audiences was a close one; broadcasters depended on voluntary donations to pay for increasingly expensive airtime, and listeners depended on radio evangelists to provide familiar and reassuring programming. By 1948, more than sixteen hundred fundamentalist programs were being aired each week.[50] One study concluded that while Baptist, Gospel Tabernacle, and Holiness/Pentecostal broadcasters bought two-thirds of their airtime in the forties and fifties, more mainstream denominations such as Methodists and Presbyterians purchased a mere third, and 70 percent of Roman Catholic airtime was free.[51] Evangelical broadcasting achieved remarkable prosperity despite receiving almost no free airtime. The national success of religious media programming, as Larry Eskridge has written, "lent the greater fundamentalist movement a measure of popular visibility and sense of accomplishment that was otherwise hard to come by in the lean years following the fiasco of the Scopes trial."[52] Quentin Schultze argues that religious radio served as a "means of creating a national evangelical identity, locating and promoting symbolic leaders, and legitimizing particular values and attitudes."[53] Evangelical radio buttressed the fundamentalist movement—or, more accurately, helped give it institutional and tangible, audible form.

One important and underutilized resource for information about evangelical self-identification through radio is listener correspondence, which I draw on throughout the book. Of course, fan mail as a historical source leaves much to be desired, being impossible to quantify and representative of such a small sample of listeners. Yet there are enough letters scattered through enough archives and published sources at least to suggest the ethos of a religious community, one with clear hopes and plans for America's future and for the role of believers in that future.

Second, religious radio not only proved important for evangelicals themselves but also played a "speaking part" in shaping the medium from its very first broadcasts. In particular, radio evangelism was part of the national identity forged by radio—as so many of these broadcasts went out overseas—and of the ambient sound of midcentury American life. Its echoes were heard in the spread of indigenous southern music through radio venues such as the Grand Ole Opry; in the call-and-response rhetoric of sixties civil rights leaders, which brought the sound of revival preaching (and its nascent liberation theology) to the wider culture; and in musical genres as varied and popular as bluegrass, rhythm and blues, country, and gospel.[54] The sheer number of popular musicians and public figures whose roots were in revival religion in itself suggests this point. I have always thought it more than coincidental, for example, that Aretha Franklin, one of the quintessential voices of American pop music, is the daughter of a south Georgia radio preacher and that country singer Dolly Parton is the granddaughter of a Pentecostal preacher who helped introduce rural mountain music into top-forty country radio.

Religious radio is a kind of American folk art, one that has nearly vanished from our national consciousness, if not from our airwaves. Although much radio religion went unrecorded, what remains preserves a collective memory of the sound, the cadence, the rhythm, the songs in four-part harmony with a vibrato organ underneath.[55] Letters from listeners to religious preachers describe the complex feelings evoked: nostalgia for an American Christian past that may or may not have ever existed; fear for the future of the nation and for the state of one's soul before God; longing for inclusion and meaning in an American present ever threatening, disorienting, and full of trouble; gratitude for a shared language of religious experience; and pride in a thriving evangelical Protestant subculture with access to the powerful channels of American media. All these impulses are important to the story of religious radio in American popular culture.

Finally, by bringing revival religion to the radio, evangelists accessed the cultural authority of the medium and gained a toehold back into their preferred role of guardian of the nation's values. In 1922, liberal Presbyterian Harry Emerson Fosdick, dismayed at the intolerant tactics employed by Christian conservatives in their efforts to purify church and society, asked in a famous sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"[56] By 1944 fundamentalist Carl McIntire would declare a victory only the mass media had made possible: "The fundamentalists are coming back," he wrote, "organized, with their feet on solid ground. The arsenals of the historic faith are being freshly stocked, and with a full dependence on the King of kings, the Leader of the battle, they believe that their efforts shall not be in vain."[57] As Joel Carpenter has concluded, fundamentalists "turned failure into vindication, marginality into chosenness, survival into an opportunity for expansion, and a religious depression into a prelude for revival."[58] I suppose Fosdick's question is still an open one, judging by recent scholarship on liberals said to be "suicidal" or to have "missed their mission" and conservatives who are supposedly "embattled but thriving."[59] Deciding the future course and cultural place of radio religion epitomized the ongoing clash between liberal and conservative Protestantism, as I show in the following chapters, demonstrating the compatibility of religious worldviews with both modernity and postmodernity.[60] The evidence amassed here compels the conclusion that we can find in American culture a vibrant juxtaposition of religion and secularism, not the gradual replacement of the former by the latter. On radio, revival religion and secular entertainment were yoked in dynamic and creative tension.

Fortunately, I have not attempted to tell the entire story here; there are many avenues of rich exploration best left to others. If this book evokes memories, provokes dialogue about media and religion in America, and inspires further research, I consider my job well done. Redeeming the Dial touches on multiple narratives of the early to mid-twentieth century and will, I hope, add to those stories while raising many new questions. Something of the migration of rural midwesterners and southerners to the California coast is here, and so is the slowly building groundswell of support for black civil rights—though no one yet has explored black radio evangelism and its role in that movement. The vulnerability of heartland family farmers is here, their struggles and dislocations. A rising tide of materialism, consumer culture, and loosening of social moorings is part of this story, as is the growth of some Christian denominations at the expense of others (for a movement that has been declared dead or dying on a regular basis since the early 1920s, evangelical Protestantism has shown remarkable, even dramatic, resilience). The exportation of "American" religion and values is here, as radio reached around the globe to speak to other countries and to American soldiers and missionaries serving there, paired with the strident impulse to protect society here at home from hidden dangers of ideology, doctrine, and behavior coded at the time as sinful.