Religious broadcasters moved aggressively onto cable and additional UHF channels in the 1980s, pioneering satellite broadcasting, and spawning a dramatic increase in television ministries and religious stations. Media trends of the last two decades of the twentieth century included decentralization, deregulation, audience fragmentation, media corporate mergers, globalization, and new programming strategies (Hilmes 2002: 324). Yet radio remained a vibrant space for religion of all stripes, as its airtime became more affordable relative to television and with the rise of a newly politicized Christian right in the United States adding its distinctive voice to American popular culture.
In particular, radio could amplify unpolished voices from the religious margin in search of converts, wealth, or validation. Some of this was old-timey, the aging vestiges of local-color regionalism. The rural “airwaves of Zion” serve as one example: live Pentecostal/Holiness broadcasting on local AM stations of Appalachia, predominantly on Sundays in the 1970s through the 1990s. In Airwaves of Zion (1993), ethnographer Howard Dorgan captured this electronic unsophisticated “folk religion” that lacked
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national distribution, and its untrained practitioners’ “heavily provincial” theology emanating from tiny independent sects in the “Full Gospel” vein. Appalachian “Zion” programs were live, improvisational, Spirit-led, strongly personal (almost soap-opera like), and characterized by highly emotional and cathartic “kinetic expressions,” like swooning, shouting, twirling, and jumping. Zion broadcasters uti- lized pay-for-time AM stations, financed by freewill offerings on the cheap ($25–35 per 30-minute time slot in the early 1990s). Even as he recorded their work, Dorgan recognized that such broadcasting was on its way out, both because of the aging demographic of rural Appalachian churches and because of looming changes in the broadcast industry. He saw the end of live local AM religious broadcasting in Appalachia as the passing of an era:
the improvisational quality, the first-person intimacy, the rustic modes of speech, the immediacy of listener response, and perhaps some of the honest passion will be gone. All of this will not happen immediately. Undoubtedly there will be stations that preserve this broadcasting genre long after the main corpus of the phenomenon is dead, but for the typical Brother Roscoe Green and Sister Dollie Shirley the AM radio environment will have chan- ged, making it much harder for them to find an airwaves-of-Zion studio from which they can send forth their “plain-folk” evangelism. When that happens Appalachia’s AM airwaves may become less culturally varied and rich by the loss.
(Dorgan 1993: 33) Other programs tapped into the era’s ebullient materialism, like Reverend Ike (born Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II), a flamboyant African-American media evangelist and faith healer who preached self-actualization and get-rich theology as “mind sci- ence” for decades on both television and radio. Harking back to the messianic prosperity theology of Father Divine, Reverend Ike established the Palace Cathedral in a lavishly renovated New York movie theater, where his sermons blended scrip- ture, motivational speaking, and unabashed celebration of the abundant life. His distinctive growly voice grooved on nearly 2,000 radio stations at his peak in the 1970s, wheedling his listeners (estimated in the millions) to “forget about pie-in- the-sky, get yours here and now” and hawking blessed prayer cloths to be mailed to donors.
Being “on the air” could afford even the most marginalized religious groups a chance to make their pitch to the public. It is worth remembering that one of the early demands of Branch Davidian prophet David Koresh—holed up with his fol- lowers, wives, and children in their heavily fortified Mt. Carmel compound in Waco, Texas, during the February to April 1993 standoff with ATF and the FBI—was that his messages be broadcast on the radio. Perhaps Koresh hoped that being gran- ted airtime for his rambling, apocalyptic Biblical exegesis conferred a measure of legitimacy; he recorded a message from the compound that was aired in its entirety on AM-1080 KRLD Dallas, a news-talk station owned by a corporate subsidiary of a religious denomination. Recorded sound became a weapon used by both sides in that hostage standoff when the FBI blared high-volume rock music from sound
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trucks aimed toward the klieg-lit compound at night. Very little survived the fire which consumed the buildings and its occupants; ironically, aside from some grainy videotape, the hours of reel-to-reel spoken negotiations and sermonizing are all that remain, serving both as evidence for tactical strategists and scholars to analyze, and as a spoken eulogy to the suicidal religious far-right fringe itself.
Radio has remained important even though its cultural and regulatory environ- ment has changed dramatically in the United States. In 1982, deregulation removed the FCC requirement for stations to report their percentage of public service pro- gramming and announcements, which further removed the incentive for both AM and FM stations to air local religious broadcasting (Dorgan 1993: 24). Five years later, the FCC declared the “fairness doctrine” unconstitutional and stopped enfor- cing it,finally removing it from the regulations in 2011. Rules on station ownership and market share also underwent deregulation. During the 1970s no single entity could own broadcasting and newspaper outlets in the same market, but deregulation of the 1980s and significant legal changes in the 1990s, notably the Telecommunications Act of 1996, now permit such cross-ownership.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first major rewrite of the act gov- erning radio broadcasting since 1934. Coming 12 years after the breakup of the telecommuncations monopoly held by AT&T, the new legislation aimed to open media markets to greater competition by relaxing rules on station licensing and joint ownership of media outlets in the same markets. The new legislation had a dramatic and rapid effect on the medium of radio, resulting in a frenzy of media mergers and consolidation in the industry. Some advocacy groups, like the Future of Music Coalition, argue that the new law has accelerated consolidation by large media con- glomerates, who reduce costs by running unattended operations from central offices, syndicating their products and playlists on multiple stations simultaneously (Keith 2010: 329). This robo-broadcasting, they argue, stifles truly local broadcasting and jeopardizes cultural and musical diversity on the American airwaves. In a 2006 report, they found that the top ten radio station owners claimed two-thirds of the entire listening audience and that local ownership of stations had declined by a third between 1975 and 2005 (DiCola 2006).
Between one-fifth and one-half of all radio stations in a local area can be owned by the same company, depending on the size of the market, and there are no limits on the number of stations that can be owned nationwide. The result has been massive consolidation of the radio industry, including of its religious radio segments. There are more stations than ever, occupying precisely defined demographic and format niches, but with a shrinking number of owners. In 1950, the United States had approximately 2,800 radio stations; that number grew to 6,500 in 1970 and to over 11,000 by 2009. Stations defined by the National Religious Broadcasters as full-time “Evangelical stations” continued to expand within the new regulatory structure, numbering almost 400 in 1972 but over 1,300 in 1995 (Hoover and Kaneva 2009: 70). A few very large players including Clear Channel, Cumulus, CBS Radio, and Enter- com, own the vast majority of radio stations, and divide their large market shares into niche stations aimed at smaller segments of the listening audience. In the field of religious radio, the for-profit network Salem Communications is the fifth- largest radio station owner in the United States, with close to 100 high-powered
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Christian stations in multiple formats on both AM and FM, airing what it describes as “family-themed content and conservative values.” The company also owns the Salem Radio Network, which syndicates politically conservative talk shows and the daily or weekly shows of more than 70 Christian ministries, tied into related Internet content and magazine publishing.
One potential countertrend to radio industry consolidation is the 2000 decision by the FCC to open up the FM spectrum for low-powered (LPFM) licenses in the ten- to hundred-watt range, many of which were acquired by noncommercial reli- gious organizations poised for a new revival of faith-based broadcasting. Triggered in part as a response to the microradio movement in the 1990s (tagged as “pirates” by the National Association of Broadcasters), these changes may allow small-wattage broadcasters to—once again—reinvent the American medium of radio.
Outside the United States, especially in developing countries, radio remains an important site of struggle between nationalism, commercialized globalism, and folk cultures. Religious movements jump borders and become “new religious move- ments” in fresh settings, often providing solace to followers but instability and challenge to political systems. This can be seen as audio technology (cassette tape, radio, and the Internet) fuels the growth of charismatic Pentecostalism in South America and Africa or conveys the ideas of Islamic fundamentalism to disen- franchised Arabs in diaspora around the world (see, e.g., Hackett 1998). It is remarkably difficult to block radio content; it travels readily into popular culture by car, audio player, and even cell phone, its reach extended even further (McLuhan- esque) by recordings, podcasts, andfilesharing technology. Radio’s power to generate and maintain religious communities—and thus to reinvigorate alternative frameworks of meaning—remains undiminished in the twenty-first century.