Broadcasting the Faith
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Broadcasting the Faith tells the riveting story of the American church’s embrace of radio in the early decades of the twentieth century. By investigating major radio personalities like Walter Maier, Aimee Semple McPherson, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and Charles Fuller, this study considers the implications for theology in America when Christianity moved to the airwaves. In the heyday of radio, religious-radio preachers sought to use their programs to counter the secularization of American culture. Ultimately, however, their programs contributed to secularization by accelerating changes already evident in both the conservative and liberal streams of American Christianity. To reach a vast American audience, radio preachers transformed their sectarian messages into a religion more suitable to the masses, thereby altering the very religion it aimed to preserve. To make religion accessible to large and diverse audiences, radio preachers accommodated their messages in ways suited to the medium of radio. Although religious-radio preachers set forth to advance the influence of religion in American society, their choice to limit theological substance ironically promoted the secularization of the American church.
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- Considers the implications for theology in America when Christianity moved to the airwaves.
- Shows radio preachers transformed into a religion more suitable to the masses.
- Exposes how they promoted the secularization of the American church.
Broadcasting the Faith offers a searching history of religion’s role in the ‘golden age’ of radio. As American Christians eagerly but uncritically embraced radio preaching and music, Michael Pohlman persuasively contends that they were opening the door, often unintentionally, to multifaceted theological problems, and perhaps to the secularization of faith itself.
—Thomas S. Kidd, Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History, Baylor University
This important book is a warning call to religious people who aim to use new communication technologies to spread their messages. Pohlman shows that maximizing audiences can have the unintended impact of watering down and even altering religious messages.
—Quentin Schultze, author of Habits of the High-Tech Heart
- Title: Broadcasting the Faith: Protestant Religious Radio and Theology in America, 1920–50
- Author: Michael E. Pohlman
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Print Publication Date: 2021
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Pages: 188
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subjects: 1900-1999; History; Protestantism; Protestantism United States History 20th century; Radio in religion; Radio in religion United States History 20th century; United States; Radio Religious aspects Protestantism
- ISBNs: 9781725290846, 9781725290822, 9781725290839, 1725290847, 1725290820, 1725290839
- Resource ID: LLS:9781725290846
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-05T19:13:09Z