Forum; The Electric Preacher Part 1

Hello. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, welcome to Forum. The electronic media has proven to be the most effective means of reaching the masses. Dissemination of information is most readily and easily made available to the public through the airwaves.

It serves as a vehicle to transmit ideals and ideas, entertainment, news and information. Recently, religion has found a place in television and radio with evangelists, Christian broadcasting networks and others, investing enormous amounts of money to spread their message. Dr. William Martin is a professor of sociology at Rice University. He is also author of the books. These were God's people, Christians and conflict, and soon to be released, the Electric Preacher. In this week's program, Dr. Martin discusses some of these independent evangelists who make wide use of television and radio in their ministries, coming up on forum. Children of God, we're not going to hold a service tonight. We're going to turn loose.

I said we're going to turn one loose. Everybody knows what I mean, say amen. We're not here tonight for white wash, sugar coated, watered down, bargain, counter soft soap religion. Praise God tonight. I'm going to preach to you an old-time trailblazing, God's splitting. God loving devil, hating soul, saving sin killing 40 years ago. Black, black, Bible. Holy Ghost inspired and God and haunted sermon. That will save everybody that believes and repents from the gutter most to the utter most. I feel good tonight. Everybody feels good. Hold up your hand. Since you have responded so well to the call to worship, I would like to ask you to settle in to one of the pews of the great church of the airwaves and listen to the phenomenon that I call the Electric Preacher. For several years, I've been working with varying degrees of intensity on the subject of independent evangelists who make wide use of radio and television in their ministries.

I'm currently about 850 pages into a 500-page manuscript on this subject. It's difficult to determine with any real precision just how many people listen to religious programming on radio and television. But the number is larger than many people suspect, though it may well be smaller than some evangelist claim. There are at present over 1100 radio stations in the United States that offer little else than religious programming. Since 1974, their number has grown at the rate of about one per week. And of course, for years we have had the superpower Mexican stations just across the border that during the cool nighttime hours can be heard for hundreds, even thousands of miles, which have a steady stream of 15 and 30 minute radio programs. There are about 30 to 40 television stations in the United States with a primarily religious format. These have been growing at the rate of about one per month.

This does not include a large increase in cable programming at the local level. Of course, many radio and television stations with a basically secular format include a great deal of religious programming on the weekends. And one major reason why so many stations have turned to religious programming is that they are almost certain to turn a dependable, if not spectacular, profit with relatively little effort, almost no risk. Evangelists stand in line to get on such stations. They pay for their own time. So a station manager doesn't have to worry about selling advertising or even about the size of his audience and the whole operation can be made with a real skeleton crew. What happens is the evangelist makes a master tape in his studios. It makes as many copies as is necessary. Since that tape out to perhaps hundreds of stations and there in the studio, one technician can switch back and forth between the tape of the evangelist and the tape of the announcer.

Many of you in this part of the country have heard Paul Kalinger, your good neighbor, long the way at XRF and see it at Akunya Kwawila, Mexico. Paul Kalinger has not been across the border probably in 15 years. The last time he went, he was shot at. His doctor had told him he wasn't supposed to have any bullets in his body. And he refuses to go back and just tapes everything in Del Rio and sends it across. Now this automation can make for some fairly interesting mistakes. One afternoon I listened for 15 minutes and heard one station which was one program which played backwards for the whole 15 minutes. No one was listening at the station to catch the mistake and perhaps very few were listening out in radio land, but we can't be sure about that. In Houston, this would hold true for almost any major city in the country. It's possible to hear at least 40 different evangelists every day, additional 20 or so on the weekend.

In Los Angeles, there are over 70 different religious television programs each week. Over 2000 evangelists are broadcasting regularly on radio or television, though to be sure most of these are original. Most of them are not nationwide. It's estimated that the costs for airtime alone run in excess of $500 million a year. That doesn't include anything about other kinds of costs that are involved. Tonight I want to give you a sample of various types of ministers and ministries and show you some of the different means they use to build a congregation of faithful supporters. In the past few years, I have interviewed most of the major independent evangelists in this country and a great many minor ones as well as key people active behind the scenes in their organizations. I have found a few charlatans. I have found a great many more men and women for whom I have developed real respect and admiration.

They are not perfect. Like the rest of us, they are vulnerable to the full range of temptations. Like physicians, attorneys, businessmen, even professors. They occasionally fall prey to what the Bible calls the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. But I think it's worth noting that the gospel they preach presupposes that to put it in biblical language all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. I'm going to try to show you this evening a whole range. Some things no doubt will offend you or perhaps even strike you as ludicrous. I hope you will not lose sight of the fact that the extremists or the ones who are the most offensive to you are not representative of the whole group. Whatever you may think of their theology or their style, Billy Graham and Orr Roberts and Robert Schueller and a good many other of their colleagues are really quite different men from Elmer Gantry and Marjo Gortner. I'd be unhappy if you lost sight of the fact that I recognize that too.

At least part of the appeal of these programs lies in the rather broad claims they make for the sponsoring ministry. Here is an introduction that gives you something of this the flavor of this. The out of revival hour is on the air with miracle restoration revival from the greatest revival takes into the world. These great broadcasts are a part of an actual revival service already in progress and is just to just take place in the presence of thousands of God's children and say worship God and believe God for the marvelous. These revival services are integrated for all people of our churches. They are undenominable and very good worldwide in stone. Thousands of eager for all those generations who are tired and disgusted with coal, that religious form and religion and who are hungry for the reality of God's blessing are coming into these great crusades and are finding salvation for the soul. We aim for their bodies delivered from human power, everything, alcohol, milk, witchcraft, spirits and the thirst of poverty.

You can see why that would have a good broad general appeal. I think it's possible to distinguish at least five distinct types or categories of ministry, although some evangelists fall into more than one category. Each of these types has a different appeal and a somewhat different audience. The first type is the basic soul winner, the true lineal descendant of George Whitfield, Charles G. Finney, D.L. Moody and Billy Sunday. Some of them like Rex Humbard come across as sincere, earnest, folksy, evangelical pastors. Others like Bob Harrington, the chaplain of Bourbon Street, have given up driving the nail of terror and the sleeping souls for an approach much more like that of a nightclub comedian whose motto is it's fun being saved. Still others like Theodore F. of the Back to the Bible broadcast or Richard DeHon of the Radio Bible class and the television program Day of Discovery are really more Bible teachers than preachers. But whatever their style, the evangelists, the soul winners have a common message expressed here by Jerry Falwell.

It's between Christianity and all other religions. The founder, the originator of the Christian faith, his Christ the Lord, who though he died upon a cross two thousand years ago, three days later rose from the dead and is alive forevermore. As these evangelists have always done, they not only preach that message, but they also press for a decision. You're a sinner. You've broken his laws. You've sinned against him. He died for you on the cross. He rose again for your justification. And just like these two young people that four years ago came to Christ, you could come to Christ tonight and give your life to him. He can become very real to you. And I'm going to ask hundreds of you right now to get up out of your seat and come and stand in front of this platform and say by coming, I receive Christ as my Lord and Master in Satan. If you're with friends or relatives, they'll wait. And I'm going to ask no one to leave the stadium, please. No one leave the arena. Just stay where you are except those who are coming because it crowds the aisles.

And I'm going to ask you to come, men, women, young people, fathers, mothers, you may be at once. In addition to their basic message, evangelists often focus on other issues as well. In recent years, a number have attacked pornography, abortion, and most recently homosexuality. James Robinson, a Hearst, Texas-based evangelist, has gained considerable notoriety in the last few months for attacks on homosexuality that became so aggressive that he was removed for a time from WFA, ATV, and Dallas. The experience did not cause James to question the correctness of his position. I have no problem understanding that homosexuality is a sin. God in heaven created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Edward. It is perversion of the highest order. It is against God. God's word, it is against society, and it is against nature. It is almost too repulsive to imagine and to attempt to describe the horrors of it. It is filth of the highest order. God have mercy upon him. There is only one way they will ever silence these lips, and that is to bury me six feet beneath the earth. And bless God at the rapture. I will come out of the grave, preaching Romans chapter 1, and it is still a sin.

It has also been quite common for evangelists to enlist their ministries in support of the American way of life. Billy Graham, of course, has been widely criticized for seeming to serve as court chaplain to whatever political party happened to be in power. A more recently, Jerry Falwell has led a politically oriented evangelical organization known as the moral majority, and he has been stumping state capitals with a religious political message. But some preachers are so concerned to render under God the things that are ceasers, and to link evangelical Christianity with patriotism, to fight the international atheistic communist conspiracy, sex education, un-American textbooks, encounter groups, crunchy granola, any other perceived threat to free enterprise that I think they inspired to put them in a class all by themselves.

One of the most important of these is Dr. Billy James Hargis of the Christian Crusade with headquarters in Tulsa. The decline in any communist fervor and rather spectacular sexual scandal a few years back hurt Dr. Hargis ministry tremendously, but he seems to have weathered the storm and he is still on the case. One of the most indefatigable of the patriots is Dr. Carl McIntyre, who for over 40 years has found it extremely difficult to get along with anyone and who seems to believe that not even Judas Iscariot would have been sufficiently duplicitous to have made it into a position of leadership in the traitorous high councils of American government. These gentlemen let them see that there are thousands of us, thousands of us. That believes that peaceful coexistence with a tyrant like the communist is morally and realistically impossible. It just can't possibly work and we're going to continue to go down the slide as we are now, and the problems we have right now certainly are a judgment of Almighty God upon us because we forsaken our great ideals and our moral principles.

And we've given the right hand of finance, the right hand of blessing, the right hand of cooperation, to the communist powers that have done so much to destroy the faith that man should have in God and that have destroyed the Christian Church. A third type of evangelist majors in prophecy. In this category I place those ministers who focus on the interpretation of biblical prophecy and the insights that it offers for understanding, contemporary events, and also those who claim themselves to be receiving and presenting new revelation, new prophecies. Though it may be unfamiliar to many, this tradition flourished during the 19th century both in Great Britain and the United States and it has never disappeared. It has enjoyed an enormous boom in conservative evangelical Christianity since the establishment of the Nation of Israel in 1948, an event that is widely regarded in prophetic circles as setting in motion the last set of events to occur before Jesus Christ.

How Lindsay's book, The Late Great Planet Earth, sold, I think perhaps several million copies, was made into a movie with Orson Wells, it is straight out of this tradition. Now as I said, a major part of this tradition is looking at current events in the light of biblical prophecy. The following example from this tape is from Howard Eastep, who has a weekly television program, The King is Coming, which focuses on the interpretation of prophecy. Daniel 2 talked about 10 toes, Revelation 17 is talking about 10 horns and these 10 horns are the same thing. And we can see that with this 10 nation confederation forming in Europe and the Antichrist appearing and the Antichrist being revealed that we are in a very good possibility of having world government by the year 2000.

What does that mean? It means the coming of the Lord is theirs. Another prominent interpreter of prophecy as well as all around snappy dresser is Dr. David Weber of the Southwest Radio Church in Oklahoma City. In one of his recent books, The Computers Are Coming, Dr. Weber identifies the marking system on food products, the little lines with the numbers as a possible forerunner of the Mark of the Beast, and suggests that all of us may soon have a mark such as this on our foreheads or our hands and that representatives of the principalities and powers will be able to summon up our entire life's history just by turning a laser beam device on this mark. And you'll notice here on the right book it's the strange world of Dr. Kissinger in this book Dr. Weber discusses a notion that was quite popular with contemporary students of prophecy during the Nixon and Ford administration.

That is the possibility that Henry Kissinger might have been the Antichrist utilizing an apocalyptic numbering system. Weber shows how the numerical values of Kissinger's name, if you add them up starting with A being worth 6 and B being worth 12 and adding 6 right on through, that the numerical value of Kissinger's name is 666. Something to think about. Perhaps the most best known of the modern day prophecy students is Garner Ted Armstrong. Who with his father Herbert W. Armstrong had by the beginning of the 1970s managed to insconce himself atop one of the most remarkable tumors ever to develop on the body of Christ. The the 70s were a rough decade for the Armstrongs and the Worldwide Church.

It was marked by sysm sexual scandal and finally by excommunication of the younger Armstrong who now operates a growing ministry out of Tyler Texas. At its height the Armstrongs were taking in over 60 million dollars a year. Herbert Armstrong's organization probably still is but early in 1979 it went into receivership in California and pending the outcome of a heated court battle. Its future is really quite difficult to predict. Garner Ted's new organization appears to be much more humane and open than that run by his father and it's growing rapidly. Even though Ted has lost his powerful base of operations at God's headquarters, post office box 111 Pasadena, California, he is still able in a voice that does not encourage doubt to offer to unravel all mysteries for the price of a first class stamp which will bring a plethora of free literature to your home. If you want to see the true story of this whole world and the picture not only of biblical prophecy and the mysterious four horsemen of the apocalypse in a portent for growing world famine and political upheaval as a result.

And also the question 10 we survive in pending famine right for these book that you've seen advertised the one on famine and the one of four horsemen of the apocalypse. Until next time Garner Ted Armstrong goodbye friends. For several years I've been fascinated by the ministry of a less well known prophet David Terrell brother Terrell's gospel contains very little good news. Instead it is strong on drought and and famine listen here to a little you get a sample not only of his of his message but of his style. I think brother Terrell is counting on a lot of folk not checking the newspapers real carefully on his claim that Canada's five inches deep in. One of the most widespread of the independent ministries being practiced today is the healing ministry the healers make some remarkable claims.

The late a Allen told of disciples who had received silver fillings in their teeth during his meetings and he asked sensibly enough why not let God be your dentist. Jimmy Swagger a more sober minded evangelist asked me in talking about this if I'd ever noticed that when these teeth were filled they were always filled with gold and silver. He said if God were really feeling filling those teeth he'd be filling them with tooth to fill them with gold or silver is like curing a man of a heart attack on a heart problem by implanting a miraculous pacemaker in his side. One of the most flamboyant of the current healing evangelist is earnest angely of the Grace Cathedral in Akron, Ohio.

Now Lord I bring the sicken of the deal those with cancer those with heart trouble those in wheelchairs those own crutches those who are paralyzed those of the doctors say there's no cure for heal heal heal He will never come to taking place in the name of Jesus. Now there are various ways in which healing ministries may be conducted but for years the standard technique and healing service has been for the evangelist to ask the afflicted to stand in the line and to minister to them as they approach. Oral Roberts in the early years of his ministry used this technique R.W. Shambok one of the last to preach in the big tents still uses it and in the following cut from one of his actual services Vic Coburn demonstrates this technique well. God bless you. Tell me about your problem. I have eyes for eyes in my ears and I have surgeries with your new knee cats.

New knee cats. How long have you had arthritis in your knees? About two to three years. Rub in. And there's nothing they can do but surgery. Do you remember the lady that I prayed for last night that got a new knee cat? Yes sir. Wasn't that amazing? Yes it was. Do you know you're going to have two new knee cats? I hope so. She hopes so. Will you watch this? I command your knees to be instantly healed and restored by the authority of the name of Jesus Christ be healed. Oh there it is. Pick up your knees the pains are gone. Yes sir. Pick them up. Pick them up. No pain. Right. Yes sir. Praise the Lord. Are you amazed? Yes I am amazed. Very nice. The doctor said they were going to have to operate. Yes he did. And soon. And soon. Pick them up again. You walked up here with pain. Right. I did.

And it's gone. Yes sir. How many of you believe that's a miracle of God's power? Give her a God bless you. Take it home and rich hearts. Some evangelists have abandoned the healing line. Though he believes in divine healing Jimmy Swagger has claims to have seen so much skull doggery and vain glory associated with the practice that he will not pray for an individual in his services. Unless they give him credit for any kind of healing or improvement that may occur. Healing ministries have been broadened in recent years by their inclusion in the general charismatic movement which has domesticated many of the successes of the old healing revivals and has achieved considerable measure as you're certainly aware of respect and acceptability in the larger society. One of the online healers who has made the transition successfully is Morris Sarulo who operates out of San Diego but flagship operation of the charismatic movement at least as far as radio and television are concerned. Our Christian talk shows like the 700 club here the PTL club others that I don't think we have access to here but that are on the west coast particularly modeled on Johnny Carson Merv Griffin featuring a blend of conversation music prayer these programs offer charismatic Christians daily nourishment contact with luminaries of their religious world.

Pat Robertson pictured on the left here a graduate of Yale Law School Phi Beta Kappa son of the United States senator the president of the 700 club which owns the Christian Broadcasting Network which owns the 700 club is making a serious attempt to launch a fourth network that will provide around the clock religious and wholesome secular programming as an alternative to the programming of the world. The secular networks it's a long shot but nobody is going to make any strong bets against him he has he has won some long shots before Jim Baker's PTL club is an offshoot of the 700 club also quite popular but a good deal less stable organizationally and financially. Dr. William Martin professor of sociology at Rice University and author of the books these were God's people and Christians in conflict in next week's program will present the conclusion of Dr. Martin's presentation on the electric preacher I'm Mary Sullivan and you've been listening to forum.

Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing forum the longhorn radio network the University of Texas at Austin 78712 that address again is forum the longhorn radio network the University of Texas at Austin 78712 forum is produced at public station KUT and distributed by the Center for Telecommunication Services all at the University of Texas at Austin. This is the longhorn radio network.