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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled
Religious Television
in
Lansing and East Lansing, Michigan

presented by

JOHN G. P. MADIGAN

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

MA (kgfek,Telecommunications

 

 

Department of Telecommu-‘cat'o’

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PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.

TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSU I: An Afiinnetive Action/Equal Opportunity Institution ‘
cmmS-DJ

7 i!_.___77—.—_

- w

RELIGIOUS TELEVISION
in
LANSING and EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN

By

John G. P. Madigan

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of Telecommunication

1992

ABSTRACT

RELIGIOUS TELEVISION
in
LANSING and EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN
By

John G. P. Madigan

Religion is a topic of conversation for all seasons.
From the smallest of tribes to the greatest of nations, the
issue of God and the attending problems be they on the
legislative level, on the constitutional level or on the mere
community level have been a source of joy and wonderment and
a source of bedevilment for the people involved. The question
of God within the context of television also crosses the
community, legislative, and constitutional arms of society.

This writing will look at the uses of television within
the communities of Lansing and East Lansing by groups who call
themselves Christian. It will seek to examine the message
that is being put across and the people who are framing the
message. The writing will also seek to examine the
relationship of the audience to the message.

The methodology used vdJJ. be on site interviews with
personnel from Continental Cable, United Artist Cable
System(TCI), Channel 39(the Religious Channel) and St. Thomas
Aquinas, a Catholic Church which uses public access and
commercial T.V. on a regular basis. Specifically we will be
looking at the people who broadcast religious programs and

their relationship 'with the prevalent ideology“ of their

society.

This study is a theoretical and developmental discussion
of religious programming on public access and commercial
television in Lansing and East Lansing.

Chapter I reviews current writings then situates the
question in a theological framework. Chapter II reviews four
local sources of religious broadcasting; Continental Cable
Public Access, TCI Cable Public Access, Channel 39 Public
Access, and St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church. Chapter III
discusses a populist culture which nibbles at the art of the
preacher and bypasses the preacher’s theology for fast food.
In Chapter IV, there is a an examination of the architecture
of television and televised religious programs. A
developmental framework of television viewing stages as they
relate to religious television is discussed intChapter V. The
final chapter, Chapter VI, explores the year 2000 and beyond.
Religious broadcasting struggles against the "media bite"!

Where lies its own identity?

CHAPTER

I D

II.

III.

IV.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ........

Religious Broadcasting in the U.S.A

North American Christianity ................

Who Is Making What And What Are They Making?

Channel 39 ..........
Interview with Channe
Windows of Lansing ..
Continental Cable ...

Victory in Christ ...

139000.000.

Interview with Continental Cable .

Saint Thomas Aquinas

Outreach Mass . . . . . . .

Interview with Saint Thomas Aquinas Coordinator

TCI....00.0.0.0...OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Immanuel Community Church ..........

Interview with TCI Station Manager ..

Is There Anybody Out There Watching?

Authority and the Churches

Populist Culture and the Churches .

Audience~Characteristics ..........

Architecture of Word and Medium .....

Classical Rhetoric ..

Renaissance Preaching

10

10

13

18

20

21

23

26

28

31

36

38

39

44

44

46

60

VI.

Bahause Architecture .....................

"Mass Persuasion and the Media ..........

From Theology to Television ..... . .........

Types of Theology ........................
Intellectual Conversion ..................
Moral Conversion .........................
Religious.Conversion .....................

ChristianConversion

Kineticscopic Television Stage ......... ...

Telescopic Television Stage ..............
Oscilloscopic/Telesis.Television Stage ...
Teleological Television Stage ............
Year 2000 and Beyond .....................
Religious Television in the Future .......
Popular Preaching vs. Classical Rhetoric

Survey Results ...........................

The Marriage of Word and Medium
to Form a New Architecture

71

74

81

82

85

88

94

97

103

108

114

118

123

124

126

128

130

CHAPTER I

I will make a Star-Chamber matter of it.

I.i.1
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
William Shakespeare
Stand up! --- stand up for Jesus!

The Psalmist, Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus
George Duffield 1818 - 1888

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to
go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is
to move.

Travels with a Donkeyl1879l. Cheylard and Luc

It is incident to physicians, I am afraid, beyond

all other men, to mistake subsequences for

consequence.

Review Dr. Lucas’ Essay on Waters p.91 25 Nov 1734
Samuel Johnson 1709-1784

In this introduction, although I have referenced several
of the books that place the whole paper in context, at this
point I would like to highlight just a few. One of the more
specific authors who deals with evangelism, televangelism and
radioevangelism, is Quentin J. Schultze author of several
books'Televangelism and the American Culture, is the editor of
American Evangelicals and the Mass Media and Dancing in the

Dark: Youth. Popular' Culture, and the, Electronic Media.

Professor Schultze teaches at Calvin College in Grand Rapids

in Communications.

A key element that Schultze brings.out in his writings is
the relationship between the privatization of religion as a
result of the influence of.American constitutional culture and
the rise of religious television that feeds this perception.
Professor Schultze does not address religious broadcasting
from a theological perspective. Whereas the theoretical,
philosophical and theological foundation of a Christian
service is vital to this discussion.

A second theme in Quentin Schultze’s writings is how
religious culture has influenced the shaping of mass media and
how, in turn, media has influenced the shaping of modern-day
Christian religious beliefs and practices in ‘the United
States. Schultze argues, "Televangelism largely reflects the
values, sensibilities, and. lattitudes of contemporary

1 arguing that instead of preaching the Gospel that

culture,"
the propagators of the Word have bought into a consumer-type
Christianity“ based on individualism. 'This is also the
argument in William Fore’s Television and Reiigion where he
speaks of the five types of relationship a person may have
from their relationship with God to their relationships in
society. William Fore does not address the Christ of culture
from a contextual perspective. However, placing the Christ of
culture in the context of television and its architecture is
necessary in order to critique religious broadcasting at the

local level. In "God-watching Viewers, Religion and

Television", a research paper on the BBC and religion, the

editors produce some surprising data linking the decline of
religious beliefs in general with the continued popular
expression of the value of religious broadcasting.

The other books that were reviewed all center on the
following points. The rise, and often demise, of religious
broadcasting, be it on radio or television. The relationship
of the rise and demise of religious practice to culture
perceptions of the moment. Thirdly, these cultural
perceptions are based on a rise of individualism and an
understanding of the privatization of beliefs and the loss of
a core belief system. In return, a belief system is accepted
that centers on success and private interpretation of values
and of our world including our relationship to the world.

We will look at the current situation and see if
religious programming at the local level supports this
argument. To see if religion through thewmass media encourages
individualism, materialism, and the belief that God rewards
success within a North American cultural understanding of the
term success.

The readings on religious broadcasting in the United
States speak of the values and techniques that are proclaimed
and how they are transferred to the audience. The
minister/preacher'normally’speaks*with authority: they are the
voice of God in this situation. Remember how Oral Roberts, a
couple»of years ago, climbed into his tower and there received

direct word from God that his life would come to an end unless

he was able to raise so many millions of dollars. They use
the scriptures and cannons.of their churchito describe society
as evil and that the individual is engaged in an individual
battle for survival on a material and spiritual level. They
support the American way of life, its constitution, and the
parts of our Cultural ethic that speak heavily on property,
rewards for hard toil, and the values that go along with it.

In sum, the readings suggest that the message of the
evangelists on radio and television is one'of struggle between
good and evil and that the good will have rewards "heaped"
upon them. It’s not unusual to hear preachers talk about
people who have donated sums to the evangelist’s cause and in
return have had riches "heaped" upon them or of people who
have been born anew and as a result of this new baptism, this
new found faith, have secured good jobs, beautiful spouses,
happy families, and riches that continue to grow and multiply.

Jimmy Swaggart’s program, until recently, had one of the
largest followings in America with his brand of show biz,
from his crying to his exuberance, his laughing, his jumping,
to his message of success because of belief in the Lord and in
particular belief in Jimmy Swaggart’s type of belief in the
Lord. It is not unreasonable to suspect that the poor, the
middle class and the elderly in America, are the first ones
to be drawn into this message of easy success sanctioned and
sanctified by God. However, this message of individualism and

individual relationship with God and a church that is centered

on individualism is in high contrast to»most minority cultures
even in the United States. The Hispanic-Latino culture, being
family and community oriented, would find that the individual
who would, begin to believe in this message as proclaimed
through radio and television would become increasingly
isolated from their family and community.

In his book, Televan elism, Razelle Franfl holds that
the "converts" that televangelism begot and beget in the
United States have»in the author’s experience found themselves
drawn further and further into an American viewpoint on the
world be it the.American.stance militarily, scientifically, or
culturally. Televangelism is not an embrace of Christianity
as such, it is an embrace of North American Christianity.
This criticism of televangelism, however, is tempered by the
knowledge that all Christianity carries a cultural coat. The
ministers of radio and televangelism assume as special and
unique relationship with God which is centered on themselves
and in the United States. The message becomes quite
attractive to those who are seeking an escape from their
present source of trials.

Dennis Smith in TherGospel According to the United States
says, "after 100 years of Protestant missionary activity and
in 40 years of evangelical religious broadcasting, Central
America. now has a large number of people who identify
themselves as evangelicals. Many sincere people point to

transformed personal lives, miraculous healing and material

blessings as fruits of the Gospel. But not all the fruits
have been sweet. Bitter secularism, isolationism,
individualism, crass materialism. and alienation from the
historical processes at work in society are also
characteristic of Central American evangelicals.2

Robert Fortner’s Americgn Evangelicals and Ngtiongi
Broadcasting would support the thesis of the cultural
imposition and the dependency syndrome that religious
broadcasting imposes on the viewer "...... religious
programming may be seen not only as politically subversive,

but culturally subversive, as well."3

This creates special
problems for religious broadcasting including being open to
accusations of “being supportive of a particular political
ideology or policy. This writing will not address this issue
directly but will point out that while the intentions of the
local broadcasters are in keeping with a call to scriptural
Christianity both at the conceptual, format andmdelivery level
they nonetheless imitate present cultural trends. The message
that.comes across on the screen*visually and spoken belies the
off'camera assertions of local Gospel simplicity» No author is
on record who addresses this contradiction in terms of the
rise of a populist culture and how in its present form it is
opposed to traditional Christianity. However in the study
Godwatching by Michael Svennevig, Ian Haldane, Sharon Spiers

and Barrie Gunter, the question is asked: Are the goals of the

religious broadcasters being met? The answer comes back that

the agenda of the religious broadcasters and the agenda of the
viewers is very much the same, both centering the question and
response within.zi populist cultural framework. Stewart M.
Hoover in Mass Medig Religion contends that the message is
being lost in the messanger so that Christian goals are very
often the goals of individuals within a church or
organization. There is a mixture of message and messenger
that is hard to break down. There is a further mixture in the
clothingqof the message that is North American. If the goal of
religious broadcasting is to bring people to Christianity,
through the use of television whether it be locally produced
programs or programs sent by a satellite, or co-productions,
then success seems to have further eluded them as most of
these programs go to the already converted.

Yet religious still wish to see themselves as very much
the converters of the unconverted. The objectives within the
goal of bringing large numbers to Christ, of setting up a,
church structure with various branches, of bringing education
and better lifestyles again seem to have met only marginal
success and in recent years, even that success has been
questioned because of the scandals that have been associated
with many of the televangelical ministers in North America.
Ministers have been shown to use little of their resources for
the promotion of such things as education and health of their
followers or their hope-to-be followers. Nevertheless, there

are many good televangelical ministers. There are many'

sincere and devout ministries. In) the words of .Robert
Forkner, "televangelicism and radioevangelicism should provide
dialogue which is the essence of evangelicalization, dialogue
that indicates our resolve to rid our minds of the prejudices
and caricatures we may entertain about the other man, the
struggle to listen through his ears and see through his eyes
so as to grasp what prevents him from hearing the Gospel and
seeing Christ. This is perhaps the fundamental cultural
problem ..... to make a medium of communication designed for

one-way mass communication distribution of information into

n4

one that provides for dialogue . Synthesizing the stages of

conversion of Bernard Lonergan and the stages of television
viewing of this present work, the question of a new approach

for Christian broadcasters will be addressed.

FOOTNOTES--CHAPTER I

 

1. Quentin Schultze. Televangelism and Americgg
Culture: The Businegg of Popular Religion. (Grand Rapids,

 

 

 

Mi.: Baker House, 1991). P. 72.

2. D. Smith. "The Gospel According to the United
States", Americgn Evangelicals and the Mass Media. Q. J.

 

 

Schultze(Ed.), (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Academic Books, 1990),
p.305.

3. R. Fortner. "Saving the World?", American
Evangelicals and the Mass Media. Q. J. Schultze(Ed.), (Grand
Rapids, Mi: Academic Books, 1990), p. 319.

4. Ibid., p. 322.

CHAPTER II

WHO IS MAKING WHAT AND WHAT ARE THEY MAKING

Beauty is a harmonious relation between something in our
nature and the quality of the object which delights us.
Pascal 1623-1662

Nemoldat quod non habet (I cannot give what I don’t have)
Latin Proverb

A nun was being helped across a crowded street by a very

small boy scout. "Thank you very much," she said. "You
are a good little boy." "That’s all right, Sister," he
repliedwwith a grin. "Any friend of Batman is a friend of
mine.
Anonymous
Channel 39: Lansing’s Christian Channel

Lansing’s Christian Channel, Channel 39, first took life
in 1977. Continental Cable had a public access channel which
could be used and built upon to create a public access channel
that was entirely devoted to Christian broadcasting. The
first attempt was short lived due to finances needed for the
making of programs and the personnel needed to produce the
programs. The void was filled once religious programming went
off the air by Continental Cable and the Christian
Broadcasting Network. CBN was put on Channel 27; however,

10

some members of the local Christian community felt it would be
better to have locally produced programs rather than importing
a national Christian program. Within nine months, the members
were reorganized and were back on the air as Channel 39.

Channel 39 has slowly gone from strength to strength,
starting with an hour and a half’s programming out of CBN’s
time slot and then to two and a half hours of local
programming and then three and a half hours, and currently
Channel 39 is at eight hours a day of local programming,
looking to go to 24 hours. The issue of going to 24 hours
lies with the city attorney of Lansing and the Cable Advisory‘
Board. As Channel 39 is a chartered channel to Continental
Cable by the City of Lansing, the decision to extend
programming lies with.thetcity and notmwith Continental Cable.
The City of Lansing has set up a Cable Advisory Board that
rules over the public access channels in the Lansing area and
it would be this advisory board that would make the
recommendations to the city attorney, who then would make the
recommendation to the full City Council to allow Channel 39
twenty-four hour programming.

Within the charter that the city has with Continental
Cable, Continental Cable is to provide $70,000 a year for
public access programming. Channel 39 is unable to receive
any of these funds for its programming as under the agreement
that the general services committee of the City of Lansing has

with Continental Cable religious groups, and in particular

11

Channel 39, are excluded from obtaining any of these funds.
The types of groups that may obtain the funds would be people
who put on programs about dog shows, cat shows, comedy shows,
etc. The intent would be to have a broad interpretation of
the current doctrine of the separation of church and state.
However, Channel 39 in interviews understands the situation
that Lansing City Council finds itself in as they are unable
to findwanother city in the country that has an agreement with
cable to provide a specifically religious access channel to
the Christian community alone.

Theractual start of the station, while somewhat normal in.
Christian modes of operation, appears to those involved
nonetheless miraculous. A group of people joining hands and
praying. The next day a Christian donor bringing their life
savings and within a day and a half the station going on the
air. The station is staffed by volunteers and even when the
station was broken into and robbed in 1984, the station
personnel saw it as a blessing from the Lord. New equipment
replaced old equipment, better equipment replaced nonexistent
equipment. The station, itself, was a donation from another
Christian. Currently pastors who wish to use the station are
asked for a stipend of $20.00 for 1/2 hour to produce the
program, with everything provided except the video tape, and
a stipend of $17.50 to air the program. Pastors who bring in
tapes ready to be aired are asked for a stipend of $17.50.

The station has membership costs which are $100.00.

12

Initially ten congregations came together, including
Evangelical, mainline Protestants, and Catholics to
participate in the station. Currently Channel 39 has a board
and a president who is also the managing director. The board
meets annually and may be called together for other meetings
as the board members or the chairperson deem necessary. It is
a loose structure, onewdesigned for information.flow, one that
is easily adaptable to change, and one that is open to the
movement of the Spirit, taking the station where the Spirit
wills. The station is a nonprofit corporation. All members
of the corporation have a voice in the government and_
decisions are by consensus.

What is the philosophy behind the operation of Channel
39? Channel 39 operates on the premise that the love of
Christ is calling all people to salvation and that all people
can be saved if they accept Christ. But that the normal place
of witnessing to salvation is not by watching the television
but by going to church. This is in contrast to many national
television programs.

What follows is an interview with the president of
Channel 39 expressing in her own words the philosophy of the

station.

Author: What would you see is the philosophy guiding
Channel 39? Is it to return people to a church or

to provide a church for them in their home.

13

Channel 39: Personally, I believe we need to be in a church.
That was the way I always thought things should
happen. But it seems to have changed in the last
several years and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the guppy
generation or whatever is growing up. They threw out all
of our values, if you remember back in the 50’s and 60’s
going to church was one that they threw out. They may have
their private belief in God, but they don’t really feel
that they have to conform to church laws in ways that I was
raised. In my time, you went to church on Sunday and you
participated by giving the church your tithes and whatever_
help you could. These were my values. But it seems as
though this generation is throwing out a lot of the way
things were done in the old days and they are saying, "we
don’t have to go to church to believe in God. We have a
relationship with God in our own way without going to
church." 'The pastors who work through this station as well
as myself try to direct the people through our programming
back to their local church, because we feel that they need
the love and care of a pastor or priest to help disciple
them and direct their lives because sometimes they don’t
see the pitfalls that they are in.

Author: You are saying that the pastors who produce the
programs in fact invite the people to return to their

churches?

14

Channel 39: Yes, I hear all the pastors say this in all of the
productions that we do. "If you don’t have a home church,
we welcome you to our church. If you have a home church,
we want you to stay in your home church. We just want you
to be in a church. We feel this is very important."

Author: This seems to be in contrast with national
television programming where one is encouraged to
participate in the television program and to tithe either
by buying books or tapes, or by direct donation to the
actual minister that is on the television.

Channel 39: Yes, I agree this seems to be a message in most of
the national religious programs and I’m always a little
disturbed by that. I have told you that one of our goals
is to build up the local church, not empty it out. If
there are Catholics out there we will provide material that
will relate to their needs and would inspire them to go
back and be part of their congregation. That for Catholics
and for all denominations is what we wish.

Author: Again, that’s not the feeling I get from watching

national religious programming.

Channel 39: I would agree with that. I don’t get that feeling
either. It seems that they encourage you to send tithes.
I don’t feel that there’s a true evangelist on TV’s
ministry. Our pastors wish to get to know the person on a
person-to-person level. They wish to be good shepherds as

in the Psalms. They wish to rub oil into the wounds of the

15

suffering, and they wish to counsel those in need. I feel
that our pastors who use Channel 39 wish to guide the
people along the path to Christ and to truly walk with them
by knowing them individually.

Author: How do you feel as head of a local television
channel about this message from the national religious
shows?

Channel 39: I wish to be separated from that kind of show.
Honestly, I do. However, I feel there’s a lot of people
who identify us with that sort of thing and are a little
hesitant about watching us because of the image that is
projected on the national shows. If somebody is going to
pull their congregation out from under a local church like
in national religious shows, then I am uncomfortable with
that. What I say on my own show is, if you would like to
accept Christ "find a church and get in with a church and
find a pastor and go and submit to the pastor and get
involved inia local church." That’s one of my own personal
messages. 'The pastors come in here all have the same exact
message. Get involved in a local church. They may not
preach it on every program, but they are not trying to pull
people into TV. I’ve always said we are not trying to be
a TV dynasty. We are trying to minister to the body and
fill up the local churches. Comparing the production of
the national religious program versus the production of a

local religious program is difficult. Because very

l6

honestly, it would appear the national programmers have a
different agenda.

Author: You mean they don’t want local religious
programming.

Channel 39: There’s something about listening to somebody who
is far off. There’s something more enticing about it. The
national television programs seem to carry a lot more
glitz and glamour and excitement. They carry a good
program that is also entertaining. People like the
entertainment, the screaming.

Author: The people want the glitz and the entertainment,.
would you consider becoming part of a national religious
television station?

Channel 39: Personally and in our philosophy at the station,
we are independent. We are just local, a local group of
churches that have joined together and bought TV equipment
and they have appointed me as president. We are not tied
to any national organization in any way and we have tried
to keep free of that. We had an opportunity to become an
affiliate of TIC and we did not take it. We wish to keep
our local identity.

Author: Tell me about the different types of programming
that you carry.

Channel 39: We have some real different varieties. For
instance, there is a pastor who comes in and uses a

blackboard and teaches. There is another pastor who comes

17

in with his wife and they create a stage effect, they have
a singer, and the congregation of twelve to fifteen people
that we place in front of them. This pastor needs people
to preach to, so we have the audience. The pastor and his
wife interact out of the Bible. We have another person who
comes in who is a singer. She does a type of variety show,
a little bit devotional, and then perhaps she will give a
recipe, sing some songs, a little bit more devotional. I
have a show called, The Windows of Lansing. This
production involves an interview. So far I have
interviewed the Mayor, people from the Governor’s Office,
officials on the drug problem, etc. I do believe that our
faith life has to be helping out in the community. Other
pastors bring in their tapes, ready for the air. They have
television equipment in their church. They do their taping
and editing on their own premises and bring it in to us to
air. Many of these pastors can stand up and preach for an
hour or more and don’t even feel tired. I am enthused by

that.

Windowg of Lansing

Windows of Lansing is a program produced by Delores

Ferley at Channel 39. She also is the host. The format is an

interview and it deals with local people and the issues that

are part of their lives. This Windowgnof Lansing carries the

philosophy of Channel 39. The people interviewed are all

18

local people. It is low key and will deal with topics of
drugs and alcohol addiction to city planning issues. The
program begins off air with a short prayer service asking for
help from the Lord that good works and changed lives may
result from the production of this program. The program is
thirty minutes in length. It uses an Evangelical, Biblical
approach, and is a realistic attempt to look at where the City
of Lansing and the people who live in Lansing are at. It does
not offer the immediate solutions and miracle approach of
national religious programming, but recounts the struggles of
a city and its people, their successes and their failures, all
the time within the context that the Lord is walking with
them. ‘The atmosphere within the studio during the production
is certainly one of family and one of mission. Perhaps
nowhere else on Channel 39 is the idea of acceptance of one’s
pain and suffering more publicized than on Windows of Lansing
and yet the program is designed so that the viewer will come
into touch with what the producers hope is their Savior and
the grace of the Savior. Windows of Lansing lacks the glitz
and glamour of nationally produced programs, does not carry
any nationally recognized names, and does not carry the
nationally recognized solutions.of tapes.or books for purchase
or'donations. The producers hope they have a program designed
for the family room with discussions that are serious, are

lighthearted, but always filled with hope in the future and

19

the Christian belief of salvation for those who believe in the
Lord.

The internal contradiction lies in using the scriptures
in. a {literal sense to address the issues of a viewing
population the majority of whom probably subscribe to an
existential ethical and religious code. The producers ask for
a Christian conversion from the viewer. The viewer on the
other hand, receives no education in the steps that lead to
conversion. The programmer asks the drug user or the city
planner etc. to turn their diverse problems over to the Lord.
Christ of the Scriptures is the Healer and Savior of all
persons and problems. All the viewer has to do is turn to the
Lord. A popoulist society by its definition of self
determination cannot accept this simple solution no matter how

inearnest those offering such a solution are.

Continental Cable

Victory in Christ is a program that goes out on public
access television at Continental CabLe. It is a half-hour
cable program, and basically takes a preaching format, using
one camera, sometimes there is music at the beginning and at
the end. Victory in Christ seems to be typical of the
religious programs that are produced for public access
televisioniand the philosophy is the same as the philosophy of
Channel 39. The programmers of Victonx in Christ use Romans,

as their articles of evangelizationn 'These verses sum up what

20

seems to be typical of the vast majority of religious
programming on public access. The Book of Romans says: "The
word that is the faith we proclaim is very near to you. It is
on your lips and in your heart. If your lips confess that
Jesus is Lord and if you believe in your heart that God raised
him from the dead, then you will be saved by believing from
the heart. You are made righteous by confessing with your
lips you are saved." When Scripture says "those who believe
in him will have no cause for shame", it makes no distinction
between Jew and Greek. All belong to the same Lord who is
rich enough. However, many ask His help for everyone who
calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. What they will.
not ask His help unless they believe in Him and they will not
believe in Him unless they have heard of Him, and they will
not hear of Him unless they get a preacher, and they will
never get a preacher unless one is sent, for the Scripture
says, "The footsteps of those who bring good news is a welcome
sound".1

The approach of Victory in Christ is very much the
approach of Paul, the Apostle. I have been sent by the Lord,
the Spirit speaks through me. Even if you don’t listen, I

have to preach the Good News. Victory in Christ continues by

 

challenging people to accept a simple message of salvation:
Live by the Scriptures, do goodmworks, and avoid the trappings

of success for in the words of the program: "we ourselves can

21

be our worst enemies because of our inclinations for power,
for riches, and for material goods".2

Victory in Chrign is opposed to the thrust that is found
in.some of the national religious programming where success is
emphasized as a result of living in Christ. "Because there
are too many false prophets out there who are speaking the
Word but they change it around. They are changing it around
to where it fits. It fits their lifestyle so they can get
others involved, involved in the things that they are doing,
and its, its very serious. That’s why it’s exciting for
people to know that we are not trying to get anything back
from them as far as far as money is concerned. We understand
that money is hard to come by and the Lord is our provider
because he said, I shall provide for all your needs in Christ
Jesus. My God shall supply all your needs in accordance to
Christ Jesus, Himself. And all we have to do is simply just
trust in Him."3

Victony in Christ suffers from the same internal
contradictions as Windogg of the Lansing in as much as the
final solution offered to a populist society is trust in
another. The sincerity of the minister is not in question.
The belief in an all providing God is not in question. What is
in question is that the solution to all problems is trust in
H11” This stance by the preacher excludes the stage of growth

the viewer may be at in his or her life by calling only for

Trust in Christ as the solution to the diverse questions of

22

life. It speaks to a theology that is miraculous with
solutions coming from outside the realm of experience. Modern
day society firstly seeks solutions to problems from a
subjective stance rather than an almighty external
provider(God).

The following is an interview with the head of

programming at Continental Cable.

Author: Can you tell me a little about Continental Cable?

Programmers Continental Cable started in the 60’s in lthe Ohio
area and then spread out to pretty much the large markets.
The headquarters for Continental is in Boston. It’s the '
fourth largest cable company. This particular system here
was started in 1976 and in the Michigan region we have a
system in Holland, a system in Jackson, Lansing,
Southfield, New Warren Heights and Madison Heights. And our
particular system, the Lansing system, has around 60,000
subscribers. We have a franchise agreement with the city
of Lansing and that’s a big factor in having access
channels.

Author: What is public access?

Programmer: On public access, there’s no advertising, no
soliciting of funds, no copyright infringement, no lottery
or contest information and no obscene or indecent material.
The air time is free. We have a religious channel, Channel

39.

23

Author: On the public access channel, what percentage of
programming is religious programming.

Programmeru Normally we have, I estimate, like 75% of the time
is religious programming.

Author: And that is beside the religious channel, Channel
39?

Programmer: Right.

Author: Who produces these religious programs?

Programmer: The majority of the religious shows that we have
here are produced locally by local churches.

Author: On East Lansing Cable(TCI), a lot of their public
access religious programming is actually going to the Black.
Community. Would you say that is true on Continental
Cable?

Programmer: Yes.

Author: Why so?

Programmer: It’s kind of ah difficult question to answer. I
guess maybe it’s because of funds. Maybe, it’s because they
have a message. They want to pass on their message more
than other groups do.

Author: As a television person, do you think there’s
anybody out there really watching religious programming on
public access?

Programmer: We haven’t ever completed a survey, but I assume
that they are really trying to target people within their

own community. I know those at Mount Hope have made

24

mention that they need to reach their own community and
public access is a good way for them to do it.

Author: What do you think of the quality of these
productions as a television person?

Programmer: It ranges from Mount Hope which is very
professional and to the down right amateurish. I just
assume that the message is the important part and not the
technical quality.

Author: Is there a market for religious programming?

Programmer: Oh, there’s a definite market out there. We do
have numerous calls for people wanting religious
programming like the Trinity Channel or some other.

Author: How would someone go about having a religious
program aired?

Programmer: We would make arrangements for them to come in
with the finished product. We would view the product. They
then.would sign a contract stating that they won’t use any
advertising. Then we would go ahead and schedule their
shows. We have either 1/2 hour or hourly time slots. The
programming itself starts at 3:30 and ends at 11:30 Monday
through Friday and then 3:30 until 11:00 p.m. Saturday and
Sunday. And they are responsible for the rotation of the
shows and the content of the shows.

Author: What is your relationship with Channel 39?

Programmer: Well we are a separate entity. We just provide

therchannel space as required by our charter with the city.

25

Author: So you have no control over content.

Programmer: No. Continental has no control over its content.

Author: That seems like a pretty unique relationship in
that the city would say that you have to carry this Channel
39, a Christian religious channel.

Programmer: Right.

Author: Have you heard of it anywhere else?

Programmer: Not to my knowledge. I don’t know of any other

system that does.

St. Thomas Aquinas Church

St. Thomas Aquinas Parish, a parish of the diocese of
Lansing, of approximately 2500 families isjperhapslatypical of
the«diocesan approach to the media” St. Thomas Aquinas Parish
currently is on TV air four times a week and has been for more
than two years. It produces the Outreach Mass which is shown
on Sunday mornings on Channel 47, and again on TCI Cable on
Monday afternoons at 2 p.m. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays St.
Thomas produces the Rosary and this is aired at 2:30 on
Tuesday and 2:30 on Wednesday.

The approach to broadcasting by St. Thomas Aquinas Parish
is twofold. Firstly it sees the use of television as a
continuation of its parish ministry. ILt is an outreach to
those unable to attend the parish church. It is not meant to
supplement the parish liturgy, it is not meant to replace it,

but its broadcasts are meant for those, for whatever reason,

26

are unable to attend their parish or St. Thomas Aquinas. The
second characteristic of the productions from St. Thomas
Aquinas are that they are within a traditional catholic
theological mold. The Mass that is aired is a regular Sunday
mass with little or no accommodation made for television. If
pews are not full, the pews are left empty. People are not
moved around the church. Cameras are placed in unobtrusive
positions, sometimes to the detriment of the television shot
that would be necessary for good viewing. The wires and
cables are kept out of the body of the church and minimal
acknowledgment is made that the Mass is being broadcast.
Minimal to the extent that some of the priests will not even
acknowledge that there are television cameras present and
those‘who do have usually just a short statement of welcome to
the house-bound, the home-bound or to those unable to attend
church. The intent of the ministry is to replicate as closely
as possible a church mass. Therefore, no creative gimmicks
are used, no avant-garde theology' or approaches to the
sacrifice of the Mass are permitted.

The Rosary is best described as countertelevision. It is
the antithesis of action, excitement and entertainment. Here,
cuttelevision, perhaps for the first time in the Lansing area,
is a religious service that is repetitive, that uses no
gimmicks, that does not homolize, sermonize, or theologize.

People in St. Thomas Aquinas during the season of advent

fourwweeks before Christmas and during the season of Lent, six

27

weeks before Easter, produce» a series of ‘programs of .a

slightly different format. These are programs that are
designed for members of the church. There is little
Evangelization worked into the design of the program. They

are usually comprised of members of the parish leading the
programs rather than ordained ministers and take a discussion
format on the meaning of these two seasons. These programs
are not of a reflective nature and are meant to stimulate,
provoke and have people ask questions about the world in which
people find themselves.

On December 18, 1984, The Outreach Mass issued its first
communique which, in part, stated, "the Spirit of Christmas,
1984, will be transmitted to mid-Michigan’s population of
elderly and infirmed people by the new Outreach Mass Program,
developed by St. Thomas Aquinas Church and Lansing’s
independent television broadcast station WFSL—TV, Channel 47.
St. Thomas Aquinas began development of the Outreach Mass
Program last year and was joined by Channel 47 in the Spring
when Ash Wednesday and Easter services were produced for
experimental television broadcast. The Outreach Mass Program
employees Apostolic ministers to lead services, singing and
distribute~communion at remote locations” .According to Bishop
James S. Sullivan, Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of Lansing
and pastor at St. Thomas Aquinas, "through this innovation,
people unable to attend church in person, such as elderly,

infirmed, nursing home patients, can participate in services

28

4 The Mass is being

as part of the whole congregation."
broadcast by Channel 47 and thus can be received at virtually
every location in the Lansing Diocese of the Catholic Church.
Since 1984 the Outreach Mass has been continuously on the air.
Currently it is at 9 a.m. It is a tape-delayed production.
The tape is actually run at the 4:30 p.m. mass on a Saturday
afternoon. It is edited and sent to Channel 47 on Saturday
evening for airing on Sunday morning.

The response to the Outreach Mass has been continuous and
gratifying to the people of St. Thomas Aquinas. This Mass has
a.small but faithful following of shut-ins and of those unable
to attend church. As letters testify, "I am 89 years old and.
I can’t go to church and I watch Mass every Sunday for several
years." "Father, your homily on doubt was so significant to
me today as I’ve had serious complications with my surgery."5
"April 2, 1991, Dear Father, this is addressed to you as the
pastor, but please pass the comments on to the other priests.
This service has been such a blessing to me. At 85 years my
eyes and ears and vigor have failed badly in the last year. .
. ."6 "Dear Father, I am writing to thank you for the weekly
service that you do on television. As you can see by the
stamp on this envelope, I am an inmate in the Branch County
Jail in Coldwater, Michigan. Several weeks ago I tuned to

7

your Mass and now every Sunday I watch it." The Outreach

Mass currently receives between ten and fifteen such letters

a week. The producers estimate that while the audience is

29

small, it is an extremely faithful audience. The Mass is

unique in its development carrying the following
characteristics:
1. It is the taping of an actual parish Mass and not a

Mass offered in a studio.

2. St. Thomas Aquinas Church has trained a group of
Outreach ministers who visit local nursing homes at the
time of the broadcast on Sunday morning at 9 a.m. and
help those present who wish to participate in the
televised service to do so.

The Outreach ministers assemble the community shortly
before the television service begins. Some hymns are sung.3
The television is turned on, thelcommunity follows the Mass on
the television, at communion time the Outreach ministers
distribute communion to the Catholics present, and at the end
of the televised service, those in need are prayed for, and
the Outreach minister then returns to St. Thomas Aquinas. St.
Thomas Aquinas has between 10 and 15 Outreach ministers who do
this on a weekly basis and between 100 and 140 people are
served by this ministry which is perhaps unique in the annals
of televised religious services in that its Outreach component
is direct, simple, and appears to be very effective. St.
Thomas Aquinas also places the Outreach Mass on public access
television on Monday afternoons.

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, St. Thomas prays the rosary

on public access television. This is again a taped-delayed

30

production. Members of the parish are asked to participate in
praying the rosary in the main church at St. Thomas Aquinas.
The Outreach television studio provides the technical support.
Four cameras are used. Three on the praying community, and
one on stills which are inserted into the production at
appropriate times. The service begins withian announcement by
the leader that includes a welcome and an explanation of the
mysteries of the rosary that will be recited. A hymn is then
sung and the rosary begins immediately afterwards. At the end
of the rosary, the concluding prayers.are recited and the hymn
is sung, and the credits are rolled. The Rosary is of a
different nature to most religious programming. It is a
meditative production; it repeats phrases and images and its
intent is to calm rather than stimulate, to inspire rather
than agitate, to create a Christian atmosphere within the
person. To bring people solace and comfort through
remembering the trials and tribulations of Jesus Christ and
offering their own trials and tribulations.toiGod, the Father,
through this association with Jesus Christ.

The following is an interview with the current church
minister in charge of the Outreach Programs at St. Thomas
Aquinas, expressing in.her'own words the philosophy behind St.

Thomas Aquinas’ incursion into television.

Author: Why is St. Thomas Aquinas in the television

business?

31

Minister: The end of St. Mathews Gospel says, "Go therefore
make»disciples of all the nations, baptize them in the name
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit and
teach them to observe all the commands I give you. Know
that I am with you always, yet unto the end of time."8 We
are in the television business because we have a direct
command from Christ to reach out and to bring the Good
News. In our situation, it has two arms: One to bring the
Good News to our members, to Catholics, to Christians who
are unable to attend their local church, who are unable to
participate in their church as they had for numbers of
years because of age, infirmity, disease, imprisonment,
etc. The other is to have a presence on a medium that
influences so strongly the lives of people. We feel by
having a presence that hopefully we will touch the lives of
some people who have not heard the loving message and the
saving message of Jesus Christ.

Author: It is normal, is it not, for the diocese to carry
the communications responsibility for the entire diocese?

Minister: Yes, that is traditionally a correct way of
looking at how a diocese operates. However, we had a very
strong pastor here in the middle of the 19803 who believed
that individual churches could aspire and in fact
participate in the television medium if the correct people

could be assembled. The technical people were assembled,

the production people were assembled, and the pastor gave

32

it his blessing and his driving force and that is how St.
Thomas got on the air.

Author: What is the unique aspect of the televising of
religious programs from St. Thomas Aquinas?

Minister: Since the idea first surfaced, St. Thomas Aquinas
has wanted not just to produce a religious program that
would speak at the viewer, but would actually somehow
include the viewer in the religious ceremony or discussion.

Author: And you achieve that by your Outreach Program?

Minister: Yes. With the Outreach Mass, we have a team of
ministers*who go to the nursing homes, to individual homes,
to invalid centers as Mass is actually being aired and
participate with the inmates of these institutions and the
sick and the house-bound in viewing the program, lead them
in prayer as the program is being viewed on television and
bring them the Eucharist at Communion time. This is a
unique aspect and probably is unique to Catholicism for
people are allowed to receive the Eucharist and thus
physically feel by its reception that they are

participating in a church service.

Author: What is your relationship with the Diocese of
Lansing?
Minister: We are independent of the Diocese of Lansing

financially. However, we do conform at all times with the

directives of the Bishop and with the teachings of the

33

Catholic Church while remaining independent on day-to-day
decisions of our programming and its content.

Author: Who produces your programs?

Minister: We have a producer and technical staff who comes
from the industry to us every week. For talent we use our
own priests and community and then I am the coordinator of

the Outreach part of the ministry.

Author: Then the programs are all produced at St. Thomas
Aquinas?
Minister: 'Yes, that is correct. We produce and edit all our

programs at St. Thomas Aquinas and then deliver them to the
various television stations for transmission.

Author: Are you interested in market size or market share?

Minister: We are not interested in the size of our viewing
audience, although it is always gratifying to know that we
are being watched. We do believe that we have a faithful
following primarily of elderly and house-bound, those in
the nursing homes and homes for the elderly and also in the
prisons. We get little response from the younger age
groups. Our productions are as I have said primarily of
service to our elderly community. Hopefully now and again
someone will tune in who is flipping through the channels
and out of interest watch us and perhaps the Grace of God
will inspire them and so they will find peace with their
God.

Author: How often are you on the air?

34

Minister: We are on a commercial channel on Sunday mornings
at 9 a.m. and then on public access we are on Monday
afternoon, Tuesday'afternoonq andNWednesday'afternoon, plus
twice a year at Advent and Lent we add some additional
programming.

Author: Do you see yourself in your programming in
competition with the national religious programmers?

Minister: No, not at all. We are providing a local service
that is of interest to people in our viewing area. We are
not carrying large staffs, our overheads are minimal, and
our intent is to help people return to their churches as
soon as they are physically or spiritually able to. We do
not even compare ourselves to national religious
programming either in format of production or in intent of
the program. In fact, we don’t like to be compared to
national religious programming. We are unique because we
actually send out ministers to be with the people while
they view our program rather than people phoning in and
seeking help or phoning in with donations.

Author: Do you ever compare your programming to prime time
television programming?

Minister: No, as I have said, our program is designed for
the elderly, the house-bound, or those who may tune in.
Our religious services are transmitted as they appear in

our church to give people a sense of unity with the type of

35

church that they knew and loved throughout their formative
and adult years.

Author: You make no concessions then for the medium and
its architecture?

Minister: We continue our services as though they were
normal church services and we merely televise these
services. We feel that it is important to give people a
sense of the church that they knew and loved or that they

may someday come to.

The television ministry at St. Thomas Aquinas.operates in
set formulae. The productions lack freedom. There is almost a
narcissistic analysis to the programming. We like what we
see. The producer, director and editor are more technicians
than creators of a message. Their task is more reproduction
with stated guidelines and objectives. There are no
productions that are specifically addressed to young people.
The knowledge available from the other sciences on people’s
stages.of life are ignored tijresent programs that speak more
to a traditional world view than developmental television

stages.

TCI Cablevision, East Lansing/Meridian Township
Immanuel’s Temple Community Church uses public access on
TCI cable to witness to Christ. It is a program cohosted by

the pastor and his wife. It carries a talk show format. The

36

setting is not particularly churchy and the audience or
congregation are not used although present. The production
does involve several of the techniques used by national
televangelists. The prayer line telephone number is almost
continuously on the screen, and the number is often repeated
by the pastor or his wife. The pastor and his wife sit around
a small coffee table with their Bibles. Occasionally the
program cuts to a musical interlude and then comes back for
another message from the pastor and his wife. There is no
traditional church furnishings. 'Ihere is rather'an attempt or
what appears to be an attempt to deliberately avoid any
appearance of a traditional church setting. There is an
obvious attempt to buy into a format, the talk show format,
that has been successful on commercial television. The hosts
appear to be successful peOple, peaceful people, and people
who wish to give a message, the message is a traditional
evangelical message that if the viewer accepts Christ, they
can be saved and acceptance and salvation will bring miracles
into their lives. As part of the opening prayer, the minister
and his wife say, "We are trusting all to our God to bless

9 The minister,

every listener who is sitting out there."
himself, says, "This is the visitation . . . because if God
will take the program and not in any fashion for entertainment

to minister to needs while you are sitting right there, where

you are listening whether you are born again and even if you

37

are not born again, we are hoping that you will stay tuned and
that God will speak to you soon."10

There is a deliberate message in the program that says
Godwwill bless and reward and will listen if the listener will
respond to Christ. The minister is but the vehicle of the
message. The program differs form the talk show format or
from the style of the national religious programs inasmuch as
it asks people, the viewers, to attend church on Sundays. It
lists the times of its own Sunday services, and it also speaks
to the unevangelized, "I have a message for those who don’t
know Christ and you’re hungry and you’re tired, and you’re
sitting there at sevenlo’clock because there’s.nothing else on
television and you’re flipping the channel and you just came
across us. My friends, it is no accident. It is no
coincidence. God has a divine meeting, a divine plan for you
today; We have to come together. We had to meet. You had to
tune in . . . . And if you are a sinner right now, and you
are going to pray for forgiveness, I’m going to ask you that
after you pray that prayer that you would call us and let us
know that you have prayed the prayer. And you gotta do is bow
your head. I’m not going to bow mine because I’m going to
look right at the camera and I’m going to pray."11

Immanuel’s Community Temple Church makes the most serious
attempt to combine a local invitation to‘worship with national

evangelizing techniques. The local invitation to worship

consisting of a call to come to the church, to phone in, to be

38

part of the ministry. The national approach using the talk
show format for cutaways for music and the promise of miracles
in your life highlighted. by the successful set that is
presented to the viewer by the camera. The successful set
includes a professional image of the pastor and his wife from
their appearance, their clothing and then the set involving
simple furnishings and props were very artistically placed
giving an overall impression of success. This ministry also
uses a studio audience who does not participate in the program
rather than a church studio type setting. And while the
pastor’s wife was part of the format, the pastor alone speaks
to the camera, his wife always speaks to the pastor and not to
the camera.

What follows is an interview with the station manager of
TCI Cable in East Lansing and Meridian Township that speaks to

religious broadcasting on public access.

Author: Tell me about TCI and Cable WELM in East
Lansing/Meridian Township.

Station Manager: Public access in East Lansing began in 1972.
We have a franchise with the city and since that time we
have provided studios, cameras and training for the public
to use public access. The cable deregulation bill of 1984
has not affected this service or our philosophy of
providing public access with training and facilities for

the public.

39

Author: What percentage of people who use public access
bring religious content to their programming?

Station Manager: About 13%. Other stations probably have a
higher percentage. Here in East Lansing and Meridian
Township, we represent so many viewpoints. The City is a
cultural melting pot. We have a lot of other programming,
including public affairs, entertainment, music, comedy, and
call-in programs.

Author: The religious programs, are they produced on-site
or off-site?

Station Manager: The majority are produced off-site. We have
just three shows that use our studios or take out our
cameras. The rest have their own equipment, production
crews, and use a church or their own studio.

Author: What type of churches are using public access?

Station Manager: We have Catholic, Protestant, and
Fundamentalists mainly. We also have two Spanish
Evangelical churches. The Evangelical churches make the
most use of public access.

Author: Where are the programs coming from ethnically?

Station Manager: Of the 13%, more than half are from the
Black churches. For example, Gospel Time is an hour of
gospel music from one of our local Black churches.

Author: What is the typical format that these religious

programs use?

40

l

Station Manager: Until very recently, it was a sermon or a
church-type format. The talk show format is now becoming
quite popular. The hosts bring in guests to discuss the
Bible or some particular church belief.

Author: Who are the audiences for the programs?

Station Manager: Currently, we do not have the capability to
do a survey of our own audience. Right now we serve 26,000
homes in East Lansing/Meridian Township and Okemos and
Haslett. That is your potential audience.

Author: Are the programs watched primarily by the church’s
own membership?

Station Manager: Some do target members, especially those who
do a talk show format. Mount Hope and First Assembly of
God show their services and they target the people who
might be looking for a church to belong to.

Author: .As a station manager, what is the main message of
all these churches?

Station Manager: Definitely, the Number 1 message is: Our
church is here. If you need help or counseling, come and
see us. Every church whose programs are on the air does
place its name and address on the screen. Many of the
churches list the times of their services.

Author: Are the makers of the programs asking the people
to watch them or go to their local church?

Station Manager: They definitely want the people to go to

their local church.

41

 

IF

Author: Comparing local public access religious
broadcasting to national religious programming, what is the
difference?

Station Manager: The big difference is the budget. National
programs, such as the National Church of God run multi-
million dollar operations out of Pasadena, California. The
national programs are very "slick" as good as Dan Rather
anytime. The local church is on its own with often as not
its one camera. The result is a massive difference in
quality.

Author: Is there a difference in the message?

Station Manager: Yes, there is a difference in the message.
The people who use public access religious
broadcasting, in my opinion, are sincere people wishing to
invite those watching the television to come and be a part
of a church. Their intent is, I believe, to bring people
back to the churches and not so much for the success for

their television programs.

42

 

FOOTNOTES--CHAPTER II

 

 

 

1. Romans 10:8-15. The Jerusalem Bible. (London:
Darton Longman & Todd, 1966).

2. Producer of Victory in Chrigi. Taped Interview.

3. Ibid.

4. . "The Outreach Mass", The Catholic
Weekly. (1984, December 21). Diocese of Lansing. p.2.

5. Letter of the Outreach Archives. St. Thomas
Aquinas, East Lansing, MI. Excerpts.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Matthew 28:19-20. The Jerusalem Bible. (London:
Darton Longman & Todd, 1966).

9. Immanuel Temple Community Church. (1992, July
30). Taped 1/2 hour television show on TCI Public Access.
East Lansing, MI.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

43

CHAPTER III

IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE--WATCHING

Religion is all very well as long as it doesn’t interfere

with your life.
Lord Melbourne

He cannot have God for his father who refuses to have the

church for his mother.
St. Augustine

The church has always been willing, to swap, treasures in
heaven for cash down.
R. G . Ingersoll

Not since the Reformation and the break of the Orthodox
churches has Christendom been faced with a mass movement that
threatens to change a traditional course of direction. Even
with the Reformation and the break with the now called
Orthodox churches, hierarchical churches in the main were
establishedrand the ruling bodies be it clergy or lay counsels
still remained in charge of the church’s corpus of theology,
of its culture, of its understanding of itself, and of its
relationship to its members and to the world. Most of the
mainline churches have either annual synods, conventions, or
counsels and in the case of the Catholic church approximately
every 50 to 100 years a counsel of the whole church. These

44

counsels, synods, or assemblies are still seen by these
churches as the protector of their creeds, the mother, of
their traditions, and the enunciator of their culture.

The Catholic Church in North America through its Bishops’
Conference debates how it will explain to its adherents
fundamental church principles ranging from war and peace to
homosexuality and economics. These bishops’ conferences do
not see themselves in a position to change church teaching on
these issues, they merely restate it in a language that they
believe will be understood in the North American situation.
Other churches from the Episcopalians to the Baptists to the
Presbyterians would grant their national conferences more
freedom to interpret church principles. They see themselves
as the people who enunciate the creed of the church who call
people to accept its teachings and to demand the allegiance
that is necessary to obtain membership in the church. The
church be it from the Southern Baptists or High Episcopalian
or Roman Catholic have their deliberating bodies. These
deliberating assemblies, while trying to speak in modern
language, still carry the format and the trappings that were
part and parcel of their origination. The churches see
themselves as speaking to a society on two levels: They speak
to a society that has communitarian aspects and to a society
that is made up of individuals.

History'has failed to be the burying ground of the notion

that the inventor will determine the use of the invention or

45

that the ruling elite if the inventor fails to determine the
use of his/her invention that they, in turn, will determine
its usage. As recent as the invention of the motor car,
newspapers and people of influence were gauging its
possibilities in an industrial society arriving at a common
conclusion that the motor car will always be a novelty, that
it will never serve a useful function in society, and that it
will remain the privilege of a select few. How wrong these
prophets have been! Among the many claims of the motor car is
one that states: the motor car is responsible for the breakup
of the Sunday community meetings after services that sometimes
would last all day. The theory being that it was such an
effort to get up and get to church on Sunday that once people
got there, that they often remained there all day to discuss
politics, farming, and the general business and news of the
day. The motor car giving greater versatility and allowing
people’s imagination to roam. The motor car took people down
the road of their imagination and over the hill to a new
setting. The day-long get-to-gethers on Sundays are now a
thing of history.

Television, itself, it.was hoped” would be, primarily, an
instrument.of education for the masses.and that its uses would
be limited. Again, the prophets failed to take into account
a mass culture which was coming into being. In some places,
it had already achieved domination over the cultural

Perspectives of the elite. The elite were also left looking

46

 

towards this populous culture for'a new ideology. The origins
of this populous culture probably go back in this country to
the foundation of the New England states. The Congregational
minister in these hamlets was an elected minister and usually
had a public office as well. In 1833 Massachusetts
relinquished for the last time the relationshipibetween church
and state. Religion was pushed into the private sphere, of
family and the individual. The seeds of the populous culture
had been set. The leaders in the community no longer looked
to church or tradition for guidance. They were elected
officials that responded to the "cry of the people".

A second element in the rise of the populous culture in
the United States resulted from the manner in which the push
westward took place. Unlike Canada where population growth
followed law and order and governmental agencies, the push
west in the United States began with a population move
followed by law, order, and government. Set into the hearts
of the people at the earliest foundations of the country is
the belief in themselves that they are the creators of their
own destiny. This was a major philosophical change from the
way people thought about themselves and it has had
unbelievable consequences for the world at large in the last
two centuries. The idea of lone heros setting out to win a
whole new world for themselves. Surviving and thriving was
foreign to the way most societies in the world operated in the

1700 and 1800’s, and is still foreign to the way a large part

47

of“world society operates todayu The wave of immigrant groups
coming into this country in the last decades, particularly the
Vietnamese and Hispanic, have been studied from an
inculturation perspective that has emphasized language and the
ability to scale the ladder of North American success. Their
inculturation into the populist culture is only beginning to
be studied.

This populist culture has the elements of individualism
with its attendant principles of the right to privacy,
privatization of lifestyle, community with the
responsibilities of and to family - nuclear and the social,
and finally the breakdown of the barrier between rights and
responsibilities. On another level, the populous culture
strives for a real understanding of its world, what the
individuals place is in the world” what are his/her rights and
responsibilities, what is his/her relationship to community,
and in community. The populist culture seeks the dignity of
each individual, seeks to create art forms that allow freedom
of expression, freedom of appreciation, and freedom from
discrimination. 'The populist culture seeks the right to share
its ideas and its values with others. The populist culture
is not a negative culture, but it is far harder to define or
describe than a culture that was dominated by a small elite.
Populist culture is hard to criticize because who will or is
allowed to define the standards of the culture. To what are

you comparing populous culture? By its own definition,

48

populist culture is the right of all to share all; to be a
part of the process of determining its own culture and to be
part of examining itself.

It is to this that religion has to speak. Religion, for
better or worse, finds itself a first cousin to culture, and
today it is by this culture that religion is partially shaped.

No longer are Catholic, Episcopal conferences the last word
in the minds of a Catholic, whether they should or shouldn’t
do something. No longer are the synods of the Episcopalian
church the rule by which Episcopalians will judge their
actions. No longer are the assemblies and conventions of the
Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the other mainline churches
the rule and the standard bearer*of the creeds and professions
of the faith of their adherents.

The populist culture has allowed people to dream that
they are the creators of their own life. In many ways this
contradicts some of the fundamental principles of established
religion.

For the Catholic Church it would be that a personal
relationship with God cannot transcend your involvement with
your church because the church is the means by which you have
any with God. In the Episcopalian Church, this would also be
true and in many of the mainline churches. Evangelism and
fundamentalism, on the other hand, are more in keeping with
the principles that have grown out of the foundation of this

country, their reliance on self, the desire to settle

49

differences on a local level based on local law if possible,
and the hesitation to bring in the rule of law and government
- church or civil.

The psyche of the United States citizen has been
conditioned for several hundred years. The populist culture
that we have today is the culmination of a process begun
several hundred years ago. This populist culture has an
enormous impact on the way people perceive God and their
relationship with God and the structures that that
relationship will have or has.

Of immediate interest is the discrepancy between mainline
church services on televisioniand televangelism in the form of
fundamentalism or the Bible churches. The mainline churches--
Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran
and some Baptist--think of the Bible in a Judeo context,
recognizing that the individual is part of a community and
that that community comes to worship God as a community. The
televangelist speaks to the individual as an individual and
their need to be saved as an individual by "The Blood of
Christ," and that through participation in the television
program and individual practices, then the individual can be
saved and does not need the services of the larger community.
This difference is fundamental and basic to an understanding
of the question: Why mainline churches find themselves on the
periphery of television religion and on the periphery of

response to their television productions by the population at

50

 

if.—

large. And why the mainline churches find their influence
through television to be minimal?

The place of the individual within mainline Christianity
is as part of the community. They are born into a family
which is community and this family is part of the larger
worshipping community. Fundamentalism and the Bible churches
speak a message that is in keeping with populist culture as we
see it in the United States and in keeping with the message of
parallel television programming that often refers to the lone
heroic person standing for truth and justice, the lone mother
supporting her child! Standing for truth and justice over and
against a community that neither supports those values or
despises them.

The intent of fundamentalist televangelism does not
appear to be to bring people into a worshipping community,
although their services are always within the context of a
particular church. The services of the Catholic and mainline
Protestant religious programming usually seek to draw people
away from their television set and back into the body of the
church where they can actually see, feel, cry, share, and
experience with other members of the community.

This'debate of the individual versus the community in the
American psyche as it appears in the last decade of the 20th
century under the term, populist culture, is currently been
played out in Presidential politics. One sees the expression

"viewing the apple’s skin from ‘the seed out" coming to

51

fruition. Republican politics and its leadership stressing
smaller government, less involvement by government in the
lives of the citizens. The Republican Party of today, finds
itself, taking the high moral ground and saying that issues
such as abortion are above politics issues such a correct
world order and the U.S. role in achieving that, are again
above politics. Today there is a very strong communitarian
approach coming out from the Republicans on certain issues. A
very strong I am my brother’s or sister’s keeper response from
a party that has traditionally stressed the right of the
individual to achieve and do and be as they so desire. The
Democratic Party, on the other hand, has a platform that says
government must be involved in the lives of the people. Yet
a party that today is finding itself reluctant to become
involved in anything but the rights of the individual, from
privacy rights of the individual over abortion issues to
reluctance to become involved in seeking a correct world
order. Somehow the presentation of both parties in
Presidential politics is not reflected in individual policies
pursued by those parties.

This is but a reflection of the overall populist culture,
and one which translates into the religious realm directly.
Individual salvation being offered and touted but under the
direction of the super minister, the tel-star minister. The
confusion that is within the political process the seed

looking at its skin from the inside is reflected in the

52

minister preaching a religion that is based in community, but
only speaking about individual salvation. The Judeo—Christian
tradition is that no one is saved in isolation; that it is
through interaction in the community that one witnesses to
one’s beliefs and faith in Christ. Salvation without
interaction either to one’s neighbor or to one’s world is
impossible. The American psyche appears to be responsive to
the ideology of the "Last of the Mohicans" over and over
again. The attempt by Vice President Quayle to give comment
on the populist TV series Murphy Brown and his reported
questioning of the ability of a single mother to raise a child
in today’s America, was drowned in a sea of negative attack.
A little analysis of Mr. Quayle’s position accepted or
otherwise would have seen that Mr. Quayle was reflecting a
reality that while the individual is to be supported and
strengthened in this society of ours, the hard facts are that
a single mother has an extremely difficult time in breaking
out of the poverty trap in America as it is structured today.
The lip service of the mother’s right to have her child were
aptly spoken to, the reality of the supports and the
institutional helps necessary for her to raise her child as
she wishes are all but lacking. The tension between the
individual and community is played out in all parts of our
culture on the street, on television, in the classroom, in the

bars, and on the religious television screen.

53

The approach of the churches to the issue of the
community versus the individual is exemplified in a reverse
manner. In the book, Media Covernge of the Cntholic Church,
the authors are looking at the rights of a Church within a
community. The authors state, "In recent decades the more
overt and virulent forms of anti-catholicism have retreated
from polite society in the public square along with other
forms of once fashionable religious and ethnic bigotry. In
theory, the Catholic Church is now more able than ever before
to compete for the hearts and minds of Americans within an
atmosphere of religious tolerance. Yet catholic defamation
organizations complain of a continuing bias that is all the
more corrosive for its apparent lack of self-consciousness."l
As Michael Schwartz writes: "In Persistent Prejudice,
hostility to the Catholic Church functions as the unspoken
premise for a great deal of our passes for the intellectual
and cultural life of contemporary America. . . . Catholicism
is represented. alternatively' as ridiculous cu? cruel and
oppressive. . . . the mass media image of Catholics is only

slightly better than of Nazis."2

While this may appear to be
a strong response, the issue reflected is nevertheless the
same. What are the rights of the individual to the community
and the community to the individual. The authors continue,
"whatever the success of Hollywood, the church’s relationship

to the news media has proven even more problematic for both

inatitutions. The news media and the church are in the

54

business of information gathering and dissemination. The
church provides information melded to interpretations based on
doctrines that holds to be true and proper. The news media
provides factual information and interpretation of its context

3 The heart

and meaning without recourse to transient truths".
of the matter is that the whole of our society struggles to
find out what is the relationship, what are my rights as an
individual, what is my relationship to the community, what are
my privileges within the community, and what are my
responsibilities to other individuals and to the community at
large.

The church is at the forefront of this struggle because
within televised Christianity, the struggle is seen most
clearly. In an essay on television "The Critical Review,"
ClaudebGitlin says: "Each society works to reproduce itself--
and its internal conflicts-~within its cultural order. The
structure of practices and means around which the society

4 His intent in the ‘paper is to look at

takes shape."
contemporary mass media in the United States as one cultural
system promoting that reproduction. Both Gitlin and Michael
Prenti in Inventing Reality draw heavily on Antonio Gramsc’s
notion of ideology hegemony. Gitlin speaks of hegemony as:
"The domination of thought, the common sense, the life ways

5 Parenti

and everyday assumptions of the working class."
states it in this way: "The state is only the outer ditch

behind which there stands a powerful system of fortresses and

55

earth works. These supportive institutions help create the
ideology that transforms the ruling class interest into a
general interest, justifying existing class relations as the
only natural and workable ones. The preferred and ultimal,
although not perfect societal arrangements. So the capitalist
class is the ruling class controlling society’s cultural
institutions and ideational production as well as its labor,
lands, and natural resources".6
So what is the religious, political, and cultural status
quo of the United States? That all men are created equal as
stated in the Constitution is perhaps the cornerstone of
American society, politically, legally,
culturally, and also religiously. However, from the very
beginning, the founding fathers, it would seem, had no
intentioniof disposing themselves of the their estates. A 100
years later the debate between Abraham Lincoln and Steven
Douglas on this exact issue showed considerable differences of
understanding: "Lincoln looked upon the proposition about
human equality not as a hypothesis for examination or as a
hypothesis for a kind of experiment or as a beneficent
sentiment. For him it was a truth affirmed and consider what
the United States might have become as a political community
had Douglas’s position had sway. He held that the signers of
the Declaration referred to the White race alone and not the

oJ

African when they declared all men to be created equal. As

then so now; the question of my rights, your rights and whose

56

 

responsibility it is to be their guardian bedevils the civil
and religious legislator. A second question follows the
first. What do we mean by good, and what do the programmers
of religious programs.consider good? IReligionland consumerism
which supports the political and cultural status quo rests its
case on the sentiment that this or that thing is good for me.
Consider the case of the religious broadcasters that say that
God wishes to heal us, to heal you, that God has good things
in store for you, that you have been forgiven your sin and
your debt, turn to God and you will reap the benefits of a
life hereafter that is blessed, but also the benefits that
come from a true believer, success in this life. Success)
being determined on a North American standard and within that
the standards of’middle-class NorthHAmerican society a society
that is consumeristic and transient in values. However, here
again the issue of ‘what good. means has not been fully
determined. Philosophically, we can go from a Machiavellian
concept of good to an Aristotelian concept of good. Religious
programming is caught in this conflict as is the current
political and cultural status quo of the United States.

If the object of religious programming is either overtly
or inadvertently to support the cultural status quo of North
America, then the question arises, who are the people
listening? In Reli ious Television the American Ex erie ce,
Peter J. Horsfield holds that people of lower income, lower

education, and blue collar occupations watch significantly

57

more religious programs than do those of higher income, higher
education, and in white collar occupations. This was the
result.of studies done by Dennis in 1962, by Robinson in 1964,
by Solt in 1971, and Buddenbaum in 1979.

On the local level, the cable companies supported this
viewpoint”, In their'opinion, the peopleewho watched religious
programming on public access cable were of lower to middle
income, were usually older, and were already committed
Christians. Later in Chapter 12 of the same book, Horsfield
says: "The influence of pay time religious television also
takes on a wider significance when considered within the
broader context of the structures of the mass media in their
political and economic dimensions. It is wrong simply to view
the owners of mass media as the sole determinants in the
shaping of media organizations and messages. They stand
within the larger historical context and they are, themselves,
played on by historical events and the circumstances these

8 Horace Newcome has noted that the

events thrust upon them."
ideas and symbols in American television have not been created
there, but frequently have a history in American culture.
"Television is rarely an innovator of social forms or
ideas, but is more commonly a preparer and reflector of these
forms. Should the television programmers move too far away
from what is publicly perceived as historically and socially
appropriate, they would soon lose the attention of their

9

audiences." In his book, All Consumin Ima es, George Ewen

58

 

talks about this lower, middle class and gives a rare insight
into the type of person that is involved.

Quoting from Ira Steward in the essay titled, "Poverty,"
written in 1873 for the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor, says:
"But is not the middle class its poverty. The poverty that
should incite the most anxiety and the most searching inquiry
. . . they are a large majority of the people and their
poverty is generally carefully'concealeda All‘who have barely
enough to keep up appearance are just the ones to cover up the
fact that they have nothing more. They are ranked among the
middle classes and their power to cover up their poverty is
made to argue that they are not poor. The middle classes have
the strongest motives for never making any parade or public
complaint of their poverty. To advertise oneself destitute is
to be without credit that tides so many in safety. To their
standing in society--over the shallow places where ready
resources fail, to be without credit and without resources is
to be dependent upon charity. Whenever employment fails or
sickness prevents employment, and.to depend upontcharity is an
advertisement of one’s destitution and poverty that the public
is slow to forget. To betray our confessed secrets of one’s
destitution is also regarded in some measure as a sign of
incapacity. For as the world goes, the poor man is an

"m Religious programming is geared towards

unsuccessful man.
an aging middle class, ones who are supportive of the status

quo economically and politically. And while the quotation

59

just used is harsh and perhaps looks at the middle class in
too unfavorable a light, it does allow us the momentary
insight into a reality that exists for many.

Herbert, Ungurait and Bohn in Mnsg Medig V: An
Introduction to Communicntion, outline five characteristics of
an audience:

1. The audience tends to be composed of individuals

who are apt to have shared experiences and are

affected by similar interpersonal social

relationships.
2. The audience tends to be large.
3. The audience tends to be heterogeneous rather

than homogeneous.
4. The audience tends to be relatively anonymous.
5. The audience tends to be physically separated
from the communicator.ll
Looking at each of these areas for a moment, and putting
them within the context of religious broadcasting at the local
level, we find that the people who‘watch religious programming
on public access indeed seem to reflect shared experiences.
The preachers speak of these experiences, the experiences of
suffering, of want, of forgiveness, of repentance, of hope.
These are experiences which create a bond between the audience
and the broadcaster. That the audience tends to be large is

debatable. Several of the programs watched including the

Outreach Mass from the Catholic Church do not claim to have

60

any significant ratings, rather the Outreach Mass would claim
to have a faithful following principally of older people. The
intent of religious broadcasting at the local level does not
appear to be to speak to large audiences. The intent is to
speak to the church’s congregation and some other witnessing
Christians. There is little attempt at publicity, there is
little attempt at evangelization. The intent is to produce a
religious program that is available if people tune in or turn
on.

In contrast to general television audiences, the
audiences of religious viewing tend to be homogeneous and
denominationally homogeneous. Religious television speaks to
a particular type of Christian, to a particular age bracket of
religion, income bracket and a particular type of socilaized
Christian;lxait.Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, or Evangelical,
etc.

Like commercial television, the audience tends 1x) be
relatively anonymous. Victory in Chrign believes that its
audience is out there but it is known that the majority of the
viewers are probably the shut-ins and the elderly. Again, in
contrast to the last point that Herbert Unguriait and Bohn
make that the audience tends to be physically separate from
the communicator; public access religious broadcasting does
try to bridge that gap. The Outreach Mass will mention people
during the Mass at the prayers of the faithful who may have

requested it. Many of the Evangelical pastors put their phone

61

line number and service times on the screen so that contact
can be made. This contact may be minimal, but it is
substantially greater than commercial television which is nil.
Therefore, in response to what an audience is, religious
broadcasting is substantially different in its aim and intent.
The aim is involvement, the aim is participation, and from
that perspective, it has an uphill battle with prime time
television which is specifically for entertainment or general
educational purposes.

The aim of religious broadcasting appears to be extremely
narrow, compared to commercial broadcasting. Even then the
content of that broadcasting remains a problem for the~
broadcasters or Churches are not immune to cultural trends.
Most churches subscribe to what is called "traditional
values." Many of the church’s problems from Evangelical to
Catholic would seem to lie in the area of talking about
traditional values. The "traditional" in value is nothing
more than a belief with historical dimension. Values in
themselves speak to a greater understanding of the meaning of
life than can be attached to it from mere human inquiry.
Churches are becoming more and more active participants in the
discussion about values. Churches find that they speak to a
situation, a world that is in a constant state of flux. In
1987 Pope John Paul asked rhetorically when he met with U.S.
bishops in Los Angeles how is the American culture evolving

today? Is this evolution been influenced by the Gospel, does

62

it clearly reflect Christian inspiration . . . are all those
things which reflect the soul of a nation been influenced by

12 The Pope raised the questions and

the spirit of Christ".
left the bishops to find the answers.

So, too, the pastors who appear on television at the
local level seem to struggle between presenting a Christianity

that carries a value system and a society that stresses

individual liberty and individual values.

63

 

ff"

FOOTNOTES--CHAPTER III

1. Lichter R. Amundson, & D. Lichter, L. MedinnCoverage
of the Catholic Church. (New Haven, CHM The Knights of
Columbus, 1991), p. 9.

2. M. Schwartz. 'The Persistent Prejudice. (Huntington,
IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1984), p. 137.

3. Lichter R. Amundson, & D. Lichter, L. Medin Coverngg
oi the Catholic Church. (New Haven, CT: The Knights of
Columbus, 1991), p. 10.

4. Claude Gillin. "The Critical Review": The Politics
of Broadcast Regulation. Kransnow, Longley, & Terry(Eds).
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), p. 342.

5. Ibid., p. 344.

6. M. Parenti. Inventing Reaiity. (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 5.

7. New Yorker. (1975, 8 September). p. 43.

8. P. J. Horsfield. Religious Teievision: The American
Experience. (New York: Longman, 1984), p. 122.

9. H. Newcomb. Television: The Cniticai View. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 63.

10. G. Ewen. All Consuming Images. (New York: Basic
Book, 1988), p. 125.

11. Herbert, Unquarait, & Bohn. Mass Media V. (New
York: Longman Inc., 1988), pp. 487-489.

12. Our Sunday Visitor. (1992, August 2), p. 15.

64

CHAPTER IV

ARCHITECTURE OF WORD AND MEDIUM

The boys were asked to draw a picture of the flight
of the Holy Family into Egypt for their religious
instruction class. All but one drew the
conventional picture of the Rocky Mountain path at
night with. Joseph leading the donkey and Mary
sitting on it, holding the infant Jesus. The
exception was a small boy who had taken the word
"flight" quite literally. His picture showed a
modern jet plane flying over the pyramids. Visible
in the plane were four figures: three at the back
with a halo, one in the front without a halo. Very
good, said the minister in charge. But who is the
man in front without the halo? Please, sir, said
the boy. That’s Pontius the Pilot.
Anonymous

The architecture of thermedium has to be transferred into
the Word. Sometimes the difference between a politician
giving a speech and a minister preaching escapes us. There is
a difference in content, but style of delivery, and method of
delivery, seem to have become one.

Before theradvent of Christianity, classical rhetoric was
well established, conceived by Plato and analyzed by Aristotle
its practical applications were put into writing by Cicero and
finally a complete system was built by Quintillion. Classical
rhetoric has five parts: invention, arrangement, style,
memory, and delivery. The aim of classical rhetoric was to
give impact to truth and justice as a spoken word.

65

This was the acknowledged type of rhetoric and debate
that was taking place in Greece and Rome at the time of the
Apostles. Christ, however, challenged the nature of rhetoric
on its internal structure by creating a whole new system that
would appeal to the uneducated, the populous at large. In

Saint.Mathews’ Gospel, Christ asks the questituiof the people:
.J

"Have you understood all this? and they said yes. The
teaching/message was couched in parables. Jesus was a
storyteller, par excellence. Again in Luke, it says: "He

came to Nazareth where he had been brought up and went into
the synagogue on the Sabbath day as he usually did. He stood
up to read. And they handed him the scroll of the prophet-
Isaiah. Unrolling the scroll, he found the place where it is
written. The spirit of the Lord has been given to me for he
as anointed me . . . he then rolled up the scroll, gave it
back to the assistant and sat down. And all the eyes of the
synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to speak to them.
This text is being fulfilled this day even as you listen."2
The style of Jesus was free flowing expressing familiarity
with the lives of his subjects and with the examples that he
used. In the time of the Apostles, this free-flowing artless
type of rhetoric became a homily, a homily coming from the
Greek word for conversation. It was a far cry from the
eloquence of classical Greek rhetoric. By the time

Christianity came out of the Dark Ages, there was a ruling

elite somewhat educated that desired something more scientific

66

and argumentative than the colloquial artless form that had
been withiChristianity since its birth. And so the Golden Age
of patristic eloquence was born.

It borrowed from classical rhetoric but used as its base
the scriptures. St. Augustine, being one of the great fathers
of this type of rhetoric gave much advice to his successors in
a book called, The Firgt Cniechetical Instruction which is a
basic document on catechesis and preaching. St. Augustine
borrowed heavily from Cicero’s triple aims of declaimation
which were teaching, pleasing, and persuading (docere,
delectare, movere). The middle ages saw a decline in the
quality of preaching. As Europe moved out of the Middle Ages,
the sermon again was taking on a standardized form. First a
part of the scripture was chosen and this became the theme.
Next came the protheme which led to the invocation for divine
helprfor the preacher and listeners, and thirdly the theme was
restated and divided which were then subdivided and developed
according to conventional modes of amplification.

The Renaissance Period gave a renewed desire to
incorporate classical rhetoric into the theory of preaching.
In 1504, Johann Reuchlin published Ihe.Art of Preaching. Here
the features of perennial rhetoric were established,
invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
Erasmus(1466-1536) solidified this trend in his writings on
preaching. 'Today the purpose of preaching is to enlighten all

persons as to the things that are necessary for their

67

salvation. The earliest preaching in North America would have
followed Catholic Renaissance rhetoric. The settlements of
the Spanish in the Caribbean, St. Augustine, in Florida, and
in the Texas-California region, Junipa, Sierra, Co-patron of
California, would have brought a Franciscan humanness to
classical Catholic preaching of the Renaissance. In the
north, the Jesuits in their dealing with the Huron and
Iraquois nations known as the Black Robes would again have
been imbued with a renaissance Catholic approach to preaching.

Concurrently, the Pilgrims with their congregational
style of church and of preaching would have made an impact on
the New England States. The sermon was extremely long,
lasting up to 6 hours. It was very much scripture based. It
was delivered to a congregation that used the Bible as their
sole directive for life. The impact of the preacher would
have been greater than in Catholic preaching where the Bible
is seen as one element of the articles of faith.

In the congregational vein, the sermon became the focal
point of divine worship and the minister based his sermon on
the meaning of Scripture. The sermon, itself, was the living
voice of the gospel and Christ spoke in the preacher’s words.
The new doctrines on justification and the role of Scripture
as the sole rule of faith were proclaimed in the sermon.
Today only in therevangelical churches has the sermon remained
as the preeminent form of worship and it is mainly these

churches that are witnessed to on television.

68

The architecture of the medium was the human voice. The
pleasing voice, the interesting voice were two qualities that
the successful preacher sought to have. The preacher it was
presumed would have posture, presentation, and syntax at a
level that was acceptable to both high and low» .A popular
speaker would often speak to several thousand people. The
orator Daniel O’Connell known as the liberator of Ireland, is
reported to have spoken to as many as one hundred thousand
people on some occasions. These monster meetings, as they
were called, demanded special architecture. The speaker would

speak and there would be relay speakers within the audience to

carry the message to further' extremities. These relay-

speakers had to have the qualities of the primary speaker and
also had to know the mind of the primary speaker.
Inflections, intonations, and gestures would be known by the
secondary speaker and would not have to be necessarily seen to
be copied. The architecture of the medium to reach large
audiences today is not through a series of secondary speakers
but is through the medium of television with its ancillary arm
of the microphone or voice enhancement. The preachers that
have been observed on East Lansing Cable and Lansing Cable
from the Gospel Hour to Victory in Christ carried a similar
intent; to preach the Word of God to their listeners. Both
the Outreach Mass on the Catholic side and the Evangelical

preachers made no concessions for the architecture of the

69

1 h‘.‘-tfiz

 

medium in trying to transfer the message of the Word from
their heart and mind to the heart and mind of the listener.

The architect of today will ask, who is this building
for? What type of building will it be? What will be carried
out within the building and outside of the building? How much
would such a building cost? and How much can the owner afford?
Overall, the architect is asking the question, What is the
philosophy of my patron? The architect, unlike the
theologian, does not presume that his. or her patron is
interested in such questions as: What are the stress
capabilities of the building, What will the frame of the
building be constructed of, What’s the load bearing of the.
walls. The preaching that appears to be on East Lansing
Cable, Lansing Cable does not enter into theological
questions. It is more suited to the homily(conversational
preaching). The preaching follows the colloquel approach.
Gospel Hour, Victory in Chris;,_ Immanuel Temple Community
Church and St. Thomas Aquinas use the Scripture to give an
explanation of life’s problems.

The style and presentation of the Black churches is
usually high in involvement with the preacher and with what
the preacher is saying. The style of the preaching in the
Black churches is exuberant, exhilarating, and very
committed(e.g. flappel Hour). Catholic preaching is quiet,
sober, logical. It is the intent of all preaching, though, to

create a response in the listener, in this case, the

70

television audience. Christian ministers preaching on public
access and on Channel 39 in Lansing and East Lansing use a
mixture of populist ideology and the everyday homily approach
of the Apostles and the early Christian period.

In the latter half of the 19th century in America, The
Richard’s style of architecture became popular. The buildings
consisted of a steel frame which gave support to the curtain
walls. Current-day American architecture also came from
Walter Gropius with his Bahause School3 of architecture which
was brought to America by Miles Vander Meis who successfully
adapted the Richardson architectural style. Now the building
itself became closely allied to the buildings seen on movie.
sets, the barest minimum of support, supporting walls that
could be put in place as a whole and even hung from the steel
frame closing the gap between reality and fiction. Many of
the buildings that surround us today in America are buildings
of this style of architecture. The philosophy behind this
type of architecture is "less is more" and form follows
function. "Less is more" in as much as the eye can be fooled
into thinking it sees greatness when infact it sees cheapness
and transitoriness. Design follows the function of the
building. Over a period of time this has led to
standardization of design and of expectations. This inability
to cross design and to dream has also become accepted in the

television world. Religious television, even on the local

71

 

level is predictable, describable and in the words of many
boring.

The architecture of the 70’s, 80’s, and now of the 90’s
is moving away from "less is more" and "design follows form"
moving back to a more neoclassical approach where more usually
is more, resulting in greater costs and greater durability.
Where design, function and form can have interplay. However,
television on the national level of CBS, ABC, or NBC right
down to the local level of public access religious television
seems slow to make the full circle back to the mixture that
traditionally human nature finds more exciting, more
acceptable, more thought-provoking, and certainly more.
colorful. Preaching, in particular, has learnednwell from the
Bahause style of architecture--a basic steel frame or a simple
Scriptural passage on which the rest of the facade will be
built around. The content of this basic structure, this
facade, in the Protestant and Evangelical tradition, is one
that I have a Scripture verse for you today. This is a
message from Christ. It is a saving message. You can be
saved. Listen to my message. Learn how to be saved. The
Catholic tradition uses the Scripture verse to call for
repentance, change of lifestyle, and a seeking of grace to
persevere. Catholic preaching does not emphasize that one is
saved either by listening to the word or by accepting Christ

into one’s life.

72

 

If it is possible to refer to the Scripture passage as
the steel frame of the building, then the curtain walls that
helped to create the illusion of the building, its strength,
its grandeur, its endurability are the preacher and his
format. Unfortunately, the intent of the architect is that
the building does not endure. The architect knows that the
steel frame and the enclosing curtain walls are designed not
to last. Architecture understands its fleeting success rate
and the fickleness of its patrons. In order to endure and to
be successful, architecture has chosen patterns of structure,
of design, that will fill the needs of its patrons. The
preacher, if he or she watches television, will find that the
basic steel frame found in architecture and its curtain walls
is the premise on which most television programs are built.
The program is designed for success, is designed for the
enjoyment of its viewers, is designed to make money for its
patrons, and when the program fails, like the Bahause School
of Architecture, it’s designed to be thrown away.

This is*what the preacher is up against. The preacher is
coming in from a neoclassical rhetorical tradition which
praises style, delights in memory, and is entranced in
delivery. The arrangement far from being a steel structure
with supporting curtain walls is as flesh is to bone. Each is
support and life to the other. Each is necessary for the

other.

73

Robert K. Murton, author of Mass Persuasion (The Social
Psychology of a War Bond Drive), first outlined the
architecture of the medium. In Mass Persuasion the preacher
would readily see the curtain walls that television builds
around its steel structure. In this instance the structure
was Kate Smith, a television commentator. Murton speaks of
the success that Kate Smith had on that day when she raised
$35 million in war bonds, the like of which has not been seen
before or since. The first thing that was done, either
deliberately or by accident, was that the viewer was privy to
the knowledge that an outstanding event was about to take

place. Then the viewer was privy to an outstanding event

taking place. According to Murton, this created a sense of
compulsive listening. Another element was repetition. "The

marathon also provided opportunity for effective persuasion
through continued repetition. At the close of each broadcast,
Smith repeated the Slogan, ’Will you buy a bond?’".4 Smith
was able in the broadcast to "arouse profound emotions and
activated strong sentiments, guilt, pity, sympathy, anxieties.
There is abundant evidence, as we shall see, that many of our
subjects were profoundly stirred by Smith’s appeals; that they
felt some of their most important values were involved in the
experience, that.deep-lying sentiments foundmexpression.in the

5

contexts supplied by the broadcasts". Finally, towards the

end of the broadcast, Smith heightened the tension by asking

74

the question out loud: Would she be able to survive to the
end of the broadcast.

Under content analysis, six major themes were found in
the Smith broadcast. The first theme was the theme of
sacrifice, the second theme was the participation theme, the
third theme was the familial theme, the fourth theme was the
personal theme, fifth the competition theme, and sixth the
facilitation theme.

The six principle themes outlined by Murton in Smith’s
broadcasts are consistent with the traditional themes of
Christianity. The first theme of sacrifice, Smith divided
into three: there was the sacrifice of others on the.
listeners’ behalf, the men and women being killed in action on
the front; there was the sacrifice of peer group pressure, men
and women all over America who were contributing to the war
effort by their sacrifice, men and women who were in similar
situation to other listeners; and finally, there was the
sacrifice of Smith, herself, doing such a marathon show, and
letting everyone know what a sacrifice she was making.

This idea of the triangular sacrifice fits fairly and
squarely into the Christian tradition. There’s the sacrifice
of Christ on all our behalf, the sacrifice of other Christian
witnesses, the sacrifice of the pastor who tirelessly preaches
and does the Word. In all of the programs viewed from the
Evangelical to the Catholic, not one program, brought out all

the elements of sacrifice.

75

The Catholics would give reference to Christ dying for
our sins; the Evangelical would give reference to being washed
in the blood of Christ. The Evangelicals would point to the
Christian witness of peers, and so too would Catholics. The
Catholics would ask the individual to likewise sacrifice in
prayerwworks or offerings, and so too, would the Evangelicals.
Neither the Evangelicals or the Catholic preachers spoke of
the sacrifice that they were making on behalf of the Word.
Thus, the viewers were unable as :hi the case of Smith to
identify with the integrity of the preacher, the truthfulness
of the message was not tested, and perhaps a great part of the
appeal, itself, of the Christian message‘was lost. A question-
arises, are the|Christian ministers sacrificing and living the
Word. Are they so humble that they prefer not to speak of
themselves? Or is there another reason by which they do not
wish to be part of this sacrifice paradigm?

In the case of the Smith broadcast, the sacrifice of
Smith, herself, was certainly productive. Many‘ of the
respondents to the study claiming that it was a desire to
identify with Smith in helping the war effort or the desire to
alleviate the distress of Smith that prompted them to support
the war effort. In designing the architecture necessary for
the successful transference of the Word to the medium of
television, perhaps the question of the minister’s integrity
and the placing of that integrity before the people needs to

be emphasized.

76

In the election of 1960, one of the appeals of John F.
Kennedy to the American population was his willingness to
sacrifice himself on behalf of his countrymen. A movie was
made of his exploits as a Navy lieutenant when his patrol boat
was destroyed and his subsequent rescuing of his crew members.
The spirit of sacrifice has beenia factor in Christianity from
the time of Christ. The need for the pastor or the priest to
be someone who has suffered, who has sacrificed, on behalf of
others, or who perhaps by their very lifestyle is suffering or
sacrificing on behalf of others would appear to be an integral
part of gaining mass appeal. Now, movie stars, in general, do
not have to attain this sacrificial element; however, their.
appeal is based on a different premise. Their appeal is
within a storyline and they are mere actors. The Christian
minister or priest is very much the story and their appeal is
intimately connected with the message that they are passing
on.

In both Catholic and Protestant television preaching at
the local level, the preaching did not in any instance
identify sacrifice as part of the Christian lifestyle.
Evangelical preaching in particular emphasized that we have
been saved by the blood of Christ. As a result, our worries,
our cares, our frustrations, our lack of worldly goods would
be alleviated by this faith in Christ. Sacrifice did not play
any role. The ministers, themselves, did not appear to be

sacrificing anything, always appearing 1x) be successful.

77

 

Christianity, itself, far from being a religion for rejects
and misfits and the uneducated, the poor, the lonely, the
downtrodden and the suffering appears to be a religion for the
middle class, for those who want to be part of the in-crowd,
for those who are enjoying the material benefits of this life.
The emphasis on healing and the ability to heal is strong.
Some programs as much as eight or nine times place their
number on the screen encouraging people to call and find
spiritual healing.

What the larger production can escape by the quality of
its production, the smaller churches, at the local level, may
be able to accomplish by people being able to identify with
ministers who are sacrificial. The larger religious
production houses following the architectural model that has
been presented earlier of a building support by a steel frame
with curtain walls can be likened to other prime-time
television productions that involve sets, outdoor scenes,
stage sequences, excellent lighting, costuming, editing, and
overall first-rate production. These programs on prime-time
television are costing upwards of half a million dollars,
something that the local-level church cannot compete with.
Preaching, be it as a homily or as a seromon, will demand more
of the speaker than is currently being given. The minister or
priest as a person of sacrifice needs to be clearly visible.

The name and House of God that the minister seeks to glorify

78

needs to be greater than a Hollywood set or a house with

hanging walls.

79

FOOTNOTES--CHAPTER IV

1. Matthew 13:5. The Jerusniem Bible. (London: Darton
Longman & Todd, 1966).

2. Luke 4:16-21. The Jerusalem Bible. (London: Darton
Longman & Todd, 1966).

3. B. Fletcher. A History of Architecture. (London:
Butterworths, 1987), Chapters 40, 43.

4. R. Murton. Mass Persuasion. (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1946), p. 33

5. Ibid., p. 7.

80

n ' ArnrYa--.'

CHAPTER V

FROM THEOLOGY TO TELEVISION

"To God I speak Spanish
To Women, Italian
To Men, French
And to my horse, German"
Emperor Charles V(1550-1558)

Sine cera (Yours sincerely, without wax)
Anonymous

I conceive some scattered. notions about a
superior power to be of singular use for the common
people, as furnishing excellent materials to keep

children quiet when they grow peevish, and
providing topics of amusement in a tedious winter-
night.

Jonathan Swift
An Article Against Abolishing Christianity(l708)

"The word television. The word is half Latin and

half Greek. No good can come of it."
C. P. Scott(1846-1932)

The study of theology is more often than not referred to
when one wishes to discuss God, the term theology coming from
the Greek, Theos, meaning God, and Logos, meaning Word. The
sense in which we still use it is in its scholastic form
dating from around the 12th century when Appleard spoke about
theology as an intellectual discipline that dealt with the

81

 

knowledge of God. Theology, when true to itself, is a
reflector of the questions of its age; and today finds itself
at a crossroads.

From the scholastics onward, theology, both Catholic and
Protestant, dealt with the cosmos in an objective manner.
They traced back into a philosophical, metaphysical foundation
to a first cause. Theology today uses the person as a
subject, a far more anthropological emphasis on the nature of
being and the explanations that the subject demands from a
Supreme Being in an attempt to analogically understand that
Supreme Being.

Theology today sees itself as a revelatory science that
has a past, a present, and a future. The priority always
being the present, but the paradigm needs past, present, and
future for a complete synthesis. Theology is always secondary
to faith. Theology is the human person at their best in a
discursive mode on the questions which befuddle the mind and
transfix the gaze on things greater in image but lesser to the
grasp. Since the middle of the last century, the Catholic
Church is an example of a church which has had to come to
terms with the notion that the philosopher is not here merely
to understand the world, but to change it. In its theology,
the Catholic Church has grasped this notion and seen that the
church’s mission is not so much to relive the Christ of
history, but to actually be the Christ of today. Its theology

is deeply engaged in what transpires in the world and is not

82

something for coffee house discussion and left behind with the
tip.

Currently within the Christian tradition and the Catholic
Church in particular, (we shall use the Catholic Church as the
basis of our discussion for a period in this chapter) theology
has been divided into three subdisciplines: fundamental,
systematic, and practical theology. Fundamental theology,
engaging in critical inquiry, examining truths and claims,
using rational argument. Systematic theology assumes belief
in religious claims, acknowledges fidelity to :1 religious
confession, is a revealer of a religious tradition, and
practical theology concerns itself with the lived experience
informed by its own theory and by the practice of the social,
political, cultural, and pastoral experiences of those
involved in the theological moment.

Television and religious television rarely look at the
questions of fundamental theology. More often than not it
will look at practical theology relating beliefs and truths to
a particular tradition as they would become discursive within
a particular society and its ethical goals. Examples of this
would be the priest or minister taking a Scripture passage,
the priest using Catholic tradition, the teaching authority of
the church and Scriptural analysis to relate this particular
passage to questions of capital punishment, paying of taxes,
divorce, abortion. 'The Protestant.minister of the Evangelical

strain using a fundamental, literal interpretation of the

83

Bible, to say that Scripture says this about divorce, this
about abortion, this about capital punishment, and that this
is the Word of God unchangeable and unalterable. It is not
common for Christian ministers of the Evangelical, the
mainline Protestant, or the Catholic tradition to engage in
critical inquiry or fundamental theology to examine the truths
of God’s existence and to use logical, rational reasoning to
pursue these matters before a television audience.

The doing of theology is often what is referred to as
religion. Religion meaning to tie or to fasten to connect
oneself with. Theology is the science of God. Religion is
the act whereby I attach myself to a system. On television
the religious minister is normally calling one to hear The
Word of God, to have a religious experience. In the words of
the Gospel, and so it was "that John the Baptist appeared in
the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the
forgiveness of sins".1

Religious.experience goes throughia series of conversions
and stages. The Canadian theologian, Bernard Lonergan,
outlined different conversions, and it is against these stages
that we will test the possibility of theology and television
being compatible with each other.

Lonergan outlines four types of conversion:
intellectual, moral, religious, and Christian. Conversion is
understood as the opening up of a new horizon or a radical

difference between a held premise and a new premise. A

84

conversion is not new knowledge about itself, rather it is
entry into a brand new realm of understanding and knowing.
Lonergan used these four conversions from a Christian world
view and did not apply them to any system other than a
Christian one. Lonergan would also hold that all Christians
have experienced these different conversions to a certain
degree, at least implicitly. The intent is to look at them
objectively and to relate them to religious television in the
public access mode.

Inteliectual Convergipn is best defined as knowing what
knowing is. Even the cleanest of physical scientists has to
grasp the world beyond themselves through the mediation of
their-operations. Thus the act of measuring something may use
objective instrumentalityy but the inner'meaning, the implicit
knowing of what the measurement means is an act of
consciousness. The physical scientist in this sense is no
different from the philosopher or the theologian who will look
at community, democracy, television, economics or culture and
see that the operations needed to know these are not visible
realities, but rather groups of ideas and values that operate
in communities who use the same consciousness streams to know
them and to know that they know them. The world then that the
physical scientists creates, the anthropologist, the
theologian, is a very fragile place. It is a construction of
reality by fallible minds. At times the physical scientist or

the theologian will fail to ask relevant questions, refuse to

85

face important questions, will pay little attention to input
of others, and more often thanrnot, the physical scientist has
been on a par with the theologian for refusing to accept
change even when it happens in his laboratory. In all human
transactions, there is human bias. The person who goes
throughticonscious intellectual conversion realizes that they
are constructing the world and they are aware of the sets used
in the<construction, and they are aware that they are the ones
who are doing it. Intellectual conversion allows the ability
to question reality with known information, theoretical
information, and illusionary information the stuff of dreams.
For the television minister on public access, this is a direct
challenge to ideas, such as community, family, religious
practice. In the 1992 Presidential election, much discussion
has been given to the state of the American family within a
traditional value system. Our understanding being that there
is a primary breadwinner, there’s a member who stays at home
to look after the children. The social scientists have
pointed out that the current state of the American family is
that one in five families now constitute this traditional
pattern. The Lansing State Journa , quoting a report by the
Population Reference bureau said: "The Ozzie and Harriet
model of 1950’s television fame -- a breadwinning husband and
a wife‘who stayed home with the children -- once, the dominant

pattern in America. Now, one in five married couples with

2

children fits that stereotype." The Lansing State Journal

86

reported about 36% of all American families are married
couples with children, but a growing number of those are
blended as in "step families." The study went on to say,
"valuing the family should not be cenfused with valuing a

3 The programs viewed on public

particular' family’ form."
access television from the Catholic Outreach Mass to the
Evangelical programming spoke to an intellectual conversion
that was of a prior age. They spoke, in fact, in the area of
family to the type of family that has been discussed in the
1992 Presidential election and as reported by the Population
Reference Bureau as being sorely tested. The Population
Reference Bureau pointing out that a particular form of family
life is not to be confused with the value of family life. The
religious broadcasting on pubic access television fails to
address the question of the increasing poverty of mothers
raising families by themselves, the increasing inner city
crime and drug rates, rising drop out rates in school, on the
level of intellectual conversion. Rather, the approach is to
seek answers in the realm of Christian conversion. This is
like using apples to speak about oranges.

inteiiectual Conversion, then, is a process that is open
to all human beings, human beings being able to reflect upon
themselves and know that they are thinking. Intellectual
conversion allows the person to entertain any question, to

criticize any belief, and to expand one’s horizons to the

theoretical, the illusionary, and away from the practical and

87

the here and now. Public access religious cabling in East
Lansing and in Lansing seems to have failed to challenge the
viewer to an intellectual conversion as part of the Christian
conversion. Religious public access in Lansing and East
Lansing has bought into behavior patterns, interpretation
modes, and language usage that is stereotypical, expected, and
populist. Religious public access television is alive and
well in Lansing and East Lansing, but the program producers do
not challenge for intellectual conversions. In the course of
this study, not one of the program originators spoke about the
need to bring their audience to a new level of knowing. The
intent of the programmers was to obey the command to preach
"The Good News" and the grace of God would do the rest.

The second type of conversion that Bernard Lonigan speaks
about is Mornl Convepgion. And here he is referring to a
change in one’s basis of choice from satisfaction to value.
Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Nnrcissism says, "The
media give substance to and thus intensifies narcissistic
dreams of fame and glory, encourages the common man to
identify himself with the stars and to hate the herd and make
it more and more difficult for him to accept the banality of

4 Later Lasch, in the same chapter,

every day existence."
says, "The modern propaganda of commodities and the good life
has sanctioned impulse gratification and made it unnecessary

for the id to apologize for its wishes or disguise their

88

 

 

grandiose propositions, but this same propaganda has made
failure and loss insupportable."5

Vice President Dan Quayle, in his famous Murphy Brown
speech in May, 1992, said, "Our inner cities are filled with
childrenthaving children with people who have not been able to
take advantage of educational opportunities with people who
are dependent on drugs or the narcotic of welfare . . . This

6 The

poverty is . . . fundamentally a poverty of values".
Judeo-Christian fabric of American society enshrined in its
constitution and the values that it spelled out had, by the
19608, been so seriously questioned as to be disregarded when
a new set of understandings were being forged for the latter
half of the 20th century. This new set of understandings were
to be the values on which the community of American society
would test itself and score itselfh However, since the 19603,
no consensus seems to have emerged on what is to replace the
Judeo-Christian value system on which America will continue to
base its practices and its laws. The talk in this country now
is of a culture war, a war in which there are defenders of
traditional values and those who take a existentialist
approach to the forging of community relationships.

The Christian churches find themselves very much a part
of this discussion of a culture war of a value war. The
country’s id was founded on a Christian-Judeo ethic from which

flowed its community relationships, its laws, its value

system, its sense of right and wrong. Therefore, when these

89

elements of the nation’s soul are being questioned, the
churches find themselves at the heart of the discussion. The
voice of the church, Evangelical to Catholic, to
Nonconformist is no longer a unified voice on questions such
as abortion, homosexual rights, the use of nuclear force, and
thehdistribution of the wealth of the country. They have also
found themselves challenged in an attempt to accommodate the
voice of cultures that may have been suppressed, such as the
African-American culture, and the native American culture.
And finally, they have found themselves coming to terms with
a population that has come to terms with value-added
packaging. This is packaging that is intended to please the
eye and fool the intellect, much as the architecture of the
country was overwhelmed with the Bauhaus System of building.
So packaging has been produced to enhance the meaning of more
is less. In the realm of religious life, the churches
struggle as they try to offer'more consolation and demand less
sacrifice. The Christian lifestyle has been reduced to a set
of self-satisfying platitudes that give comfort to trying
questions and dull the need for intellectual and moral
conversion.

As in intellectual conversion, in moral conversion there
is a chasm between obtaining satisfaction from some thing or
person and seeing the value of the thing or the person in
itself and then relating it to the world. If society seems to

be obsessed with more is less and packaging is everything,

90

. '.I. my m—F

 

then, too, the religious minister on public access television
seems to have become enamored with satisfaction and failed to
bring himself and his audience to the question that moral
conversion raises, namely, is there a GOOD over and against
which I, the community in which I live, and my world, can
judge itself? Religious public access television, as in the
case of intellectual conversion, does not seem to raise this
question to its viewers. Religious public access television
is concerned with bringing Christ to the people. The overall
message that comes from Evangelical and Protestant usage of
public access television is that we are sinners and that we
can be saved by the "Blood of Christ". Some of the actions
that are called sins are sometimes mentioned--drug addiction,
murder--but these sins are not sins that are based against a
moral conversion that sees a universal objective good, rather
they are sins that are based against the personhood of Christ
and therefore are subject to transient interpretation,
depending on the minister’s relationship with Christ and
understanding of Christ’s role in the world. Catholic usage
of public access television in Lansing and East Lansing is
less extensive and a pattern does not seem to emerge on the
question of the universal good on the level of moral
conversion. However, practical Catholic Theology would
include an understanding of natural law which would, in
essence, mean that Catholic preaching and programming would

Speak to a fundamental objective good. Even then, in the

91

confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court
of the United States, the specter of Thomas’s belief in a
natural law was raised. Natural law did not become an issue
in the hearings, but the commentary that surrounded the
discussion was derisive of natural law and spoke to a society
that had rejected an objective good in the sense of natural
law and was basing its principles on existential ethics.

This is the society to which the minister on public
access television speaks. Lansing and East Lansing is but a
small part of the cosmos of television in the United States
and assuming that it is a typical reflection of communities
across the country, then the decline of objective standards
for the minister and for the bearer of the word is spoken of,
cutthe one hand, as something to be sadly missed and something
that the nation will suffer as a result of its loss, and on
the other hand, the question is set forth as in the case of
the American family that the value of family must not be
misinterpreted for any particular structure that may emerge of
a family unit. The religious minister in the preaching and
the programming on religious public access seems to have both
feet firmly in the air and not know which way to turn on this
issue, and as such, the issue is avoided.

A solution to the dilemma may lie in the notion of
sacrifice. The elements of self-sacrifice and community
sacrifice are not present in the programming and preaching.

The ministers shy away from sacrifice because the society of

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which they are part and parcel of rejects the notion of
sacrifice, rejects the notion of pain, and accepts that "more
is less" and that appearance is substance and substance can be
bought and sold.

In 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the newly elected
President of the United States of America, in his Inaugural
Address said: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but
what you can do for your country." The ministers, preachers,
and priests on television on a national level are seldom heard
to speak about love of neighbor as an element of religion,
rather'they speak more in the Protestant tradition which tends
to concentrate on God’s love for us. Since the Middle Ages at
the time of the reformation, Protestantism and Catholicism do
not look at the notion of love of God in a similar vein. The
national evangelical ministers, when they speak aboutwwhat God
can do for you and me in our lives, speak out of their
tradition. This tradition is a reaction to the practical
theology of the Middle Ages which emphasized sin, doom, death
and despair. The reaction being God has such great love for
us that we will never be lost if we once acknowledge Him as
our Lord and Savior. The first and the greatest of the
commandments, then, that Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God,
with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and thy whole
mind does not receive much emphasis on popular religious
preaching in Lansing and East Lansing. The approach of the

Protestant churches with its emphasis on God’s love for us

93

seems to have won the day. The field is squarely in the hands
of the preacherswwho emphasize miracles for suffering, healing
for despair, and blessings for poverty. The Blood of Christ
is all encompassing and all saving. 'The jprograms from
emphasizing that a miracle can happen in your life today, to
call this number for help drive home again and again the
message that we are the recipients of God’s love and to
paraphrase President Kennedy, "Ask not what you can do for
your God, but what your God can do for you."

Religious Conversion is the third of Lonergan’s
conversions and falling in love with God. Religious
Conversion is a response attitude for we are already loved by
God. Religious Conversion outside of television seems to show
more unity between the churches as the first commandment to
love God is emphasized. It is neglected on television, but
emphasized in the local focus. Religious conversion is a love
story and love story means that a horizon is shared with
another. A panorama that is greater than self becomes exposed
and I can become a part of this new vista by acceptance of it.
Above all, religious conversion is a dialectic, a painful,
creative, and unending dialectic between two persons. God’s
love on the one hand and the respondent’s love on the other.
There is a tension in this dialectic and there are levels
within the dialectic. God’s love of the creature demands a
love that is of the inner self and a love that receives

meaning and that is motivated by things of value in this

94

 

 

world. The love of God by the recipient inwardly is a
commitment and outwardly a storyline for action. The call by
the preacher on television to experience the love of God
through miraculous events in our lives is to turn the process
somewhat upside down. For we know in reality that those who
are loved do not necessarily rely on tokens and trinkets as
proof or evidence of that love; we have to make a decision of
acceptance that we are loved. It’s a decision that we believe
that somebody loves us. Within our culture, the act of making
a decision has been reduced to proofs on a scientific level.
However» as we saw (earlier, even science relies on. the
intellect to give meaning to its propositions. It is possible
to eliminate objective, scientific variables and replace them
with philosophical concepts and feelings and still arrive at
a verifiable decision that I am loved without recourse to the
trinkets of materialism to provide substantial evidence of my
being loved.

Practical theology' would base the evidence for its
decision that‘we are loved not on the materials and gifts that
we have received, and less today on the order of beauty within
the universe, but more on the fact that we ourselves are
capable of love. If we accept that we can and do love, then
we are called to make a decision of acceptance that we, in
turn, are loved and this decision gives value and meaning to
our lives. It is based in the intellect and does not rely on

the gifts of the preacher or of the television evangelist and

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their promises of succor in this world. The problem that
religious broadcasting is up against is not so much a problem
of the interpretation of theology and the transmission of that
interpretation to the viewer, rather it is a problem of
populist cultural domination of a medium and the nonacceptance
of a deviant viewpoint. Television presents a culture that is
highly beneficent, a culture whereby all viewers can
participate fully with the amount of talent that they have and
the amount of effort that they are capable of. It is a
culture as has been stated earlier that is populist, that
believes in the transient nature of things and is
existentialist in its value system.

For the minister, priest, or preacher to rise against
this populist culture in a deviant fashion would require the
minister to step) outside his or her cultural heritage,
possibly his or her traditions and certainly his or her way of
life. But perhaps this is what is being called for. The
preaching of the early Apostles was in line with the preaching
of John the Baptist -- repent, turn away from your sins, and
be saved. The Gospel teaches that it is harder for a rich man
to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle. Religious programming on public access in
the Lansing and East Lansing area, in general, seems to have
interpreted its theological foundations in the light of this

populist culture and appears to have little to say to the

96

 

population at large. Its message seems to lack personal
example by the preachers.

St. Mathew’s Gospel states, "When the Son of man comes in
His glory, escorted by all the angels, then he will take His
seat on His throne of glory. All the nations will be
assembled before Him, and he will separate men one from
another as the Shepherd separates sheep from goats, he will
place the sheep on His right hand and the goats on His left.
Then the King will say to those on his right hand, come you
whom my Father has blessed. Take for your heritage prepared

for you since the foundation of the world. I was hungry, and

you gave me food. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I
was a stranger, and you made me welcome. Naked, and you
clothed me. Sick and you visited me, in prison and you came

to see me. Then the virtuous will say to Him in reply, Lord,
when did you see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and gave
you drink, when did you see you a stranger and make you
welcome, naked, and clothed you, sick or in prison and go to
see you, and the King will answer. I tell you solemnly, in so
far as you did this to one of the least of these brethren of
mine, you did it to me."7

Christian Convergion is the acceptance that Christ is
God. Here again there is a leap, a quantum leap, a leap into
the dark, a leap of faith from God to Jesus. If in an

intellectual conversion, the gapfbetween the mindnand the real

is bridged, then in Christian conversion, the gap between God

97

and Jesus is bridged. Religious conversion is conversion to
a supreme good, a God. Christian conversion names that God.
Religious conversion is a falling in love with God. Christian
conversion. names that love as Jesus Christ. Christian
conversion allows the person to authentisize themselves
against another person. IkiChristian conversion, the follower
truly encounters God. The encounter is immediate and not
remote, it comes packed with relevance, meanings, images, and
values that take significance in a particular location in
time. For the Christian, Christ is the Alpha and Omega of
their religious conversion. The teachings of Christ are the
pathways, the doors, and the horizons that the Christian walks I
on, dreams about, and opens to. The teachings of Christ are
very specific in those who are authored the first accounts of
his life, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The teachings are
specific about how Christ will place a value on.a person, The
story in Matthew about the Last Judgment speaks to the second
commandment, Thou shalt love thy brother as thyself. For
Christ, love of God, and love of neighbor were intimately,
inextricably found together. The poor and the down trodden
were friends of Christ. The Gospels are clear that not all
the hungry and the poor, those suffering diseases of mind and
b°dy were cured by Christ. Christ probably only healed a few
0f the suffering people that he actually encountered. To the
r9313: he gave the command: Love thy neighbor as thyself.

Television ministries on a national level and on the local

98

level in Lansing and.East Lansing and public access television
seem to have forgotten this part of the Christian message.
Rather they emphasize accepting Christ as Savior, being washed
IthiS blood, and receiving the many blessings. This doesrun
counter to the vast proportion of the written accounts of the
life of Jesus and his Apostles. Simone Weil once said, "We
are well aware that the good that we possess at present in the
form of wealth, power, consideration, friends, the love of
those we love, the well being of those we love and so on is
not sufficient. Yet we believe that on the day we get a

little more, we shall be satisfied. We believe this because

we lie to ourselves. If we really reflect for a moment, we.
know it is false . . . we have only to imagine all our desires
satisfied; after a time we shall become discontented. We

should want something else, and we shall be miserable through
not knowing what to want. A thing that everyone can do is
keep his attention fixed upon this truth".8 Simone Weil, the
patriot, the Christian who could never become a Christian, the
woman who cried at the thought of pain and grief and sorrow of
others. She reflected. deeply that the message of the
Christian gospel does call for a conversion. Christian
Conversion is a radical acknowledgement that we cannot be
satisfiedwwith good health, with wealth, with the trappings of
materialism or even of friends, that we are not satisfied with
all the things that many televangelists seem to offer

precisely because we believe in Christ. Rather, we are

99

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I"

 

satisfied when we renounce the "I" and let go to let another
enter in. Televangelism following the line of mainstream
television seeks to fill the people with their desires and
wants. Entertainment has become the business of television.
Entertainment sometimes seems to be the business of religious
television, even at the local access level. The idea that one
is to renounce oneself, pick up one’s cross, be it in personal
circumstances or the cross of another, is not the message that
universally comes across from religious broadcasting. If the
business of television in the United States is entertainment
and the business of American culture is entertaining the
masses, then it appears that religious television has learned
its lesson well, that it is a mirror reflection of the most
popular aspects of North American culture and the idea of
needing a conversion from self to love of other runs counter
to the prevailing religious sentiment that God loves me and I
will continue to receive many benefits and blessings if I once
acknowledge my sin and my being loved by God.

From the earliest days of Christianity, those who delved
into the writings of the Scriptures and those who would lead,
have tried to impress on the followers that the "other" is
more important than self that in finding the "self," one has
to go through the "other". From its earliest days,
Christianity because it drew on the things of this world to
speak about the things of another world has opened and closed

the pandora box of many of the sciences that are in vogue

100

 

today--anthropology, sociology, phenomenology, psychology.
Within the realm of Christianity, these sciences take on a
holistic meaning. For Christianity alone seeks to offer
answers to questions that these sciences, great as their area
of examination may be, tend to shy away from. Christianity
will draw sociology and psychology together when it speaks of
the Christian ideal of community. Christianity alone paints
a picture of who we are and the world that we live in that is
with us from our conception to our death.

Long before the modern sciences discovered that the
solution to many of the problems that it raised lay in the
essence of the correctly stated question, Christianity had
tried to refine and define the questions which it would
answer. Christianity has stated that give me the child until
he is seven and I will give you the man, a dictum that has
been followed in recent times by both capitalism and
communism.

For the minister presenting him/herself on television, an
understanding of the stages of growth that his/her audience go
through is of equal importance and runs parallel to the
different types of conversion that a person may have in their
life. Traditionally, the spirituality in the western
tradition outlined three stages of growth: the purgative, the
illuminative, and unitive. The purgative is a recognition of
one’s limitations and in spiritual terms of one’s sins. The

illuminative is a growth stage of bonding and relationship

101

- ...—av"

with another, and the unitive is that stage in which the two
become one and either speaks with the mind and heart and love
of the other. James W. Fowler, in Stages of Faith, took these
traditional stages and applied and cross-referenced them to
other developmental sciences, taking Piaget’s Intellectua_l
Stages, Erikson’s Ppychologicnl Stages of Develgpnent, and
Kohlberg’s MornigDevelopnent and applied them to stages of
faith development. The Christian minister who addresses his
community or congregation needs to know that as television has
become more audience segmented, that this segmentation can be
but a mere reflection of the nature of the human being,
firstly, in the developmental stages and secondly in the
interest stages.

The remainder of this chapter will look at the interest
stages as television stages and relate them to the faith
stages of Fowler with some cross-references to Kohlberg’s
Moral Develgpnent Sta es, Piaget’s Intellectuai Stages of

Developnent and Erikson’s Psychological Stages of Developmen .

The minister in the pulpit and before the camera can either
address the assembled community as one single audience and
dilute the message so that there seems to be an attraction for
each of the various segments of the audience or can be aware
of the segmentation that naturally occurs in the form of
development stages and address homily, sermon or lecture to
those developmental stages, knowing that parts will appeal to

some more than others.

102

 

From the type of food that a person likes to the area
that one likes to live in to the type of math problem one can
solve, there is progression. With the onset of age, sometimes
regression in one’s capabilities and one’s likes and dislikes
also occurs. There is likewise growth in television awareness
and attitude formation. There are stages in television
watching, Stages that the minister should be aware of when he
stands in front of a camera, these stages can be paralleled to
the faith stages in one’s life at a minimum and at a maximum
paralleled to other theorists stages of development from

Kohlberg, Piaget to Erikson.

Stages of Television Development

Kinetipcopic Stnge of Televigion Viewing

In the kinetiscopic stage, the child is attracted to the
television by light and darkness, by color and colors, by
movement, by sound, including the human, the musical and
robotic. These stimulators are important as precursors of
stimuli that will continuously occur in the child’s life as
they pass through other television stages and will help to
frame the environment within which they will live and the use
or misuse of their senses, feelings and beliefs. Television
at this stage addresses the child’s limited attention span
throughrcontinuously'changing sets and scenes, changing colors
and.changing sounds. In sharpicontrast to the known, soothing

tones of the parents or other siblings, or even the noises

103

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within the house, like the striking clock at midnight, or the
noises familiar of cars passing by on the street. Television
offers to the child at this stage an unparralled number and
depth of experiences that individuals have not had to embrace
since society first started to record its teachings and
beliefs and create structures within which it could organize
and create order.

Children at this age are experiencing stimuli that their
later world will truly reflect in their attitudes,
perceptions, feelings, intellectual processes and faith. Very
quickly the ego, which is emerging in the child as a result of
itS‘willingness to forgo the continual presence of the primary
caregiver, is assailed by a multitude of stimuli the
consequences of which in today’s society we as yet do not
fully understand or comprehend.

Traditionally, the result of the loss of the primary
caregiver to another room still meant a host of familiar
objects and artifacts within the young child’s reach and grasp
and understanding. Now it is possible for a child of three to
be in a room that has a television set on which visually and
audibly acts out a murder for every night of their lives.
Therefore, the very basic trust that is the first prerequisite
in Erikson’s first stage of development has been challenged to
such a degree that when the minister speaks of love on
television, this child has lived through a host of unknown

experiences to the minister. These have been incorporated by

104

 

Fr .1 ‘bMI-u .-

television into the development of that child. The child may
not respond in a traditionally expected mode to the minister’s
calling.

The parents of today and the producers of television
programs both know that the scheduling of cartoons will draw
a large child population to watch the television. These
cartoons from Tom and Jerry to the Teenage Ninja Turtles of
today discuss the primary issues of good and evil, but in a
physical manner using force to ensure that good prevails and
evil is dispelled. Likewise, the child watching in a room
where adult television programs are being broadcast is
subjected to crimes that would be unspoken of a few decades
ago. Two issues are being presented to an extremely young
mind for consideration. First, that good and evil must
struggle in a physical nature against each other, and second,
that the hero, the one who is to be trusted, is a deviant that
is outside the reach and grasp of the normal human being.

It is to this young person that the television minister
or priest addresses him or herself. Not alone has this person
had their basic trust challenged, but their faith, simplistic
as it may be in their world, is also challenged. Why not then
challenge the religious message of the minister, why not put
it on a par with all the other stimuli that the young child
has to understand and assimilate. Finally, through an act of
omission, the young child has heros and heroines without

religious content. Traditionally, this religious content has

105

 

been seen as fundamental in the earliest development of a
child. Erikson, in Child nnd Society states:

The parental fate that supports the trust emerging

in. the newborn. has throughout history had its

institutional safeguard (and, (n1 occasion, found

its greatest enemy) in organized religion. Trust

born of care, is, in fact, the touchstone of the

actuality of a given religion.
The understanding of the world that the Christian religion has
is not shared with the child at the same intensity as other
stimuli are allowed to enter its life. The sharing of
Christianity with the child is at best piecemeal and in an
off-on stance. When things move more slowly, when a person
may expect a limited number of stimuli in their lives,
especially in their early childhood, then the opportunity for
Christianity to have a competitive chance would to have been
more real. The minister, when using television, is using a
medium that almost suffocates from its vectors and stimuli.
The minister on public access religious television in East
Lansing and Lansing does not seem to address this question of
competing stimuli and their representations of the world.

The child from its earliest moments to the age of seven
encounters its first stage of faith, Intuitive Projective
Faith. This .... "is the fantasy-filled imitative phase in
which the child can be powerfully and permanently influenced
by examples, moods, actions and stories of the physical faith

N

of primally related adults". The strength of this stage of

106

 

faith is the association of the child with adults and adult
type situations.

Our world teaches us firstly through the multiplicity of
child programs on television that adults and children even
children at their earliest stages, are spending less time
together. Secondly, there is not a single program on
religious television in public access in Lansing and Ehst
Lansing that is addressed to children of this age group.
Piaget’s functional invariants(cognitive processes that are
inborn, universal and independent of age) of accommodation,
assimilation, and organization are left to the Hollywood
makers of cartoons and children’s programs to be capitalized
on. The processes that are basic and essential to
intellectual functioning, according to Piaget, that.are inborn
and universal are not addressed at this stage by religious
broadcasters in the area. The accommodation to the external
world by the child is made to the Teenage Ninja Turtle and its
equivalent where children will stand up in front of the screen
and become engrossed in the Turtle world, imitating sword
fights, calling themselves after the names of the Ninja
Turtles, one being Michelangelo and one being Donetello, etc.
The child assimilates the attributes and world view of these
children’s programs, cartoons, Sesame Street and the lonesome
hero who bases his/her justice on a situational type value. On
an organizational level, the child can be expected to create

schema that reflect the schema seen on television. These are

107

the values and moral conCepts that are placed upon the basic
building blocks of the child. These intellectual acts are
placed in the seat of knowledge, in a larger organization, to
be used again and again when the child creates wishes to
problem solve. The individual acts or role playing to solve
the problem may vary, but the organization and process
according to Piaget remains the same. Fowler speaks about the
beauty' of the birth. of the imagination. at this stage,
imagination that will help in the transition to different
stages of faith. Television, on the other hand, while
subscribing to the birth of the imagination in the child,
seeks to use it for its own end. The child’s formation does
not seem to be a concern of the religious broadcaster at the
kinetiscopic stage of television viewing.
Telescopic Stnge of Televigion Viewing

Telescopic viewing is formed usually at the adolescent
stage out of interest and a need for a feeling of mutuality.
The‘youngladolescent identifies with particular situations and
will use them as a basis for problem solving and for value
creation. The adolescent uses telescopic viewing as a
measuring stick for themselves and for their'acceptance within
given peer group image making situations. M-TV addresses
telescopic viewing. M-TV uses the speed of cartoon situations
by dramatic cuts, camera angles, lighting, music and combines
it with the audio wording to express philosophies of life,

solutions to situations, and approaches to sexuality,

108

authority, love, money, family, good, and evil. The stage of
faith that closely resembles this telescopic television stage
is the Mythic-Literal Faith Stage.

In this Mythic-Literal Stage, the God of immediate and

definitive justice appears. Right and wrong are clearly
defined. The right will be rewarded and those who commit
wrong will be punished. This is a world of symbols and

storytelling of beliefs and Observances, traditions, and
occultic expressions. The mythical is entwined in the real
and the story is part of the truth. In this stage, the child
learns the stories of the scriptures. It is also possible in
this stage that the growth of the person will stop. That a
literal interpretation of the Scriptures and the God of good
and evil become dominant in one’s life.

Television appears to enhance this mythic-literal stage.
The telescopic viewer will see the drama of life told in a
song or a poem, symbolized in motion or in vision, told
through different sounds. This stage is allegorical with the
struggle within, It. is not the struggle itself, but it
portrays universal elements whichineed individualizing acts to
conquer and to tie it to the individual. Thus the individual
can begin to come in contact with the I that searches for a
reason to be and for a reasonableness to carry on. This is
the stage where the rebellious adolescentwwill refuse to go to
churchibecause peer groups are not attending Church. Here the

adolescent enters the Formal Operations Stage. According to

109

Piaget, this stage encompasses having the ability to connect
past, present and future in various hypotheses and
predictions.

The difficulty in reducing any human being’s life
development, from childhood to old age, to a series of stages
that are closed, is highlighted by Kohlberg and his attempt to
look at the person from moral stages. The second stage of
faith and the telescopic stage of television viewing do not
fit nicely into Kohlberg’s moral stages. Kohlberg would hold
that in the second stage of development, there is much more
reciprocity involved, that the actions of the adolescent are
often determined by an attitude of "you scratch my back, and
I’ll scratch yours," and not so much by loyalty, gratitude, or
justiceu IHowever, there are elements of fairness involved and

the world is interpreted in a much more pragmatic way than one

might imagine. This type of analysis of moral dilemmas is
attempted in 21 Junp Street and Quantum Leap. The other

 

television shows that seem to have high interest level for
this television stage and faith stage are Beverly Hills 90210
and the game shows. At the other end of the spectrum, you
have Mnrried with Children and the soap operas.

None of these programs, while diverse in nature,
structure and format, show overtly a Christian perspective on
the issues involved. It is as though Christianity is not part
of this nation. It is as though the laws that 21 Jump Street

seeks to enforce are not founded on the Constitution which, in

110

 

turn, is founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic. This fact is
ignored on programs like 21 Jump Street and Beverly Hillg
_9_0_2_1__Q and comes directly in conflict in such programs as
.Mnrried with Children and the soap operas. Tbe'minister'who
appears (n1 public access television is firstly' competing
through a channel that does not have the drawing power of the
networks or of the cable television channels. Secondly, the
ministers and the programs on public access that are religious
in nature in Lansing, East Lansing, and Meridian Township do
not have the finances, do not have the expertise, and do not
have the creative story people to compete with national
programming, funding, and expertise. By default the minister
cannot address the issues that appear on these programs from
Marriedmwith Children to 21 Junp Street and All in the aniiy.
Yet these are the very issues that appeal to this telescopic
group of viewers. The minister when he/she speaks of ethical
or moral situations, be they justice on an economic level or
sexuality on a moral level, he/she is unable to provide the
building blocks necessary for intellectual, moral, religious
or Christian conversions.

131the power and limits of a vision, Rozen, commenting on
the work of Erikson, says,

I will speak of moral learning as an aspect of

childhood: moral learning and of ideological
experinentntion as a part of adolescence; and of

ethicnl congolidntion as an adult task. As we know
from the study of psychosexuality, the earlier
stages are not replaced, but develop according to a
epigenetic principle--that is, they are absorbed

111

into a. hieralrchic system of increasing
differentiation.
In. IPs cholo Toda , Howard Muson, in an] article called:
Moral thinking: Can it be thought? says "many experts will
agree with Piaget that moral judgment does seem to unfold in
a developmental pattern.and Kohlberg’s theory has provided the
most comprehensive effort to describe it to date".12

The telescopic stage in television viewing builds on the
kinetiscoPic stage. The use of public access for religious
broadcasting appears to believe that its audience by a process
akin to osmosis or the Grace of God will understand where the
minister or priest is coming from without actually taking
these first two stages of television viewing patterns into
account and incorporating them into its format and into the
structure of its content.

At the corresponding faith level stage the person has
looked at their peer group and made decisions to follow or to
beat another path in their television viewing and life
orientation. Styles of approach to God, the church, and the
world have been formed by the myths of parents. These myths,
iJiturn, have been put against the spotlight of the world that
the adolescent has encountered on their own. Sometimes the
myth is found believable; other times, the the world teaches
that the myth and the morality that surrounded it and the
faith of believe in God is no longer acceptable as was first

presented in their early childhood. At the third stage of

112

faith, the person seeks to create their own myths, seeks to
create their own world view, and starts to fashion a God that
is believable for them. Following the thought of Erikson,
there is identity confusion in the person that is transferred
into the faith stage. For Kohlberg, this age group would be
struggling with issues of law and order, that are again
carried over into the faith stage, the person is coming to
grips with a vengeful, powerful God, but a God who is also
just and forgiving. Piaget sees the person moving into the
stage of formal operations, allowing the young person to use
the powers of their intelligence to schematize and to build
whole pictures of the way their world works and how they can
understand it.

Perhaps this is too much for the minister to try to
understand when composing his/her lecture or sermon or
television show. Nevertheless, this is what the social
sciences and psychology seem to be telling him about the
building blocks and how they are formed and placed together in
the human being. So, too, the faith of the person is
responding to these developmental stages and trying to
articulate itself through the lived experience of the given
individual. The minister, often ill prepared, often lacking
education and funding to tackle these issues will not address
them on television. The minister, by definition, does not
have to address people at this stage of development, but the

national programmers are. The sheer weight of programming

113

that the young adult has to sift through and endure without
any support of a religious nature addressing their problems
and the identity struggles is too great for most. For most
adolescents, the value system that they are trying to fashion
and shape for themselves would appear to be left high and dry.
And without being able to substantiate the assertion, most
adolescents would seem to be absorbing the values, the
developmental stages, and the overall world view and cultural
taboos and norms of the producers of network programs from All
in the Family to 21 Junp Street to Beverly Hills 90210 and to
Murphy Brown. At the local level of public access in Lansing
and East Lansing, no explicit programming is designed to
address the issues, no homilies are prepared, and no lectures
given to address the issues as seen through the eyes of a

person at this faith and television stage.

_§cillg§copic or Telesis Stnge of Television Viewing

 

Television viewers at this stage are viewers with a
fluctuating attention span. These are viewers who can make
intelligent decisions on the type of programming they will

watch. Selecting the programs that they wish to view on a

basis other than peer group pressure, right or wrong, or a

selection process that merely repeats the programs that they
saw their parents watching when they were young children.
This is the age group that roughly corresponds to 18 to 54.

The oscilloscopic and telesis viewer is parallel in the

114

any.

 

developmental stage to Erikson’s stages of intimacy versus
isolation and generativity versus stagnation. For Kohlberg
thiS‘would be parallel to the social contract stage and Piaget
would still be in the formal operation stage.

Once again the problem of placing television viewing
stages into developmental and faith stages is apparent as
different stages from different developmental schools.

Erikson’s developmental stage from 18 to 45 covers both

television stages, the telescopic and the
oscilloscopic/telesis stage (M? viewing. Nevertheless, the
comparison remains possible and reliable. The corresponding

periods in Erikson’s stages are for intimacy versus
isolation(within an age range of 18 to 30) which is the
question of love; and his generativity versus stagnation
stage is often situated in the years 30 to 45 and centers on
caring. In these stages Erikson sees the desire for fusion
with others and sometimes a significant other. The desire to
commit or affiliate with another and the ethical strength for
honor and commitment. In the later stages of generativity
versus stagnation (care), starts the belief in the species,
itself, and the desire for charity toward others. Bathe
television stages, the telescopic and oscilloscopic/telesis
patterns of viewing also somewhat overlap and no definitive
lines can be drawn between one stage and another. 21 Jump
Street and All in the Family, mix with Rosanne, Seignfield,

Roc, and the talk shows of Letterman, Arsenio Hall, and Jay

115

Leno. Some shows do not appeal as strongly across the lines,
an example of which would be Murphy Brown, which is aimed at
the Reagan Yuppie carrying the ethics, economic, and moral of
that age group as presented by its creators and producers.
At the equivalent faith level, James Fowler questions the
ability of many to move into his fourth stage, "the self . .
. claims an identity no longer defined by the composite of
one’s roles and meanings to others". "It expresses its
intuitions of coherence inian ultimate environment in terms of

.dl In this faith stage, the

an explicit system of meanings.
person is willing to be reflective on their own identity and
their position in the world. They are able to ask the
questions of philosophy, who am I, where am I going, what do
I need to get there, and what do I expect to find when I have
arrived? If the person is courageous enough to enter into
this stage that involves many questions, and if one is further
courageous in following through on the questions, the normal
experience is disillusionment and the ever-greater complexity
of life begins to weigh on the person. Solutions are
difficult, if not impossible to many of the deeper questions
of life. The seeking of the solutions is a task of herculean
proportions that demand great energy and the ability to
reflect at ever deeper levels. Unfortunately, the ministries
of religious television in Lansing and East Lansing do not

enter into this fourth level of faith or third level of

television viewing.

116

The literal interpretation of the Bible, in many
instances, is the best solution offered. The promise of
miracles in one’s life to combat the evil that may be
surrounding a person is another solution offered. 'The joining
in a prayerful service or the simple reflection on a Biblical
passage and applying it at a nominal level to the questions of
life seems to be what religious television is offering. From
the Gospel Hour through Victory in ChrLsi to the Outregch Mn§._§
to Immanuel:§_Tenple the minister or priest has failed to lead
people into this mythologizing stage of faith. The ministers
following commercial television, fail to'challenge the viewer.

The oscilloscopic viewer or the telesis viewer with
fluctuating attentiveness on specific interests are addressed
by Murphy Brown, All in the PM to Murder She Wrote.
Programming that seems to accept a community that does not

wish to think about thinking (Piaget, Formal Opergtiongl a

 

community that does not want to go beyond the social contract,
moral stage (Kohlberg) and a community that does not want to
go beyond intimacy versus isolation (Erikson).

Religious television at the local level, religious
television at the national level, and programming on
commercial television on the national and local level have
stayed at the entrance door of this third stage of
television’s viewing the oscilloscopic and the telescopic

stage.

117

..7

ll.

 

Teleological Stnge of Television Viewing
The teleological viewer is one*who watches television for

a purpose, to try to find meaning to a life that they know is
in decay, and to try to find a vision of a life on some other
level. The teleological viewer is seeking an answer to the
meaning of life and trying to avoid the conclusion that life
collapses with death. On the surface, it would appear that
religious television is (directly answering this viewer’s
needs, that questions of the meaning of life, who am I, where
am I going, how do I get there and how do I know that I have
gotten there when I eventually arrive? However, they are
being addressed under the guise of self-realization.and within
a culturally populist milieu and ideology of religion. This
self-realization relies very much on what God can do for the
individual, leaving out the hard work that the individual has
to'do for him/herself, for the family community and the world.
It is a self-realization which through its message of instant
salvation tries to bypass the stage of conversion and seems to
deny the traditional values of sacrifice and self-abnegation.
The medium with its conditioning of the viewer into an
expectation of instant gratification and half-hour solutions
to perennial problems has created a barrier for the minister
or the teacher when they address the questions of a universal,
ethical principle (Kohlberg) or address the question of
integrity ‘versus despair (Erikson). The questions of ti
universal moral good cannot be addressed and a solution found
in the time it takes to cook three hamburgers. The question

118

 

T“
11

of integrity or despair is a on-going question that goes
through successively deeper levels within.the person.and makes
for intense committed television viewing. The hope and pain
at this stage is.difficult even for professionals to translate
from a feeling into a visual or from despair into a medium
that also wants people to buy the products that come at the
commercials.

The pastors and.the producers.of religious programming in
Lansing and East Lansing likewise do not address these issues.
Fowler offers one insight into a possible solution of why the
fundamental questions of life are not addressed on religious
access television when he tells us that at this faith
level(conjunctive faith) "symbolic power is reunited with
conceptual meanings. Here there must also be a new reclaiming
and a working of one’s past. . . . Importantly, this involves

"14 The

a critical recognition.oflone’s social unconsciousness.
calling of an individual to the reworking of his/her life to
a rebirth of a new naivete to the world that surrounds
him/her. This is what is not addressed by commercial
television and not addressed by public access religious
television. The teleological viewer is offered balm for his
wounds but no "eternal" solution.

The question does arise: Is this too major a task to
expect from television? ‘Lelevision, our friend, our companion

in solitude, our relief bringer, the image maker and solver of

problems similar to our own, seems incapable of addressing

119

IT:

these more basic of life’s questions. The cycle of
information intake in the individual begins with the auditory
and appears to end with the auditory. In the teleological
viewer, the image is not of extreme importance. The
television person is listening for the word which has life in
it.which speaks to them joining their own visions and memories
and creating an approach to the question of integrity and
despair that is internal and eternal. This does not need the
visual for sustenance or resuscitation.

Religious broadcasting in the area speaks to the
teleological viewer of an age in their life that was fuller
with.symbols and myths and anmunderstanding of right and wrong
that was simpler. An understanding of God that was also
simpler and a knowledge of their place within creation that
was defined by law but lived within love. The teleological
viewer in Lansing/Meridian Township have religious programming
that speaks to them with a certitude that was familiar in
their childhood, that they would have heard in their churches
as they grew in age, and perhaps that they rejected as their
life progressed.

The kinetiscopic, telescopic, oscilloscopic/telesis, and
teleological viewers in the main are failed by religious
access television. However, the jury is still out as to
whether some of the issues that need to be addressed or the
different stages of television viewing are capable of being

translated into a kinetiscopic, telescopic,

120

oscilloscopic/telesis or theological framework. The medium is
vociferous is its ideological claims, is consistently biased,
while claiming to be unbiased, and refuses by its reliance on
statistics and sales of sponsor’s materials to look at itself
in any other light than an entertainment medium that
subscribes to the current philosophy and in turn creates the
current philosophy. The kinetiscopic, telescopic,
oscilloscopic/telesis, and teleological viewer is a viewer who
is segmented, is a viewer that has programs produced for its

particular stage, but not by local church broadcasting.

121

'-'El‘.

CHAPTER V--FOOTNOTES

 

 

1. Mark 1:4. The Jerusalem Bible. (London: Darton
Longman & Todd, 1966).

2. _nnsing Stnte Journni. (1992, August 25), p. 1.

3. Ibid.

4. C. Lasch. The Culture of Nnrcigpign. (New YOrk:

 

Warner Books, 1979), p. 55.
5. Ibid., p. 56.

6. Our Sundny Visitor. (Indiana: Huntington Puess).
(1992, August 2), p. 5.

7. Matthew 25:31-40. The Jerusalem Bible. (London:
Darton Longman & Todd, 1966).

8. D. Allen. Three Outsiders. (Cambridge, MA: Cowley
Publications, 1983), p. 106.

9. E. Erikson. Childhood nnd Society. (New York: W. W.
Norton and Co., 1963), p. 250.

10. J. Fowler. Stages of Faith. (San Francisco, CA:
Harper & Row, 1981), p. 133.

 

11. P. Roazan. Erikson--The Power nnd Limits of a
Vision. (New York: The Free Press, 1953), p. 153.

12. Howard Muson. (1979, February). Moral Thinking.
Psychology Today, p. 57.

13. J. Fowler. Stages of Fnith. (San Francisco, CA:
Harper & Row, 1981), p. 182.

14. Ibid., p. 198.

122

CHAPTER VI

YEAR 2000 AND BEYOND

We cannot bring ourselves to believe it possible that a
foreigner should in any respect be wiser than ourselves.
If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim
those follies as the special evidences of our wisdom.
Anthony Trollope
1815-1882
(Orly Firm, Chapter 18)

Alas, oh Lord, to what estate dost thou bring those who
love Thee?

St. Teresa Avila

1512-1582

Interior Castles
Use not vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they
think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

Matt:7

Oh, Lord, from statistics, deliver me.
Anonymous

The story is told of a British officer in the last
century who wished to know which of four roads was the way to
Dublin. He pointed to one that looked as though it ran north
and east, and asked the peasant if the road would take him to
Dublin. The peasant replied, "Yes, sir. It will take you to
Dublin." And the British officer promptly marched his men up
the road. The road, in fact, was a road to the northwest of
Ireland, but if one traveled on it long enough and stayed on
it, eventually it would take one south and east to Dublin.

123

 

The view of the countryside of Ireland would be extensive and
very comprehensive. The officer did not ask which is the
direct road to Dublin, The peasant answered the question that
was.asked, while knowing that the question, itself, was wrong.

In the course of this study, the analysis has stepped
outside the bounds of simply recording what is happening,
although that has been covered. The area of study avoided the
pitfall of burying the people of God in statistics and tried
instead to find a middle road whereby the question of religion
and television could be examined from a theological
perspective.

Malcolm Muggeridge, the former editor of Pnnpn magazine
and a latter-day convert to Christianity felt that
Christianity’was at a loss when trying to adapt itself to mass
media. By its very nature, it was reflective and long term
versus the medium which was instantaneous and short term.

The people like Quentin J. Schultze speak of the use of
mass media and television in particular by the church and
lament the church’s use of theemedium. Schultze suggests such
things as obtaining greater control over the televangelists by
appointing boards of directors drawn from people who hold
positions of respect and authority in public life and also
speaks of the need to educate the people in the pew to
critically view televangelism and to contribute to it in a
constructive fashion. This study has tried to avoid the

defeatism of Malcolm Muggeridge or the types of solutions that

124

 

Quentin Schultze offers and instead has looked at the way the
Word is spoken. Secondly, the study has, through a series of
comparative steps, looked. at ‘what it ‘takes to become a
Christian in the age of information and applied these stages
of conversion to the popular sciences of today. Thirdly, the
study has proposed a series of stages in television viewing
that future students of religion and the media may use as a
basis for comparison to faith and human development.

A major obstacle that the theologian pastor has to come
to terms with and overcome when he/she uses the media is best
summarized by Rubert Murdock when he said, "that part of the
result of the communications revolution is that it has not
produced an information society, but a media society in which
vast amounts of repetitive information are confined to a
narrow spectrum of thinkable thought. . .".l

The ministers, in their struggle to get people to ask
fundamental and philosophical questions about the nature of
their being. Then to use these questions as a stepping stone
into the large question of their place in the universe,
constantly run against this society where vast amounts of
repetitive information are confined to a narrow spectrum of
thinkable thought. Politicians, including the wives of
politicians, Hilary Clinton, being an example, in a recent
interview on 20/20 on NBC, spoke of her need to speak in sound

bites that were no longer than.thirty seconds. Otherwise, the

media would chop and change her sentences. She had learned

125

I .u-atunw

 

the hard way, her statement on the role of women in the home
would always be reduced to laundry and making cookies if she
didn’t learn the art of the thirty second sound bite.

This runs directly against the purpose of classical
rhetoric which takes a developmental approach to a pmoblem
slowly unravelling the questions that will lead to the answers
and over a period of time of hours to years offering a
solution that is livable. Secondly, the minister is up
against a medium where most of the people with the power, the
producers, share little of the value system of Christianity.
A study reported in the Catholic League Newsletter reported
that the men and women who are responsible for creating the
visual image of America that is shown on television have
little in common with the pastors who stand and preach the
Word of God. This study from the Center for Media and Public
Affairs said that out of one hundred. TV producers and
executives who were questioned, 93% rarely go to a place of
worship. “Two-thirds thought that.TV entertainment should play

'J and of the

"a major role in promoting social reform
institutions which should influence society, religion,
government, and the military finished at the bottom.

The religion, the government, and the military are all in
the business of informationiat various levels.and from various
perspectives. Whereas television does not necessarily have to

be in the business of information, but rather may be, as

Rubert Murdock said, be in the media business. Secondly,

126

 

television does not have to bring authority to its imagery,
rather television has become a populist medium. In the words
of Time Magazine, which proclaimed Ted Turner the Man of the
Year for 1991, saw CNN’s role as to provide "the raw materials
of the story, and let the viewers form their own opinions."3
The church, by its very nature is not in the business of
everybody forming their own opinions. The church is
hierarchical, whether it is Protestant, Evangelical, Roman
Catholic, or Baptist. Some churches have varying degrees of
doctrinal freedom, but almost all churches are hierarchical
and it is not their intention that everybody makes up their
own minds about the teachings of Christ, the scriptures, and
the dogmas of their churches. The minister is battling a
culture that is populist, that seeks to give the freedoms of
forming opinions to all individuals without also giving the
educational and analytical tools necessary to make truly
independent decisions. The'majority of these opinions that are
expressed seem to be within the parameters of the information
provided by the culture. Most of that information that the
culture relies on comes from the television media itself. The
dog seems to be eating its tail and enjoying it.

The producers who are partially responsible for creating
and sustaining a populist ideology have a world view which
undermines.in many instances the world view'that the religious
broadcaster wishes to convey. In a study that examined the

media coverage of the Catholic Church during three five-year

127

 

time blocks from 1964 to 1968, and 1974 to 1978, and 1985 to
1988 using content analysis, it was found that long-term
trends in the coverage were unfavorable to the church. Over
time, official Church teachings were reported less frequently
and were challenged more often when they did appear. This is
from Medianovernge of the Catholic Church, a study by Robert
Lichter, Daniel Amundson, and Linda S. Lichter, published by
the Knights of Columbus in 1991. This constant portrayal of
the Catholic Church in an unfavorable light in the media
highlighting the controversies within the church and playing
down the area where the church is doing good was a common
trend in all of the news media. This is what the pastors who
use television are facing when they speak theologically.
Areas‘where the church came out on the losing side of the
reporting included the controversies of birth control,
clerical celibacy, the role of women and minorities in the
church, and the response to internal dissent on issues
involving freedom of expression. The major exception to this

H

pattern involved ecumenical efforts which the media treated
as a kind of motherhood and apple pie issue supported by all
people of good will."4

The recent media coverage of the scandals in the
Evangelical churches has also impacted that church’s image.
Specifically, the scandals associated with Jimmy Swaggart and

Jim Baker have created a problem for people like Robert

Schuler, Oral Roberts, and Jerry' Falwell, and even Pat

128

Robinson. All of these people in an Arbitron number of
households viewing report suffered severe losses. Arbitron
reported that in 1986 Robert Schuler had almost two million
viewers by 1988, this was reduced to just over one million.
Oral Roberts, after the press finished its stories on his
retreat to his tower to be with God, dropped from
approximately one million two hundred fifty thousand
households in 1986 to 561,000 households in 1988.5

Religious broadcasting has an extremely difficult time
competing with commercial television on a production level,
but secondly, it has an extremely difficult time because
commercial television, itself, appears from the result of the
study done by the Knights of Columbus to be biased against the
church and thirdly, it has a difficult time with commercial
television from the amount of air time that it uses compared
with the incessant, unrelenting use of air time by commercial
television.

It is important for pastors and religious people who use
television to understand the nature and the architecture of
the medium. Religion, by its nature is reflective and
introspective. Religion is community and socially orientated.
Television is a medium that speaks in sound bites where little
reflection is needed and instantaneous gratification is
assured. On television, the constant repetition of a single
message over a variety of programs guarantees its inclusion

into populist culture. The pastor may well decide that

129

 

television is not a medium for religion and the use of
television in fact may diminish the pastor’s hope for a real
spreading of the Gospel. However, the medium cannot be
ignored and must be used in a countercultural manner. The
success of the religious broadcaster at the local level which
is not an issue. They are not appealing for large funds, they
do not.hope for mass audiences, they merely wish to preach the
Gospel. This, in fact, may be the simple answer to the
question: Can religion use the medium of television?

The success stories of national evangelizers with
millions of households watching them and raising millions of
dollars seems to be at odds with the message of the Gospel
which is not a populous document, but one which speaks of a
God who created all. As a result, all people have
responsibilities and privileges because of that Creator’s love
for them. For public access television at the religious level
to be successful, it needs to be countercultural; it needs to
speak a simple, forthright message, and perhaps be a voice
like John the Baptist of "one crying in the wilderness". It
also needs to be aware of the ever-ready pitfalls to which it
may fall into, seeking for greater and cleverer styles and
forms of production. The Church needs to be aware of the
pitfall of imitating the materialism of North America in its
interpretation of its Scriptures and of its church teachings
and of its message. The Church needs to be careful not to

judge its success by the standards of commercial television.

130

 

Public access television at the religious level must
analyze the world that it lives in, analyze the prevailing
culture, and how it permeates every aspect of people’s lives
and.it needs to combine that analysis with an understanding of
the development stages of the human being, and the television
stages that a human being goes through so that when it does
present its simple, clear Gospel message, that this message
will speak to people in a way that it will be relevant to
them. People need to be able to implement the message as they
can with commercial secular television. The message has to
reassert itself over the medium, the messengers need to be
believed by simplifying their lives, and making their lives
more in.tune with their Gospel message. The minister needs to
understand one’s self and personal cultural bias. The
minister needs to understand the developmental and faith
stages as well as the conversions that a person goes through
in his/her life. In terms of this paper, the minister must
also be aware of the television stages that a person
experiences in order to make the message, the simple Gospel
message of love of God and love of neighbor effective for all

age groups and the unevangelized.

131

 

FOOTNOTES--CHAPTER VI

1. Guardisn Weekl . (1911, January 13), p. 12.

 

2. Catholic League Newsletter. (1991, July/August), p.
10.

3. Time. (1992, January 6), p. 26.

4. S. Lichter, IL Amundson, &; L. Lichter. Media
Coverage of the Catholic Church. (New Haven, CT: Knights of
Columbus, 1991), p. 5.

5. Arbitron. (1988).

132

 

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