Building a Climate of Righteousness: Religious Television Networks in American Culture
Creators: name: Lausch, Kayti
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: US Television
subject: Christianity
subject: Media industries
subject: American politics and conservatism
subject: Evangelical media
subject: media history
subject: Screen Arts and Cultures
subject: American and Canadian Studies
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities

description: Building a Climate of Righteousness: Religious Television Networks in American Culture examines Christian television networks as primarily industrial organizations in order to understand how these broadcasters have fundamentally shaped American culture and politics. This project mixes analysis of archival material from Regent University’s Special Collections and Archives and the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives with national and local newspapers, magazines, books, and trade journals, as well as textual analyses of networks’ programs and schedules. Drawing upon media industry studies, television studies, and cultural history, this dissertation explores how different evangelical media companies, including the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), the American Christian Television System (ACTS), The Family Channel, and the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), built alternative spaces that were parallel to, but distinct from, the traditional Hollywood industries. I explain who these Christian broadcasters imagined their alternative spaces to be for, and how these broadcasters each constructed their audiences. I argue that these networks created and nurtured a new demographic of television viewers, identified by their religious and moral values, by encouraging them to define themselves in opposition to the mainstream. These networks and their viewers became important players in the culture wars and the growth of the Religious Right, and this oppositional rhetoric continues to play an important role in American politics. Chapter 1 reconstructs the first twenty years of the history of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which Pat Robertson founded in 1960. By 1980, CBN had emerged as a serious competitor to the commercial cable channels, and I argue that Robertson and his team built this viable alternative space by balancing their spiritual goals with a dedication to mastering the industrial intricacies of television production and distribution. Several challengers to CBN’s dominance emerged in the 1980s, including the American Christian Television System, which was founded by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Radio and Television Commission in 1984. Chapter 2 examines how ACTS re-theorized religious television’s potential to be a positive cultural and spiritual force by focusing specifically on using their network to support local churches and communities by promoting local programming and a non-commercial broadcasting model. Chapter 3 returns to CBN to consider its transformation from CBN to The Family Channel, the first cable channel explicitly devoted to a family audience. The Family Channel played a vital role in defining the “family audience,” as television viewers fragmented across a rapidly increasing number of channels. The channel proposed a socially conservative definition of “family,” one that was rooted in the midcentury imaginary of the white, mild-mannered, middle-class, suburban, patriarchal, Christian family. Chapter 4 explores how TBN’s dozens of national and global networks and the Holy Land Experience theme park work synergistically together to ensure that Christian audiences never need to turn to secular spaces for their entertainment needs, nor risk encountering people or ideas to which they are opposed. TBN encapsulates religious media organizations’ desire to build an entire alternative entertainment system outside of Hollywood while adopting Hollywood’s own strategies of media conglomeration. The conclusion considers how Donald Trump’s presidency and the rise of Christian streaming services like Pure Flix suggest new evolutions in evangelical media-makers’ ongoing ideological project.