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Electronic Technology & American Religion

Electronic technology has transformed American religion. Once concerned mainly with personal salvation and helping the needy, conservative Christians have become political activists. The Christian Right enhances it image and promotes its social agenda through the "electric church," a conglomeration of syndicated religious programs broadcast to millions of people each week.

Although composed of numerous religious affiliations, the primary constituency of the Christian Right is the white evangelical community. This community is Protestant and largely fundamentalist. The following four fundamentalist beliefs bond evangelical Christians: the divinity of Christ, acceptance of Christ as necessary for salvation, the infallibility of biblical scripture, and the recognition of a mandate to spread the Gospel (Wilcox, 1992, p. 43). Hadden and Shupe (1988) add to this list a creationist worldview. Bendroth (1993) describes the worldview of the early fundamentalists which still holds true for many in the Christian Right: "Most, but not all, were dispensational premillenialists, which meant that they saw human history only in terms of decline and expected a literal Second Coming of Christ" (p. 4). Because including all conservative Christians in the definition of evangelical is technically correct, some authors use the terms fundamentalist and evangelical interchangeably (Hadden and Shupe, 1988, p. 82).

For decades, conservative Christians have used the broadcast media to promote their religious views. The roots of televangelism, today a multibillion-dollar enterprise, emanate from the 1920s, when national radio networks allowed religious programming on a complimentary basis as a public service. In the 1930s, one radio network, the Mutual Broadcasting System, offered commercial time for religious broadcasting and found the practice financially lucrative. During the 1930s and 1940s, the allocation of airtime for paid and compliment...

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Electronic Technology & American Religion. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:27, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689519.html