Television

Like all forms of cultural transmission, television plays an important role in the communication and propagation of religion. When Constantin Perskyi first coined the term television in 1900 in an academic paper on selenium-based photoelectric capture and transmission systems, the Russian physicist could not have imagined that the phenomenon of which he spoke would one day achieve a place of centrality in peoples' lives the world over. To say that television has changed human life as we once knew it is to make a gross understatement. In fact, humanity still has a long way to go before we fully understand the capacities of television as a communicative, informative, and entertainment medium. There is no doubt that the human habituation to television has induced in us a peculiar set of devotions: Families gathered in front of a television eating “TV dinners” at regular times throughout the week appear eerily similar to devout religious practitioners performing rites that shape their lives. Even “secular” television culture, some scholars claim, is distinctly religious in this respect.

That global TV audiences can unite virtually in their observance of local events (e.g., think of the New Year's celebrations in New York's Times Square) was not lost on the religious leaders of communities who welcomed the new medium into their homes. Almost since the earliest popular embrace of television in the 1950s, the shrewdest religious leaders of the era sought to take advantage of the format's potential for reaching new believers. For nearly 30 years, radio, which itself benefited from an early interest by American ministers who realized its capacity to reach “those with ears to hear,” demonstrated the viability of new media technologies in the service of religion. Today, television effectively blankets the globe and plays a critical role in the phenomenon of global religion, but for reasons that will become manifest, the story of religion and television is a distinctly American one, or at least a Western one.