Airwave Internationalism: Missionary Radio and Global Evangelical Activism

Evangelicals in the United States were early adopters of radio, television, and satellite networks, embracing communications technology to spread the gospel throughout the world. Beginning in the 1930s, U.S. evangelicals established missionary media stations in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, broadcasting programs in a range of languages. Eager to make evangelistic inroads in predominantly Catholic, Muslim, and communist nations—some of which were otherwise closed to missionary work—they expanded these stations throughout the 1970s and 1980s. They also forged strong connections with Christians in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who ran their own evangelistic radio and television stations. In this way, communications networks bound evangelicals together across national borders.

These relationships brought greater attention to the challenges evangelicals living in the Global South and the communist world faced in seeking to practice and propagate their faith. Over time, U.S. evangelicals came to see religious broadcasting as a means to work around religious restrictions in the Soviet Union, China, and parts of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a way to cope with perceived hostility from Catholic leadership in some Latin American countries. Furthermore, increasingly robust communications networks proved crucial for gathering news about religious repression and evangelistic opportunities in “hostile” countries, which mobilized political activism in the United States on behalf of Christians abroad between the 1970s and the 1990s.

This paper will explore the flourishing of evangelical communications networks in this period as a catalyst for Christian human rights activism in the United States. Using several regional case studies, it will argue that religious media fostered two-way communication between U.S. evangelicals and their foreign brethren, and will show how amplified awareness about religious repression pushed U.S. Christians to intervene through political lobbying and international advocacy campaigns.