Religion and the Electronic Media in Latin America:

A Review

Technology and Millenarianism: A Brief History

Christians have long been fascinated with technology.

As early as the 12th Century, theologians linked technological development with millenarian thought. Based in the apocalyptic literature of the Bible, millenarianism proposed that the end of the world was near, but that the apocalypse bore within itself the seeds of a new heaven on earth. The advancement of knowledge and technique came to be viewed as a way to hasten the arrival of paradise.

The original prophet of millenarianism was Joaquim of Fiore, a Cistercian abbot from Calabria. Joaquim believed that his monks had been called to be the holy vanguard of a redeemed humanity. Their preaching, together with the practice of the contemplative life, were meant to promote a generalized illumination of the spirit that would alleviate human misery.

Millenarist thought came to articulate the "most influential prophetic system known to Europe until Marxism." (Noble 1997:24). For centuries, millenarianism motivated great scientific and technological advances. In the 13th Century, Roger Bacon, the English Franciscan scientist proposed that:

The arts were the birthright of the ‘sons of Adam,’ that they had once been fully known while mankind still reflected the image of God, that they had been lost because of sin but had already been partially regained, and that they might yet be fully restored, as part of the recovery of original perfection, through diligent and devout effort. (Noble 1997:27).

This is the same millenarianism that motivated Cristobal Colón to find new routes that would permit missionaries to bring in the millennium by converting the heathen.

In his unfinished Book of Prophecies, Colombus (states): ‘God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth. . .and he showed me the spot where to find it.". . .To his eyes, the discovery of the New World signaled the imminent End of the World and hence the promised recovery of perfection. (Noble 1997:33)

In the 16th Century, this same millenarian spirit undergirded the Protestant Reformation. Richard Popkin notes how Francis Bacon and other luminaries of the court of King James in England:

took seriously the injunction in Daniel that, as the end approaches, knowledge and understanding will increase. . .They also took seriously the need to prepare, through reform, for the glorious days ahead. Their efforts to gain and encourage scientific knowledge, to build a new educational system, to transform political society, were all part of their millenarian reading of
events. They needed to understand, to construct a new theory of knowledge, a new metaphysics, for the new situation, the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, which was to be followed by a new heaven and a new earth. (Noble 1997:47).

As Protestantism and modernity took root, so did individualism. Until this point the Millennium had been understood as a salvific project that embraced all of humankind. With the Reformation, salvation came to be understood in individual terms.

Technological and religious optimism sustained the missionary enterprise in the 19th Century. The United States, especially, came to understand their rapid mechanization and industrialization as an integral element in their sacred mission to save humanity. As Schultze observes:

If the Second Coming of Jesus Christ were imminent. . .there was no time to waste and no technology to overlook in the task of global evangelism; millions of unsaved souls would soon perish. Evangelicals projected American technological optimism onto their view of radio and later television. (1987:248).

2. The Church and the Media

Communication has often been understood as a function of media; and media come and go as a function of technological change. At the same time, the mass media have always been vehicles for informing, entertaining and orienting the masses, according to parameters established by the dominant ideology of the day.

Less noted, however, is that the Church, as an institution, has played a key role in the development of new communication technologies and media. In medieval Europe, we find the most important technological innovations for religious communication incorporated into the great cathedrals. These enormous buildings were designed as communication emporia: stained glass windows, statues, murals and paintings, columns crowned with gargoyles and angels, audacious steeples, the multi sensory impact of music, incense, bells, lighted candles, a splash of water, pungent wine, the fragile flavor of the host. The intensity and diversity of the media employed makes one’s head
spin.

The purpose of all this media, of course, was to tell the stories that undergird the Christian faith and to create an atmosphere conducive to an encounter with transcendence.

The Reformers, on the other hand, flee from the complex sensuality of the mass. Protestants come to celebrate the printed word. The Protestant Reformation brings us the printing press, the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, the mass printing and distribution of books, and the widespread promotion of literacy.

Reformed emphasis on the written text leads many Protestant groups to sacralize the written text. In its most extreme form this manifests itself as a kind of bibliolatry. The text, for many Protestants, becomes more important than the lived experience that gave birth to the text in the first place.

By casting their lot with the written word, many Protestant theologians become trapped in the parameters of Cartesian logic: linear, rational, scientific, modern. Protestant liturgy becomes a relatively sterile space where an academic presents rational arguments from a written text to an assembly of individuals. Long gone is the fecund, smoky darkness where the faithful abandon themselves to the mystery of faith.

With the theological wars between modernists and fundamentalists at the beginning of the 20th Century, fundamentalists began to doubt the virtues of scientific endeavor. Science, they decided, proposed to eviscerate God on the altar of secular humanism. Nevertheless, fundamentalists maintained their infatuation with technology as a useful tool for helping to bring in the Millennium.

The history of Christian broadcasting clearly illustrates this trend.

In the 1930's US evangelicals had already found in the electronic media a metaphor for the Holy Spirit. Evangelist William Foulkes commented in 1937:

There is something so uncanny and far-reaching in the persuasiveness of the radio waves that to the Christian it might well become another Pentecost. . .Will the Christian church once again demonstrate its short-sightedness, and permit this swift-winged messenger to become the permanent possession of forces hostile to the gospel? (Schultze 1987:250).

One of the earliest defenders of electronic religion was Eugene Bertermann of The Lutheran Hour. In 1949 Bertermann argued that:

Christians who maintain the Christ-centered view of history properly hold that our Heavenly Father permitted radio and television to be invented and discovered, first and foremost, for the dissemination of His saving Gospel. (Schultze 1987:249).

In 1979, Rev. Ben Armstrong, Executive Director of National Religious Broadcasters, wrote a book titled The Electric Church. With marked triumphalism, Armstrong proclaimed that:

radio and television have "broken through the walls of tradition" and "restored conditions remarkably similar to the early church." Armstrong predicted that this "electric church" will become "a revolutionary new form of the worshiping, witnessing church that existed twenty centuries ago." (Schultze 1990:32).

3. The Electronic Church in Latin America

Producers of religious radio and television, and especially the on-air personalities who host such programs, have come to occupy a place apart among Christian ministries. Quentin Schultze, a specialist on religious broadcasting at Calvin College, observes that "the so-called electronic church has created a special class of prophetic clergy who sometimes claim special knowledge and spiritual insight into the power of modern communications technologies." (Schultze 1987:253).

Peruvian communication researcher Rolando Pérez notes that in recent years the electronic church and the virtual congregation have come to constitute:

"a sort of parallel church to community congregations. This phenomenon is part of a para-ecclesiastical movement built in the world of mega-events and transnational missionary movements. That is, we are witnessing the growth of de-territorialized churches, wide open to the codes of mass culture." (Pérez 1997:21).

Indeed, during its apogee in the 80s, the US electronic church offered serious competition to local churches in Latin America. In 1985 I coordinated a study of the impact of US religious broadcasts on Central America’s active Christians, both Protestant and Catholic. We found that 70 percent of the sample found the teachings of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart to be of more use in their daily lives than those received in their local parish. They characterized the benefits of such programs as "spiritual blessing", "consolation", "sound advice", "healing" and "a blessing for family life."

We were curious to note that the public does not necessarily trust these media preachers. When we asked our sample whether Jimmy Swaggart, Luis Palau and Hermano Pablo merited their trust, only 40 percent responded affirmatively. Obviously, trustworthiness is not a prerequisite for being a bearer of blessing. (Smith and Ruiz 1987: 147-155).

The dominance of the US media evangelists was short-lived. A combination of the personal and legal problems suffered by Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker in 1987 and 1988, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and innovations in the marketing of symbolic goods developed by the Brazilian media evangelists in the 90s led to the end of the US monopoly on electronic religion in Latin America.

The US media preachers counterattacked by helping to set up Evangelical TV stations in many Latin American countries. Trinity Broadcasting Network has been a key player in these initiatives. These projects have met with only limited success. During their heyday, TV preachers such as Rex Humbard, Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart bought prime time on commercial TV channels. However, setting up their own TV stations has accelerated the ghettoization of the Evangelical message. By concentrating their investment in these channels, Evangelical media entrepreneurs radically limited their ability to reach a heterogeneous mass audience. Furthermore, they acquired the enormous burden of maintaining a sophisticated technological infrastructure while seeking the financial support of a highly fragmented Evangelical population with very limited resources.

At the same time, in the last decade the Roman Catholic Church has entered the fray in a big way, setting up local affiliates of Mother Angelica’s Eternal Word Television Network as well as local broadcast initiatives.

Such new religious media projects tend to further segment the market in symbolic goods.

In 1989 Edir Macedo, bishop of the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD) made an audacious attempt to break out of the religious programming ghetto. He forked out US$45 million for three TV channels in Brazil. In the following decade, Macedo invested millions of dollars in Rede Record de Televisão, today Brasil’s third largest network in terms of number of affiliates and perhaps number one in terms of the technical quality of its equipment.

Record offers varied programming, with a healthy dose of overtly religious content combined with both local and imported general entertainment and news.

In his study of the IURD, Brazilian sociologist Leonildo Silveira Campos documents some of the technical innovations introduced by Macedo:

At critical hours throughout the day, spots feature pastors offering special prayers for the audience. At 6 a.m., a prayer for the worker infuses optimism in those setting about their daily tasks; at noon, the midday prayer calls for divine protection; at 6 p.m., thanks is given for the day with Gounod’s Ave María in the background, neatly appropriating the discontinued Catholic program, the Ave María Hour. (Silveira Campos 1997:274,288).

On this new modality, Rolando Pérez comments:

Churches are moving from program production or an occasional appearance in the media to the commercial appropriation of mass media. This implies setting up and running their own communication enterprises, entering into direct competition with the commercial media and the mass culture industry. (Pérez 1997:19).

4. The Message: Reductionism and Other Theological Considerations

The technologization of evangelism has had a profound impact on the content of the evangel. Religious faith, and especially religious conversion, are enormously complex phenomena. However, the commercial media demand simple messages. Thus, producers of evangelistic messages for the electronic media came to conceive of religious conversion in reductionistic, individualistic terms as demanded by the principles of marketing. In this process "electronic evangelism" came to be dominated by the incessant recitation of a brief list of theological nostrums:

Do you recognize you are a sinner?

Do you believe God loves you and can save you?

Do you believe Jesus is the Son of God who died for your sins?

Are you willing to ask God to forgive your sins and invite Jesus into your heart as your Lord and Savior?

When a member of the audience understood and responded to these questions, either positively or negatively, this person was considered
to have been evangelized. Thus, in the case of this individual, the program producer had fulfilled his commitment before God and had hastened by some minuscule degree the Second Coming of Christ. Members of the audience who responded affirmatively to the message where considered to have been saved, born again. (Smith 1990:296).

This minimalist expression of the Christian message actually did end up changing individual lives. Otherwise, the whole enterprise would have collapsed long ago. In a context of personal pain and hopelessness, people will cling even to marginal expressions of forgiveness and grace.

We cannot sidestep the fact that it is precisely the simplicity of the electronic gospel that makes it so attractive and successful.

Traditional evangelical media producers like Luis Palau, Billy Graham and Hermano Pablo have tended to present well-crafted exercises in rational discourse designed to convince religious consumers of the persuasiveness of their message. Such programming has never been very good at producing long-term converts that come to form part of a local church. People tend to respond to religious programming for the short-term satisfaction of immediate needs: they feel lonely, hurt or empty. The media touch us through our senses and emotions, more than through our intellect.

Indeed, the great innovation of the neo-pentecostal media preachers has been to simplify the message even further, eliminating doctrine and
reducing the message to a commercial transaction of symbolic goods. They have deepened and more effectively individualized the emotive content of religious media. Do you want hope? Do you long for forgiveness and liberation? Do you need healing, wealth, power?
Demonstrate your faith by entrusting your offering to me, the intermediary with Mystery, the channel of Transcendence. I grant your desire in God’s name! Furthermore, I give you this symbol of the sacred: a rose, a vial of holy water, a few drops of healing oil. Use the sacred substance as prescribed and God will liberate you from your demons and resolve your problems.

Jesús Martín Barbero, one of Latin America’s most important communication theorists, states that:

Modernity has not fulfilled many of its promises of social, political and cultural liberation. But one promise it has fulfilled: that of disenchanting our world. It has rationalized our world and left it without magic or mystery. (1995:71)

Humans are capable of surviving grave limitations, but take away the sense of mystery and transcendence and our very humanity is at risk. Confronted with disenchantment, humans always build mechanisms of re-enchantment. One of those mechanisms is the electronic church. Martín Barbero comments:

To me, the electronic church is restoring the magic to intellectualized religions; religions that had lost their ardor, that had become disenchanted. . .it employs the technology of the image and sentiment to capture messianic, apocalyptic exaltation, while at the same time giving a face and a voice to new communities that are, in essence, ritual and moral, not doctrinal. (1995:76)

Remember how the medieval cathedral functioned as a multi-sensory communication emporium? In a sense, the same is happening today via the new mediated religious spectacles, especially those coming out of Brasil. The media producers behind such spectacles have finally managed to break with the Cartesian logic of Christian programming that has always been at odds with the visceral immediacy of audiovisual media. These mediated spectacles restore the dominance of symbol, gesture and sentiment, all wrapped in mystery, authority and transcendence.

The Future: Traditional Christianity on the Defensive

In recent decades, traditional churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, have lost their dominance over the public manifestation of the spirituality of the people. For many years, Pentecostals bore a certain social stigma. Prestigious options of the Christian persuasion were limited to Roman Catholicism, Presbyterianism, Methodism, Lutheranism. But when neo-pentecostals began to penetrate the mass media and the world of politics, they found themselves in a position to compete with the defenders of the religious status quo. Today they are well-placed to exercise great influence in a consumer society whose dreams and expectations are rooted in the commercial media, especially television.

Christianity, of course, has never exercised a monopoly in Latin America’s religious supermarket. Both Amerindian and African spiritualities are deeply rooted in the region’s psyche, as are more recent imports such as Spiritism.

The case of Amerindian spiritualities merits special comment. For centuries, the first peoples of the region found within the Roman Catholic church a grudging refuge that permitted the preservation and evolution of key elements of their spiritual vision. Yet many rituals were suppressed and many spiritual guides were persecuted. With the 500 year event in 1992, many Amerindian spiritual guides reclaimed their right to celebrate their faith publically and to have unfettered access to sacred sites. Today, when I ask young Mayans about their religious affiliation, some freely respond, "Mayan." More importantly, many now consult Mayan spiritual guides for advice and counsel or participate in a Mayan religious ceremony as part of the normal range of their religious practice.

With the increasing globalization of culture, the symbolic goods offered throughout the region have become even more diverse: New Age, Candomblé, Santería, Spiritism, Brazil’s Father Rossi with his CDs, the merchants of Prosperity Theology, Islam, Buddhism and other Eastern religions, Mother Angelica, Pare de sofrir with the Igreja Universal, spiritual mapping for spiritual warfare.

But I suspect that such has always been the case. Clearly, the symbolic goods offered for public consumption today are more diverse and more attractively packaged than ever before. But diversity has always been part of the spiritual landscape. And people have always built their personal religious convictions in the intimacy of their own hearts. What is different today is that traditional Christian churches have lost the power to be able to impose their "orthodoxy" and suppress the "heterodoxies" of the people.

Also, as hierarchies have less power to impose a veneer of religious uniformity, many people feel free to simultaneously and publicly embrace apparently contradictory belief systems. Consumers of symbolic goods no longer feel obliged to practice "brand loyalty" nor grant increased credibility to the traditional churches.

This is something with which the traditional churches have not yet come to terms. If they are to survive, they must devise effective ways to offer their message in a highly competitive, very volatile marketplace.

- Dennis A. Smith is a mission co-worker for the Presbyterian Church (USA). He is a Guatemala-based consultant to the Communication Training and
Publications Program of the Central American Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies (CEDEPCA) who has lived and worked in Central America since
1977.

This paper is a summary of a longer piece to be published in Spanish in October, 2001.

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