Information AboutTelevangelism |
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Evangelists have been using Telecommunications to convert people to Christianity since the earliest days of radio. One of the more famous American radio evangelists of the early 20th Century was Father Charles Coughlin , whose strongly anti- Communist and Anti-Semitic radio ministry reached millions of listeners during the Great Depression of the 1930s . While largely Catholic in the North, this phenomenon has been almost entirely of the Evangelical Protestant variety in the USA Midwest and South , where it formed as an outgrowth of Revival-tent Preaching , which experienced a resurgence during the Great Depression as itinerant traveling preachers drove from town to town, living off Donation s. In the 1970s and 1980s , the rise of evangelical Protestant Christianity created well-known televangelists, with their own media networks, news exposure, and political influence. Many of these figures and their ministries retain substantial influence today. Some televangelists have been at the center of considerable controversy, as some of their ministries believe in the Charismatic doctrine of Divine Healing . This method, seen as Pseudoscience and charlatanry by Skeptic s (and by many Christians) has been exposed as a Fraud in the cases of some televangelists, such as Peter Popoff . A series of such scandals in the 1980s resulted in the fall from grace of several famous televangelists, including Jim Bakker , who served a Prison sentence for financial improprieties associated with his ministry, and Jimmy Swaggart , who made a famous tearful confession to a dalliance with a Prostitute . Most of these televangelists have continued preaching, nonetheless, even though their audiences may be a small fraction of what they were at the height of their popularity. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell achieved further notoriety in 2001 with their conviction that the September 11 terrorist attacks constituted divine Retribution provoked by rampant sexual Immorality . Although televangelism began as a peculiarly American phenomenon, some US televangelists now reach a wider audience through international broadcast networks, and domestically produced televangelism is increasingly present in some other nations such as Brazil . Some countries do not permit this kind of open-access evangelism, and religious broadcasts, where they exist, are produced by the TV companies rather than private interest groups. SEE ALSO |
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