Evangelicalism, a faith with which 1 in 4 American adults identifies, exerts an enormous impact on American society. Its story typically begins in the Seventies and is portrayed as a reaction to the social revolution of the Sixties. But the beginnings of evangelicalism as a distinctive American subculture date to the dawn of the Media Age. With the arrival of radio, evangelicals flocked to the airwaves. For the first time, they developed their own mass culture as evangelicals nationwide, across denominational lines, heard the same popular preachers and music. The Master’s Radio captures the evangelical media and music culture of this pivotal midcentury era as evangelicals left behind the fundamentalism of the early twentieth century and prepared for the culturally engaged New Christian Right of the late twentieth century. To capture the spirit of these times, The Master’s Radio avoids dry historical writing with a narratively driven “historical ethnography” that presents the era’s major radio evangelists and songwriters in the own words—not only from their writings and recordings but from songbooks, record liner notes, and “song story” anthologies of the period. The Master’s Radio is sure to become the standard work on the midcentury rise of evangelical mass culture.
