Charles Edward Coughlin was born in Hamilton, Ontario, on October 25, 1891, and ordained a Roman Catholic priest in Toronto in 1916. In 1926 he became pastor of a new parish outside Detroit, the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, and began broadcasting Sunday sermons on a local station, WJR, to fill empty pews in a small congregation.
The broadcasts outgrew the parish almost immediately. By 1930 Coughlin's Radio League of the Little Flower carried a national program on CBS, and by the mid 1930s his weekly Golden Hour of the Shrine of the Little Flower aired on as many as 58 stations to an estimated 30 million listeners, a share of the national radio audience no religious broadcaster before or since has matched. Listener mail arrived at a rate of tens of thousands of letters a week, funding a broadcasting operation on a scale that dwarfed his parish.
Coughlin's early programs mixed Catholic teaching with Depression era populism and support for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. He broke with Roosevelt by the mid 1930s and moved toward increasingly conspiratorial and nativist politics, laying the theological and technical groundwork, a national audience assembled entirely through purchased and donated airtime, that both his own later broadcasts and rival evangelical broadcasters would build on. The National Religious Broadcasters, founded in 1944, formed in part from evangelical anxiety that networks might simply hand religious airtime to whichever voice, Coughlin's among them, drew the largest audience.