By the early 1940s, most American radio networks donated free "sustaining time" for religious programming rather than sell airtime to religious broadcasters directly, and that donated time was controlled almost entirely by the Federal Council of Churches, an organization dominated by mainline Protestant denominations. In 1943 the Council supported federal regulatory proposals that would have removed independent evangelical broadcasters from the national networks entirely, leaving mainline denominational programming as the only religious content most stations would carry.
Evangelical broadcasters organized in direct response. On September 21, 1944, about 150 evangelical broadcasters and church leaders met at Moody Memorial Church in Chicago and formed the National Religious Broadcasters, an association built specifically to represent evangelical broadcasting interests before federal regulators and the networks themselves, and to argue for evangelicals' right to purchase airtime rather than depend on donated slots controlled by a rival religious body.
The campaign succeeded over the following decade: evangelical broadcasters won the ability to buy commercial airtime on their own terms, a change that made possible the purchased time model nearly every religious broadcasting ministry since, through the cable and satellite networks built decades later, would eventually depend on. Charles Coughlin had already built the same purchased-airtime model on his own more than a decade earlier, buying commercial time directly from individual stations through the 1930s after CBS dropped his program in 1931, the same right the 1944 campaign later won and made an organized standard for the ministries that followed.