National Religious Broadcasters

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.

Having secured evangelical broadcasters' access to purchased airtime, the National Religious Broadcasters shifted over the following decades from a defensive advocacy campaign into an ongoing trade association: an annual convention, a network of member ministries and broadcasters, and a standing effort to promote financial accountability and integrity across an industry the association itself had helped bring into existence.

That standard setting role gained visible urgency after the televangelism scandals that followed, from the PTL fraud conviction to the Senate Finance Committee's 2007 to 2011 inquiry into several prosperity preaching ministries. Member accountability, transparency about ministry finances, and public trust in religious broadcasting became recurring themes of the association's advocacy in a way the original 1944 founders, focused on simply staying on the air at all, could not have anticipated.

The National Religious Broadcasters continues to operate today as the principal trade association for Christian broadcasters in the United States, holding its annual convention, engaging federal media policy on behalf of its members, and tracing its own institutional identity directly back to the 150 broadcasters who met at Moody Memorial Church in 1944 to keep evangelical voices on the American airwaves.