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274 Conclusion: what is produced?

we’d find that, in spite of knowing a good bit about some kinds of religious
television, even our born-again and Evangelical interviewees would seek to
distance themselves from that kind of media. Clearly, there is a level of social
opprobrium attached to televangelism in the culture in general. It is inter-
esting to see that that sense also stretches to those audiences that should be
most likely to be viewers and listeners. With the partial exception of radio
programs from the Focus on the Family organization and children’s media
such as the Veggie Tales series, we found very few examples of self-
consciously religious media being very important in these narratives. Specific
televangelism ministries were identified and criticized. While some ritualistic
mention of religious TV occurred in some interviews, religious television
never rose to the surface as the kind of interesting, attractive, or meaningful
programming that even the Evangelicals found in “secular” media.
Some found an occasional religious program meaningful, but the PAX
network and sentimental and inoffensive programs on the Hallmark
network were clearly preferred, even for them. This is an important finding,
taken together with what we’ve seen about the relationships between reli-
gious identity and the media of the broader, “secular” culture. It is of course
commonplace to think of there being a syllogistic relationship between
conservative religious values and conservative religious broadcasting. This is
connected, of course, with the rise of televangelism and its role in the emer-
gence of the neo-Evangelical movement. The evidence here would suggest a
different reality, however. Those with longer memories might suggest that
televangelism does not fare well, even with its “core” potential audience,
because of the scandals that rocked the industry in the late 1980s. There is
little evidence of that here. Rather, what people object to about televange-
lism are specific things about the form of the genre as they understand it. Jay
Milliken and Karl Callahan, for example, found the programs too much
devoted to “hocus-pocus” and the “health and wealth” gospel.
The view of televangelism encountered here is consistent with senti-
ments attributed to mainstream Evangelicals by Christianity Today’s Ted
Olsen in Chapter 9. Olsen decried the tendency for televangelism figures
Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to get disproportionate attention from the
secular media because they are television figures. He contended that they
are not looked to as authorities by mainstream or majority Evangelical
opinion. Consistent with this, when televangelism did occur in our inter-
views, it was most often Trinity Broadcasting or Benny Hinn that were
mentioned. Neither Robertson nor Falwell figured in any of our interviews
with “born-again” or “dogmatist” interviewees in Chapters 6 and 7.

A “symbolic inventory”?
There are other issues beyond the distinctions made that are significant of
the negotiations we’ve encountered. One of the expectations I’d set up at