Doctoral Dissertation Research: Globalizing the Gospel: The Technology of American International Religious Broadcasting, 1931-1980

在二战后的30年里，美国福音派广播公司在节目语言、传输时间和收到的信件数量方面取代了商业公司，并通过了国营服务，从而在全球范围内占据了重要地位。利用学者们没有查阅过的档案，这篇STS学位论文改进补助金提供了一段以前不为人知的这种现象的历史。该项目从1931年在海外建立第一个新教电台开始，并绘制了从20世纪50年代初到全球时代的黎明，四大福音派广播公司的崛起。本文将传教士电台与美国之音的活动进行了比较，后者在1950年采用宗教广播进行宣传。与普遍的观念相反，福音派广播者并不是落后的反动派，而是活跃的技术使用者，有选择地利用现代技术系统，创造性地在世界各地传播他们的传统信息。该项目采用社会建构主义的方法，展示了福音派和美国之音广播员如何在1950年代通过在发展中国家偏远农村地区建立和分发预调好的“传教士接收器”的项目来培养听众。这项研究收集了广播公司档案中听众的信件，深入了解了广播公司如何看待他们的听众，以及广播如何被热情的听众转换为重要的子集公开接受。《全球化福音》展示了美国福音派广播公司如何通过本地化使命和实践，有效地应对20世纪70年代以来发展中世界不断变化的政治和技术条件。20世纪末，福音派世界广播没有建立一个单一的全球“虚拟”社区，而是培育了一个基于重叠的宗教、国家和种族认同的马赛克社区。在20世纪70年代开始的亚洲、非洲和拉丁美洲教会的全球复兴的背景下，该项目以传教士电台为背景，展示了对美国化宗教霸权和全球技术的疏远影响的“当地文化的耐力”。这项研究将探索新的主题，审查迄今大部分未使用的原始材料，并采用新的私人/公共比较框架，从而大大增加现有的国际广播学术研究。该项目致力于宗教和广播的交叉，将打开美国在海外文化影响力的一个未被充分认识但却很重要的来源--美国福音派宗教，追溯其对海外机构和个人的影响。该项目将利用国际宗教广播作为个案研究，以扩大对传统群体如何通过技术的占有和调解来适应现代生活的学术理解。

In the three decades following WWII, American evangelical broadcasters rose to positions of global prominence, supplanting commercial firms and passing state-run services in the number of program languages, transmission hours, and letters received. Drawing on archives that scholars have not consulted, this STS Dissertation Improvement Grant, provides a previously untold history of this phenomenon. The project begins with the establishment of the first Protestant station overseas in 1931 and charts the rise of four major evangelical broadcasters from the early 1950s to the dawn of the global era. The dissertation compares missionary radio with the activity of the Voice of America, which adopted religious broadcasts in 1950 for propaganda purposes. Contrary to widespread conceptions, evangelical broadcasters did not function as backward-looking reactionaries, but acted as dynamic technological users, selectively appropriating modern technological systems to creatively proselytize their traditional message around the world. Employing a social constructivist approach, the project demonstrates how evangelical and VOA broadcasters constructed listening audiences in the 1950s through projects to build and distribute pre-tuned "Portable Missionary Receivers" in remote rural areas of developing countries. Engaging a collection of letters from listeners in broadcaster archives, the study provides insight into the how broadcasters perceived their listening public and how radio broadcasts were publicly received by an important subset of enthusiastic listener converts. "Globalizing the Gospel" shows how evangelical American broadcasters responded effectively to changing political and technological conditions in the developing world beginning in the 1970s by localizing their mission and practice. Rather than build a single global "virtual" community, evangelical world radio in the late twentieth century fostered a mosaic of communities based on overlapping religious, national, and ethnic identities. Setting missionary radio against the backdrop of the global revival of the church in Asia, Africa, and Latin America which began in the 1970s, the project demonstrates the "stamina of local culture" against the hegemony of Americanized religion and the distancing effects of global technology. This study will add significantly to existing scholarship on international broadcasting by exploring new subject matter, examining hitherto largely unused source material, and adopting a novel private/public comparative framework. Working at the intersection of religion and radio, the project will open up an under-appreciated but important source of American cultural influence abroad, American evangelical religion, tracing its effects on institutions and individuals overseas. This project will use international religious broadcasting as a case study to broaden scholarly understanding of the ways in which traditional groups accommodate modern life through the appropriation and mediation of technology.