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

在第二次世界大战后的三十年里，美国福音派广播公司在全球范围内占据了重要地位，取代了商业公司，并在节目语言，传输时间和收到的信件数量方面超过了国营服务。 利用学者们没有查阅过的档案，STS论文改进补助金提供了这一现象以前不为人知的历史。 该项目始于1931年在海外建立第一个新教电台，并描绘了从20世纪50年代初到全球化时代黎明的四个主要福音派广播公司的崛起。 本文将传教士广播与美国之音的活动进行了比较，美国之音于1950年采用宗教广播进行宣传。 与普遍的观念相反，福音派广播公司并不是向后看的反动派，而是作为动态的技术用户，有选择地利用现代技术系统，在世界各地创造性地传播他们的传统信息。 该项目采用社会建构主义方法，展示了福音派和美国之音广播公司如何在1950年代通过在发展中国家偏远农村地区建造和分发预先调谐的“便携式传教士接收器”的项目来构建听众。 从事广播档案中的听众的信件的集合，该研究提供了深入了解广播公司如何看待他们的听众公众和如何广播公开接收的一个重要子集的热情听众转换。 “全球化的福音”显示了福音派美国广播公司如何有效地回应不断变化的政治和技术条件在发展中国家开始在1970年代通过本地化他们的使命和做法。 世纪末，福音派世界广播电台没有建立一个单一的全球“虚拟”社区，而是在重叠的宗教、国家和种族身份的基础上培育了一个马赛克社区。 该项目以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为背景，展示了“地方文化的耐力”，以对抗美国化宗教的霸权和全球技术的疏远效应。 这项研究将通过探索新的主题，研究迄今为止基本上未使用的源材料，并采用一种新的私人/公共比较框架，大大增加现有的国际广播奖学金。 在宗教和广播的交叉点工作，该项目将开辟一个被低估但重要的美国文化影响力来源，美国福音派宗教，追踪其对海外机构和个人的影响。 本项目将利用国际宗教广播作为案例研究，以扩大学术界对传统群体如何通过技术的挪用和调解来适应现代生活的理解。

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.