My dissertation conceptualizes and analyzes the historical development of a little-studied form of conservative media that I call Christian Right broadcasting. In recent decades, conservative Christian broadcaster-activists have won pride of place in an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party coalition. Provocatively, these figures not only beam messages over the national airwaves like Fox News, but synthesize the reach of mass media with the intimacy of face-to-face contact in local community settings. This successful integration of mass media into the “real world” of communities defies scholarly wisdom, which holds that the nationalization of American politics has hollowed out civic life across the heartland, breaking the links between national political groups and the grassroots level.
How did this distinctive Christian Right broadcasting structure come into being? And what can this tell us about the historical development of conservative media in the US? To answer these questions, my dissertation takes readers on a twisty journey that begins with small town radio preaching and ends with our current democratic crisis, tracing the rise of Christian Right broadcasting from its humble beginnings in the Jim Crow South of the 1940s, to its melding with more centralized forms of media in the 1980s and 1990s, to its far-reaching influence in the present-day.
By unearthing the hidden history of a major media company, I reveal how this uniquely-American form of media was made possible by the South’s distinctive history of capitalist development. As I show, the conjuncture of industrial growth and anti-civil rights mobilization made the post-WWII South a laboratory for far-right entrepreneurs experimenting with media technology on a big scale—and who made fateful choices about the organization of American broadcasting. Challenging and extending scholarship on media and civic institutions, I demonstrate how the American South’s distinctive path to modernization has structured the long-term development of the conservative media industry that has polarized Americans, led to a crisis of misinformation, and helped turn the Republican Party into an authoritarian political force under Donald Trump’s grip.
A paper that synthesizes findings from my dissertation research won the 2024 Reinhard Bendix Student Paper Award presented by the Comparative and Historical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association for best student paper in comparative-historical sociology. My research has been supported by the American Sociological Association’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG).
Matthew Brooke 