The Rise of Christian Right Broadcasting: From Resisting Brown to Overturning Roe

Abstract

Every day, millions of Americans tune in to conservative Christian radio, podcasts, and television, or what I call Christian Right broadcasting. These broadcasters have integrated mass media into the intimacy of local religious life, using national media platforms to rally pastors and churches behind the Republican Party. How do Christian Right broadcasters operate as political actors? How did the distinctive structure of Christian Right broadcasting first come into being? How did Christian Right broadcasting rise to power? To answer the questions, I focus centrally on the history and present-day operations of Salem Media Group, the biggest conservative Christian radio company in the U.S. Drawing from novel archival and quantitative evidence, I trace Salem’s history and political engagement from the late 1940s through the 2024 election. This evidence reveals how Salem Media descends from, and draws upon, media models first innovated by segregationists striving to defend Jim Crow in the American South. My theoretical account focuses on how the American South’s distinctive path to modernization enabled religious entrepreneurs on the far-right “fringe” to innovate new forms of community-based religious radio and turn them into big business. Advancing a historical institutionalist account of American media’s transformation across the past eighty years, I show how the South’s regional political economy—together with the weak capacity of federal broadcast regulators—enabled grassroots religious networks to create institutional pathways in American broadcasting that are still visible on the podcast charts and in party politics. This study places religious communication at the center of the story of how conservative media became big business in the United States, contributing to scholarship on the determinants of democratic instability in the U.S. It also reorients scholarship on conservative media’s breakthrough in the 1980s and 1990s to focus on subnational, and distinctively American, processes of media development that unfolded in the post-WWII period.