American Protestants and TV in the 1950s Responses to a New Medium [Hardcover]

Americans in the 1950s faced the challenge of negotiating the new medium's place in the home and in American culture in general. Using the American Protestant experience of the introduction of television, Rosenthal illustrates the importance of the interplay between a new medium and its users.American Protestantism and the Television: Toward a Dialogical Approach to Media, Religion, and Culture Turn It Off!: The Liberal Protestant Critique of Television Mainline Religious Broadcasting: A Failure? Television and the Construction of Evangelical Identity The Age of Space Requires Space Age Teaching Tools: Technology on Evangelical Terms Epilogue: Protestants in the Age of Electronic Media

Why are evangelicals early adopters of new media technology while the

Protestant mainline responds ambivalently to innovations in mass communications? Rosenthal analyzes the nexus of technology, faith, and culture to answer key questions in the emerging field of religion and media studies. Her book extends previous scholarship on religion and television through in-depth case studies of how American religious groups responded to the potential of a new medium for outreach. - Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Media and Religion, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California

Rosenthal's outstanding account fills a long-standing gap in our understanding of American media history. The new medium of television posed a perceived threat to the authority of the Protestant establishment in education, politics, and the domestic sphere. The reaction Rosenthal details tells us much about the place of Protestantism in the culture in the mid-twentieth century and much about how the media age has de-stabilized and re-structured religion and religious institutions. This excellent history provides fascinating and telling insights into the ways that these institutions saw themselves and this new medium. Their perception of threats tolãC