National Religious Broadcasters

The NRB was born from a regulatory emergency. In 1943, the Federal Council of Churches — the mainline Protestant establishment — successfully lobbied NBC, CBS, and the Mutual Broadcasting System to adopt policies barring independent evangelical broadcasters from purchasing airtime. The policy would allocate religious broadcast slots exclusively through donated 'sustaining time' distributed to mainline-approved groups. The practical effect: every independent evangelical broadcaster was locked out of national radio. This was a massive financial threat. By 1942, Charles Fuller's Old Fashioned Revival Hour was the largest single program on Mutual, generating more than 25% of the network's total revenue. Walter Maier's Lutheran Hour was receiving more listener mail than Amos 'n' Andy. The mainline establishment was trying to shut down a populist movement that had built its own audience. 150 evangelical broadcasters convened on September 21, 1944, at Moody Memorial Church in Chicago and founded the NRB. William Ward Ayer became its first president. The founding documents included a Statement of Faith and Code of Ethics — simultaneously a lobbying document (demonstrating legitimacy to regulators) and a theological gatekeeping instrument (defining who counted as a legitimate evangelical broadcaster). The NRB's five-year lobbying campaign paid off in 1949 when ABC reversed the ban on paid religious broadcasting. The other networks followed. Evangelical broadcasters could now purchase airtime nationally, creating the financial and institutional foundation for every major Christian radio ministry that followed. By the 1980s, one in seven American radio stations was Christian — a direct product of the infrastructure the NRB had built and defended. The NRB maintains a permanent Government Relations office in Washington, D.C., lobbying the FCC and Congress on First Amendment grounds. Its regulatory victories made the Christian radio ecosystem legally secure at every stage of its growth.

Documented themes

• Political Strategy
• Christian Nationalism
• politics-and-the-pulpit

Connections from National Religious Broadcasters

• influenced → Liberty University (1971) — Liberty University's growth from a small Lynchburg Baptist College to the largest Christian university in the world was financially inseparable from Jerry Falwell's Old-Time Gospel Hour — a nationally syndicated television and radio ministry that the National Religious Broadcasters' decades of regulatory advocacy had made possible. NRB's successful fight for the right to purchase airtime rather than receive it only through public service allocations meant that Falwell could buy the reach he needed to build a donor base. That donor base, cultivated through broadcast ministry, funded Liberty's construction and kept it solvent through years of precarious finances. The broadcast infrastructure NRB had built was the financial engine of the institutional infrastructure Falwell was building.
• influenced → Focus on the Family (1977) — Focus on the Family launched its radio broadcast in 1977 on only a handful of stations — but by peak reach, Dobson's daily program aired on more than 4,000 radio stations worldwide, including over 1,500 in the United States. That scale was only possible because of the regulatory and institutional infrastructure the National Religious Broadcasters had built over the preceding thirty years. The NRB's 1944 founding was a direct response to the mainline Protestant campaign to lock independent evangelical broadcasters out of national radio. Its lobbying victory in 1949, when ABC reversed the ban on paid religious broadcasting, meant that a ministry like Focus on the Family could purchase airtime on commercial stations market by market, building national reach without owning a single transmitter. The NRB also maintained ethical standards and FCC lobbying representation that gave Christian broadcasters collective legitimacy in regulatory proceedings. Without the NRB's foundational work — securing the right to purchase airtime, defending it through subsequent regulatory challenges, and establishing the professional norms that kept the industry credible — Dobson's program could not have achieved the scale of political and cultural influence it did.
• influenced → Salem Communications (1974) — Salem Communications was founded in 1974 — thirty years after the NRB's founding battle to secure evangelical broadcasters' right to purchase airtime. The NRB's infrastructure was the precondition for Salem's business model: Salem's revenue structure, which charged ministries fees for airtime rather than relying on mainstream advertising, was only viable because the NRB had established and defended the legal right to sell airtime to religious organizations. NRB membership also provided Salem's founders Stuart Epperson and Edward Atsinger III with the professional network, FCC lobbying access, and industry credibility that a new entrant needed to acquire licenses and expand. Both founders held NRB leadership positions. The NRB's ongoing regulatory advocacy — defending Christian broadcasters from Fairness Doctrine challenges, FCC rule changes, and local zoning restrictions — protected the airwave access that Salem's city-by-city acquisition strategy depended on. Salem's growth from two stations in 1974 to 117 stations in 2024 was built on a legal and regulatory foundation the NRB had spent thirty years constructing.
• supported → American Family Radio (1991) — American Family Radio, launched in 1991 as the broadcast arm of Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, operated within the National Religious Broadcasters network — the trade association that set standards, provided distribution infrastructure, and conferred legitimacy on evangelical broadcast organizations. NRB membership gave AFR access to industry lobbying, spectrum advocacy, and the broader ecosystem of Christian broadcasting, while AFR's explicitly political programming represented the most aggressive edge of what NRB's infrastructure made possible.

Connections to National Religious Broadcasters

• Christian Nationalism: Before 1940 influenced (1944) — The National Religious Broadcasters was founded on the assumption that Christian radio was not merely religious programming but a form of national stewardship — that America's identity as a Christian civilization depended on Christians controlling the airwaves. This premise was not invented in 1944. It was the direct application of a theological tradition that had been defining American Protestant identity since the Puritans.
• Prosperity Gospel Network influenced (1980) — Prosperity gospel preachers — Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts, Jim Bakker, Paul Crouch (TBN), Joel Osteen — built and dominated the Christian television broadcast infrastructure. Trinity Broadcasting Network, the largest Christian television network in the world, was founded by Paul and Jan Crouch on prosperity gospel theology and became the primary distribution platform for prosperity gospel content. The fundraising model of prosperity gospel (seed faith donations, sowing and reaping financial miracles) was also the fundraising model that sustained broadcast ministries. National Religious Broadcasters, as the trade association for Christian broadcasters, operated in an ecosystem where prosperity gospel ministries were among the largest and most financially powerful members.

Sources

• National Religious Broadcasters: History of the Association — NRB (2024)
• One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America — Kevin M. Kruse (2015), pp. 1–50