Hangen, Tona J. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. ix + 220 pp. $18.95 (USD). ISBN: 0807854204.

[1] This is a thoroughly researched and well-written study of the use of the radio by conservative Christians from the 1920s through the early 1960s. These groups employed this new medium to spread the Gospel, assume the guardianship "of the nation's values" (19), and battle liberalism/modernism. According to Hangen, the radio also gave the movement its "institutional and tangible, audible form" (18). During these years the fundamentalists and conservative believers carried on a running battle - first with the Federal Council of Churches, and then with the National Council of Churches - over the proper method to allocate religious time on the airway. The latter groups favored "sustaining time" or free airway, which the major networks usually gave to mainline Protestant ministers, Roman Catholic priests, and Jewish rabbis, while the former preferred "commercial time" or programs paid for by the sponsors. In the end the fundamentalist desire for commercial time won out, and this helped pave the way for the rise of radio programming from the Christian right in the late 1970s and 1980s.

[2] The author focuses on three of the important figures in the rise of conservative Christian radio - Paul Rader of the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle, Aimee Semple McPherson of the Angelus Temple, and Charles Fuller of "The Old Fashioned Revival Hour." Radar provided a wide variety of Sunday programming, ranging from sermons and gospel music to shows for children and the home-bound. Before it collapsed in debt in the 1930s, the broadcast reached from the Rocky Mountains to the New England states. Through her church's own radio station, McPherson provided many of the same types of programs not limited by commercial fees (which could increase at any time). Fuller, however, depended solely on donations from listeners and contributions from friends to sustain his show, which was first aired on the Mutual network and then on independent stations. By the mid-1940s, "The Old Fashioned Revival Hour" with its "plain-folks persona" (110) was reaching 20 million people weekly over 400 stations.

[3] A good book (like this one) often raises questions that can lead to further research. After examining the radio ministries of Radar, McPherson, and Fuller, why not a chapter on how an early Bible institute, such as Moody Bible Institute, utilized radio? The author notes that the formation of organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Religious Broadcasters led to attempts "to self-regulate fundamentalist commercial programs on the production side" (116). How did this take place? Were there any noteworthy examples of programs being modified? Finally, where does Aimee Semple McPherson fit into the religious mosaic of the inter-war years? Is she a Pentecostal, a fundamentalist, or a combination of the two? Hangen favors the latter, writing that McPherson's radio station "served as a national signpost of fundamentalist strength that transcended region, but it was first and foremost the jubilant expression of a local Pentecostal congregation" (74). Is the author implying that there was a much closer relationship between fundamentalists and Pentecostals in the 1920s and 1930s than previously imagined? While not all will agree with this assessment, the issue is certainly worth further investigation.

[4] In conclusion, one must ask to what the title Redeeming the Dial refers? The word "redeem" means to recover, get back, rescue, or restore. Thus, the title seems to suggest that fundamentalists and conservative Christians struggled to regain control of the radio waves in order to proclaim the Gospel and to redeem a sinful America. As Hangen writes, "Religious radio sought to counter the social fragmentation of American life by using the very tool - the mass media - being portrayed as the culprit in the breakdown of American community" (157). However, the author spends more time on the triumph of "commercial time" over "sustaining time" than on a Christian struggle to regain control over secular radio. Thus, Redeeming the Dial appears to be about the triumph of conservative Christians over the liberals in the struggle over access to the nation's airways.

W. Terry Lindley
Department of History
Union University
Jackson, TN
tlindley@uu.edu