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.

Themes this entry appears in

• Political Strategy
• Christian Nationalism
• Politics & the Pulpit

Connections from National Religious Broadcasters

• 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 rested in part on the regulatory and institutional groundwork the National Religious Broadcasters had laid 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.
• 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. Salem's business model, which charged ministries for airtime, depended on the paid-airtime system the NRB had fought to establish. 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. 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.

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