Making waves: Christian broadcasters beam their messages to the world.

• Author: Rivers, Frances
• Position: Includes related article on George Otis's High Adventure ministries - Cover Story

One hundred and sixty evangelicals are snapping their fingers in a motel conference room in Colorado Springs. They snap eleven times. "Every time you snapped your fingers, someone died and went to a Christless eternity," says the woman up on stage. "That's pretty sobering, isn't it?" Heads nod. The man next to me sighs.

With a quick shuffling of chairs, the audience forms into groups of threes and fours and, armed with little white cards, starts to pray. Each card, small enough to slip into a Bible, carries a brief description of a particular language group--Uzbeks and Turkmen, Mazanderanis and Macedonians--and their prayer "needs." One such need reads: "That the spiritual darkness of Islam will be shattered."

To nonbelievers this buzz of earnest activity seems harmless, even absurd. But these people are electronic crusaders. The organizations they support are creating cultural and political havoc around the world.

World Radio Missionary Fellowship hosted the conference in Colorado Springs last summer. It is commonly known by the call letters HCJB, which stand for Heralding Christ Jesus' Blessings. Battling Satan via the airwaves has been HCJB's self-appointed mission since 1931, and its field of operations is huge. It broadcasts its fundamentalist gospel message in forty-one languages and dialects from twelve shortwave transmitters and thirty-two antennae in Quito, Ecuador. It owns a network of FM stations in Ecuador and along the U.S.-Mexican border, and it is helping to set up thirteen stations in Romania and small studios and transmitters all over Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It owns a television company that airs productions throughout Latin America. It has studio facilities in Panama, Brazil, and Argentina, broadcasts productions from sites in Lebanon, the Seychelles, and Italy, and runs two Ecuadorian hospitals.

The organization is not alone. Trans World Radio, Far East Broadcasting Company, Sudan Interior Mission International, LeSEA Broadcasting, World Wide Christian Radio, World Christian Broadcasting Company, High Adventure Ministries, Family Stations, and others have similar operations in various parts of the globe. In 1985, HCJB, Trans World Radio, Far East Broadcasting Company, and Sudan Interior Mission International joined forces and pooled resources for what they call "World by 2000." They aim to have broadcasts in every language of more than a million speakers by the year 2000.

These organizations are unknown to most Americans. Mention religious broadcasting and people imagine televangelists waving Bibles and demanding credit-card numbers. But outside the United States, evangelical broadcasting, operating on far smaller budgets and headed by less exciting personalities, is having a disturbing impact on Third World communities.

Organizations that claim to avoid politics enjoy intimate relations with political leaders, often while ignoring the plight of a country's citizens. Stations pitched strategically at communist countries and poverty-ridden communities blare a religious philosophy that is unashamedly American, conservative, and individualistic. Their claims of cultural sensitivity toward indigenous peoples ring hollow when stacked against their track records in the countries where they broadcast.

George Bush, well known for hobnobbing with evangelical circles, recently wrote a letter of tribute to the retiring president of Far East Broadcasting Company, Robert Bowman. "Your career," Bush gushed, "has been characterized by your loyalty and dedication to sharing the Word of God, and I am pleased to join your friends and colleagues in saluting you for a job well done." As Bowman's wife, Eleanor, narrates in her triumphant history of Far East Broadcasting Company, Eyes Beyond the Horizon, its "job well done" has consisted of trying to undermine communist governments since 1945 by converting people to Christ.

People "trapped by political oppression" in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea, and China secretly listen to FEBC by night, Eleanor Bowman boasts. She tells the story of "Ricardo," a Peruvian communist guerrilla. "Plugging the earphone into his radio, he slowly moved the tuner across the dial. It stopped at the spot where Radio Havana's powerful voice spewed out hatred toward its enemies.... Continuing to move the dial across his radio, Ricardo paused for a moment when a voice identified itself as 'La Voz de la Amistad' [Voice of Friendship-FEBC's Latin American service]. The young communist listened intently. He knew he hated his enemies. and suddenly...