TV Preaching as a Socioeconomic Media Reality

TV preaching (also known as Televangelism in the US) is a media product that started to appear in TV channels around the world during the 1970s and made its way to Turkey in the 1980s. Being a by-product of collaboration between media and religion, this concept has started to become more popular in recent years with the help of another concept called “Return to the Sacred” which is seen as a universal phenomenon by social scientists. Media entered into a new era with TV preachers who used its tools to promote religious ideas. On the other hand, the concept of religious preaching has also taken a different form due to constant interaction with technological advances of the century. As media and religion share a common goal of addressing and influencing the masses, their by-product TV preaching is aimed at conveying the religious message accurately and in an effective and simple way. The significant contribution that preachers made to the ratings of TV networks proves that this new concept has also shaped the relationship between the producer and the consumer of media. However, the nature of television as a financial business and the spiritual nature of religion sometimes contradict with each other. Recent years have witnessed an increasing public demand for information about religion as well as increasing dependence on technology in everyday life, both of which further complicated the aforementioned collaboration. Although religious contents have always found a place on TV screens, they have been subjected to rating concerns and increasingly shaped and formed by the demands of media rather than religion. In this context, the advantages and disadvantages of TV preaching are often questioned and the concept itself is criticized with regards to its actual purpose, public benefit as well as its relationship with media and the financial aspect of that relationship