Turn Your Radio On: Liberal Theology in a Southern Register, 1953–1963

Abstract In the mid-twentieth century, a contest played out between evangelicals and mainline Protestant denominations over which organizations would have access to the radio airwaves and whose message, including whose theology, would receive the widest hearing. While networks favored the mainline denominations, a host of independent evangelical stations and the National Association of Evangelicals’ broadcast arm countered the impression that network religion represented American religion more generally. Against this backdrop, the Atlanta-based Protestant Hour radio show, which began as one station in 1945 but boasted 600 participating stations by 1963, sounded a liberal theology that promoted the liberalization of Protestantism throughout its largely southern listening area. Building on Gary Dorrien’s characterization of liberal theology, this essay shows how the theology of three preachers who frequently appeared on the show—Methodist Robert E. Goodrich, Jr., Presbyterian John A. Redhead, and Lutheran Edmund Steimle—presented this liberalism and echoed such evangelical elements as a heightened Christocentricity, repeated reference to the Bible, and personal appeal. Despite the later decline of mainline Protestantism, a type of evangelical liberalism in the 1950s and early 1960s attracted numerous radio listeners in the south contrary to the stereotype of southerners as fundamentalists who embraced a conservative theology.