A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

When Associate Editor Richard N. Ostling began to study the recent controversies surrounding U.S. television evangelists and then to write this week's cover story, he called on 22 years of religion reporting and a lifetime in mainstream Protestantism. He wrote the TIME covers on Televangelists Jerry Falwell (1985) and Pat Robertson (1986), and has spent countless hours in recent years watching the shows of TV preachers and poring over their periodicals. Reared as an American Baptist, Ostling is perplexed, as are many other Evangelical Christians, over the phenomenon he calls theme- park Christianity. The electronic churches, he says, are a "fascinating but problematic component of our culture, and their emergence is one of the most unexpected events in American religion in the past decade."

On Sundays, Ostling squeezes out time to instruct an adult Bible-study class at the Christian Reformed Church in Ridgewood, N.J., where he, his wife Joan and daughters Margaret, 15, and Elizabeth, 14, are all members of the congregation. He believes the current upheaval among the cathedrals of the airwaves may create benefits for less flamboyant Christian ministries. "Out of this," says he, "the unglamorous church on the corner may come out looking much more attractive."

Piecing together the accompanying profiles on the country's leading TV pastors was Staff Writer Sara Medina who, like Ostling, plays an active role in her New York City church. She serves regularly as a subdeacon at Calvary/ St. George's Episcopal Church, which she has attended since 1982. It is not the first time she has collaborated with Ostling. In 1977-78, years that saw a dramatic upsurge in U.S. Evangelical Protestantism and the death of two Popes, she was the reporter-researcher in the Religion section.

Through the week, TIME's correspondents were active in the strongholds of the video preachers across the South and West. Los Angeles Correspondent Michael Riley and Reporter Bill Blanning interviewed many of the principals in the story, including Tammy Faye Bakker. Meanwhile, Atlanta Correspondent B. Russell Leavitt assessed the deep Fundamentalism of the Southern states. Says he: "Driving through kudzu-covered country on a Sunday morning and flipping the radio dial, one can hear the evangelists by the score. They are a constant refrain, a fixture in the landscape."