Abstract

The Greatest Story: Commercial Radio and Religion in the American Century

In December 1947, John K. Hough, the Director of Advertising for the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, outlined why Goodyear decided to get into the business of religious radio. Earlier that year, Goodyear had begun broadcasting The Greatest Story Ever Told, a soap opera dramatizing stories from the Christian New Testament. Goodyear had two goals: to counter communist influence among listeners and to enhance Goodyear’s public image so that it could sell more tires. Though wary not to be perceived as commercializing the bible, Hough insisted that Goodyear had “every reason to believe that this sort of advertising is… commercially justified.” This paper uses Goodyear Tire’s The Greatest Story Ever Told as a case study to explore the surge of commercially-sponsored religious broadcasting during the early Cold War. It argues that these programs demonstrated that radio networks could fulfill their legal mandate to operate “in the public interest” while generating revenue. This marked a shift, as radio’s public interest mandate had previously been fulfilled by unsponsored religious and educational programming, and it paved the way for the Federal Communications Commission’s decision in 1960 to eliminate distinctions between commercial and sustaining time. The paper demonstrates how the rise of commercial sponsorship of network religious radio programs contributed to the creation of an imagined national consensus on religion during the early Cold War. Goodyear hoped to maximize The Greatest Story’s appeal. It employed an interdenominational advisory board and public opinion surveys to ensure that Goodyear’s Jesus resonated with the American mass market. Ultimately, The Greatest Story Ever Told played a foundational role in broadcasting a so-called consensus interpretation of Christianity that shaped what religion looked and sounded like in mass media throughout the American century.