TELEVANGELIST

noun (Lifestyle and Leisure) (People and Society) An evangelical preacher who uses television or other mass media to promote his or her doctrines. Etymology: Formed by telescoping television and evangelist to make a blend. The unblended forms television evangelist and TV evangelist, and the compound tele-evangelist, also occur, but are less common. History and Usage: Television, especially on channels devoted to religious broadcasting, was first used by some evangelical Christian denominations as an effective means of preaching the Christian gospel as long ago as the fifties, when the first pray-TV channel was set up in the US. Evangelists with a gift for mass communication, such as Billy Graham, became world-famous, but televangelism as such remained a predominantly American phenomenon for some years after the words televangelist and televangelism started to be used in the mid seventies. With the renewed fashion for fundamentalist doctrine during the early eighties, however (see fundie), televangelists such as Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Oral Roberts (who even founded a university named after himself) achieved considerable fame and political influence. In the later eighties, a succession of scandals involving the financial and sexual affairs of certain televangelists brought them into the news in a more negative way. A study...performed by the A. C. Nielsen Co. found that 34 million people watched one of the top 10 tele-evangelists during the month studied. Washington Post 5 Feb. 1986, section C, p. 11 Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart smugly cast stones at adulterous PTL (Praise the Lord) head Jim Bakker--until his own voyeuristic trysts with a New Orleans hooker came to light in 1988. Life Fall 1989, p. 142