This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Stewart Hoover's study of the electronic church approaches religious broadcasting from the audience's side rather than the broadcaster's, interviewing actual viewers about what religious television meant to them personally and how it fit into the rest of their religious and daily lives, a method that complicates any simple account of a broadcast work as either purely sincere ministry or purely commercial enterprise.
That audience centered method matters for a broadcast work entry because a program's stated devotional purpose and its actual, documented effect on the people who watch or listen to it are frequently two separate facts worth recording rather than assuming one straightforwardly explains the other, a religious broadcast reaching very different audiences in very different ways than its own producers may describe.
A broadcast work entry tries to hold both halves of that picture together, a work's own stated religious mission and content, and, where it is documented, how an actual audience received and used it, since studying religious broadcasting seriously means treating it as a real, measurable media phenomenon and not only as an extension of the religious content it carries.