Febe Armanios is an impressive scholar of the history of the Middle East, whose wide-ranging work focuses on the history of religious minorities, and on the connections between food practices and religious cultures. Her most recent book, titled Satellite Ministries: The Rise of Christian Television in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2025), deals with multiple issues of enormous interest to me personally, including the relationship between religion and electronic media, the rapidly shifting balance of religions in the Middle East, and specifically the current state of Christian traditions in that region. Moreover, the subject matter is very little known, except to other specialists. All in all, I think the book is a treasure, and it deserves a wide audience. Dr Armanios kindly agreed to write a guest blogpost for this site, which follows below. She is a very welcome visitor!
Satellite Ministries
Febe Armanios
In 1981, a television station called Star of Hope began broadcasting from Israeli-occupied South Lebanon. Backed by American missionaries, Israeli politicians, and Lebanese Catholic leaders, the channel aired Western entertainment and Christian content using a repurposed ABC Monday Night Football truck situated on the Israel-Lebanon border. Later renamed Middle East Television (METV), its programming included American evangelical fare, secular soap operas, sports, and daily news, along with innovative Arabic Christian televangelism.
The station had an enormous impact. METV spurred the growth of competing Christian broadcasters and reshaped the Middle East’s media and religious landscape over the next forty years. Yet it was, of course, controversial—its foreign, imperialist, and missionary approach generated curiosity and consternation in the region and, occasionally, around the world.
My book, Satellite Ministries, traces the forty-year history of Christian television in the region. I examine no fewer than sixteen channels, and describe the role of foreign-sponsored evangelical initiatives in inspiring varied platforms for indigenous Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. The book maps the evolution of these stations, from their terrestrial origins in the early 1980s to the satellite broadcast boom of the 1990s and beyond.
This story finds its roots in mid-twentieth-century America, where televangelists like Oral Roberts, Rex Humbard, Jerry Falwell, and later Pat Robertson revolutionized the spread of Christianity through television screens. They saw new communication technologies as part of God’s plan to disseminate the ideals of born-again salvation, spectacular divine healings, and Jesus’ Second Coming. By the 1970s, America’s “electronic church” had become a powerful force closely tied to the Religious Right and conservative politics.
In the 1980s and 90s, of course, the medium was plagued by a variety of moral and financial scandals, but even so, it persisted as a staple of American religion. Such popular figures as Robertson, Joyce Meyer, Paul Crouch, and Benny Hinn continued to capitalize on viewer donations and to build media empires that financed their global expansion.
American-sponsored televangelism was propelled into the Levant (specifically Lebanon and Israel-Palestine) by eschatological zeal, by a desire to hasten Biblical end-times prophecies believed to unfold in the “Holy Land.” From the 1970s onward, moreover, Western religious leaders aimed to combat Soviet political outreach in the Middle East and the potential spread of “godless Communism.” Such aspirations converged with the close (and often paradoxical) alliances being forged between US evangelicals, Israel’s right-wing politicians, and a handful of Middle Eastern Christians. Their partnerships, which allowed early and missionary-oriented Christian television to take root in South Lebanon, led to frequent accusations of cultural imperialism, and sparked hostile responses from local Jewish, Christian, and Muslim groups, as well as Arab leaders and pro-Palestinian activists.
Although foreign-imported televangelism was disruptive, it achieved some measure of success primarily through the growing involvement and creativity of Middle Eastern Christians. In Lebanon, the devastation and chaos of the long Civil War (1975–1991) created opportunities for foreign evangelicals to partner with Catholic and Maronite Christians, including militia leaders who viewed television as a tool for their political ends. But such partnerships inspired other local Christians in Lebanon, and later elsewhere, to launch their own stations, ones that would more accurately reflect their traditional beliefs, mores, and spirituality. In later years and in places like Egypt, the rise of Islamic revivalism, pervasive in politics and popular culture, motivated Christians to build satellite media outlets that allowed them, for the first time, to express their religious identities quite boldly and publicly.
The channels analyzed in Satellite Ministries fall into three main categories: Western-backed conservative outlets with a charismatic and apocalyptic outlook; middle-ground channels that sought to balance their international donors’ expectations with local interests; and grassroots initiatives rooted in ancient church traditions, particularly Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The histories and programming strategies of primarily Arabic, but also Turkish and Persian, Christian channels reveal how media producers forged unexpected alliances, pursued sectarian objectives, and navigated various transnational influences.
Satellite Ministries explores how Western-style televangelism connected local Middle Eastern Christians (and potential converts) to a charismatic renewal movement that promoted conservative views on family, gender, and sexuality. Broadcasters often emphasized “family values” agendas that promoted traditional marriage relations and decried sexual liberty, homosexuality, and abortion. Mirroring the American Moral Majority movement, they asserted a robust Christian ethos in opposition to secular culture.
But with time, too, native Christians, along with their diasporic counterparts, seized some control of their media narratives. They established themselves as authoritative voices on belief, scripture, and praxis, and they challenged state dominance, majoritarian religions, and even their own church hierarchies. Through programs that touted impassioned and emotive prayer or the use of television screens to trigger miraculous healings, this medium also became integral in the expression of personal and lived religious identities.
What I seek to demonstrate is how Christianity is practiced and contested in a global communication age where many have found strength, solace, and community through media technologies in an uncertain regional climate.
Febe Armanios is the Philip Battell and Sarah Frances Cowles Stewart Professor of History at Middlebury College. Her books include Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2011) and she is the co-author, with Boğaç Ergene, of Halal Food: A History (Oxford University Press, 2018).
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