It's About Time
A Probably Inaccurate History of Christian Public Radio
When I was a kid, I thought the first people that woke up in the entire world were Jon and Sherry Rivers, hosts of the morning show on the Christian radio station 89.1 KLOVE (“Positiiiive…enouragiiiing…KLOOOOOVE”). When you rolled out of bed they were already talking—really, chatting. Not mumbling over a bowl of cold cereal but effervescently alive. This fact became all the more incredible when it occurred to me, around age 5, that radio hosts must work at the tower stations on top of mountains (duh). The McDowell mountains in Phoenix are tall. It seemed impossible that anyone could scale those heights and announce an uninterrupted half hour of the David Crowder Band before my Gorilla Munch even got soggy. So every morning I’d scrutinize their voices for a sign of pre-recorded fraudulence, and every morning Jon and Sherry would help my unbelief by delivering live updates on traffic accidents and breaking news alerts, pausing the worship just long enough for a prayer.
I am unaware if Jon and Sherry Rivers of KLOVE are salaried employees, but I know that the reason they wake up earlier than the rest of us is because they work on time. In the marketplace of free FM radio, these laborers earn their pay on the basis of their ability convince us to spend our time—not our money—on them. That Christian radio hosts financially profit from our time, and in doing so direct our attention to an eternal (i.e. time-less) God, does not seem like a conflict of interest. As Christians and capitalists we understand the arrangement intuitively: time, like property or knowledge, is a God-given resource one can use for his own profit. If profits on time lead to both personal and eternal reward, well, then–God is good.
You can google how long Christian public radio has been around. I am sure its Wikipedia page is an abundance of riches. My tab bar is already at risk of Malthusian catastrophe, so this whole post is going to be one big educated guess about its history. Those who want an “informed opinion” on radio history should run for the hills. I will not be using the internet as an aid in this endeavor, because the history of Christian radio is not really a technological matter; it’s a theological one. When you strip away all the satellites and radio towers, all the traffic alerts and weather reports and need2breathe encores, you’re left with two people engaging in a profitable exchange of time. “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time” (Ephesians 5:15-16). Time is ours to redeem, sayeth the Lord. But is it ours to sell?
In the beginning were the bells. The first bells were made in Campagna so they were called campana and the peasants who heard them knew no other way to tell time so they referred to the hours as campanas.1 Bells were held in church towers and were rung three times a day to call the faithful to prayer. Monks developed methods, such as sundials and water clocks, for keeping a consistent schedule on which to ring these bells, until one especially crafty monk created an escapement device that rang a smaller bell which in turn told him to ring the larger church bell. Thus, the first alarm clock ever made had as its sole purpose the duty of reminding us not what time it is, but that time is. (We have always needed alarms to do things on time.)
Then, in 1355, the royal governor of Artois (of Stella fame) authorized the people to build a second set of bells, opposite the church, to be rung on a different schedule from the monks’ prayers. Artois was well-known in the late medieval era as a hub for textile manufacture. Throughout the 13th century the great cities of Europe were draped in wool textiles woven and dyed in Artois. At the turn of the century, however, productivity decreased dramatically as a counterfeit market for Artois textiles arose in nearby Bruges. The governor’s new bell tower sought to reverse this market shift. Artois would become more productive than ever before, out-competing Bruges simply by out-producing it. In order to meet those high-production quotas, Artois would abandon the church’s time, which followed the rather lazy schedule of monks, and instead run the city on a new set of hours: merchant time.
The French historian Jacques le Goff calls this moment “the great revolution of communal movement” in the middle ages.2 The Artois bells shifted communal life from the organizing principles of church time to a more tediously accurate standard that was useful for the “profane and secular tasks” of a market economy. It is important to note that people had been measuring time in 24 units since the Ancient Egyptians, but these units had been previously based on astronomy and as such were subject to variation (e.g. summer hours were longer than winter hours). It is not until the creation of bell towers like the one in Artois in the 14th century that 24 equal hours were fixed. These fixed hour bells popped up in centers of the European textile industry in order to organize the more complicated schedule of urban work (especially night labor) in opposition to the simple, sun-up-sun-down schedule of agrarian labor.3 Unlike farmers, merchants did not take the time nature afforded them with sunlight, but claimed the time they measured out for themselves in neat chunks: sick time, free time, lunch time, work time. Clock in, clock out. For the first time, pay was made according to man hours, and each worker suddenly found themselves in possession of such hours—24 of them, to be exact—that a merchant could buy. Of course, it was an illusion that merchants now owned the time they purchased–just because you measure a liter of water does not mean that you own water–but it was a useful illusion. And, more importantly, a profitable one.
It is not as though Artois was the first place to organize life around a measurement of time–far from it. Time has probably been measured (refraining from google here) since the Paleolithic Era, when artists captured its movement in cave paintings of animals in motion. Aristotle defined time as exactly this: “the number of motion.” Numbering the motion of our shadows and organizing communal life around such numbers is a central feature of probably every civilization on the planet. Certainly such early experiences of time had occasion to induce anxiety, or to tempt one towards procrastination, or to make one stress over arrivals and departures.
Even the most strict deadlines on a sundial, however, could ultimately be reduced to a natural event. You ride at dawn. You retire at sunset. You meet the baker’s hot daughter at the oxbow on a harvest moon. Even though these events occur at specific times, the experience of them is closer to what French philosopher Henri Bergson calls durée: lived time. Durée is the time your body drags through on that early morning ride, or the time your body races through as you lie with the baker’s hot daughter among the tall valerian stems, taking care the callus on your thumb (a wrought mark you earned as a cooper’s apprentice) does not bruise her soft skin as you gently brush the flakes of flour powdering her downy cheek. To quantify lived time in metrical hours hardly expresses the quality of those experiences, and somehow seems to mischaracterize the human experience time. After all, not all hours pass the same. One hour on a horse at frozen dawn feels like a whole year; one hour in the sweltering saddle at sunset feels like a whole summer; and one hour with that furnace-hot daughter at the oxbow, away from that tyrannical master, and that ravenous oven whose bellows of smoke cause her to cough, you think, too easily, so you take her to this part of the river so that so that you can tickle that spot beneath her left ear until she wrestles you in the dewy valerian, forcing your arms down, laughing that wounded, raspy laugh you love even as it portends the disease that will one day take her from you, emphysema, already spreading in the tender lungs of this young girl whose time in your life feels to you now, in your old age, lying in the cold comfort of a marriage to the cooper’s only daughter (she’s ugly), like nothing more than a whisper, a breath, a blush in the moonlight…
So anyway we know that durée is how people were supposed to experience time because the Ancient Jews told us so. The earliest Hebrew scriptures are full of proscriptions against treating time as if it were a measurable property that one could own and profit from.4 Treating time as one’s property inevitably led to the sin of usury, or the charging of interests on loans. Charging interest on a loan was forbidden among Jews not only because it prevented charity among God’s people but because the time required for interest to accumulate was not the rightful possession of the lender. Nobody could claim that a period of time belonged to him; time belonged to God. Profit off credit requires a mortgage on God’s time, which no one has a right to claim. For the Jews, it did not matter if the debtor’s timing was inconvenient for the lender, “For there is a proper time and procedure for every matter, though a person may be weighed down by misery” (Ecclesiastes 8:6).
Aristotle felt similarly. Under his natural law, profiting from time by charging interest was a perversion of money’s natural purpose as a means to acquire goods and services. Using money to procure more money, as in the case of charging interest on a loan, was unnatural, since self-reproduction (money breeding money) went against the law of nature. When Aquinas sought to synthesize Aristotelian rationalism with Judeo-Christian tradition in the middle ages–notably at the time when capital markets were really starting to heat up in Florence–he brought down an altogether more forceful judgment: “To take usury from money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist.”5 Aquinas is not disputing the existence of the money lent; he is questioning the existence of the thing the lender sells alongside his money: namely, his time. In this way, Aquinas disputes the very existence of merchant time itself.
What Aquinas and other middle age theologians were doing was nothing short of questioning the legitimacy of the modern market system. As le Goff writes, “To reject the notion of earnings on time and to identify the practice with the basic vice of usury is not merely to attack the principle of interest but to destroy the very possibility of credit.”6 The church was, and remains, quite comfortable with humans divvying up God’s possessions for their temporary stewardship. We can own property and keep livestock and even accumulate money because God commanded Adam to “work and to keep” the land and gave him “dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on Earth.” But claiming ownership of time is something altogether different. Remember that the bell tower at Artois, as in many other merchant cities, stood opposite the church tower. To profit off the tolling of Artois’s bells, either through interest or speculation, requires a man-made creation (merchant time) which is quite literally set in direct opposition to God’s creation (lived time). When contemporary theologians settle this matter, they pussyfoot the question and claim that the crime of usury all depends on the intentions of the lender’s heart. (One theologian even goes so far as to suggest there may be interest rates in heaven; if only the Fed knew what they were.) This is what remains from John Calvin’s influence, who condoned charging interest so long as it was done in good conscience.7 Modern churches follow this judgment, investing parishioner’s tithes in low-risk savings bonds or occasionally borrowing a few billion on interest from the Rothschilds.
So, what does any of this have to do with Christian public radio? It seems to me that if we expand the definition of usury beyond charging interest on a loan to include any financial profits made on claims of time, then it’s not just interest and speculation that are called into question, but the entire attention economy itself.
People who work in the attention economy, like radio hosts and producers, claim to own chunks of time. We know this because they literally sell segments of that time to advertisers. I’m not claiming that Christian public radio is a lucrative industry–I’m sure it’s not. Only that it is a very curious industry for Christians to participate in given that its profits clearly derive from merchant time rather than church time. Its programs are tailored to the work day, from devotionals during morning commutes to life-affirming worship when you’re stuck in rush hour. More to the point, its ad-revenue business model quite literally packages and sells time, from two minute ad-reads to sponsoring a half hour of Chris Tomlin.
It is fair to counter that time, being a creation of God, is also allotted to man for his stewardship. This position, however, seems to equivocate creation with property. Christians also believe that God created heaven and hell and the angels and the demons, yet it would be strange to say that because God commands Adam to till the Earth and name its creatures he also gives him the right to ownership over heavenly bodies. More to the point, even if God created natural laws like the second law of thermodynamics and the mechanisms of the Higgs-Boson particle, it would still be wildly inaccurate for us to claim any temporary ownership over such things. Otherwise, a man might sell not only the apples that fell off his trees, but also charge interest on the gravity used for those apples to fall.
Except the case with selling time isn’t like this–it’s even stranger. It would be as though we took some naturally occurring process of God’s creation, like gravity, and endowed it with properties arbitrarily chosen in the interest of our own profit. After all, this is exactly what merchant time is: an arbitrary distortion of some naturally occurring thing that was created in the interest of financial gain.
Has merchant time had the unintended effect of improving God’s kingdom? It is hard to say, though it certainly would be a surprise given that it was historically set in direct competition with the church. Ignoring the fact that Scripture again and again extols believers not to confine God’s will to man’s time, I suppose Christian public radio makes the most compelling case that you can sell time in the name of God. Its deal with the devil is selling 2 minutes that tempt you with a used car you can’t afford/don’t need so that it can afford to praise God with a 4 minute Newsboys song. Is that a fair deal? Not for me to say. All I know is that Jon and Sherry started their show every morning at 6am–and they were never late.
P.S. I am now a Contributing Writer at County Highway, a new American magazine started by David Samuels and Walter Kirn. You can read my work regularly there by subscribing here. I will continue to post on this Substack for free, but in my own time.
Campana dicuntur a rusticis qui habitant in campo, qui nesciant judicare horas nisi per campanas (John of Garland, Dictionarius)
I’ve drawn from le Goff’s work at length in this post. See Jacques le Goff, Time, Work, & Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1980), 32.
le Goff, Time, 43-44.
The reason Jews are historically associated with moneylending is because the Torah allows for God’s people to charge interest to gentiles. Since Jews were historically ostracized from skilled trades in medieval Europe, they were forced into moneylending and tax collecting to sustain their communities.
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3078.htm
le Goff, Time, 29.
Interesting reflection, Chandler. I wrote about the early history of Christian preachers on the radio a few years back. Both liberals and conservatives were eager to adopt the new medium. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26751307