Satellite Ministries

In 1981, a satellite 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 soap operas, sports, and evangelical content alongside innovative Arabic Christian televangelism. It was a station of enormous consequence. METV spurred the growth of competing Christian broadcasters and reshaped the Middle East's media and religious landscape over the next four decades. Yet it was, of course, controversial--its foreign, imperialist, and proselytizing approach to media was a source of curiosity and consternation in the region and, occasionally, around the world. Through extensive fieldwork and archival research, Febe Armanios explores how Western evangelicals and indigenous Christians harnessed terrestrial and satellite technologies to promote Christian television in the Middle East. The sixteen channels analyzed in this study fall into three main categories: Western-backed conservative outlets with a charismatic and apocalyptic outlook; middle-ground channels that sought to balance their international sponsors' expectations with local interests; and grassroots initiatives rooted in ancient church traditions. The histories and programming strategies of primarily Arabic, but also Turkish and Persian, Christian channels reveal how media producers forged unexpected political alliances, pursued sectarian objectives, and navigated various transnational influences. Satellite Ministries explores how modern expressions of faith, technology, and political power intersected and clashed across the Global South and beyond. In this groundbreaking work, Armanios presents a crucial examination of this unique and little-known media landscape.

Febe Armanios is the Philip Battell and Sarah Frances Cowles Stewart Professor of History at Middlebury College. She specializes in the history of Christian communities in the Middle East, with a focus on Egypt's Copts, as well as the history of comparative religious practices. She is the author of Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt (OUP, 2011) and co-author, with Bogaç Ergene, of Halal Food: A History (OUP, 2018).