From Ode to Joy-FM
James Hitchcock on the Sale of a Lutheran Classical Station
Shortly after nine o’clock on a hot night this past July, the closing strains of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony carried over the radio, bringing with them an end to a venerable St. Louis institution. The finale of KFUO-FM also brought into focus some of the anomalies of the relationship between the Church and contemporary culture.
KFUO-FM was, as listeners were reminded each day, “owned and operated by the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod” (LCMS). It had broadcast classical music for 62 years and, during that time, had ceased to be a Christian station, devoting itself almost exclusively to the classics and featuring religious music only around Christmas and Easter. Presumably it attracted aneducated and financially successful audience—the station was richinadvertisements, including ones for automobiles and gourmet restaurants.
When the LCMS first announced its intention to sell the station, a group called the Radio Arts Foundation was formed to buy it. Later, this group charged that it had been frozen out of the negotiating process, but an LCMS spokesman countered that Radio Arts had been the first group approached about the sale and had simply been unable to meet the price paid by the ultimate buyer.
Instead, the LCMS sold KFUO-FM to a group called Gateway Creative Broadcasting, for $18 million plus interest, to be paid in installments; and overnight the station became JOY-FM, a “Christian rock” station that proudly proclaims its evangelistic mission.
Affront to the Religion of Art
KFUO-FM was one of the few remaining classical music stations in the United States, and news of the sale brought many protests, including some from politicians and from prominent members of the LCMS itself.
The sale unavoidably took on a religious dimension, both because of the buyer and because the LCMS candidly said that the musical format did not serve the synod’s mission and that the money from the sale would be used for better purposes.
But in addition to the Lutherans who sold KFUO and the nondenominational Christians who bought it, a third creed quickly entered the picture—the Religion of Art, whose beliefs do not seem to include understanding of and tolerance for other faiths. For the Religion of Art, the sale was nothing less than a sacrilege.
Its rhetoric became increasingly feverish and self-pitying (“a wound that will never heal,” “a dull, throbbing pain”), and some of the complainants manifested a kind of spoiled self-indulgence, given that, as a number of people pointed out, technology now makes classical music available in many ways and the complainants seemed miffed primarily because they could no longer access it by a simple touch of the radio dial.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is a typical American newspaper of this generation, which means that it is bemused and suspicious at any manifestation of conservative Christianity. But even so, when the paper published a largely factual article about JOY-FM, a reader accused the Post-Dispatch of spreading Christian propaganda.
James Hitchcock is Professor emeritus of History at St. Louis University in St. Louis. He and his late wife Helen have four daughters. His most recent book is the two-volume work, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton University Press, 2004). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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