Reel Faith: How the Drive-In Movie Theater Helped Create the Megachurch
The Atlantic’s Megan Garber traces the origin of Crystal Cathedral, the California megachurch now facing bankruptcy, back to the 1950s and drive-in movie theaters. In 1955, the church’s founders, the Rev. Robert Schuller and his wife Arvella, of the Reformed Church in America, started their congregation at a drive-in theater. Garber writes, “The Schullers, and their contemporary entrepreneurs of religiosity, had happened into an idea that made particular cultural sense at its particular cultural moment: In the mid-1950s, Americans found themselves in the honeymoon stages of their romances with both the automobile and the television.”