Vision is a favorite topic of Dr. Garth W. Coonce, a minor Christian-broadcasting magnate from Marion, Illinois. In his monthly newsletter, Partnership, he often muses on the sacred visions that have inspired him to amass 16 television stations, creating a 24-hour network that beams charismatic preachers like Creflo Dollar and Benny Hinn into devout homes. Coonce also likes to share the communiques he still receives from the Almighty, who occasionally instructs him to expand his media holdings into, say, Detroit or greater Boston. "Perhaps it is good that God doesn't give us the big picture in the beginning," he wrote in the September 1999 issue of Partnership, "Seeing too much would likely scare us out of taking a single step."

As he begins his 25th year in Christian broadcasting, Coonce must be especially thankful for the Lord's business smarts. After years of scraping by on goodwill offerings and souvenir sales, his nonprofit, commercial-free network just hit the corporate-welfare jackpot. This coming June 19, Tri-State Christian TV and Radiant Life Ministries--Coonce's two main evangelical concerns--will join at least 20 other broadcast companies in auctioning off a portion of their electromagnetic spectrum, the invisible commodity that carries broadcast signals. The spectrum to be sold was given gratis to Coonce and hundreds of other broadcasters in 1996--a slab of political pork that Arizona Senator John McCain calls "one of the greatest scams in American history." Now, thanks to the largesse of the Federal Communications Commission, small-fry religious broadcasters like Coonce stand to become tycoons literally overnight. "I'm sure they're seeing this as manna from heaven," says Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). "Except instead of coming via God, it's coming via the FCC."

Coonce's sudden good fortune has its roots in the deregulatory Telecommunications Act of 1996, which granted every TV station an extra six megahertz of spectrum--in effect, a second channel's worth of airwaves. The mighty National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) pushed through the gift--then valued at somewhere between $37 billion and $70 billion--with the dubious claim that American viewers were clamoring for digital TV, with its sharper pictures and $3,000 high-definition TV sets. The NAB insisted that stations would use their bonus airwaves to convert gradually from analog to digital broadcasting; while the new spectrum was being set up for digital, stations could still broadcast on their existing analog spectrum. When the transition was complete, the stations would return their old six-megahertz slices to the FCC, the airwaves' public guardian.

But the law's fine print contains some slippery wording. The broadcasters are allowed to retain their analog spectrum until December 31, 2006, or whenever 85 percent of American households are able to receive digital signals, whichever is later. As of last August, fewer than 1 percent of households possessed digital tuners; at that snail's pace, the broadcasters could hold on to all their spectrum until approximately the end of time. Meanwhile, with the boom in mobile phones and the like, the demand for spectrum--which carries wireless signals in addition to Facts of Life reruns--has soared, and telecommunications companies are aching for airwaves. According to Bernstein Investment Research, demand from the wireless industry has pushed the value of the broadcasters' freebie to $367 billion--more than three times the combined value of every TV station in the land.

Lowell "Bud" Paxson, chairman of Paxson Communications, was quick to recognize the money to be made in exploiting the telcos' desperation. Paxson formed the Spectrum Clearing Alliance, a consortium of broadcasters--Coonce's companies included--that own stations on UHF channels 60 to 69, a boob-tube Siberia populated by televangelists, shop-at-home outlets, and Pax TV's family-friendly pabulum (such as Doc, starring mullet-sporting Nashville washout Billy Ray Cyrus). The Alliance offered to relinquish its bonus spectrum and allow the FCC to auction it off, in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. These broadcasters also agreed to make an eventual "hot switch" conversion to digital broadcasting on their analog spectrum, rather than slowly moving from an old channel to a new one.

Paxson has never made a secret of the Alliance's Mammon-centric goals; as he wrote in a letter to the Barron's Web site last March, "We are entrepreneurs hoping to reward our shareholders who invested in our business of amassing spectrum." On September 17, the FCC exceeded those shareholders' fondest dreams, even permitting Paxson and his peers to negotiate their own share of the auction loot. This June, accordingly, a hearty 66 cents of every dollar bid will go into a "clearing fund," which will then be divvied up among the 140 or so stations on the 60-to-69 band according to a population-based formula. Based on past auctions, the Alliance's members could collectively haul in upwards of $30 billion, a figure that has industry wags dubbing channels 60 to 69 "the Band of Gold." As for the overnight digital switcheroos that the Alliance agreed to, they're far from faits accomplis; the order merely lowered the mandatory conversion threshold from 85 percent of households to 70 percent, which should still take years to reach.

Coonce's windfall should be astounding, especially considering that his stations now slink by on proceeds from Praise-a-Thons and the peddling of "love gifts." Radiant Life Ministries has been a money loser; according to a 1999 tax return, the ministry was nearly $310,000 in the red. Its sole asset is WLXI-61 TV in Greensboro, North Carolina, a station that Coonce purchased for a paltry $1.9 million in 1991. Considering that Greensboro is part of the 44th largest TV market in America, even an ultraconservative estimate of WLXI's share of the booty is around $70 million--a 3,700 percent return on investment. In fact, the sale of WLXI's spectrum alone could bring in nearly three times more cash than the value of Coonce's entire network.

Tri-State Christian TV and Radiant Life Ministries will not be the only nonprofit religious broadcasters to benefit from the FCC's decision. Trinity Broadcasting Network, the self-proclaimed "world's largest Christian television network," is also an Alliance member. Financially, however, TBN has little in common with Coonce's humble network; the ministry made $192 million in 2000, and its vast holdings include the movie studio that produced the apocalyptic sleeper hit The Omega Code.The husband-and-wife team of Paul and Jan Crouch, TBN's president and co-founder, respectively, earned a combined $750,914 in salary last year, a healthy portion of which will doubtless go toward paying for the couple's recently purchased $5-million, 9,500-square-foot estate in Newport Beach, California (complete with an elevator, a six-car garage, and a climate-controlled wine cellar.

The prospect of such a lavish empire fattening itself further at the public trough infuriates Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, the Democrat who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the FCC. After learning of the spectrum-clearing decision, he dashed off an angry missive to FCC Chairman Michael Powell. "Allowing industry to negotiate private marketplace deals that dictate the governance and the transfer of spectrum and to earn profits on the spectrum through such arrangements is outrageous," Hollings wrote.

Powell's lengthy reply noted the long-term benefits of assisting the nascent wireless-telecommunications industry, as well as the potential for some of the cleared spectrum to be used for public safety. Powell also alluded to the money to be gained by the federal government--after all, 34 cents of every dollar bid is better than nothing.

What Powell's response lacked, however, was a direct response to Hollings's core objection--that broadcasters have been authorized to sell something that doesn't really belong to them and that they got for free. As a "creature of Congress," the FCC's power to alter the situation fundamentally is limited; only legislative action, such as a modification of the overly permissive deadline for the return of the analog spectrum, can truly curtail the broadcasters' profiteering. But that doesn't mean that the FCC couldn't have thrown a wrench into the Alliance's plans by, say, pressuring broadcasters to live up to their end of the bargain and vacate the airwaves in a timely manner.

So, what will Coonce, the Crouches, and other religious stakeholders in the Band of Gold do with their newfound wealth? The American Prospect tried several times to contact employees at Radiant Life Ministries, Tri-State Christian TV, and Trinity Broadcasting Network to answer that question, to no avail. As it turns out, all three are represented by the same Washington attorney, Colby M. May. "The groups I represent are religious organizations, so they don't look at this as a profit-making venture," said May. "Whatever revenues become available, they would certainly be invested in the digital transition."

But the expense of upgrading a station to digital is nowhere near the vast sums that Alliance members will likely rake in. The cost of a digital conversion tops out at $6 million, far short of the $70 million that a small station like Radiant Life Ministries' WLXI could net from the auction (to say nothing of the larger payouts that stations in major cities will garner). And there's no guarantee that the broadcasters will ever spend even that relatively meager amount of money. "How many of them are going to say, 'Screw the broadcasting part of this'?" asks AEI's Ornstein.

May downplays his clients' interest in the auction proceeds. "We're happy for whatever is generated, but we truly don't have large expectations," he says, adding that any leftover auction monies will be used "to fulfill the traditional missions to feed the hungry, clothe the naked." With hundreds of millions of dollars to play with, his clients will indeed have plenty of resources with which to do good works. And perhaps buy a few nice knickknacks for that Newport Beach pad.