"A Prostitution of the Faith"

If you , . . utter speech that is not

intelligible, how will anyone know what is

said? For you will be speaking into the air.

I Corinthians 14:9

On this text the Rev. Liston Pope, dean of Yale Divinity School, last week addressed the Broadcasting and Films Commission of the National Council of Churches. The increase and popularity of religious programs is often cited as a happy sign of a wide religious revival in the U.S., but Dr. Pope found little on the U.S. air to be happy about. No irate sponsor has ever given TV and radiomen a sharper tongue-lashing.*

Terrible Brotherhood. "Religious" radio and television falls into two categories, said Pope. One is the airing of sermons, services and music, and it is occasionally effective, as in the case of Queen Elizabeth's coronation. "But music designated as religious ranges from the syncopated nonsense of Jane Russell and her confederates to the noblest arias of the human spirit. I suppose you pay your money and take your choice, but let us not designate it all as religious, or even as music."

The second category of religious programming he found even worse: "First of all, there are the popular skits about wholesome families, presumably model Christian families; some of them are the best argument for celibacy advanced since the Middle Ages. I would never have believed that anything could be stickier than some of the soap operas, but religion has outdone even Lever Brothers. The difficult art of Christian family life is reduced to little moralisms and pleasantries, and to the cheerful conclusion that it pays in the end . . . Religion is introduced as a fragment of ritual, or a moralistic cliche, or an offstage voice quoting Scripture in a mellifluous voice."

Then there are the programs that offer solutions to personal or social problems under the guise of religion. If there is Christian truth in them at all, it is generally a crumb fumbled off the whole, meaningless or misleading by itself: "For example, 'brotherhood' is lifted out of relation to God's Fatherhood, which is seldom mentioned . . . and mere brotherhood is offered in the name of Christianity as a nostrum to keep America strong. In the name of God, this kind of thing represents a prostitution of the Christian faith and a crucifixion anew of the Christ who put human brotherhood in the most terrible and demanding of all relationships, that of common sonship under God. Let us have brotherhood, but not by all means."

A Song or a Shot. Dean Pope also gave the back of his hand to the "peace-of-mind cult." He objects to identifying Christianity with it, no matter how popular it is or how many people claim to have been helped. "The mambo is popular, and innumerable people have been helped by patent medicines, hospitals and social-work programs, but not every popular or helpful thing is to be described as Christian or presented under Christian auspices."

He cites the souped-up sentimentality of some of the programs' titles: So Will We Sing, Song of the Shining Mountains, This Is the Life, Bless This House, For Every Child, Look Up and Live, The Art of Living, What's Your Trouble? A happy contrast: Dr. Ralph W. Sockman's National Radio Pulpit, with a title that "conveys a true impression of what is to be offered, and does not promise you a song in your heart or a shot in the arm if you will listen to it."

Congregationalist Pope questioned whether a so-called mass audience for religious programs really exists at all. "No matter what we do, we will not compete successfully with Jackie Gleason for the audience out there, not even if we give away free trips to Palestine or old church pews for use as lawn benches. The mystical hope that some Protestant equivalent of Bishop Sheen will arise to speak for us to the vast missions is an unworthy delusion. In the first place, any such voice would be out of keeping with the Protestant emphasis on the necessity that each individual find his faith for himself . . . In the second place, Bishop Sheen speaks to a very large audience but hardly to a mass audience; he has a specialized audience of people who like to listen to Bishop Sheen for one or many reasons."

Maudlin or Morbid. Pope turned a searing blast of his flamethrower on the out-and-out secular as well as the bogus Christian. "If you give nearly eighty percent of your time to entertainment and two percent to religion, the implications of that fact are not lost on the public ... If religious programs are often maudlin, a high percentage of the other programs is simply morbid . . .

"It has been said that the newer media of communication were invented just at a time when nobody had anything to say. The churches have something to say, and it is their responsibility to learn how to say it."

* For another utterance in which Yale's Pope joined, see JUDGMENTS & PROPHECIES.

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