If the Eye Offend Thee

Sex is only one of the targets in church attacks on TV

With rhetoric once reserved for the likes of prostitution and child labor, America's often divided churches have united to assault a new public vice. "Television dumps into our homes a steady stream of illicit sex, casual violence, alcohol promotion, materialism, vulgarity," declared a resolution passed by 15,000 members attending the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. The tough words are being backed by action, with the Baptists, and others, launching long-range educational programs and citizens' campaigns to clean up TV.

A remarkably broad group of religious agencies zeroed in on ABC-TV's sex-saturated series Soap well before the public had even seen the show. The ensuing fuss helped make last week's Soap premiere (TIME, Sept. 12) into something like a national event. And the campaign has only begun. Church strategists who have had a bootlegged look at future and, they contend, far sleazier episodes of Soap expect public antagonism to build steadily.

Officials of the National Council of Churches and two of its member denominations have asked church leaders to organize community anti-Soap action groups in 174 cities. The U.S. Catholic Conference considers the show unfit for prime time, when 18 million youngsters are in the potential audience, and is lobbying to have it scheduled at a later evening hour. A militant "no Soap" coalition formed by the Southern Baptists and nine other religious and civic organizations has been pressuring local stations and sponsors to boycott the program. As of last week, 17 of ABC's outlets did not run Soap. In addition, 47 stations in the South and Midwest ran the show an hour later than the network.

The churches realize that explicit sexual material has been creeping into network programs for several years. But Soap is regarded as a key test case. The Rev. Everett Parker, media watchdog of the liberal United Church of Christ, calls the program "a deliberate effort to break down any resistance to whatever the industry wants to put into prime time." Says Wall Street Media Analyst Anthony Hoffman: "Soap is a stalking horse. If it is a success, everyone will want one."

One concern of the churches is that television will use sex to replace violence as an attention getter. Violence has been de-emphasized, partly as a result of protests last season from the U.S. Surgeon General, the American Medical Association and, especially, Parent-Teacher Associations all over the U.S. Churches played a strong role in this campaign too. An alliance of Protestant and Catholic agencies threatened stockholder resolutions. Representatives met quietly with officials of eight corporations listed as sponsors of the most violent programs by the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting. All but one (Schlitz) have since agreed not to advertise their products on programs with "excessive" violence.

Several denominations are trying to teach people how to keep watch on TV. The Southern Baptists' Christian Life Commission has mailed "Help for Television Viewers" kits to 35,000 pastors and 15,000 lay leaders. The $1.50 kit includes a checklist so viewers can log incidents of violence, profanity and alcohol and sexual abuse. A more sophisticated project is "Television Awareness Training," a 16-hour course sponsored by the United Methodist Church, American Lutheran Church and Church of the Brethren. T.A.T. has trained more than 100 instructors so far, and they will begin offering classes for church and civic groups in 50 cities this month.

T.A.T.'s impact is heightened by documentary films that splice together bits of prime-time material broadcast last year. A film section on violence, for instance, moves rapidly through 19 scenes of mass murder, bludgeoning, bombing and miscellaneous mayhem. In the film on sexuality, compassionate treatment of sex is viewed favorably, but many scenes are criticized for mechanizing and dehumanizing sex. Among the more eye-stopping examples: Gabriel Kaplan joking about gang rape; a crazed rapist on Baretta telling his victim, "I've broken a lot of necks in my time. I'm glad you know it. It will make it better." On advertising, T.A.T. presents the classic (though now changed) commercial in which David Janssen mumbles that doctors' studies favor Excedrin for "pain other than headache" and later concludes, "the next time you have a headache, try Excedrin."

The 304-page textbook that accompanies the course contains thoughtful assessments of unstated TV-show presumptions and subtle moral issues often ignored in the sex and violence v. censorship debates. In one essay, the Rev. William Fore, communications director of the National Council of Churches, discusses messages directly or subliminally being transmitted to masses of TV viewers. Among them: the good are usually weak; power is good, even if you have to be evil to get it; happiness consists of limitless material acquisition. None of these views are new or wholly inaccurate, but pervasive repetition of materialism and situation ethics, churchmen argue, can be overwhelming.

Church efforts to encourage viewers to be more discriminating in their TV habits can have the same result as that of the action recommended by TV executives who defend today's programming. Says Thomas Dargan, manager of the ABC station in Portland, Ore., who has been barraged with complaints about Soap "There is excellent alternative programming available--including the off button." To commercial TV's complaints about religious censorship, Parker responds, "You have a perfect right to say you don't want this coming into your living room. It's a matter of the public interest. Who else besides the churches is going to stand against the effort of television to tear down our moral values and make all of us into mere consumers?"

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