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Shadows and Light: Religion and American Popular Culture
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10943 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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5 / 1993 |
2,207 Words |
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K.L.Billingsley
Author and screenwriter K.L. Billingsley writes about
California for the American Spectator. |
"The outstanding non-event of modern times," writes British historian Paul Johnson, "was the failure of religious belief to disappear." Nowhere is Johnson's statement more apparent than America.
Only the willfully blind could fail to see that America remains the most religious nation in the Western world. According to the best polling data, over 90 percent of Americans believe in God and roughly 50 percent regularly attend religious services. Churches, synagogues, seminaries, and religious colleges dot the landscape. But when one turns to American popular culture--excluding such obvious areas as gospel music--the picture is startlingly different. A visitor from another planet, judging America by television alone, easily could conclude that traditional religion scarcely existed in America.
On which shows is a traditional religious character favorably portrayed? In which films do characters make decisions based on religious criteria? Or, as Ben Stein put it in The View from Sunset Boulevard, which show even questions the assumption that the unexamined life is the only one worth living? Exclude the Christmas and Easter specials that religious historian Martin Marty calls "be kind to God week." On all counts, the list is short.
In November 1990, communication professor Thomas Skill of the University of Dayton, John Lyons of Northwestern University's psychiatry department, and David Larson from the psychiatry department at Duke University analyzed one hundred episodes of prime-time programs on ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. The researchers found that 94.5 percent of all speaking characters have "no discernible religious affiliation." In sixty-eight hours of programming, there were only 115 behaviors by nine characters that were clearly religious. And these were mostly brief statements such as "thank God!" after a close call.
The researchers concluded that "religion is a rather invisible institution" in network television. Overall, the message is that "religion is not very important," and in the final analysis, they wrote, television's treatment of religion tends to be "abuse through neglect."
HOSTILITY TO RELIGION
There was Amen, a comedy that seemed to shrug off traditional religion as a cultural phenomenon of blacks. A recent episode of Picket Fences featured a discussion of the Ten Commandments and prayer. Two episodes of thirtysomething dealt with a
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