Searching for God in America

National Review, Feb 10, 1997 by Hugh Hewitt

EIGHTEEN months ago, PBS and its Los Angeles affiliate KCET sent me and director Martin Burns on a year-long examination of the beliefs and stories of eight religious leaders. The series and a companion book that resulted were titled Searching For God In America. The eight half-hour segments first aired nationally last July. For a variety of reasons, including the series' apparent ability to motivate pledges, it continues to be rebroadcast around the country. And although final production was completed almost a year ago, I continue to hear about the series on a daily basis. An article in this month's Forbes focused on the project, and shortly I'll be in Nashville addressing the Christian Booksellers Association mid-winter meeting on the subject of the show's reception.

I'm hardly a theologian. Far from it, I'm a broadcast journalist and a law professor -- a career combination about as far removed from theological authority as one can get. But because of a unique set of circumstances, I was lucky enough to have the chance to ask some very learned and very charismatic spiritual leaders some basic questions about what they believe and why. Because such conversations have been almost completely exiled from commercial television, I had this corner of the secular TV world to myself. I used the opportunity to pose questions that people of faith might pose if given the chance.

I asked Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson: "Why would God want to save everyone?" I asked Rabbi Harold Kushner: "Do you believe that a Messiah is coming?" I asked Presbyterian Pastor Roberta Hestenes: "Do you count the conversions you've been instrumental in as achievements?" I asked Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr: "What do you make of New Age?" To Cecil Murray, pastor of inner-city L.A.'s First African Methodist Episcopal Church: "Do you see any miracles?" To Mormon Apostle Neal Maxwell: "What does it imply for my theology that yours is restored and mine is not?" To Trappist Monk Thomas Keating: "What do you mean when you say, 'turn it over to God'?" And to the Dalai Lama: "In Buddhist practice, is there a Creator and Orderer, to whom all things are accountable?"

None of these, or the hundreds of other questions posed or answers given, broke any new ground. But the exercise -- serious conversations about faith in God, on television, on PBS, in 1996 --was remarkable.

Given that 40 per cent of the American people attend church, synagogue, or mosque on a nearly weekly basis, the idea that an audience would exist for these conversations did not seem implausible to me. It did, however, to many others, who found the very idea of talking about God rather quaint. And of course a number of reporters who interviewed me questioned the "appropriateness" of the project; after all, what about church -state separation and all that? A few were more candid: faith is hokum, they implied, so why clutter up the airwaves? Skeptics with good manners did not push the point once they discovered that I was an Evangelical.

The lessons I learned from this project begin with the reflection the series provided on the American media. There is no segment of the population that is more systematically excluded from the commercial airwaves than people of deep and sincere faith. And the opinion class that drives the news and the chattering class that comments upon it are overwhelmingly unchurched, and at best skeptical of religious belief. This is why Searching For God In America has been treated as so highly newsworthy.

THE division between the media elite and the vast majority of Americans -- again, 90 per cent in our country profess a belief in God, and more than 100 million made it to church in the last seven days -- presents believers with a difficult choice: acquiesce or demand inclusion. Many other groups -- from libertarians to homosexuals, Native Americans to the disabled -- are comfortable crusading for acknowledgment in the mainstream media. Christians, especially, appear reticent to follow suit. Why?

"I am not ashamed of the Gospel," wrote St. Paul to the Romans. But today there is a fine line between Christian reticence and embarrassment.

While some Christians now focus on politics and organize to elect sympathetic candidates, the larger battle over the direction of our culture is a rout. Unless and until faith is accorded a position in the media proportionate to its centrality to people's lives, it is hard to imagine the moral condition of the country improving. If God doesn't deserve space on the calendar of television news and programming or in the print dailies, then how can the unchurched be expected to take seriously appeals to a transcendent moral order?

Search for God in America and you will find God in hundreds of thousands of faith communities and in the lives of tens of millions of citizens. But you will probably not find Him or His representatives on the air or in the headlines. We must strive to close the gap.