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Norman Lear: ‘That’s Not the American Way’

The biggest next after my decade in network television was socio-political. It had begun brewing in me years earlier with the proliferation of fundamentalist TV ministries that perverted the pulpit by mixing politics and religion and spewing the sort of malice that horrified me when I was nine and came upon Father Coughlin on my crystal set.\n
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December 17, 2014

Following is an excerpt from Norman Lear’s autobiography, “Even This I Get to Experience”:

The biggest next after my decade in network television was socio-political. It had begun brewing in me years earlier with the proliferation of fundamentalist TV ministries that perverted the pulpit by mixing politics and religion and spewing the sort of malice that horrified me when I was nine and came upon Father Coughlin on my crystal set. What they were calling the Religious Right began with Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network in 1966 and really caught fire in the later 1970s when dozens more religious radicals added their voices.

“This nation was built upon a Christian foundation, upon a Bible foundation,” declaimed Rev. James Robison, roaming from the pulpit and brandishing his Bible like a weapon as he decimated the Constitution in Jesus’ name.

On a different channel, Paul Weyrich, a leading lay leader of the Christian Right and cofounder with Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, fumed: “We don’t want everybody to vote. Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

[Q&A: Norman Lear's bright future]

“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools,” said Rev. Falwell. “The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”

For all of their virtuous posturing, the morality these power-grabbing men of the cloth were championing was their singular version of it. As their crusades to spread fear and division became more blatant, so did my desire to sabotage their efforts through ridicule. I’d begun making notes for a screenplay titled Religion, with the intent to satirize these fundamentalist TV ministries as savagely and commercially as Paddy Chayefsky mocked television itself in the film Network. …

Universal Pictures found the story intriguing and ordered a screenplay. I met with two of the funniest comics around, Richard Pryor and Robin Williams, and we couldn’t have had a more hilarious time coming up with the characters and potential scenes. The more we laughed, the more serious the project became in our minds. Then one day, while working to realize the film we envisioned, my concern reached its peak. I had tuned in to Jimmy Swaggart and caught the reverend, Bible in hand, railing about a constitutional issue that was due to come before the Supreme Court and asking his “godly” viewers to pray for the “removal” of a certain justice. That was the last straw for me — I had to do something. I knew that even if I had a Religion script ready to go, it would still take a couple of years to make the film. The need to alert people immediately to the danger at hand was pressing and I realized I could create a public service announcement (PSA) and get it on the air in a matter of weeks. That is what I did.

My PSA was on the money. It had a working guy, a hard hat, standing next to a piece of factory equipment, talking straight into the camera, which pushed in from wide shot to a close-up as he said:

I have a problem. I’m religious. We’re a religious family, but that don’t mean we see things the same way politically. Now, here come certain preachers on radio and TV and in the mail, telling us on a bunch of political issues that there’s just one Christian position, and implying if we don’t agree we’re not good Christians. So, my son is a bad Christian on two issues. My wife is a good Christian on those issues but she’s a bad Christian on two others. Lucky me, I’m a hundred percent Christian because I agree with the preacher on all of them. Now, my problem is I know my boy is as good a Christian as me. My wife, she’s better. So maybe there’s something wrong when people, even preachers, suggest that other people are good Christians or bad Christians depending on their political views. That’s not the American way.

The actor was perfect and I couldn’t wait to share the spot with my friends and associates.

Echoing Mickey Rooney years earlier when I’d described Archie Bunker to him, Robin French, Tandem/ T.A.T.’s head of distribution, said, “They’re going to kill you, Norman.” Everyone felt I was making a big mistake. I was from Hollywood, a Jew, and wealthy, and if that wasn’t three strikes against anyone going to war with the Christian Right, my pals couldn’t imagine what was.

Copyright 2014, The Penguin Press

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