Striving to Shake Up Jell-O

Religious groups fight sponsors of "immoral" TV shows

More than 83 million television viewers tuned in to Dallas three weeks ago to find out who shot J.R. Ewing. In an hour's time, they saw Ewing's accused attacker, Wife Sue Ellen, stagger around drunk and mourn her former lover. They watched a flashback in which Sue Ellen's comely sister Kristin fired a gun at J.R.

The evening's climax: Kristin's announcement that she was pregnant with her brother-in-law's child.

Dallas drew the largest U.S. television audience in history; members of an estimated 40 million households were riveted to their sets to find out which sinner did the dastardly deed to J.R. But the show also turned off an increasingly militant minority of viewers: in the past nine months half a million Christians have pledged themselves to boycott the products of sponsors of television programs like Dallas that "depict scenes of adultery, sexual perversion or incest, or which treat immorality in a joking or otherwise favorable light."

So far, the boycott has been largely ineffective, but it continues to grow, and the potential of the movement is worrying top executives of sponsoring companies and network officials. Says Alfred Schneider of ABC, the network that the campaign finds most offensive: "If you lose advertisers, that is an indirect form of censorship. When there's a threat of a boycott, there is a chilling effect." Says Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union: "We believe we are facing a major struggle with these groups over the Bill of Rights." Replies John Hurt, a Tennessee minister who is leading the crusade: "We are not trying to censor anybody at all. We are not trying to say you have to follow our moral judgment. What we are saying is that we don't like this material and we have no obligation to pay for it."

The "Clean Up TV" campaign began in earnest early this year when the elders of Hurt's Church of Christ in Joelton, Tenn., became disgusted by the increasingly explicit sex on their television screens. Exhorted Hurt: "If you ever plan to take a stand for moral decency, now is the time, while hundreds of thousands of others are moving in the same direction."

The Joelton church members, who consider themselves fundamentalists, wrote several thousand other Churches of Christ, asking which five television shows they found the most morally offensive; a spokesman for the church members termed the response "an absolute explosion." The church compared the findings of its survey with the views of the National Federation for Decency, which was founded in 1977 in Tupelo, Miss., and now publishes a monthly newsletter that attacks what it considers to be distasteful TV programs. Hurt's congregations deemed the five most offensive shows to be Soap (ABC), Three's Company (ABC), Dallas (CBS), Saturday Night Live (NBC) and Charlie's Angels (ABC). The chief sponsors of these programs were General Foods Corp., American Home Products and the Warner-Lambert Co.