Religion: Spots for God

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The scene is a cocktail party. The host cuts through the chatter to suggest that everyone play a word-association game.

Leader. Money.

Guests: Bills. Evil. Las Vegas.

Leader: Freeway.

Guests: Death. Ticket. Hurry.

Leader: God.

Guests: (Silence).

The end of this 60-second playlet makes the point: most people do not know what to say about God any more, and perhaps they ought to know. The soft-sell message is a TV commercial, one of 50 religious spots sponsored by the Franciscan Fathers of Los Angeles' St. Francis Productions. The friars may be the most visible practitioners of this new missionary technique—their spots have been distributed to more than 700 stations. But they are by no means alone: more and more churches are turning from Sunday-morning sermonettes to brisk 30-and 60-second TV ads.

Sneak It to 'Em. TV stations, expected by the FCC to give a certain amount of viewing time to public-service programming, usually relegate full-length religious shows to the somnolent Sunday-morning hours. A slick, quick spiritual ad, on the other hand, may well win an unsold prime-time minute. Now that Christmas commercials are out of the way and advertising budgets depleted, there may be more religious spots on the air than usual.

Satirist Stan Freberg was a pioneer in sneak-it-to-'em inspiration. Commissioned by the United Presbyterian Church in 1963, Freberg turned out a series of low-key but catchy radio ads. Franciscan Friars Karl Holtsnider and Emery Tang of Los Angeles used a similar approach on TV with a pilot Mother's Day spot in 1966: the camera simply panned across the faces of mothers of many races and nations. Now the Franciscans have a 20-man staff and a $150,000 annual budget, funded by 3,000 fellow friars and affiliated laymen.

Selling an Option. The Franciscan spots are never overtly Roman Catholic in message. In one, a dark hand shakes and holds onto a white hand, and a voice asks, "All things considered, that's not very much, is it?" Another spot shows flashbacks from a day in the life of a married couple as they exchange a kiss on his return from work. The kiss is an external sign of a love that "builds today into forever." A commercial produced for the Episcopal Church shows a man switching channels from catastrophe to catastrophe on his TV set. Finally, he settles on an old Christians-and-lions epic, and is projected back through time right into the scene. The voiceover announces: "Being a Christian didn't used to be a spectator sport—it still isn't."

The new commercials seek to convey the idea that religion is something worth thinking about. Observes the Rev. Charles Brackbill Jr. of United Presbyterian's Division of Mass Media: "We are selling an option. What we're saying is, 'Consider God—consider God as an alternative.' " The churches are convinced that at least a few halfway believers are once again doing just that.