Religion: Power, Glory - and Politics

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In the face of Gospel TV's theological simplifications and secular agendas, its sometimes overbearing personalities and unrelenting emphasis on money, should earnest Christians simply shun electronic religion altogether? To Hollywood's Ogilvie, that is not an option: "Otherwise we roll over and play dead." Jim Bakker sees video technology as the means to fulfill Jesus' 2,000- year-old injunction to reach out to the world and spread the Gospel. If Jesus were on earth today, Bakker asserts, "he'd have to be on TV. That would be the only way he could reach the people he loves."

The opposite view comes from Malcolm Muggeridge, a British author, TV personality and curmudgeonly Christian convert. In his 1977 book Christ and the Media, Muggeridge spins a fantasy in which Jesus, having survived the three temptations in the wilderness, is offered a fourth: a contract from Lucifer Inc. to go to Rome and anchor a First-Century network variety show. Jesus, "concerned with truth and reality" rather than "fantasy and images," refuses. As a direct result of that choice, across the centuries the greatest artists and architects, poets and philosophers, musicians and mystics celebrate "the brightest and most far-reaching hopes ever to be entertained by the human mind and the most sublime purposes ever to be undertaken by the human will." Now that, says Muggeridge, is communication.

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