TELEVISION: THE GOD SQUAD

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Television has come to repent, for it has sinned, my brothers and sisters, yes it has. It has sinned with thongs on Baywatch, it has sinned with adultery on Melrose Place, and it has sinned, time and time again, on MTV. But now prime time is appearing before you to beg forgiveness, to prove that it too can be a virtuous member of our community.

This season the networks are paving a multilane highway to heaven with an unprecedented eight shows with religious and spiritual themes. Each of these supplicants is praying for the Top-10 ratings success of last season's surprise hit, Touched by an Angel (CBS, Sundays, 8 p.m. E.T.). Also back this fall are 7th Heaven (the WB, Mondays, 8 p.m. E.T.), the melodrama about a minister's family; Dan Aykroyd's priestly sitcom Soul Man (ABC, Tuesdays, 8 p.m. E.T.); and the Angel spin-off Promised Land (CBS, Thursdays, 8 p.m. E.T.). Joining them are four newcomers, each offering a slightly more irreverent approach to religion. A pastor tries to fill his church on UPN's jokey sitcom Good News (Mondays, 9 p.m. E.T.). A winged adolescent watches over his mortal friend on ABC's kid-com Teen Angel (Fridays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.). And Fox's The Visitor (Fridays, 8 p.m. E.T.) mixes religion and sci-fi through the wanderings of a messianic alien abductee, played by Jesus look-alike John Corbett (Northern Exposure).

Then there's ABC's Nothing Sacred (Thursdays, 8 p.m. E.T.). The most hyped--and most controversial--of this fall's new shows, it centers on Father Ray, a hip Catholic priest, played by Kevin Anderson. In the pilot episode alone, he suggests that a young woman considering abortion follow her conscience, struggles with his belief in God and barely resists scoring with a married ex-girlfriend. Some Catholics have already threatened a boycott against ABC.

All in all, not since Bishop Fulton J. Sheen began delivering his weekly sermons in front of a chalkboard on the DuMont Network has television been so pious. You could call it prime-time revivalism, except that TV never had much religion to revive. Until recently, religion was considered too sensitive a topic to dramatize--or joke about. Producer Norman Lear (All in the Family) made an unsuccessful venture into that territory in 1991 with Sunday Dinner, a weak sitcom in which characters regularly argued about God. Two years later, Lear addressed the lack of religious programming in a speech at the National Press Club. "I said, 'Where are you guys? Why aren't you reporting on the biggest story in the culture of America?'" he remembers.

Lear was right. As the millennium approaches and baby boomers begin to confront their mortality, people have begun to seek out the comfort of religion in all aspects of their lives--even on TV. "Since the beginning of television, God has been a taboo word," says Father Ellwood ("Bud") Kieser, whose program Insight was one of the pioneers of religious TV in the '60s. "The industry was convinced that entertainment and religion were incompatible. Now there is dramatic evidence that this is not true."