TV Sitcom to ‘Bring Religion Out of Closet’ on Network : Entertainment: Norman Lear creation wins praise from some religious publications after advance screenings. But a conservative activist clergyman believes the program will promote a New Age and secular humanist philosophy.

TV producer Norman Lear’s upcoming situation comedy “Sunday Dinner” has some clergymen smacking their lips in anticipation of a network program treating God-talk as normal while the Rev. Donald Wildmon, an activist religious conservative, is grousing at the menu--sight unseen.

The program, scheduled to debut June 2 on CBS-TV, is the latest venture into touchy subjects for Lear, who created “All in the Family,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and other provocative shows.

“Sunday Dinner” focuses mainly on family tensions surrounding the engagement of a widowed father to a younger woman, who coincidentally talks to God, addressing “Him or Her” as “Chief.” Six episodes have been taped for a trial run.

Praising Lear in an editorial for “bringing religion out of the closet,” Editor James Wall of Christian Century magazine observed after watching samples of the program that “Lear is gambling that the audience will accept his premise that a belief in a higher power is not just for the elderly or the naive.”

A review in United Methodist Reporter, a nationally distributed newspaper, called it “some of the best treatment this year of faith and religion by a television series of any kind.”

But Wildmon, whose Mississippi-based American Family Assn. tries to discourage potential advertisers from supporting what he calls “anti-Christian” programs, has sent word to 675,000 people on his mailing lists and to the news media that Lear “is using the program to promote his New Age/secular humanist religion.”

In a telephone interview, Wildmon said he based his assessment on Lear’s comments in published interviews. Why the combination of New Age, which assumes the existence of unseen cosmic forces, and secular humanism, which scoffs at reliance on the supernatural?

“That’s about the best conglomeration to describe Mr. Lear’s mixture,” Wildmon said. “Those two terms seem to encompass what Mr. Lear’s new theology is all about.”

Over the last decade, fundamentalist and charismatic preachers have warned followers first about secular humanism, then about New Age movements, which they see as corrosive influences in U.S. society. But Wildmon denied that he was using buzzwords to draw more attention to his cause.

Wildmon, who helped launch an angry religious protest against the 1988 film “The Last Temptation of Christ” before it was released, said that he debated “a long time” before saying anything about “Sunday Dinner” before seeing it.

“It’s a risk,” Wildmon said. “I am going to draw a little more attention to it, but that is outweighed by educating people so they can catch the subtle messages of Lear on his spiritual odyssey.”

Declaring in his news release that Lear “demeaned Christians and Christianity in past television programs,” Wildmon contended that the writer-producer “now plans to provide answers where he thinks traditional Christianity has failed.”

Lear, responding to Wildmon’s charge that he wants to promote his own theology, said in an interview: “I don’t look at myself as anybody’s mystic or zealot. For me, it’s a very short step from the notion of a living faith of any kind to practical, non-mystical” everyday life.

Lear added that he is attempting with his program “to evoke some real conversations and questions” about the spiritual instincts that give rise to so many different religions.

The characters in “Sunday Dinner” provide a range of views--the non-religious father, played by Robert Loggia; his Christian sister; his three adult children (one atheist, one New Age-inclined and one materialistic) and the young fiancee, affectionately known as “T.T.” and played by Teri Hatcher. She quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson and speaks of the Taoist concept of Yin and Yang.

Lear incurred the wrath of the religious right for founding People For the American Way in 1980 to advocate church-state separation and critique the political claims of prominent TV evangelists.

But in more recent years, Lear himself has lamented publicly what he calls America’s neglect of moral-spiritual values while celebrating material gains.

In a speech to a national meeting of educators in March, Lear talked of “an unhealthy reticence” in the country to discuss what he called one’s mysterious inner realm, a source for creativity and morality. “We are so estranged from an essential part of ourselves,” he said. The nation needs a “commitment to higher values and a moral code that connects with each other and with eternity,” he said.

The Rev. Martin Marty, University of Chicago historian of modern American religion and a friend of Lear, wrote in his widely read newsletter that program previews he saw of “Sunday Dinner” struck him as neither New Age nor anti-Christian.

“I thought they were funny . . . and successful at bringing up things (in the sitcom medium) which usually are hush-hushed,” Marty said.

Television viewers looking for explicit endorsement of Judeo-Christian tenets will have a long wait, Marty added. “That is not what prime time commercial secular-pluralist comedy is or can be about,” he said.

In his review for the United Methodist Reporter, the Rev. Thomas W. Goodhue, pastor of Island Park, N.Y., United Methodist Church, said the show may leave people wondering what Wildmon finds so objectionable.

“From the opening photograph of a family praying at the dinner table to the close (of one episode) in which enemies discover their common spiritual bond, ‘Sunday Dinner’ delivers moving testimony to the existence of God and the joy of faithful living,” Goodhue wrote.