RELIGION / JOHN DART : A Famous Skeptic Does His Part

For a self-proclaimed skeptic who decries many religious beliefs as simply dumb, humorist-author Steve Allen shows up as a welcome figure in a surprising number of tabernacles.

Best known as the original host of television’s “Tonight Show,” Allen is an ex-Catholic who spoke before a conference of 600 Jesuits last year and a secular humanist favorite who addressed a major religious communications conference the year before.

The conservative National Religious Broadcasters gave him a Distinguished Service Award in 1987, and the World Humanist Congress featured him as a major speaker in 1988.

Whether it’s Salvation Army kettles, Catholic Christmas seals, a Cult Awareness Network fund-raiser or, most recently, a Unitarian church benefit, Allen has found time to lend his celebrity status for religious promotional purposes.

“If someone were to invent a religion tomorrow in which, if you want to contact God, all you have to do is buy a pumpkin, everyone at first would scoff at the stupid person who believes that somehow pumpkins are physically part of God,” he said in an interview at his Van Nuys office.

“But now, Chapter 2: These people open kitchens, buy clothing and build shelters for the homeless,” Allen said. “I think their views about pumpkins are dumb, but they are helping starving, miserable people and I admire them, and I will help them.”

More than that, Allen, whose energy belies his 70 years, said that “whoever is interested in a better society, a better world and a better morality can count on my support.”

Inasmuch as Allen has written more than 4,000 songs (“This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” “Impossible,” etc.), authored 38 books, made 40 record albums, written reams of poetry and created/wrote/hosted the Emmy Award-winning PBS-TV series “Meeting of Minds,” it might be guessed that religion occupies just one corner of his multifaceted mind.

But Allen’s “black books” prove otherwise.

Lining dozens of shelves at his office and in his Encino home are black notebooks containing news clippings, magazine articles and other pieces of information that Allen has collected on “abortion,” “AIDS,” “Crime,” “Congress,” “Death Penalty,” “Economics” and so forth.

Only three categories exceed the 42 volumes collected under the heading “Religion.” According to an inventory kept in assistant Carol Vogel’s desk, the catch-all category “Odds and Ends” consumes 65 notebooks, “conservatives” fills 59 and “funny men” takes up 48. “Politics” is dead-even with religion at 42, but religion may have more sub-categories.

The “Catholic” black books number 34 so far. Other topics include “Protestants,” “Bible” and “Free Thought.” The category titled “Reagan and Astrology” was created when reports emerged during Reagan’s presidency that he and his wife, Nancy, had some interest in those beliefs.

The fruit of Allen’s collection can be seen partly in “Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion & Morality,” a dictionary-style, 428-page book published by Prometheus Books in 1990. That was only Volume 1, it turns out. Entries that didn’t make it will be used in a future companion volume, he said.

A review of the book in the Jesuit-run magazine “America” credited Allen with being “skeptical without being cynical, charitable and respectful for ambiguity” while focusing on naive or simplistic interpretations of the Bible and religious tradition. At the same time, the reviewer said Allen “grinds the same axes over and over,” descending to the literalist level and regrettably leaving for another time a book that deals with the morally uplifting and spiritually ennobling aspects of religion.

“One of the things I’m passionately trying to do with that book, and Volume 2,” Allen said, “is to get the regular Catholic or Protestant to read what the experts say about the Bible.”

Allen--whose 1989 book titled “Dumbth” argues eloquently for teaching critical thinking--claims that a lot of adult Christians read the Bible as an 11-year-old might, as if it were a straight-forward journalistic report.

“Why do churches let the average believer languish in 1872-type ignorance?” he said.

Allen’s own spiritual odyssey started with a Catholic upbringing in Chicago by his mother, who was widowed when he was an infant.

He said the traditional church faith that he inherited “suddenly cracked and something fell away” when he read a World War II account of hundreds of American seamen from a torpedoed ship dying slowly in shark-infested waters--despite the prayers of those still on the ship.

“We have a black book category called ‘Disasters,’ ” he said. “Any religious leader would emerge from a three-hour inspection of my files on that subject somewhat unnerved.

“He would not necessarily become an atheist; I never did. I assume--not believe, assume--that there is a God, but it doesn’t make sense.

“Sorry to be specific, but His eye is not on the sparrow,” he added, referring to a common religious allusion to God’s watchful concern.

Allen, whose college education was limited to four months at Arizona State University, did not develop his appetite for religion and philosophy until he was 30, during his early television days when his first marriage crumbled in the wake of an affair with another woman.

“The idea that it could happen to me knocked me for a loop, so I tried to read my way out of it and make sense out of life,” he said.

His second marriage, to actress Jayne Meadows, helped steady his life, but also formalized his break with the Catholic Church, which does not recognize divorce unless the first marriage has been annulled.

Another family crisis in 1971 stirred him to research the sectarian Christian and Eastern movements that were attracting thousands of young people in that period. Brian, 24, one of four sons, notified Allen by letter that he had joined a Christian commune in Seattle that was led by a former salesman who took the name Love Israel. Brian, who took the name Logic Israel, said he would not see his natural family again.

In a book titled “Beloved Son, a Story of the Jesus Cults,” Allen recounted a decade of patient rapprochement with his son, visiting the commune, worrying about his questionable beliefs. However, he did not resort to hiring a controversial deprogrammer, as some parents did, to kidnap their offspring and break their allegiance to the sect.

Not long after the book was published, the commune fell apart with revelations about the leader’s police record and money motives. “My son, who still lives in Seattle, said it took a long time to realize it, but he now says, ‘I wasted 11 years of my life,’ ” Allen said.

In general, Allen said, “some things about religion are lovely and some things are horrifying.”

In researching “Meeting of Minds,” in which costumed figures from history debate classic ideas from contrasting viewpoints, Allen said his respect for medieval Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas dropped several notches. “I read that he had said and later reaffirmed that he could contemplate with a smile the torments of the souls in Hell.

“I have long concluded that what is most important about religion is morality. There is a great pool of moral thinking that I find encouraging, and I have been struck by the good intentions of people in all religious camps.”

Allen said dinner with Presbyterians isn’t much different from dinner with humanists.

“You hear good people say good things, mostly sensible things, and they are usually people who, by the simple act of affiliation, are trying to do something to improve the world,” he said.

In illustrating his reasons for helping groups of disparate philosophical views, Allen started to say that he might not address a Nazi group or the Ku Klux Klan.

“But come to think of it,” he said, “I might like to tell them a thing or two if they were so ill-advised as to invite me.”