Foe of Religion Crusades on Cable TV

Wearing a baseball cap, thongs and a Hawaiian shirt under his gray sports jacket, John Boag sat casually in front of the video camera he had set up himself in a studio at Paragon Cable.

“I want to talk to you about the assassination of John Lennon,” he said earnestly, staring directly into the whirring, unmanned camera. “Is it incidental that (Lennon’s killer) Mark Chapman is a fundamentalist Christian? I don’t think so.”

During the next 15 minutes Boag, 54, spun his own unusual conspiratorial theory regarding the famous musician’s 1980 shooting on a Manhattan street. Lennon was killed, Boag suggested, because his music expressed a philosophy antithetical to fundamentalism. “Was there a motive for the Christian community to get rid of John Lennon?” he asked rhetorically. “Certainly. Who else could bring 250,000 people to (a concert in) Central Park” for an anti-Christian message?

The self-taped monologue will be featured in an upcoming segment of Boag’s weekly cable television show, “The Age of Logic and Reason.” To officials at Paragon Cable, which airs the show on Channel 25 each Friday at 7 a.m., the broadcast constitutes compliance with a federal requirement to provide public access for 91,000 subscribers in Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley, Westminster, Stanton, Garden Grove, Los Alamitos and Rossmoor.

For Boag, however, the program has become much more: specifically, the major vehicle in a one-man, eight-year crusade against organized religion that, among other things, has resulted in his arrest, prompted lawsuits, got him thrown into a local mental hospital and once, he maintains, even incited the firebombing of his car.

“I don’t believe in the Bible God--that’s mythology,” says the self-employed clothing designer. Other cable programs he has produced include a segment on Catholic priests who molest children, explorations of the Christian right’s political agenda, an interview with a priest who considers religion addictive and a show attempting to prove that Jesus didn’t exist. “Christianity,” he says, “has about as much validity as the tooth fairy.”

Local Christians vehemently disagree, of course, describing Boag as a misguided individual who, though sometimes irritating, poses no major threat. “He’s kind of comical because he says such outlandish things that no one pays attention,” says the Rev. Guy Ruggeri, pastor at Huntington Beach Calvary Chapel, which frequently has been the object of Boag’s attacks.

Yet the verbal confrontations there and elsewhere have, at times, prompted dramatic responses.

A few months ago, according to Ruggeri, Boag had to be escorted from Calvary Chapel by police after setting up camera equipment at a spot normally reserved for church traffic. Boag says he was simply taping portions of his show and was not disrupting anything. Frequently, he says, he promotes his program by leaving leaflets attacking the church on the windshields of congregants’ cars while they attend Sunday morning worship services.

In 1986, Boag says, he was arrested and charged with trespassing at another church in Huntington Beach. He says he spent four days in jail on charges that eventually were dismissed.

And in 1989, the anti-religionist got arrested for trespassing on public school grounds in Seal Beach, where he was protesting the Los Alamitos School District’s lease of school property to a local church. Eventually, Boag says, the incident resulted in his conviction on trespassing charges, for which he is still serving a sentence of three years’ probation. It also resulted in the police admitting him involuntarily to the Brea Hospital Neuropsychiatric Center for a psychiatric evaluation.

Boag later sued the hospital and received, as part of an out-of-court settlement, a letter signed by neuropsychiatric center executive director David J. Delmastro stating that the activist had not been “diagnosed as having, or suffering from, a mental disorder” while at the hospital.

In addition, he retained an independent psychiatrist--Dr. Irwin I. Rosenfeld of Laguna Hills--who, after examining Boag, wrote a letter indicating that he suffered from “no significant psychiatric pathology.”

And officers at the Huntington Beach and Seal Beach police departments say they no longer consider the clothing designer a danger to himself or to others. “He’s an outspoken, enthusiastic individual who is interested in following the beat of his own drum,” Lt. Charles Poe, a spokesman for the Huntington Beach Police Department, said in a recent interview.

Boag, whose design customers consist mostly of members of rock bands, admits that his antipathy to organized religion has roots in early life. Raised as a Catholic, he says he was emotionally abused by a priest for whom he served as an altar boy. That disaffection deepened considerably years later when, as a resident of Encinitas in San Diego County, the future cable producer locked horns with a local Christian group engaged in picketing a friend’s mini-market to protest its sale of men’s magazines such as Penthouse and Playboy.

“They had a political agenda they were trying to shove down everybody’s throats,” recalls Boag, a registered Republican. To counter it, he plastered the neighborhood with anti-Christian leaflets. And four days later, he says, his truck was firebombed. He believes the culprit was allied with a local church.

The Christians denied involvement in the attack, and no charges were ever filed. But the incident touched off an anti-Christian crusade on Boag’s part that has continued to this day. “I was getting my Ph.D. in religious violence,” he says. “I was forced to examine what fundamentalism is. You can’t be on the defensive; you must take the offense to stop religious violence.”

Today, Boag says, he considers himself part of a national “free thinkers” movement that has roots in the philosophy of American revolutionist Thomas Paine. A recent issue of “Freethought Today,” a newspaper published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wis., defines a free thinker as one who “forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority or established belief.” In his own case, Boag says, reason has led him to question the existence of God while rejecting outright the validity of Christianity.

“The jury is out on whether a Supreme Being exists,” he avers, “but without a doubt Jesus and the apostles never did.”

Such is the logic behind “The Age of Logic and Reason.”

“He seems to be a very serious man with a mission,” says Donald Weddle, public affairs director for Paragon Cable which, he says, receives more viewer complaints regarding the contents of Boag’s programs than that of any other public access producer.

While each of Boag’s new productions prompts a handful of complaints, Weddle said, no one has ever come forward with a serious proposal to counter Boag’s messages with another show.

All of which is just fine with Boag. “I’m kind of a loner,” he says. “I’d just as soon (be) on my own.”