A Spiritual Void on the Small Screen : Networks: Times are hard and TV reflects the times with tough programming. The calming Sunday religious programs are now relegated to the occasional special.

Something was really missing from TV when the Rodney G. King case went to the jury last week. And it was particularly noticeable on Easter Sunday.

What was missing was the type of religious series on the networks that once distinguished weekend viewing by dealing in a spiritual dimension with topics that ranged from everyday life to cultural matters to news events.

More than merely contemplative, they were islands of calm in stormy seas--programs such as “Lamp Unto My Feet,” “The Eternal Light” and “Look Up and Live.” They gave a kind of reassuring human perspective to television.

What reminded me of these long-gone series was a CBS announcement of a Sunday religious special “Strangers in Town: The New Refugees,” an interfaith broadcast about helping immigrants survive in the United States.

Yes, there are occasional network specials of this type, but they are so few these days that I found myself doing a double take upon finding one--and thinking of what we have lost.

Times are meaner all around us and on TV too--which is why prime-time drama has turned into the killing fields; why nasty, leering and exploitative reality shows harden what is left of the soul of the medium; why slimy, suggestive dating shows and snake-oil infomercials pollute and cheapen the human environment, and why, alas, religion has little or no place on the networks.

Everything on network TV today has to make a buck, or forget it. And weekly religious programming was not a profit center. It took the era of TV evangelists to teach the religious community how to really pass the national collection plate.

Maybe the evangelists didn’t siphon off the kind of audience that watched “Lamp Unto My Feet.” But many of them made religious programming more profitable for individual stations by paying for the air time they used. The networks couldn’t match such inducements, or simply wouldn’t go to bat for religion the way they do for violence.

There are other reasons why network TV seems to avoid religion like the plague: the cynicism of our times; the bogus fear of being accused of proselytizing in a politically correct age; the residual effect of the notoriety of broadcast evangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart.

But you don’t have to be particularly religious--I’m not--to realize that the end result is a failure of the networks to deal, except sporadically--in specials and holiday programming--with a part of life that is important to many viewers and helps sustain them through the worst.

Many TV stations around the land now put on their own local religious shows, often at ungodly hours--too early or too late. And several cable channels offer religious programming, but they are not available everywhere and can’t possibly draw anywhere near the number of viewers that networks attract.

The gaping hole at the networks may not be obvious to a generation that can barely recall, or doesn’t remember, the pre-evangelist era on TV when religion, in formats of cultural programming, made for special Sunday daytime viewing along with such news series as “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation.” But those who do remember know what is lost in terms of civility and the calmer, higher road.

How nice it would have been to hear the Dan Quayle-”Murphy Brown” family values dispute discussed in the calm Sunday morning religious arena of “Lamp Unto My Feet.” How worthwhile it would have been, and would be, to hear the King case presented by a Big Three network to the nation-at-large in a similar arena removed from hard news--and “Hard Copy.”

Wondering if the Big Three even have religious programming units anymore, I called them up and confirmed that, for all practical purposes, they don’t. I started with a veteran of the field, John P. Blessington, executive producer of “Strangers in Town: The New Refugees,” which is scheduled to air May 9 at 10 a.m. on KCBS-TV. He said one of his former hats at CBS was handling the cultural and religious unit.

“Now what we do is five programs a year,” he said. “You’re talking to a person who wishes there was more. One of the reasons the televangelists did so well is that the mainline churches are very intellectual about religion and the evangelists go for emotion, which is where the jugular is in religion. It’s the vulnerability of man.”

If religion has no real place in today’s crasser-than-crass network atmosphere, local stations nonetheless carry some such programming because “they want to be seen as good guys on the block,” said Blessington. Religious programming is the kind of public service TV that adds up to brownie points at license-renewal time for stations.

The new-style specials were kind of a way of “reinventing” station interest in network religious programs after clearances by affiliates had dropped disastrously, said an NBC executive. NBC, ABC and CBS now work with the Interfaith Broadcasting Commission and provide distribution for the specials.

As an example, “Strangers in Town: The New Refugees” is a CBS production made in consultation with the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches and the New York Board of Rabbis. Other organizations involved in the various network productions include the Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission an the Jewish Theological Seminary.

The trouble with the networks’ view of other religion-oriented programming is that it too often is tied to immediate issues and controversies and winds up as segments of news programs. Shows like “Lamp Unto My Feet” and “The Eternal Light” were where viewers dropped in regularly, regardless of the topic, simply to find some spiritual nourishment and renewal.

It never ceases to amaze me that there once was an Emmy Award for “best cultural, religious or educational program.” It was in TV’s earlier days, but of course now we’ve become so smart and sophisticated that we don’t need stuff like that anymore.