RELIGION / JOHN DART : Military Broadcasts Change Tune : Airwaves: To keep pace with modern audiences, Armed Forces Radio and Television religious programs are livelier.

Armed Forces Radio and Television broadcasts religious programs for the 1.3 million servicemen and women overseas, but for many years the military airwaves typically carried worship services, Bible studies and music by the likes of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Little wonder then that surveys of the predominantly young military personnel ranked religious shows at the bottom, almost as expendable in their minds as big band and classical music.

Today, however, Christian rock music--including the metal variety--black gospel singing, and Top 10 contemporary Christian music dominate the five weekly hours of religious radio offered to military stations. And the religious television package is livelier too, with magazine-format shows and religious video shows done in the MTV style.

The transformation was largely the effort of two chaplains who have acted as religious program coordinators at a little-known military facility in the San Fernando Valley--the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service Broadcast Center in Sun Valley.

“For the first time, both radio and television religious programming . . . will be compatible with our audience’s lifestyles and tastes,” Army Maj. David Smith, the current religious program coordinator, wrote to fellow chaplains after the revamped schedules were introduced last April.

“The feedback was extremely positive from programmers at a meeting here last December, because 70% of our audience is between the ages of 18 and 28,” Smith said in an interview. Gerald Fry, a civilian who directs programming and news at the Sun Valley center, confirmed that the changes have had a good response.

“If it were my choice, I’d put the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on every week,” said Fry, who has been in broadcasting since 1952. “But the more contemporary the program, the more popular they are compared to the old-style religion programs.”

Fry credited Smith’s predecessor, Air Force Maj. Richard Davenport, with launching the innovations. One well-received change, Fry said, was the introduction of religious-themed children’s television programs for military families with small children.

The Armed Forces Radio and Television Network, received by U. S. military bases in 128 countries and on ships at sea, selects news, sports, sitcoms, movies, specials and a variety of programming from the broadcast and cable networks. Extra news coverage of disasters such as the Northridge earthquake are picked up from the major broadcast networks and CNN and transmitted by satellite.

With a limited budget, which is diminishing with military cutbacks, the broadcast center relies on the patriotism of networks and producers to donate their products.

Some religious broadcasters go even further to accommodate Armed Forces Network needs. For instance, Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” is pared down to a half-hour by his Family Channel editors and the Rev. Robert Schuller’s “Hour of Power,” the top-rated syndicated religious program in this country, is edited down to 30 minutes by technicians at the Crystal Cathedral, Smith said.

“White Heat,” the Christian metal program produced by broadcaster Ken Roberts of Torrance, is done free of charge solely for the military network. So is “Love on a Rock” (top hits) and “Amen Corner” (black gospel).

“You can’t hear these programs anywhere else,” said Smith, 38, a United Methodist minister who is halfway through his three-year assignment at the broadcast center.

“As a chaplain, I don’t want to play the ratings game, but if the servicemen and women are not listening or watching, then we are not reaching them,” he said. “The programmers overseas usually ran worship services and Bible study programs on Sunday morning--when the people who might listen or watch were in chapel. We want to reach more than them.”

Smith said that he changed the radio schedule to run some music programs for 52 consecutive weeks--instead of changing them every 13 weeks as before--in order to build up a following.

Some of the biggest concerns, however, are to balance programs for different religious faiths and ethnic groups and to assure that the spiritual exhortations do not include pleas for money.

On radio, “East of Eden,” a Jewish program of music and talk, is offered at eight holiday times during the year. “Passages,” an award-winning program with interviews of people whose faith helped them overcome traumatic experiences, is produced by the Presbyterian Media Mission in Pittsburgh.

On television, “The Jesuit Journal” and “Catch the Spirit” offer interviews on current religious issues, from the Catholic and Methodist perspectives, respectively. When “Hour of Power” is not showing, the military network offers the upbeat “Outreach of Love” Sunday service from an African Methodist Episcopal church in Baltimore led by Pastor Frank Reid, formerly of Los Angeles.

Network documentaries or specials on religious themes--such as how churches and synagogues responded to Hurricane Andrew--are picked up by the network.

Final approval of the program selections rests with a three-chaplain committee called the Audiovisual Advisory Group, but it is the religious program coordinator who searches program listings and monitors network feeds for new material.

Smith picked up two television productions that focused on last September’s Parliament of World Religions in Chicago--a documentary from CBS and a series of interviews produced by the Faith & Values Cable Network featuring Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Bahai and other religious leaders.

“This will really be beneficial because we have a very diverse audience,” Smith said.

That very diversity means that the chaplain-coordinators have to review each program to make sure that no religious group is criticized or demeaned. The military programmers do not censor or edit programs, so the entire show has to be free of abusive references to meet government guidelines on fairness.

“We got one complaint when I first came here that a program was unfair to a faith group, and when I looked at it, I had to agree,” Smith said. “It turned out that was a program that went through the approval process in the three months between Maj. Davenport’s assignment here and when I started.”