RELIGION / JOHN DART : Rumors of Push to Ban Christian Broadcasting Refuse to Disappear

It’s the rumor that won’t die, although it’s nearly 20 years old. It popped up at a Pacoima church recently, gets picked up occasionally by small-town newspapers and has surfaced in computer on-line forums.

The story that is still spreading among Christians of all stripes goes something like this: Atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair--who played a much publicized role in banishing prayer from public schools--has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to ban all religious broadcasting.

No such petition was ever filed. The rumor is baseless. It always has been.

But its latest appearance, like the previous outbreaks, has generated believers by the millions.

In the past 24 months, FCC offices in Washington have received nearly 3 million protests, petitions and inquiries in the mail. That is comparable to some yearly volumes in the 1980s but short of the record 4.7 million pieces of mail received in 1976.

Another 8,000 people have telephoned the FCC about it over the past 12 months, commission spokeswoman Audrey Spivack said.

“A lot of people call to verify our mailing address and that’s when we try to defuse their concerns,” Spivack said. Although the federal agency spent $1.5 million refuting the rumor during the story’s first 11 years, it lacks the staff today to combat the spurious reports other than to reply to personal inquiries, she said.

FCC officials say they believe they know what may have started the rumor. On Aug. 1, 1975, the commission denied a petition by Californians Jeremy Lansman and Lorenzo Milam asking that no licenses be granted for any new, non-commercial educational stations, including those of religious groups, until their practices were examined.

The Lansman-Milam petition, RM 2493, did not involve O’Hair, now 75, the nation’s best-known atheist, whose suit played a part in the 1963 U. S. Supreme Court ban on government-sponsored devotional activities in public schools.

But the number assigned to the denied petition--2493--showed up in the 1970s on a much-copied circular attributing to O’Hair a pending effort to ban religious programs. The circulars warned that she could only be stopped by a campaign “showing that there are still many Christians alive and well, and concerned, in our country.”

Psychologist R. Patrica Walsh of Loyola Marymount University said that the name of the famous atheist probably has made the rumor credible to many religious people--despite the fact there have been no news reports of such a petition.

“The Christian right would tend to think that they’re not going to find the truth in the media because they feel it is too liberal,” Walsh said.

Robin Murray O’Hair, daughter of Madalyn and executive director of the American Atheist Center in Austin, Tex., contends the current religious and political climate keeps the rumor alive.

“In the climate of fear that somehow Christian people are being oppressed by an atheist minority, people are far more likely to take this at face value without checking it out,” the younger O’Hair said.

“I get clippings from small-town papers telling readers to do something,” she said. She said she squelched the rumor when it appeared recently on an on-line computer forum on religion.

Robin O’Hair confirmed what FCC officials have found over the years--that the phony story gets passed around in all kinds of Protestant and Catholic churches.

“I’ve encountered this from Christians who are reasonably intelligent and not foaming at the mouth,” she said. “They have a natural tendency to believe what they’re told by their pastor who puts a notice up on the bulletin board.”

In Pacoima this spring, a member of Greater Community Missionary Baptist Church left on a table circulars that announced a threat to religious broadcasting from O’Hair, but Pastor Dudley Chatman said the copies went fast and he could not remember details on the flyer. The church member, who did not wish to be interviewed, told a church secretary that she received the flyers from a friend in Florida.

The pattern has been repeated in past years in a range of denominations even as warnings of the bogus petition have been printed by religious publications.

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Charisma, the leading national magazine for Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, noted in its March issue that the rumor was still alive, and as false as ever.

“Who knows how much ink, paper, postage, time and energy have been wasted by well-intentioned individuals who have kept this counterfeit claim going for nearly two decades?” asked an editorial last year in the California Southern Baptist magazine, which also lamented the cost to the federal government, though no updated figure has been tallied.

The FCC, which tallied its rumor-inspired mail beginning in 1976, noted a drop to 546,478 pieces of correspondence in 1981. As it turned out, however, that was the only year that the recorded volume fell below 1 million.

By 1989, the FCC had received 23.5 million letters. Spivack, the agency’s spokeswoman, said the agency stopped counting for a few years in the early 1990s, but had resumed again by 1993. Between May, 1993, and June, 1995, the two-year total was 2,980,376.