Rumor of FCC Ban on Religious Programs Resurfaces

It’s the rumor that won’t die, although it’s nearly 20 years old.

It popped up at a Pacoima church recently. It gets reprinted occasionally by small-town newspapers. It surfaces in computer on-line forums.

The story, 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.

The rumor is baseless. It always has been.

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

In the last 24 months, FCC offices in Washington have received nearly 3 million protests, petitions and inquiries in the mail. Another 8,000 people have telephoned the FCC about it in the last 12 months, said commission spokeswoman Audrey Spivack.

At its peak, the rumor generated a record 4.7 million pieces of mail to the FCC in 1976.

Although the federal agency spent $1.5 million refuting the rumor during its first 11 years, it lacks the staff to combat the spurious story today, Spivack 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 earlier lawsuit helped lead to the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ban on government-sponsored devotional activities in public schools.

However, the number of the Lansman-Milam petition, 2,493, 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,” and prompted a massive letter-writing campaign.

Psychologist R. Patricia Walsh of Loyola Marymount University said that the name of the atheist has lent credibility to the rumor among many religious people despite the fact that 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 it is the current religious and political climate that 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,” O’Hair said.

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

She confirmed what FCC officials have found over the years: that the phony story gets passed around in all kinds of Protestant and Catholic churches.

In Pacoima this spring, a member of Greater Community Missionary Baptist Church left some circulars on a table announcing a threat to religious broadcasting from O’Hair, but Pastor Dudley Chatman said the copies disappeared so quickly he could not remember details of the flyer. The church member said she received the flyers from a friend in Florida.

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

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.

The FCC began tallying its rumor-inspired mail beginning in 1976, and in only one year--1981--did the volume of mail recorded drop below 1 million.

By 1989, the FCC had received 23.5 million letters. Spivack, the agency’s spokeswoman, said that the agency stopped counting for a few years in the early 1990s, but resumed again in 1993. Between May, 1993, and June, 1995, the agency received 2,980,376 letters urging denial of a request that has never been made.