Turning the Camera on Views of God

PBS is answering the prayers of those properly angry at television for granting so little quality time to religion.

The first occasion this year was Bill Moyers’ documentary “The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith.” And now comes “Searching for God in America,” a bracing amen from KCET-TV Channel 28 featuring interviews with eight religious leaders by Hugh Hewitt, an evangelical Christian, Orange County lawyer and co-host of the Los Angeles station’s “Life & Times” series.

It’s unrealistic to expect a chain of 25-minute chats, occasionally punctuated by factoid visuals, to resolve questions debated by humanity for millennia. And whether Hewitt’s search succeeds in a literal sense depends on your view of God. When it comes to achieving highly watchable, sometime provocative television, though, without a doubt he and producer Martin Burns throw open some pearly gates.

Far from being preaching heads, Hewitt’s subjects in this four-part series, ranging from reborn Watergate figure Charles Colson to Tibet’s exiled Dalai Lama, are compelling studies in the main, largely because of their considerable personal magnetism and ability to speak of godly things at street level. The only exception is the Dalai Lama, who is willing, but whose segment in Atlanta, where he was visiting, is undermined by his choppy English that makes almost everything he says hard to follow, blocking the viewer’s path to enlightenment.

Hewitt achieves much better karma with former Nixon dirty trickster and ex-con Colson, who created Prison Fellowship Ministries; famed Rabbi Harold Kushner of Boston; the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray, social activist and senior pastor at the First A.M.E. Church in Los Angeles; Trappist monk Thomas Keating in Colorado; Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr; Mormon leader Neal A. Maxwell; and the Rev. Roberta Hestenes, president of Eastern College near Philadelphia.

As the program’s only woman, Hestenes becomes a bold-face footnote on the lagging status of female clergy in the hierarchy of mainstream religion. Note also that Murray, who is African American, questions the traditionalist Caucasian view of a “white, blue-eyed, blond-haired Jesus,” but neither he, Hewitt nor any of the other subjects questions their own genderizing of God as “He,” even though Kushner, for one, says he doesn’t believe God has a human form.

Much fascinating ground is astutely covered by Hewitt, who is especially drawn to the personal odysseys, some serpentine and circuitous, his subjects have experienced in attaining their present strata of spirituality.

A recurring question here, also, is the very nature of God. To even many true believers, God’s ways are, as they say, just a bit mysterious, a thick enigma that clings to this series despite Hewitt’s best efforts to demystify things. For example, he repeatedly wonders aloud why the Creator found it necessary or beneficial to make a universe in which bad things occur on both cosmic and personal levels alongside the good. Why not goodness all the time?

Although he presses them, his subjects let God off the hook, in effect, by giving God credit for everything they think is swell, but not the blame when things go bad. Although using different words, most state that God gave us potential for both good and evil, thus bears no responsibility for the seemingly unfair miseries that victimize the innocent.

“I believe in a God who does not send the tragedy, but the incredible grace to deal with the tragedy,” says Kushner in the opening hour. He did second-guess God after his infant son contracted a rare genetic disease from which he later died at age 14, Kushner says, but ultimately came to believe that “God didn’t want that to happen.”

Hestenes expresses an equally charitable attitude in recalling how shaken she was by the suffering she saw when, in her capacity as chair of the Christian relief organization World Vision, she encountered a Romanian orphanage where all the children had AIDS. Not God’s fault.

Meanwhile, Nasr tells Hewitt that “we always look at the negative aspect of suffering. We rarely look at the aspect of suffering as a necessity for growth.” Maxwell speaks of pain as a “tutorial from a loving God that wants us to be stretched.” And the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who leads one of the largest sects of Buddhism from his headquarters in India and is recognized by millions as God incarnate, believes that “all negative experiences occur due to one’s own negative actions.”

Would he define China’s 40-year brutal occupation of Tibet as such an experience, and if so, did it result from his or his people’s “negative actions”? The Dalai Lama isn’t asked that. But Hewitt repeatedly does ask his subjects why a God of such omnipotence would accommodate tragedy at all. “I’m stumped by that,” Kushner acknowledges. “I can’t read God’s mind. All I can do is deal with the cards I’m dealt.”

In other words, go figure.

Hewitt will likely raise some eyebrows when describing his first subject, Colson, as “a leader in American Christianity surpassed in the eyes of many only by Billy Graham.” As will Colson, no doubt, when saying that “tolerance” is the “perfect prescription for moral chaos.” That sound bite needed to be fleshed out.

But Hewitt does broach with Colson issues concerning the very existence of God. The Christian gospel about turning the other cheek and loving one’s enemy, asserts Colson, citing circumstantial evidence, is so radically in conflict with human nature that it could have come only from God.

Yet if the universe didn’t pre-exist and was created by God, who or what created God, and what entity is responsible for creating the creator of God, and so on and so on down this path of murky infinity? These are age-old questions that Hewitt’s subjects surely have addressed before, but don’t here, proving either that he is not almighty as an interviewer or that even born-again television has a cutting-room floor.

* Part 1 of “Searching for God in America” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28, and continues at that hour for three consecutive Fridays.

* IDEA FOR A SERIES

Hugh Hewitt recognized religion’s blooming popularity. F2