Beyond the New Orthodoxy

The Rev. Malcolm Boyd used to be an adman and TV producer; now he is a San Francisco nightclub entertainer.

In-between times he is also an Episcopal priest who has some highly unorthodox notions about how religion ought to be presented to the modern world. Last week Father Boyd was making like a Mort Sahl or a Lenny Bruce and pulling down $1,000 a week in San Francisco's dark and smoky hungry i. Sitting on a bar stool, his clerical collar shining in the spotlight, he is putting on a four-week act that includes readings from his book of unusual prayers, Are You Running with Me, Jesus? (TIME, Nov. 26), and anecdotal ad libs on such subjects as premarital sex, homosexuality, integration and the institutional church. Says Father Boyd: "I'm communicating that the church should get off its ass." Some of the communications:

> "A girl came to me and said, Tm not the religious type and I don't want a sermon, but there's this cat and he wants me to go away with him for the weekend. I feel horny. Have you anything to say?' So I quoted the Gospel according to D. H. Lawrence: 'Every parting means a meeting elsewhere. And every meeting is a new bondage.' In other words, there isn't anything that doesn't matter."

> "Who is my brother? Is it the m:m who uses the same deodorant? If Sams Peter and Paul came back, the churches wouldn't want them. Maybe they could get in here. I hope they could."

> "I think seminaries are one of the great problems. Instead of making people into polite ministers of the Establishment, I'd try to break down the gulf between ordained clergy and other people."

> "When people talk about evangelism, they talk about Ghana or some faraway place, not the bar across the street."

> "I wonder why sex is the big hangup. I was on a television show recently. It was double-A time, you know, people eating TV dinners on trays and ali. And the announcer said, 'Father Boyd, are you in favor of premarital sex?' And I replied in the only honest way I could: 'Do you mean masturbation, petting to orgasm, or coitus?' And he said, 'We must pause now for a commercial.' "

Father Boyd gets mixed reviews. Variety called him "hipper-than-thou." San Francisco's Columnist Ralph Gleason dismissed his act as "boring" and advised him that "the nightclubs are in far less need of preachers than the cathedrals." He sometimes has to deal with heckling spectators who have had a bit too much to drink, but in general the audience, which often includes priests and ministers, seems to like his act. The Rev. James Clark Brown, pastor of San Francisco's First Congregational Church, calls Father Boyd's appearance at the hungry i "the most effective and, for my money [$3.50 a head], gutty evangelism I've observed in a long time."

At a time when novelty in religion is becoming the new orthodoxy, the good father is trying hard to be just plain pop. A onetime atheist, he was ordained in 1955, won quick notoriety and ecclesiastical disapproval by hearing "informal" confessions in bars and writing plays peppered with cuss words. He maintains that "you've got to begin with people where they are" and feels that a bar stool can be an effective pulpit.

Comedian Dick Gregory, who is also appearing at the hungry i, has seized on his new competitor's specialty for his own act just as easily as Father Boyd joined an entertainers' union. "Watch out," said Gregory. "The Rev. Boyd had a heckler last week, and he turned him into a pillar of salt." The peril of mixing show business and religion is that the quip may become more important than the Word.

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