Spots for God

The scene is a cocktail party. The host cuts through the chatter to suggest that everyone play a word-association game.

Leader. Money.

Guests: Bills. Evil. Las Vegas.

Leader: Freeway.

Guests: Death. Ticket. Hurry.

Leader: God.

Guests: (Silence).

The end of this 60-second playlet makes the point: most people do not know what to say about God any more, and perhaps they ought to know. The soft-sell message is a TV commercial, one of 50 religious spots sponsored by the Franciscan Fathers of Los Angeles' St. Francis Productions. The friars may be the most visible practitioners of this new missionary technique--their spots have been distributed to more than 700 stations. But they are by no means alone: more and more churches are turning from Sunday-morning sermonettes to brisk 30-and 60-second TV ads.

Sneak It to 'Em. TV stations, expected by the FCC to give a certain amount of viewing time to public-service programming, usually relegate full-length religious shows to the somnolent Sunday-morning hours. A slick, quick spiritual ad, on the other hand, may well win an unsold prime-time minute. Now that Christmas commercials are out of the way and advertising budgets depleted, there may be more religious spots on the air than usual.

Satirist Stan Freberg was a pioneer in sneak-it-to-'em inspiration. Commissioned by the United Presbyterian Church in 1963, Freberg turned out a series of low-key but catchy radio ads. Franciscan Friars Karl Holtsnider and Emery Tang of Los Angeles used a similar approach on TV with a pilot Mother's Day spot in 1966: the camera simply panned across the faces of mothers of many races and nations. Now the Franciscans have a 20-man staff and a $150,000 annual budget, funded by 3,000 fellow friars and affiliated laymen.

Selling an Option. The Franciscan spots are never overtly Roman Catholic in message. In one, a dark hand shakes and holds onto a white hand, and a voice asks, "All things considered, that's not very much, is it?" Another spot shows flashbacks from a day in the life of a married couple as they exchange a kiss on his return from work. The kiss is an external sign of a love that "builds today into forever." A commercial produced for the Episcopal Church shows a man switching channels from catastrophe to catastrophe on his TV set. Finally, he settles on an old Christians-and-lions epic, and is projected back through time right into the scene. The voiceover announces: "Being a Christian didn't used to be a spectator sport--it still isn't."

The new commercials seek to convey the idea that religion is something worth thinking about. Observes the Rev. Charles Brackbill Jr. of United Presbyterian's Division of Mass Media: "We are selling an option. What we're saying is, 'Consider God--consider God as an alternative.' " The churches are convinced that at least a few halfway believers are once again doing just that.

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