Mob Morality 17 December 2004 Stoner jokes about biblical precedents for wedding-party hook-ups; a Catholic comic speculating on her "get-out-of-hell-free card"; Will and Grace's shallow materialist Karen musing about transforming an historic church into a gay bar; a Scrubs character telling his fiancee it "sucks" that they won't be allowed to read their own vows in a Catholic ceremony. It's pretty rough stuff that makes up the new Parents' Television Council (PTC) study on negative TV treatments of religion, "Faith in a Box: Entertainment Television and Religion." But if the examples of "insults to faith" picked by the PTC are lacking in substance -- by and large the complaints concern innocuous stock punchlines older than the medium itself, along with the occasional allusion to hypocrisy among the clergy or moral values politician -- PTC's justification for demanding changed content is worse. Citing a 2003 poll indicating that 90% of Americans believe in God and 80% believe in Jesus' resurrection, PTC founder and president, L. Brent Bozell (who also owns CNSNews) said that "Hollywood" (read: "people who make TV sitcoms") isn't accurately reflecting the viewpoints of a majority of Americans (read: Christians). Bozell kindly suggests that Hollywood be helped to overcome its fantasy -- that "spirituality is trendy, but organized religion is outdated and oppressive" -- so it can accept the new "reality": The People are religious, so Hollywood had better give the people what they want (read: more networks like PAX).
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