The Church on TV: Portrayals of Priests, Pastors and Nuns on American Television Series by Richard Wolf (review)

Richard Wolf’s study of The Church on TV is a thorough, well-written analysis of how the television medium has explored the relevance of religious institutions to contemporary social challenges through various prime time serial programs. Interested readers in the fields of communication and the media, religious studies, sociology, and the history of religion will find this book interesting and useful.

Television programming of this sort first aired in 1962 with Going My Way and continued into the early twenty-first century with 7^thHeaven. All the main characters from the programs discussed are priests, pastors, nuns, bishops, deacons, and rabbis. The laity play supporting roles. One of Wolf’s main goals is to compare how church historians have assessed the challenges and issues of the churches in this era with how television grapples with them. What he has discovered is what one might expect—the programs that did well in the ratings tended to take a lighthearted and sentimental position of the church in the contemporary world, such as The Flying Nun. This does not mean, however, that networks did not attempt more hard-edge examinations of the challenges of making the church relevant to the contemporary social and spiritual problems, but failed to appeal to a broad, mass market.

In the period of the 1960s and 1970s all religiously based programs focused on the Catholic Church as many of its challenges were in the forefront of the news, such as the effects of Vatican II that significantly impacted its theology and practices as well as elevated the role of the laity. The Catholic Church is also territorially defined. When its European immigrant population moved to the suburbs, its parishes became part of the “inner city.” Hence, many themes portrayed priests and nuns as social workers to a minority population and even as murder mystery solvers related to drugs, gang warfare, etc., such as Father Dowling. These programs also delved into priests’ and nuns’ internal struggles with their calling to a Church that demanded celibacy in a highly sexualized era, the exclusion of women from the priesthood during the women’s movement, issues of birth control and abortion, along with scandals with Church leadership. In all, these programs did seriously try to explore the relevance of the Church to the modern world.

Series that explored Protestant Churches in the modern world had the advantage of using material related to the family life of ministers in contemporary settings as well as the challenges women ministers faced in gaining the respect and trust of their congregations. The social milieu of these congregations tended to center in the suburbs or small towns. Hence, they did not grapple with issues of the poor or minorities, but these programs did seriously address dating and sexuality, alcohol and drugs, contemporary stress on the family, and issues of belief in a secular age.

There was only one short-lived series that dealt with Judaism that was a Father Dowling murder mystery knock-off. However, Jews often did appear in Catholic- and Protestant-focused programming as a means to explore ecumenism.

Wolf concludes that lighthearted programming fared better because viewers did not see the sacred as negotiable. He also does not see any tangible evidence that these programs were successful at evangelizing or changing church practices or beliefs, but he does feel there is evidence that the message sent was that churches are open for business in the modern world.