Radio program holds rare gem of fun, religious conversation

Garrison Keillor has a pretty good thing going on "A Prairie Home Companion." All he has to do is say "Lutheran," and he gets a laugh. He says "Unitarian" and gets a bigger laugh.

These words are not in themselves laughable. But over the national airwaves, it's different. Keillor knows that in the congregational setting of his secular radio show, the lingo of church life has a strange charm. Comic memories accrue and detonate with each new reference to "Corinthians" or "Episcopalians" in the tales of the show's stoic, church-going Minnesota characters. A phrase like "covered dish supper" is a gold mine, a renewable national resource. Such is Keillor's shrewd magic.

There's a reason for this, of course: The words of Middle American religious life just aren't heard much on public airwaves. The jarring little titillation at hearing the word "Baptist" on the "News from Lake Wobegon" is like a trespass on the guarded compound of public rhetoric. It's the unwritten etiquette of church-state separation, a tradition of reluctance to talk about religion, other people's religion, on the air. So the words sound exotic. They carry voltage, a slightly scandalous vibe.

Mainstream religion's absence from the mass media in spiritually minded America never ceases to be peculiar. The paradox gets discussed at earnest seminars. At the end of the day, though, the taboo remains so forceful that a tall man with a radio show can appear to be breaking the rules and get a weekly chuckle just by saying "Presbyterian."

It gives Keillor, who will be broadcasting his live National Public Radio show from Town Hall in New York for four weeks beginning on Saturday, a monopoly on the religious humor market for a national audience. (I don't count stand-up comedy's short list of public-domain words that no longer shock: "hell," "Satan," "sin," "nuns" and "circumcision," in that order.)

Big-time TV and movies don't offer much competition. When organized religion gets a mention at all, it's usually reduced to a couple of basic clergy cliches - the Rev. Milquetoast Harmless Bumbler and the Rev. Southern-Accent Bad-Guy Evangelist. Neither of them has anything to do with the lives of 100 million mainstream American believers.

Serious television air time is reserved for cops, lawyers, surgeons, the occasional coroner, cowboy and nurses' aide - seldom a minister, priest or rabbi. Scriptwriters just don't get much practice using Catholic or Protestant terms. It's not easy to tune to the music behind a phrase like Council of Nicea. Religion is considered too scary, too divisive, to warrant much of a dignified prime-time life. Nearly 30 years after "M*A*S*H," the lovably ineffectual Father Mulcahy remains a Mount Rushmore figure, an enduring cliche of prime-time clergy decorum.

When the taboo is occasionally challenged, the results can be swift and brutal: cancellation. Remember the 1997 ABC show "Nothing Sacred," a drama about an inner-city Catholic parish? Dead within weeks.

So the religious world by and large continues its exile from big-time media, except for all the current explorations of Islam and the annual obligatory local news report on snake-handling.

Occasionally an independent film will smuggle in everyday spiritual reality in a serious way. "You Can Count on Me," from a couple of years ago, includes a Catholic priest in a pivotal scene or two, a compassionate clergyman probing the chaos of the main characters' life choices. This goes on for several minutes, and without ironic, embarrassed smirking - surely some sort of cinematic record.

Maybe it's best this way, this curious absence of mainstream religious life in mass media. More than ever, the big entertainment conglomerates are driven by nervous laughter: the more foul the jokes, the more debt the network is probably carrying - the more desperate the need to please in cartoonish ways. There's little inclination to dignify the daily life of faith.

And so there's another reason Keillor succeeds with religious laughs: His listeners trust him, his context, his skill. The audience senses his complicated respect for the humble foibles of his Wobegon citizens, their modest pleasures and boring vacation plans. Keillor's weekly stories weave a theology of human limitation and bittersweetness at time's passing. He brings a gentle lack of judgment, the feeling of old radio.

Keillor is located somewhere between mass media and the real world. His stories are seasoned with real life, the life of weekly worship in unglamorous neighborhoods, long-term marriages and sweet moments of wonder. These memoirs of Midwest Americana offer ballast and armor for renewing the daily battle against the aggressions of the mass media's definitions of reality - the fast-cut editing, the big-talking personalities, the fake glitter of all those skinny, gabby people on the E! channel.

Keillor's religious humor is a shy subversion of this status quo, coming most weeks from an unlikely stage in St. Paul, Minn. He offers blessings on everyday things that don't make Headline News or MTV award shows - moments of grace, love of family, and little jokes about Lutherans, Unitarians and other real people.

Whatever your opinion of Garrison Keillor (years ago in St. Paul he was my neighbor and an early personal influence, so I may be unfairly biased), I think this writer makes a great point.

...In the public mind (as that concept is understood and shared in most broadcast and print media) it's hard to say the words "male spiritual leader" -- forget about "priest" or "minister" -- without eliciting some sort of snicker. You're pretty stuck with Ned Flanders (the "Simpsons"), the two guys from TV reruns of 25 years past (on "MASH" and "Little House on the Prairie"), with the occasional black-and-white 40's film thrown in for an appropriately "historical" distancing effect (Spencer Tracy, Patrick O'Brien, Gregory Peck).

So there is a little bit of delight to be taken in the "shy subversion of [the] status quo" when someone brings up the subject of "Christianity" with a modicum of respect and serious attention. Even in the limited, strictly regional Minnesota/Lutheran sub-context.

So, we've definitely lost something, haven't we, when the most interesting portrayals of "community spiritual leadership" are inevitably female (Rita Morena as the psychologist/nun on HBO's "Oz") or loner/outlaw outside-the-boundaries types (Chris or Ed, "Northern Exposure").

I can't think of too many other role models...

I had my hopes up, before I actually went to see it, that the film version of "Lord of the Rings" might retain some of the original spirit, but the first 5 or 10 minutes of that film -- the tinkerbelle pop-new-age watered-down "framing" -- were absolutely brutal and soul-crushing. [...Although I have to admit, the film did get more interesting after the wretched intro was over.]

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