‘Life’ Host Goes on Search for ‘God in America’

Some interviews came easier than others when Hugh Hewitt was compiling “Searching for God in America,” a PBS series of eight conversations with religious leaders who represent the nation’s divergent and expanding universe of traditional faiths. Among Hewitt’s catches were the Dalai Lama and the Rev. Cecil Murray. The big miss was the Rev. Billy Graham, who couldn’t do the interview because he was recovering from a severe fall.

Hewitt, 40, an Orange County lawyer and resident conservative host of KCET-TV Channel 28’s “Life & Times,” was desperately seeking Graham for his first national series, which poses such eternal questions as: Who is God? Why is there evil in the world if God is good? What happens after death?

So to open “Searching for God” in place of Graham, Hewitt and producer-director Martin Burns, “Life & Times” senior producer, chose Charles Colson. “Once Dr. Graham was unavailable,” Hewitt said, “the next foremost evangelical [to explain] theology was Chuck Colson.”

That’s right, Chuck Colson of Watergate fame--Richard Nixon’s special counsel, who was more familiarly known, Colson acknowledges, as the president’s “hatchet man” and the “toughest SOB” in that White House. He served seven months in a federal penitentiary for obstruction of justice, and at the low point of his life turned to God. The born-again Southern Baptist then founded Prison Fellowship Ministries and has worked more than 20 years for prison reform and to repair the lives of inmates and their families.

Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the best-selling landmark “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” is paired with Colson in the second half of tonight’s hour.

Why Colson? “He’s really the most recognizable of our eight, and the largest [viewing] demographic out there will be evangelical Christians. . . . It’s going to be a very surprising interview because there is incredible skepticism still about Chuck Colson’s conversion and the sincerity of his faith. Now [Bob] Woodward and others [conclude] that it’s very authentic. . . . It’s real [to me] because of his works. The book of James says, ‘You will know them by their works.’ ”

Won’t Colson turn skeptics off? “I think it will bring them in,” laughed Hewitt, who worked for Nixon in San Clemente for two years, between graduation from Harvard in 1978 and law school at the University of Michigan in 1980. “They’ll be interested to bathe in their own predisposition to dislike him.”

The choice of Kushner was “easy,” Hewitt said. “He’s America’s rabbi already.”

Hewitt spent 75 minutes in September with the Dalai Lama in Atlanta. The leader-in-exile of Chinese-occupied Tibet had come to visit the Buddhist faithful in America. “Extraordinarily ecumenical,” Hewitt enthused. “The happiest face I’ve ever seen.”

In a conversation at October’s end, Hewitt was clearly relishing discussing race and faith and whether there is a darker Jesus with Murray, senior pastor of Los Angeles’ First African Methodist Episcopal Church, in the church-like rare books room at Central Library downtown.

Hewitt was speaking at Hollywood Presbyterian Church, where under the church’s stained glass windows, he had just finished taping three hours with the Rev. Roberta Hestenes, the first woman to chair World Vision, the world’s largest Christian relief organization. Hestenes vividly described famine camps of Ethiopia and orphanages of Romania where babies were dying of AIDS. Hewitt came away moved.

Hewitt’s series--with a meager $500,000 budget funded by the Corp. for Public Broadcasting and PBS--is kind of a preamble to other programming about religion on PBS in the coming season, including Bill Moyers’ 10-part “Genesis” beginning Oct. 20.

As the sole interviewer for this series spread over four consecutive Fridays, Hewitt got his subjects to reveal telling life incidents, giving context to their faith: Murray, owing his life to a white South Carolinian when he was in the Air Force; Hestenes, overhearing that her heart had stopped during a medical procedure; Kushner, losing his 12-year-old son to a genetic disorder; Elder Neal A. Maxwell, one of the 12 Apostles of the Mormon Church, knowing a “special spirit” was entering the family, after hearing a granddaughter would be born without a hand.

In a kind of fire-and-ice pairing with Murray next week is Father Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk and leader of the Contemplative Prayer movement, who lives near Snowmass, Colo. It “felt right,” Burns said. “Here’s Cecil Murray, whose whole life as a man of the cloth has been about preaching a social gospel, taking to the streets to fight these drug dealers and [gang violence]. And there is a man who goes to the mountaintop, to solitudes of silence . . . the completely contemplative life vs. the life of action.”

Rounding out the roster is SeyyedHossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University in Washington and a leading scholar of Islam, who went from being saluted by generals on the streets of Tehran before the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 to becoming destitute in London, with a family to support. “He believes you can’t have religion on the cheap,” Hewitt said, “you have to work at [the search]. There are disciplines, there is rigorous study. . . .”

Raised a Catholic in Warren, Ohio--his mother was Catholic, his father Presbyterian--Hewitt, who worked for six years in the Reagan administration, experienced what he calls an “evolution of faith” in 1990, and became an evangelical Presbyterian. (He does not go after converts but will “witness” someone who asks.)

“Searching for God” came about because as a media maven Hewitt recognized religion’s blooming popularity on air. When he was at KFI-AM (640) as a weekend host and at “Life & Times,” he saw the caller boards light up and viewer interest skyrocket when the topic was religion.

For those who want the fuller text of Hewitt’s “Searching for God in America” interviews, along with selections from the nation’s “spiritual treasury” from the Mayflower Compact onward, there is a companion book with the same title from Word Publishing ($27.99) in Dallas.

In a kind of separation of church and state, Hewitt steered clear of political subjects. “The temptation to do a political issue with all of them was ever-present,” he said. “Each of these traditions has a political problem or two. . . . But that’s all well-covered ground.”

Hewitt disputes any suggestion that the proliferation of religious programming on public TV is a reaction to criticisms by conservatives. “I think--and it will soon be commercial television--that television is catching up with the culture. There is [a religious] awakening underway. Every statistic points to it. All the mass movements. . . . There’s a renewal, there’s a resurgence. And media may be slow. But it’s not dumb.”

* “Searching for God in America” airs at KCET Fridays at 9 p.m. starting tonight.