Archive: Don Wildmon

The Methodist The Networks Love To Hate

by James S. Robb

The United Methodist ministry is not exactly overloaded with famous people.

Switch on your local Christian radio station and wait for a syndicated program to air featuring a UM minister—but don’t wait too long.

Or check out Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” TV show to see if any of our ministers are being interviewed.

Try picking up your local newspaper to look for national news quoting a Methodist pastor. It’s unlikely you’ll find any.

So what’s the big deal? We hire our preachers to preach, not showboat, right? Right.

Yet every denomination needs some leaders who cast a shadow outside the rarified walls of the institution. Today the UMC has very few.

And then there’s the Rev. Donald E. Wildman, director of the Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association and a member of the North Mississippi Annual Conference of the UM Church.

He’s on 200 Christian radio stations every day. Ted Koppel interviews him frequently. As for news, writing stories about Wildman and his work has turned into a minor cottage industry—recent coverage has included the front page of The Wall Street Journal and a long interview in Time.

In all probability Wildman is now the best-known United Methodist minister in all the world.

Increasingly, moreover, he’s one of the most influential Christian leaders in this country.

By organizing an alliance called Christian Leaders for Responsible Television (CLeaR TV), Wildman has garnered support for his efforts from prestigious leaders of nearly every U.S. denomination—including the Roman Catholic Church, the United Methodist Church, the Assemblies of God and the Southern Baptist Convention.

His goal? To clean up television.

“We have focused on TV because it’s the most pervasive, persuasive medium in our society,” says Wildman.

The fact is Americans, and especially American children, are influenced more by TV than any other source, at least in terms of time. The average U.S. TV set is on more than seven hours a day. Television is frequently used as a cheap babysitter. And in too many homes “the tube” has replaced reading and family conversation as the evening leisure activity.

These facts are scary enough, but the big problem is not that people are watching so much TV. It’s what’s on the TV when they are watching.

In Wildmon’s new book, Don Wildman: The Man the Networks Love to Hate (Bristol Books, 1989, $8.95), he relates how he awakened to the problem one pivotal evening in 1976.

Then a pastor in Southaven, Mississippi, Wildman, like most pastors, had little time for television or any other recreation. But one December evening his wife, Lynda, and his four kids gathered in their living room, and Wildman flipped on the TV. In the book he explains what happened next.

“As the TV picture filled the screen, we found ourselves witnessing the romantic overtures of an attractive married couple. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that they weren’t married to each other. When the seductive dialogue stopped and mouth met mouth, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what the actor and actress were about to do. I didn’t wait to see what happened. I asked my son Tim to change the channel.

“I’m afraid that I can’t even begin to tell you about what we saw next. That’s because we only had the show on for a half minute or so before it had filled our cozy den with an outburst of offensive expletives.

“Tim’s third try seemed to be the charm. He had found my favorite kind of program—a “Who Dun It?”—and in no time I was wrapped up in a well-written and well-acted story. A quick look around the room revealed that everyone else, including little Mark, was hooked on this suspenseful mystery as well.

“But then the scene changed. Without warning, we found ourselves watching a scenario similar to those found in grade B Hollywood slasher films. To my horror one character, brandishing a hammer, was literally beating the life out of a terror-stricken, defenseless victim who had been bound and gagged.

“This time I told Tim to turn the set off. I’d guess that it took him about ten seconds to get up, cross the room and push the knob. But as far as I was concerned, that was ten seconds too long. This graphic brutality had not been a welcome holiday guest in our family room. I especially had not wanted such savagery imprinted on my five-year-old’s consciousness right before bedtime.

“When Tim suggested that we watch television, I had thought that my family might laugh together or that we might all hold our breath in suspense. Ideally, I had hoped to find a program that would teach us something positive about the fascinating and complex world we live in—a program that would mix some mind-stretching nourishment into the entertainment.

“Instead, however, our three choices on the prime-time television menu (these were the days before cable TV) were promiscuous sex, crude profanity and gratuitous violence!”

For Wildman the experience was like getting ice-cold water thrown in his face. All of a sudden he was alive to a national program he had not realized even existed.

Soon Wildman hit the library, figuring he’d better research TV programming before he did anything. What he found was shocking. He learned children entering kindergarten in 1976 (such as his son Mark) could expect to witness 13,000 TV killings by the time they entered high school. At that time little information existed about the amount of sex on TV, but Wildman suspected it was a big problem too. He found that respected voices, from the PTA on up to Senator Hubert Humphrey, were beginning to speak out against TV excesses. But so far no one had organized to do anything.

So in typically Methodist style, Wildman decided he must take action. He organized a ‘Turn-The-TV-Off Week” in early 1977. Although it was a one-congregation, local protest against exploitive programming, Wildman was savvy enough to send news releases about it to area news organizations.

The results were stunning. First the area TV and radio stations interviewed him about this up-to-then-unheard-of action. Then it got into the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper. Then the Associated Press picked the story up nationwide. Before he knew it Wildman was giving interviews to news outlets across the country about his “Turn-The-TV-Off Week.”

Most surprising of all, letters of support began pouring into his church—more than 1,500 in all!

The indignation against bad TV was so strong in those letters Wildman decided to act again, this time by forming The National Federation for Decency (now called the American Family Association). He soon received a special appointment from his bishop to direct the new group.

“We’ve grown because we’re dealing with issues that people want something done about,” he explains. “Also, AFA crosses all denominational and theological lines.”

Today the AFA has a well-trained staff and a mailing list in the hundreds of thousands. But it didn’t start like that. At first it was just Wildman with a secondhand desk set up in his Tupelo living room.

From being a local church pastor, Wildman turned himself into one of the leading experts on TV in a remarkably short time. A key part of this transformation was his decision to gather hard data on sex and violence on TV.

He arranged with churches supporting his efforts for volunteer monitors to collectively view every minute of prime-time television and mark down on special questionnaires every instance of profanity, violence, illicit sex, etc.

The result was that his federation soon had a listing of the most and least responsible TV shows on the air in a number of categories. Among the worst in the late ’70s were ABC’s “Three’s Company,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Soap.”

Armed with this information, Wildman and his supporters contacted ABC and the other networks and protested the worst programs.

He got back polite letters from the officials assuring Wildman that they would never “be swept by fad or surrender those durable moral values that give our nation its spiritual foundation,” as one put it.

But when it was all said and done, the network people promised nothing and delivered less. As Wildmon puts it in his memoirs, “It became clear that network officials were using the same words I used, but we weren’t speaking the same language.”

It soon became clear the only dialect these people spoke was money. If it made a profit, they’d do it. And the ones who governed which shows made a profit—and thus which shows would be kept on the air—were the advertisers.

After reaching this conclusion Wildmon decided to determine which advertisers tended to sponsor the worst shows and talk to them.

So his volunteers went to work again, marking down which advertisers sponsored which shows.  The results were shocking. None other than Sears Roebuck turned up as one of the least responsible advertisers.

Wildmon, unhappy to have to confront such a venerable institution, contacted Sears’ advertising executives with the bad news. Their reaction was disbelief. It couldn’t be! they claimed. But the federation’s research was solid; Sears advertised on the worst shows.

So Wildmon declared his first nationwide boycott for May 1978. He flew to Chicago to personally lead picketers in front of the Sears Tower. He only had a small band of protesters with him, but the effect was gigantic and nearly instantaneous.

After being there for just one hour a newspaper reporter rushed up to Wildmon and asked, ” Have you heard? Sears just announced that it is pulling its ads from ‘Three’s Company’ and ‘Charlie’s Angels.’ Your comments, please!”

The protest worked because advertisers sponsor shows to gain business, not lose it. If sponsoring a show makes large numbers of citizens angry, Wildmon discovered, most advertisers would rather switch than fight.

In the years since that first boycott Wildmon and his American Family Association have taken on many other bad-boy companies and, not too infrequently, have turned them into model gentlemen.

One recent TV target has been CBS’ attempt to put the sadistic Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, which feature cartoons such as children being put in blenders, on Saturday morning TV. Wildmon responded by launching a letter campaign to CBS and the leading sponsors of children’s programs warning what would happen if the poisonous program ever aired. The program never aired, and CBS lost $3 million in the process.

Another horrid kiddie show episode occurred when the cartoon character Mighty Mouse sniffed cocaine on Saturday morning TV. (See article on page 18 for full details.)

Wildman has also made his voice heard in areas other than television. He led a several-year battle against 7-Eleven, the giant chain of convenience stores. Its vice was selling Playboy and Penthouse magazines. In fact 7-Eleven was the nation’s biggest distributor of those magazines.

This highly publicized campaign included a boycott and nationwide picketing of the stores. But in 1986 7-Eleven gave in and pulled the magazines. Many other convenience store chains followed suit, causing the circulation of the soft-core pornography magazines to plummet.

Then there was last summer’s boycott of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” the movie which most Christians found insulting to their faith.

Wildman comments, “Boycotting ‘The Last Temptation’ was different because dozens or hundreds of national church leaders got involved and became united. That’s never happened before.”

With this new-found support from actual denominational leaders, “Temptation” was stopped in its tracks. Few theater owners risked showing it in the face of universal church denunciations.

Fortunately, the momentum was not lost. Wildmon and his allies spent the last year lining up church leaders for his Christian Leaders for Responsible Television (CLeaR TV) group. It wasn’t enough to stop one blasphemous film—TV must be reformed as well.

This very large, very prestigious alliance includes UM Bishop Schowengerdt of New Mexico. The group’s strategy was to warn all advertisers that research would be conducted in May 1989 to find the worst all-round TV sponsor. Then that company would be boycotted by Christians nationwide for an entire year without mercy.

In July the results were announced. The Mennen company, maker of deodorants and similar products, and Clorox, the bleach king, were tied. All the products made by these two firms should be bypassed until next summer.

The idea is to teach profit-hungry corporations that sponsoring decadent TV programming is no longer the quick road to riches.

The leader of this gigantic effort feels properly somber about what may happen next.

‘We have to be successful in this. Once Mennen and Clorox get the message that bad sponsorship doesn’t pay, all the others will learn from them.

“But if we fail, ‘Katie, bar the door!’”

James S. Robb is senior editor of Good News magazine and editor-in-chief of Bristol Books.