Leaders Want to Narrow ‘Cultural Divide’ : Morality: Religious groups back Quayle’s assertion that the ‘elite’ are out of touch with average citizens. They say America wants the media to depict ‘traditional values.’

The “cultural divide” that Vice President Dan Quayle says has developed between the influential “elite” and the “average American” is extensively corroborated by declarations from the nation’s churches.

Religious leaders have voiced strong and repeated dissent to many mass media inducements and portrayals of life, calling them warped and out of touch with reality and common standards.

“There’s a culture war going on in this country,” said the Rev. Billy Melvin, executive director of the National Assn. of Evangelicals. “The vast majority of Americans still embrace traditional values. But there is an elite in this country that has its own agenda.”

That agenda’s “bottom line is that everybody should be free to do whatever they want to do,” he said in an interview from his office in Carol Stream, Ill. “That’s scary.”

The rift was dramatically demonstrated at last week’s meeting in Indianapolis of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant body, at which Quayle unleashed his manifesto of a fractured culture.

Thousands there fervently avowed their accord, and proceeded to detail their distress at many modern pressures, including television’s “themes, plots, images and advertisements which promote and glorify sexual promiscuity, violence and other forms of immorality.”

However, that conservative denomination is not alone in its estrangement from many contemporary influences and trends. These have been strongly criticized by Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and most of Judaism and Protestantism, liberal and conservative, mainline and evangelical.

They total 146 million members--about 60% of the American population. Most others claim some religious commitments, but are not on the active rolls.

“There has been a religious hue and cry about devaluation of human life and the implied unimportance of enduring family relationships,” said the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the New York-based National Council of Churches.

Brown said there is an emphasis on violence and casual sex in the media--in motion pictures, TV and popular magazines.

“There is a real chasm in the portrayal of American life (over) what most people want and understand as morally decent. This holds for almost all faith groups, liberal and conservative, across all lines.”

John Carr, secretary for social development of the U.S. Catholic Conference in Washington, said the “cultural divide” is not just with the entertainment media, but with “other institutions in American life.”

He said he would put the rift in “broader terms” than Quayle, who linked it only to TV and the news media. Carr said there are also failures in political, financial and social institutions.

“There’s a loss of confidence, a loss of trust, not only in Hollywood and the networks, but also in Washington, leaders of business and sometimes religious institutions,” Carr said.

Of TV, he said: “You don’t have to be a Republican or conservative to be distressed at the image of the country presented by network television with its obsession with sexuality and emphasis on violence.”

In the TV image, “the only people who don’t sleep together are people who are happily married,” he observed wryly. “Faith is an invisible part of American life on TV.”

As Quayle described the breach, the powerful and sophisticated “elite” dismiss and ridicule traditional values, but those ideas are held firmly by ordinary people in their homes, churches, communities and workplaces.

“Moral values are what the American people care most about,” he said.

Religious leaders said that under the circumstances, the idea may have been seized as an effective campaign theme, but that nevertheless, it struck a chord.

“Traditional values get voted up” whenever they’re challenged at denominational conventions, Campbell said.

The various denominations, on their own and in ecumenical coalitions, have deplored the gratuitous sex, violence and profanity mushrooming in films and TV, tried to get corporate advertisers to quit sponsoring such material, and fought pornography.

Religious groups, whatever their stands on abortion, have voiced distress at the number of abortions--1.6 million annually--and deplored increasing out-of-wedlock births, about 1 million a year, nearly a fourth of the total.

Quayle says his criticism of the TV show “Murphy Brown” as glamorizing such a birth brought a flood of mockery from the “elite.” It also fired his diagnosis of a split culture.

Whatever his political motivations, religion’s stands and views of its leaders give some credit to his point--that a widely religious people are at odds with pervasively spurred conduct and attitudes.

“There’s no question but that the vast majority of Americans are fed up, outside the church as well as in,” Melvin said. “Enough is enough! They’ve gone too far. Too much violence. Too much free sex. Too much drugs. Too much ‘I’ve got to have my way.’ It’s gotten out of hand. It’s time to stop it.”