“Mr. Rogers Preaching”

Some 20 years ago as a student at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, I did my year of student ministry at the Emory United Methodist Church, a couple blocks from the Seminary. Like most metropolitan Protestant churches, Emory operated at about 30 percent capacity, with the congregation consisting of a growing contingent of African Americans from the “hood.” In addition to my other duties, I was to deliver the main sermon once a month. At my first preaching, I was pleasantly surprised to gaze out at 25­50 additional congregants. More amazingly, I counted 15 or more Seminary students, nearly all of whom I knew to be “Presbys,” or Presbyterians.

In a conversation with a conservative female classmate at the coffee hour after church, I said, “It’s nice that so many Presbyterians Caine to hear my first sermon.”

“Did you notice the marquee sign out

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front?” she asked softly.

I had. It read, “Mr. Rogers Preaching.”

Fred Rogers was a graduate of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and an ordained Presbyterian minister. Despite his “day job” on television, he remained active in the local Presbytery and eventually served on the board of the Seminary. By all local accounts, though, he viewed “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” as his ministry.

The original format of the show would appear to have been borrowed from a post-WWII addition to the service in Protestant churches to accommodate the “baby boom,” namely, the “Children’s Sermon” This innovation­-perhaps an indirect product of Dr. Spock’s book­-was the via media between the total exclusion of young children from the service and the earlier practice of forcing them to sit in uncomfortable seats listening to that steady pastoral drone which has cured many parishioners of insomnia. One of the higher compliments that churchgoers pay to the parents is “How well behaved they are!” I wince when I hear this because my observation has been that the dumber the child, the less the fidgeting.

My exposure to “Mr. Rogers^’ Neighbor­hood” over the decades has been somewhat limited, but from the programs that I did view it seems fairly clear that the text comes largely from the amorphous theology of Middle American. By this I mean the preachments of the mainline Protestant churches (for example, Presbyterians, Methodists, the United Church of Christ, Northern Baptists), Reform Judaism, and “cafeteria” Catholicism. These are the people who the Religious Right has accused of “secular humanism.” With the exception of anti­war protesters (past and present) and “pro­choice” people, the religious left in this country has never been much of a socio­political factor, at least nothing close to the force of labor-Catholic coalition in Poland that caused the Soviets to blink or the liberation theologians in South America Numerous women applied the term “non-threatening” to Mr. Rogers when I asked them what children saw in the entertainer.

The theology can without too great an oversimplification be reduced to a general admonition to “Be nice.” This surface pleasantness meshes with what has been the predominant psychological type for the clergy for the past three or four generations. Since WWII numerous studies about the clergy have indicated that the mother has been the one person who most frequently influenced the child’s vocational choice. In the century before, it was the father whom a majority of seminarians said influenced their decision. Whether the “feminization” of the clergy (not necessarily a bad thing) was the cause or effect of this “Be nice” theology is a “the chicken or the egg” question. However, traditional “feminine” values such as absence of conflict, sharing, and soft voices do complement a “Be kind” theology. This is a way of describing “Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood”­-a get-together with no one getting angry or raising their voices, and the end product being a bland consensus. It also describes many church board meetings. No one ever gets sent to the principal’s office.

Part of Mr. Rogers’ mystique is the hagiography of public television by the socioeconomic classes just below the idle rich. Commercial television is market-driven, of course, but public television must toady to the affluent, as well as to the foundations and the Fortune 500. It would require a considerable naivete to believe that the people who donate large sums to public television do not to some degree influence the programming. At the very least, those who operate the stations act as volunteer censors.

This was brought home to me in the early 1970s when I went to WQED in Pittsburgh (Mr. Rogers’ home base) in the company of Dr. I.E. Buff; a physician who had long been active in the fight to gain adequate compensation for those afflicted with coal miner’s pneumoconiosis, or “black lung.” The coal companies had attempted to control (with some success) the media coverage of the matter in West Virginia.

The interviewer began “Well, Dr. Buff, you’re not in West Virginia now, so you can say anything here you want to say.”

“Fine,” the doctor replied, “I want to talk about the Mellon family.”

The remark was later excised from the tape, just as I suspect Fred Rogers would have been redacted if he had ever asked his child audience, “Why do you think some people in Pitts­burgh are so rich and why some are so poor?” For those who might argue this question would have been inappropriate for these little tots, I would suggest that many inner-city youth have already made this observation, perhaps at show-and-tell after Christmas at a very tender age. But then, in Mr. Rogers’ defense, I didn’t preach on this subject at my church either, not with trustees from the Mellon Foundation in the congregation.

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