What's missing from this picture?

Most Americans know Norman Lear as the man who gave us Archie and Edith Bunker, Fred Sanford, Maude, and Mary Hartman. He once commented that he liked to imagine that he had made almost every man, woman, and child in the United States laugh at least once.

Some know him for his forays into politics, the most significant being his founding of People for the American Way, which took strong stands against the televangelists and the fundamentalist "religious right." But Lear has other facets.

In his keynote address to the convention of the National Education Association two years ago, he startled the audience by shifting the focus from civil liberties - the anticipated topic - to our society's need to restore a sense of spirituality and moral responsibility. Society, he said, had to reclaim its spiritual center from the religious right and the new-age swamis. Why, he asked the NEA, "in our schools, our communities, our homes...have we been so afraid to teach and discuss the values that hold us together, that make us moral and spiritual beings? At no time in my life can I remember our culture being so estranged from this essential part of itself."

Last spring, Lear addressed a joint faculty meeting of the Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Business School, where he argued that Americans today are lonely for people and institutions which believe they matter and will reach out to them. Business, he said, has become the fountainhead of values, replacing church, family, education, and civil authority. "The truth," he said despairingly, "is that which sells." We can ease our loneliness, he said, if we renew our sense of social responsibility and "learn to nourish and respect the spirit."

Lear is a warm, emotional man. His Los Angeles office is surprisingly simple, its shelves lined with manuscripts and books like The Cosmic Christ, the Tao Te Ching, and The Book of job. He is a bundle of seeming contradictions. The same man who likes to make people laugh also says, "I find outrage very helpful." He rarely watches TV, except to fall asleep at night. And if the focus on religion and family seems strange coming from a media mogul and staunch civil libertarian, the reason does not seem apparent to Norman Lear.

Thomas M. Landy: What is the difference between the Norman Lear most Americans have known in the past - sitcom king and civil liberties champion - and the Norman Lear who spoke to the NEA and at Harvard Divinity School? Have you changed significantly?

NORMAN LEAR: I don't experience it as a shift. I do know myself better. There's nothing I've learned about myself that I can't look back and see in my work. Edith Bunker was written in 1968, and what I tried to do was make her as quintessentially Christlike in her responses as I could. And we continued to do that for nine years. That's the question - how would Jesus have reacted? Or take Cold Turkey, a picture that starred Dick Van Dyke as a reverend. I had a lot to say about the way he practiced religion. Or the response of my character in "Sunday Dinner," the television show - the awe and wonder she expressed at the explosion of taste in her head from biting into a great peach. That awe is something I have felt and talked about all of my life.

What happened to me in 1985 is that I met my wife Lyn. For the first time in my life I was in a relationship that nurtured, encouraged, allowed this side of me to bloom.

LANDY: Can we talk about your own experience of spirituality?

LEAR: The only things that I can hold onto in religious and/or spiritual terms, are those things that appeal to me commonsensically. It may not have to be proved - that's where my faith comes in - but if commonsensically I can get it, then I can hold onto it.

There's an ancient piece of Hasidic wisdom which I adore. It's not unlike some things in the Tao or in Buddhism. It goes: A person should have a garment with two pockets. In the first pocket there should be a piece of paper on which is written, "I am but dust and ashes." In the second pocket there should be a piece of paper on which it is written, "For me the world is created." Now, that's exactly the way I feel.

Having heard this, I cannot open my eyes, I cannot look at you, and everything in this room, and not feel that it was all created for me. In the other pocket, I appreciate more with every passing day how insignificant I am, how tiny my place on this planet is, given the grandeur of the enterprise - this universe as only one of a billion universes. How can I take me so seriously? In a crazy way, the more I understand that, the bigger I feel, the more important my day is, the more important the moment I own. What's it here for, if it wasn't created for each of us? Of course it is. That's what I mean by commonsensical. It makes such ultimate sense to me.

LANDY: Mary Hartman never talked about those values, by a long shot. Haven't you helped form the culture you lament?

LEAR: I believe that art can inform and comment on the culture. It rarely leads it. I just saw Batman Returns. Its cynicism appalled me, but I've not read a single review about the film that spoke of its antihuman essence. Because we live in a cynical and mean-spirited time, neither the film nor the critics and social commentators understand the culture, let alone lead it.

LANDY: You tend to talk about common ground - apparent similarities among religious beliefs. It's easy to do that, but what about the institutional terms by which most Americans understand their faith? What happens when we might want to share the common experience, but not lose the particularity of our religious beliefs?

LEAR: That's where all the trouble arises, the conflicts in what humankind makes of the Original Gift, that capacity to experience, to wonder.

Suppose you and I love films, and we join a film club. Every time I see you on Tuesday nights when the film club gets together, we shake hands, share a drink, and we're grateful for the common interest that brings us together. I can't wait to see you. Then we run Basic Instinct, a Scorsese movie, whatever. You see it very differently from me, and we get into an agitated discussion. It's the same way with religion. I often think that interfaith meetings are never really going to come up with solutions until it's widely accepted that we have to love one another before we find our individual dogmas. I have to love you and recognize what's inside that I can't see, that capacity which I share. It's wonderful. I look at 700 people in an audience, and I know that they all found something different than I did, because they are all different.

LANDY: What happens when people take their particular religious beliefs as the grounding for arguments about policy-funding for the NEA, or pomography, or abortion? Is that a problem for you?

LEAR: Well, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam movement, peace movements - every great movement in modern American history has had a great religious component. I think we're much richer for that contribution.

People for the American Way has just published a "Declaration of Conscience." We worked on this document for a long time. "The fate of this nation lies not just with a system of government and laws," it says. "Its destiny will flow from the spirit with which we treat each other. In recognition of this, we acknowledge the contribution of religious experience to the values we share: respect, compassion and love, transcending even those differences of ideology and politics that so engage our passions." We can still do this and protect free speech, tolerance, the separation of church and state.

LANDY: Why did you found People for the American Way?

LEAR: I didn't start out by trying to found an organization at all. I saw Falwell, Robertson, Swaggart, and all those fellows, and I thought they were abusing religion. Most people I knew laughed them off, but I got an idea to do a motion picture called Religion, and I started to watch all these shows eight, ten, hours a week. It was sobering. And I started to say, This is not my America. You don't mix politics and religion this way. They railed against the Supreme Court, the public school system, secular humanism - often with thinly veiled anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic intolerance. You don't wish Supreme Court justices dead with a Bible in your hand as Swaggart once did. They exploited their followers' needs for their own ends, and insisted that federal law ought to embody sectarian beliefs.

My goal was simply to get another message on the tube. So I went out at my own expense and made three or four thirty-second commercials. I had a working stiff like Archie Bunker. I always try to think what the average guy is thinking. In them, he says that a bunch of preachers came on TV trying to tell him what to think on political issues - that he and his family are good Christians or bad Christians depending on their political point of view. He knows there's got to be something wrong when somebody tells you you're a good Christian or a bad Christian depending on your political views.

I had a passing acquaintance with Father [Theodore] Hesburgh [of Notre Dame]. I showed him this video. He thought it was important, and he put me in contact with six other religious leaders, including Martin Marty. At one meeting, they were saying, This problem never goes away, it seems to be getting worse - you should institutionalize this. Since my commercials ended with the guy saying "that's not the American way," we chose People for the American Way.

LANDY: So, People for the American Way included a lot of religious figures in order to address church-state issues in a different way.

LEAR: Oh, yes! When we started off, there was Ted Hesburgh, who later asked to step down because he was catching a lot of flack. Father [Robert] Drinan is still on the board, as are several other clergymen.

LANDY: You talk a lot about morality, the need to discuss religion, family values. There are a lot of people out there who would argue that civil libertarians are precisely the ones who have turned us away from discussing these things.

LEAR: I've made clear in my talks that I agree. But the religious right's divisiveness may be another reason why schools and other institutions are afraid to deal with this issue.

LANDY: What response did you get when you took your new focus to People for the American Way?

LEAR: It's taken some time, and I introduced the idea of doing the Declaration of Conscience a couple of years ago. We talked about it for a long time.

In the course of our work together, we read that some 40 million people call themselves born-again Christians. No way, we realized, were 40 million people following the televangelists. The reason these people were getting as far as they were hadn't as much to do with who they were or what they were saying, but with the emptiness of people's lives - the deep spiritual needs of the American people.

In good part because civil libertarian arguments may have discouraged discussion, and because the mainline churches were unsuccessful in reaching out to them, these televangelists were aggressively and successfully reaching for those people. We realized that we had to start reaching out as well.

LANDY: It sounds, in a way, as if People for the American Way was begun by a coalition of civil libertarians and mainstream religious leaders to protect First Amendment rights, but that in some ways it has shifted to trying to talk about religious foundations of civic culture and to encourage civil libertarians to do the same.

LEAR: Well, that' s not the way I'd word it, but you're on the right track. We didn't come this distance without learning something, without growing. And one of the things I think all of us have learned is that people you initially perceive as your opponent are not necessarily that. Everyone in what appears to be the opposing army is following a leader. When you try to find out, Why that leader?, then you begin to discover that they have some of the same hopes and aspirations that you do. That's what happens. You begin not to write off a whole section of America just because they are following something or someone out of their own needs. It's better to reach out to their needs.

The religious right taught us a lesson, in spite of themselves. Even though they responded to people's deepest yearnings in ways more likely to divide than unite, their exploitation underscored a point: We are not a nation enjoying our material success. We must begin to make commitments to higher values, to live a moral code that connects us with each other and with eternity.

Ninety percent of Americans believe in a higher meaning - God. It seems so foolish for all the people who care to use religion properly - I mean privately, personally - to cede so much to the fringes - to the fundamentalists and the new-age people.

LANDY: Where do we find the resources in a pluralistic democracy to bring about the kind of discussion you are calling for?

LEAR: It would really help to have a leader, a president, who could rcspect and appreciate religion, and who understood he could talk about it without trampling on anybody else's religion. Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia was the first leader in a long time whose public statements indicated a spirit-led philosophy.

LANDY: Do you think our culture has the capacity to produce a politician like Vaclav Havel?

LEAR: Absolutely.

LANDY: In 1992, which do you think is more endangered - the religious foundations of civic culture, or our First Amendment rights?

LEAR: What lies behind the question, l assume, is these things are in conflict. I don't see them as in conflict at all. I don't think the First Amendment infringes anyone's rights or circumscribes them.

LANDY: Many people would argue that the recent Supreme Court ruling on prayer in school pointed to a conflict.

LEAR: I grew up with prayer in schools. It was a joke. We also pledged allegiance to the flag. But when you are six or seven, you cannot do anything by rote without finding funny ways to change it. It grows less meaningful each time. Unless you're living in an entirely different culture with somebody behind you banging a drum at you. But that's not America. So prayer in school was a joke. It trivializes religion to pretend that one person's prayer is the same as another's.

LANDY: I wonder if most Americans today really are in fortresses. So few people even vote, or seem to be informed enough to have political opinions they want to act on.

LEAR: l always blame us - the elites - for that. Not just the media. Mencken said, Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. It's the way the establishment thinks about "the great unwashed." I don't buy it, but it's the way over the years television has treated the American public. They bought the lowest-common-denominator nonsense. They even developed cynical tests to prove it. I think we're ill-informed because no one informs us. We can't be informed by thirty-second political spots, or by politicians who talk in sound bites and are afraid to speak their minds.

LANDY: Do you believe those critics who argue that America is on the skids morally, politically, spiritually? Has the fabric of American society been undermined?

LEAR: Yes, in every one of those departments. But I would call it a slump. Slump suggests something temporary. We just may be the most well-informed, yet least self-aware, people in history. That partly explains why we see ourselves so negatively.

LANDY: Your major themes sound like ones we'd expect from Dan Quayle or the religious right more than from Norman Lear. What's the difference?

LEAR: I don't think there are any villains. We live in a climate that grew around us - no one specifically devised it. We are 250 million people in an experiment that's only 200 years old. Give us a break. It's very complex. A climate of blame has been pushed in America. But nobody said, let's take the industrial revolution and progress and turn them into a means of destroying the planet. Nobody said, let's pollute the streams and the oceans and burn holes in the ozone. There's no conspiracy about all of that. Nobody decided that we should become a short-term business culture. Somehow Wall Street, computers, who knows, emerged and we became the nation we are, obsessed with numbers and short-term gain.

Now if you're a working guy, and you followed your father into a company as tens of millions have, and you've always believed your kid could do the same - look at what's happened. Businesses have lost the human touch, closed down, and moved to Taiwan, or Korea, or Japan. The ground shifts right under the average worker. These are the things that have been so instrumental in fracturing the American family. There's nothing that's ever made me cry more - because as a kid in the Depression I watched my father and uncles go belly up - than to see a strong, proud man unable to provide for his family. Now, that's happened to so many American families. You couldn't find a better way to destroy the American family.

LANDY: l know that you were really shaken by the L.A. riots. Shortly afterward, I heard Senators John Danforth (R-Mo.) and Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) argue that the media bore some responsibility because of the violence and stereotypes they project. What do the riots tell us about media responsibility?

LEAR: I think they could say that about the news, in that every time you see anything terrible going on, you're looking at black or Hispanic kids - largely black kids. And anytime something terrible happens you see it repeated hundreds upon hundreds of times. If a reasonable society plays it 30 times, our society plays it 3,000 times. The media, because it is a business, panders to the bottom line, and so we get all the gratuitous sex and violence. What's good for the shareholders, not everybody else with a stake in it, is what's on their minds.

LANDY: How would you change that?

LEAR: I started something called the business Enterprise Trust. It helps business realize that it is possible to do good and to do well, and then honors those who do by putting a spotlight on good examples.

LANDY: What does Norman Lear hope the world to remember him for?

LEAR: I'd like to be remembered as being grateful for a great life. An extraordinary life. I am wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor grateful. I asked Martin Marty once for the shortest definition he could give me of worship. And he said, gratitude." I always thought that was terrific.