By Chris Eckl

Playboy gives more consideration to Christianity than any other magazine, the religion editor of the widely read and often criticized publication says.

“What Playboy is rebelling against is not Christianity, but superstition, the anti-human, anti-joy repressive ideas of Calvinism and medieval Catholicism,” Anson Mount said in an interview.

“We are against the schizophrenic idea that the mind and spirit of man is good, but his body is evil…the heretical idea that human joy and happiness are at best neutral, at worst the handiwork of the devil.”

Mount expressed his views on the magazine, the future of Christianity and other topics during a visit with a friend, Hartwell D. Hooper.

He said people ask Playboy ‘What is your religion?’ “Our religion is our love affair with life and any man who doesn’t love life doesn’t have a religion worthy of the name. We have boundless reverence for the man who was Jesus, for the life He lived and for the spirit of His teachings.

“But we have almost unanimous contempt for most of the leading churchmen who have presumed to represent Jesus since the conversion of Constantine.”

Mount said he knows very little of the system which the Church uses to select saints. “But if a saint is a person whose mind and spirit is so large that it lifts up the whole human race, if a saint is a person whose inner goodness and worth surpasses everyone around him, then there have been two saints in my lifetime—Pope John XXIII and Martin Luther King.”

Continuing his comments on religion, Mount said the definitive article on sexual morality and Christianity was in the June issue of Playboy. Mount was the interviewer. The panel included Harvey Cox, Martin Marty, Bishop James Pike, Father Herbert Rogers of Fordham, James Luther Adams and others.

“We have sent out 20,000 reprints of that articles. Harper & Row has contracted to me to expand the discussion into book form,” Mount said.

“In January, we are coming out with one of our most significant articles, ‘God and the hippies,’ by Harvey Cox. Cox says the hippies are the nearest thing we have to the Christian communities of the first century.’

Mount said he believes there is a great awakening in Christianity and that the golden age of Christianity will be the 21^st century. Why?

“Because it is a system of human values, life values. It is workable only when its adherents are perceptive, open, loving and intelligent. Until now we have lived in a world in which the vast majority have been repressed, frightened, narrow defensive people. We have worked on the concept that the world is made up of a few wise all-knowing shepherds and stupid sheep.”

But Mount said he thinks Christianity is trying to overcome its defensive repressive attitudes.

Asked about the magazine’s highlighting of nudity and jokes, Mount replied, “We are taking sex, making it respectable, desirable, clean and even sometimes holy. We are shoving it down the throats of conservative churchmen.

“These churchmen have always accepted the fact of a red-light district across the tracks somewhere. They didn’t worry about it too much because these horrible women were diseased and were going to hell.

“What makes them really lose their cool is when we move into Atlanta and open a Playboy Club. It’s clean, well run, the girls don’t have any notion of accepting after-hours dates. It does have a strong sex symbolism connected with it, but it’s respectable and the best people belong to it.”

Asked again about nudity, Mount said, “Some truck driver may buy Playboy for its pictures and jokes. Others buy it because of its serious articles—the pros and cons of abortion, the plight of the younger generation—and don’t even know who the Playmate of the Month is. People see different things in Playboy. What people tell us they see in the magazine, tells us something about them.”

How did Playboy become interested in articles about religion? “We were for—fun, games, cars, travel, girls. In 1961 a then obscure theologian, Harvey Cox, wrote and article in ‘Christianity and Crisis’ on the ‘Playboy Philosophy’ and he decided that our view of life was irresponsible hedonism.

“This wasn’t so. We are trying to sell liberation from ‘hang ups’ of the past. Publisher Hugh Hefner decided he would rather be damned or praised for what he believes, rather than what people think he believes.

“So we started the ‘Playboy Philosophy’, and it drew thousands of letters from clergymen and readers. We discovered they were interested in human existence so we began articles written by serious theologians.”

“Jesus rebelled against legalism. For example, if I marry a girl and she isn’t baptized then I can get a divorce, but if she is that’s tough luck. This is what I call petty legalism.”