The Rev. Robert Chase says the annual "Faith in America" installment on Meet the Press, which aired on Easter Sunday, April 16, "totally shut out any representation from the nation's mainline Christian churches."

For at least the second year in a row, NBC's invited panel of religious leaders included no representative from the National Council of Churches or any of its 35 member communions, such as the UCC, Episcopal Church, United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Reformed Church in America, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, among others.

"This issue transcends liberal and conservative, Left and Right," says Chase, who also chairs the National Council of Churches' communications commission. "It's about the continued absence of representation afforded to mainline, mainstream voices. The fact that NBC could have an hour-long conversation about religion in America and think it was permissible to avoid any representation from more than 100,000 mainline Protestant, Orthodox or African American churches is something worth questioning."

Sunday's program on faith and politics, hosted by Tim Russert, included Father Richard J. Neuhaus and Sister Joan Chittister, both Roman Catholics; the Rev. Joel Osteen, Pentecostal pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston; Jewish Rabbi Michael Lerner; Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is Muslim; and Jon Meacham, Newsweek's religion editor.

Last year's lineup, Chase points out, also failed to include mainline church representation. In 2005, Christian panelists included a Protestant evangelical, a Roman Catholic priest and the president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

While the programs participants were balanced along political lines, Chase says, the "persistent absence" of mainline church representation troubles him.

"At the beginning of the show, Tim Russert asked, 'Were people more religious at the founding of our country and were we more divided on moral issues back then?'" Chase says. "Ironically, there was no one present to represent those historic, mainline Protestant traditions that have been so prominently at the center of American life since its earliest days."

The UCC is increasingly calling media outlets to task for failure to air the religious perspectives of mainline religious groups. The UCC has created an online advocacy site accessibleairwaves.org to encourage mainline Christians concerned about their increasing invisibility in the media, despite their prominence in America's town squares.

According to Media Matters, prominent leaders of the Religious Right (Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Chuck Colson, Gary Bauer and Richard Land) have amassed as many as 40 appearances on the major Sunday morning talk shows during the past eight years. Meanwhile, the media watchdog group says the principal leaders of the historic mainline Christian denominations have not appeared once.

The UCC is the largest Protestant church in New England. Eleven signers of the Declaration of Independence were from UCC-predecessor traditions, and more than 10 percent of present-day UCC congregations were formed prior to 1776, with the earliest still-operating church founded in 1616.

In 1773, Old South UCC in Boston helped inspire the Boston Tea Party and, in 1777, Old Zion Reformed UCC in Allentown, Pa., hid the Liberty Bell from occupying British forces. Today, the UCC's membership includes six U.S. senators.