We need to focus on religious literacy – before it’s too late
by Archbishop Cranmer:
“For religion to be taken seriously there needs to be an improvement in religious literacy across the media,” wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby last year. The context was the BBC Charter renewal and debates around the ownership and purpose of Channel 4 – the State’s broadcasters. “Commissioners, editors and producers are essential in this respect. Religion is about the stuff of life. It’s about people and communities, and what drives them. And, as has been argued before now, religion needs to be treated with the same seriousness as other genres like sport or politics, economics or drama. If anything, they should make an articulate case for more.”
The BBC turned a deaf ear to the Archbishop’s entreaties, instead shutting down its Religion & Ethics Department (“This page is no longer updated”), ostensibly to increase competition, but everyone knows that it was really to dump the otiose and syrupy ‘God slot’ so they could focus on the real stuff of life, like the imperative of the European Union, indispensable sport chat, inescapable Gay Britannia, or the mandatory inculcation of a liberal-progressive worldview and the perpetual tolerance of everything except that which may be prefixed with ‘right’ (morally, politically and religiously). There’s nothing more offensive to British state broadcasting than the rightists’ reasoned articulation of the rightful inheritance of right-wing philosophy and moral righteousness.
Religion had been given a cursory glance in the BBC White Paper, which perhaps reflected the rise in irreligion and unbelief over recent decades. But no-one was really ever happy with the BBC’s religious output, whether it was led by an agnostic, a Methodist or a Muslim. Sometimes it was judged to be too Christian (the clappy-chorus or pappy-hymn type of Christianity: never the morally ‘robust’ type); and then it was too ecumenical, and then too multifaith, and then too Islamic. For every content complaint there was an equal and opposite content complaint: far easier to talk blandly about ethics and reduce everything to variations on a theme of ‘love thy neighbour’.
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