The way we were

But I’m going to start by looking at where we’ve come from. So I’m going to spend a few minutes looking at how television and radio covered and thought about religion in 1979, the year when I joined the BBC as a trainee. This is how I remember it.

If you looked at a Radio Times of the period, you’d find that then as now there was a rich and imaginative array of religious output on BBC Radio. On television, you’d find some friends who are still very much with us – Songs Of Praise, for example, early on a Sunday evening – and a few, like ITV’s Stars On Sunday, who are not. Overall, you’d find rather more fixed slots for religion, but rather fewer specials and occasional series. But I want to delve a little deeper.

After a few weeks in the BBC’s equivalent of boot camp I was sent in the autumn of 1979 to the religious documentary programme Everyman as the most junior of junior researchers.

It was a fantastic first posting for any young programme-maker – a place of incredible creative and intellectual energy, a rather amazing gathering of talents – and I enjoyed every moment of it.

At the same time I couldn’t help noticing that one thing that Everyman didn’t seem to do very often was actually to make programmes about religion.

Each year there would be a handful of programmes on conventional religious subjects – I worked on one, a profile of Robert Runcie just as he was about to become Archbishop of Canterbury.

But most editions of Everyman were only “religious” in the broadest possible sense. They’d deal with topics in the hinterland between science and spirituality – cryogenic suspension, for instance, as a hoped-for route to immortality. Or they’d explore the many New Age cults which then, as now, promised some new form of personal revelation. Or they’d use religion as a way into large-scale social or political issues – liberation theology in South America would be an example of that. <…>

Even among religious programme-makers then, there was a real anxiety about whether religion as a thing in itself was a topic of any real interest. And outside the specialist departments, religion was marginal at best. It was almost entirely absent in mainstream drama, documentary and comedy. Compared to our bulletins and website today, it was also remarkably peripheral in our coverage of news. <…>

A problem solved?

So what was going on? I want to spend a few minutes exploring the worldview which I believe underpinned all these editorial choices. Think of it not as an explicit argument but as a set of prevailing background assumptions, not held by everyone, indeed not held by me as it happens, but so widespread – both within and beyond the media – as to be normative.

It comprised two underlying ideas. The first is that familiar post-Enlightenment claim that the rationalist arguments against belief in God are so persuasive that they spell the inevitable long-term decline of organised religion. Progress brings education and knowledge, and education and knowledge inexorably undermine belief. <…>

The second idea is a rather different and in some ways contradictory one, though it too draws its roots from the Enlightenment, if not from the Reformation. It is that there is another ineluctable movement in the history of religion and belief, from the primacy of collective and communal worship to that of individual and individually chosen belief.

Alongside the decline of organised religion, in other words, we should expect to see all kinds of new spirituality and of people mixing-and-matching, picking-and-choosing between the old and the new. Submission and adherence to a common set of doctrines and practices would be progressively replaced by new, essentially personal goals – the goals of spiritual self-realisation and self-discovery. Expressivism is the term Charles Taylor uses in his brilliant new book, A Secular Age.

Connected with this idea was a growing – and in many ways admirable – appreciation of the sheer diversity of human religious and spiritual responses and a strengthened awareness of the need for tolerance, especially of minority belief systems.

Now these two big ideas don’t quite fit together. Hardline rationalist atheists, for example, are characteristically every bit as dismissive of New Age spiritualism as they are of conventional religion.

But it’s worth adding that in a sense this was not just a post-Christian worldview, but a post-atheist one. A generation or so earlier, atheism had been frequently debated on the airwaves. <…> And yet by the late Seventies and early Eighties, and despite the presence of some very powerful individual voices like that of Richard Dawkins, I think it’s fair to say that media interest in atheism had also waned. Perhaps atheism was thought to have done its job, or to have been superseded by the new spiritual eclecticism.

I’ve put it briefly and no doubt far too crudely, but this I believe was the prevailing intellectual landscape against which editors and journalists and others in the media thought about the coverage of religion in the Eighties. <…> Except for those with a particular interest, religion was regarded as rather dull and safe. It was, it was thought, broadly sorted. It was a problem solved.

Or is it?

Well, how different the world looks today.

One of the most striking things I’ve witnessed over the past 20 years in the media is the way this comfortable background consensus about religion has broken down. Many of the individual themes I’ve talked about – the decline in church attendance in the UK and across Europe, the rise of New Age spirituality, the growing importance of minority faiths in multi-ethnic societies – are very much with us. <…> But the easy consensus, the sense of manifest destiny, the near certainty that this story could only ever end one way – that confidence has largely evaporated.

<…> The first and most obvious factor has been the series of shocks and outrages directly or indirectly connected with extremist or hardline strains of Islam. 9/11 and 7/7 are the dates that many people in the media would cite as the days on which their view of the world changed.

<…> The controversy posed another troubling question: what was the right response in an open, tolerant society when the beliefs of minorities clashed, potentially violently, with other fundamental rights and freedoms – for example, the freedom of speech and artistic expression?

The cognitive dissonance associated with this last point is still unresolved and is still playing out 20 years later.

<…> The churches also found themselves in new controversies of their own. Women and gay priests. Child abuse. The battle within many faiths between conservatives and modernisers. For good or ill, religion began to make the news regularly again.

In many ways though, the biggest single factor was a subtler, more diffuse one. It was, and is, the progressive recognition that the long-predicted global recession of religion has not actually materialised. Indeed, whether you look at the Islamic world, or the success of both traditional and relatively newer forms of Christianity in Latin America, in parts of Asia, in parts of Africa, you can make the case that what we have been witnessing in recent decades is a global religious revival.

Over the next 20 years, the demographers expect the number of Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs all to grow as a proportion of the world population and the number of those who profess no religion or who define themselves as atheists to decline.

This is something which can fill you with optimism – or with gloom – or provoke any number of reactions between the two. The point I want to make is that the world just looks a more complex and diverse place in the matter of religion than it did a generation ago.

<…> And of course, for reasons I’ve already made clear, beyond our religious output, faith and religion have come inescapable in the news, in current affairs, in discussion programmes and so on. And old debates have revived. <…>

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