Down on your knees
The Church of England is gearing up to give the BBC a damn good scolding for being so mean to Christianity and so nice to Islam.
Concerns over the appointment of Aaqil Ahmed, who was poached by the corporation from Channel 4 last month, will be raised in a Church document to be published tomorrow…Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, met with Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general, in March to challenge him about the issue. Now a motion prepared for the Synod calls on the corporation to explain the decline in its coverage of religion and its failure to provide enough programming during key Christian festivals.
Sorry to be clueless, but what’s the deal here? Is the archbishop of Canterbury the boss of the BBC? Is the BBC a branch of the church of England? Is the church of England the boss of everything that happens in England? What is all this? Why does the archbish get to challenge the BBC’s director-general about the BBC’s appointments? Why does the Synod get to call on the corporation to explain things? How does all this work? What kind of power, exactly, do they have? Apart from all those bishops in the House of Lords, of course. What kind of temporal political power do they have? What entitles them to be so bossy and so explain-yourselfy?
“BBC 3 tackles religion rarely but does so from the angle of the freak show, and many of the Channel 4 programmes concerned with Christianity, in contrast to those featuring other faiths, seem to be of a sensationalist or unduly critical nature.”…The main Christian documentary broadcast for Easter [last] year, called The Secrets of the 12 Disciples, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Pope’s leadership of the Roman Catholic Church.
Yes…But you guys are Protestants, remember? You’re supposed to have some doubts about the legitimacy of the Pope’s leadership of the Roman Catholic Church yourselves! Have you forgotten all this? Have you forgotten your own history? Bloody Mary? Foxe’s Book of Martyrs? Latimer and Ridley? We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out? Ring a bell, any of that? It had quite a lot to do with the pope. Surely you remember.
Ah yes but that was then; now the pope is a bulwark against secularism, and the enemy is everyone who doesn’t want to grovel to religion, like that god damn atheist BBC.
Nigel Holmes, a General Synod member and former BBC producer, who has tabled the motion and who wrote the paper, said that the Church needed to tackle the issue at a time when the future of religious broadcasting was under threat…”Religion is higher on the political agenda than ever before and we are crying out for programmes that give a moral view.”
And religion alone can do that of course because religion alone is moral while everything else is inherently and adamantly anti-moral. This is common knowledge.
A spokesman for the BBC said…”The BBC’s commitment to religion and ethics broadcasting is unequivocal. As the majority faith of the UK, Christians are and will remain a central audience for the BBC’s religious and ethics television and other output.”
See? Religion and ethics are the same subject, they go together like waffles and syrup or god and bothering. Got that? So no worries: the church of England will harmoniously combine with the Roman Catholic Church and Islam to impose religion and theocracy on everyone else. Can’t say fairer than that can you.
Well, the CoE’s head is the Queen
and the Beeb has a charter from her. By the way, a book I flicked through a year or two ago was called “Who Owns the World”, and it claims that the Queen is not just the head of the Commonwealth, she is the OWNER of all the land therein totalling about one sixth of all the world’s land.
http://www.whoownstheworld.com/
In fairness, I suspect the Synod’s call to the Beeb is just what happens in civil society. It would be courteous for the BBC to respond but there would be no obligation to do so.
Though Nigel Holmes whom you quote certainly conflates religion and morality I’m not sure that you can conclude that the BBC thinks that they are the same from what the spokesman says. IIRC there is a “Religion and Ethics” department, but there are progs that are one but not the other. For instance, “The Choice” or The Moral Maze” on R4 are about ethical questions, which only sometimes are religion-related.
Well it’s the Telegraph’s wording, to be sure, so maybe the Synod didn’t actually ‘call on the corporation to explain’…
As for what happens in civil society, though – arguably religious bodies ought to keep their distance from that rather than shoving themselves forward in such a peremptory way.
It’s not that the BBC thinks they’re the same, it’s that the BBC shouldn’t pair them as if they were the same.
Stephen: Interesting. I suppose that’s why it is called ‘the Commonwealth’. Taken in common with the rest of Her Majesty’s wealth, it must be about as ordinary to her as the ground under her feet.
The Archbishop of Canterbury is entitled to a seat in the House of Lords as one of a small number of Lords Spiritual, as distinct from the more mundane Lords Temporal. In an earlier age, for a bishop of the church founded by Henry VIII to be found supporting Popery would have been a cause for the drums to roll, and not just them either.
I know that some day in the future Her Majesty may see fit to evict me from her property. As a staunch royalist and confirmed member of the Church of which she is Supreme Governor, I would of course go with a good grace, tugging my forelock all the way. But I fear that not all my fellow residents of the Commonwealth would be so loyal.
As Prime Minister Harold MacMillan said (or was it Peter Sellers?), it is not everything that has changed for the better.
Enjoyable post OB. I think it likely that Stephen Turner is right – anyone in civil society is free to write the Beeb a letter, and the Beeb DOES have a Charter which has suitable standards to which ANYONE can question their adherence.
As to ‘shoving themselves forward in such a peremptory way’, why should not a mainstream body engage in mainstream debate? For an Established church, the form of ‘writing the Beeb a curt note’ is a very civil way to behave compared with convening a special session of Parliament to have them taken to the stocks which they might once have been able to pull off. (Instead, these days… no I better not go there ;-)
I’m sorry this is entirely off-topic but another story I spied on the Telegraph site rather dismayed and appalled me and I have to highlight it:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5586617/Segregated-high-school-proms-divide-Georgias-students.html
Sorry – Working link for lazy people!
Thanks Dave!
Looks sinister…
A point about the BBC: on the topic of abortion, the BBC grossly over-represent the views of the Catholic hierarchy compared to that of, oh, doctors, ethicists/philosophers and so on – you know, people with some expertise other than “God/The Church tells me abortion is wrong, so it’s wrong”.
I wrote it up back in 2006:
http://tommorris.org/blog/2006/06/28#When:21:43:41
Also, everything I say about the lack of intellectually-capable moralists applies just as much to the Moral Maze. Melanie Phillips and Clifford Longley aren’t critical, reflective inheritors of the Socratic tradition, but are blithering ideologues (apparently, I share the same train to London with Longley, although I have never seen him). The fact that the Moral Maze has got so much right-wing crazy as to make Michael Portillo sound like a LibDem (it’s quite worrying that I find myself agreeing with him only because he’s not a raving lunatic like Mad Mel).