The archbishop gives the BBC a damn good scolding
Dr Rowan Williams warned Mark Thompson at a meeting at Lambeth Palace that the broadcaster must not ignore its Christian audience. His intervention comes amid mounting concern among senior members of the Church of England that the BBC is downgrading its religious output and giving preferential treatment to minority faiths.
Warned? Must not? Intervention? Well, those are all the Telegraph’s words, to be sure, not the archbishop’s. But all the same, it seems somewhat peculiar (to me anyway) for an archbishop to be attempting to tell the BBC what to do. Where in the bible does it say what proportion of time the BBC has to give to Christianity?
As a public service broadcaster, the BBC has a duty to provide religious programmes. But Dr Williams challenged the director general during their meeting earlier this month over the decline in religious broadcasting on the BBC World Service.
Huh? As a public service broadcaster, the BBC has a duty to provide religious programmes? Does it? Why? That seems like a complete non-sequitur to me. How does public service impose a duty to provide religious anything? They’re two different things. It’s not clear if the Telegraph means a moral duty or a statutory one; if it’s the former the claim is absurd.
A BBC spokeswoman argued that changes that have been made to the department were intended to strengthen the BBC’s offering. “The BBC’s commitment to Religion and Ethics is unequivocal and entirely safe,” she said, adding that the BBC had stressed this to bishops who had expressed concerns.
Yeah don’t worry, the BBC is quite determined to go on treating religion and ethics as if they were indissolubly joined when in fact they are in strong conflict. No problem, the BBC will go right on confusing people by pretending you can’t have ethics without religion. No doubt that is their duty as a public service broadcaster.
Unfortunately the BBC has a statutory duty to provide religious programming so presumably that’s what the Telegraph meant.
I had the same reaction to the “religion and ethics” part. They’re near enough mutually exclusive, but everybody acts as if they are joined at the hip.
The Archbishop should take the first flight out of GB to the Far East. As I am sure, he will enjoy on a daily basis all the religious broadcasts on loudspeakers his spiritual Sarah mind can absorb. He won’t have time to think about the minority religions in GB jumping on the BBC broadcast wagon. He will be too busy cow-towing to his Ambrahamic religious clone.
One of the minor annoyances of the internet is drop-down menus which list “Religion/Philosophy” as a single choice.
Eric: “What I would be concerned about is the BBC offering a multicultural pastiche of programmes which does not take the reality of religious threat or religious decline or the need for assimilation seriously.”
which sounds oddly like exactly what the BBC (“Songs of Praise” notwithstanding) tends to do… :-)
As for Ethics/Philosophy/Religion/Woooo in a pot: at my son’s primary school, one of their classes is titled “Religious and Moral Education”, which rather vexed me at first (taxpayer-funded sky-fairy nonsense, etc,etc) …except there is the implication in the title that ‘religion’ and ‘morality’ are two separate entities.
Which is nice.
:-)
“Doesn’t your local bookstore combine philosophy with ‘spirituality’?”
No. My local bookstore labels a shelf ‘Philosophy’ that is in fact filled almost exclusively with new agey bullshit.
The Archbish actually had his own 45-minute slot on BBC Radio 3 very recently, on the topic of “silence”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00h8zjv
Apart from Evelyn Glennie (percussionist) all the interviewees seem to be from the religious world.
The gist of the prog was that we all need a bit of silence in our lives.
The very next programme in the same series (Sunday Feature) was about the Ka’aba. How wonderful it is, according to the interviewees.
BBC Radio 4 has for many years had a daily (Mon-Fri) 15-minute programme of Christian worship. There is also a full service on Sunday mornings.
“The gist of the prog was that we all need a bit of silence in our lives.”
Spiritual reformation = two friends: Solitude and Silence.
Henri Nouwen, who once said:
“The man or woman who has developed this solitude of heart is no longer pulled apart by the most divergent stimuli of the surrounding world but is able to perceive and understand this world from a quiet inner centre”.
“We unhook from companionship with others; we take ourselves physically and mentally out of our social, familial, and other human relationships”.
One of London’s 2nd hand bookshops had a shelf labelled “Life, Death, Art, etc”.
Stendhal said, “One can acquire everything in solitude except character.”