"Are you an idiot?!"

Here's something you're likely to have missed: Aaqil Ahmed, the BBC's Head of Religion and Ethics, speaking at SOAS, University of London late last year (from 35:00 to 50.00 in the YouTube video of it).

Here's a transcription of the closing couple of minutes of his talk, relating to that episode of Songs of Praise from Calais before returning to the subject of religious illiteracy (his main bugbear at the moment). 

I think it reveals a lot about his way of thinking:

Someone talked about Calais just recently...so I went to Calais with a team. It was my stupid idea to send the Songs of Praise guys to Calais. And we had to have a senior manager on the ground. It was me or my executive producer for Songs of Praise. I can speak a bit of Arabic, he's a scouser. I thought I had more chance of getting through to people on the ground than he did. So I went along... 

...as was described by a Sun journalist who didn't know who I was as "the Asian Ross Kemp security guard". He has no idea what story he had in his hands. He told me to "get lost, get me that woman producer over there. I'm not interested in the thoughts of the Asian Ross Kemp security guard". I thought, "Great! If you knew who you were talking to that would be a bigger story!". 

But while we were there, there was an interesting thing about...when you talk about that: I...in that I wrote a blog explaining why we went, and in that blog we talked about how for a Christian audience this is really important because for our Christian audience they will understand what migration, what asylum means, because in the story of the Holy Family in Christianity it's an important part - the flight to Egypt, etc. 

I was ridiculed and vilified in the Express and in some right-wing press and on all the right-wing blogs and websites, saying "What's the Nativity story, what's the census got to do with migration in Calais?" 

And you think to yourself, "Are you an idiot?! It's not Bethlehem we're talking about. it's when they go to Egypt! So who am I to tell these people their own religious story?"

The fact of the matter is decisions are made about how I operate, what our Christian audience may be interested in, and people are having an opinion on that with a complete lack of literacy. 

So when we make some of these programmes we have to understand that everybody we make programmes for, and whether you're a journalist or an academic or from every form of life, the people we do things for often have no idea, irrespective of what their faith is. So, as I said, I know a little bit about everything but the vast majority of people know diddly-squat about everything as it were. 

And so because of that we live in a world where integration is....it's virtually impossible without a better understanding of religious and cultural literacy. Without religious and cultural literacy integration, in my opinion, is very difficult to pull off without it becoming essentially assimilation or isolation. 

The middle ground of integration will require everybody, whatever their faith is or no faith, to understand that without that little bit of knowledge of faiths you'll never be able to integrate around all of us.