Historian and Radio 4 presenter Tom Holland has a fascinating piece in the FT, 'Our secular society draws from the well of Christian tradition'.
In it he mentions the BBC ("a broadcaster so unapologetically liberal that it has entrusted responsibility for its religious output to an atheist, and even then only on a part-time basis"), focusing on the corporation's newly-published 40-page Religion and Ethics review:
The tone may have been that of an anthropologist observing with curiosity the customs of distant tribes but the report did at least commit the BBC to making an effort to understand them.
He continues:
Nevertheless, there are limits to how far it is willing to go. Acknowledging that the great array of the world’s faiths are now to be found in Britain, the BBC’s response will be to double-down on what has long been its default setting: a bland ecumenism. Henceforward, Eid will be given primetime coverage as well as Christmas; Diwali as well as Easter. The template for this approach is provided by Thought For The Day, a three-minute slot on the BBC’s flagship radio morning news programme, in which bishops, rabbis and Buddhists compete to utter vacuous platitudes. No one ever says anything that a speaker from a different faith might not equally have said. Not a hint of the passions or the yearnings that can animate believers — still less the hatreds — is ever betrayed. It is the theological equivalent of milky tea.
And here's his account of the thinking that underlies the BBC's "bland ecumenism":
The conviction that underlies the BBC’s approach, that all religions are essentially the same, is not unique to Britain. Rather, it is the secular orthodoxy across the west. It has its militant wing, in the form of atheists who dismiss all religions as equally pernicious. It has its pacific wing, in the form of liberals who refuse to countenance the possibility that, say, the actions of Isis might have anything to do with Islam.
The underlying conceit, though, is invariably the same: that it is possible to leave behind the swirl of religious identities and attain a plateau of moral and intellectual superiority; that to be secular is somehow to have left belief behind.
The whole article is well worth reading.
