Let’s hope the new BBC head of religion will be fairer to non-believers

By Terry Sanderson

Reaction to the appointment of a Muslim, Aaqil Ahmed, as the new head of religion at the BBC gives further indication of the rather nasty competition that is developing between religions for influence in our society and its institutions.

There have already been rumblings from the Archbishop of Canterbury about the “neglect of Christianity” by the BBC and now we have the Rev Robert Coulter, a senior member of the Ulster Assembly, saying yesterday: “It beggars belief that the BBC would stoop so low as to employ a Muslim head of religious programming” – a remark that would surely have got him into trouble with the law had it been made outside the privileged precincts of Parliament.

The BBC rushes to reassure everyone that its commitment to religion remains strong. It has a whole department devoted to it; the Director General has lunches at Lambeth Palace so that Rowan Williams can demand more time for Christianity and gives speeches to Christian think tanks telling them that the BBC is broadcasting more religious programmes now than it has done for decades. It even has an advisory panel to keep the Corporation on track.

The BBC is, of course, a public service broadcaster – indeed, the public service broadcaster – and as such needs to serve all sections of its audience. Some of them are religious (although the 70 per cent that keeps being claimed, based on the census, is highly questionable) and as such they are entitled to see their interests represented.

But do they get more than their fair share of time and resources? Of course they do. Sometimes listening to Radio 4 is like listening to a broadcast version of the Church Times. The Today programme is infested with bishops, quite apart from Thought for the Day.

A Freedom of Information request by a member of the National Secular Society revealed that the BBC Religion and Ethics department costs £10 million a year

– and that was before the cost of many of the programmes it produces.

If you look at the research into viewer reactions to religion on radio and TV, you’ll see what I mean about over-representation. A survey by Ofcom, the media regulator, showed that religious programmes were not greatly valued by viewers – only 5% found them to be of any personal significance, and when you look at the charts of actual viewing figures in the report, religion hardly registers.

Other research from Social Capital showed that in homes with access to digital channels, there was an almost total flight from terrestrial channels showing religious programmes.”

But worse than the fact that hardly anyone watches or values religious output on TV (Ofcom allowed ITV to drop its religious coverage entirely when it became clear it could not generate advertising to support it), the religious affairs department sometimes behaves like a propaganda arm of the Church.

As President of the National Secular Society, I am often invited on to BBC programmes to comment (never unchallenged, always with a religious representative to give me a hard time). But I have now made a firm decision not to do any more pre-recorded interviews with the Religion and Ethics Department, after the last three interviews I did with them were edited to the point that I felt they did no represent properly what I had said.

I am not the only one who has had to endure this misrepresentation. The writer and psychologist Dorothy Rowe made the BBC apologise when they did it to her.

This is one practice that the new head of religion should put a stop to immediately.

Even non-believers deserve their voice to be fairly represented on the BBC, although we have no Archbishop to twist the arm of the Director General.