Religious programming in secular media

Religious programmes have featured on television in the United Kingdom since the earliest days of BBC television and its commercial counterpart, ITV. Today, religious programmes are regularly shown on BBC1 and on each of the commercial channels, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. BBC2 also shows religious programmes from time to time. And the recent WACC and UNDA-sponsored European TV Festival of Religious Programmes, held in Helsinki at the Finnish public broadcasting station, YLE, showed just how wide a range and variety of religious programmes can be seen on public-service television stations throughout Europe.

All this assumes that there is a distinct body of programming that can be described as ‘religious’ and identified as such. But is that in fact the case? ‘Religious broadcasting comes into that fascinating class of things where “we all know what we mean until we have to define it”. The centre ground is clear: services of worship, or theological discussions, for example. The boundaries are blurred.’ So wrote CRAC - the religious advisory body to the BBC and ITV – back in 1975. Judging from the recent debate in the UK – and the debate about some of the programmes shown in Helsinki – CRAC’s observation still holds good.

Certainly, if you ask viewers what is meant by a religious programme, the ‘centre ground’ identified by CRAC is top of the list. In what remains the most extensive survey of religious broadcasting undertaken in the UK, Seeing is Believing, carried out in 1994, the Independent Television Commission (ITC) asked a representative sample of the population how they would identify a religious programme. The two top responses, with 38% each, were ‘church services/televised church services’ and ‘hymn singing/people singing Gospel songs’. And in third place, with 32% of responses came ‘people talking about their religion/their beliefs/why they believe in God’. The centre ground shifted however when the same question was asked of groups of Muslims, Hindus and Jews, with ‘people talking about religion’ coming top of the list.

This difference in perception is perhaps not surprising given that the Reithian tradition of public service religious broadcasting (PSB) was established in the UK at a time when the overwhelming majority of the population was actively or nominally Christian. And the churches – though they did not control or finance religious broadcasting – played an important part in determining the style and content of programmes. It is, however, also the case that the concept of public service broadcasting has developed significantly in the decades since Reith first articulated his vision for the BBC. And with particular regard to the place of religion within PSB, for the past twenty-five years, official policy for religious broadcasting on the BBC and the commercial mass audience channels has been to ‘reflect the worship, thought and actions of the principle religious traditions, recognising that those traditions are mainly, though not exclusively, Christian.’

Despite this policy, it appears that members of faiths other than Christian do not feel that they too have a stake in religious broadcasting in the UK. Having canvassed in depth the views of people of a range of religious persuasions, the ITC survey concluded that ‘Even if a minority of the population agrees that Britain is a Christian country, a strong feeling emerged from these discussions that Christians, and, more particularly, a type of Christianity characterised as “Church of England” are the legitimate “owners” of religious broadcasting in Britain; because of this, the members of religious minority groups who took part in this survey find the term “religious broadcasting” a difficult one to identify with.’

A challenge to public service broadcasting

Does any of this matter? Is it important if religious broadcasting is seen as a principally Christian affair, to which other groups are invited as occasional guests? Or should religious broadcasting be something that a wide range of groups in society feel they have a significant stake in? And by other groups, I am thinking not only of minority religious communities but also the substantial group of people in society characterised by the former Head of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC, Ernie Rea, as ‘people who are happy to acknowledge their spirituality but who run a mile from institutional religion. And no – they’re not nutters. Like you and I, they are struggling to make sense of a world where the failure of materialism to fulfil the aspirations of the human spirit has become self evident.’

I believe that these questions face public service religious broadcasting with an important challenge. Having modelled its original principles on the basis of the institutional Church – it now finds itself addressing a social context very different from the one in which it developed, and attempting to meet the needs of a much more diverse audience than was previously the case. To illustrate the extent of the challenge – the latest figures for Sunday churchgoing in England, compiled by Dr Peter Brierley, show a fall in attendance from 12% in 1979 to just 7.5% in 1998. Much of this dramatic fall can be attributed to the steep decline in child attendance, which has halved between the years in question. The decline in churchgoing is not new: it has been a trend for the past 150 years. What is different, however, is the extent of the decline: from having being a gentle slope it is fast becoming a sharp incline.

At the same time, the number of adherents of faiths other than Christian is rising. Recent figures in the UK suggest that around 7% of the total UK population are members of faith traditions other than Christian. More detailed information should become available following analysis of the 2001 Census, which for the first time included a question about religious affiliation.

So how is religious broadcasting to address this new situation? On the one hand it remains closely associated in the public’s mind with the churches – and in England with the Church of England in particular – yet on the other hand if it continues strongly to reflect the life of the churches and to meet the needs of those associated with the latter, it risks becoming increasingly irrelevant to the majority of its audience. One option might be to broaden significantly the base of the religions represented – for example by transmitting regular services of worship from those communities.

However both the BBC and ITV have cut back significantly on the amount of televised worship they transmit, with the BBC1 no longer carrying any regular worship (though there is a weekly service on radio), and ITV on most Sundays carrying a short, made-for-television service. This reduction in the amount of worship transmitted reflects the steady decline over a number of years in the audience for televised church worship. To extend the coverage of worship to other religions on a regular basis would risk fragmenting an already small audience still further.

The change of emphasis on the two main UK channels away from worship reflects the increasing dilemma for religious broadcasters: what should religious broadcasting be about and who is its target audience? If religious broadcasting is to be more than an accumulation of programmes designed in total to meet the special requirements of particular groups, and if its core component is no longer acts of worship – as seems increasingly to be the case - then what is it?

De-regulating ‘religion’

One suggested way of dealing with the issue would be to cease to treat religion as a specific and ‘protected’ programme genre. After all, programmes that raise searching questions about religion are not only made by religious departments. One of the prize winners at a previous UNDA-WACC television festival, for example, was an episode of a popular legal drama series shown on ITV – that had as its central theme the medical and ethical dilemmas posed by a Jehovah’s Witness’s opposition to blood transfusions. It was an absorbing piece of television – and I for one could not have said hand on heart that it was any less ‘religious’ than many of the programmes broadcast in dedicated religious slots on UK television.

In fact, the suggestion that religious broadcasting might in fact thrive without what one UK journalist recently called ‘the icy hand of the religious quota merchants’ is by no means new. In 1977, the Annan Commission, in a searching report on the future of British broadcasting, put forward what it called the ‘audacious possibility’ of disbanding religious broadcasting departments and allowing the skills and experience within those programme departments to inform the output of all programmes.

But despite this, and despite the fact that in the years since Annan, religious broadcasting departments have grown steadily smaller, in the UK religion itself has remained a distinct broadcast genre, rather than an influence across all genres. And the presence of this genre in the schedules has been protected thanks to a combination of legislation – in the case of the main commercial channels – and custom and tradition in the case of BBC.

Whether this has been healthier for religion than Annan’s prescription is a matter of debate. Personally, I am sceptical whether in today’s competitive broadcast environment, ceasing to have a genre called ‘Religion’ would not simply mean that religion would cease to have any significant presence in broadcast schedules. Certainly having quotas for religion can – and sometimes does mean – that mediocre programmes find their way into the schedules (and as they regularly do in plenty of other genres!). On the other hand, I think of the many programmes broadcast as part of religious ‘quotas’ that have delighted, surprised and moved me and caused me to think about life and faith in completely new ways. Often those programmes have taken an unexpected approach – I think in particular of a memorable series some years ago about Christianity in England presented by a Jewish Rabbi. And very often they have been programmes that have shone a light, not so much on what it means to belong to a particular faith, but on what it means to make a personal spiritual journey - wherever that journey has led.

It is that kind of programmes that I hope to see more of in the future. It is the kind of programmes I was glad to see many examples of at the WACC/UNDA TV Festival of Religious Programmes in Helsinki - and the kind of programme I believe risks being lost without an insistence that public service broadcast schedules include something called ‘religious programmes’. In my view, the very best religious programmes focus, not on institutions, but on people. And when those programmes are made by individuals who are knowledgeable about the world of faith and sensitive to the spirituality of others, they can be a powerful force for good. For I believe that religious programmes are at their most effective when they build bridges between one person’s religious experience and another’s. And I can think of few things more important in today’s culturally diverse society than fostering empathy between people of different beliefs.

Rachel Viney is a freelance Media Consultant. From 1990-99 she was Religious Broadcasting Officer at the Independent Television Commission