Secular Right

At one level this story from the London Independent is good news:

Religious broadcasting has taken an unexpected turn at the BBC, leaving secularists last night claiming a breakthrough. An important new committee that the corporation will consult on religious broadcasting is to include a humanist.

Read on, however, and the story rapidly turns for the worse:

Andrew Copson, director of education and public affairs for the British Humanist Association, has been appointed to the BBC’s Standing Conference on Religion and Belief, a new body which replaces the Central Religious Advisory Committee (Crac), which advised on “religion-related policy and coverage”. Mr Copson suggested his appointment may give him the chance to challenge the long fought over Radio 4 religious slot, Thought for the Day. “We need to see an increased contribution from humanists in slots run by the religion and ethics department that are presently confined only to religions,” he said.

To explain a little, Thought for the Day is a two-or-three-minute homily broadcast during the course of BBC Radio 4’s Today, a highly influential (and deservedly so) news program broadcast each weekday morning. Once (if my memory is correct, which it may well not be) Thought for the Day was mainly confined to the pronouncements of various worthies from the Church of England (fair enough; the C of E is, and should remain, the state religion – and the BBC is the state broadcaster) but has since been made much more ‘inclusive’. Needless to say, this has done nothing to derogate from Thought for the Day’s overall tone of highminded, usually harmless usually leftist flummery – albeit highminded, usually harmless usually leftist flummery wrapped in a clerical guise. As such it was something that could be safely disregarded. And was: I seem to recall my father usually switched off  Thought for the Day when it came on to the car radio in the course of long journeys down to London when I was a small boy. Like the ‘exercise’ segment the BBC used to broadcast even earlier (and which received the same paternal switch-off), it was a mild irritation he was well able to do without at that time of the morning.

Allow humanists onto this show, and luckless listeners will be subjected to yet more leftist nonsense (trust me on this) made even more nauseating by paeans to the glories of ‘humankind’, the mysteries of the universe and, worse of all, the sickening prospect that someone somewhere might take it seriously. Leave Thought for the Day where it belongs: with the vicars.

It’s worth adding that BBC religious broadcasting like Thought for the Day and the marvelous Songs of Praise (completely unwatchable, but like the Church of England, I like to know that it’s there) is part of the warp and woof of the nation. Tampering with it is not something that a secular right should support.