Religion in the Media: Privileging Religion and Christianity (Book Notes: The Gathering of Infidels)

The general prejudice in modern society is to accord religion, religious beliefs, and religious people special privileges that are not granted to anyone else or any other belief system. The trend of modernity is to reduce unjust privileges, but killing religious privileges has proven very difficult.

In The Gathering of Infidels: A Hundred Years of the Rationalist Press Association, Bill Cooke writes:

Early in 1928 the BBC announced that it was going to expand its service to supply two programmes a day to most of its listeners. The only exception was the Sunday evening religious programmes — the notorious God-slot. The RPA organised a campaign of protest against this, claiming that, alongside the religious programmes, there should be something else for people to listen to, just as there was to be at all other times of the week.

But it might as well not have bothered. The Guide quoted the BBC’s Director-General Sir John Reith as saying; ‘It has been against the policy of the BBC from the outset to have an alternative to a Christian Religious Service on Sunday evenings, and the Corporation does not see any justification for a change in this policy.’ And that was that.

I wonder what the BBC was afraid of? It’s not as though people didn’t get enough religion in the rest of their lives, so why not open things up for different perspectives? It seems likely that they were afraid — so afraid, that they just couldn’t bear to give nonbelief an honest presentation under any circumstances:

That the BBC recognised the merit of the RPA’s complaints is illustrated in the degree to which they sidestepped the issue. At one stage, for instance, they staged a ‘debate’ between a bishop and an atheist. Only later did it transpire that the bishop had written his argument and that of the atheist, the part of which was read by an actor! Not surprisingly, the atheist’s argument appeared shallow and unconvincing when compared to the profundity and depth of the bishop. The privileged access to the media by churchmen and their allies has remained a live issue for rationalists and humanists ever since.

I wish I knew who this bishop was and if he ever regretted this dishonesty and his deceptive show. By doing the above, he was admitting that he was incapable of having a serious conversation or debate with a nonbeliever; the only way he would appear alongside an atheist was if he could write the atheist’s lines. The atheist in this case appeared shallow, but it was the bishop who was truly shallow, lacking depth of thought and argument.

Unfortunately, privileging religion in the way that modern society does ensures that religion will continue to be shallow. Only through equality with other beliefs and ideologies is there real competition, and only through serious competition is religion forced to evolve, improve, and adjust to new situations. Privileging religion is simply an admission that religion can’t compete and needs to be protected from the big, bad world.

Privileging religion is an attempt to protect it, and by protecting it society admits that religion is inferior.

 

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