Keeping the Faith

For more than fifty years, BBC Radio 4’s ‘Sunday’ has examined news and current affairs through the lens of religion. The premise behind the programme being that religion does not exist in a vacuum. Which is to say it’s not isolated in a discrete public-domain of ritual practice and belief. At the time of writing this remit has never seemed more relevant. With the Middle East poised on the brink of a full blown war and in the face of immense and ongoing tragedy, what people believe, how that impacts on their sense of identity, community or history and how it is translated into how politics or social-economics are practised, means that it’s never been so important to understand religion.

Now, Edward Stourton has collaborated with his former ‘Sunday’ editor Amanda Hancox to review over fifty years of current affairs in their book, Sunday. Featuring interviews with well-known figures such as Desmond Tutu, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and Enoch Powell, the book traces the evolution of debate on a variety of key issues including sexuality, bioethics, nuclear weapons and many more. To mark it’s publication, Edward and Amanda took part in a special Sandford St Martin salon and Ed wrote a special column for the Radio Times which has been reproduced with their permission below.

“At a time when complaint is sometimes made that religion is losing its hold on the world”, the 1928 BBC Hand Book declared, “The BBC is doing the best of service to prevent any decay of Christianity in a nominally Christian country”.

John Reith, the corporation’s deeply religious founding father, wanted a “thorough-going, optimistic and manly” version of Christianity preached from the “pulpit of the airwaves”, and his Sunday schedule offered an austere diet: two services, separated by a long period of complete silence, self-improving talks and serious music.

While secular critics complained that millions of listeners might prefer to be entertained on their day of rest, Reith’s vision endured for decades. Right up until the 1960s, most producers in the BBC’s religion department were clergymen in the Church of England.

But religious broadcasting changed with the birth of Radio 4’s Sunday programme in 1970. For the first time, religion was treated as an object of journalistic inquiry, not simply celebrated in broadcast services. Priests and bishops were challenged in interviews and could no longer assume the deference they had enjoyed.

In the half century or so since Sunday first aired, religious broadcasting of that kind has become more, not less, essential.  Mainstream Christianity may have “lost its hold” over our audience in a way that would have shocked Lord Reith, but religion is a more powerful and present force in our world than ever before.

The first non-Christian religious item broadcast by Sunday seems to have been a 1974 interview with a Muslim community leader who objected to mixed PE and swimming lessons in schools. Then, there were around 250,000 Muslims in the UK; today there are closer to four million. Britain’s religious landscape is richly diverse and, without some understanding of Islam, Judaisim, Hinduism (our prime minister’s religion), Sikhism and Buddhism, it’s impossible to make sense of our own society.