Hurrah for Children’s Religious Programmes!

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This year the Sandford St Martin Trust launched a new award for Children’s broadcasting.  Sharmini Selvarajah, formerly with the Sutton Trust and a freelance broadcaster and journalist, was one of those media professionals invited to help hone a shortlist from the many excellent entries.  She writes here about the experience.

As a child I thought about religion more than average. My family included Hindus, Sikhs, Catholics, Anglicans and Buddhists, and, thanks to this, I had direct experience of different customs and festivals. But growing up in 1980s Britain, I’m not sure if the same could be said of many of my contemporaries.

Religious Education – or RE – consisted of learning scriptures off by heart or illustrating Bible stories. And although I was interested in religion throughout my childhood and teenage years, I don’t remember ever being engaged with religious ideas at school, or through the mainstream media.

Shortlisting entries for the new Sandford St Martin Children’s Prize has shown me how much things have changed though. The experience opened my eyes to the diversity and quality of children’s broadcasting on religious issues. Unlike the worthy, and usually boring, videos we were shown at school, these entries spoke directly to young people, informing them without being patronising.

I was particularly impressed with the high production values of many of the submissions. It’s true that some came from big production companies, but many of the specialist films aimed at schools were beautifully made with limited resources.

There was also a welcome diversity within the programmes, with subjects including Hanukkah, Bible stories, Humanism and even an exploration of Ji’had. In addition to explicitly religious themes, there were also entries which dealt less directly with ethical issues. These programmes were particularly interesting, though often hard to judge. Not all met the criteria of the Award, to include a “strong religious or spiritual element”, but those which did were inspiring. They demonstrated that religious themes can be effectively included in mainstream programming for young people.

I watched and listened to many of the entries with my three children, and took on board their comments when making decisions. Seeing their enjoyment and engagement with the process convinced me that the days of poorly produced, unimaginative, religious programming for children are long gone.

Sounds Jewish, Sounds Religious?

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Over the past decade Poland has been experiencing what many people are calling a “Jewish revival” – fuelled in large part by a growing number of young people who are discovering their religious roots.  In 2014 Denise Grollmus and Sarah Peters won a Sandford St Martin Award for their moving and inventive podcast based on Denise’s own exploraton of her Polish-Jewish identity.  Here Denise reflects on the experience and her reaction when she found out her podcast had been nominated for a religious broadcasting award.

When Sarah Peters, the producer of Sounds Jewish, told me our podcast, “The Jewish Revival in Poland,” was nominated for a prestigious broadcasting award, I was definitely flattered and excited. But I was also a bit confused. The Sandford St. Martin Trust is dedicated to promoting religious broadcasting. Why, then, had we been nominated?

            First, as an American, I have a very specific and unflattering understanding of religious broadcasting. To me, religious broadcasting is little more than the corrupt world of televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham—men with bad toupees who preach fire and brimstone and promises of salvation in order to terrorize their viewers and listeners into parting with their savings. I knew that world well after I reported on Rex Humbard, the father of televangelism, in 2007. The title of my story was “Jesus for Sale,” which exactly encapsulated what I thought religious broadcasting was.

            Of course, that is a severely limited and unfair definition of what religious broadcasting is and can be. But even in a broader sense, our podcast still didn’t strike me as particularly “religious.” Though the piece we made was by and about Jews for a program funded by the London Jewish Community Centre (JCC) called Sounds Jewish, I understood our podcast as a strictly cultural piece of narrative journalism for a general audience of international listeners of all faiths and backgrounds. Not only is Sounds Jewish produced for The Guardian, but also our piece was interested in Jewishness not from a strictly religious perspective, but from a more complex understanding of what Jewishness is as a cultural, historical, religious, ethnic, and sometimes national identity that can not be limited to any one category. Furthermore, our piece wasn’t interested in Judaism generally, but in the reemergence of Jewish life and culture in Poland specifically.

It was also a piece about me. And I’d describe myself as anything but religious.

In fact, my religious background is incredibly complicated. While I was raised Catholic, it was the discovery of my grandmother’s (and therefore my own) Jewishness that had brought me to Poland in the first place. Like many of the Poles I’d interviewed, I, too, had stumbled across my own Polish Jewish roots late in life. My maternal grandmother, who had been born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, had gone into hiding, changing her name and her identity, so that she could survive the war. Even after the war was over, she decided to keep her Jewish identity a secret from our family until I was 28 years old. Ever since she told us the truth about who she was, I’d been obsessed with my family history, the history of the Polish Jews, and the revival of Jewish life in Poland, where I found a community of people just like me.

That’s also how I’d found myself living in Warsaw on a Fulbright grant in order to research and write about this cultural phenomenon. I had been living in Warsaw for seven months when Sarah first contacted me. She had read a story I’d written for Tablet Magazine about Poland’s Jewish revival—a piece that coincidentally did focus more specifically on the religious aspect of this much larger story. There was a chance, she said, that she was coming to Poland to do a story on the subject and she wanted me to tell her more. As we talked for nearly an hour about adult Hebrew schools and contemporary Polish perspectives on the Jews, Sarah asked how and when I’d become interested in this topic. That’s when I had to admit that my investment wasn’t purely academic or journalistic. It was personal. When I was done telling her my family’s story, the line went silent. “You should present the podcast. You should tell it through the lens of your family’s story,” Sarah said.

            Two weeks later, Sarah and I met in Krakow, where we worked 15-hour days interviewing everyone who was willing to speak to us, and then headed to Warsaw to do the same, until we had more than 30 hours of audio. It was very important for us to cover all the nuances of this very complicated story—one with ties not only to the Holocaust, but also to Communism and the fact that Poland was once home to the largest Jewish communities in the world. We wanted listeners to understand the historical conditions by which the Jews had all but disappeared from Polish life and then exactly how Jewish life began to reemerge. We interviewed not only the Head Rabbi of Poland and members of the JCC Krakow, but also non-Jewish Poles who had made it their life’s work to revive and preserve Poland’s rich Jewish history and cultural legacy. We never conceived of it as a story about religion, but as a socio-historical story about trauma, inheritance, and healing.

            Our podcast was posted online on June 5, 2013—the same week that The Guardian was making waves for its reporting on Edward Snowden. Even in the shadows of such huge breaking news, I was extremely proud of what we’d made and I was glad that it was in the world so that anyone could hear it. A month later, I returned to the United States, where my time in Poland often felt like little more than a dream. Then, almost a year later, Sarah wrote me with the news that we’d been nominated for a Sandford St. Martin Trust Award, which we eventually won for the “Best Local, Community, and Online” program.

Despite my initial misgivings about our podcast being defined as “religious,” I eventually embraced such an understanding of our work. It wasn’t simply the fact that we won, but also, after much thought, I finally realized how important it was to understand what religious broadcasting could be in a much broader sense. In today’s world, we sometimes emphasize the absolute divide between the secular and religious to a fault. In fact, much of what we understand as “secular” or “non-religious” has a crucial religious dimension that we willfully ignore in our attempt to see ourselves as rational actors beyond the hocus pocus of religious belief. We fear that by acknowledging the ways in which our behavior, our history, or our beliefs might be implicated in religious thought and traditions, we might be revealed as unenlightened, medieval, or irrational.

But ultimately, what I’ve learned through my own research is that culture is almost always implicated in the religious, both good and bad. To deny this fact is to ignore the whole truth of who we are and where we’ve come from, as well as to perpetuate some of the more unseemly prejudices and behaviors that we’ve inherited from religious practice. After all, though Communist thought insisted on its opposition to religious belief, the exile of Poland’s remaining Jewish community by Poland’s Communist government was not unlike those exiles perpetuated the Catholic Church in previous centuries.

To that end, winning a Sandford St. Martin Trust Award was much more than an honor or a professional accolade. It also offered me the chance to interrogate my false assumptions about what we deem as religious or not. Just as our podcast revealed, things are not always what they seem and it is in what is not immediately obvious that we learn the most about who we are.

Don’t forget, the 2015 Sandford Awards  – for programmes that explore who we are, where we come from and the role that religion can play in our lives – are now open for entries. 

You can listen to Denise’s 2014 Award-winning programme here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/audio/2013/jun/05/sounds-jewish-podcast-poland

Roger Bolton - Radio's Resurrection

Atheism is in crisis

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Atheism is in crisis, not least because it fails to satisfy human needs.

This may seem a questionable statement given the success of the atheist author Richard Dawkins, but it’s beginning to occur to many of his readers that the God of the Old Testament which he so vigorously debunks, is not believed in by most Christians, Jews or Muslims today. He is demolishing a straw man.

And the consequences of discarding God are worrying the most unlikely people, some leading atheists.

In a remarkable article for the weekly magazine The Spectator the atheist, Douglas Murray, faced up to the difficulties involved: “The greatest challenge in the atheist argument,” he wrote, is that “contra most atheists, ethics are self evidently not self evident”.

As he pointed out: “We should look back only a century when entire schools of very intelligent non-believers could discern no moral objections to eugenics.”

“We may have to accept,” he said “that the sanctity of human life is a Judeo-Christian concept which might very easily not survive Judeo Christian civilisation. Those who do not believe in God and who stare over that cliff,” he went on “may realise that only three options remain open to us.

The first option is to fall into the furnace.

Another is to work furiously to nail down an atheist version of the sanctity of the individual.

If that does not work, then there is only one other place to go. Which is back to faith, whether we like it or not.”

In the same edition of The Spectator Theo Hobson writes that “the energetic universalism of modern humanism is rooted in Christianity”. He quotes the Marxist author. Terry Eagleton. as saying that “rational humanism is rooted in the Protestant passion for reform,” and he refers to the point made by American writer, Marilynne Robinson, in relation to the US Declaration of Independence. She writes:

“Is it self evident that all are created equal? Only in a religious conception. Jefferson makes the human person sacred and thereby sets  human rights outside the reach of rationalization.”

The most moving account of this disillusion with atheism which I have read is contained in the latest book by one of our foremost writers, Julian Barnes.

In Levels of Life, which concerns the death of his much loved wife in 2008,

Barnes reveals that his devastating loss has made him inconsolable. He writes:

“When we killed – or exiled – God, we also killed ourselves. Did we notice that sufficiently at the time?

No God,

no afterlife,

no us.

We were right to kill Him of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren’t going to get an afterlife anyway.

But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on.

And the view from there – even if it was only the illusion of a view – wasn’t so bad”.

It was with these thoughts in mind that I went down last month to Hay on Wye, on the borders of England and Wales, to chair some debates organised by The Institute of Arts and Ideas which coexists with the Book Festival there. Religion was not directly mentioned and the organisers are mostly atheists.

They like to be provocative in their choice of subjects for debate.

One took as the question to be addressed: “Can neuroscience settle philosophical debates about the mind”.

The three members of the panel were a cognitive scientist, a philosopher of mind and language, and a neurobiologist. None were religious. Their answer was a resounding “no”. Neuroscience cannot settle debates about the mind.

The neuroscientist Professor Stephen Rose said that “we are not just a bunch of neurons”, that the brain is the servant of the mind and that we are nowhere near understanding how the mind functions. He said that 93% of brain scans, for example, were pointless. He later upped that to 98%

All three panellists agreed that neuroscience was in crisis, engaged in “scientific fishing expeditions”, without theories to investigate. The early hopes that we might understand consciousness for example were in shreds.

The mind remains a mystery.

A second debate also addressed a provocative question. Under the heading “Beyond Good and Evil” it asked: “Is Morality an instinct.”

The panel consisted of a philosopher, a neuroscientist and a Professor of Bioethics. Again, none were religious. To the likely disappointment of the organisers the answer came back in the negative… No, morality is not an instinct.

One panellist said that instinct played a part in some moral decisions but the Professor of Bioethics, John Harris, was insistent that  “Morality is a matter of rational reflection and judgement, not instinct.” When I pressed him to say where concepts of good and evil and equality came from, he did not seem to me to have a clear answer.

The point I am making is not that religion is winning the argument against atheism but that it is very much in the ring and that its opponent is experiencing a great deal of self doubt, perhaps even exhaustion. Atheism does not have answers to some of the most important existential questions, and cannot satisfy our spiritual needs.