Britain needs more understanding of religion, not less — so why is the BBC cutting back?

The news that the BBC is planning substantial cuts to its Religion and Ethics department will come as a disappointment to many Catholics, and indeed anyone who believes religion deserves a place in British public life. According to a statement released by the National Union of Journalists yesterday, the proposals include significant reductions to religious programming, with The Daily Service facing a substantial budget cut and a possible move towards a digital format.

Back in April, BBC management announced plans to cut between 1,800 and 2,000 jobs as part of a 10% reduction to its total costs by the end of 2028-29. As AI transforms the media industry, it is unsurprising that our national broadcaster faces considerable uncertainty, but there is something particularly depressing about reducing its commitment to religion at precisely the moment when understanding religious belief, at home and abroad, has never been more important.

Whatever secularists in positions of civic authority may like to think, a religious outlook remains central to some of the most difficult political and humanitarian questions of our time, and understanding how faith functions and interprets the world is of critical importance in contemporary society.

Some voices within the BBC have suggested that declining church attendance means programmes such as The Daily Service no longer have their former relevance, but this conflates physical attendance with religious adherence and assumes that the BBC’s primary objective is to chase ratings. Actually, its public-service responsibilities also include informing and educating the nation and helping people understand beliefs even when they do not share them.

Rather surprisingly, the Catholic Church in England was once at the very cutting edge of this media debate, and was even remarkably imaginative in its approach to television. In the mid-1950s, when television was still establishing itself as the dominant medium of popular communication, the English hierarchy created the National Catholic Radio and Television Centre at Hatch End in Middlesex. The purpose of this radical foray into emerging media mechanisms was to train priests, religious and laypeople in professional broadcasting and help the Church use television intelligently and effectively.

A major £750,000 campaign was launched by the British bishops in 1964 to build a modern broadcasting and film studio in the London suburbs and the centre was formally opened with a papal inauguration in November 1969.

This was not simply a matter of putting a priest in front of a camera and hoping for the best; those behind the Hatch End project understood that television had its own language, that broadcasting required professional standards, and that the Catholic Church needed to take the medium seriously to communicate beyond its congregations. The centre acquired an international reputation, attracting students from overseas, and by 1976 was training more than 200 people a year.

When the Second Vatican Council published Inter Mirifica, its decree on social communication, in December 1963, it gave formal expression to many of the ideas that had already been put into practice at Hatch End. The document insisted on professional training and institutions where journalists, broadcasters and others could receive appropriate technical, intellectual and moral formation, and the Council’s thinking was developed further in 1971 with Communio et Progressio, the pastoral instruction on social communication, which remains one of the most interesting – yet least-appreciated – Church documents of the period.

What remains refreshing about the document even today is its refusal to see broadcasting merely as a means of delivering religious messages; the Church understood that communication involved something more ambitious: encouraging informed discussion, improving understanding and contributing to a more humane society.

The document describes communications media as ‘gifts of God’, an expression that might sound optimistic in today’s world of misinformation and endless social media arguments, but its underlying point remains apposite: communication is about bringing people together rather than merely transmitting messages or winning arguments. It also recognises that people need accurate information and sufficient background to understand events. Paragraph 16 discusses the media’s contribution to the common good and the importance of context. That sounds very much like what public-service broadcasting ought to be doing.

Religion is a subject where context matters enormously. Beliefs that seem strange when reduced to a few sentences often make more sense when their history, theology and cultural significance are explained, and the same applies when religious institutions are criticised, as they sometimes deserve to be, because serious criticism requires knowledge rather than just caricature.

Communio et Progressio understood that the Church needed to participate in this wider world of communication, contributing to public discussion while learning to listen and engage with those who did not share its convictions. In many respects, that was the very spirit which inspired Hatch End, and it remains a great shame that the Church eventually wound down such a pioneering project. Its closure in February 1996 meant losing an institution that put the English Catholic Church at the forefront of broadcasting training – and one can’t help but wonder what might have developed had that commitment continued into today’s enormously varied media world.

It would be easy to dismiss the argument for religious broadcasting by pointing out that Masses, sermons, theological discussions and documentaries are readily available online, but that misses something vitally important about the BBC’s role in particular – namely that there’s a considerable difference between religious material produced for those already interested in faith and serious coverage intended for the wider public.

One of the BBC’s great strengths has been its ability to bring unfamiliar religious traditions into people’s homes, explain controversies and allow difficult questions of faith and morality to be discussed seriously. For its part, the BBC should certainly scrutinise religious institutions, including the Catholic Church – because nobody should expect favourable treatment simply because they are religious. But informed scrutiny is very different from superficial reporting, and a broadcaster that loses religious expertise risks becoming much less capable of making that distinction.

There is also the question of those for whom traditional religious programmes remain important. The Daily Service is not simply another item in the schedules – for older listeners, people living alone or those unable to attend church, a familiar prayer, reading or hymn can provide a connection with a wider worshipping community and providing this particular public service is also at the heart of the BBC’s societal remit.

There is another important point as Britain becomes an increasingly diverse, multi-faith society and that is that while the BBC rightly has a responsibility to reflect different religious traditions, it has an equally important duty to recognise Britain’s foundational Christian identity that has shaped our laws, institutions, education, literature, architecture and moral outlook over centuries. That inheritance cannot simply be set aside because Britain is more religiously diverse and it could even be reasonably argued that greater societal diversity makes it even more important to understand the Christian foundations of the country – not to diminish other faiths, but as part of our shared history and cultural identity.

The BBC has a responsibility to explain that inheritance, ensuring Christianity is not treated merely as one religious interest among many, but recognised as a tradition that has shaped Britain profoundly. This is not about demanding special treatment for Christians, but rather that a genuinely inclusive approach should make room for different faith communities while acknowledging Christianity’s particular historical place.

There is also a broader question about religion’s place in an increasingly secular society, one Pope Benedict XVI addressed when he spoke in Westminster Hall during his 2010 visit to Britain. Benedict did not argue that the Church should tell politicians what to do, or that religious belief should have automatic authority over public policy. Rather, he pointed out during his address that faith and reason had something valuable to offer one another, and excluding religious perspectives could narrow our understanding of moral questions.

That deserves attention when political discussion revolves around slogans and accusations of bad faith. The Catholic intellectual tradition has spent centuries wrestling with justice, human dignity, freedom, responsibility and the common good and one need not accept Catholic teaching to recognise these as serious contributions to public debate, just as one need not be Muslim, Jewish or Hindu to appreciate the importance of understanding those traditions.

One oddity of contemporary Britain is the assumption that becoming more secular necessarily means becoming more enlightened about religion, when in fact the exact opposite may be happening – people may practise faith less while knowing less about the beliefs, history and moral reasoning of those who do, and that hardly encourages understanding in a diverse society.

None of this means that Catholics should blame the BBC for religion’s diminishing place in public life, as the Church itself has not always been the best at communicating with the wider world. Especially at the margins where it meets secular society, much Catholic discussion gets directed towards people who already know the vocabulary, accept the assumptions and understand the arguments, and then we are left wondering why everyone else is uninterested.

Although the Hatch End project is long forgotten now, it stands as a reminder that its founders understood that modern communication requires imagination, investment, professional competence, the ability to communicate in meaningful language and a willingness to learn how media works – principles that matter as much in the age of streaming, podcasts, social media and artificial intelligence as they did when television was a novelty.

It’s something the executives currently controlling the BBC could do with reflecting upon – not because religion ought to be protected from financial pressures, but because understanding faith is essential to understanding Britain and the wider world – and a public-service broadcaster that loses the expertise to cover religion properly will be much poorer for it, and so will its audience.

More than half a century ago, the Catholic Church in England recognised the extraordinary possibilities of broadcasting when it invested in Hatch End, anticipating much of the thinking later expressed in Inter Mirifica and Communio et Progressio. What made that initiative remarkable was its recognition that broadcasting was not simply a means of reaching the faithful, but an opportunity to contribute to a wider conversation about religion, society and the human condition.

That understanding is no less relevant today. Indeed, at a time when religious literacy appears to be declining, and when questions of faith, identity and moral conviction continue to shape events across the world, the need for informed and imaginative religious broadcasting is arguably greater than ever.

This is why the BBC’s proposed reductions deserve much more serious consideration than just another round of financial restructuring might suggest. Religious broadcasting is not an optional extra, to be maintained only for as long as audience figures or budgets permit. It is an important expression of the BBC’s public-service purpose, helping people understand beliefs they may not share, traditions they may not know and convictions that continue to influence the society in which they live.

The BBC has rightly invested considerable effort in reflecting the diversity of modern Britain, but that commitment surely ought to include a serious engagement with religion, including the Christian inheritance that has shaped so much of our national life. Reducing the resources and expertise devoted to religious programming risks diminishing precisely the understanding and mutual respect that public-service broadcasting exists to encourage.

Nobody can reasonably expect the BBC to be immune from financial pressures or technological change, but priorities are ultimately a matter of choice, and the corporation’s leadership really needs to ask itself whether its gradual retreat from serious religious broadcasting is consistent with its broader responsibilities to the nation.

The BBC has a distinguished history of bringing religious thought, worship and discussion into British homes, often reaching people who would otherwise have little opportunity to encounter them, and that is a tradition worth preserving and developing, rather than allowing it to disappear through successive rounds of cuts.

The critical question for the BBC right now is not whether Britain is religious enough to justify religious broadcasting, but whether a national public-service broadcaster can properly fulfil its mission without it.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic publisher and public theologian