The BBC and it's peculiar contempt for the Anglican Church

Anglican leaders are exercised about the treatment of their religion by broadcasters (well, the BBC, to be honest). Quite right, too: the BBC, as an organization, is clearly hostile to the nation’s religion and its adherents. Christians are generally portrayed as mad, bad, silly, or comic.

This blanket attitude stems from a mixture of intellectual laziness, prejudice and ignorance (and, let’s be honest, the fatuous social worker vapourings of many Anglicans help foster the prejudice).  

Following the Haiti earthquake, the Archbishop of York was summoned to the Today programme to explain what his boss was playing at (i.e. God, not the Archbishop of Canterbury – I seem to remember Dr Williams also being given a jolly good carpeting by the programme in the aftermath of some earlier natural disaster). 

In the wake of any tragedy, there’s always a hiatus before the media can start blaming the country leading the relief effort (i.e. America) for “getting it wrong” and “having an agenda” , during which it casts about for someone to blame. 

Now that the US has a nice cuddly, ethnic, left-wing president - and even the BBC would have found it a bit of a stretch to pin this one on George Bush - they decided to have a go at God instead. After all, he’s meant to be all-powerful, which makes Him an authority figure, and the BBC hates those. They also suspect Him of being old and white and infinitely wise, so He’s just the kind of remote elderly fogey who should step aside and make way for a young, vibrant, ignorant, multi-ethnic female – you know, someone who “gets” it, and to whom the younger audience can, like, relate?

So, with God cast as a sort of conglomerate John Maclean/Bob Dole/George Bush figure, one of his British-based representatives was duly wheeled out to explain why He had allowed yet another tragedy to strike mankind – and poor blacks, at that! Does He really exist? And if He exists, why is He so useless? 

I haven’t always believed in God, but I have always been amazed at how intellectually vacuous the arguments against religion usually are (to be fair, many of the arguments in favour of it are equally undistinguished). I tried to read a book by Richard Dawkins years ago – The Blind Watchmaker? - but, finding this very clever man’s anti-God arguments to be on a par with those I remember myself using as a bumptious and distinctly unclever fifteen year old, I set it aside without getting very far: the Prof didn’t seem to have the slightest understanding of the nature of the religious impulse in human beings. (I’ve been surprised ever since by the number of people who cite Dawkins as either causing or confirming their unbelief – I must try to sell them London Bridge some day.) 

Let’s agree some fundamental truths: 

          

  There  is no such thing as a meaningful proof of the existence of God. 

          

  Some religious people are deranged. Many are hypocritical. Many are  

                creepy.

          

  Terrible, evil things continue to be done in the name of religion. 

          

   Religions have sometimes acted to suppress knowledge.

          

   You don’t have to be religious to be a good person, or to achieve 

                 great things on behalf of humanity.

          

  Government policies should not be formulated by religious leaders.

Despite my religious beliefs, I have no problem with any of these statements. I would hope that non-believers wouldn’t have a problem with any of the following:

          

  Many religious people are sensible, likable and honest.

          

  Great things are done in the name of religion.

          

  Religions have often acted to preserve or increase the sum of human 

                knowledge.

          

  Being religious does not preclude you from helping humanity – it may 

                even help.

          

  Scientists should not formulate government policy. 

Were both sides able to agree on these points as givens at the start of any discussion involving religion, how much more interesting the ensuing arguments might prove. 

In addition, there are four areas where we believers would really appreciate a scintilla of compromise from the Dawkins’ camp and its provisional wing in the Media.

First, using examples of religious extremism – either contemporary or historic– to attack modern Anglicans is childish: I have as much in common with the psychopathic Taliban swine who throw acid in the faces of little girls to prevent them going to school as your average research chemist does with Dr Joseph Mengele. 

Second, believing in God has nothing to do with proof, in the scientific sense: demonstrations of God’s existence are meaningless twaddle. Faith requires a conscious effort or decision on the part of the believer to believe: God isn’t some sort of sub-atomic particle whose existence can be deduced from a range of observations. Asking for – or providing – the same type of proof in favour of His existence as we would for the existence of a photon involves what Wittgenstein called a category mistake. 

Third, people crave meaning. Religion has provided that sense of meaning for the majority of humans since we acquired self-consciousness: this doesn’t mean religion is necessarily true in an objective sense, but it is undoubtedly psychically vital for millions – probably billions. Attempts to fill the God-shaped hole within humanity with alternative sources of meaning – the State, Race, the Nation, Science, Evolution, Equality – almost invariably end in horror or widespread alienation, usually both. These concepts simply aren’t designed to supply the same sense of meaning as religion has done for millennia

Fourth, our culture – from Gothic cathedrals to Renaissance painting and sculpture to the very language we speak and the conceptual framework within which we think – has for centuries been shaped by the Christian religion in its various forms. To suggest that we dismiss all that as the result of superstition imposed on credulous dupes in order to achieve social control is arrogant beyond belief – and the results of doing so, the loss of meaning it would entail for believers and non-believers, would be dreadful.

I’m a believer partly because I can’t accept that meaning in life is supplied by the goal of becoming richer, bigger, smarter and healthier or by the aim of eradicating hunger, poverty and inequality from the face of the earth. In themselves, these aims are perfectly worthy and reasonable, I suppose. What I don’t accept is that they can replace the inner meaning in people’s lives which the concept of a personal God provides. 

As for Evolution or Science as a substitute for religion, I’m not sure how that would work. Mankind’s need for religion reflects a hunger for the numinous - something unseen, mysterious, unknown but endlessly meaningful to us as individuals. We can marvel at Nature’s handiwork, but it’s hard to see how you can worship purely mechanical processes, no matter how intricate or complex. We invest Nature with meaning; in itself, it possesses none. And much of themeaning with which we invest Nature derives from our deep-rooted religious impulses: Nature is one of our routes to God.

I have no particular desire to convert anyone else to my faith - it is hardly strong enough to bear my own psychic weight, let alone that of others - but I do feel that trying to dislodge Christianity from its central position in European culture on the basis of schoolboy arguments against it is does a disservice to all of us. Bleeding the meaning from the lives of millions of people without having any clear idea of what is to replace it with strikes me as dangerous, unkind, and wantonly, selfishly destructive.