The BBC have published their Religion and Ethics Review – but can they get the balance right?

And the BBC’s commitment to ‘raise their game’ will worry people who look at some of the worship output as being old-fashioned and aimed at an elderly audience. But their own research (which my team weren’t involved with) indicated that younger and non-white audiences are keen to see religion and belief represented in BBC content and that they would be interested in learning more.

This very much confirms quantitative survey work ComRes led earlier this year which found that younger adults are more likely than older ones to say that understanding religion is important to understanding the world.

And with global projections suggesting that more people around the world are likely to identify with a religion in future, meeting this need for awareness of the religious context beyond our shores, as well as its impact here, is surely an important element of the BBC’s public service remit.

In the review document, the BBC takes the opportunity to celebrate some of its recent achievements and points to highly popular programming including The Boy With The Topknot and A World Without Downs Syndrome. Choosing these as their flagship case-studies indicates an interesting direction. Rather than producing content which is instructive or assumes involvement in a religious tradition, these programmes hardly mentioned religion at all but presented some of the big themes of life and showed how a family navigated them. Religious practice was in the background, but not the star of the show. Beliefs informed people’s behaviour quietly, through habits and relationships established over many years.

It’s a helpful recognition that this is in fact the way many of us live. We find ways to make sense of the world and life’s grand themes – love, death, fear, grief, belonging, joy, compassion – which draw on beliefs and personal rituals which may or may not be explicitly recognised, and which often don’t always make much sense outside of our own family.

If the BBC can find ways to show the normality of millions of people’s daily lives and the ways we navigate those important moments, recognising but not tub-thumping about the beliefs and traditions which many of us hold dear, they will fulfil a crucial role in helping us understand a messy and complicated world.

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Katie leads Faith Research Centre at ComRes, helping public, private, non-profit, academic and media clients to gather data and insights about religion and belief, and worships at Riverside Vineyard Church.

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