.jpg)
It is little remembered that many of the BBC’s ideals were biblically inspired. Its two mottos – “Nation shall speak peace unto nation” and “Quaecunque” (“whatsoever”) – are both drawn from scripture.
The first alludes to the prophets Isaiah and Micah, and the second to St Paul’s injunction to think on “whatsoever things are true”.
One constant note of scripture is for people within a nation to live peaceably at unity. “How good and joyful a thing it is to dwell together in unity” says the psalmist, and “Jerusalem is builded as a city that is at unity”.
Unity is cherished by encouraging respect for the “goodly heritage” – a maintenance of the shared laws, customs and culture which give a nation its character and coherence.
In particular, in both Old and New Testaments, as much as one must cherish the stranger, so too must strangers honour and adapt themselves to the laws, customs and culture of their hosts, if they wish to be part of the host society.
It is not for strangers to fracture the coherence of their host society. Rather, they must come to it as good guests, with humility. Christ counselled that when a guest is invited to a feast, they should sit in the lowest place so that the host could say “friend, move up higher”.
Why, therefore, does he call for the BBC to use its still considerable power to foster a Britain ever more Balkanised and fragmented into ethnic enclaves, when it could be acting to engender a sense of unity, based on inspiring its inhabitants to respect and adapt themselves to a more than a millennium-old shared culture rooted in Christian values?
One of the greatest sources of mistrust in contemporary media is not, as he says, a lack of diverse representation, but because too often it has tried to paper over the cracks in the nation’s Balkanisation and the growing failure of the multicultural project.
However, Cottrell would like the new digital media, which is less restrained and has done most to bring home this failure, to be muzzled by extra regulation: anything to avoid spreading “hatred”.
Is stifling the freedom of digital media to report on problems we can often see with our own eyes going to enhance trust? Archbishop Cottrell’s approach is strikingly at variance with the demand for press freedom by one of our greatest Christian thinkers John Milton, who reminded us that our God-given reason endows us individually with the capacity to sift truth from falsehood: “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” he wrote.
Does the Archbishop not trust us enough to discern the truth unaided, or realise that frank conversations about “whatsoever things are true” are our best hope of peacefully healing the divides that afflict us?
Even Broadcasting House, when it was opened in 1931, was dedicated as a “temple of the arts and muses” to “Almighty God” Himself.
Nearly 100 years later, the Archbishop of York, the Most Rev’d Stephen Cottrell, has given us his contemporary Christian perspective on public service broadcasting in an address to the Religion Media Festival. They have diverged somewhat from the wisdom of these earlier visions.
Cottrell rightly said in his address that we cannot understand the world around us, this nation, or even our individual selves without an understanding of faith. He correctly identified a general lack of religious literacy that can contribute to escalating tensions within society. He also spoke of the general lack of trust in contemporary media. However, his remedy for this is in tension with some essential tenets of biblical thought.
He argues that “21st-century Britain is a network of communities”, many of which “find their identity in ethnic origin and religious faith more than geographic location”.
Public service broadcasting, he says, needs to reflect diversity, and that trust can only be rebuilt when everyone feels included. This needs more than “presenters with a regional accent”.
Aside from it being unclear what has made Archbishop Cottrell think the BBC doesn’t reflect contemporary British diversity – perhaps, thanks to a life of prayer, he hasn’t switched on a television in the last 30 years – it is troubling he thinks that we should be content with a future vision of broadcasting, and our nation itself, divided up into “communities”.