The BBC and Radio 4’s Thought for the Day programme   
 

The BHA has long protested to the BBC about its failure to provide any explicitly humanist programmes, by contrast with the many hours of programmes that are explicitly religious, a high proportion of which consist of Christians preaching Christianity to their own followers. No programme has ever been broadcast on a national network in which humanists have been allowed directly to address humanists on Humanism. (The only possible exception would be the 1958 broadcasts by Margaret Knight on morals without religion, which created outrage at the time for the mere suggestion that morality could be independent of religious faith.) The BHA has also made representations to commercial television companies as occasion arises, for example over the series on the evangelical Christian so-called Alpha Course.

Thought for the Day is a religious slot that, coming in the middle of the Radio 4 Today programme, obtrudes itself on the general listener. It plainly proclaims to all and sundry five days a week that reflective thoughts on the events of the day come only from people with ‘a faith’. There are different views about the idea of a reflective slot in the middle of a current affairs programme: some see no place for it, others think it is a valuable interlude. But so long as it exists it is entirely unacceptable to exclude some speakers just because they are non-religious.

As John Humphrys wrote in the Sunday Times (18 August 2002): “[Listeners] may have little time for doctrinaire religious certainties, but they do want some sort of framework within which they can find their moral bearings. They are not satisfied with the rationality promoted by an uncompromising, secular, materialist world. They want an ethical interpretation: what is of real value; what is good; what is right and wrong? They do not believe you need a ‘faith perspective’ for an ethical view of the world”.

In August 2002, over 100 eminent persons, all of them Distinguished Supporters of the BHA, or Honorary Associates of the Rationalist Press Association or of the National Secular Society, signed a letter to the Governors of the BBC asking that occasionally Thought for the Day should have a secular or humanist speaker.

The BBC brushed the letter aside, first with a letter from the secretary to their Central Religious Advisory Council and then (when a formal reply from the Governors was requested) with a letter stating that the Governors were satisfied with the present policy. In June 2003 the Governors again confirmed their policy.  

The BHA will continue to press the case for Humanism on the air.


The text of the Distinguished Supporters' letter to BBC Governors about Thought for the Day:

To the BBC’s Governors

In a letter from the BBC’s Head of Religion & Ethics to the National Secular Society, the BBC has again refused to lift its ban on non-religious contributors to Radio 4’s Thought for the Day .

Calls for non-religious voices to be heard on this prime-time slot have been made repeatedly for well over thirty years, and it was even suggested that the change of title from Lift up your Hearts in 1970 presaged the removal of this discrimination, as Pause for Thought did with the World Service.  

The proportion of the population that does not consider itself to be religious has grown rapidly in recent decades to the 30-40% it is today. By resolutely maintaining the ban, the BBC is discriminating against the non-religious. The BBC is also laying itself open to the charge that it considers non-religious reflections on current moral issues unworthy of such a prestigious programme, and thus giving the impression of promot ing religion as the one source of ethics.

We call on BBC Governors to end this discrimination and include non-religious contributors on Thought for the Day .