But has there been a reduction in religious broadcasting?
According to Nigel Holmes, a former BBC senior local radio producer and lay member of the Synod, who put down the motion, the BBC has cut its religious television output over the past 20 years from 177 hours to 155 hours a year.
Is that such a big cut?
Holmes makes the point that the broadcasting environment has changed out of all recognition over those two decades and the BBC, with its large family of channels, has doubled its general programming in the same period. For its part the BBC argues that its charter only requires it to make 110 hours of religious programming and the intention this year is to broadcast 164 hours, including Oxford history professor Diarmaid MacCulloch’s ambitious six-part series for BBC4, A History of Christianity. Even Holmes accepts that BBC radio controllers “have been very supportive of religion”.
McCulloch’s program, although admittedly high-profile, is in some sense *about* religion but hardly “religious”. In fact he makes it pretty clear that he doesn’t believe a word of it and is at best a “candid friend” of Christianity.