The Church can no longer demand automatic rights

For a religion that prizes humility and doing good in secret, Christians – at least in this country – seem very wedded to the idea that they should have a guaranteed front-row seat in society. The BBC broadcaster and practising Catholic Adrian Chiles is only the latest to grumble that Aunty has become an atheist in her old age and does not give Christians nearly enough airtime. They feel “completely forgotten”, he says, although he is careful to add that it is not just the Church that suffers from this terrible lack of exposure.

It is a strange complaint from Mr Chiles, given that he is about to present a new religious series on BBC2, but the lament is an old one. The last Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, demanded a meeting with the then Director-General, Mark Thompson, in 2009 to complain about the corporation’s alleged neglect of its Christian audience. His predecessor, Lord Carey, banged the same drum on an even more regular basis, routinely accusing the government as well as the BBC of actively marginalising Christians and pushing a secular agenda.

The BBC should robustly dismiss this twaddle. The days when Sunday night schedules on television were clogged up with syrupy religious shows are long gone and these programmes were canned because only a small minority of viewers got much out of them.

The BBC has to cater to the audience it has, not to some imagined vision of Britain that lives on only in the Church’s imagination. The “sea of faith that once girdled the earth” has been receding for a long time in Britain. Matthew Arnold wrote those words back in the 1860s, and it has been downhill all the way since then. If Christians want more attention on the BBC – or anywhere else for that matter – they need to become more numerous. More airtime would then be a right, not a privilege.