COULD BROADCAST DEREGULATION BOOST CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY?

All of us who are orthodox Christians and licence fee payers have an interest in the BBC's coverage of our faith. And the fact is inescapable that the coverage of the Pope's robust comments about aggressive secularism, the dictatorship of cultural relativism, and the marginalisation of Christianity showed just how liberal-dominated the BBC's religious affairs offering normally is.

During the pre-visit negotiations between the BBC and the Vatican, the Pope was offered a slot on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day. The Vatican's rejection of this proposal, made earlier this year when the Pope's State visit was expected to be an embarrassing flop, proved a very wise move indeed.

If the Pope had agreed to be slotted into Thought for the Day, that would have put him on a par with the religious liberals who normally dominate that platform. His voice would have been lost in the hubbub.

As it happened, by using the platforms that he did, the Pope took the initiative and ensured that his counter-cultural statements got maximum broadcast coverage. The state broadcaster had no choice but to allow him to set the agenda.

But now it is back to business as usual with the innocuous homilies of the Radio 4 slot and the bland platitudes emanating from a cheery vicar or vicaress on Radio 2 amidst the frivolous banter with the presenter. We the listening public are never told the truth that we are great sinners in desperate need of a great Saviour. Which raises the question: how would the cause of Christ fare in the broadcast media if the BBC were broken up and its constituent parts sold to private enterprise?

If commercial media groups were granted greater access to terrestrial analogue and digital broadcasting, would the moral content get significantly worse than it already is on BBC1 or 2 or on the corporation's digital channels?

The liberal Oxbridge elite who revolutionised the ethos of the BBC in the 1960s were crusaders for the permissive society. They were not persuaded by Rubert Murdoch's Sun newspaper superciliously to dismiss Mary Whitehouse’s Christian-inspired concerns about the deteriorating moral content of the corporation’s output.

If the coalition government were to make a public service educational provision a condition of the sale, that could open up a tremendous opportunity for Evangelicals. Media groups that own newspapers as well as TV stations have a vested commercial interest in programming that promotes reading. Evangelicals share that concern as well, not in the cause of Mammon but because literacy enables Bible reading.

What are the chances of a programme ever appearing on the BBC written and presented by the Anglican Evangelical Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Dr Richard Turnbull, based on his new and quite excellent biography of the 19th century Evangelical social reformer, the Earl of Shaftesbury?

As for the argument that deregulation would open up the airwaves to crackpot fundamentalist ranting and donation-soliciting as in the US, the fact is that there is not a market for that sort of thing in the UK. Furthermore, liberalisation would summon up a beefed-up broadcasting standards authority with sharper legal teeth.

Cranmer's Curate may be naive in thinking this, but he believes new commercial broadcasters entering the market could be significantly more open to programmes produced by robustly orthodox Christians than the subsidised media monolith currently spewing out political correctness.

This piece by Cranmer's Curate about business as usual in PC Britain post-Pope appeared on the US-based orthodox Anglican news service VirtueOnline:.