Is the British media anti-Christian and anti-conservative? 

Robin Aitken

As a former Today programme journalist and author of two books on bias in the BBC, Robin Aitken MBE has been closer to the inner workings of the media giant than most of its critics. 

He tells Christian Today that the dominant worldview of UK journalists can lead them to misunderstand or ignore issues that are important to Christians around the world – especially the severe persecution of believers in some of the poorest countries around the world. 

For example, a recent massacre in the Democratic Republic of Congo was barely mentioned, and there has been limited reporting of the disturbing situation in northern Nigeria where Christians are regularly killed and kidnapped. 

Why do you think the persecution of Christians is under-reported in the media?

One explanation I’ve heard put forward is - coming from the position of a majority Christian culture, as our media does - the supposition is that Christians are part of the dominant world culture, and therefore are always in a stronger position than other religions. I think that’s profoundly mistaken in many ways. However British journalists, as a misplaced politeness almost, consider Christians to be in the driving seat. Therefore what persecution they suffer is of less interest than those who are viewed as more vulnerable minorities. 

There is another explanation that is more troubling. Within the media, most British journalists, in my experience, are either without religion or hostile to it. There are exceptions ... but there is a lot of hostility in sections of the media towards religion itself. That is manifested in a disregard and an uninterest in what happens to Christian minorities whose persecution doesn’t strike them with the same force as when other religious minorities are persecuted. 

A good example of that is the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar. There was a period where that occupied an awful lot of headline space for a while. What happened to the Rohingya was not pretty. But there are worse examples of the persecution of Christians still actually going on which don’t command any headlines at all, and you have to wonder why it is. 

There is no one simple explanation. It’s a multi-faceted thing. 

Some British journalists, having renounced their allegiance, then feel a residual animosity towards the position of the Church in England. The CofE is seen is part of the establishment, and is easily mocked.

Does a liberal, secular bias affect the media?

That general feeling of disdain for the CofE maybe colours journalistic responses to the persecution of Christians, if a journalist has renounced their faith, or left the faith, or felt mild hostility towards the idea of religion. That is something that is implanted during an upbringing by liberal parents, a background from which many journalists spring. 

You have an intelligentsia that is largely [hostile to] the CofE, and the Catholic Church too. If you come from that background, that of the well-educated middle class, the chances are you will not have been brought up with any respect for the Christian faith. So much of the indifference comes from a position of the purest ignorance [about religion] on the part of journalists. 

There are lots of journalists who know about politics and economics, but the amount of religious understanding is woefully inadequate. I remember working once with a BBC producer and we were doing a series of films about the ordination of women. As we were driving around the country, she had absolutely zero knowledge of the period of monasticism in Britain. Monasticism was for centuries a civilising influence in the country, and it was the repository of what education was available. It started, preserved, and maintained a tradition of literacy and learning, at a time when there was no-one else doing that. She had no knowledge of that at all. I think that’s the case for many young journalists.

It’s extraordinary that the history of Christian persecution - such as that under communism – is often unknown. There are many brave stories of persecution that are unheard outside of the Church. 

We’ve internalised the idea of communist persecution of Christians so it has become a ‘oh yes and they persecuted Christianity’ but that is something that is not actually recognised. The beating heart of communism was its rejection of Christian faith. The same is true of the deep-set anti-religious fervour of the revolutionaries in France in 1789, another instance where the real visceral hostility towards Christianity was the main motivations of the revolution, and similarly in Spain in the 1930s. 

The murder of religious nuns and priests in Spain was widespread and ferocious and accounted for an awful lot of deaths. The Spanish Civil War is usually portrayed in terms of the struggle between Republicanism and a monarchist right wing. But of course some of the main casualties in that conflict were religious men and women carrying on their religious lives in Spain. 

Another aspect of this is the historic hostility towards Catholicism in England, which does complicate things. There are still plenty of people in this country where you can still uncover quite a visceral dislike of Roman Catholicism and that is something that is embedded in our national history. The Spanish Armada, for example, even in these ignorant times, people know something of that. 

Does a negative perception of right wing politics and its association with Christianity play a role?

If you divide the political firmament into broadly two camps, progressive and non-progressive, in the progressive camp, the liberal left sees and rightly identifies the orthodox Christians as their natural opponents. So the things that progressives have stood for, things like abortion, easy divorce, the tolerance of sexual laxity, those things are all of course opposed for humane reasons by Christians because we see those things as antithetical to human flourishing. 

Within the BBC certainly, most staff in the BBC are drawn from a particular demographic – they are young, highly educated and they incline left. That’s true of the whole cohort. That’s because of their formation in an education system that is dominated by progressive thinking. They rightly discern their opponents as Christians on these matters. 

When I reflect on my own attitude to Christians before I converted, I think I was very hostile to US evangelicalism in particular, because I was left wing at the time. 

In America the Christian right actually organised itself politically in a way that hasn’t happened in many other countries, certainly not Britain. What happened in America is that the evangelical movement in America was initially, back in the 70s, not terribly interested in the abortion issue. They became influenced by the Catholic opposition to abortion. It became an issue where among the mid-Western evangelicals – often cited by media types who report on these matters – there was a definite move towards an anti-abortion position. That was then seen by the politicians on the right as a wedge issue that could peel off the supporters on that specific issue. 

We then have the odd situation of people who consider themselves orthodox, upright Christians supporting Trump, a man who you would think would be disqualified of their support due to his back story, who has broken all the rules. And yet he won the support of all these God-fearing Christians. Within an organisation like the BBC, it became political shorthand to describe the “Christian right”. But in what sense is being opposed to abortion right wing? What does right wing mean? The problem in the BBC is that anything which can be categorised as right wing or populist - the two terms are promiscuously bandied around - the BBC is against, because they are overwhelmingly on the side of ‘progress’, albeit progress that many of us have described as backwards. 

From my own experience, I think it’s very hard for people on the left to understand the perspective of conservatives, even if they are trying to be fair and unbiased.

Many BBC journalists strive to be impartial and to live up to the core doctrine of the BBC. But impartiality is a very tough thing to ask of people. We ask it of judges, and I’m not sure they live up to that doctrine. It’s almost impossible for a thinking adult to divorce themselves entirely from their core beliefs. I can’t, and I don’t think many people can. The only way of correcting that imbalance in our media coverage is to ensure there are equal numbers of left and right wing people in your organisation. That would be a very difficult thing to achieve. 

There is a deep set and structural imbalance in the media, which is dominated by highly educated people who have had their political and psychological formation under the tutelage of progressive opinion in the universities and schools. 

There’s a bias – in a materialistic culture the secular majority does not understand what we use among ourselves as Christians to explain the world and the way it is. Our belief in a God, a Creator, in that which is ineffable and spiritual, and in the realm of the supernatural, that language and vocabulary does not sit right in the media’s representation of the world as it is. 

So there is no vocabulary in the general media, to explain what it is that motivates those people who die for their faith. To a secular leftist, someone who dies because they are attached to a belief in an understanding of a Creator God – they think that we Christians and others are simply deluded, and that our understanding of the world is deformed by an attachment to what they consider to be superstitious nonsense. 

To us, there can be no understanding of the world without acknowledgement of a Creator God, and to what God has explained to us is the right way to live. Bridging that gulf is difficult in reality, and in language it’s difficult too. A bunch of secular journalists sitting in a TV newsroom, is perfectly comfortable dealing with the nuts and bolts of left-right politics. They are unable to explain the motivation of people who have religious belief. 

To what extent does the BBC’s attempts to be impartial and fair to all religions lead them to misunderstand stories of Christian persecution?

The film Of Gods and Men [about a group of monks who were murdered in Algeria, choosing to stay there despite the danger] confronted people with this episode where these men decided to die because they wanted to remain true to their beliefs. That of course is why martyrdom – those sorts of acts of witness - do I’m sure, bring people to an understanding of the truth. Sacrifice in that way is superhuman, it’s to do with the supernatural. 

The whole of the difference between Islam and Christianity can in a way be illustrated by the different use of the word ‘martyr’. In the Christian faith martyrdom is reserved for those who die for their faith willingly and helplessly in the face of hatred and power. In contemporary Islam, martyrs are people who go into places where there are innocent people unconnected with power, and they kill themselves and other people, which is a wicked and murderous thing to do. Those two uses of the word “martyr” tell us a lot about the differences in the two religions. 

If you don’t understand the difference between the religions, why should you discriminate against one rather than the other? If you perceive all to be superstitious nonsense, why should Christians be privileged? But all religions are not equal, and the flaws in Islam should be obvious to any thinking liberal, but [they can’t see them] because they’re blinded by their hostility to Christianity. Not because we as individual Christians are superior, but because how God has told us to treat others is a universal good. 

Robin Aitken has raised the question of why Christian persecution is ignored with leading thinkers on the podcast he hosts, The New Humanum, and via a documentary for the New Culture Forum.

Heather Tomlinson is a freelance Christian writer. Find her work at https://heathertomlinson.substack.com or via X (twitter) @heathertomli