Faith leaders have put forward criticisms to the House of Lord’s select committee considering the future of the BBC, accusing the television corporation of having an anti-religious attitude, reports the UK’s leading Hindu newspaper, the Hindustan Times.

|TOP|One member of the select committee, Lord Maxton, said, “religion is treated at the BBC with kid gloves and is rarely criticised”.

Lord Preston, also on the committee, described as ridiculous claims that the BBC was anti-religious. He conceded, however, that there was not enough knowledge about religion in the corporation.

“The media is full of people trying to fluff their way through very complicated matters,” he said.

Members of the committee were presented with evidence earlier in the week from representatives of the Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh faiths, all broadcasters and contributors to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, of how popular serials on the BBC like Eastenders ridicule religion.

Rev. Joel Edwards, the general director of the Evangelical Alliance UK and an honorary canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, criticised the BBC for what he called a “pervasive anti-religious attitude that works very vigorously in (its) editing suites”.

He added that “the interests of sensationalism” often took over in many of the BBC’s productions.

One select committee member, the Rt. Rev. Butler, said that without understanding of religion, “grave errors” have occurred about world affairs, adding that the BBC lacked sufficient “depth of knowledge” about religion, reports the Hindustan Times.

|QUOTE|Dr Ram Prasad Chakravarthi from the department of religious studies at the University of Lancaster said the anti-religious attitude is apparent in the way religion is featured in many of the BBC’s entertainment productions.

He said BBC soaps “tend to use stereotypes – the Christians are mad fundmentalists, the Hindus are in arranged marriages”.

Dr Chakravarthi also criticised the BBC for repeatedly making a fundamental error in reporting the India-Pakistan conflict as a clash of religions, owing to its reporters lacking an adequate understanding of the situation.

Dr Indarjit Singh, editor of the Sikh Messenger and patron of the World Congress of Faiths, cited Eastenders’ Dot Cotton as an example of the BBC’s misrepresentation of a person of faith.

“She quotes endlessly from the Bible and it ridicules (religion) to some extent,” said Singh.

“The BBC should look at the removal of ignorance about religion. We need to know and understand what essential beliefs are and how they contribute to society. The BBC should do a lot more of that. It is so easy in an atmosphere of ignorance for prejudice to arise,” he said.

Chair of the Scottish religious advisory committee, Dr Mona Siddiqui, urged the BBC to present religion in a way that people can identify with and to “make programmes about the way people live and believe”.

She also called on the BBC to produce programmes to demonstrate how religion “sits side-by-side in contemporary debates”.

Dr Siddiqui said: “People are hungry for real debate, they want to know how religion makes a person tick.”