Christians and humanists went head to head in a debate this week on whether the BBC’s Thought for the Day broadcast should be opened up to non-religious speakers.

The slot on Radio 4 has traditionally been reserved for speakers from a faith background to share their reflections on the big issues of the day, but humanists say they have an equal right to the airtime because the BBC is a public service provider.

Ariane Sherine, who teamed up with God Delusion author Richard Dawkins for an atheist bus campaign earlier this year, said religious people were already “regularly and fully” represented on broadcast media with programmes like Songs of Praise, Beyond Belief, and Moral Maze, while humanists and atheists had been “marginalised”.

“I am very happy for the BBC to represent religious people but there is no reason why they should be represented and non-religoius people shouldn’t,” she said.

“We want the right for our voices to be heard. We have ideas to put across that are equally inspirational, moving and thoughtful to those of anyone else.”

Fellow humanist speaker Andrew Copson, of the British Humanist Association, said that opening up Thought for the Day to non-religious speakers was an issue of “balance and fairness”.

By excluding humanists from the slot, he said, “the heavy impression is given that such people have no insights or views to contribute to the questions that religious people are invited to contribute to”.

The Bishop of Croydon, the Rt Rev Nick Baines, argued that Thought for the Day should remain distinctively religious because the majority of programmes on BBC Radio were secular.

“Thought for the Day is a window on the world from a religious perspective that does not come anywhere else,” he said.

“Radio 4 is full of secular voices and atheist voices … If you want balance and fairness then every programme that comes on ought to have a religious worldview because most of the world is that way.”

The Rev Canon Giles Fraser, canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral and a regular on Thought for the Day, said the slot would lose its distinctiveness if it were opened up to non-religious guests.

“I don’t think that humanists haven’t got anything to say,” he said. “Of course they’ve got lots of things to say but I think we need to retain the distinctiveness (of the slot) otherwise it will become like any other comment piece that we find is ubiquitous in the media.”

The motion for debate at the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity was "this house believes that humanist speakers should be included in BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day".

It comes as the BBC Trust considers whether non-religious people should be included on Thought for the Day.