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Mishal Husain: It’s ten to eight and time for ‘Thought for the Day’. With us in the studio this morning is our speaker John Humphrys. Good morning John.
JH: Good morning Mishal and good morning Martha and may I say what a great privilege it is to be allowed to fill this hallowed slot after so many years of merely introducing it …
And that, to the relief of millions of listeners no doubt, is where my ‘Thought’ would have to end. I would be allowed to go no further. I would be banned, disqualified, forbidden from offering whatever thoughts I might have in this, the most protected three minutes on radio. I do not have the qualifications demanded. Nor do many more who are far better equipped than me to offer the nation their thoughts.
Even so I’ve always rather fancied doing a ‘Thought’. After half a lifetime of asking questions, always demanding to know what other people might think and why, the prospect of playing the wise teacher holds a certain appeal. Even better to be playing the preacher. Perhaps a latter-day Martin Luther King, inspiring my audience to dream great dreams. Perhaps a kinder, gentler version of Savonarola driving out corruption with my fiery rhetoric. Not that I’m much in favour of burning books, and the prospect of ending up being hanged and burned holds little appeal. And anyway I have no idea what I would say.
If I were a Christian I’d have no problem with that aspect of it. I would choose one of the more interesting news developments of the previous few days – preferably something that poses a profound moral dilemma – and tell the audience how Jesus would have dealt with it. I would then exhort my many listeners to behave likewise. Similarly if I were a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Sikh or a Hindu or a member of any other religion. There are an awful lot of gods out there to believe in – the Hindus alone have millions, though only four main ones so that’s not too bad. But my problem is that I don’t know what any of them would have done because I do not believe in any of them. I am an atheist. And that disqualifies me – and everyone else who happens not to believe in one god or another – from presenting ‘Thought for the Day’.
That is absurd. In fact it’s worse than absurd. It is – to use the word that causes every right-on boss in the BBC to quake in his shoes – discriminatory. Whoops … let that last sentence be struck from the record! Even as I typed it I could hear the sirens of the Thought Police squad car screaming around the corner into my street, pulling up outside my house, blue light flashing. My crime? I typed ‘his’ when I know perfectly well that some bosses are men and some are women and some are (probably) trans. In the modern BBC that’s probably enough to get me sacked. Fair enough. Discrimination is, after all, a bad thing. So how come the BBC is allowed to discriminate between those who have been blessed with the gift of faith and those who, like me, have had it cruelly snatched away from them?
Let’s remind ourselves what it’s called. It is ‘Thought for the Day’. It is not ‘Religious Thought for the Day’, let alone ‘Sermon for the Day’. It’s perfectly reasonable that the Sunday Worship programme on Radio 4 should be all about religion. The clue is in the title and if I don’t want to join in the worship, which I don’t, I can go elsewhere. Equally, the Sunday programme, presented by the brilliant Edward Stourton, is based on religion and I often listen to that (I almost said ‘listen religiously’) because it’s thoughtful and raises interesting questions. But, again, it’s a stand-alone programme. We know where it’s coming from and what informs it.
‘Thought for the Day’ is not. It is plonked into the middle of a news programme when the audience is at its peak and consists of millions of people who are listening to Today because they want to find out what’s going on in the world. Not because they want to be preached at.
That’s not to say there aren’t lots of listeners who welcome a few minutes of calm reflection. As Tony Blair once said in another context, I bear the scars on my back from all those listeners I have upset by sounding off about it.
It was probably twenty-five years after I’d joined Today that I first summoned up the courage to go public and suggest that maybe we should have second thoughts about ‘Thought’. I might as well have suggested burning all Christians at the stake. I gave up counting the letters of protest – almost always letters rather than emails, incidentally, which may or may not suggest something about its defenders. Either way, there are an awful lot of listeners who would, it seems, willingly go to the stake themselves to retain ‘TFTD’.
It is not, though, popular with most presenters, producers and editors. Barring royal deaths and the intervention of big bosses, the editor has the last word over what goes into Today and how it is treated. But not when it comes to ‘TFTD’. It’s the one segment of the programme where the journalists who work on it have no say whatsoever. The editor does not get to decide who presents it nor what subject it addresses, let alone whether the ‘thinker’ is a reasonably competent broadcaster. All of that is the prerogative of the Religion & Ethics department in Manchester.
If it sometimes sounds more like a party political broadcast than a religious tract, so be it. It matters not a jot whether the editor or producers think it is brilliant or boring, witty or witless, stimulating or soporific. There is nothing they can do about it.
Stranger still is that even the contributors do not always get the last word as to what they say. That right also goes to R&E and they defend it as fiercely as a grizzly bear facing a hunter trying to steal her cub.
Many past Today editors have come a cropper when they have tried confronting the Religion department. One of them decided back in the 1990s that, rather than try to appeal over their heads to senior management, he would unearth the evidence to prove that most listeners thought it was a turn-off – literally in many cases. So he commissioned a survey of listeners. The ostensible reason was to find out what they most liked and disliked about the programme, what should be allocated more time and what should get less. The real motive was to amass the ammunition which could be used to blow ‘Thought’ off the air. It failed miserably.
We had all been convinced that ‘TFTD’ would be given the thumbs down by the majority of those we surveyed. Instead the message was clear and consistent. Cut back on boring politicians who never answer the questions anyway. Don’t bother with company results and most other business news unless it’s something to do with the price of electricity. Don’t keep speculating about the Budget on Budget day when we will know exactly what’s in it in a few hours’ time. Even, God forbid, give the racing tips a well-earned rest. But leave ‘Thought for the Day’ alone – or else! So much for our faith in surveys.
The next editor tried a different tactic. If we can’t dump it, he suggested, maybe we could just trim it a little. In those days it ran for four minutes. Why don’t we cut it back to three and see if anyone notices? So we did … and they noticed. It’s one thing to be brave in the face of adversity; it’s quite another – as our editor learned – to place your head in a noose and invite someone to kick away the chair on which you’re standing. In other words, the Wiltshire Banana went bonkers. I may need to explain that.
In July 1925 the world’s first long-wave transmitting station was opened. It brought the total audience within listening range to ninety-four per cent of the population. The idea of a national broadcaster had become a reality. Seventy years later it was obsolete – defeated by the upstart FM. But there were still a few areas where FM could not penetrate and one of those was in Wiltshire. The area was shaped more or less like a banana and its inhabitants loved Radio 4 – or the Home Service as they probably still called it. When they learned that they were to lose their long-wave signal they decided to protest. They marched on Broadcasting House.
These days the merest whisper of a protest outside the BBC means pretty much total shutdown. The police arrive. The barricades go up. The staff are given instructions as to how to enter and leave the building and what to do if they are captured and held hostage until the protesters’ demands have been met. It can only be a matter of time before all staff are issued with flak jackets. It was different when the Wiltshire Banana first staged a protest.
When they arrived at Broadcasting House they were welcomed by the polite receptionist and invited in for a nice cup of tea and a chat with one of the bosses. Then they went home again. Job done. They may not have won a promise that the BBC would spend millions keeping the world’s last long-wave transmitter operating so that they could listen to The Archers without any irritating squeaks and squawks, but they had made their point. They had proved they were a force to be reckoned with. No sane editor would risk their wrath over ‘Thought for the Day’.
I have long been in the dog house with millions of listeners because I do not approve of it. They sum up my views as follows.
‘It is invariably boring, sanctimonious, poorly presented by religious zealots out of touch with the real world and is roughly thirty years past its sell-by date. It should be dumped forthwith and more room freed up for pointless political interviews so that preening presenters like me can parade our prejudices before an audience that is yearning for a few minutes’ respite: a few minutes of reflection; a few minutes to think more elevated thoughts.’
Some of that may be true, but not all of it and not all the time. What follows is a ‘Thought’ delivered by the former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, in November 2017:
Good morning.
Coming in to Broadcasting House this morning I saw for the first time the statue, unveiled this week, of George Orwell, with its inscription on the wall behind, ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ How badly we need that truth today.
I’ve been deeply troubled by what seems to me the assault on free speech taking place in British universities in the name of ‘safe space’, ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘micro-aggressions’, meaning any remark that someone might find offensive even if no offence is meant. So far has this gone that a month ago, students at an Oxford college banned the presence of a representative of the Christian Union on the grounds that some might find their presence alienating and offensive. Luckily the protest that followed led to the ban being swiftly overturned. But still …
I’m sure this entire movement was undertaken for the highest of motives, to protect the feelings of the vulnerable, which I applaud, but you don’t achieve that by silencing dissenting views. A safe space is the exact opposite: a place where you give a respectful hearing to views opposed to your own, knowing that your views too will be listened to respectfully. That’s academic freedom and it’s essential to a free society.
And it’s what I learned at university. My doctoral supervisor, the late Sir Bernard Williams, was an atheist. I was a passionate religious believer. But he always listened respectfully to my views, which gave me the confidence to face those who disagree with everything I stand for. Now that’s safety in an unsafe world.
And it’s at the very heart of my faith, because Judaism is a tradition all of whose canonical texts are anthologies of arguments. In the Bible, Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah and Job argue with God. The rabbinic literature is an almost endless series of Rabbi X says this and Rabbi Y says that, and when one rabbi had the chance of asking God who was right, God replied, they’re both right. ‘How can they both be right?’ asked the rabbi, to which God’s apocryphal reply was: ‘You’re also right.’ The rabbis called this ‘arguments for the sake of heaven’.
Why does it matter? Because truth emerges from disagreement and debate. Because tolerance means making space for difference. Because justice involves ‘audi alteram partem’, listening to the other side. And because, in Orwell’s words, liberty means ‘the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’.
I wish every listener had been able to sit opposite Jonathan as I did while he was delivering those words. It was like watching a revivalist preacher, but without the histrionics and the nonsense. His passion and his belief are palpable. He frowns with concentration and sometimes with frustration, seemingly directed at the inadequacy of mere words to express what he believes. He clenches his fist – almost in anger at himself because he feels what he is saying is so important and he’s not doing it justice. But of course he is. If I were forced to make the case for ‘Thought for the Day’ in only two words they would be: Jonathan Sacks. And if I had to pick a few of his ‘Thoughts’ that made the case for it, this would be one of those near the top of my list.
It was everything that ‘Thought’ should be. Jonathan took a current topic of supreme importance in a democracy – freedom of speech and, specifically, academic freedom – and he argued his case with fluency and wit. He didn’t presume to tell us what God thought – he’d be appalled at the notion – but he did tell us how he had reached his own faith. He didn’t patronise the listeners or preach at them. He told them what he thought about one of the great issues of our day – and he made us think.
Why would anyone want to get rid of something like that? I know I wouldn’t. My problem is that for every Jonathan Sacks out there there’s at least one Alan Bennett. I’m thinking, of course, of a very young Alan Bennett and his brilliant sketch in the 1960s Beyond the Fringe. Bennett played the well-meaning young vicar struggling with the meaning of life in his weekly sermon:
You know … life … life … it’s rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all of us looking for the key. Some of us – some of us – think we’ve found the key, don’t we? We roll back the lid of the sardine tin of life, we reveal the sardines, the riches of life, therein and we get them out, we enjoy them. But, you know, there’s always a little piece in the corner that you can’t get out. I wonder … I wonder, is there a little piece in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine.
Brilliant satire – and naturally I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that any of our ‘thinkers’ has ever been quite so crass or (more’s the pity) quite so funny. But too many of them manage to get horribly close to Bennett’s young vicar. They seem to feel they must draw both a moral and religious lesson from everyday events. You know the sort of thing. There will be a story in the news about some so-called celebrity who has made a fool of himself with his high-and-mighty behaviour and our thinker will use his example to tell us that Jesus was so humble he washed his disciples’ feet before the Passover dinner. So maybe we should all just get out there and start washing people’s feet – whether they want us to or not. Very enlightening.
It was that sort of thing I had in mind when I made the great mistake of telling the Radio Times as part of a long interview that ‘Thought’ was ‘very very boring’. The wrath of God descended on me. Or at least, the wrath of Dr Giles Fraser, which is pretty much the same thing.
Giles, as it happens, is another one of Today’s thinkers worth listening to. He’s clever, articulate, often funny and nearly always angry. You tend not to get homilies and promises of salvation with Giles so much as dire warnings of what will happen if we don’t change our ways. In the many years I have known and liked him Giles has never been exactly one of those ‘turn the other cheek’ Christians. Quite the opposite. He belongs to the militant wing – the left-leaning militant wing. He often used the weekly column he once wrote for the Guardian to savage those who do not share his views of the way the world should be run – and why not? The world needs people who care and aren’t afraid to say so no matter who they might offend or what might be the cost to them. Giles is one of those who puts principle before power – and has paid a price for it.
He held the imposing title of canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in 2011, at a time when anti-capitalist protesting was all the rage. A group of activists calling themselves ‘Occupy London’ staged a protest in the City calling for an alternative to our ‘unjust and undemocratic’ system. When they weren’t allowed to camp outside the Stock Exchange they pitched their tents just outside St Paul’s Cathedral, causing much inconvenience to all and sundry. After ten days Giles’s superiors decided they had to be moved – by force if necessary – and he resigned in protest.
As I write he is the parish priest at St Mary’s Newington, a rather more downmarket area of London where, I suspect, he’s more at home ministering to his flock than he was in the splendour of one of the world’s great cathedrals. Both ministering to his flock and taking a pop whenever the opportunity arises at yours truly.
It must be said, he has a nice turn of phrase. When he attacked me over my Radio Times interview he said I had delivered my ‘Thought’ comments ‘with all the critical sophistication of a slovenly adolescent squirming his way through morning prayer’. It was, moreover, indicative of my ‘assumed superiority … as if there is something about religious belief and religious believers that is not really worthy of his attention or interest’. And, just in case we hadn’t got the message, he accused metropolitan liberals (like me apparently) of thinking that religion is ‘beneath them’ and is not something to be ‘taken seriously’.
Now that’s the one that really hurt. Because I do. I take religion very seriously indeed. And Giles knows that I do. So seriously that I wrote a book about it in 2012 – which would be a curious thing to do for someone who regarded God as unworthy of attention. And guess who went to considerable time and trouble to help me with it – for no greater reward than a bowl of my (admittedly superior) home-made soup and my sincere thanks in the acknowledgements? Yup. Giles Fraser. We spent many hours in my kitchen arguing about religion and it’s partly down to those conversations that the book got its title: In God We Doubt: Confessions of a Failed Atheist.
Note that. It was not For God We Have Contempt: The Final Proof that Atheists are Right. I used the word ‘doubt’ because if I believe in anything it is that we do not know and never will know who or what God might be. Assuming, obviously, such an entity exists. We can be pretty sure that the God described in the Old Testament does not – and that if he did he’d be a nasty piece of work. Unless, of course, you happened to be an Israelite in which case he looked after you rather well. Either way, we can be entirely confident that the Genesis version of how the universe came into being is codswallop.
And yes, I know any halfway competent theologian would make mincemeat of my glib objections. Only the most extreme fundamentalist believes the Bible is literally true. But you don’t need a theology degree to point out one obvious flaw in the God scenario. Faith is something that cannot be proved. If it could be proved it would be science. And if it could be proved scientifically you would not need faith. You would need only to study the evidence. So faith, by definition, is something that can be acquired or, perhaps, granted – but not proved.
It is also indisputable that there are vast numbers of people who do believe and have held on to that belief. And this is what really puzzles me.
Let’s assume that faith is a gift – which is a reasonable assumption because the Church endlessly tells us so. And forgive me if I concentrate here on the Christian faith – partly because this is a reflection on ‘Thought for the Day’, which has more Christian speakers than others, and also because it is the ‘established’ religion of this country. Let’s also assume that it is in God’s power to grant that gift.
Maybe, like St Paul, you are going about your business one minute and then the next minute Jesus appears to you in a divine revelation. You are now a Christian. You have been blessed with faith in Jesus. Or, to use a more topical illustration, perhaps you happen to be listening to ‘Thought for the Day’ one morning and the speaker says something that ignites the divine spark in your brain and you become a believer. You are a born-again Christian. Who knows? It might well have happened, given how long it’s been running.
My question is why some are blessed with the gift of faith and others are not. Obviously you don’t have to be good to be blessed. Paul himself did some pretty nasty things to Christians before God showed him the error of his ways. And, rather more recently, we’ve had far too much evidence that ‘devout’ Catholic priests were doing evil things when they weren’t actually worshipping God. Like abusing children.
So faith clearly cannot be earned. It seems entirely arbitrary. In fact it’s much more pernicious than that. Isn’t God meant to be fair or, to use a word deployed incessantly by priests, ‘just’? If that is so, why are vast numbers of people denied a decent life reasonably free from suffering and, into the bargain, denied the gift of faith? Why are some deemed more worthy than others? Certainly it’s true that many people lead exemplary lives and it’s fair enough that they should be rewarded by God. But what of those who never had a chance?
What of the child born into squalor who never knew his father and whose mother is a drug addict and does not know the meaning of that most precious of all states: love? How can you express love if you have never experienced it? His only role models are other desperately deprived, unloved youngsters who teach him that the way to lead a good life – or at least a better life – is to arm yourself with a knife, steal what you need and avenge yourself on a society to which you owe nothing. He’s probably never been in a church in his life, except maybe to try to steal something.
Is it his fault, when he lies bleeding to death in a gutter after a rival gang caught him on their patch, that he has not been blessed with the gift of faith? At least he might then have found comfort in the knowledge that he could be on his way to heaven? But of course he can’t. He does not believe in God. He has no faith. Is that his fault? As I wrote earlier, I once asked Margaret Thatcher how she described the essence of Christianity and she said ‘choice’. I wonder what choice that child had. And if God does exist, how unfair to be denied faith in him. How much more fulfilling life must be for those with an unshakeable faith.
It’s true that being a devout believer carries with it some obligations – maybe modest stuff like going to church every Sunday morning or helping raise money to mend the church spire. Maybe, at the other end of the scale, giving up all the comforts of a middle-class Western lifestyle and living in some godforsaken corner of sub-Saharan Africa. Or taking their medical skills to a country torn apart by civil war and risking their lives to save injured children. Or maybe slaughtering the infidels who refuse to share their own faith. What they all have in common is the comfort of knowing they will be rewarded in the afterlife.
For lost souls like the boy dying in the gutter there is no such comfort.
My own mother was a good Christian and she took it for granted that her children would grow up in her faith. I did my best. I desperately wanted to believe too. I was enthusiastic about being confirmed in the Church in Wales when I was fourteen and I even wrote my own prayer book as part of my confirmation preparations. Then I decided that I really needed to understand the Bible, so I read it. Every last page of it from cover to cover. What a spectacular waste of time that proved to be. True there is some wonderful, poetic writing (entirely unappreciated by my young self) and some pretty good storytelling. But most of it struck me as pure nonsense with about as much relevance to the modern world as a horse and carriage has for a space traveller.
I did learn (though not from the Bible) that Christianity had bestowed some benefits on my compatriots. On our rare holiday excursions to west Wales, where there were many more sheep than humans, I was told that in the old days human urine was an important part of the process of preparing the raw wool for spinners. Locals were paid a penny a gallon – unless they were Methodists, in which case they were paid twopence. Their urine was deemed purer because they drank no alcohol.
My faith, such as it was, did not last long into adulthood. Every Sunday of my childhood I had been told why I should believe in God. He was all-powerful. He was all-loving. He was all-merciful. He heard us when we prayed to him. He answered our prayers. I was twenty-three when I began to think that we had been sold a false prospectus. My epiphany – a strange word in this context perhaps – dawned in Aberfan.
I have written earlier in this book about that terrible tragedy. It was not the greatest disaster in scale that I have ever witnessed as a journalist. One small school in one small village. I have reported on earthquakes and wars and famines around the world that have killed countless thousands. But if Stalin, one of history’s greatest mass murderers, got anything right it was his claim that the death of a million is a statistic; the death of one is a tragedy. At Aberfan only 144 died. Only?
Most of them – 116 – were children. As I wrote earlier, they had been buried alive under that obscene avalanche of mud and rock that had roared down the hillside only a few minutes after they had settled down at their desks. Their fathers were nearly all miners. They had been going about their work deep beneath their school digging out yet more coal, yet more waste to add to the tip that would destroy the school. Destroy their lives. Deep though they were they heard the roar and they knew what it meant and they raced to the surface. Nothing could have prepared them for the horror of what awaited them.
To drive your spade or your pick into that foul mess knowing that it might strike the body of the human being you loved most in the world. To stand motionless holding your breath when someone thought they might have heard a child cry out. You had to wonder how could any human withstand such agony? These men seemed to me to be superhuman.
And how could God have allowed it to happen? Where was that much-vaunted mercy? What love had been shown to those blameless children? To their digging, weeping fathers atop their grave? To their mothers huddled in groups watching that awful tableau? Most were beyond tears. The tears would come later.
These were decent, hard-working, God-fearing, chapel-going people. I had known some of them for years. I could not weep for them – not then and not later when I watched their tiny coffins being carried into the chapel when there was no hope of finding another child alive. After all, I was a journalist. I was doing my job. Journalists are not meant to weep. You have to get on with the job. I hated myself for that. And I hated this God for allowing it to happen. Yet how can anyone hate a god they do not believe exists?
This was a conversation I was to have many times over the years to come with the great and the good, prime ministers and prelates and, much more importantly, with those who had every reason to hate God but did not: the bereaved mothers and fathers of Aberfan. Surely what had happened to their innocent children must have shattered their belief in an all-powerful and merciful God?
For some, it had. But for many others it was their faith that had got them through the agony and despair of their terrible grief. Of course there was anger too. The anger of the grieving fathers, experienced miners who had warned their superiors that the tip was unstable and a danger to their children. But also anger in their village at the arbitrary nature of that disaster.
I talked some years later to one mother who had lost her daughter. She told me that she had been angry with herself. How could that possibly be? In the weeks after the tragedy, she said, she had been unable to leave her house in case she saw a child walking in the village.
‘Because it would bring back the memory of the child you had lost?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said, ‘because of the resentment I would feel towards the child’s mother. Why was her daughter spared when mine was taken?’
I am sometimes asked what it is like to have been a foreign correspondent who must, inevitably, witness suffering on a scale that most can only imagine or can view only through the sanitising prism of a television screen. The awful truth is that you become hardened to it. Both hardened and angry.
Why are these men dropping bombs or firing rockets on totally innocent people trying to live decent lives? Why are these earthquake victims, who have lost everything they possess in a few minutes of disbelieving horror, now facing a future of misery, knowing their corrupt rulers will grow even richer stealing so much of the aid sent to help them?
Why are these children starving to death when there is more than enough food on this planet for everyone?
You watch a child being weighed at a medical station in the heart of a famine area. His hair is ginger, his stomach swollen, his arms and legs like sticks. You can count every rib. His mouth is distorted into a rictus grin because the flesh on his face is pulled so tight. It is the face of a very old man. You are told he is four years old and is beyond help. He will die very soon. Probably tonight. So of course you feel anger. Guilt too when you think of your own four-year-old and the life he can expect to enjoy.
You watch the relief planes fly very low over a dirt strip that is too short for them to land so they push the bags of rice out through the loading doors. Some burst, and hordes of children descend on the spilled rice, picking up single grains until they have a handful and then running off with it before the men can chase them away. And you think of the meal you will soon be eating in your hotel that night and how you complained last night because it wasn’t exactly what you had ordered.
It is the single isolated incidents that stay with you. I stupidly tried to give a couple of hungry children in Ethiopia some cereal bars I had in my bag and there was an immediate riot. The men waded in, delivering hard smacks to the heads of the dozens more children who had arrived within seconds.
I stopped the car on a dirt road in Sudan on the outskirts of Khartoum to talk to a woman who was walking, very slowly, with her three emaciated children. They had been begging in the city. It was a two-hour walk from her village. Two hours there and two hours back at the end of the day. I asked how much she had raised. She thrust her bony hand into the pocket of her frayed smock and showed me. A few crumpled notes. Perhaps fifty pence. My film crew and I gave her what cash we had and our local guide shook his head in disapproval. ‘That will be stolen from her when she gets to her village,’ he told us.
Thirty-eight years after Aberfan, when I had long since stopped reporting on the ground and retreated to the comfort of a London studio, a group of heavily armed Islamic terrorists attacked and occupied a school in the Russian town of Beslan. They murdered some of the children and teachers and held the rest hostage. They wanted independence for their homeland of Chechnya. They warned they would kill everyone in the school if their demands were refused. Instead, the Russians sent in the police and the army. We held our breath.
And finally, after a siege lasting three days the army stormed the school. At least 334 people were killed, 186 of them children.
Throughout those three days their mothers held a vigil outside the school gates, begging the terrorists to release their children, praying to God that they would show mercy. On the second day I phoned the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and asked him if he would come onto the Today programme to reflect on what was happening. To my huge surprise he said yes.
It was brave of him. He would surely have known what questions awaited him. As one of the most respected theologians of his generation he must have devoted countless hours to those questions over the years. But scholarly examination of a theological conundrum is one thing. This was different. On that Friday morning in 2004 we were not discussing some theoretical concept, some tricky question of theology. We were talking about a group of mothers standing at their school gates as we spoke, each and every one of them suffering simultaneous agonies of hope and despair.
They didn’t know whether their child was still alive and, if they were, for how much longer. It was simply not possible to imagine their anguish. So I asked Rowan: ‘Where is your merciful God in Beslan?’ There was a long pause – the longest pause I have ever experienced on Today. Years later Rowan told me he had expected the question but when it came he found he could not answer it. Eventually this brilliant and almost painfully honest man mumbled an answer. God, he suggested quietly, was in the hearts and minds of those brave teachers who had tried so hard to save the children and in the love of the mothers at the school gates. We both knew it was painfully inadequate.
Some years later I returned to the question with Rowan and, once again, I sensed the same uncertainty when I asked him how the mother of a child dying from cancer could find faith in a supposedly merciful God. He told me there was always hope … hope of healing. But how and when, I asked?
‘In God’s perspective,’ he told me. ‘In God’s time, maybe within this world and maybe not. And part of the difficulty of living with faith is the knowledge which you underlined so powerfully that for some people in our time frame in this world there is not that kind of feeling. It’s not there. And that’s not easy to face or to live with.’
‘But you can live with it?’
He hesitated again and then: ‘Just … Just.’
I can hardly claim that my questions to Rowan were original. Ever since the Holocaust, Jewish philosophers have argued over the claim that God was put ‘on trial’ in Auschwitz by some of its inmates. A few years ago the BBC produced a film which imagined what that ‘trial’ might have been like. It was one of those programmes that justifies the existence of the BBC: immensely powerful, moving and deeply troubling. Of course it produced no answer to the question: where was God in Auschwitz? How could it? Nor did it settle the debate as to whether the trial had actually happened. The two distinguished Jewish scholars who advised the BBC at the time conceded that it was entirely plausible but it could well have been a legend.
And then, soon after the programme was broadcast, one of the great men of the last century made an extraordinary statement at a Holocaust appeal dinner. He was Elie Wiesel. No one spoke with greater moral authority than him. He had survived Auschwitz and gone on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee called him a ‘messenger to mankind’. It said that through his struggle to come to terms with ‘his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler’s death camps’ he had delivered a message ‘of peace, atonement, and human dignity’ to humanity.
This is what he told the Jewish Chronicle at that dinner: ‘Why should they know what happened? I was the only one there. It happened at night; there were just three people. At the end of the trial, they used the word chayav, rather than “guilty”. It means “He owes us something”. Then we went to pray.’
Perhaps, then, one answer to the question is – as Rowan had suggested when those terrorists were holding their guns to the heads of children – God exists in the hearts of those who want him to exist. In the hearts of the Jews in Auschwitz or the mothers outside the school. My problem is that if he is omnipotent, why does he allow evil? And it won’t do simply to repeat what Margaret Thatcher told me all those years ago. Of course we can choose to be evil just as we can choose to be good. But the mothers of Beslan had no choice. The Holocaust victims had no choice.
We know there was evil in the hearts of those who planned and committed those terrible deeds. Unthinkable, unimaginable evil. To murder 6 million Jews in the concentration camps. To hold a gun to the head of just one small child in a school and pull the trigger. There is no hierarchy of evil but much of it is carried out in the name of God. Perhaps most of it. Five hundred years ago Christians were burning other Christians at the stake because they were heretic. Their great sin was that they had different interpretations of the Bible. As I write, Muslims are killing Muslims because of a difference over who should have succeeded the Prophet Muhammad in the year 632.
‘Where was God?’ may have become a clichéd question but it is no less fundamental for that. The great philosopher David Hume summed up his answer thus: if God is all-powerful he would not allow evil to exist. If he allows evil to exist he cannot truly be all-powerful. So it surely follows that if God is not all-powerful, he is not God – and certainly not in the sense in which he is presented to us by any of the three great Abrahamic religions. Which takes me back to where I began this chapter: ‘Thought for the Day’.
I am banned from presenting it not because I would almost certainly do it very badly and would most definitely annoy an awful lot of people, but because I do not believe in God. There are many thousands of potential contributors out there who are serious people with serious things to say about the greatest mysteries of our time – or maybe occasionally with offbeat reflections that might shed a little light on something that’s been worrying us. But they lack the essential qualification: they don’t believe in God.
Can it really be the case that non-believers have nothing to offer? No valuable experience to impart, no wisdom to share with the audience? No spiritual insights that might offer comfort? If so, that’s a pretty bleak judgement on an awful lot of people in this country.
It’s true that the last national census showed most of us declared ourselves to be Christians, but pollsters point out that the question was deeply flawed. It asked ‘What is your religion?’ That makes the assumption that we all have one, even if it’s Jedi. So when YouGov did its own poll some months later it asked a different question: ‘Are you religious?’ This time sixty-five per cent of the respondents said no. And research published in Church Statistics in 2018 showed that thirty-five years ago about twelve per cent of the population went to church; now it’s down to five per cent and still falling.
And yet. I’ve presented quite a few programmes for the BBC over the past fifty years and the one that produced the biggest response from the audience – bigger than all my other one-off programmes put together – was Humphrys in Search of God.
There were no fancy production gimmicks, no clever sound effects, no whooping audiences. It was just a series of conversation between me and the leaders of the three monotheistic religions in this country: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
I knew I was taking a bit of a risk with the whole thing – not least the title. Michael Gove, who was writing a column for The Times in those days, created a fictional radio series: God in Search of Humphrys. There was plenty of that sort of thing, none of it flattering. The obvious difference between the series and my day job was that these were personal conversations, rather than an attempt at news-breaking confrontations. I was inviting the three foremost clerics in the land to convert me live on air. They must have felt a bit like the wannabe comedian in the agent’s office being told: ‘Go on then … make me laugh!’
And the result? Well … it’s pretty clear from everything I have written in this chapter. They failed. I suppose it was obvious they would. What I found striking was the difference between Rowan Williams and Jonathan Sacks. Jonathan was combative, Rowan almost apologetic. But what stayed with me was a brief exchange I’d had with Jonathan when I first suggested to him the idea of the series. He asked me what I hoped to get out of the interview with him.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s simple enough. All you’ve got to do is convert me … turn me into a religious Jew.’
Jonathan laid his hand on my arm and smiled rather forlornly. ‘John,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. You’ve got enough problems already.’
I thought he was joking, but I’ve never been quite sure.