'Dispatches: The New Fundamentalists'

Response to the Channel 4 programme presented by Rod Liddle.

Statement by Rev Dr David Hilborn, Head of Theology at the Evangelical Alliance

09 March 2006

Channel 4’s documentary strand, Dispatches has distinguished itself as a home for fine investigative journalism. Unfortunately, it was let down badly on Monday night by Rod Liddle’s sloppy, ill-informed attack on British Evangelicalism, ‘The New Fundamentalists’. The crass hyperbole and wilful lack of balance on display here was made worse by the fact that Juniper, the production company behind the film, had consulted the Evangelical Alliance several times during research to check their facts, only to disregard them in the service of Liddle’s overblown, sensationalist polemic. The errors and misrepresentations in the piece were legion. Here I highlight merely the most obvious examples.

At the beginning of the film, Liddle’s commentary suggested a sinister evangelical takeover of ‘our national established church’ (the Church of England). Yet this commentary was accompanied by shots of him at a service in Kensington Temple, which is an Elim Pentecostal church. The Alliance spent a long time explaining to Juniper’s research team the different varieties and denominational expressions of Evangelicalism, and stressed to them that most British Evangelicals exist outside the Church of England. We also made it very clear that Kensington Temple is Pentecostal, not Anglican. Granted, this information was all new to them at the time, but there is no excuse for the misleading juxtaposition of image and voiceover which occurred at this point in the finished documentary. Sadly, this howler set the tone for much of what followed.

Liddle claimed that Evangelicals’ views are at odds with ‘mainstream liberal Britain’, but he bothered to define neither the history, development and present shape of Evangelicalism, nor what ‘liberal Britain’ actually denotes. The programme was entitled ‘The New Fundamentalists’, but Liddle failed to define fundamentalism in any serious way, and failed also to expound how it relates to, and differs from, Evangelicalism. There are numerous decent scholarly resources on this distinction, and we suggested a number to Juniper. Again, however, our advice was wilfully ignored.

The first main segment of the programme focussed on supposed evangelical threats to freedom of speech. However, the sole example cited in this respect was the campaign pursued by Christian Voice against the touring production of Jerry Springer – The Opera. Juniper were well aware that the tactics of Christian Voice do not attract majority support among Evangelicals, and that the Alliance’s opposition to the broadcast of the musical on BBC television had deployed different methods. Yet here as elsewhere, mainstream evangelical witness was excluded. Worse still, the programme signally failed to acknowledge counter-examples like the recent campaign against the Religious Hatred bill, in which the Alliance and other evangelical groups joined forces with a range of non-religionists to champion free speech. Here, as throughout the film, facts not amenable to Liddle’s one-eyed rhetoric were simply passed over.

It was telling that Liddle aligned himself to liberal Anglican Christianity, and lamented its decline and eclipse by evangelicalism, but offered no constructive mission strategy to reverse the dramatic fall in church attendance since the 1960s. Of course, he did not for a moment consider that liberalism might have been the cause, rather than the victim, of this decline!

Liddle moved on the describe Evangelicals as taking ‘many of the words of the Bible utterly literally’, and accused us of offering ‘simplicity’, with no room for ‘shades of grey’. Time and again the Alliance told Juniper to avoid this vacuous stereotype. Time and again we spoke to them at length about the development of evangelical hermeneutics; about Tom Wright and Tony Thiselton, Kevin Vanhoozer, Alister McGrath, Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstoff and a whole host of other complex, nuanced evangelical scholars. But apart from the grudging get-out implied by the word ‘many’, Liddle chose not to acknowledge that Evangelicals might have a rather more sophisticated understanding of biblical authority and interpretation.

Turning his jaundiced gaze to sex outside marriage, Liddle accused the Silver Ring Thing and other such ‘abstinence’ advocates of peddling a ‘naïve and dangerous’ message. He cited ‘one study’ from the States which claims that 88% of teens who take a pledge of abstinence until marriage fail to keep it and, in doing so, also typically fail to use contraception, thus increasing the risk of contracting an STD. But the point made by Katie Jones of SRT in the programme needs to be underlined: contraceptive advice assuming sex before marriage is in plentiful supply in British schools and the British media. Whatever does or does not happen in middle America, young people here are hardly shielded from this information by the government agencies and others; evangelicals are simply trying to present an alternative view. Besides, as Katie Jones put it, while condoms may be 85% effective against HIV/AIDS and other STDs, abstinence is even more effective if adhered to. And if it is not adhered to, the vast majority of evangelicals are compassionate and forgiving in welcoming people back to start anew.

On homosexuality, Liddle made great show of the refusal of Living Waters to talk to him about their ministry to gay men and lesbians who voluntarily wish to embrace a biblical sexual lifestyle. But having ‘shamed’ them for not appearing on camera, he did not bother to speak with any other evangelical groups or representatives about homosexuality, except briefly to Colin Dye of Kensington Temple. Some mention of the True Freedom Trust would have been helpful here: Juniper certainly knew about their ministry.

In a rare moment of praise for Evangelicals, Liddle admitted that Teen Challenge and others do ‘an awful lot of selfless and valuable work in the community’, not least with drug addicts and the homeless. But as soon as this concession had been made, he could not resist suggesting that it was unfortunate that they had to do this while ‘shoving Christ down people’s throats’. Such gratuitous and pejorative abuse hardly promotes understanding.

If those helped and converted by Teen Challenge have their lives changed voluntarily, Liddle implied that a more coercive regime is in operation in Peter Vardy’s three City Academies in the North East of England. Vardy’s second-hand car business is frequently sneered at by liberal critics of Evangelicalism, as if his occupation ipso facto made him suspect as a Christian, a philanthropist and an educationalist. This is sheer, unadulterated snobbery. As for Vardy himself, he was given an opportunity to explain the philosophy behind the schools, and he did this quite clearly. They aim, he stressed, to offer an ‘all round education’, and are not intent on indoctrinating pupils with evangelical dogma. Yet Liddle refused to believe this, and set out to cast the schools as a hotbed of religious bigotry. He tracked down a current teacher who had spoken of ‘Bible bashing’ in assemblies, but could not persuade her to appear. If ‘Bible bashing’ here meant that assemblies in the Vardy academies have a Christian ethos, that is hardly novel: hundreds of state sector church schools up and down the country operate on a similar basis, and the academies themselves have been established legally on Christian grounds. Another teacher who had served a single term at Emmanuel Academy, Gateshead called it ‘totalitarian’, but we did not learn what axes he might have had to grind beyond his opposition to the school’s clearly religious foundation. Certain parents were shown complaining of excessive discipline and there were accusations that higher than average numbers were being expelled to inflate exam results, but these claims were not pursued in depth and were certainly not proven.

From a journalistic perspective, Liddle will feel that he secured something of a coup in exposing the young earth creationist views of certain teachers at the Vardy Academies. The schools concerned have hit the headlines before over this, but Liddle got the Director of all three Academies, Nigel McQuoid, to admit on camera that he believes in a literal six day creation and a young (i.e 6000 year-old) earth. Liddle also secured an interview with two pupils from Emmanuel City Academy, Richard Almond and Adam French, in which they reported some of their teachers as asserting an equivalence of educational value between creationism and Darwinian evolution, even while counselling pupils to take the Darwinist line ‘for exams’. There were further testimonies to the creationist ethos of the school from one current and one former teacher, and from a few parents, but it is McQuoid who will attract most attention. Indeed, atheist and humanist lobby groups are already working themselves up into their usual lather over this. McQuoid, however, was quite clear that his was a purely personal view of cosmic origins, that the schools under his charge have no formal stance on the age of the earth, and that Darwinian evolution is taught as per national curriculum requirements. Although Liddle angrily hounded McQuoid, never once in the whole documentary did he point out that young earth creationists are a minority among British evangelicals, that the majority believe in an old earth, and that many are theistic evolutionists who essentially accept Darwin’s account of origins and integrate that with their evangelical faith.

One of the most snide remarks in a commentary full of them was Liddle’s concluding comment that as they have ‘grown more militant in their demands’, Evangelicals ‘perhaps’ have ‘learned a trick or two from Islam’. Precisely what these tricks might be, and how exactly they might have been borrowed from Islam, Liddle did not say: the links were left to the audience’s imagination. But in a post 9/11 and 7/7 world it is hard not to draw the inference that in Liddle’s mind there is little to choose between British evangelical ‘fundamentalism’ and the sort of Islamist fundamentalism that seeks to force its agenda on public life by any means necessary. If this is indeed what Liddle was suggesting, it is yet further evidence of his own ignorance of the subject he was purporting to present. Whatever he meant by this comment, he should have spelt it out, and the manifest differences between Evangelicalism and Islamist radicalism could have been debated. Not to have done so was capricious and irresponsible.

Rod Liddle can be an insightful, well-informed commentator. Yet these gifts seem to have deserted him here. Reading a couple of the decent books on Evangelicalism might have been a good start. As it was, this programme was unworthy of Dispatches, and, quite simply, a travesty of the truth.

Rev Dr David Hilborn Head of Theology, Evangelical Alliance UK

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