Here's the "Faith to Faith" column from today's edition of The Guardian. It's by Caspar Melville, Editor of New Humanist magazine on a topic that has featured strongly in this blog. It's interesting, insightful and amusing (though I'd take exception to his assertion that the writ of the Church of England runs all through the UK!)
So the British Humanist Association ads with the headline "If You're Not Religious for God's Sake Say So", urging people to tick the "no religion" box on the census, have been banned because the people who own the advertising space in railway stations think they will cause "serious and widespread offence". I mean, Christ on a bike!
Before considering the ads themselves it's worth reminding ourselves what they are about. The way the religion question was posed on the last census grossly distorted the figures – does anyone really believe that 71.8% of the UK population are practising Church of England Christians? So if we are going to bother to have a census and ask questions about the population's religious affiliations, it only makes sense to get it right – especially since the figures are subsequently used to justify policy. So this is a serious issue.
But the ads are not in themselves serious. Andrew Copson of the BHA admits that the strapline was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, designed to "express urgency" and be attention-grabbing. This is, after all, what a good advertising headline should do. But offensive? OMG!
In actual fact we don't really know if anyone would have found the ads offensive. CBS Outdoor, the owner of the ad space, says it referred the decision to its franchisees, who passed it on to something called the Committee of Advertising Practice, which came up with the advice that the ads would cause "serious and widespread offence". How would they know this? They don't say, and it's hard to think how you might go about proving it, short of actually running the ads. I was interviewed on BBC Breakfast on Sunday about this, alongside the Times's religion correspondent, Ruth Gledhill. She's a Christian, but she wasn't herself offended by the slogan; she just argued that she could see why some people might be.
The presenters urged viewers to email their thoughts. They got a large response, they said, on both sides, and read out on air the views of one person who said he was offended, though he didn't explain why. But really, if you are the kind of person who is going to find commonplace expressions like "Oh my God", or "Bless you", or "Blimey", or "Lord love a duck", or "Saints preserve us" offensive you'd be well advised only to go out in public with ear plugs and a mask (on second thoughts, perhaps it would just be safer to stay in).
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the slogan would not have caused "serious" and "widespread" offence, and I have as much evidence to prove this as the Committee of Advertising Practice has to prove its argument. I just don't think most Christians, still less part-time CofE don't-take-the-Bible-literally Christians, are that thin-skinned. The ones I know certainly aren't.
In any case, we do not (yet) live in a country which guarantees the right not to be offended. No one should be in the business of banning things on the off-chance that someone might be upset by the message.
And why is it the companies which own the advertising space who end up policing the boundaries of acceptable speech? These are commercial ventures and their job is to make money, it's not to arbitrarily decide what kind of message society can take and what is beyond the pale. We need an independent body to do that, which should set the bar very high and have a sense of proportion – even, if that's not too much to ask, a sense of humour.
Read this article on The Guardian's website, along with reader comments:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/12/census-humanists-christians-offence-religious-sensitivities?INTCMP=SRCH
Visit the website of New Humanist magazine:
http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/
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