‘Religious literacy’ rules risk gagging the press

There should be more ‘religious literacy’. So says the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Religion in the Media, chaired by Yasmin Qureshi MP. Amen to that. Religious ignorance is now virtually universal, so errors appear in news stories every day. But the APPG report seems less concerned with facts, more with attitudes. It wants news to concentrate more on ‘lived experience’, less on doctrine and ritual; it asserts that ‘religious literacy also incorporates respect for religion and belief as a valid source of guidance and knowledge to the majority of the world’s inhabitants’. The report’s remedies include ‘a formalised, coordinated approach to the education of journalists’, making ‘religious literacy training’ compulsory. Another is ‘around access to regulatory redress’: ‘In particular, groups should be able to make complaints on the grounds of discrimination.’ I am afraid these aims add up to gagging the press. ‘Lived experience’ is a buzz phrase in current debates about race, used to privilege the utterances of those who feel themselves hard done by.