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Film & TV

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Truth and Trust

13 November 2025

6 min read

The BBC and the Church of England: two giants, one crisis of trust

Will honourable resignations save the BBC—or anyone?

Tim Wyatt

Tim Wyatt is a journalist, and editor of The Critical Friend Substack.

TIm Davie, sits in an interview in front of screens showing facts about the BBC

Tim Davie, former BBC boss.

BBC.

Sometimes it seems like the BBC is never out of its own headlines. Just as one crisis is finally overcome, another erupts. This year alone we’ve seen outcry over a documentary on Gaza and the Glastonbury fiasco. Now, the broadcaster’s director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness have resigned over the latest scandal. A leaked internal dossier concluded a Panorama documentary on Donald Trump had misleadingly edited a speech he made on 6 January (it also raised questions over the BBC’s LGBT coverage and its Arabic language service).

Both Davie and Turness have insisted that the corporation is not biased in its coverage, even if mistakes had been made by its journalists and editors. But both found the pressure too much to bear. Speaking outside the BBC’s London HQ, Turness said:

“I stepped down over the weekend because the buck stops with me. But I'd like to make one thing very clear, BBC News is not institutionally biased. That's why it's the world's most trusted news provider."

She was right to identify trust as key. Can we trust the BBC to tell us what is going on in the world fairly and accurately, if it makes mistakes like these? Can we trust the individuals within the broadcaster to report the news impartially, regardless of their personal views? Indeed, can we trust those currently condemning the BBC to be acting in good faith, and not motivated by political hostility or commercial rivalry?

According to research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the BBC is the most trusted news brand in Britain, with 60 per cent of people saying they have faith in its output. Some of its newspaper antagonists can muster barely a third of that trust score. An Ofcom survey from 2019 found an impressive 83 per cent of viewers of the BBC’s TV news output trusted it to be accurate.

But trust in the media overall is slipping away in Britain. A decade ago, 51 per cent of people told the Reuters Institute they trusted the news in general; a Brexit referendum, Covid pandemic and ten years of political turmoil later, that figure is just 35 per cent.

Trust in the BBC is one of its most precious commodities, part of what helps it stand out both in Britain and globally. This is why Davie and Turness decided to fall on their swords, despite nobody suggesting they had personally done much wrong. It has to preserve the trust of its audience at all costs and the price to pay has historically been that when someone messes up, the people at the top resign. We saw the same back in 2012 when the then director general George Entwhistle quit after just 54 days in the role after the BBC got sucked into the Jimmy Savile abuse scandal. In 2004, both the director general and chair of the BBC’s board had to resign in the wake of the suicide of Iraq War whistleblower David Kelly.

This – the regular spectacle of the ‘honourable’ resignation – is an increasing rarity in other parts of public life. In our post-truth post-shame political environment, it is more common for politicians to brazen out scandal and disgrace, and rarer for their party institutions to insist leaders fall on their swords. We lost count of how many scandals Boris Johnson survived as prime minister before he was finally felled by Partygate in 2022. Across the pond, Donald Trump has effectively rendered himself uncancellable by capturing the Republican Party and much of the US media ecosystem, despite corruption and growing authoritarianism. As the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde put it, “The BBC is the last place anyone still resigns from.”

And yet. There is an interesting counter-example from another storied British public institution battling to maintain relevance in the 21st century and wracked by scandal and division: the Church of England. Just a year ago it too suffered the ignominy of seeing its leader resign in disgrace. Justin Welby was forced to quit as Archbishop of Canterbury after he was criticised in an official review over John Smyth, one of the most prolific abusers in the church’s history.

Welby painted his resignation in similar terms: an honourable act of falling on his sword to take responsibility for the institution’s broader failings. In his cloth-eared valedictory speech in the House of Lords, the outgoing Archbishop told his fellow peers that “there comes a time, if you are technically leading a particular institution, when the shame of what has gone wrong, whether one is personally responsible or not, must require a head to roll.” And in this particular case, there was only “one head that rolls well enough”, Welby added; his own.

But did this supposedly principled act of resignation rebuild trust? Not really. In fact, it may have done the opposite and further damaged the public’s trust in its national church. Welby initially hesitated and refused to resign after the damning Smyth report was first published, only agreeing to go after a weekend of simmering outrage. The vibe was less 'honourable man falling on his sword' and more 'leader convinced they’d done little wrong reluctantly forced out against their will'.

And yet with the passing of time, his resignation has become mired in regret. Growing numbers of both bishops and others in the church have questioned just how liable he really was for the failure to stop Smyth’s abuse, and how robust the Makin report’s conclusions are. There is an increasing sense Welby was forced out in a rush to find a scapegoat, any scapegoat, to stem the bleeding and show that the church was taking it seriously.

His successful defenestration has radicalised the more hardline elements of the abuse survivor movement, encouraging them to try to topple their other despised enemies within the church hierarchy. Bishops now fear they will be next on the chopping block, regardless of their culpability; unsurprisingly this does not engender greater trust. In fact, many observers would suggest trust between the bishops and those in the pulpits and pews has never been lower in modern times. The tortured attempt to introduce blessings for gay couples has poisoned the well further, contributing to the system for appointing new bishops to begin to break down. Somehow, both the liberal and the conservative wings of the Church feel equally betrayed by the bishops’ actions during the gay blessings saga.

Trust is slowly earned, and quick to drain away. Even doing the honourable thing and resigning is no longer a surefire route to restore trust in our public institutions. Just as with Welby, it is likely these BBC resignations will not rebuild confidence in our national broadcaster. Instead, they may well further encourage the right-wing press and demagogues like Trump to scream “fake news” and hector impartial news outlets further. The resignations also tell the ordinary viewer and listener the accusations of bias must be true – otherwise why would these bigwigs have to stand down?

There are no easy lessons to read across from the Church of England’s battle to regain trust to the BBC. For years now bishops have been urging clergy and lay people to try to trust them once more, to put aside defensiveness and hostility and work together in vulnerable collaboration. And things have mostly only got worse. Trust cannot be willed back into existence, nor will it return through the bloodletting of high-profile ‘honourable’ resignations.

In fact, there’s a deeper problem which goes much further than the BBC or the Church of England. A deeper crisis of trust in society at large. For 25 years the Edelman Trust Barometer has been measuring societies around the world, and of 28 nations polled last year the UK’s average trust score was rock bottom: just 39 per cent of people on average said they trusted businesses, the government, or the media. In fact, almost everywhere people are running low on trust. Fears that government leaders and media elites purposely lie to us are at an all-time high. Until we can find ways to rebuild the ties that bind us, as individuals and communities, it is hard to see how the large institutions that used to shape British civic life – whether that is the BBC, the Church or parliament – can regain the public’s trust, resignations or no resignations.

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Article

Art

Belief

Culture

24 July 2025

5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.

Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art.

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it?

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics.

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books?

JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration.

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others.

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns.

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period?

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well.

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such.

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)

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