Religious broadcasting at the more sophisticated end of its spectrum is often of high quality and it has legitimate appeal to the minority audience at which it is aimed. As an unbeliever, a secular humanist, I find many such programmes stimulating and informative and well up to the best standards of quality broadcasting generally.

I wish the same could be said of religious features aimed at the 'popular' end of the spectrum. Much of the output under such heads as 'Thought for the Day', 'Reflections' and the like, is of poor quality. At best it is bland; at worst this output seems to exemplify 'knee jerk piety' of little use (I suspect) to believers and posing no challenge to the firm sceptics and wobbling neutrals who, between them, probably comprise the majority of people in our untidy plural society.

There seems to be an underlying assumption that 'thought' equals 'religious thought' in spite of the fact, evident to any honest and informed person, that 'thought' merely includes 'religious thought'.

There are three points to be made about this half conscious assumption that religion has a monopoly of seriousness about the major things in life: 1) the proper liberty to be heard in a free society is not enjoyed by the informed sceptics as much as it is by the believers; 2) there is an implicit undermining of the proper dignity of those who, mistakenly, feel that there is something wrong with them if they cannot accept honestly the claims of any of the churches and religious movements generally; 3) 'Low brow' Christian output seems to exhibit a characteristic feature of monopoly - stale, tired predictability.

The monopoly factor militates against effective presentation of religion at a popular level - a bit more sceptical competition would do the churches a power of good. Is it not time that we all admitted that religion no longer has any automatic status in our society but that it can have the standing that it can earn when it is presented fairly and in face of equally fair presentation of conscientious non-religion?

This is a challenge that, I think, ought to be taken up by the mass broadcasting establishment. Religion is too important to be left to the religious.