In this episode, Susie Triffitt, a third-year PhD student studying Theology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, interviews Michael Wakelin, the executive chair of the Religion Media Centre. They discuss Wakelin's extensive background in religious broadcasting, his work with the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, and various interfaith projects, such as the leadership training program at St George's, Windsor. Wakelin also talks about the Religion Media Centre's mission to improve religious literacy in the media, responding to the Bloom Review, and the importance of new media, including TikTok, in furthering interfaith engagement. The conversation highlights the significance of building interfaith relationships and addresses the challenges and successes in the interfaith space.

Michael and Susie find themselves in agreement: despite secular trends in census data, many people continue to exhibit religious behaviors, and the future of faith is promising, filled with passionate individuals.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

01:11 Michael Wakelin's Background and Career

01:54 Interfaith Leadership Program

02:54 Religion Media Centre

05:01 Religious Literacy and Bloom Review

07:32 Challenges and Successes in Interfaith Work

11:31 New Media and Interfaith Engagement

13:34 Future of Faith and Interfaith Relations

16:28 Closing Remarks and Final Thoughts

Resources mentioned

• Faith in Leadership (St George’s Windsor)
• Religion Media Centre (ReligionMediaCentre.org.uk)
• Bloom Review
• Religious Literacy Partnership
• Creating Connections (an RMC project)

Well, hello, everyone. My name is Susie. I'm a third year PhD student in Theology and Anthropology at the Divinity Faculty at the University of Cambridge.

My ethnographic research looks at revival and hope amongst Christian evangelicals in the very religiously diverse Bradford in West Yorkshire.

I'm a Christian. I'm a big believer in interfaith and a postgraduate member of CIP.

I'm very pleased to introduce my wonderful guest, Michael.

Michael

00:48

Hello. Hello, Susie.

Well, it's, it's lovely to have you, Michael.

Michael Wakelin is the executive chair of the Religion Media Centre. And he's going to speak to us today about interfaith futures and how that engages with his work.

So to start off, Michael, I'd love to know, and our listeners would love to know a little bit about yourself and the work that you're doing at the moment.

Well, I started in broadcasting, many years ago now and, at the BBC's religious broadcasting department. And I produced programs on all networks, including television in relation to religion. And I worked my way up the slippery pole and ended up as head of religious broadcasting in 2006. I left in 2010 and started working with the Cambridge Interfaith Programme.

And, a few years down the line, I was charged with coming up with lots of interfaith projects that would really up the ante around interfaith. We used to rudely refer to interfaith dialogue as "tea and samosas", and it obviously needs to be much more than that.

So some of the projects I came up with have come to fruition in different ways.

And one of them was the leadership program that we run at St George's Windsor, where we bring together seven Jewish, seven Muslim and seven Christian leaders, and we put them through three two- night modules at St. George's, and we give them lots of leadership training, we give them media training, we get lots of top speakers come in to address them about interfaith issues. But the main thing that happens, which is so important to interfaith, is that relationships are allowed to build up.

So even if they ignore all the takeouts we give them around leadership and media, what happens is afterwards they have firm friendships in the interfaith community. And it's lovely if you turn on Newsnight one night and there's three of our alumni sat on the sofas there talking about issues.

We started with a feasibility study that thought it was a good idea. We had no money. We had just about five of us sat in a room thinking, well, we ought to do this. But where do we go from here? And I rather rashly put my hand up to be chair. And then a couple of years later, we got a grant and that enabled us to set up a website and enabled us to employ one or two people, reporters to write articles ,and fact sheets.

We have a daily news bulletin. We have a weekly summary. We have weekly press briefings where we address the key topics of the day and assemble top experts and invite journalists to join us. And we've gone from nought followers to, for the second year running now, we've crossed our 1 million social media reach. So we really have found a market.

And we serve it, I believe, with passion and integrity, and I think we've got now the respect of the key journalists in the area, everyone follows us that should. We're now followed by people in 150- odd countries around the world, so we've discovered that there is a need for this. For that independent—we are fiercely independent in the work that we do, and we do not take, we take money from people, but they, no one tells us what we can write.

We're all kind of ex- BBC, and we're passionate about that ability to report without angle, as it were, as much as you possibly can.

So we're very excited about the direction that's going in and, we're hoping that we can secure more funding and more sustainable funding going forward. But the other big project that I'm involved in at the moment, which I think is really important, is the response to the Bloom Review, which came out a year ago.

And one of the key recommendations, it was commissioned by the government, to look at the relationship between religion and society. And one of the key recommendations was that there should be religious literacy training for the civil service, initially the public sector. And that's something that me and my colleagues in the Religious Literacy Partnership have been doing for a while.

We've worked with Marks & Spencer's and Tesco's, but also the House of Commons and the Pharmaceutical Society, where we try to really address issues around not only the accommodation of religion in the workplace, because lots of people do that. Lots of people, I think, now feel more accepted in the workplace. But what we're really interested in is not just making sure there's an organization for Jewish friends in a company, or, you know, a way that the company can celebrate the various festivals. What we're concerned about really is about policy and strategy of companies, how they engage with their stakeholders, how being religiously literate can really inform the outcomes and the outputs of organizations and companies.

And therefore how religious literacy can make things better and make religion where it should be in society, which is asset rather than liability, which it often is. We give people the confidence to talk about religion. We change disposition towards religion because that can be so poor in the UK, very different to the States, I think. People can have a very negative attitude to religion and actually not want to engage with it at all.

What we want to address is that paucity of conversation and raise it to a different level and make religion a positive aspect of a company or a organization's work.

Thank you so much, Michael. It's absolutely amazing to hear what you're up to.

I have to say, having spent 13 months in Bradford, tea and samosas are very popular.

I'm not mocking them. Tea and samosas are great, but...

Yeah, I remember someone joking that in the Church of England, we have tea and cake, but in Bradford we have tea and samosas.

Thank you so much for telling us all the different things you're doing. And I think it's very evident in my research that, we are becoming more religiously diverse in England, and so things are becoming more and more needed. And so I'm so glad that we're having this conversation now.

It's really interesting to hear what has worked in your context. Are there any things haven't worked quite so well, or you've observed things that haven't worked? Just to signpost other people as they're trying to navigate this space.

And you can say no. And I could go on to my next question. But is there anything that you're a little bit hesitant around in this interfaith space?

Well, you've obviously got to be very careful. And I think especially after October the 7th, there was a real, well, a need for the conversation, but also a need to be really super careful around it because it's so easy to be polarizing about it and to let emotions take over.

But I think that's when in all the work we do, including I'm executive producer of Pause for Thought on Radio 2, which goes out to millions of people. And we have to make sure we steer a very steady line on that. So I think at times when emotions are running high, we need to be very careful to take deep breaths and be very conscious of all the sensitivities around it.

In relation to Bradford, one of the projects which we've been doing, which we've learned a lot from, is Creating Connections. This is part of the Religion Media Centre work. We discovered from our various contacts around the country that religious groups were very frustrated that they weren't having their stories covered in local media and local media were very frustrated that religious communities weren't talking to them.

So we thought there's a need here for to bring them together. So we rather cleverly came up with the title “Creating Connections”. And we've started to build these bridges between local faith groups and local media. In fact, we've now done it in 11 cities around the country, including Bradford, where we had a wonderful time, and Leeds and Liverpool, Manchester, Norwich, Birmingham, Nottingham, Plymouth. And we're about to do one in Wolverhampton, on November the 28th.

And what happens is we bring together editors, journalists, people who write about these areas, like Wolverhampton, and we bring the faith groups in Wolverhampton, and we get them to talk to each other during a kind of six-hour day session, and the response we've had has been nuts.

It's been like 97 percent of the people that attend say they are much more confident about talking to the media. So we know that works, and we're going to carry on doing that.

You asked me about what doesn't work. I suppose, I'm trying to think of our failures, but they're not springing to mind, but I know that we must not avoid the difficult things. The leadership programme that we run at St. George's, we actually said last year, after October the 7th, that we just weren't going to talk about it. The issue in Israel, Gaza. And I think in some ways, maybe that wasn't such a good idea.

I think we need to be brave. And I think it's people who really know what they're talking about that have to stand up and be counted and tackle the really difficult issues.

Thank you so much, Michael. I'm just fascinated because I actually think that the best interfaith thing I saw in Bradford was probably Saturday morning Park Run. And so I just love how we can do this in sort of slightly different ways and sometimes not quite religious ways. And actually it's fascinating how in a way, like a leadership programme, which could be seen as almost like corporate, it provides that space to do...

Yeah, and often the way is to find a common cause, isn't it?

I mean, you say Park Run's a great idea, because actually everyone's there to run. But in fact, you know, the conversations that happen around it is what really matters in terms of interfaith. It's like our leadership programme. We pretend we're teaching them leadership skills and media skills, but actually it’s about building up relations.

So relationships, you have to kind of distract people away from the obvious and then they find they're talking about it. If you really want to bring together a local rabbi and a local imam and a local minister, you don't get them to sit down and talk about faith, you get them to try and save the local recreation ground.

Yeah, fascinating. I'm sure I've seen that in Bradford.

So do you think that any new medias, such as things like TikTok can be used to further interfaith engagement? I find TikTok fascinating, because of its reach and its reach to people who might not necessarily be looking, for something like, discussion about interfaith or different faiths.

So do you think that there are these sort of exciting interfaith futures on these new medias?

Of course, and one of the things we do in our work with the RMC is a session on, in fact we did one with CIP recently, the rapidly changing face of new media, and it is extraordinary how fast it's changing.

We have to change our presentation every month because the stats have changed ridiculously. An important thing to say about TikTok is that people think, oh, it's a young people's platform. It isn't. It's right across the generations, interestingly, and lots of TikTok stuff ends up on Instagram, and that's followed by all generations. So it's an incredibly important and very fast growing platform. And of course, religious people should be communicating on it to try and at least balance out some of the nonsense that's on there. So indeed, the Religion Media Centre is looking for funding to set up a TikTok channel so that we can cover our valuable output on that as well.

But there are lots of tricks around that. It's not to be done lightly. You need to know what you're doing. You need to know how to communicate in short form. And there's lots of things like you have to post very regularly for it to have any impact at all.

You can't just think, oh, we've got a TikTok channel now. Off we go. It has to be very carefully monitored, carefully nurtured. And a lot of work needs to be put into it to make it work well. But no, very important that we get involved in all this.

Mike, I'm very excited to see you dancing on a TikTok in the future.

Can I assure you that won't be happening? And we'll make sure that the people that do present for us are the right looking people.

Quite. So I'm very aware, this is your moment in the spotlight , on our YouTube channel and things like that. What do you think no one knows, but needs to know about the interfaith future that we're entering?

I think something I often find in my research is that people don't realize that Britain and the world is becoming more religious instead of less religious. And I just wondered if there was anything like that, that you just keep on coming across that people don't know, and they should really know.

Well, yes, I suppose I'm very excised by the noisy kind of secular atheistic lobby that's out there. And there are lots of high profile people that, that are out there talking about their lack of faith. So often, I find myself listening to the new atheists as it were, who were telling me about that they don't believe in a God that I don't believe in either.

I'm thinking you're asking the wrong questions here. This is not what faith is about. I think, I mean, I get told off for this, but you know, I think most people are religious kind of without knowing it. And I have a very broad definition of what being religious is. But to find real, proper people who really don't believe in anything, I think is very unusual.

And I think the latest census came up with all sorts of stats around, Oh, look how people are non religious these days. But if you dig into the people who call themselves nones, the non religious, the non affiliated, you find that actually they're doing all sorts of things that I would count as religious.

Like praying and believing in angels and there's a massive amount of religiosity out there, but it's just being talked about in different ways. People aren't members of churches anymore, but they are still practicing a faith in their own ways. And I think that I want to kind of reveal that a bit more and get that talked about a bit more in the open.

Yeah, I agree with you. That's what my PhD is on.

So Michael, last question, a positive question, I think, for this sunny day. What excites you most about the faith future that we're entering?

I think the people that I've met. When I was at the BBC and I was supposed to be involved in religion... I didn't really know anything until I left the BBC and entered the real interfaith world and I've met some simply fabulous people. And I'm really heartened by the work that's being done. And I mean I'm talking people from all the major faiths that I've encountered and I'm so charged by that.

And know that in the end, of course, good will win, love will conquer hate. I believe all those things very passionately. And when I see the people that are engaged in this, they're so much braver, so much stronger than the divisive elements that are emerging all around us. And we will win in the end. Love will conquer hate.

Michael, I think that's a beautiful way to end our little podcast .

I'm really excited to see what you end up doing with the Centre in the future. And it's been a real delight to get to know you in this short period.

Thank you so much from CIP and me.

Thank you.

And Religion Media Centre.org.uk. Sign up!

We'll sign up.

Thank you so much, Michael.

Thank you