Another helping of religious reality tv

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 06 September 2005 22:26:45

BBC 2 (the less watched of the public broadcasting companies in the UK) along with Channel Four has somewhat reinvented religious broadcasting. We now have the category of spiritual reality tv which has emerged with programmes like The Monastry and Spirituality Shopper. Tonight we got the latest of the bunch
No Sex Please We're Teenagers .

The basic idea of the programme is two Christian youth workers take 12 British young people between 15 and 17, the majority sexually active, and get them to pledge to not having sex for 5 months. An interesting idea, partly because in the US this approach has run into problems because it has led to young people not recieving information on safe sex. However, this British version seems to be much more balanced and down to earth and rooted in the world the young people are living in, dealing with the effect of alcohol and drugs have in the choices that young people make.

Part of the project involved a trip to the US where the group encountered full on evangelical Christianity US style, although it was made clear to the group they could express there anger and confusion with what was going on. (Pity the most likeable member of the group, a stereotype Chav had got himself banged up by this point and so couldn't go on the trip). It was interesting because it showed the real cultural differences between the US and Britain in terms of religious teaching to young people. I can't imagine anybody over here in the 21st century being told they should only go out with somebody they thought they would marry.

I think there are two more programmes in the series and I would recommend them as this programme provides an interesting study on young people and their attitudes to sex, alcohol, each other, church and the culture they are growing up in. As a parent of somebody who in the next few years will be becoming a teenager and facing a whole set of choices I think it is a really useful programme that I can use to discuss the choices she'll be facing and the way that the expectations of the church culture she is growing up in may differ to the wider culture in which she will find herself. The programme clearly showed the conflicting tensions that 1 guy who was a Christian in the group felt, particularly in the trip to the US.

Oh and quote of the night has to be one of the youth workers who said when he first came across The Holy Spirit he seriously thought it was a drug that he hadn't come across before.