Religion Media Centre Sarah Sands lecture review

“What a joy to be back at St Bride’s… It feels like home”. So began Sarah Sands’ lecture – ‘The news sphere and the heavenly sphere’ – for the Religion Media Centre.

Sands was editor of The Sunday Telegraph, the London Evening Standard and BBC Radio 4’s Today programme before she became chief executive of Hymns Ancient and Modern, the Christian publishing house whose titles include the weekly Church Times newspaper.

She spoke of her experience in newsrooms where stories about religion rarely ever featured on the agenda unless they were sensational or scandalous. The perspective and meaning religion might bestow on a topic was not considered to be worth reporting.

Even on the Today programme when speakers on Thought for the Day reflected on news stories presenters were not allowed to comment on any matters raised: “It was strictly one-way traffic”.

At no time was this more apparent than during COVID when the “language of sorrow and solace” that religion had to offer was ignored.

Sands did mention some brilliant journalists who are exceptions to this – including Ed Stourton whose memorial takes place in St Bride’s this November – but these are rare.

She argued that there is a fundamental difference in timescales between the news sphere and the heavenly sphere: the news thinks constantly of today and only as far ahead as tomorrow whereas religion thinks beyond the now to the eternal.

“So, what is the bridge, and how do we cross it?” Sands asked.

One facet of her answer was particularly pertinent to our ministry to journalism here at St Bride’s. She drew a striking similarity of purpose between the news media and the gospels – the need to bear witness.

She spoke of how journalists who seek to bear witness and speak truth to power are facing ever greater danger, hostility and lies. Some even die in that pursuit.

We hold an annual service called the Journalists’ Commemorative Service which remembers and gives thanks for all those involved in news gathering.

Sands mentioned her friend, the journalist Marie Colvin, who died whilst reporting from Syria in 2012. Two years before that, Colvin had stood in St Bride’s to give the inaugural Journalists’ Service address at which she said “Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction and death, and trying to bear witness.”

The date of the lecture fell on the feast day of St Michael and All Angels and Sands closed with a reference to when the chief messenger of that heavenly host, the Archangel Gabriel, delivered the biggest scoop of all to Mary – that she was to have a son who would be patron saint to all.

You can read the full transcript of Sands’s lecture or watch it on YouTube.