Alice Roberts: ‘Radio 4 pushes Songs of Praise-style, 1970s Christianity at us’

Don’t get Professor Alice Roberts started on Thought for the Day. “It’s so frustrating that Radio 4 persists with the idea that we need a dose of religion with the news every morning,” she says. “I was President of Humanist UK for four years and I was told by the head of Radio 4 they absolutely will not let a non-religious person speak in that three-minute slot. Apparently we have no moral or ethical views on current events worth hearing.” She rolls her eyes. “Instead they keep on pushing this 1970s, Songs of Praise-style Christianity at us.” When The i Paper contacted the BBC, a spokesperson responded: “Religion remains an important part of life and public debate for many people in the UK and non-religious beliefs and views are well represented across the BBC’s wider output.” Last month, the TV archaeologist took to social media for a “little rant” about a “thought” from Roman Catholic historian Catherine Pepinster, whose “historically inaccurate” talk she felt failed to acknowledge that “Christianity was a religion of empire since the Romans adopted it as their state religion, and then it was a religion of empire, of course, for the British Empire and others as well. It was the religion that basically supported the monarchies of Europe.” As she prepares to go out on tour with her brilliant new infotainment show about evolution, From Cell to Civilisation, Roberts is bracing for the odd skirmish with creationists, whose Christian soldiers she once fought in greater numbers on Twitter. “I’ll be showing how we got to complex life forms from inorganic chemistry,” she says of a process which she finds “astonishingly beautiful in itself” without any magic glazing. She first performed the show – a live stage spectacle taking in biology, genetics and archaeology – in Canada, where 20 per cent of the population are Creationists, compared to 37 per cent across the border in the US. So she is looking forward to a relatively easy ride in the UK, where she says “we’re quite sensible” with only 12 percent of the population believing God made the world in seven days. ‘Historically, humans have done their best to explain how the universe came into being,’ says Roberts It’s not that Roberts lacks empathy for the consolations of religious faith. On the contrary, on shows like BBC Two’s Digging for Britain – which she presented for 20 years before leaving last year – she devotes much of her screentime to the compassionate exploration of our ancestors’ supernatural beliefs. Watched by an impressive 2.5 million viewers a night at its peak, the series regularly found the medic-turned-broadcaster theorising about the faith systems that drove ancient Britons to inter their dead beneath massive stones in burial mounds, pour the charred remains into pots of coiled clay, or set them ablaze and adrift in funeral ships. “Historically, humans have done their best to explain how the universe came into being, using the best evidence that they had available at the time, and I think various civilisations have made a pretty good stab of it,” she says, “even if the Christian Bible gets whales and fish terribly mixed up.” A chuckle. But Roberts also suspects that if we were able to bring many ancient people back to life today and run them through the scientific discoveries of the past 2,000 years they’d jettison faith for science. “They’d say, ‘Oh! Brilliant! So you can prove that the sky isn’t a painted dome? The stars are actually distant suns! Glad you’ve sussed that out!’” The fight for facts is personal for the 53-year-old, who trained and worked as a doctor before becoming a full time academic, author and broadcaster. Born in Bristol in 1973, she was raised in a devout Christian household. She jokes that the first big knock to her faith came at the age of seven when she got her first printed hymn book and learned that “Jesus wasn’t ‘the Lord of the dance settee’, which I had been singing and sounded really fun. I had this image of him jumping up and down on the sofa having a lovely time.” Though she was confirmed at 14, Roberts stopped attending church at 15. Her parents – an aeronautical engineer and an art teacher – seemed to accept her rejection of their religion until 2018, when her mother wrote to a national newspaper to condemn her campaign to halt government funding of faith schools. Wendy Roberts said she was “embarrassed” and “upset” by Alice’s campaign. The incident led to Alice becoming estranged from her parents and not attending her mother’s funeral in 2022. Roberts presented BBC Two’s ‘Digging for Britain’ for 20 years before leaving last year (Photo: BBC/Rare TV) In 2023 she appeared on Radio 4’s All In The Mind to discuss that decision, explaining she had already experienced a “kind of grief” after choosing not to see her parents any more. “I’d almost thought, ‘Well, I shouldn’t be feeling sad,” she said, “because I instigated the separation.’ But the sadness is, again, about a relationship that I never really had.” Recently, Roberts has been re-evaluating her faith history and has come to some new realisations. “In the past, I said that I was Christian and then I became atheist at 15,” she says. “But I don’t think I ever really was a Christian. I don’t ever think there was any point where I actually believed it.” Instead she recognises “a long time spent hoping, ‘At some point this will all make sense,’ before accepting that it never would.” Talking via video from the eco-home just outside of Bristol, which she shares with her archaeologist husband and their two children, she tells me that she recently appeared on Radio 4 herself, on the Rev Giles Fraser’s series Church Going, about the decline in church attendance. “He thought it was very sad that congregations were shrinking,” she says. “Of course, everyone in the Middle Ages went to church because, by law, they had to.” She suspected churchgoing was more motivated by practical than spiritual needs. “I’m sure some people felt their faith very deeply but for others the consequences of excommunication – which often meant you couldn’t work or trade any more – was a much more pressing factor.” She suggests the 17th century Act of Toleration (created so Trinitarian Dissenters didn’t have to attend Anglican church) left many people thinking: ‘You don’t have to go? Hang on! I don’t either!” ‘I don’t think I ever really was a Christian. I never actually believed it,’ says Roberts Only five per cent of adults (and only 13 per cent of those who identify as Christian) currently attend church in the UK. Roberts says that although modern Christians assume the decline is recent, “Churchgoing actually dropped off until it was pretty low at the turn of the 19th century and there were real fears of a moral decline.” Another eye-roll. “The Methodists built 1,000 churches in 20 years and now we’re stuck with these terrible buildings which are hard to heat. Giles Fraser thinks it’s a shame they’re being turned into houses and nightclubs, but I think he should probably be glad that now only the people who actually chose to be in a church are the ones going along.” On the day we talk, Roberts has been working on a book about rituals. She’s been thinking of the way we – like our ancestors – create ceremonies to suit our seasonal needs. “Christmas is interesting,” she says. “It wasn’t a big festival in the Christian calendar until the faith reached north-west Europe. When it did, the people felt they needed a party in the middle of winter.” She also loves Halloween, which, of course, her parents hated. “They said it was a new invention, that it was American.” A brisk, scholarly shake of the head. “Of course it is actually quite ancient,” she says, summoning the festival’s roots in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (“summer’s end”)”. The ancient Celts believed the season of mists and falling leaves allowed spirits to pass between worlds. “Autumn has such a lovely liminal feeling,” she sighs. “Apple wassailing has a lovely tradition here in Somerset and I will merrily hug a tree!” Roberts on ‘Digging for Britain’ with Duncan Sayer and Gemma Sweeney, examining finds from an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Kent (Photo: BBC/Rare TV) It follows that a woman who’s spent most of her career hanging out with skeletons – or squelching her scalpel into the prosthetic corpses (packed with real animal organs) in her Royal Autopsy series – would love spooky season. She gets cheerfully nerdy when we discuss costumes, wondering if it’s possible to buy skeletons of our ancient ancestors. “Imagine opening the door to a kid who says, ‘I’m Homo Naledi boy!’ Gotta be worth a Twix, that!” It’s at this point – as we’re laughing – that I confess to Roberts that Humans, the new evolutionary textbook that she edited, made me cry. Because she’d done something amazing to the standard diagram showing the ape-to-human evolutionary process. Every figure in the illustration was female, with visible breasts. It choked me up to realise I’d never seen that before. “Oh I’m so glad!” she says. “Because the archetype is always male, isn’t it?” She has seen the same in medical textbooks where all the people are also always Caucasian. “So I put my foot down and insisted the publishers make the base model female for once.” She smiles. She also made sure the BBC kept the gender balance on Digging for Britain before she left, recommending archeologists Meg Russell and Rosanna Price to fill her muddy boots. “When I suggested them as presenters, the response was, ‘They haven’t done any screen tests.’ I said, ‘We are in the 21st century, look at their Instagram pages!’ And now there they are on the show, carrying the torch.” (The BBC declined to comment when this was put to them.) From the richly illuminating Humans to the more dramatic From Cell to Civilisation (which comes with a special-effect meteor strike “boom” she’d quite like to use at home to get her kids off their computer games), she will always shed a sane and cheerful light in the darkness. ‘From Cell to Civilisation’ is touring to March 2