Every morning from Monday to Saturday at 0745, the good people of Britain are treated to three minutes of whining and vapid pseudo-religious drivel called Thought for the Day. I say “good” people to exclude the indolent, who are still in bed, the thick, who are watching flopsy bunnies on television, and the terrible, desiccated ranks of the undead, who are tuned into Radio 2.

Thought for the Day is a long-standing component of the Today programme on Radio 4 — my old manor, as it happens. Uniquely, it is not under the control of the Today programme team — who, in my day, cordially loathed it and probably still do — but part of the rapidly diminishing BBC religious affairs department, which lives a hermetic and endangered existence in a Manchester bunker.

Once again, Thought for the Day has become a sort of cause of the week, a status it achieves periodically, with earnest questions and debates in the broadsheet newspapers. How can we, in this day and age, sanction three minutes of prime, licence-fee-paid radio airtime to religious propaganda? Given that religion has caused so many wars and bad feeling over the years, shouldn’t the slot be secularised and opened up for atheists, such as Hitler or Stalin (or, preferably, somebody nice such as Richard Dawkins)?

The BBC Trust is now to consider the matter, which is good news for Barbara Smoker, the former president of the National Secular Society, who has been banging on about this for years and used to write me scary letters when I worked for the BBC.

The first problem, though, is that Thought for the Day is secular already. God is almost never allowed to poke His nose into a broadcast and when He does His appearance is heralded with apologies and embarrassment. He does no smiting, He is never angry, no matter what issue comes before Him. The God you hear in Thought for the Day has been created by BBC producers and made in their image — a slightly disappointed but nonetheless benevolent middle-aged man of confused sexuality who wishes that everybody might live together peaceably in a warm and caring multicultural society, m’kay? A middle-aged man not terribly convinced as to whether he exists or not.

This is the main problem I have with TftD, to give the slot its corporation acronym. In a country which is nominally Christian, and certainly comprised of a majority of people who still feel drawn to one or other religious faith, there is surely room in a 180-minute broadcast for 180 seconds of spiritual reflection, a chance to step beyond the compelling immediacy of Humphrys versus Harman and ask, well, what would God think about all this? But we never find out what God thinks; we find out what God thinks if He were James Purnell or Eddie Izzard or Stephen Fry.

Whatever creed or faith the person who delivers TftD, they are almost always impeccably liberal and perfectly in tune with a 21st-century metropolitan liberal zeitgeist. An encomium from Dawkins would not differ one iota from that of Rabbi Lionel Blue or Indarjit Singh. The presenters frighten no horses. God, I think, from time to time, was not averse to frightening horses, if He didn't like them.

What TftD needs to be is not secular but more religious. We need liberation theologians from the Roman Catholic Church denouncing capitalism; Presbyterians smiting sodomites right, left and centre (preferably on a morning on which Evan Davis is presenting). We want the occasional Muslim wandering into the studio with a faint but discernible ticking coming from his waistband. I do not mean that all Presbyterians loathe homosexuals, or that all Muslims wish to blow themselves up — simply that the BBC’s conception of religious belief is, like some of its news coverage, constrained by political correctness and alien to a good many people in the country.

One more reason for keeping TftD:

0745 happens to be Today’s peak audience time. I used to argue, out of self-interest, that this was mere coincidence. But sometimes when advancing this argument, I heard a faint, ironic chuckling from some nearby place . . .

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