This is not a complaint about the BBC. It is a complaint about the way a recorded interview was edited by a producer working for the BBC Religion and Ethics Department. The result was that what was broadcast was the opposite of what I had actually said. Why this producer failed to maintain the high standards of the BBC I do not know.

I had been interviewed at considerable length by John McCarthy and later, more briefly, by the producer Dawn Bryan (see email 10). In the broadcast programme What I Believe on Radio 2 on October 21, 2008, I can be heard twice, once for 27 seconds when I said that I had no religious beliefs, and once for 67 seconds when my words were edited to make it sound that I held a favourable opinion of religion in that it gave a structure to a person's life. What was not broadcast was what I had said about how such structures can be damaging to people. Being misquoted in this way concerned me greatly. When I write or lecture, I try to make what I say as clear and as consistent as possible. Having something in the public domain that did not represent my views could cause me considerable problems, particularly when the subject matter was religion.

I wrote to David Barber, then Head of Compliance, to ask him to look into the matter (see email 16). He replied within minutes to say that he had forwarded my email to Christine Morgan, Executive Producer at the Religious and Ethics Department (see email 17). Why he had dealt with my email on a Sunday afternoon became clear a few days later when he left the BBC, having been involved in the scandal concerning Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. After listening to the recorded interview and the broadcast programme, Christine Morgan found that the producer of the programme had made a serious error, but she went on to apologise to me 'for the distress this has caused you'. Saying to someone, 'I'm sorry you're upset' is not an apology. We are all sorry for the distress the people of Darfur are suffering, but in saying we are sorry we are not taking responsibility for causing that suffering. To apologise we have to acknowledge both the exact injury itself that has been suffered and our own responsibility in causing that injury.

After discussions with colleagues, Christine Morgan wrote to me offering to put a specific apology on a page on the BBC website and to invite me to write an article for that page, which is now accessible via the BBC website. I thought this was an excellent resolution of the problem. What follows here are the emails in chronological order concerning the setting up of the first interview and what followed that event.

December 2010

Jill Tweedie once wrote an article for the Guardian about her encounter with some evangelical Christians. Jill noted their smiling, joyous certainty about their salvation, and called them doves, in contrast to the dour, punitive Christian fundamentalists whom she called the hawks. She related that, as her encounter with this group of doves ended, she saw in their eyes the cold, steely glint of the hawk.

I've been encountering quite a few doves and hawks at the talks and interviews I've been giving about my new book What Should I Believe? I find that they fall into three groups, namely, the vulnerable doves, the hawks masquerading as doves, and the proud, vigilante hawks. The proud, vigilante hawks examine me and dismiss me coldly. In another time and place, they would have sent me to the stake with a wave of their hand. The hawks masquerading as doves wait until the event is ending and then they advance on me to patronise me. If being patronised were fatal, I'd have died weeks ago.

The poor, vulnerable doves cannot contain their distress at my suggestion that their most dearly held belief might be a fantasy. Life is difficult, and we all need a fantasy or two to get us through the day. If we are reasonably self-confident, we don't have to tell ourselves that these fantasies are true. We know that they are our comfort blankets. But, if we feel that there is nothing about us that is valuable and that no one cares about us, then, in an effort to save ourselves, we create a precious belief that protects us from the full horror of our life. This belief, whatever it is, assures us that we are special and that we are loved. At one of my talks, a young woman interrupted me to say, 'I've met Jesus. He gave me a hug.' I knew a little of this young woman's background and could surmise that she had had few loving hugs in her life. I said, 'You're very lucky,' and so she was to have been able to create such a fantasy and believe it to be true. At another lecture, I had barely finished speaking when a middle-aged woman rushed to me and with tears in her eyes begged me not to tell her that what had happened when her father died was just her fantasy. She said, 'I was with him when he died. Right at the end, when he died, I saw a golden halo around his head.' I said something like, 'He must have been a very good man,' and wished I had more time to talk to her. Why had she needed to make her father a saint? But other people were around us and she went away.

Not all vulnerable doves refer to their precious belief in such an emotional way. They can mention it in what seems to be an ordinary voice, but there is a quaver in their voice, a stray high note. When I was working in the NHS I'd hear this in statements like, 'My husband doesn't say much but I know he loves me,' or, 'My parents treated all us children equally', or, 'I always thought I'd have a family but I think it was for the best that I didn't.' When I was told that I would be debating with the formidable Christian broadcaster Anne Atkins on the World Service programme Reporting Religion I went along expecting to have a very lively discussion. However, when she was telling me that her religious beliefs were not fantasies about life and death but absolutely true, I heard that quaver, that high note. She needed her beliefs to protect her from I know not what. I could no more tell her that her physical make-up did not allow her to know anything that was absolutely true [link to What It Is to Be Human] than I could have told the young woman that her belief that Jesus had hugged her was a fantasy.

The hawks masquerading as doves have a particular tone of voice, a patient I-understand-where-you're-coming-from unctuous, patronising tone, derived from a brief encounter with psychotherapy training, and aimed at putting me in my place. If there is an audience, the hawk in the guise of a dove seeks to heighten his status while decreasing mine. With an audience of counsellors and social workers one man began with, 'I can see that you're angry with religion . . .' I retaliated with, 'I'm not angry with an abstract noun but with people who inflict suffering on others' and listed some of the recent atrocities. Hawks in the guise of a dove can always inflict a small atrocity of their own by waiting until the very end of the proceedings when it is obvious I am getting ready to leave. When I have been on my feet and talking for two hours I begin to look and sound quite tired. After my lecture at the Ways with Words Literary Festival in Southwold, I signed books and chatted with readers and was signing some books for the bookshop when a substantially built woman, with black wavy hair flowing over her shoulders in the manner of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, loomed over me and said, 'The Christianity you were talking about isn't the Christianity I know.' I replied, 'That's what you all say.' I was thinking of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had told Stuart Jeffries of the Guardian, "In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin says, 'When I hear atheists talk about Christianity, I don't recognise what they're talking about.' I often feel when I read Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens that this isn't quite it. I thought it might not do any harm to put down a marker about that and say: 'Here is a form of Christian engagement with the world and with the complexities of human experience that may be radically wrong but is not cheap or glib and any critique has to deal with this just as much as it has to deal with a southern baptist.'" http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/08/religion.anglicanism

I couldn't quote Rowan Williams to her because remembering Rowan-Williams-speak is quite difficult, and at least she had said what he had said but much more simply. She sat down beside me and told me that she was a Methodist Minister and so she was in a position to point out to me that all of that about being born in sin and hell had disappeared from the Church. Now they talked about loving oneself and loving Jesus. I growled, 'If you're not intrinsically bad you don't need salvation.' She then told me that being born in sin is not in the Bible and quoted some early Church doctrine. Here I should have quoted Guy Consolmagno SJ who wrote in The Tablet, 'Our theology of original sin has serious difficulties, but anyone who denies the reality of original sin hasn't been reading the news lately.' (September 27, 2008) Perhaps Catholics suffer from original sin but Methodists don't.

Then there are the proud hawks like Catherine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet. The article she wrote about me, and my article about this article, The Curious Case of The Tablet, are elsewhere on this website.

And then there was my encounter with the BBC Religion and Ethics Department.

I love the BBC. I wake up and go to sleep with Radio 4 or the World Service. I watch and record the kind of programmes I like which are usually on BBC2 and BBC Four. Whenever I'm asked to be interviewed or take part in a discussion I hasten to accept because it is always good fun. When I went to Bush House to record a discussion with Anne Atkins who was in the Oxford studio, the presenter Dan Damon said to me, 'She [Jane, the producer] told me to keep my opinions to myself.' Dan has strong views about religion. He did what he had been told to do, and kept to Jane's script. Anne talked at length and kept repeating what she had said. Several times she told me, 'I agree with you', but what she said showed that she didn't. When I was leaving Jane said to me, 'I'll edit all that', and so she did, brilliantly. What was broadcast was an interesting discussion [link]. But much happened before that discussion was broadcast.

When Tom Williams of Aitken Alexander forwarded Charlotte Manchester-King's email inviting me to contribute to a programme for Radio 2 about religious belief I was delighted, and even more pleased when I found that my interviewer was to be John McCarthy. I had followed the story of his kidnapping and his five year's incarceration by Hizbollah in Lebanon, with Jill Morell doing all she could to make sure he was not forgotten by everyone and not least Margaret Thatcher who, as Prime Minister, refused to have any dealings with kidnappers. John and the other people who had been kidnapped would be left to perish before she relinquished any of her precious principles. However, John survived and returned home. He and I had a long talk [link] and decided to get together again to continue our conversation. However, domestic matters intervened and we weren't able to meet before I left for Australia.

A few days after my interview the producer of the programme, Dawn Bryan, got in touch with me and asked me to record my answers to some questions. As she was in Manchester I had to go to Western House where the BBC do their down-the-line interviews. It seemed to me that she was asking me to repeat much of what I had already told John, but, as our time was limited, I couldn't ask her why. A few weeks went by and then Charlotte emailed to tell me that the programme would be broadcast at 10.30pm on October 21. This was the evening of my book launch, so I didn't listen to the programme until the next day. I had to listen to it twice to make sure that I'd heard my two brief appearances, and then to listen to the second passage again to make sure I'd heard correctly. Yes, I was saying, or had been edited to say, the opposite of what I had said in the interview, and what I would always say if asked about the benefits or otherwise of religion. I could not believe that this was the BBC. I had been edited before, but never to change the meaning of what I had said.

The week following the broadcast was a very busy one for me and I did not have time to think through what I should do. I had heard from Reporting Religion that my discussion with Anne would be broadcast the following Sunday morning, too early for me to be awake to listen. That afternoon I went into the World Service website and found Reporting Religion. My discussion was listed, but when I clicked the play again button the following programme did not include it.

Was there a conspiracy at the BBC Religion and Ethics Department to keep me off air, in short, silence me? Was the Religion and Ethics Department infested with hawks?

When Natasha of Reporting Religion emailed me to ask for my address so she could send a CD of the programme, I phoned her and told her what had happened, not just to me on Reporting Religion but on What Do I Believe. She could tell me about what had happened to the Reporting Religion website. It was, she said, a typical BBC cock-up. The programme was broadcast on October 26, the day the clocks went back. The engineers who look after the text part of the World Service website remembered this and set their clock to go back, but the engineers who look after the audio part forgot. So the text was up-to-date but not the audio. It was probably something more technical than that, but the result was for the website to show the appropriate text but it was not accompanied by the appropriate sound. Natasha and I laughed about this, but she was very concerned about the editing of What I Believe. 'You must make a complaint,' she said, and insisted that I talk to her executive producer. She would speak to her right away, and the producer would phone me. I did not expect this call to come for a few days, but within minutes Eleanor Garland had phoned me. She impressed on me the absolute necessity of my contacting the Head of Compliance, David Barber, and gave me the necessary contact details. It was quite clear from the seriousness with which Eleanor treated what I had told her that any error, either accidental or deliberate, in the material that the BBC broadcast had to be corrected and amends made.

Christine Morgan treated the matter with the same seriousness. However, she made the mistake of using the form of apology that many women use without always realising that it is not an apology. She was saying she was sorry I was distressed, not that she was sorry that I had suffered an injury. I am not at all patient when someone makes this error in speaking to me.  Also, she thought, or had been told, that I was a novelist, and perhaps she did not realise that novelists can be as particular about the truth as psychologists are. She could not have known how weary I was becoming with the hawks and the pseudo-doves. I was not going to let them have any extra ammunition to fire at me, such as, 'We know you value religion because it gives structure to people's lives.'

Christine did not tell me anything about what had gone on in the making of the programme What I Believe. Perhaps the group making the programme had started out, as Charlotte had said in her first email, to ask where religious faith came from and 'why so many people want to believe in God and search for faith', but then they had to change their plans and make a very simple programme where people's voices describing their beliefs were interwoven with sentimental music. If Dawn had phoned me and said that their plans had changed and they wouldn't be using what they had recorded of me, but she would be sending me a copy of my interview, and thank you very much, I would have accepted this. She could have gilded the lily and paid me the usual BBC grand sum of fifty pounds for my work. I am used to producers phoning or emailing me to say that I have not been included in the broadcast programme. It is not just out of courtesy they do this. They know that they might need to ask me again to do something for them.

But my words were edited and their meaning changed. Was this the work of a hawk, or a pseudo-dove? Or was it that most curious of events, a BBC cock-up? I do not know.

Critical understanding of religion vital, says TV Producer

While institutional religion is in decline in Britain, the diversification of faith in this country and the massive global impact of religion means that it is an appropriate subject for thoughtful TV programming.

That is the view of Jeremy Dear, executive producer at Pioneer Productions, whose six-part Christianity: A History series continues on Channel 4 on Sundays at 7pm.

"In the last five years, programmes about religion on the terrestrial channels have never been more prominent," says Dear in an article in the Independent newspaper - contradicting those lobby groups that say it is being marginalised.

On the other hand, Dear also disputes the generalised claims of some hard-line secularists that programming about religion is automatically 'propaganda' and should be excluded from scheduling.

He declares: "In the wake of September 11 [broadcasters have] woken up to the fact that not everyone shares a post-Enlightenment, rationalist view of the world. For billions of people, faith is still very much a 'live' issue and if we're to understand the world, it's critical that we understand the beliefs that those people espouse."

The key word, he believes is 'critical' - which means probing and understanding, not dissing or blandly promoting.

Jeremy Dear thinks that "Channel 4 in particular was quick to realise this. Under commissioner Aaqil Ahmed, it has produced a plethora of films - such as the excellent Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber, or its recent two hour special on the Qur'an - that explore religion as a global force today."

In fact, rather than being confined to 'god slots', "religion now appears all over the networks, in drama and reality TV as well as documentaries. So we had the BBC's The Monastery (five ordinary men try the contemplative life with an order of monks) or C4's Priest Idol (a country parish tries modern marketing techniques to reverse falling attendance)."

He argues that "the imperative to find new and, yes, entertaining ways to tackle religious issues continues."

Of Christianity: A History, he says: "The eight films in our series are each authored by a different commentator with a particular view or stake in the topic. For instance, the Independent's own Howard Jacobson rails magnificently against Christianity's denial of Jesus' Jewishness, and explores how this laid the ground for 2,000 years of anti-semitism."

"What all the films have in common", he concludes, "is the idea that, believer or not, you can't deny the continuing influence of faith on almost every aspect of our world today - and that includes television."

There is also pressure to ensure fairness in broadcasting about religion, however. The BBC, which spends £9.8 million a year on it Religion and Ethics operation, according to a recent Freedom of Information request, has recently been castigated for misrepresenting the views of psychologist Dorothy Rowe - who is critical of religion, but was portrayed as sympathetic.

The BBC also remains under pressure to open its Thought for the Day slot to nonbelievers - an issue highlighted by Ekklesia and others.

Religious programmes sometime reach a wide audience - as with the four million who watch Songs of Praise (the only directly confessional show on BBC primetime) and series like The Monastery. But surveys have shown a growing disinterest in other sections of the overall terrestrial audience.

Ekklesia

BBC's expensive religious affairs department accused of misrepresentation

Read the full article on the National Secular Society website.

BBC sorry for 'misquoting' expert's views
Edited broadcast was 'opposite' of original view

By Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
Published in The Observer, Sunday 11 January 2009

The BBC has been forced to apologise to an acclaimed psychologist and writer after editing her derogatory comments about religion so that a radio programme broadcast "the opposite" of what she had said.

Dorothy Rowe complained to the corporation that her interview on the Radio 2 programme What Do You Believe? had been so heavily edited that the final version misrepresented her views. During a 50-minute recorded interview, Rowe, best known for her work on depression, had attempted to comment on the subject proposed by the programme's producer: "Why so many people want to believe in God and search for faith." But she was aghast to hear how her words were eventually used.

In an email to the corporation, published on her website, Rowe stated: "My words were edited to make it sound that I held a favourable opinion of religion in that it gave a structure to a person's life. What was not broadcast was what I had said about how such structures can be damaging to people. Being misquoted in this way concerned me greatly."

Rowe, who says she is one of the BBC's biggest fans, was never likely to keep her complaints private. An Australian who spends much of her time in the UK, she has become one of the most respected modern-day thinkers, named as one of the six wisest people in the UK by a magazine and voted one of the world's 100 living geniuses in a global poll.

Rowe, who is in Australia promoting a new book, said on her website she had no option but to complain as she was acutely aware of the dangers of "having something in the public domain that did not represent my views" and which would "could cause me considerable problems, particularly when the subject matter was religion". She said the interview "sounds like I am giving unqualified praise to religious belief. There is no mention of what I talked... about at length, that religious belief can cause immense misery. I often summarise this with: 'The church keeps me in business'."

The latest row over the BBC's production methods comes soon after the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand saga and a string of phone voting scandals which have undermined confidence in the corporation. The BBC has promised to introduce tighter editorial controls.

After hearing the broadcast, Rowe emailed David Barber, the BBC's head of compliance. Barber, who later resigned over the Ross-Brand furore, passed the complaint to Christine Morgan, executive producer at the BBC's religion and ethics department, who apologised to Rowe, saying she was "very concerned to find that, as you say, the programme did not accurately reflect the view you expressed". But on her website Rowe accuses Morgan of "saying she was sorry I was distressed, not that she was sorry that I had suffered an injury".

The row has provided ammunition for secular critics who accuse the BBC of using its programmes to promote religion. Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, who was interviewed for the same programme as Rowe, said: "I gave a long interview, but when I listened to the finished product it contained just a couple of very brief soundbites from me which were not representative of the thoughts I had expressed... This programme was the most blatant piece of religious propaganda I have heard for a long time."

A reply to a Freedom of Information request passed to the Observer reveals that the corporation spent almost £10m last year on its religious affairs unit in Manchester. According to the BBC's annual report, religious broadcasting on BBC radio rose from 1,078 hours in 2006-07 to 1,114 hours in 2007-08.

A spokeswoman for the corporation said: "The BBC's religion and ethics department acknowledged that extracts from an interview with Dorothy Rowe - broadcast in the programme What Do You Believe? - misrepresented her views on religion and has apologised to her."

Rowe was also invited to write an article published on the BBC's religion and ethics website explaining her views.

The Curious Case of The Tablet

Having learned of the imminent publication of What Should I Believe?, Catherine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet, contacted Adrian Weston of Raft PR to arrange an appointment for an interview with me. Thus it was that Catherine came to my home on September 30, 2008, where we spent about two hours in quiet discussion. Like all good journalists, she had read my book carefully and prepared a list of questions. I answered straightforwardly and seriously.

All her questions were crystal clear. None aimed to trick or attack me. It was not until the end of our discussion that she chided me for criticising the Catholic Church. She told me that to her the Church was family, and she was loyal to her family. We spent a few minutes discussing family loyalty, and how we can feel hurt if an outsider criticises it. She then packed her things and prepared to leave. I asked her when her article was likely to be published, and she said that possibly it would appear in the issue after next.

Catherine left me copies of six issues of The Tablet which I read with considerable interest. However, I did not feel I needed to subscribe to the journal in order to find her article about me. I assumed that I would find it on The Tablet's website.

I checked the website each week, but there was no sign of the article. Adrian phoned her office and left messages, but his calls were not returned. Time went by, and I left for Sydney in early December. A few weeks later a friend rang from London to talk about a lecture he was preparing. He mentioned that he had seen the article in The Tablet weeks before. It was, he said, 'not very nice'. I did not mention this description when I then emailed Catherine and asked for a copy of the article. Adrian also phoned her office. Neither of us received a reply.

A few weeks later, another friend, in an email, mentioned that she had seen the article. She made a photocopy and sent a message that 'this offensive article' was in the post.

It was now four months since the interview, and nine weeks since the article had been published. Out of the blue, on January 23, 2009, an email arrived from Catherine's PA, referring to my email of January 6, 2009, and offering to send me a PDF of the article. I had to prompt her to do this, but eventually it arrived on January 27, 2009.

Why take so long to send me the article? Why wasn't the article on The Tablet website? Did Catherine think I would not be able to find the article? Surely she knew that nowadays nothing that has been published disappears entirely. Someone has a copy somewhere. I have no answer to these questions, just as I do not know what went on in the BBC Religion and Ethics Department.

Catherine was the only one of the editors of religious publications who received a press release about my book and wanted an interview. She took the book seriously enough to study it, and write a well thought-out article. She gave credit where credit was due. My Depression: the Way Out of Your Prison was 'deservedly successful'. She set out a number of my arguments, and put her arguments against them. I imagine that some of the more thoughtful of her readers might have decided to get the book and read it for themselves. What more can an author want?

Since reading the article, I have not spoken to my two friends in England who had commented unfavourably about the article, but, knowing them, I think that what they were reacting to was not Catherine's scholarship but an underlying vein of anger in the article, directed, not at the book, but at me. Unlike the godly who chose to reprimand me after one of my lectures, Catherine did not adopt the lofty tone of one who patronises the ignorant: rather, she saw me as the enemy who must be severely chastised.

When we see someone as our enemy, we can make the mistake of not being as accurate as we can be about his strengths and weaknesses, but, from a distance, attribute to him far more power than he actually possesses. This is what Catherine did to me.

According to Catherine, self-help gurus 'don't come bigger than Dorothy Rowe'. My books are 'highly influential' Would that this were so! I have found that journalists who want to write a competent article and have no strong feelings about me, get the sales figures for my books. These show that I am no Deepak Chopra. I have found that women journalists who are worried that they might end up living, as I do, on their own press me for a detailed answer as to why I never married again. They do not accept the answer, 'What for?' To be a good interviewer you need to know how you see yourself and your world in order not to make assumptions based solely on personal biases.

Hierarchical power structures such as a church or a monarchy encourage their members to make heroes of those at the top of the structure. If you have heroes, and you do not understand that this is your way of seeing the world, and that others may not see things as you do, you can assume that all people have heroes. Catherine assumed this about me. She said that Richard Dawkins is 'undoubtedly her hero'. When she read my book, she must have skipped that part where I take Dawkins to task for being so silly about memes. I agree with Sheldon Kopp, 'If you have a hero, look again. You have diminished yourself.'

Catherine saw me as 'loathing the BBC Radio 4's Thought for Today'. She might loathe things or people, but I do not. Loathing and hating use up precious energy. I so something far worse. With one exception, the Buddhist Vishvapani, I cannot take the people involved in Thought for Today seriously. I laugh at them. Thought for Today is in the middle of a three hour programme where the presenters are skilled in uncovering the half-truths, the empty blustering, the self-delusions of anyone, but especially politicians, who venture on to the programme. However, the godly are sacrosanct. They are protected from the presenters in the way a cage protects divers from predatory sharks. Apparently, those who speak on Thought for Today have agreed not to criticise one another. It seems that they have not noticed how the plain, down-to-earth good sense of Vishvapani contrasts markedly with the empty abstractions of most of their number, but they and Mark Damazer, Controller of Radio 4, refuse to allow a humanist to join them. On January 7, 2009, Damazer wrote in his blog of the BBC website

Within Thought for the Day a careful balance is maintained of voices from different Christian denominations and other religions with significant membership in the UK. We are broadcasting to the general Radio 4 audience which regularly engages with the comments and ideas expressed by our contributors from the world's major faiths - whether they are believers or not.

The voices from all these different religions cannot help but raise the question, 'Is there just one God, and all these differing religions are competing, like siblings, to be His favourite, or is there a different God for each religion, and each of these gods compete to be top God?' Perhaps this question could be discussed on Thought for Today.

This is the kind of question which the godly do not want asked because it throws into doubt everything they believe. Becoming a faithful adherent to a religion is a difficult, often painful process, and always involves the sacrifice of important parts of oneself. Becoming a humble, obedient follower means giving up the parts of oneself that strive for individual expression and achievement. Many of the pleasures and advantages of the world have to be rejected. The joy of being an accepted member of the group has to be balanced against the fear of failing to meet the group's expectations, being punished and perhaps expelled from the group. If we make a bargain that we will be good in the way the dogma of the religion defines 'good' and in return God and the Church will keep us safe, we can feel impelled to destroy in whatever way we can those who would tell us that all we have got for our bargain is a mess of potage.

The self-help delusion

Spurred by the atrocities of 9/11, critics of religion first turned their fire on the fundamentalists - initially those of Islam, then those of Christianity. Now, doyenne of the make-it-alone gurus Dorothy Rowe has conventional Christians in her sights

By Catherine Pepinster

If you have attended literary festivals you will know which kind of author is guaranteed to be a big draw. There will be a good crowd for a novelist, a few hangers- on for a poet reciting his verse, but the sellout stars are the gurus - the ones that people feel explain the world and make sense of it.

Once, that might have been the role of a priest, and certainly some of today's gurus reflect the characteristics of a holy man. There's the fire-and-brimstone, preaching-from-the-pulpit type - a Christopher Hitchens or a Richard Dawkins warning their followers of the dangers of religion. Or there are the emotional gurus, the ones attracting those wanting to confess their misery and their failings, looking for some kind of redemption from those who advocate psychological self-help. And among the self-help gurus, you don't come bigger than Dorothy Rowe.

Rowe, to give her credit, is no self-made selfhelper. She has earned her spurs, training as a clinical psychologist and working in the NHS, but since her deservedly successful Depression: the way out of your prison won the Mind Book of the Year Award way back in 1984, she has gone down the guru path with titles such as The Successful Self and The Courage to Live. Her latest volume, What Should I Believe?, is a publisher's dream, merging the two worlds of atheism and self-help into one. The festival queues will no doubt double in size.

Rowe should be taken seriously, just as Dawkins is, for her books are highly influential, albeit on a different kind of audience. To give her due, she is at least a welcome departure from the testosterone-fuelled attacks on religion by Dawkins, who is undoubtedly her hero, and his cohorts Hitchens and Martin Amis.

She acknowledges life as infinitely more complicated than they would ever do. She also has time for believers, in that she has encountered people of faith who have undoubtedly made an impression upon her and whom she respects. But she has little respect for the actual beliefs that they hold and the religious institutions to which they belong.

Rowe's intervention is a sign that the debate - or, rather, the attacks, have moved on from the critiques of religion that began with 9/11 and focused on religious fundamentalism, particularly Islamism. The focus now is on more moderately held beliefs, particularly conventional Christianity. Her argument is that religion - and it's clear that she is mostly focusing on Christianity - has left many people with debilitating senses of guilt and shame, and that religion's power is due to its focus on death, the great unknown of all our lives, and that religions seek to overcome it. Religion, she says, provides certainty, and rewards us for being good.

"So great is our fear of life and death that most of us allow hope to override our intellect," writes Rowe, continuing: "No religion accepts us as the person we know ourselves to be. Rather we are told that we are inadequate, unsatisfactory and helpless. We fear that this is so, and to give us hope we … construct a fantasy about how we are superior to those who do not share our views."

One can begin to see how her argument is shaping up. Rowe's hero, Dawkins, has taken believers to task, vilifying them for belief in religions that he says are counter to reason. He attacks religion as outmoded, defeated by convincing theories of evolution. He blames religion for causing wars and for being a threat to values.

Rowe moves from the scientific realm and the political to the personal, attacking religion for messing with our minds. Unhappy people are religious and they inflict their beliefs on others to make them unhappy. Rowe's thesis charts a path from Church and State coercing people into believing things that suit Church and State, to clergy telling people that it is their wickedness that is the cause of their illnesses, to believers viewing others with condescension.

While on the one hand Church and State make you feel guilty and therefore depressed, once people do believe they feed their pride, believing they are special and chosen. Given that Rowe is a psychologist and her case studies, which she quotes liberally as part of her armoury of arguments, are of people who are at least unhappy enough to have consulted a psychologist, this would suggest that she is basing her arguments on those who have come off worst in their encounters with religion. She does at least admit that there are people who have faith who appear to be, well, not so desperate as her clients. But she has a get-out clause: they would have been good anyway, whatever their beliefs.

Trying to get to grips with a vilifier of religion of this kind is rather like trying to fight one of those fairground knife-throwers: the weapons keep coming every which way. She loathes BBC Radio 4's "Thought for the Day"; Christian groups are meaner than secular ones and don't offer to pay her fees; Christian fundamentalists are so absorbed attacking homosexuality that they care nothing for the suffering of millions in places like Darfur and the Congo. One wonders how she can possibly know: has she checked the fundamentalists' bank statements for donations?

Yet there is a point that she makes that is valuable. While many of those working in psychiatry, psychology and therapy do not take religious belief seriously, Rowe does, seeing in it the possibility of hope for some people. There is a recognition that faith is something profound, a reality rather than a fantasy, a fact of life rather than a delusion.

But it is clear in her writing on the purpose of life that the chasm between psychologists who focus on happiness and self-esteem as the way to living at peace with ourselves and others and those of faith yawns wide. The link between happiness and virtue, highlighted in Abbot Christopher Jamison's Finding Happiness, published at the same time as Rowe's work, is in marked contrast to the self-help gurus' routes to being happy, seemingly the goal of twenty-first-century life. For Jamison's route, involving virtue, means that there is vice to be avoided or, more properly, sin. And nothing shocks and appals the gurus-cum-critics of religion more than the idea of sin.

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