Michael W. Higgins recalls, with some bemusement, the time the CBC sent a radio crew to the wrong event. He and a colleague had organized a symposium on the life, work and legacy of the monk Thomas Merton, which the public broadcaster planned to record for a possible documentary. But on the day of the event, the crew never arrived. A frantic producer for CBC Ideas later called wondering where the scripts were. The reason soon emerged: the crew had completely bungled the assignment, confusing “monasticism” with “monsters” and returning instead with tapes about Sasquatch. With airtime to fill, the corporation turned to Higgins to write — and eventually narrate — a five-part radio series called Thomas Merton: Extraordinary Man.

The mix-up was revealing, suggests Higgins, a longtime CBC documentarian and commentator, now president and vice-chancellor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ont. It hinted at a deeper problem: a public broadcaster that could recognize religion as a category without quite knowing what it was looking at.

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That was 1978. The uncertainty, he believes, has only deepened since. While Canadians continue to argue about the CBC — its funding, its mandate, its politics — the national broadcaster has quietly abandoned programming devoted to religion and spirituality. A few exceptions remain: occasional features and a lone freelance contributor covering a faith beat. But they stand out precisely because the wider landscape has thinned so dramatically. What has diminished is the nuanced, contextual work of helping Canadians understand the ideas, traditions and moral vocabularies that shape religious life beyond the news cycle.

Higgins sees this less as a militant secular purge than institutional confusion. “It’s out of ignorance more than malevolence,” he says. Executives sense a gap, he argues, but lack the religious literacy to name it. The disappearance of dedicated spirituality programming — from Man Alive to Tapestry — reflects, in his view, a failure of imagination. “They’re dealing with competing statistics and algorithms, not ideas,” he says. “It’s a tragic misjudgment.”

Religion has always had a complicated place at the CBC. Norm Fennema, who teaches history and Canadian studies at the University of Victoria, argues that the public broadcaster has long worked to contain religion’s more unruly voices, shaping them into something palatable, safe and comfortably mainstream.

Debates over religion on Canadian airwaves predate the CBC itself. Even before the corporation existed, regulators were deciding which preachers could speak, which movements were too controversial and how to balance freedom of expression with fears over national unity.

The CBC was born, in part, as an instrument of containment. In the late 1920s, the Bible Students movement that would evolve into the Jehovah’s Witnesses had begun using radio to spread their message. Their broadcasts alarmed politicians, who feared the new medium could become a megaphone for religious warfare. In 1928, the federal government refused to renew the group’s broadcasting licences, igniting a backlash framed as a test of free expression. “Protest meetings were formed where petitions were signed in favour of freedom of the airwaves,” says Fennema. “Some 458,000 signatures were gathered — an astonishing number for a country whose population was then just shy of 10 million.”

When the Canadian Broadcasting Act of 1936 established the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, it granted the network sweeping authority “to control the character of any and all programmes broadcast by Corporation or private stations.” Religion appeared only indirectly, tucked into a clause forbidding “abusive comment on any religion, race or creed.” Religious........

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