Church of England defends Songs of Praise filmed in Calais migrant camp

 The BBC’s Songs of Praise film crew with the presenter Sally Magnusson at the church of St Michaels in the Calais migrant camp. Photograph: Rex Shutterstock

Senior Church of England figures have vigorously defended the BBC’s decision to film an episode of Songs of Praise at the migrant camp in Calais.

The Right Rev Nick Baines, bishop of Leeds, said he had been appalled at the attacks on the broadcaster for filming at the “jungle” camp. The segment will be featured on Sunday’s programme.

“The decision to record in the Jungle of Calais, right at the heart of where migrants are trying desperately to find a new life in a place of safety, is absolutely the right one,” the bishop wrote in a blogpost. “Songs of Praise usually gets slagged off for being … er ... Songs of Praise. Often the critique is that it is bland or anodyne. Well, not now it isn’t.”

The Daily Express and the Sun both carried critical front pages of the BBC programme’s decision to film in the church, which they claimed was a waste of licence fee money and a highly politicised gesture.

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, made it clear in a tweet that he fully supported the programme, as well as retweeting a positive piece from the influential Anglican blog, Archbishop Cranmer.

“What do they think the church is for? It is for the poor and the vulnerable, it is to voice things that others cannot voice,” Baines told the Guardian. “Everyone else seems to be allowed to be political apart from the church.”

“Christian faith is about God in the real world, not relegated to some imaginary fairy land where it can’t do any harm or embarrass anyone,” he said in the blogpost. “If we don’t like being exposed to worship from Calais, then it is for us to face the hard question of why – not simply to project this on to the soft target of the BBC.”

The corrugated iron church, known as St Michaels, is predominantly used by Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox Christians and was built over a weekend by a team of 30 volunteers. The programme will be presented by the broadcaster Sally Magnusson.

An estimated 5,000 migrants, displaced from countries including Eritrea, Libya and Syria, are living in several camps around Calais.

The Rev Michael Sadgrove, dean of Durham, also mounted a passionate defence of the BBC on his blog. “I want to applaud the BBC’s decision to cross the Channel and broadcast from the Jungle,” he wrote.

“What’s the answer to the scornful Pharisees at the Sun? It’s pretty obvious. Just ask what Jesus would do. He would be in the Jungle, of course, just as he kept company with a lot of other people the establishment of his day found it difficult to tolerate.”

The Baptist minister and prominent Christian commentator, Steve Chalke, wrote in anarticle for Christian Today that tackling a complex issue like the migrant crisis in Calais was “exactly what Songs of Praise should be doing”.

“Their brave and wise investment of a tiny part of the licence fee will only help us more clearly focus one of the growing moral issues that life in our, otherwise much sought after, globalised 21st-century world has created, and which none of us any longer can afford to ignore,” he said.