While religious practice has declined throughout western society, we have the paradox that the religious imagination has sought new scope and new eclecticism. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has noted in The Persistence of Faith that "a multicultural mind can use Zen for inwardness, Hassidic tales for humour, liberation theology for politics, and nature mysticism for environmental concern."

There is a do-it-yourself, a la carte aspect to the contemporary appetite for variety in religious experience, and it is especially marked among younger adults. There is also a hunger of the imagination, of the kind described by the novelist and art critic John Berger. He writes: "The human imagination . . . has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialistic practice of philosophy."

The notion of open ground, of space for the imagination and the spirit, has a long history. The Greeks had a word for the place dedicated to the spirit, the realm of values and beliefs. The word was temenos. It stood for an area of ground sacred to a god, for the sanctuary or a temple precinct. It was land literally "cut off" from common use and demarcated as a zone or site of the community's relationship with the gods.

In this sophisticated concept, it was not only the human community which benefited from the existence of a divine space. The god became in some sense a landowner. And just as the city had its divine space in the temenos, so it had its secular, political forum in the agora - the marketplace and debating assembly. In classical Greek civilisation the healthy community had one foot in the temenos and the other in the agora.

There is something here with relevance for broadcasting. In our time, in the theory of mass communications, broadcasting is often referred to as public space, a necessary forum in which each society conducts its debate with itself. Indeed, broadcasting is now so central to our public life and our social discourse that it may no longer be meaningful to draw an absolute distinction between communications and culture.

Certainly advocates of public service broadcasting have long argued that television and radio are essential to the survival and growth of our democracies. We have borrowed the language of the Greeks and we claim that broadcasting is the agora of modern democratic society. Equally, society needs a temenos - a spiritual space - and here, too, broadcasting can be a ground for our well-being.

At the conference in Prague, producers from all over Europe were conscious that one of the most striking religious broadcasts of the year covered the attendance of one million young people at a papal Mass in Longchamps, Paris, last August. How is this to be explained in a Europe where the religious practice of earlier generations is on the wane? As the broadcasters know, young people show little interest in religious programmes and the traditional forms of religious expression. Yet this event drew attention to a reality that is rarely acknowledged by television services, despite television's unremitting effort to prove attractive and relevant to the under-40s. At one level, of course, the Longchamps Mass was remarkable simply because so many turned up to share the collective emotional experience.

But in another sense, it was evidence that the Pope is seen as a spiritual rather than a denominational leader by significant numbers of a generation seeking a spiritual dimension in their lives.

Clearly, if religious broadcasting is to respond to the spiritual interests of younger adults, the content and style of the programmes must change to speak to those viewers.

Surprisingly, broadcasters have paid less attention to religion and spirituality, even though these signatures of culture are every bit as distinctive and noteworthy as food and music and fashion.

Prague, with its long history of high culture - Jewish and Christian - was an inspiring venue. The broadcasters and programme-makers came from diverse societies, multi-faith and multi-ethnic, with distinct patterns of religious practice and secular indifference.

Yet they recognised a common challenge memorably expressed in a quotation from an essay, How Zurich Invented the Modern World, by Carlos Fuentes. Here he ponders the moral and spiritual significance of the cultural renaissance that took place in Zurich around 1916, at a time of world war and mechanised barbarism: "It should be the warning once more, as the phantoms of racism, xenophobia, anti-Islamism, raise their heads anew and remind us of Conrad's words in Under Western Eyes: `There are phantoms of the living as well as phantoms of the dead.' "

Our broadcasting has its role in warning against the phantoms of the living. And not only warning, but also grappling with them and repelling them. If we confine ourselves to the language of materialism in broadcasting; if the marketplace is our only common ground; if we serve only propaganda and ignore the need to promote understanding; then we lose the ability to conduct the discourse of the spirit, and we will dispossess our young people. In that darkness, the phantoms will advance.

Adrian Moynes is special assistant to the director general at RTE