Faith, Fools’ gold – a modern disaster?
In today’s paper (The Observer, 26/5/13) a front page story shows a majority of Britons believe that we are bound for a clash of civilisations between the Moslem minority and the majority British indigenous population. One “civilisation” is characterised by faith and the other by a kind of secular broad Anglicanism.
A simplified historical analysis suggests that Europe was riven by religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until they learnt better and slaughtered each other for nationalist and imperialist reasons instead. In Britain religious strife was the underlying cause of executions, conspiracies and murder let alone Civil War and regicide. Then in 1689 the Act of Toleration, allowing freedom of religious worship – even if at first only for most Protestants of whichever denomination, started a process of freedom for all religions, leading to the largely secular and tolerant society of late twentieth century Britain.
But even these islands suffered a little from religious intolerance. In twentieth century Ireland, the south saw the largely peaceful but very damaging emigration of the relatively affluent Protestant population; and much more notoriously in the north the so-called “Troubles” have destroyed lives and communities. And religious conflicts have often surfaced in cities such as Liverpool and Glasgow.
In Britain, one of the curious by-products of religious interests and a conservative society was, and is, the existence of so many C of E and Catholic schools, especially at the primary level. Originally a messy typically British compromise, to buy off church opposition to compulsory state education, it was a compromise never seriously questioned except by some of us on the left in the sixties.
Church schools remained a curious feature of this very secular society. They are even more of a curiosity when compared to the overwhelmingly secular, state schools and schooling system that reigns in far more religious countries, such as USA, France and Germany.
As it turns out the failure to resolve this clearly illogical policy left secularists, like me, in a weak position when faith resurfaced as an important feature in post-Thatcher years. The argument that C of E schools didn’t really matter as all they taught was a very secular kind of bible study and good manners was pathetic against the demand for equality from other religions.
Suddenly local education authorities had to create SACREs (Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education, Education Act, 1988). I was one of the members of Wandsworth’s first Sacre as a “protesting” humanist! And then came Tony Blair!
Under him, we got faith schools and now with the arrival of Govite free schools, a mechanism designed to create a thousand different types of school – what a Maoist Government we have! Suddenly just as religious strife hits our streets in more and more dramatic fashion, with bombs, knifings and vandalised mosques, we are creating separatist education. In Wandsworth, we have an Islamic primary school, a new Catholic secondary school on the drawing board, a new Anglican secondary school now a decade old, and just approved a new Jewish school.
Surely it is one thing to celebrate difference but quite another to cement separate development worthy of Ireland, South Africa or Palestine. It is surely time for us humanists to gang together with tolerant and sensible members of other faiths to defend and fight for secular education for all.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 