Andrew Copson

A new All Party Parliamentary Group is going to be forming soon to improve the subject of ‘Religious Education’ with ones of its aims as ensuring ‘every young person experiences a personally inspiring and academically rigorous education in religious and non-religious worldviews.’

Some people are surprised that humanists have such a long involvement in the subject of ‘Religious Education’ in England and Wales but the fact is that they have been involved for many decades working to make the subject more balanced, fair and objective and to ensure that it includes education not just about religious beliefs but about non-religious ones too.

Reasons to support education about religious and non-religious beliefs in schools:

1. Religions and other philosophies and worldviews are an important part of the heritage and culture of humanity and education about them, from the Ancient Greek pantheon to Islam to Confucianism to Humanism, is consequently an important part of a Humanities education.

2. At least a basic knowledge of our fellow citizens’ beliefs is useful for good citizenship because it can help to generate mutual understanding which, other than in schools, may not develop (so, a child of Christian parents can learn about where non-religious people get their values from; a child of humanist parents can learn why their Sikh neighbour wears a turban etc)

3. Learning about the range of different beliefs is a way of ensuring children get their entitlement to learning about a broad range of human views and is a good counter to indoctrination that might occur in the home. One of my friends who is a teacher had a pupil from a very religious background who said to her that the trouble with RE was that it was interesting but made you question things you weren’t really supposed to question. Bingo!

Unfortunately, the subject needs much improvement, as the latest Ofsted report pointed out, and RE remains the subject most taught by non-expert teachers. There are also laws which exempt state-funded religious schools from the general requirement to teach a broader syllabus and allow them to teach a confessional one. It seems unlikely that these problems will be addressed under the current government but maybe in the longer term.

Coincidentally with the news of the new Parliamentary Group, an education researcher called John Tillson has been posting videos of interviews about RE he did with various people a few years ago. It was so long ago I can’t actually remember doing it but here is one with me:

Here is the video of The Big Questions yesterday where Richard Dawkins, Jonathan Bartley and I defended secularism and argued this is not a Christian country. Here also is a video from earlier last week with me and Anne Atkins discussing the same issues on the BBC.

Looking back on the week I think there is one really important unanswered question: why have politicians from Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles to Baroness Warsi to the Prime Minister seen it as important and legitimate policy to declare that Britain is a Christian country and secularism is illiberal and intolerant?

I can think of three possibilities but welcome suggestions of any others:

1 It is an attempt to develop a Christian right that will be a future security for the Conservative party as the religious right is in the US. There are already Christian lobby groups in the UK which behave like those in the US and advance the same range of concerns (anti-choice, against assisted dying for terminally ill people, against comprehensive sex and relationship education for young people etc) which have been working with individual Conservative politicians.

2 They think that this message plays well to their already existing support base. (I know that, when we were last recruiting Conservative members of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group, many potential members were concerned that their own local parties would not like them to join, so certainly the perception that such bases are Christian by inclination if not by religion is strong).

3 They really believe it. They just can’t understand that most people in the UK don’t rely on religion generally or Christianity in particular for their values and do just fine. So, when they are searching for some unifying values to promote, in response to what they see as a values deficit in society, they can only resort to Christianity. I think this is the scariest interpretation as it means they really mean what they say rather than it just being tactical, and the threat of actual public policies based on their false beliefs is much greater.

Any other interpretations?

This Valentine’s Day has started badly with a love letter from Baroness Warsi to Christianity and the Pope, both of which she really loves. The Telegraph, Independent and Guardian are all reporting it.

She’s said it all before, of course, but she has chosen a bad day to say it today: the same day that research published by IpsosMori shows that most self-described Christians disagree with her.

She never gives any solid and real examples of what this ‘militant secularisation’ is that she is talking about. She never defines her terms, so we don’t even really know what she means by ‘religion in the public sphere’ and the one time I saw her defending her positions on religion on Newsnight, it became clear that she was actually quite ignorant of the detail of most of the policy areas in which religion intersects with government in practice.

Are there any actual specific policies that she is recommending to support ‘faith’? She has basically made this same speech five or six times now, and written on the same theme in The Telegraph repeatedly, but I still don’t quite know what she actually wants.

Today’s second lot of data from IpsosMori, commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation, looks at the social and political attitudes of people who tick ‘Christian’ in the census.

I’ve often been in debate, on panels, TV, radio or elsewhere, with those (Bishops, people from Christian lobby groups, Christian politicians) claiming to speak for that 70% of census Christians so it’s always interesting to find out what those self-defining ‘Christians’ actually think about the social and political issues on which religious leaders pontificate.

When we do find out, we often see a huge disconnect between their views and the views of those who claim to speak for them. A good example is assisted dying: polls from 2010 and earlier show over 70% of self-described Christians in favour of legalised assisted dying, but not a single Bishop in Parliament voted in favour of it.

Of course, most who ticked the Christian census box meant nothing religious at all by this self-identification (see my previous post) so in a sense we can’t complain that religious leaders and lobbyists are not representing their views accurately. Bishops et al could claim that they are really speaking for their actual believers, a much much much smaller crowd.

That’s fair enough but what they can’t do is have it both ways: either they are speaking for a small minority of actual committed believers or they can try to speak for the 70%, as they often claim they are doing, in which case they should take the trouble to find out what that 70% actually believes.

Among the things they are revealed as believing in today’s research are that gay people should have the same legal rights in all aspects of their lives as straight people (61%), women should have the right to abortion within the current time limit (62%), the law should apply to everyone equally, regardless of religion (92%) and religion should not have a special influence on public policy (73%).

Bad news for those who claim the support of the 70% in their campaigns to exemptions from equality laws, reductions in the abortion time limit, Bishops in the House of Lords, confessional education in state funded schools, keeping marriage for a man and a woman only, and generally giving religion a privileged place in public life.

There’s a lesson for politicians too: 78% of census Christians say Christianity has no, or not very much, influence on how they vote in General Elections. If they knew this, perhaps successive governments would have greater courage in standing up to powerful church lobbies in particular and pursuing policies that would give effect to the social and political morality of the fair-minded humane mainstream in Britain of which many census ‘Christians’ are a part.

(PS I believe that even many real believing religious Christians don’t support the policies of the lobbyists either. The vast majority – though obviously not all – not just of my Christian friends today but of all the Christians I have known have been more liberal, tolerant, humane and fair-minded than many of the institutions and organisations that claim to speak for them – I’d be interested to see more data on this.)

‘Believing without belonging’ has been the slogan of those who say that, although actual church attendance has fallen to negligible proportions on the average week and very few people are in membership of any church, people do still believe.

This was an argument whose advocates were driven almost delirious with joy when the results of the 2001 census were published and it was revealed that over 70% of those answering had ticked the ‘Christian’ box.

Although good serious demographers like David Voas and Alasdair Crockett have strongly rebutted the ‘believing without belonging’ thesis (e.g. here) and academics like Abby Day have demonstrated that many of those who ticked ‘Christian’ in the census were not in any sense believers, still the same argument rattles on regardless.

As part of our Census Campaign last year, the BHA commissioned research by YouGov to find out a bit more about census Christians. We discovered – of course – that only 6% of census Christians had attended a church in the last week but we also discovered that 65% of them also said they were not religious and only 48% of them even believed Jesus was a real person who was the son of god, died and came back to life. It seemed to pretty much explode the claims that all or most of those ticking ‘Christian’ in the census were religiously ‘Christian’ in any meaningful or significant sense.

Today, IpsosMori is releasing research commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation, which was carried out a week after the BHA poll, once the 2011 census had already been taken, and the findings go even further in exposing how meaningless the “70% Christian” line really is.

Amongst other things, it shows that only 10% of census Christians say they seek most guidance on questions of right and wrong from religious teachings or beliefs and over 60% of them haven’t read the Bible in the last year. Only 28% say that it is a belief in the teachings of Christianity that makes them tick the Christian box.

It just underlines what any sensible person knows and any rational person has accepted from the weight of research done since the 2001 census – not only are the majority of people in the UK not religious at all, but even most self-identifying ‘Christians’ mean by that only a vague inherited cultural self description: nothing religious.

The way that the census data was abused following its release ten years ago has done great damage to a proper understanding of the belief demography of the UK, but at least it has also helped contribute to the building of an evidence base that should make that same sort of abuse of the 2011 data impossible.

Hopefully!

I wrote a letter to The Sunday Telegraph last weekabout this letter which they published from a group of Christians:

The new barbarism

SIR – We write as senior church leaders whose congregations have been affected by the recent violence on our streets.

What made Britain great was a sense of responsibility, of accountability to one another and, ultimately, to God. It is the loss of this moral framework that has led to the plunge into the new barbarism. We must take steps immediately to strengthen the family as a place for moral and spiritual formation where our children first learn about boundaries.

The churches are also committed to the task of supporting schools in their work of instilling the young with values derived from the timeless life-enhancing principles of the Bible.

What we instil in children today will determine in the future how they govern a nation, influence our policies and ultimately determine the quality of life in our communities.

We each make choices and decisions based on our value systems. Godlessness has only produced selfishness and greed. The well-tried Christian faith has given us hope in the past and can do so again now.

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali

Former Bishop of Rochester and President of Oxtrad

Pastor Ade Omooba

Co-Founder, Christian Concern/Christian Legal Centre

Pastor Kofi Banful

Senior Pastor, Praise Chapel, Edgware, Middlesex

Rev Celia Apeagyei-Collins

Rehoboth Foundation, London E16

Rev Wale Hudson-Roberts

Founder African Development Forum, London

Pastor Lanre Sholola

Co-Founder, Christian Victory Group, London SW9

I tried to make it as Telegraphy as possible but they didn’t publish it. Here it is anyway!

Sir,

The idea that the Christian religion per se has some sort of beneficial effect on personal morality is without foundation, especially in Britain where surveys have found little variation in social responsibility between Christians and the non-religious. The idea that many centuries of Christian teaching and practice in Europe produced a more morally advanced culture that the culture of pre-Christian Europe or non-Christian societies elsewhere in the world is at the very least arguable, and many would argue the contrary.

In any case, the linking of morality to a system of religious belief in the education of children is seriously misguided. What will happen then if the religious belief dissolves in later life? Young people can be left with the very false idea that a sense of concern for others and values of social responsibility have become unnecessary.

The recent civil unrest and criminality surely needs addressing rationally and with a regard to evidence of what really works, by citizens of all beliefs. Pious and ahistorical assertions from those most interested in pursuing their own proselytising religious agenda are not helpful.

Andrew Copson

Natalie Haynes’ excellent Voltaire Lecture for the BHA yesterday on how the ancient world can tell teach us about ourselves and our society, made me remember an article I wrote 5 years ago for  ’Scottish Review’ on ‘the book that most influenced you’. Here it is (since you probably don’t read ‘Scottish Review’):

‘When I was at university I was studying the history of Greece two and a half thousand years ago and reading the Oresteia, a trilogy of plays by the dramatist Aeschylus which he wrote for performance in Athens.

The basic plot is quite simple. In the first play, the king Agamemnon returns from the Trojan war and is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and the man she has taken as her lover in the ten years her husband was away. She kills him in the bath with an axe. In the second play, her son Orestes, returns from exile and, encouraged by his sister, kills his mother in revenge for her murder of his father. Revenge is a pattern of the trilogy, because one of the main reasons that Clytemnestra murdered her husband in the first place was because he’d sacrificed their daughter to the gods. As a result of killing his mother, Orestes is haunted by the Furies – goddesses of revenge – who pursue him across Greece, not letting him rest, always trying to tear him to pieces.

This nightmare of blood and revenge continues until, in the third play, Orestes comes to the city of Athens. That’s where the cycle of revenge is broken, and the city comes together in a new way to judge, in the first court in history, the crime of Orestes, and to replace vengeance with justice. The furies are converted into spirits of righteous justice and the darkness that has pervaded the plays, is dispelled with a torch-lit parade of thanks.

Aeschylus had seen a terrible war in his youth, but unlike the thousands that died in it, Aeschylus was lucky. He lived on past the war to enjoy the results of victory when his native city of Athens, rich through victory, was the scene of a cultural explosion: poetry, art, drama, sculpture, political equality, the rule of law at the time when he was writing. When he looked back on the events of his lifetime, he saw the same sort of story that he put into his plays: the struggle of mankind to break the bounds of savagery, and establish a new sort of existence for itself.

The plays are beautiful: well-crafted, poetic, tragic in a truly moving sense, but full of hope. Their historical importance is immense: they don’t just describe the beginnings of civilisation, they helped themselves to light the spark of civilisation, and they made Europe and the whole western world what it is today.

Although we don’t go around these days killing our mothers because they killed our fathers who killed our sisters, for me the play still reflects a timeless reality. The thought that through our own efforts we can bring order and justice to a naturally harsh world, that we can control it, that people almost three thousand years ago were doing just that when they took the first steps towards creating the world that we know today, has made me very optimistic, because it’s made me aware of how much we can do, and how much we’ve done in the past.

It’s given me a more long-term perspective, to know that human society has been struggling with questions of justice and ethics, and meaning and purpose for so long. I’m always suspicious of politicians, journalists, and commentators of all sorts when they make expansive statements about the course of history, and I’m sure it’s because this book made me realise how long – unknowably long – human history really is.

It’s made me think more critically – when someone says that something is right or inevitable, because I remember how the characters in the book, and the man who wrote the book and all the other people in the society he lived in, made purpose and meaning for themselves in a world where there was no ultimate meaning, and where the characters that were gods were petty and destructive and weak, and it is the people who are noble and strong, because their lives are short and they are the only lives they have.

It’s given me a sense of the unity of humanity throughout time, because we can see how the problems that we face today are so similar to the problems of three thousand years ago, understood by people in a rural backwater that at the same time was one of the most civilised places on earth.’

The 200th anniversary of Shelley’s ‘The Necessity of Atheism’, perhaps the first atheist pamphlet in England and the cause of Shelley’s expulsion from the University of Oxford, has been under-commemorated. But Ann Wroe’s Shelley Lecture for the British Humanist Association last week was  brilliant event and I have a piece on the subject in today’s Guardian (p.41).

You can read it online.

The silly rejection of the BHA’s Census Campaign adverts prompted a blog from me on the Index on Censorship’s ‘Free Speech blog’. You can read it here.