Several issues have placed religion and it’s role in politics in the spotlight this week.
Britain's Labour Party has found itself in hot water over allowing a free vote on the bill that will allow the creation hybrid human-animal embryos. Meanwhile, Barack Obama is assessing the damage done to his campaign by the comments of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
*********It's worth noting that this piece is an a-bridged version of something I wrote for a British liberal blog site, but I think it raises some issues that are pretty universal********
First, let’s set some parameters for the debate.
Religious faith, or lack of it, is a matter of personal conviction - but the business of government is to govern an entire society comprised of different levels and types of individual belief. Modern, democratic states must be secular (not atheist) in nature. This is especially true in the age of the ‘war on terror’, when fundamentalist ideologues try and portray secularism as merely a covert tool of Christian domination.
Secularism is a cornerstone of moder democracy, it is a founding principle of democratic nations and direct and principled break from a past in which rulers claimed legitimacy from divine inheritance. It is more than just a fancy word, it must be at the heart of democracy because it is the principle of the predominance of the people’s will over patronage allegedly handed on down from the heavens.
It is not essential to have religious faith to share a set of moral values or indeed to ‘belong’; it is easier and far more healthy to unite around human centered values in beliefs, such as belief in the innate capacity of humanity to better itself. More often than not, religion does more to divide than unite, as we are seeing day-after-day in the world at large.
It coheres a specific ‘group identity’ but part of that process is unity against the other groups. Saying religion is a unifying force is a bit like saying a love of soccer unites a nation - try telling that to a room full of Tottenham and Arsenal or Manchester United and Manchester City fans.
It is perfectly understandable that somebody’s religious faith may inform and even guide their personal political convictions. This is fine in a local activist; but when those convictions become a matter of state or governance then they must always be set aside. Labour MPs should be allowed to vote as their conscience dictates; that is a matter of elemental democracy. However, there conscience must be guided not by scriptures but by a hard-headed assessment of which course of action best serves the people they govern; this is the only acceptable criterion for judging a piece of legislation.
So, when we come to faith schools it is not merely a matter of ‘freedom of conscience’, as has been insisted. As I have said above, governments govern in the name of all the people and preferential treatment for, or discrimination against, faith schools is equally unacceptable. Often as liberals we have to grapple with tricky balancing acts between different sets of contending rights.
Parents have the right to raise children as they see fit; but those children also have the right to develop, as fully functioning individuals, their own sets of beliefs formed by their own judgment. We would not accept schooling in a particular political train of thought, and it is unacceptable for a particular religious one to be taught as the all-defining truth - let alone be the criterion for entry to a state-funded school, or the bar that denies a child their basic right to education. All religious education must be strictly neutral and taught in the spirit of educating to understand.
Schools must work on the assumption that the child they are admitting is an individual with no set pattern of belief and has the inalienable right to develop their own. I am afraid that I do not agree with the right of parents to determine their child’s religious belief at any age. Children who do not have a self-professed faith should be chracterised as non-committal until such a time as they feel able to make their own choice; those that wish to stipulate a faith should do so under conditions where parental pressure cannot be brought to bear.
Providing for each ‘faith identity', for example, is precisely the course of action that is fragmenting our society, because within that ‘provision’ accusations of favoritism and sectional jealousies grow. Where there is no provision, where a state maintains the strictest neutrality there is no room for this growth. A tolerant, secular state which respects the rights of the individual while maintaining its neutrality is one that can heal the wounds that are beginning to appear within our society.
Neutral provision of religious education would allow for the free intermingling and exchange of ideas, and the development at an early age of a healthy culture of critical engagement with different ideas.