Rethinking religion and belief in public life: a manifesto for change
The time has come to rethink religion's public role in order to ensure equality and fairness for believers and non-believers alike, says a major new report launched by the National Secular Society.
The report says that Britain's "drift away from Christianity" coupled with the rise in minority religions and increasing non-religiosity demands a "long term, sustainable settlement on the relationship between religion and the state".
Rethinking religion and belief in public life: a manifesto for change has been sent to all MPs as part of a major drive by the Society to encourage policymakers and citizens of all faiths and none to find common cause in promoting principles of secularism.
It calls for Britain to evolve into a secular democracy with a clear separation between religion and state and criticises the prevailing multi-faithist approach as being "at odds with the increasing religious indifference" in Britain.
Terry Sanderson, National Secular Society president, said: "Vast swathes of the population are simply not interested in religion, it doesn't play a part in their lives, but the state refuses to recognise this.
"Britain is now one of the most religiously diverse and, at the same time, non-religious nations in the world. Rather than burying its head in the sand, the state needs to respond to these fundamental cultural changes. Our report sets out constructive and specific proposals to fundamentally reform the role of religion in public life to ensure that every citizen can be treated fairly and valued equally, irrespective of their religious outlook."
Read the report:
Rethinking religion and belief in public life: a manifesto for change
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Add your endorsementComplete list of recommendations
Our changing society – Multiculturalism, secularism and group identity
1. The Government should continue to move away from multiculturalism and instead emphasise individual rights and social cohesion. A multi-faith approach should be avoided.
2. The UK is a secularised society which upholds freedom of and from religion. We urge politicians to consider this, and refrain from using "Christian country" rhetoric.
The role of religion in schools
Faith schools
3. There should be a moratorium on the opening of any new publicly funded faith schools.
4. Government policy should ultimately move towards a truly inclusive secular education system in which religious organisations play no formal role in the state education system.
5. Religion should be approached in schools like politics: with neutrality, in a way that informs impartially and does not teach views.
6. Ultimately, no publicly funded school should be statutorily permitted, as they currently are, to promote a particular religious position or seek to inculcate pupils into a particular faith.
7. In the meantime, pupils should have a statutory entitlement to education in a non-religiously affiliated school.
8. No publicly funded school should be permitted to prioritise pupils in admissions on the basis of baptism, religious affiliation or the religious activities of a child's parent(s).
9. Schools should not be able to discriminate against staff on the basis of religion or belief, sexual orientation or any other protected characteristics.
Religious education
10. Faith schools should lose their ability to teach about religion from their own exclusive viewpoint and the law should be amended to reflect this.
11. The Government should undertake a review of Religious Education with a view to reforming the way religion and belief is taught in all schools.
12. The teaching of religion should not be prioritised over the teaching of non-religious worldviews, and secular philosophical approaches.
13. The Government should consider making religion and belief education a constituent part of another area of the curriculum or consider a new national subject for all pupils that ensures all pupils study of a broad range of religious and non-religious worldviews, possibly including basic philosophy.
14. The way in which the RE curriculum is constructed by Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education (SACREs) is unique, and seriously outdated. The construction and content of any subject covering religion or belief should be determined by the same process as other subjects after consultation with teachers, subject communities, academics, employers, higher education institutions and other interested parties (who should have no undue influence or veto).
Sex and relationships education
15. All children and young people, including pupils at faith schools, should have a statutory entitlement to impartial and age-appropriate sex and relationships education, from which they cannot be withdrawn.
Collective worship
16. The legal requirement on schools to provide Collective Worship should be abolished.
17. The Equality Act exception related to school worship should be repealed. Schools should be under a duty to ensure that all aspects of the school day are inclusive.
18. Both the law and guidance should be clear that under no circumstances should pupils be compelled to worship and children's right to religious freedom should be fully respected by all schools.
19. Where schools do hold acts of worship pupils should themselves be free to choose not to take part.
20. If there are concerns that the abolition of the duty to provide collective worship would signal the end of assemblies, the Government may wish to consider replacing the requirement to provide worship with a requirement to hold inclusive assemblies that further pupils' 'spiritual, moral, social and cultural education'.
Independent schooling
21. All schools should be registered with the Department for Education and as a condition of registration must meet standards set out in regulations.
22. Government must ensure that councils are identifying suspected illegal, unregistered religious schools so that Ofsted can inspect them. The state must have an accurate register of where every child is being educated.
Freedom of expression - Freedom of expression, blasphemy and the media
23. Any judicial or administrative attempt to further restrict free expression on the grounds of 'combatting extremism' should be resisted. Threatening behaviour and incitement to violence is already prohibited by law. Further measures would be an illiberal restriction of others' right to freedom of expression. They are also likely to be counterproductive by insulating extremist views from the most effective deterrents: counterargument and criticism.
24. Proscriptions of "blasphemy" must not be introduced by stealth, legislation, fear or on the spurious grounds of 'offence'. There can be no right to be protected from offence in an open and free secular society.
25. The fundamental value of free speech should be instilled throughout the education system and in all schools.
26. Universities and other further education bodies should be reminded of their statutory obligations to protect freedom of expression under the Education (No 2) Act 1986.
Religion and the law
Civil rights, 'conscience clauses' and religious freedom
27. We are opposed in principle to the creation of a 'conscience clause' which would permit discrimination against (primarily) LGBT people. This is of particular concern in Northern Ireland.
28. Religious freedom must not be taken to mean or include a right to discriminate. Businesses providing goods and services, regardless of owners' religious views, must obey the law.
29. Equality legislation must not be rolled back in order to appease a minority of religious believers whose views are out-of-touch with the majority of the general public and their co-religionists.
30. The UK Government should impose changes on the rest of the UK in order to comply with Human Rights obligations. Every endeavour should be made by to extend same sex marriage and abortion access to Northern Ireland.
Conscience 'opt-outs' in healthcare
31. Efforts to unreasonably extend the legal concept of 'reasonable accommodation' and conscience to give greater protection in healthcare to those expressing a (normally religious) objection should be resisted.
32. Conscience opt-outs should not be granted where their operation impinges adversely on the rights of others.
33. Pharmacists' codes should not permit conscience opts out for pharmacists that result in denial of service, as this may cause harm. NHS contracts should reflect this.
34. Consideration should be given to legislative changes to enforce the changes to pharmacists codes recommended above.
The use of tribunals by religious minorities
35. The legal system must not be undermined. Action must be taken to ensure that none of the councils currently in operation misrepresent themselves as sources of legal authority.
36. Work should be undertaken by local authorities to identify sharia councils, and official figures should be made available to measure the number of sharia councils in the UK to help understand the extent of their influence.
37. There needs to be a continuing review by the Government of the extent to which religious 'law', including religious marriage without civil marriage, is undermining human rights and/or becoming de facto law. The Government must be proactive in proposing solutions to ensure all citizens are able to access their legal rights.
38. All schools should promote understanding of citizenship and legal rights under UK law so that people – particularly Muslim women and girls – are aware of and able to access their legal rights and do not regard religious 'courts' as sources of genuine legal authority.
Religious exemptions from animal welfare laws
39. Laws intended to minimise animal suffering should not be the subject of religious exemptions. Non-stun slaughter should be prohibited and existing welfare at slaughter legislation should apply without exception.
40. For as long as non-stun slaughter is permitted, all meat and meat products derived from animals killed under the religious exemption should be obliged to show the method of slaughter.
41. In public institutions it should be unlawful not to provide a stunned alternative to non-stun meat produce.
Religion and public services
Social action by religious organisations
42. The Equality Act should be amended to suspend the exemptions for religious groups when they are working under public contract on behalf of the state.
43. Legislation should be introduced so that contractors delivering general public services on behalf of a public authority are defined as public authorities explicitly for those activities, making them subject to the Human Rights Act legislation.
44. It should be mandatory for all contracts with religious providers of publicly-funded services to have unambiguous equality, non-discrimination and non-proselytising clauses in them.
45. Public records of contracts with religious groups should be maintained and appropriate measures for monitoring their compliance with equality and human rights legislation should be put in place.
46. There should be an enforcement mechanism for the above, which would for example receive and adjudicate on complaints without complainants having to take legal action.
Hospital chaplaincy
47. Religious care should not be funded through NHS budgets.
48. No NHS post should be conditional on the patronage of religious authorities, nor subject directly or indirectly to discriminatory provisions, for example on sexual orientation or marital status.
49. Alternative funding, such as via a charitable trust, could be explored if religions wish to retain their representation in hospitals.
50. Hospitals wishing to employ staff to provide pastoral, emotional and spiritual care for patients, families and staff should do so within a secular context.
Institutions and public ceremonies
Disestablishment
51. The Church of England should be disestablished
52. The Bishops' Bench should be removed from the House of Lords. Any future Second Chamber should have no representation for religion whether ex-officio or appointed, whether of Christian denominations or any other faith. This does not amount to a ban on clerics; they would eligible for selection on the same basis as others.
Remembrance
53. The Remembrance Day commemoration ceremony at the Cenotaph should become secular in character. Ceremonies should be led by national or civic leaders and there should be a period of silence for participants to remember the fallen in their own way, be that religious or not.
Monarchy and religion
54. The ceremony to mark the accession of a new head of state should take place in the seat of representative secular democracy, such as in Westminster Hall and should not be religious.
55. The monarch should no longer be required to be in communion with the Church of England nor ex officio be Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and the title "Defender of the Faith" should not be retained.
Parliamentary prayers
56. We believe Parliament should reflect the country as it is today and remove acts of worship from the formal business of the House.
Local democracy and religious observance
57. Acts of religious worship should play no part in the formal business of parliamentary or local authority meetings.
Public broadcasting, the BBC and religion
58. The BBC should rename Thought for the Day 'Religious thought for the day' and move it away from Radio 4's flagship news programme and into a more suitable timeslot reflecting its niche status. Alternatively it could reform it and open it up to non-religious contributors.
59. The extent and nature of religious programming should reflect the religion and belief demographics of the UK.
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Religion is not a justification for discrimination
A shadow minister was wrong to say religious registrars should be able to opt out of providing same-sex marriages. And her comments are a reminder that we don't need a ministerial office for faith, says Stephen Evans.
Janet Daby, Labour's shadow minister for 'women, faith and equalities', resigned from the party's frontbench this week after suggesting that religious registrars should be permitted to refuse to carry out same-sex marriages.
In doing so she reopened an old argument that was settled in 2013 when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that requiring religious civil registrars to perform their duties fully and without prejudice does not amount to religious discrimination.
The case concerned Lillian Ladele, a civil registrar who objected to being required to officiate at same-sex civil partnership ceremonies due to her Christian beliefs. Her request for an accommodation of her faith was turned down by Islington Council, which insisted that all registrars should perform civil partnership duties – a secular task – in accordance with its 'dignity for all' policy.
Ladele took them to court claiming harassment and discrimination on grounds of religion or belief. After her case was dismissed by the UK courts, she went all the way to the ECtHR, which also dismissed her complaint.
The NSS intervened in that case to argue that any further accommodation of religious conscience would create a damaging hierarchy of rights, seriously undermining UK equality law.
As we argued at the time, anti-discrimination laws are not solely about ensuring provision of services. It's not enough that another civil registrar can step in to provide the service to same-sex couples. If such discrimination became normalised, there may be cases where this becomes impractical anyway. But discriminatory acts have a moral significance beyond the deprivation of a service. Accommodating discriminatory demands causes serious moral harm, undermining the dignity of those discriminated against.
But Daby, apparently prioritising the 'faith' bit of her 'faith and equalities' portfolio, suggested this should be revisited. She said there should be a conscience clause to protect people of faith being penalised for objecting to performing certain tasks because of their religious duties.
Evangelical Christian groups have long argued for such a 'conscience clause' to give Christians and other religious people an unfettered right to manifest their beliefs in the workplace. They've lobbied for a 'duty of reasonable accommodation' that would allow them to discriminate – usually against gay people – on religious grounds.
Their efforts even persuaded the UK's equality watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, to carry out a major review of Britain's equality and human rights legal framework to see if it sufficiently protects individuals with a religion or belief.
It found that it did. It dismissed calls for a duty of so-called 'reasonable accommodation', saying the law "should not be changed to permit individuals to opt out of work duties, to accord with their religious or non-religious beliefs, where this has an actual or potential detrimental or discriminatory impact on others".
It reasoned that the law struck the right balance between protecting religious freedom and upholding the right to non-discrimination.
It was therefore alarming to see someone in Janet Daby's position again advocating for religion to be used as justification for discrimination. Any further accommodation of religious conscience would drive a coach and horses through equalities legislation – and undermine the equal dignity of gay people. As spokesperson for equalities, her job was to protect equality, not undermine it. Hopefully, her resignation indicates that hers is not a position shared by the Labour Party.
The party may also now wish to consider whether rolling the portfolios of 'faith and equalities' together is such a good idea when the two are so often in conflict with each other.
Better still, how about we just drop the minister for faith role altogether? The non-religious and religiously unconcerned don't have a minister for their philosophical views; it's not clear why the religious should have one. Religious organisations and faith groups are, as with any other voluntary and special interest groups, at liberty to advance their own interests. And they are perfectly able to do so without the additional support of a minister to champion and celebrate their causes.
Let's hope Labour's next shadow equalities minister works to roll back the many religious exceptions in equalities law, not extend them further.
Image: Official portrait of Janet Daby MP (cropped), via parliament.uk / Wikimedia Commons, © Richard Townshend [CC BY 3.0]
Allowing religious discrimination in school admissions opens the door to other forms of discrimination
A state-funded faith school recently rejected a child because her mother isn't Jewish. This shows the absurdity of religious discrimination in admissions, says Megan Manson.
One of the most significant ways faith schools cause unfairness and division is by discriminating in their admissions codes. Many state schools in Britain effectively reject local children whose families aren't religious, or follow a different religion.
This causes needless complexity, undermines social cohesion and sends a damaging message about which children are valued and why. And it's wrong on principle: at the National Secular Society we've long argued that no child should be turned away from a publicly-funded school because of their family's religion or belief.
On their own, those arguments should be enough to end faith-based discrimination in school admissions. But there's more to it, because faith schools that prioritise children from religious families in their admissions criteria can end up discriminating on the basis of other protected characteristics too.
Sometimes this discrimination is indirect. For example, schools with religiously discriminatory admissions criteria may indirectly discriminate against children whose parents are LGBT+, because most religions represented by faith schools are unwelcoming to same-sex couples. Therefore, same-sex couples may be less willing to attend a place of worship than opposite-sex couples and so miss out on a key criterion for prioritised entry to a faith school. The NSS's recent report Faith-shaped holes: How religious privilege is undermining equality law made this point.
Faith-based admissions criteria may also result in indirect racial discrimination. Religious affiliation is closely linked to race. Certain ethnicities are far less likely to follow a particular religion than others; this is especially true of non-Christian faiths. Faith school admissions policies that prioritise members of particular faiths are therefore likely to be intrinsically biased towards particular racial groups as well, leading to ethnic as well as religious segregation in many faith schools.
While these forms of indirect discrimination are bad enough, there are occasional cases where faith schools commit direct discrimination against protected characteristics other than religion or belief, due to the application of religious codes in admissions criteria.
A recently-published report from the local government and social care ombudsman details a case in which not merely the religion, but also the sex, of the parents resulted in a child being refused a place at a state-funded faith school.
According to the report, the father ('Mr C') applied for a place for his daughter at King David Primary School, a Jewish faith school (whose location is unclear). This school prioritises children from Jewish families.
However, although Mr C is Jewish, his wife is Catholic. According to the Jewish 'law' followed by this school, their daughter is therefore not Jewish. In Orthodox Judaism, only children whose mothers are Jewish are themselves considered Jewish, unless they undergo a formal process of conversion.
As a result, Mr C's daughter was placed in the lowest category in the school's oversubscription criteria and consequently failed to get a place. Later, a rabbi did affirm the daughter's Jewish status on the basis of her personal observance, but Mr C's appeal failed regardless.
Mr C's story is similar to a high-profile case over ten years ago also involving a state-funded Jewish school. The Supreme Court found the Jewish Free School in London had broken the law by refusing to admit a boy whose mother was a convert to Judaism rather than a born Jew. The school had directly discriminated against the boy on the basis of race under the Race Relations Act 1976.
Today, increasing numbers of children live in families that don't follow the standard of one mother plus one father. Large numbers live in one-parent families. A smaller yet significant number have same-sex parents, or parents who are transgender. What will happen to these families when they apply to schools with such restrictive requirements? What if a child lives only with his or her father, and the mother's Jewish status is unknown? What about children with two gay fathers?
Cases like these highlight two important points. One is that once you let faith schools discriminate on the basis of religion or belief, other forms of discrimination are likely to creep in, either directly or indirectly. Religion comes heavily packed with ideologies and values, some of which are inherently discriminatory.
And the other is that it is completely absurd to allow archaic religious codes to determine where children go to school in the first place. By its very nature, religious orthodoxy is based on ancient ideas and is resistant to change. It is utterly unsuitable and inappropriate for state schools, which should be open to all children in their communities. Religion, race and family structure shouldn't be relevant considerations.
Religions should be at liberty to define themselves and their members as they see fit. But they should not be allowed to impose their membership criteria on to the schools that we all pay for. The state must cease facilitating and upholding discriminatory religious 'laws'. Only one law belongs in our schools – the democratically-determined law of the land.
The state mustn’t allow children to die for their stated religious beliefs
The High Court is considering whether to allow a girl from a Jehovah's Witness community to refuse blood transfusions. Dr Antony Lempert says the precedent of overriding a child's refusal of lifesaving treatment should be upheld.
An upcoming court case involving a teenage girl from a Jehovah's Witness community will require the judge to make a very hard decision whichever way the case goes. On the face of it, a competent 15 year old girl is asking that she not be given a blood transfusion should one be required even to save her life. It seems as though she fully understands the implications of this decision and is prepared to accept death if the alternative is a course of action prohibited by her faith. Her mother has refused to consent to the treatment on her behalf.
The freedom to make important decisions for ourselves is central to a society such as ours which supports diversity, choice and basic freedoms. In most free democratic nations, restrictions on liberty must rest on strong foundations. We need look no further than the recent Covid-19 pandemic to see examples of such restrictions. It would have been hard to envisage just one year ago the stringent curtailments on our daily life that we are now living through. Nevertheless, these are exceptional times from which most of us expect to return to something approximating our former liberties. Whether or not we agree with particular government policy, we recognise that the peculiar risks of Covid-19 require a change to our normal way of living if we are to protect other people, and particularly the most vulnerable people, from serious harm.
Sometimes in medical practice it is also necessary to restrict patients' liberties. This is the case particularly regarding mental illness, if we feel that our patient does not have the capacity to protect themselves or if they are considered a danger to themselves or others. Yet, crucially, we do not restrict patients' liberties if it is only that we disagree with their decision or think that they are making a bad decision, even one that may ultimately result in a potentially avoidable death, such as refusing amputation of a cancerous limb. The overriding consideration in these cases is autonomy for a patient to make his or her own decision – particularly about the things that matter the most to the patient – provided they are aware of the risks.
In 1982, Victoria Gillick, a Catholic mother of ten children, took her health authority and the Department of Health and Social Security to court to try to prevent doctors from giving contraception or contraceptive advice to children under 16 years of age. In 1985, the case was ultimately decided by the law lords who ruled that children who are judged competent to make their own decisions, since known as 'Gillick-competence', may be given contraception or contraceptive advice even contrary to their parents' wishes or knowledge. Since that time, children's rights to be involved in and to participate in their own treatment decisions according to their level of maturity is not only common, it is good practice.
And yet, bearing all that in mind, I very much hope that the judge rules so as to authorise the medical staff to give this girl blood transfusions as and when required to save her life whether or not she agrees. And this hope remains despite the knowledge that all the evidence of other children from similar communities indicates that this girl is likely to retain her current beliefs for at least the next few years. And it would be the case that once she turns 18, as desperately sad as many of us feel it would be, there would be no court case, but an acceptance of her autonomy and her fundamental right to die for her beliefs.
The reason why I think that it would be the wrong decision to let this 15 year old girl die for her beliefs is because autonomy does not emerge from a vacuum and most children are not intrinsically free. In order to make free, truly autonomous decisions, people must be provided with all the facts and must be protected from undue pressure or coercion. The very reason that children are ordinarily given more legal protections than adults is that they are most at risk from outside pressures, and less well-equipped to recognise and respond to the dangers, even when they can see them.
Though I have no involvement in this case, we are given to understand that in 2011, when she was six, perhaps seven, this girl made a lifelong commitment to a faith which coincided at least with that of her mother's community. She was baptised as a Jehovah's Witness earlier this year. Having been raised in a strong faith community myself, I am sure that her public concordance with her mother's beliefs and community values must have given her mother great joy and satisfaction. Yet the odds of a six year old child having made such a commitment to a faith other than that of her parents, particularly when born into a community with a strong faith ethos, must surely approach zero.
And it would be remiss not to comment on the particular characteristics of the Jehovah's Witness branch of Christianity relevant to this case. The penalty for a Jehovah's Witness who chooses to have a whole blood transfusion, even on medical advice that the alternative would be to die, is that the community of family and friends with whom they have likely grown up and who provide their whole social network, will no longer have anything at all to do with them. This is not just disapproval but full-on shunning. Any friends or family members who meet with them for any purpose other than to encourage or support a return to the community, will also face serious repercussions from the Jehovah's Witness community. Members of the community do not use the word shunning, instead claiming that the transfused person has chosen to disassociate themselves from the community. In this way, perhaps, there is less felt responsibility for the community's actions, actions that many people regard as intrinsically coercive.
And at the best of times, there is a difference between the autonomous choice of a fully informed adult under no pressure from outside agencies, and the choice of a child, necessarily still reliant on her parents and community for support. The case of this 15 year old girl is far from the best of times. With the media spotlight now firmly fixed on her, there would be no possible way for her to retain patient confidentiality even in the unlikely event that she were to agree to a transfusion. Also adult Jehovah's Witnesses, should they wish to, can rarely escape the community's gaze. The hospital liaison committee (HLC) is a three-person group of Jehovah's Witness elders who promote themselves as akin to chaplains offering Jehovah's Witness patients specific support in their dealings with medical staff. The darker side of the HLC is that they will report back to the community about any patient who 'has chosen to disassociate' by accepting a blood transfusion. Central to the role of medical and nursing staff and hospital chaplaincy services is a respect for patient confidentiality, something the HLCs do not adhere to in this regard.
Back in 1985, I am sure that Victoria Gillick was acting in what she thought was her children's best interests. On the whole, most parents, irrespective of background or belief, will make choices for their child with the child's best interests at heart. Similarly, I am sure that this girl's mother wants only what she thinks is the best for her child. And the fact remains that she is still a 15-year-old child. There is an important difference between the current case and the Gillick ruling. Nearly all children will become sexually active adults, most in their teens. Supporting children's burgeoning independence is integral to keeping them safe, also ensuring that they can still access sexual health information and advice even if their parents or community would prefer them to remain ignorant about certain aspects of sexuality or sexual behaviour. This is why the Gillick ruling was so important.
In stark contrast to the universality of a child's developing sexuality stands a community that enforces its particular biblical interpretation with a coercive system of disassociation. Only children raised into this community would face such a dreadful choice – disassociation or death. By any normal marker used to ensure that patients are not being unduly influenced by others, that is not a free choice. So if there is even the smallest chance that a child born into such a coercive, controlling community, might later find a way to leave that community, then they should be protected from dying and supported to live long enough in order to have at least the opportunity of making her own decisions as an adult.
I don't envy the judge this ruling, though in some ways it will be easier to make this decision than for someone whose life is interwoven with the Jehovah's Witness community having to decide between death and disassociation from all that they hold dear. And if the judge does rule against the girl, they should know that, because she has fought tooth and nail not to have the transfusion, she will most likely still be supported within her community, even after a transfusion, at least until she turns 18. At that point, if she is still in need of regular transfusions, the chances are that before too long, she will leave the community – desperately sadly one way or the other.
The Catholic Church’s control over abortion policy has sparked a furious backlash in Poland
A ruling which effectively outlawed abortion in Poland has again highlighted the government's damagingly close relationship with the Catholic Church. But many Poles are now questioning the church's power, says Aleksandra Myslek.
This article is available in audio format, as part of our Opinion Out Loud series.
On 22 October, in the middle of a dangerous spike in Covid-19 cases and with faith in the Polish government's competence diminishing, a ruling on the legality of what is purposefully called eugenic abortion was about to be heard. The same constitutional tribunal that was a subject of mass protests just a few years ago would announce if women have the right to terminate a pregnancy if it is known that the baby has serious defects, including those that will prevent it from surviving. The sense of tension in the country wasn't yet so palpable as few thought that the government-influenced tribunal would make a step so cruel and so dangerous as outlawing abortions in these circumstances.
The announcement brought a sense of complete disbelief. Pregnancy termination due to "serious and irreversible disability of the foetus" was ruled incompatible with the Polish constitution. The wrongdoing was obvious on so many levels. Raking over the issue during a world health crisis was thoughtless. But the added brutality of the verdict and the apparent law making by the judiciary caused a constitutional and ethical crisis.
Most commentators saw this situation as yet another government attempt to distract the public from its incompetence. If this was the case, the Law and Justice Party showed either a lack of respect for human life lost in the pandemic or very poor knowledge of the nation's views. Were those responsible blinded by the church's statistics asserting that over 90% of Poles are Catholic, which are based on the number of christenings and not actual practising members? Perhaps they weren't aware that public opinion is largely against further abortion restrictions. Did they not know that some of our neighbouring countries offered a much more liberal approach and would draw Polish women en masse, maybe even offering help in solidarity?
The answer may lie in the government's dependence on the Catholic Church.
Between 1956 and 1993 Poland had one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world, allowing terminations due to "difficult circumstances of the woman". This was an equivalent to the modern way of viewing the issue as one of health and wellbeing, as some medical professionals now propose. That paragraph was specifically removed from the legislation after intense and long lasting lobbying efforts from the clergy, who were feared by politicians for their power to influence people's political views.
This development wasn't entirely uncontested but the Polish electorate had a generally homogenous approach to Catholicism in the 90s, as it was seen as the unifying identity of the country that was still recovering from its turbulent past and the recent communist oppression. The government needed the church's steadfast support and thus sold the right of women to make choices about motherhood. Feminists never gave up the fight though and the subject kept coming back, sometimes because the left-leaning parties and NGOs asked for liberalisation of the law and sometimes because the Catholic conservatives demanded further tightening of it. Many debates and many huge protests took place but nobody dared to make changes to what was cynically called an abortion compromise.
Now, in 2020, the government seems to be reaching for the affirmation provided by the church's support one more time. It's a bow to the institution that is still thought to be able to make or break Polish politics. Perhaps the government is preparing to soften its ideological stance against LGBT people, as the EU reaches for dreaded financial threats in response. Maybe, the response to the pandemic is going so badly that the government expects public discontent that can only be remedied by ideological, religious consolation.
No matter the reasoning, the move was not a clever political distraction. The 2020 Poland is different from the 1993 one. Young Poles have felt that they are part of the bigger world for some time now, thanks to the high levels of literacy, technological developments, the EU, and knowledge of foreign languages. The generation that was ironically often called the John Paul II generation is not so attached to the Polish pope, who they view as a dubious historical figure. Young people are aware of their rights and already suspicious of the church due to its illogical stance on environmental issues, regressive aggression towards LGBT people, the multiple and well known paedophilia scandals and simply its pompousness, arrogance and glaring hypocrisy.
The recent ruling prompted the largest protests in Poland since the fall of communism. This seems like a breaking point; the protests unite many social groups.
This might be because the church forgot about another factor, which is perhaps specific to Poland. The country has a long history of feminism with a slightly different emphasis to its western friends. Of course, Polish women had to fight the common fight for equal rights, and the governmental response to domestic violence is still embarrassing. But somewhere along the way, Polish culture became centred around strong women.
It is a part of the patriotic duty to respect women and the country's comedic scene loves to remind everyone that women should be feared. Conservatives and liberals alike still let women first through the door and often stand up when one enters the room. Polish women belong to the most educated in the world and they have been well represented in executive, academic and political roles (even though the current ruling party is doing so badly in this respect).
The dissonance has been reflected in recent weeks. Faced with hardline Catholics questioning the Polish identity of the women's rights supporters and the fury of the Catholic Church trying to "save" the soon to die "unborn", the majority of Poles chose to stick with living women. It has helped them re-establish their cultural identity while rejecting the church's ideological inhumanity.
The road towards liberalisation of the abortion law seems longer than ever but something seems to have broken in the relations between Poland and the church. Although there is no question that many people still dogmatically believe in the absolute sacredness of life from the point of conception, many don't see the church as a fair player in the game anymore. Instead they see a cruel manipulator that will choose to inflict real suffering and take away human dignity in pursuit of ideological purity and control.
The lightning bolt in the image is the symbol of Strajk Kobiet, the women's strike movement in Poland.
This article is available in audio format, as part of our Opinion Out Loud series.
Why was the Church of England allowed to influence the direction of our local secular schools?
The church was given a key role on the board of our local multi-academy trust – even though there were no faith schools in it. Chris Leng questions the assumptions which lay behind this arrangement.
Our child started at our local school in 2016, not long after our family moved to the village in the Yorkshire Wolds. The school is excellent, a lovely community school at the heart of the community with committed staff (and parents). Though many of the nearby schools are faith schools, in 2017 our school along with other non-religious community schools formed the Wolds Learning Partnership, a small multi-academy trust, which purported to retain the constituent schools' community ethos.
However, when my child started in Reception I became aware of how often the local C of E vicar featured in the weekly school newsletter. There were regular references to visits from 'Reverend Fran', particularly at times of Christian significance but many other times as well – assemblies and 'fun days'. This surprised me, but I roughly accepted that the local vicar might feature in the life of the village's only school from time to time. Nothing to get exercised about, I told myself.
In 2017, I read that 'The Prayer Bus' had visited the school. Reference was made in the school newsletter to children playing with 'sorry sand' and 'fuzzy forgiveness'. This prompted me to have my first conversation with the school. I asked why kids of primary school age had been encouraged to take part in an activity which introduced them to the idea that young children might wish to 'atone' for their sins. The (then) headteacher assured me that she understood my concerns and undertook to notify parents of any further visits, the nature of the activities, and a note that parents were within their rights to refuse permission for their child to take part.
I joined the governing body as a parent governor in 2018, and have been a committed member ever since. I was unaware that, unlike schools in local authority control, the MAT (multi-academy trust) board has responsibility for setting the strategic direction of the trust, and for the governance of its schools. It issues only delegated powers to the governors of each individual school. MATs are private organisations rather than being accountable to parents and local communities. We have no say in the membership of MATs, leaving us with little say in the strategic direction of our kids' schools.
But the biggest surprise was that (despite none of the schools in Wolds Learning Partnership being faith schools) a key player on the board of WLP is the Diocese of York Educational Trust (DYET). DYET has a privileged position in the MAT. The articles of association enshrine it within the trust, and give it a right of veto on the appointment of new members.
DYET's website boldly says "it's only right that there is a Church of England presence within the range of academies nationally". It states its commitment to ensuring young people "understand the significance of faith". The diocese's goals on its website are more explicit and include "reaching those we currently don't", "growing in numbers, discipleship and influence" and that it will "seek God's will in pursuing these goals".
Why is it 'only right' that a religious institution should play a key part in the running of such a MAT? Why should the Church of England have strategic influence over my son's school, when it is a community school, as are all of the other schools in the MAT?
I raised the matter with the chair of the trust whose knowledge and wealth of experience within the education sector had impressed me. He informed me that when the trust was set up it was hoped that a number of C of E schools would join. To encourage them to do so, the diocese was involved. The trust adopted the C of E standard articles of association. By his and the trust's own admission, there was no reasonable prospect of a faith school joining the MAT in the foreseeable future.
In September 2019 I was informed that the trust's board (including diocesan appointees) had voted "unanimously in favour of retaining our articles which are the least reflective of church influence available", apparently unaware that 'no influence' is a sound, alternative option – and is available. The trust also claimed, despite the diocese's own statements, that the diocese is "not in the business of promoting a faith".
I was not satisfied with this response so in October 2019 raised a formal complaint asking why a religious institution was being given this influence over the direction of a secular organisation.
In January 2020 I received a hostile written response which recognised that "DYET appears to have enhanced rights within the constitutional documents" and said "the trust continues to seek an appropriate resolution to your concern about diocese involvement whilst having no church schools yet within the MAT".
The trust conceded "Whilst acknowledging that your complaint is justified and must be upheld, the members regret that you felt any complaint was necessary in the first place". They went on to threaten a formal complaint – against me!
I also raised the diocese's involvement with the trust with the Education and Skills Funding Agency. But the agency declined to take it forward, on the grounds that I had "not exhausted the trust's complaints procedure". The trust's letter claiming that "(the members) have determined that this issue is now closed" was perversely not – according to the ESFA – evidence that the grievance was resolved.
The saga reinforces my belief that the Church of England considers that it has an inalienable right to privileged influence over our children's education. As both its reputation and congregation numbers continue to fall, it nonetheless wishes to keep its foot in the door of our schools as part of its attempt to arrest the retreat.
But the story has a more encouraging conclusion. The WLP board has confirmed that following lobbying, the trust has opted to transition to a community articles model and any appointees by the diocese will resign when the new articles are confirmed. But even then, the trust's board minutes said the diocese "requires input" into the drafting of the articles of association. And at the time of writing, some six months after the diocese agreed to leave, the process has not yet been completed due to "certain legal and confidential matters".
However, the fact that the diocese has agreed to leave this wholly non-denominational multi-academy trust is evidence that some progress is being made – perhaps pushing back can work.
A shortened version of this story appeared in our 2020 report Power grab: Academisation and the threat to secular education.
The onus should be on theocrats, not liberal democracies, to change
Liberal equivocation on whether to stand up to jihadist murder and Islamist intimidation is morally wrong, misguided and counter-productive, says Chris Sloggett.
France has understandably reacted to the atrocious killing of teacher Samuel Paty, who was targeted for showing Charlie Hebdo cartoons to his students, by defending freedom of expression.
The cartoons have been publicly displayed, as a sign that the assassin's veto shouldn't prevail. Emmanuel Macron said he "understands" Muslims' "feelings about the caricatures", but he would "never accept that someone can justify the use of physical violence because of these cartoons".
In several Muslim-majority countries, there has been much greater outrage at this defence of a fundamental principle than at the original killing. French items have been taken off shelves amid widespread calls for a boycott – endorsed by Turkey's president, tens of thousands of marchers in Dhaka, and many others. Pakistan's prime minister has hit out at Macron for "attacking Islam". Egypt's president said free expression "should stop when it comes to hurting the feelings of one and a half billion or more Muslims".
Muslim protesters also demanded "respect for the prophet" outside the French embassy in London. And elsewhere there's been another depressingly predictable sight: liberal equivocation on whether fundamental freedoms are worth defending in the face of intimidation and murder.
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau said his country would "always defend freedom of expression", before adding that "freedom of expression is not without limits". In response to this effort to enforce a blasphemy code, the leader of a liberal democracy invented an apparent obligation "not to arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet".
Meanwhile the head of a UN body called the Alliance of Civilisations, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, made a "call for mutual respect". Behind this pleasant-sounding title lay familiar apologetics about "inflammatory caricatures" which have "provoked acts of violence". That was followed by a request for freedom of expression to be "exercised in a way that fully respects the religious beliefs and tenets of all religions". Then came a claim that "insulting religions and sacred religious symbols provokes hatred and violent extremism leading to polarisation and fragmentation of the society".
Sections of the western press have fallen into a similar pattern, showing little appetite for understanding the problems of Islamism or jihadism and instead asking again what France had done to deserve this. A since-pulled piece in Politico said the reason why France is targeted "over and over again" by violent extremists was "simple": its "extreme form of secularism and its embrace of blasphemy" had "fuelled radicalism among a marginalised minority".
A writer in The Independent accused Macron of "using this period of justifiable fear and anger to support those who seek to portray Muslims as backward, moronic and – most terrifying of all – irrevocably savage". (It's worth pointing out, as Alex Massie did in The Spectator last week, that this is an unfair characterisation of Macron's response.) Once again Charlie Hebdo was painted as a Muslim-hating rag; by defending its right to publish, Macron was "suggesting specifically that Muslim hate is apparently desirable". And don't forget, the writer mentioned, that "the Nazis infamously used cartoons as part of their propaganda war against the 'Untermensch'".
In the face of terrorism it remains legitimate to ask potentially uncomfortable questions about why it's happened and how best to react. It's legitimate for those defending human rights to highlight inconsistencies and imperfections in the way they're upheld. But much of the liberal response to the latest events in France – even where it hasn't engaged in ludicrously hyperbolic comparisons – has brought a reflexive shift to a comfort zone where there's no need to confront hard questions about Islamist separatism and supremacism.
No matter how absurd the comparison between the actions of the two, this places the onus to change on a liberal democracy which, imperfectly but still roughly, upholds human rights norms. It hands the murderers, theocrats and censors the power to keep making demands.
And as in 2015, in some cases the response has again slipped into blaming Charlie Hebdo and those who defend its right to publish. As well as being spectacularly wrong on moral grounds, calls for effective curbs on free speech very much miss the point. Last week three worshippers were murdered at a church in Nice. Was this – or the similar murder of a priest in Rouen in 2016 – also the fault of cartoonists who routinely mocked religion, including Christianity? Should French secularism take the blame for attacks in Vienna, Kabul and Pakistan in recent days?
If those who give France a telling-off for refusing to give in are well-intentioned, they should also realise that their arguments are counter-productive. Essentialising Muslims, and mainstreaming the idea that they expect Islam to be given special protection, is a gift not only to Islamic reactionaries who would like this to be true, but to anti-Muslim reactionaries too. In the meantime secularist Muslims are left on the margins of the discussion.
At the moment many of those Muslims are speaking out. In a call published in Le Monde this week, a group of Muslim intellectuals called for the end of the boycott of France and corrected several misrepresentations of events there. In this morning's i, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown noted the similarities between the narratives of Muslim and anti-Muslim reactionaries. And she made an impassioned plea to Muslims to "honour the victims of jihadism and affirm our allegiance to religiously neutral governance".
Muslims aren't the only ones who should take note. We don't need to, nor should we, ask liberal democracies to dilute their commitment to fundamental freedoms in the face of jihadist murder and Islamist intimidation.
Church and state should be separate
Ahead of the NSS's 2020 Bradlaugh Lecture on the subject, Stephen Evans says the disestablishment of the Church of England is right in principle and could benefit church and state alike.
This article is available in audio format, as part of our Opinion Out Loud series.
This is a busy period of anniversaries for disestablishmentarians. 2020 marks the centenary of the disestablishment of the Church in Wales. New Year's Day 2021 will mark 150 years since the Church of Ireland was disestablished. But when will it be the Church of England's turn?
The C of E hierarchy has shown little enthusiasm to take the lead on this. The current archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has said disestablishing the C of E wouldn't be a "disaster", but said the removal of its privileges should be "a decision for parliament and people".
In his book 'Cut the Connection: Disestablishment and The Church of England', the former bishop of Woolwich Colin Buchanan said: "There seems to be almost a principle of history that leaders in established churches often have difficulty in thinking positively about disestablishment." But he notes that when their times came, both the Church of Ireland and Church in Wales took to disestablishment "like ducks to water".
So much so that 150 years on, the Church of Ireland is celebrating 150 years of "independence from the state" with the strapline "free to shape our future". Welby himself preached at the church's 150th anniversary service. He remarked how "God reminds us constantly of temporal security of complacency and reliance on earthly riches" – and, without any apparent irony, said disestablishment "liberated" the Church of Ireland from that.
But despite the upbeat nature of the 150th celebrations, disestablishment wasn't universally regarded so positively at the time. Reflecting on the separation, the archbishop of Armagh spoke of "widespread uncertainty about whether the church could survive financially and also that it might fragment into different doctrinal and ecclesiastical factions".
Nevertheless, survive it did, and it now recognises that disestablishment enabled the church to "find afresh its independence and mission".
Are these the sunlit uplands that could await the ailing Church of England, should it decide to forgo its privileged status as the established church?
The Church of England's policy in relation to the state today is a matter for the church. But the state's approach to this matter is all of our business. And the arguments for maintaining the established church are looking thinner by the day.
The majoritarian argument for an established church has gone. Fewer than two per cent of people in England regularly worship at its churches. Only one per cent of people aged 18-24 say they belong to the C of E. Over half of the population say they do not belong to any religion. For all its claims of being 'a presence in every community', its relevance to people's lives doesn't justify its prominence in our public life.
Any argument that the church provides the nation with some sort of moral leadership has also long disappeared. Most of us no longer look to clerics for ethical guidance. Quite the opposite. With their moral compass clouded by dogma, religious leaders have often proved an obstacle to desirable and popular progress on issues such as assisted dying and same-sex marriage. Recent findings from the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse that the church covered up abuse, gave abusers a place to hide and often offered them more support than victims surely place the final nail in the coffin of any moral leadership argument for retaining a state church.
The argument from tradition isn't so much as an argument for establishment as the absence of one. Warnings of irreparable damage to the UK's social and cultural fabric are little more than thinly veiled prescriptions for inertia designed to create the impression that disestablishment is not, and will never be, possible. But it is a matter of historical record that disestablishment can and does occur – and with favourable consequences.
Perhaps the main argument advanced these days for preserving an established church is that it secures a platform for religion more generally in the public square. But why should religion enjoy a special platform to participate in public life? Religious voices must be free to participate in the affairs of the nation, but it should be on terms of equality, not privilege. Their interests should be given no more or less weight than any other special interest groups.
The pretence that we're still a Christian country lacks authenticity and makes it harder to foster any sort of inclusive national identity that we can all buy into, irrespective of our religious beliefs or lack of them.
There are those who warn that a relatively benign established church acts as a sort of bulwark against more extremist forms of religion. But the presence of an established church gives fundamentalists and religious groups which are more reactionary than the C of E a foot in the door. Anglican bishops are some of the most enthusiastic proponents of multifaithism. As the late Christopher Hitchens noted: "The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them – and it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you."
Christian privilege is morphing into a multifaithism that is fuelling the fragmentation of society. It's led to the spread of faith schools, the erosion of freedom of speech in the name of 'tolerance' and 'respect', and the ghettoisation of ethnic minorities – all of which undermines the notion of common citizenship. A secular state would be better placed than an established church to keep the more destructive elements of religion in check.
Many Anglicans also agree with the principle of church-state separation – and make theological arguments for it. As the examples of Wales and Ireland show, disestablishment could breathe new life into the church. Virtually every other church in the world manages fine on its own two feet.
The C of E could, too.
Writing in The Times in 1989, the religious commentator Clifford Longley said: "Any Christian church which still needs official state privilege for support has chosen to manacle itself to a spiritual corpse. In their heart everybody knows it, but no one will admit it."
For the time being, the church still appears unready to unshackle itself from the corpse. Those who benefit from religious establishment will instinctively cling to it – not least the bishops whose seats in the House of Lords give them political lobbying power and prestige.
But if we value equality and democracy, disestablishment needs to happen. It is right in principle and would be an important step towards recognising all citizens as equals, irrespective of their religion or lack of it.
This article is available in audio format, as part of our Opinion Out Loud series.
Human rights should not be at the mercy of the pope’s pontifications
Amid widespread interest in the pope's views on same-sex civil unions, Megan Manson says states shouldn't allow themselves to be used to further the Catholic Church's agendas.
Last week footage of Pope Francis apparently endorsing same-sex civil unions came to light, capturing worldwide media attention.
Some welcomed his statement. Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA which represents gay Catholics, said the comments "could represent an international game-changer and a major step forward for LGBTQI equality". James Martin, a Jesuit priest with an active ministry for LGBT+ people, called the remarks "historic" and "momentous".
The remarks also attracted criticism and back-peddling from conservative quarters of the Catholic Church. American cardinal Raymond Burke said the comments "generate great bewilderment and cause confusion and error among Catholic faithful" and that they should be "interpreted as simple private opinions of the person who made them".
And many more were quick to point out that the pope's statement does little to promote LGBT+ rights. The pope has made no indication that he's changed his view that marriage is exclusively for opposite-sex couples, and that gay people should live a life of celibacy. He's even stated that parents who notice their children exhibiting "strange symptoms", i.e. same-sex attraction, should go to a psychiatrist. This isn't far from outright endorsing so-called 'conversion therapy'.
But why should the internal policies of the Catholic Church be of such immense interest to the international press and to non-Catholics?
It's because the Catholic Church's policies resonate far beyond its own congregation. Because the church wields disproportionate power over law and policy-making in countries throughout the world, we are all – regardless of religion or belief – potentially affected by whatever its leaders say.
One only need look at what's happening in Poland right now for evidence of this. Thousands of protestors have taken to the streets in the wake of a ruling last week that amounts to an almost total ban on abortion. Many of the protests have targeted churches, as activists claim Poland's ruling party has pressed the court to tighten restrictions in order to please the influential Catholic Church. One protestor stated: "Our rage should be directed towards politicians, but also towards senior church figures as they have also added to this women's hell that the authorities are preparing."
Another said: "I'm here today because it annoys me that in a secular country the church decides for me what rights I have, what I can do and what I'm not allowed to do."
But what about the UK? Although Catholicism is a minority religion here, Catholic policies have considerable impact on our state education.
A third of the UK's state-funded schools are faith schools, and a significant proportion of those are Catholic schools. Many children who attend Catholic schools are not Catholic themselves, or from Catholic families. They happen to attend Catholic schools for practical reasons, for example because it's close to home. Yet such schools are permitted to teach the curriculum according to Catholic tenets – and this includes teachings about LGBT+ people and abortion.
In 2018, National Secular Society research found examples of state-funded Catholic schools' policies that said same-sex relationships are "unacceptable", "morally wrong" and "against the natural order" and same-sex attraction is "disordered". It also found many Catholic schools teaching that marriage between a man and a woman is the only 'valid' relationship. One school said "treating alternative relationships as equivalent to marriage" was "contrary to the school's ethos".
There were also many policies explicitly condemning not only abortion, but also all forms of contraception besides the pope-approved – yet ineffective – 'rhythm method'.
In this way, the Catholic Church uses state funding to promote its anti-LGBT+ and anti-family planning agenda, and inculcate generations of children with the view that same-sex relationships and women who control their own reproduction are shameful and wrong. And as long as the church remains embedded in the state school system, its teachings will continue to shape education policy at state schools – and the opinions of our future leaders, educators and policy-makers.
The church's lobbying can even impact those who don't go to Catholic schools. In June, a coalition of Welsh Catholic school headteachers wrote to the first minister asking him to resist changes to religious education to make it more pluralistic. And the Catholic Church was, unsurprisingly, one of a number of religious institutions that supported the 'Section 28' policy, thankfully now repealed, that prohibited "promoting homosexuality" in all state schools.
The Catholic Church has imposed its views on non-Catholics in other areas of public life too. Healthcare policies regarding the use of the contraceptive pill that were introduced in order to try and accommodate Catholic teachings were only revoked last year. The church has continued to throw its weight against abortion, even pressing the attorney general to appeal a 2015 High Court ruling that allowed abortion in cases of incest, rape or fatal foetal abnormalities in Northern Ireland in 2016. And its privileged position has given the church a disproportionately large platform on which to lobby against assisted dying.
Like any other religious institution, the Catholic Church should be free to determine its policies. And everyone else should be free to ignore them. But while governments continue to accommodate religious demands, our basic human rights – including women's rights to bodily autonomy and LGBT+ people's rights to equal treatment – lie at the mercy of the whims of religious leaders. That's why governments need to resist attempts by religious institutions to force their hand, and stand up for liberal, secular, democratic principles prioritising individual rights over theological dogma.
Image by Annett_Klingner from Pixabay.
The BMA’s opportunity to rethink its position on assisted dying
The British Medical Association's opposition to assisted dying is at odds with its members' views. There's now a chance for the BMA and parliamentarians to stand up to religious obstructionism, says Dr Antony Lempert.
On 8th October, the British Medical Association (BMA) published details of the largest ever survey of UK doctors on the subject of physician-assisted dying. The results of the survey paint a picture, as nuanced as it is, which is nevertheless starkly at odds with the BMA's long-term policy of absolute opposition to assisted dying (AD). That the survey happened at all was in spite of attempts by a minority of doctors to frustrate the process. What can no longer be hidden is that there is significant support within the medical profession for the legalisation of AD.
Current AD legislation dates from 1961. Although suicide itself was decriminalised, anyone found guilty of assisting someone else to take their own life is guilty of a crime. In 2012, the director of public prosecutions further clarified that doctors who assist patients to die would be at most risk of prosecution. Patients' options are thus restricted, leaving some in avoidable torment feeling desperate and abandoned; open, honest doctor-patient communication is hindered, with the risk of botched suicides and the additional risk of prosecution faced by relatives if they respect the patient's own wishes and help them to end their suffering.
The influence of medical professional bodies' historic opposition to AD cannot be understated. Opponents of AD, arguing in favour of the status quo, have long relied on claims that doctors oppose AD in order to bolster their arguments and to persuade parliamentarians to maintain opposition. Since the majority of BMA policy is decided by BMA representatives at its annual representatives meeting (ARM), this survey does not force the BMA's hand. Nor will it necessarily convince politicians that the time is now right to listen to the overwhelming majority of the public who consistently support properly-regulated, legalised AD for people suffering unbearably and with no realistic prospect of relief. It does, though, burst the bubble of those who have fought so hard to prevent the wide variety of doctors' views from seeing the light of day.
In February this year, almost 30,000 BMA members, approximately one fifth of the membership, responded to the survey questions posed by the independent research organisation, Kantar. The questions were subdivided into doctors' personal opinions and their views as to the position they would like to be adopted by the BMA, the main UK trade union and professional body for doctors. Comments were also included in the summary if at least five per cent of respondents made the same point, allowing for a greater understanding of the reasoning behind doctors' decisions.
When asked for their views regarding a change in the law that would "permit doctors to prescribe drugs for eligible patients to self-administer to end their own life" only one third of respondents expressed support for the BMA's current position of active opposition. This leaves twice as many doctors unrepresented by the BMA's existing oppositional stance. Forty per cent of respondents thought the BMA should actively support AD legislative change with 21% in favour of BMA neutrality and six per cent undecided.
Doctors' personal views on the same question showed that half were in favour of legalising AD, 39% were opposed with 11% undecided. It is not surprising that doctors' opinions are more conservative than public opinion in this matter. Should the law change and a regulatory process be adopted in any way similar to the increasing number of other jurisdictions where AD has been legalised, then some doctors would be personally involved in the process; currently a UK doctor whose patient wishes to discuss AD must instead simply advise them that it is illegal.
An overwhelming majority (93%) of survey respondents felt that individual doctors should be guaranteed the right to exercise a conscientious objection to participation in AD should it be legalised. Nevertheless, with 36% of doctors expressing personal willingness to prescribe and 26% willing to administer life-ending drugs, it is likely that those patients who express a wish to consider AD to end their suffering would be able to find a supportive doctor.
No-one should claim from these statistics that there is a clear mandate of UK doctors either for or against legalisation of assisted dying. This is precisely why so many of us who personally support legalising AD would still prefer our professional bodies to adopt a neutral position. Neutrality recognises that this is primarily a societal decision, and enables medical bodies to advise government on the medical implications of all options rather than offering a partisan viewpoint.
The last substantive ARM debate on AD took place in 2016, reaffirming policy made in 2012. In response to the 2012 motion calling for neutrality, that I had written and submitted via my local BMA division, the then BMA chair Dr Hamish Meldrum opined that a neutral position would leave the BMA unable to contribute to the debate. He recommended to representatives that they vote against neutrality, which sufficient numbers duly did to defeat the motion.
It was curious therefore that, in 2014, in response to proposals in Rob Marris MP's assisted dying bill, the BMA commented: "For reasons of inconsistency with BMA policy it would be inappropriate to engage with the detailed proposals in the Assisted Dying Bill." In other words, far from neutrality leaving the BMA unable to engage with parliamentarians, it was precisely the rigid binary opposition that prevented MPs from hearing from the medical profession a balanced view of the risks, benefits, practical problems and solutions that might pertain to the introduction of assisted dying legislation.
Whatever the motivation for the chair's recommendation to vote against neutrality, religious influence has certainly played a large part in the AD debate, wherever it takes place. The evening prior to the 2012 ARM debate on AD, the newly installed BMA president Baroness Hollins used the privileged platform of her inauguration speech to BMA representatives to influence the next day's debate by focusing on her opposition to AD. This was particularly disappointing considering what she had said just one month previously, when she had featured on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs (start: 23:30). Asked explicitly about the relationship between her personal religious (Catholic) beliefs opposing AD and her then role as president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in drawing up AD policy, she had replied: "As president of a secular organisation I wouldn't let my particular religious beliefs interfere with that." She had additionally gone on to comment how some might find that difficult to believe.
Recently, other medical colleges have been undertaking similar exercises to understand their members' views with regard to AD. Earlier this year, the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) released limited details of its 2019 survey of members' views about AD. Here too, in a college positionally opposed to AD, only a minority of GP respondents concurred. The subsequent RCGP decision to maintain its active opposition despite these results has resulted in a legal challenge (still ongoing) against the RCGP from two senior members. A few months previously, the Royal College of Physicians' (RCP) survey on AD had also shown that there was no clear mandate from its members in either direction. The RCP took the rational step of switching from opposition to neutrality in order to better represent all its members' views.
At last year's BMA ARM, held in Belfast in June 2019, where I was honoured to propose the successful motion calling for the BMA to support the decriminalisation of abortion across the UK - another bête noire of the pro-life brigade - AD was on the agenda again. The 2019 AD motion was to debate whether or not to survey all members' views about moving the BMA to a position of neutrality. Both debates were particularly noticeable for the dearth of religious argumentation used by representatives opposed to the motions. Anyone attending their first ARM might have been forgiven for taking at face value the concerns of those who opposed both motions.
Two or three familiar faces from previous years' debates who had spoken strongly against AD itself, now turned their gaze to the process (start: 55:12). We heard that a poll would be too expensive, and AD wasn't a 'binary' issue which could easily be put to the BMA membership; the irony that existing BMA policy is unashamedly binary was perhaps lost on the speaker? In the event, the vote to survey all members was passed by a small majority, which precipitated this year's survey.
The current pattern of avoidance of the use of religious arguments by opponents of AD is neither incidental nor coincidental. The 2006 Lords debate of the late Lord Joffe's assisted dying bill was peppered with the noble lords' religious objections to AD. Nine years later, and religion featured sparingly during the 2015 debates about the Marris AD bill. Over the past few years, there is evidence that religious people have been advised to try to win over the increasingly-secularised majority with secular-sounding arguments and to avoid using religious terminology. They have been tutored to reframe the AD debate in terms of plausible sounding arguments such as the focus on patient vulnerability, slippery slopes, the importance of alleviating pain, the risks to society and to the medical profession.
The problem is not that these important arguments do not need to be discussed - they do - it is that most of the assertions made around these arguments by pro-life proponents are fear-mongering, and often grossly distorted to fit the argument. For example, patient vulnerability is often cited as a prime reason why AD should remain illegal. Whereas supporters of properly-regulated AD legislation recognise that vulnerable people who request AD do need strict safeguards, opponents regularly fail to acknowledge the evident fact that many people are already extremely vulnerable under the current legislation. They do not speak of the minority of patients whose suffering simply cannot be relieved even with gold standard palliative care, instead offering unhelpful, arrogantly presumptive platitudes about their needing more love or better treatment which would somehow magic away their suffering.
Most people who contemplate AD are in unbearable torment and are therefore inherently vulnerable. Equally, without AD legislation, with no legal avenue to approach, the only time that relatives may be questioned as to whether the person they may have (illegally) assisted to die is after the person is dead when it is too late to offer a possible remedy and the deceased's views can no longer be known with certainty. Strictly regulated legalised AD would reduce the vulnerability both of the suffering patient and of the rare patient whose unscrupulous relatives might later try to claim that their death was voluntary rather than murder.
Nobody is arguing that anyone should disrespect or disregard the personal views of patients or doctors who oppose AD; quite the opposite. In contrast, however, the views of many suffering people who are in favour of AD for sound reasons, and who do not agree with the scare-mongering of the pro-life brigade, are being disrespected and frustrated by people not content with personal disagreement, but who are actively engaged in enforcing their (religious) world-view.
In recent times, we have heard that some religious authorities believe they are acting 'in the greater good' by pushing religious ideology even where it is not wanted. Some religious people genuinely believe that the ends justify the means in order to prevent what they regard as the evil of assisted dying.
Similar 'greater good' arguments were used by the Church of England and by the Catholic Church in the recently exposed long-term practice of covering up child abuse. The justification later offered was that reporting of clerical child abuse might have caused people to lose faith in the church's assumed moral authority. Pushing religious ideology where it is not wanted, whether by fair means or foul, is unacceptable, denies patients their personal autonomy, and leads to physical and moral harm.
The BMA had initially intended to publish the AD survey results in time for them to be debated at the June 2020 ARM. In the event, the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic caused the postponement of the usual four-day ARM. Many of us still wanted the results to be published and a debate to go ahead so any change in BMA policy would not have to wait another year. Instead, the ARM was held as a one-day virtual meeting in September with a decision to withhold the survey results until after the ARM. Most likely, therefore, AD will be debated at the ARM in June 2021.
Given the views of the BMA's members, adopting a neutral position would be eminently reasonable. And should it do so, this would be a golden opportunity for the BMA to demonstrate professional leadership and to inform the parliamentary debate around assisted dying with principles based on medical evidence, patient autonomy and medical ethics, rather than religious dogma.
Dr Lempert is a BMA member and has been a representative since 2009, though he writes here in a personal capacity.
The Church of England’s culture of entitlement has to end
The furore over John Sentamu not being handed a life peerage reveals an ugly culture of entitlement that has not served church or state well, argues Richard Scorer.
This week, in an article headlined "Peerage snub for top black bishop", the Sunday Times claimed that Downing Street had delivered an "extraordinary snub to Britain's first black archbishop by failing to award him an automatic life peerage".
The article claimed that as a retiring archbishop of York, John Sentamu should have been given a life peerage to enable him to continue sitting in the House of Lords in a personal capacity after his retirement in June.
The article pointed out that in failing to make the award to Sentamu, Downing Street broke with longstanding precedent by which retiring archbishops of York and retiring archbishops of Canterbury are made life peers on retirement. It also suggested there might be a racial aspect to the decision, although there have also been other, conflicting, suggestions that Sentamu has been promised the peerage, but has been told to wait a few months as Downing Street considers that the House of Lords is currently too large.
Let me be clear: any decision not to award Sentamu a peerage on the basis of his race would be totally wrong and unacceptable. However, it appears that there might have been something of a rush to judgement in this case. As the blogger Archbishop Cranmer pointed out yesterday, there are serious concerns regarding Sentamu's past actions in relation to safeguarding: concerns which could legitimately lead to the denial of a peerage, or at a minimum require that any decision is delayed pending full investigation.
Cranmer set out some of the detail. Amongst other things Sentamu stands accused of failing to respond properly to a report of clerical sex abuse by survivor Matthew Ineson. Ineson was repeatedly raped by a clergyman when he was a vulnerable and homeless 16-year-old. Ineson reported this to other bishops, including Stephen Croft, but no action was taken. So he went to Sentamu, who effectively said: "Not my problem". When confronted at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse with the evidence of his gross mishandling of Ineson's complaint, Sentamu declined to offer any apology to Ineson, who was sitting in the hearing room with him.
This brief summary barely does justice to what happened to Ineson; you can read more about his damning testimony, and the church's disgracefully "shabby and shambolic" response, here. It also seems that contrary to national policy, Sentamu fast-tracked his wife's ordination before she had completed her safeguarding training. There are other ongoing investigations, including an independent review of the York diocese's safeguarding on Sentamu's watch, which may yield other material relevant to Sentamu's suitability for a peerage. And as Cranmer observed this week, perhaps, in the light of the damning recent report from IICSA on the C of E's handling of abuse, "it might be a little unseemly to rush to ennoble any member of the clergy, let alone an archbishop".
These are very serious issues. Along with a number of abuse survivors and those who work with them, I have written to the House of Lords appointments commission to ask it to investigate Sentamu's safeguarding record as part of the process of vetting him for a peerage. But because of the secrecy which surrounds the appointments process, we will never know to what extent these issues will be investigated, and we have no idea whether the fact Sentamu has not been given a peerage at this stage is a product of racism, laziness or justified concerns about his record on safeguarding. However, the issues raised by this controversy go well beyond John Sentamu himself. They raise much bigger questions about the Church of England's privileged constitutional status.
First, let's consider the custom of awarding automatic life peerages on retirement. Because Britain has an unwritten constitution, there is no rulebook or statute we can consult to identify who gets an automatic life peerage on retirement. But as Wikipedia puts it, this generally happens to those retiring from "important public offices, such as prime minister, speaker of the House of Commons, or archbishop of Canterbury or York".
However, when you stand back and reflect on it, the suggestion that the archbishop of York or Canterbury is an office comparable in importance to the prime minister is self-evidently absurd. The proportion of the UK population self-identifying as Christian has substantially declined to less than half – and is now exceeded by the proportion identifying as having no religion. The suggestion that a retiring archbishop is an important public official may have been arguable 100 years ago; today, with long term religious decline and increased pluralism of belief, it is completely untenable.
Personally, I favour a fully elected upper chamber. But given the technical complexity of many of the issues now facing us – pandemics, climate change, food security, poverty, terrorism to name just a few – I can see an argument for reserving space in the legislature for those who have outstanding expertise in relevant areas.
Yet despite their outstanding intellectual distinction, and the expertise they could bring to parliamentary proceedings, retiring presidents of the Royal Society or the British Academy are not automatically granted life peerages, and a majority have not been awarded peerages at all. Since 2000 some 34 British citizens have won the Nobel Prize: 28 in sciences, three in economics and three in literature. None as far as I can see have been awarded a life peerage. Of the 16 individuals who have served as chief medical officer for England since the post was created in 1855, none has been made a life peer on retirement. Of the 13 individuals who have served as government chief scientific adviser since the post was created in 1964, only two have received life peerages.
Are we really saying that an archbishop of a declining church – a church riven with obscure obsessions about the status of women and homosexuality, and now fending off child abuse scandals on a vast scale – has more justification for an automatic life peerage than any of the above? The automatic award of a life peerage to a retiring archbishop of York (or Canterbury for that matter) is a ludicrous anachronism. It relies on a long defunct notion that the Church of England plays a role in our national life which makes it deserving of special treatment, and is completely outdated. It's also created such absurdities as George Carey, who was the subject of a damning IICSA report last year over his failures to report evidence of child abuse to the police, enjoying a lifetime seat in the legislature.
Of course, the issue does not end there. Before his retirement Sentamu was one of the 26 serving Church of England bishops who sit in the House of Lords as of right as 'lords spiritual'. In this respect, the Church of England enjoys a unique and completely unjustified constitutional privilege. Only two countries in the world have clerical representation as of right in the national legislature: Britain and Iran. Sharing a constitutional arrangement with a theocracy ought to ring alarm bells for us. As I argued here, this privileging of the Church of England is completely unsustainable.
Lest I be misrepresented, I have no objection to any member of the clergy seeking to stand for political office, and be elected in his or her own right: despite being a non-believer, there are individual members of the clergy I would happily vote into our legislature if they stood as candidates on their own merits. But members of the clergy should not be given this role automatically, when nobody voted for them, most of the population has no attachment to the institution to which they belong, and that institution is increasingly discredited.
To my Anglican friends I would also add: in the long run your church would benefit from disestablishment. Constitutional privileges have made the Church of England lazy and entitled, and fostered a belief amongst some of its leaders that they are above the law (as Carey's behaviour showed).
This culture of entitlement has not served the Church of England well, as its abuse scandals and rapidly declining congregations testify. My late friend and radical Anglican priest the Rev Ken Leech put it thus: "If the Anglican presence is sustained only by a legal structure, is it worth anything?... As it stands the Church of England is a captivated and compromised church, a church in bondage to Babylon". Its leaders, said Leech, "bear the mark of the beast...For the church to hide behind the structures of Caesar is a betrayal of the gospel".
But, Leech argued, "were it to be disestablished, the Church of England might well lose some of its more expensive buildings and much of its status, but what it might gain in credibility is enormous".
I agree. The church now faces an existential choice. It can cling to the decaying relics of theocracy, including automatic peerages, or it can choose the path of honesty and renewal as a church that stands on its own two feet, and on its own merits.
In truth, only the C of E's increasing irrelevance protects it from public pressure to abolish these outdated and undemocratic arrangements. But the controversy over Sentamu brings them back into the spotlight, and reminds us that it's time to bring the Church of England's unearned and unjustified constitutional privileges to an end.
The 2015 General Election
Taxpayers shouldn't be burdened with propping up the Church
Faced with dwindling congregations, the Church of England is looking for ways to fund the growing repair bill of its aging buildings. Could your taxes be the answer?
Quite possibly, yes. Because the Church has successfully lobbied the government to allow more money to flow from cash-strapped local authorities to places of worship.
Using her seat in the House of Lords to further the Church's interests, the bishop of Bristol Vivienne Faull argued that legal uncertainly was preventing parish and town councils from funding church repairs.
The uncertainty stems from two conflicting bits of legislation – the Parish Councils Act 1894, which says that funds cannot be given to churches, and the Local Government Act 1972, which says that they can.
Now, faith and communities minister Baroness Scott has added an amendment to the Levelling Up Bill which will abolish a clause in the 1894 act to make clear that local authorities can fund churches and other places of worship.
Many churches hold historical and architectural significance. Few would want to see them fall into a state of disrepair. But who should foot the bill for their maintenance? Before any public money is spent, questions need to be asked about whether the organisation responsible for their upkeep has the means to do so.
England's 16,000 Anglican places of worship are the responsibility of the Church of England. The CofE is one of the largest private landowners in the UK and sits on £10.3 billion investment fund. Its assets were estimated in 2016 at £23 billion, since when the fund has grown by £3.6 billion.
Speaking in the House of Lords, Lib Dem peer Paul Scriven argued that if any of the Acts should be withdrawn, it should be the 1972 Act, not the 1894 Act. When it comes to maintaining religious buildings "the first port of call should be the reserves which the Church of England holds", he argued.
This view was echoed by Baroness Lorely Burt, who suggested more state subsidies would be an "inappropriate use of taxpayers' money" given the "extreme wealth" of the Church of England.
Despite its significant wealth, the CofE frequently pleads poverty. Due its fragmented financial and organisational structure, the Church can hide its money in plain sight, leaving many parishes in dire financial difficulty and struggling to afford repairs.
But the CofE can certainly find money when it wants to. Between 2017 and 2020, £248 million was allocated to evangelism as part of the Church's (so far unsuccessful) efforts to attract new worshippers. This has included splashing the cash on 'planting' new churches, hiring 'social media pastors', converting a nightclub in Bradford into a church with a gym to attract students, and recruiting children and young people's 'mission enablers' to "bring Christ to young people".
This year it also announced a £100m fund to make reparations for its slave trade links. And in a bid to tempt couples back to church weddings (which fell by half between 1999 and 2019) the Church has just voted to trial dropping its £500 fee for weddings. So, while lobbying for easier access to public funds for church buildings, the church is turning its back on a reliable source of income.
Churches, like any other organisation, should be responsible for their financial sustainability.
The Church of England received £750 million of public money between 2016 and 2021. This level of reliance on government funding risks creating dependency and discouraging financial accountability.
Britain is no longer a majority Christian nation. Fewer that 1% of the English population attend Anglican services on the average Sunday. With emptying pews and ageing congregations, the Church needs to face up to reality and downsize to survive. Until it learns this lesson, taxpayers shouldn't be further burdened with propping up an ailing yet wealthy religious institution.
As well as the practical reasons for resisting state grants to religion, there is also an important one of principle. Taxpayers at odds with the Church's doctrine and those it discriminates against, such as same sex couples who aren't even permitted to marry in their churches, may well have reasonable objections to their money funding a religion they reject. Providing financial support to religious institutions blurs the lines between the government and religions and undermines the state's commitment to treating all citizens equally.
So, when local churches come knocking for local authority grants, councils should remind them of the Church's wealth and refer them back to their powers above.
Image: UKgeofan at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
Religious selection in schools challenged in parliament
Parliamentarians have spoken out against state schools which religiously discriminate against children in their admissions.
Baroness Lorely Burt today asked education minister Baroness Diana Barran if she agreed that "all children – irrespective of faith and belief background – should have equal right to access schools" funded by taxpayers' money.
Faith schools in England have exemptions from the Equality Act 2010, which enable them to prioritise children from families who share their faith if they are oversubscribed.
This can include requiring parents and children to regularly attend a local place of worship or provide evidence of baptism.
Many parents find that because they belong to no religion or a minority religion, they are unable to send their children to their local school.
Lorely Burt: "in agreement" with UN
Burt told peers that children of nonreligious families experience "double discrimination", because approximately 40% of all faith schools and 60% of Catholic schools give priority to children of families of any religion against those of no religion.
She said she is "in agreement" with the UN Commission on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which last month criticised the UK over discrimination in faith schools.
The CRC urged the UK to prevent "the use of religion as a selection criterion for school admissions in England" to "guarantee the right of all children to freedom of expression and to practise freely their religion or belief".
Other peers opposed to religious selection pointed out that only three other OECD countries – Ireland, Israel, and Estonia – allow state funded schools to practice faith selection.
They also highlighted that disadvantaged pupils are under-represented at faith schools, while those with high prior attainment are over-represented.
Baron Kenneth Baker said he did not know of any Church of England schools which practice faith selection Former archbishop of Canterbury, who became a temporal peer after retiring from the bishops' bench, also said the Church of England is "tolerant of other faiths".
But a quarter of Church of England state secondary schools prioritise children from different faiths over children from non-religious families. One in four dioceses surveyed advise local CofE schools to reserve some places on faith grounds.
Speaking on behalf of the government, Barran said the UK is a "proud signatory of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child", but the government "supports faith schools' ability to set faith-based oversubscription criteria."
NSS: Faith-based selection "goes against our basic values"
The National Secular Society, which has long campaigned for the equality law exemptions for faith schools to be repealed, briefed peers ahead of today's debate.
NSS head of campaigns Megan Manson said: "This debate should be a wake-up call to the injustice of inexcusable religious discrimination in our school system.
"Allowing state-funded schools to select children based on their family's religion goes against our basic values: equality, inclusion, fairness, and freedom of religion or belief.
"Our government must cease enabling religious institutions to foster this discrimination and segregation within our schools. It's time for faith-based school admissions to end."
This month the NSS also met with the Department for Education to echo the CRC's concerns.
NSS calls for change as RE “least useful” subject again
The National Secular Society has called for a rethink of religious education as polls again reveal the subject's unpopularity.
A poll last month revealed religious education (RE) to be one of the least popular school subjects, with over a quarter (28%) of those surveyed naming RE the least useful subject. Twenty-six per cent said they would remove it from the school curriculum.
In contrast, 88% said more needs to be done to educate children on personal finance. Sixty-three per cent of teachers said managing money should be added to the school curriculum.
The findings, from a survey of 2,000 adults via OnePoll on behalf of Discount for Teachers, are consistent with other recent research on RE. Last year a YouGov poll found 58% of Brits consider it not very important (31%) or not at all important (27%) to teach religious studies at secondary school.
A separate survey last year found 34% of academies in England do not include RE on the school timetable.
RE in England is regularly criticised as out of date and failing to be broad, balanced and inclusive.
It is the only compulsory subject that is locally determined, largely by religious interest groups. It is even less balanced in faith schools, which teach the subject in accordance with the religion of the school.
Some proponents of RE have resisted attempts to make it more balanced, inclusive and relevant by replacing it with a 'religion and worldviews' subject, similar to recent reforms in Wales. Two practitioners recently announced the creation of the 'Religious Education Network', which "rejects the downgrading of religion into just another world-view".
NSS: Replace RE with "more relevant and useful" subject
NSS chief executive Stephen Evans said the latest statistics support the growing concern that RE is "an outdated and unpopular subject area with no clear educational rationale".
He said: "It's no surprise that teachers and the wider public are wondering whether it wouldn't be better to replace RE with a subject which teaches more relevant and useful skills to the next generation.
"There is value in children and young people learning about a plurality of religions and beliefs. But a subject dedicated to religion is not necessary to achieve this.
"Education about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, moral and political virtues such as civility and tolerance, and respect for human rights including freedom of religion or belief, will nurture greater harmony and social cohesion. These values should be promoted throughout our state schools.
"An outdated model of RE isn't the appropriate vehicle for this."
Image: Dragana Gordic, Shutterstock
UN rights body votes in favour of banning Quran burnings
The National Secular Society has warned a United Nations resolution to ban the burning of religious texts could be detrimental to human rights.
Members of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) today voted in favour of a resolution for the "deliberately and publicly" burning of the Quran or "any other holy book" to be prohibited by law.
The UK voted against the resolution. In a statement yesterday, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: "we do not accept that, by definition, attacks on religion, including on religious texts or symbols, constitute advocacy for hatred".
Other states opposed to the motion included France, Germany and the USA, but they were outvoted 28 to 12.
The resolution follows a high profile incident in Sweden last month, when Iraqi refugee Salwan Momika burned a Quran outside a mosque in Stockholm. Momika is an atheist formerly from Iraq's persecuted minority Christian community.
The resolution was introduced by Pakistan on behalf of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which has long supported efforts to curtail 'blasphemous' speech.
The OIC is an intergovernmental organisation of 57 states and claims to be the "collective voice of the Muslim world". Although it stopped explicitly campaigning for a global blasphemy law in 2011, it has repeatedly spearheaded attempts to install "backdoor" blasphemy laws. The NSS warned the UN of the OIC's attempts to use 'hate speech' laws to restrict free expression last year.
The resolution passed was amended to include the explicit provision that burning the Quran and other holy books should be banned. The original resolution did not include this statement.
Allegations of Quran desecration are regularly used in Islamic theocracies to persecute members of minority communities. Last year, a 65-year old member of Pakistan's Ahmadi Muslim community was arrested after being accused of destroying an anti-Ahmadi propaganda poster that had verses from the Quran on it, according to the International Human Rights Commission. Ahmadi Muslims face widespread oppression and discrimination at the hands of the Pakistan state.
During the debate on OIC's resolution, the UK's representative to the UN Simon Manley said some members of the OIC have "not shown the same willingness to debate a certain other largescale, and in this case, state-sponsored manifestation of religious intolerance affecting a significant Muslim community."
He added: "In combatting religious intolerance, we must always be mindful that other rights must also be respected.
"The exercise of the right to freedom of expression is not unlimited. But it is something we hold dear, and which can only be limited under very clear, narrowly defined parameters under international human rights law."
UNHRC resolutions are not legally binding, but can be used to pressure states to change their laws.
NSS: OIC "more interested in protecting religion than protecting individuals"
NSS chief executive Stephen Evans said: "Equating the desecration of religious books and symbols with incitement to violence is a pernicious attempt to impose blasphemy laws by stealth. The Islamic nations behind this resolution have long been more interested in protecting religion than protecting individuals.
"Speech and expression must be viewed in context. Crude attempts to impose blanket prohibitions clearly risk capturing and silencing legitimate expression and dissent.
"Democratic societies must find ways to combat intolerance and hatred without further restricting freedom of expression to meet increasing sensitivities of certain religious groups."
NSS: Don’t let Welsh independent schools put faith before education
The National Secular Society has told the Welsh Government independent schools should not omit education which conflicts with religious teachings.
Responding to a consultation on proposed changes to standards for independent schools in Wales, the NSS warned that allowing the teaching of personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE) in a manner that reflects a "school's aims and ethos" could lead to faith schools not teaching about protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010.
The NSS welcomed provisions in the proposed changes which would require a curriculum which "encourages respect for other people", with particular regard for the protected characteristics set out in the act. These include religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.
But they also highlighted that independent faith schools in England frequently fail to teach about same-sex relationships or people of different religions and beliefs, or teach discriminatory ideas about them.
As recent figures from England's Department for Education revealed, independent schools with a faith ethos are four times more likely to be issued warning notices than their non-religiously affiliated counterparts, with many judged to be of an unacceptable standard because they fail to teach aspects of PSHE which are perceived to contradict the school's faith ethos.
Examples from 2023 alone include:
- Ateres Girls High School, which fails to teach about "sexual orientation, different types of stable relationships and vocabulary such as consent and the implications of this word".
- Bnois Jerusalem Girls School, where the school's proprietors forbid "any coverage of different religions, faiths and beliefs" and where respect for others, including those with protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010, is not encouraged.
- Bournemouth Christian School, which presents a Christian perspective as "more important than scientific fact" and fails to provide appropriate relationships and sex education (RSE).
The NSS also drew attention to its own Unsafe Sex Education report from 2018, which uncovered RSE policies from state-funded faith schools in England that explicitly denigrated same-sex relationships.
The NSS said that the Welsh Government's proposed curriculum changes allowing PSHE which "reflects the school's aims and ethos" could create a similar situation in Wales.
The NSS also raised concerns that, under the proposed changes, 'partisan political views' could be given a free pass when they have a religious basis. The proposals would preclude the promotion of such views in teaching or require that when political views are discussed, a balanced view is presented.
In its Unsafe Sex Education report, the NSS found many faith schools delegitimised same-sex marriages by describing marriage solely in terms of being 'between man and woman', with one stipulating that "treating alternative relationships as equivalent to marriage" was "contrary to the school's ethos".
Other faith schools were found to explicitly teach that contraception and abortion are morally wrong.
The NSS argued that these perspectives are fundamentally political and, as such, should not be excluded from the restrictions simply due to their faith-based character.
NSS: 'Faith ethos is no excuse for avoiding educational obligations'
Jack Rivington, campaigns officer at the NSS, said: "We welcome the proposed changes to the regulations for independent schools in Wales, which will bring requirements largely in line with England and help to promote respect for the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act.
"However, the Welsh Government must ensure that the regulations do not contain loopholes which can be exploited by faith institutions to avoid teaching full and impartial RSE and PSHE curriculums, or to present biased political perspectives without context.
"All children are entitled to high-quality, age-appropriate RSE, whatever kind of school they attend. It is vital that the wording of these proposed changes guarantees that provision and protects against religious attempts to circumvent it."
Don’t let the Church dictate how we marry
In justifying its uniquely privileged position as the established religion, the Church of England likes to portray itself as "an advocate for freedom of religion or belief". But its recent outburst on plans to liberalise wedding law tells a different story.
Last week bishop of Durham Paul Butler spoke out against the Law Commission's recommendations to reform wedding law in England and Wales, warning they are "likely to undermine the Christian understanding of marriage".
What are these proposed recommendations? They are to make our wedding laws simpler, fairer, and easier for anyone – of any religion or belief – to be married in a ceremony that's right for them.
Wedding laws in England and Wales are archaic. Different rules and restrictions apply depending on whether your wedding is Church of England, Jewish, Quaker, a different religion entirely, or not religious at all. If the wedding isn't Jewish or Quaker, you must get married in a building licensed for weddings. That strictly limits where most couples can get married, and there's no way to have a legally binding wedding ceremony led by an independent celebrant.
The statistics reflect the need to update wedding law. In 2019, marriage rates for opposite-sex couples fell to their lowest on record since 1862. Religious ceremonies accounted for less than one in five of opposite-sex marriages, the lowest percentage on record before the pandemic. These figures aren't too surprising since the 2021 Census revealed England and Wales are less religious than ever.
The Law Commission's proposals are designed to stop the decline in marriage by removing barriers to weddings suitable for people from all walks of life. They recommend streamlining the law so all weddings, whatever their religious or non-religious nature, take place according to broadly similar rules. Crucially, the 'buildings-based system' would be replaced with an 'officiant-based' one, meaning couples could get married anywhere provided the officiant was authorised.
This would greatly expand the possibilities of legally recognised weddings for religion or belief groups who don't tend to congregate or marry in dedicated buildings, including Muslims, Pagans and Humanists. The majority who want civil weddings would also benefit from having a much wider choice of venues, including "gardens, beaches, forests, parks, village halls and cruise ships."
Furthermore, the Law Commission has proposed a scheme for independent celebrants to become officiants and hold legally binding weddings. This makes sense; independent celebrants are in demand. Although the weddings they hold currently have no legal standing, there are at least 1,000 independent celebrants in England and Wales performing over 10,000 wedding ceremonies each year. The number of such ceremonies has more than doubled since 2015.
Wedding reforms would maximise freedom of religion or belief for all – especially if independent celebrants are included. They offer freedom for personal and spiritual expression quite unlike any other wedding provider. As Sophie Easton of the Association of Independent Celebrants says: "Many of the couples we work with are non-religious, but equally, many are spiritual in outlook, or in mixed-faith relationships, so it's our job to ensure their ceremony reflects them to a tee."
But the Church of England doesn't seem to like the idea of giving people the weddings they want, even if this would inherently deliver greater religious freedom.
Butler's fretting over the "Christian understanding of marriage" reveals the Church thinks weddings belong to them. They don't and they never did. Marriage institutions exist across cultures and religions – no single religion has a monopoly on weddings. It should be noted that the Church used this same argument in its opposition to legalise same-sex civil marriage.
Butler also argued that moves to "commercialise" weddings would lead to ceremonies that are not "dignified". This perhaps refers to the fact that for independent celebrants, holding weddings is their vocation and livelihood – they have to charge money for it.
The idea that allowing for greater choice in weddings would lead to 'undignified' weddings is scaremongering. The Law Commission has said the reforms are designed to "preserve the dignity of weddings" and said all officiants should be duty-bound to "uphold the dignity and significance of marriage". That Butler assumes the Church can do this, but other officiants can't be trusted to do so, may reveal the Church's own prejudice against heathens who dare to wade into what the Church thinks is its own territory.
And let's not forget the Church does charge a fee for officiating weddings; this can reach over £600. It is hypocritical for any religion or belief group to criticise independent celebrants for charging money for officiating weddings when they do the same thing.
What's more, every other aspect of weddings, from the venue to the catering to the clothing to the entertainment, is open to the free market. It seems entirely unreasonable to exclude the officiant alone.
So, what's the real reason for the Church's opposition to wedding reform?
Perhaps it's because allowing more groups and individuals to conduct weddings with far fewer restrictions will present significant competition to Church weddings, which are already in a drastic state of decline. In 2017, the average church only held one wedding that year, which isn't too surprising considering less than 1% regularly attend CofE services.
And while the Church's self-imposed ban on gay marriage remains, it cannot capitalise on same-sex weddings to bolster its numbers. No doubt many opposite-sex couples find the Church's homophobia distasteful, which puts them off marrying in a church too.
The Church's opposition to making it easier for others to hold weddings – weddings that don't have all the religious baggage of Church weddings – looks like petty protectionism. It knows it can't beat the competition, so it must discredit them.
The government is now considering the Law Commission's recommendations. The established Church, with all its privileged access to political power (as bishop of Durham, Paul Butler sits in the House of Lords), may put it under immense pressure to retain the unequal and restrictive status quo.
We can only hope the government can resist this pressure and reform the law based on principles of equality, fairness and freedom of religion or belief for everyone. The Church may not welcome that, but the British public would.
Bishops’ bench “gives democracy a bad name”, MPs hear
Bishops in the House of Lords give "democracy and bad name", MPs have been told in a debate today.
Scottish National Party MP Tommy Sheppard, who brought the debate forward on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group, argued for an end to the "guaranteed and automatic" appointment of Church of England bishops to the 'bishops' bench' in the House of Lords.
The Westminster Hall debate followed recent lobbying from the National Secular Society. The NSS briefed all MPs ahead of the debate.
Two Church of England archbishops and 24 bishops are automatically given guaranteed seats in the upper house.
"Time is right for a review"
Sheppard said there are only two national state legislatures where clerics are automatically guaranteed a place: Iran and UK.
He asked MPs whether they thought the pre-feudal, pre-democracy arrangement of bishops in the Lords is still appropriate in the 21st century in "a country which aspires to be open and democratic", and where most people don't belong to the CofE.
He quoted figures from the British Social Attitudes survey which found 52% of the population are nonreligious and only 12% are Anglican, in addition to the Church's own findings that just 1% of people in England regularly attend Sunday services. But even excluding the bishops, 60% of members of the House of Lords identify as Christian.
He reminded MPs that the bishops' bench is not a mere "ceremonial" function, but that the bishops have "real, effective, political power", with their votes being decisive on many occasions. He noted that they even occupy a privileged place within parliament itself, with protocol dictating that other members of the house give way to bishops during debates.
Sheppard said their influence is "socially conservative" on issues such as same-sex marriage and assisted dying, and "puts the legislature at odds with the public".
He added that the bishops have an inherent conflict of interest, as they are there to "protect and advance" the Church of England, giving it an "unfair advantage".
In answer to questions regarding wider reforms to the House of Lords, Sheppard said the bishops' bench "is a good place to start" as it is not elected and not subject to the same scrutiny as other appointments.
He said the bishops' bench "gives democracy a bad name" and "doesn't do the Church any favours either". He concluded that the "time is right for a review" of the arrangement.
Other SNPs raised concerns about the bishops voting on issues only affecting Scotland, despite the Church being established in England alone.
Responding on behalf of the government, Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office Alex Burghart MP dismissed the concerns and said the government would not be engaging on the issue.
The bishops' bench is consistently unpopular with the public. A survey last year found over 60% of UK adults think bishops should have no place in parliament. In February writer and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig launched a petition to remove the bishops from the House of Lords, which received nearly 164,000 signatures.
In March the Commission on Political Power said the bishops are an "anomalous" presence in the House of Lords and recommended their removal in a reformed second chamber.
NSS: bishops' bench "an affront to democracy"
NSS chief executive Stephen Evans, who attended the debate, said: "Today's debate has brought much needed parliamentary scrutiny to the bishops' bench.
"The positively medieval privilege of ex officio seats for 26 Anglican bishops sits in stark contrast to the reality of 21st century Britain where Christianity is no longer a majority religion.
"Ending the automatic right of bishops to sit in the House of Lords is an important and necessary step towards creating a more modern, open and equitable parliament.
"The whole concept of clerics in the legislature as of right is an affront to democracy. Every other western democracy has realised this, it's time we did, too."
The debate was also welcomed by prominent Anglicans who oppose the bishops' bench. Simon Barrow, director the Christian thinktank Ekklesia, said: "If bishops or any other type of cleric wishes to be in a legislative body, they should get there by the same route as anyone else - that is, by election and popular franchise, not as a result of privileging a particular religious body.
"Having faith leaders from one denomination of one religion based in only one of the nations of the UK in an unelected second chamber is particularly inappropriate, unnecessary and anachronistic."
Church plans to use schools to drive conversion of children
The Church of England has unveiled plans to use schools to drive recruitment of children and young people to Christianity.
In a document published on Friday, the Church said "courageous structural shifts in thinking and practice in education" will "contribute to the Church's vision to double the number of children and young people who are active Christian disciples by 2030".
The Church, which is embroiled in safeguarding scandals, has seen a dramatic decrease in membership, particularly among young people. The 2019 British Social Attitudes survey found just one per cent of 18-24 year olds in Britain belong to the CofE. Overall, less than 1% of adults in England regularly attend CofE services.
Education "central to the mission of the wider diocese"
The document recommends government leaders "further deepen the mutual partnership between church and state, at national, regional and local level, to enable the ongoing flourishing of church schools for coming generations".
It calls for dioceses to "provide an ambitious and expansive vision" for the role of the Church in education. This includes "the creation of new models of church in schools, which provide opportunities for children and adults to develop their journey of faith, through well planned pathways to discipleship".
"By creating and embedding strategic partnerships between churches and schools across the diocese, children, young people and their families can have the opportunity to grow in faith," it says.
It says diocesan leaders should ensure education is "central to the mission of the wider diocese", and should pay particular regard to religious education and collective worship.
The document says the Church's vision for education is "not just for Church schools" and that the Church will "continue to embrace vibrant partnerships with all major education institutions".
It adds that the Church "has a particular responsibility" to "safeguard the distinctive vision of its schools".
It also says school trust leaders should "celebrate equity, diversity, belonging, inclusion and justice". But many Church of England schools' admissions policies discriminate against children whose families do not belong to the Church. Research in 217 found one in four dioceses advise their schools to reserve some places on faith grounds. In 2013, the Fair Admissions Campaign found Church of England comprehensives whose admissions criteria allow full selection of faith admit 35% fewer children eligible for free school meals.
The Church has also been criticised recently for its homophobic and sexist policies.
Last month the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) urged the UK to repeal compulsory collective worship laws and end the religious selection practised in faith schools.
NSS: 'Church regards our schools as mission fields'
National Secular Society head of campaigns Megan Manson said: "The Church has made it clear that it regards our education system as a mission field. Its latest plans reveal it wants to cynically use the state education system, which citizens of all faiths and beliefs pay for, to boost its plunging membership figures.
"Its desire to form even deeper links to the state can only further undermine secular democracy.
"These plans are highly inappropriate in such a diverse society, where Christians are now a minority.
"The government should stop giving the Church a free hand to pursue its own self-serving agenda in publicly funded schools. The purpose of such schools should be to educate, rather than inculcate pupils into a particular faith.
"And it should work separate Church and state rather than further entrench these ties."
NSS urges Charity Commission to investigate CofE safeguarding
NSS letter comes amid mounting criticism of the decision to sack the Independent Safeguarding Board
Faith school found teaching Bible as fact in history and science
An independent school has failed an inspection after it was found teaching the Bible "as fact" in subjects including science and history.
Bournemouth Christian School was judged "inadequate" by Ofsted after inspectors found multiple failings at the school during an inspection in April.
In a report published this month, Ofsted said the school's leaders have established a curriculum that presents "flawed and inaccurate information in all subjects", with pupils learning through an "unmoderated Christian worldview".
This includes presenting a Christian perspective as "more important than scientific fact", and failing to provide a "balanced, factually accurate curriculum". Ofsted said that this impedes pupils' understanding, and that they consequently do not gain the knowledge necessary for their futures.
Pupils "do not learn much about the world around them", including "citizenship in modern Britain", Ofsted said. It added that the curriculum's "focus on America" does not help pupils "prepare for life in modern Britain" or beyond school. This includes a focus on "the American literary tradition", which means pupils "do not learn about the literary traditions that have shaped the United Kingdom".
The school also fails to provide an effective personal, social and health education programme for students, including appropriate relationships and sex education.
The school, which teaches pupils between ages 3 and 18, uses the online curriculum of SwitchedOn Education. SwitchedOn Education describes itself as providing a "Christian digital education curriculum" for both "schools and home schools" in the UK and internationally.
Ofsted found teachers "do not have the subject knowledge to support pupils effectively" and are unaware of what pupils do or do not know, with pupils interacting "mainly with computers".
Ofsted said the school has also failed to "create an effective culture of safeguarding", with pupils at a "serious risk of harm". Leaders do not address concerns about pupils or ensure that pupils were safe in school. The school site was found to be insecure, with pupils easily able to leave.
NSS: School "more interested in indoctrinating its pupils than educating them"
National Secular Society campaigns officer Jack Rivington said: "This damning report from Ofsted reveals an organisation more interested in indoctrinating its pupils than educating them.
"The presentation of religious dogma as more valid and more important than scientific fact is unacceptable, and deprives children of their full right to an education.
"The appalling quality of Bournemouth Christian School's curriculum, teaching methods, and safeguarding processes revealed in this report is highly concerning. This school should now receive further scrutiny to ensure children and young people's rights are protected."
