The Independent reported on Thursday, with a piece entitled: “Humanists threaten further legal action over ‘unlawful’ Religious Studies GCSE syllabus”. You can also read about it in the TES.
A New National Curriculum
Here's the background, as laid out in those articles. The Department for Education published a new National Curriculum for GCSE Religious Education. It excluded non-religious world-views from that curriculum.
A Legal Challenge
3 families, supported by the British Humanist Association, challenged the legality of this. They objected to "the lack of parity between religious beliefs and non-religious worldviews in the school curriculum, which in the eyes of children may well lead to the belief that religion, in whatever form, has a monopoly on truth and on morality."
They were successful in taking this to the High Court. There, in November 2015, the government was criticised for acting unlawfully.
Mr Justice Warby ruled that the government had had a "breach of the duty to take care that information or knowledge included in the curriculum is conveyed in a pluralistic manner. However, he made a distinction. It is not unlawful to devise a curriculum that only looks at Christian worldviews. However it is unlawful for the government to require that all curricula should only look at religious worldviews, that that the 1944 requirement to teach RE is discharged in that form. If you really want, you can read the whole of that ruling.
The Department for Education responds
The DfE responded to this court ruling on 26 November 2015. Their response ended with these words "Nothing in this judgement affects our previously issued guidance on RE for faith schools." In other words, they weren't going to change their curriculum. They were going to clarify some of the phrasing within it. Schools needed to realise that they may decide to teach more than the national curriculum requires of them in order to ensure they are teaching what they need to cover.
The DfE also noticed some other crucial details in the ruling:
"He also made clear that it would be lawful to give priority to the study of Christianity in the curriculum if we wanted to do that."
"The judge made clear that there was no requirement in either domestic or human rights law to give 'equal air time' to all shades of belief."
It's not all over yet!
What made the news on Thursday was a statement from the British Humanist Association, threatening to take the Government to court yet again over all this.
The Independent summarised the BHA's take thus: the government's "failure to include non-religious world views such as Humanism is unlawful."
A Christian Response
How might a Christian respond to this debate?
Many are throwing their arms up in horror. Actually, the point to do that was when it comes to teaching Religious Studies as a multi-faith subject. That is a separate debate. There are arguments both sides on that, and my own view is that it revolves more around the way it is done than around whether it is done.
The Great Lie of Neutrality
Actually, I think Christians should welcome what the BHA is asking for. Here's why.
There's a great lie that we are repeatedly told by the "new atheists" and by humanists. It is the lie of neutrality.
It goes like this: Humanism / atheism is the neutral position when it comes to religions. Each human being is born as a blank canvas, with no belief in deity. At some point, many people come to believe in one or several deities. They may do this through upbringing, as their parents teach them about the god their family follows. They may do this through their education, as schools teach a faith position. They may do this through meeting followers of a religion, and so coming to join in this religion for themselves. But until that happens, we are neutral.
This means that each faith claim needs to be evaluated. Is there evidence for what a person believes? Richard Dawkins said this: "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." In other words, he critiques the person who believes in a god because they've done so without evidence.
The burden of proof lies on those who would believe in a god. They need to give the evidence to justify their position. They need to explain why they've chosen to adopt this view.
Humanism and Atheism are Religions
Here's why the BHA are doing us all a service.
That lie is a lie. The view that there is no god is as much a worldview as any view that there is. We need to ask atheists for the evidence to back up their beliefs. It colours the way you see the world, and the way you view life, just as much as any theistic worldview. Your ethics, your values, your priorities are coloured by your view of the world, and that is just as much the case for the atheist as for the believer in a god.
In saying that non-theistic (which is what they mean) worldviews need to be taught as part of GCSE RE, the BHA have done us a favour. They've just made the case that their viewpoint is as much a religion as Christianity, Hinduism, or Islam. The beliefs, practices, customs and traditions of atheism need to be examined, studied and questioned just as much as those of the others. We all look at the world through lenses. If RE is about getting you to look at your lenses, to become self-conscious about the grid through which we filter life, then atheism and humanism are not exempt. They are also matrices that need examining.
What is The Default Position?
In fact, I want to go one stage further, and put the ball on the other foot.
Romans 1 says that the default position, with which we are all born, is theistic.
We don't know much. Creation and conscience cannot teach us much about the character of God. We cannot know, even, that there is only one God. But we know of his glory and his power. We know that there is a powerful creator God, and that the universe revolves around him.
Romans 1 then goes on to explain that we suppress the truth, denying what we know to be true when it becomes inconvenient. For this, God will hold us accountable. Romans chapters 3 and 4 then go on to explain God's answer to this. He sent his own Son to die in the place of those who deny the existence of the God they know to be there. This is good news that all must hear, as Romans chapters 9 to 11 make clear.
The default position is theistic. We all need God's special revelation to flesh this out. We need to hear of the saviour who can rescue from our sinful suppression of what we know, something none of us is exempt from. But we start theistic. We're born with the instinct that there is a God. When we deny that, we're actually living in denial of something we know deep down to be true. Some of us get so good at suppressing it that we bury it deeply - so deeply that we genuinely think it's not there.
So any worldview that denies the existence of a God has a lot of explaining to do. Once you're going to allow non-Christian religions onto the RE syllabus, let's have humanism and atheism right at the top of the list. It's not enough for anyone to say that they don't believe in God. They need to be able to articulate why they hold that view, in the face of all the evidence that points the other way.
End Note
Of course I realise that this is not the only Christian perspective on this issue. There are other perspectives from which to look at this, and a proper assessment is one which looks from all perspectives.
In particular, whilst the humanists are undermining the lie that theirs is the neutral position, they are also seeking to reinforce the lie that their position can adequately ground an ethical moral system.
However I wanted to reflect on this from the perspective I have, because it's one that some other Christian commentators seem to be missing.
Recent comments