GUEST POST: Laurence Boyce – “Liberal Vision wrong on religion”
Julian Harris has kindly asked me to comment on the news, as relayed by the National Secular Society, that the Conservatives are planning to go full steam ahead with increased provision for faith schooling in the now inevitable event that they form the next government. Well, that’s no great surprise. Conservatives have always been deeply wedded to religious values. While some may protest the generalisation, the voting record in Parliament speaks for itself. From blasphemy to gay rights, stem-cells, and abortion, it’s pretty clear that God is a Tory; even if his only kid is a beard-and-sandals liberal.
A few months ago, I would have written yet another piece pointing out the glaring opportunity for Liberal Democrats to adopt a strong rational secular standpoint on faith schools and everything else. If Nick Clegg says the choice at the next election is between the Lib Dem and the Conservative, then a spot of secular politics could have generated a clear distinction between us – portraying them as the reactionary and outmoded bunch that most of them still are – conservative in the literal sense of that word, that is wishing to keep things more or less the way they have always been, while the public is gagging for radical change.
Anyway, we had that vote at Spring conference and totally flunked it. A motion to phase out faith schools didn’t even come close. Instead we are to bar faith-based selection for new faith schools, while allowing existing faith schools to retain their discriminatory powers. It’s all pretty academic, seeing as we won’t be in power. Back then, I had a little hissy fit about the vote and threatened to quit the party. But eventually I renewed my membership, opting for another year of holding my head in my hands – a posture I seem increasingly to be adopting with respect to party policy and the banal utterances of the leadership.
So why is the party so useless on faith schools? Well, part of the problem is you. Yes, I mean you, Liberal Vision. While the social wing of the party is far too “nice” to say anything overly critical of religion, however desperately it may need saying; the libertarian wing of the party has its libertarian philosophy to uphold – obviously. You rarely hear a libertarian suggesting that religion might be bad for the health, any more than that smoking is bad for the health. I bet if I told Mark Littlewood that the cigarettes were doing him no good, he would smoke the whole packet in front of me as some sort of political protest.
And therein lies the problem. You can’t very well make a song and dance about personal freedom and lifestyle choice, and then immediately follow this by socking someone over the head when they make a mistake. So if people want faith schools, then faith schools they must have together with everything that is insane and divisive about them – whether this be the creationist schools doing very nicely 150 years after Darwin, or the Islamic schools preaching an explicit doctrine of separation. By the way, these schools tend to obtain glowing Ofsted reports, so I just need to lie down and hold my head in my hands again for a bit . . .
The trouble is that all this much-heralded self-determination and personal freedom is largely illusory. How are we free in any meaningful sense to choose our own religion? We bang on and on about religious freedom, even going so far as to enshrine it in a charter of human rights, and yet the facts are pretty clear – in the main, people stick with the religion of their parents, with a small degree of inter-denominational movement. Movement between the main religious groupings is almost unheard of. You might be aware of someone who, having been raised an Anglican, is now a devout Sunni Muslim; but I think you also know that person to be a very rare exception.
This is not freedom or anything like it. Rather, this is the “despotism of custom” of which JS Mill spoke long ago, and faith schools help to enforce this dismal pattern of cultural determinism. Your parents are Catholic, so you’re a Catholic, and you go to the Catholic school; your parents are Muslim, so you’re a Muslim, and you go to the Muslim school; and so on. Are we serious about this? Apparently we are. It’s not so much like freely choosing to smoke against the best advice, but more like insisting on the right to blow the fumes in your child’s face. Except that faith schooling is potentially more lethal. Every time I write on this topic, violence seems to flare up in Northern Ireland just to make my point.
I support the aims of Liberal Vision. The welfare state has been a train wreck – I can say that here, right? Now that we’ve run up such a ridiculous debt, there’s surely no better time to press for a radical resettlement of the relationship between the individual and the state. And yet I always baulk at describing myself as libertarian. The reason is because I believe the libertarian conception of freedom to be faulty. It’s a conception which seems to rest unduly upon a mythical “free will” of the individual – a rather shaky doctrine, strangely required by both libertarian and religionist alike.
If we truly believe in personal freedom, then I would like to hear much more about the pressing need to free young minds from superstition and falsehood, and less about abstract freedoms which only exist in political pamphlets. Because the most important thing to understand about freedom, may well be that we don’t really possess any of it at all.
Laurence Boyce is (still) a member of the Liberal Democrats.