I was interested to hear of the unusual case of Kevin Yuill, who wrote recently in this magazine that he is a humanist, secularist, and atheist opposed to assisted dying. Since a basic humanist principle—at least as I, and most self-identified humanists, understand it—is the belief that everybody should have agency over their own body and be able to make choices that are best for them, this is like somebody saying, ‘I am a true pacifist, but I would like to join the army.’ Is he really saying that he could stand by unmoved if a close relative of his were in the same position as Tony Nicklinson, suffering from locked-in syndrome and begging pitifully for deliverance from his seven-year-long ordeal through blinking his eye—his only way of (computer-aided) communication?

Would Yuill really not immediately begin campaigning for a change in the law, instead of spending years battling to maintain the cruel status quo? Answering ‘yes’ to this question would mean that he couldn’t possibly continue to claim to be a humanist. I could understand a god-squadder getting worked up about this issue but not a self-proclaimed rationalist. Yes, I could see such a person raising legitimate questions about some of the aspects of this moral issue, but that approach is not for Kevin Yuill, who appears to be in the grip of an obsession.

Could this be because he is aghast at the lingering painful deaths some people must endure? Well, no, that’s his opponents’ case. Does he see himself as a knight in shining armour, riding to the rescue of the condemned? But there’s nothing to rescue. Nobody is being dragged kicking and screaming to the scaffold. Could it be that he is a crypto-Christian, using the humanist label to strengthen his impact? I cannot claim to know the answer to this question, though a case could be made for it. But such speculation on motives might be seen as unfair, so let’s take Yuill at his word and see what he has to offer by way of argument.  

He sets out his stall in his 2013 book Assisted Suicide: The Liberal, Humanist Case Against Legalization. I have been unable to locate a copy of this book but have seen two extensive, highly critical reviews of it: one by Iain Brassington in the Journal of Medical Ethics blog, the other by Jonathan Herring of Exeter College, Oxford. It seems that Yuill’s recent Freethinker article offers a précis of the book’s arguments, so let us turn to that.

Yuill makes a big deal about terminology, always substituting ‘ASE (assisted suicide and euthanasia)’ for ‘assisted dying’. Who cares? There are more than 5,000 suicides in England and Wales each year, which is proof of the agony that many people must endure. If some of these desperate people can be helped to die at their own request, subject to all necessary scrutiny, overseen by two doctors, then a humane service is provided. By all means, let Yuill call it assisted suicide; would he prefer that people starve themselves to death or cut their veins in the bath or find a rope and a tree?

Yuill’s commentary contains several unsubstantiated allegations but one that stands out particularly is his despicable statement that ‘utility is the real force behind [assisted dying] campaigns; some citizens—particularly those who are disabled or elderly—are inevitably valued less than others.’ Where on earth does he get this from? He provides no evidence, apart from his own suspicious mind. In another leap of fantasy, he conflates modern interpretations of euthanasia with fascistic utterances by some German supremacists more than a century ago. Throughout, he portrays desperate applicants for assisted dying or ASE as unwilling lambs to the slaughter, urged on by suicide-promoting organisations, aided by the state. If only he could grasp the fact that such people ask for help unprompted, voluntarily, motivated by an irresistible desire to be free of their unbearable condition, without paying any attention to outside parties who might have an interest in their demise. It is highly condescending and offensive to suggest that people in despair are incapable of knowing what’s good for them.

Yuill makes great play of the fact that thousands of people who have died from euthanasia have had their lives cut short. Well, of course they have—that was the whole point! Why prolong a life that is unbearable by some extra months with no respite? Yuill just can’t seem to understand that people really are desperate to go through with this.

Further on he once again states that those with fewer years left and those with disabilities are thought to lead less valuable lives and thus are directed towards assisted suicide and euthanasia. Who are the fiends who apply this pressure and who are the doctors that approve enforced suicide for such people? He has a lot to say about fear in all directions. He talks about fear-mongering campaigns by assisted dying proponents whilst at the same time whipping up fear himself by saying that many vulnerable people are under mortal threat from predatory mercy killers. His singling out of Dignity in Dying and its engagement with Hospice UK over the former’s ‘The Inescapable Truth’ campaign conveniently omits to tell the end of that story. The two organisations engaged in an open discussion. Here is what Dignity in Dying’s Chief Executive had to say, which rather undercuts Yuill’s tendentious telling of the story:

‘[W]e welcome Hospice UK’s statement which acknowledges that some people will have a bad death, “despite the very best care” and the “need to be honest and straightforward with people about what dying can be like”. We also welcome Hospice UK stating that they “do not disagree with the findings in the Dignity in Dying report The Inescapable Truth About Dying” and “urge as many people as possible to read the report and debate the findings”.’

Yuill also looks abroad to Canada and Holland, both countries very close to my heart (I’m a Dutch national and have lived in both countries), for more ammunition. He alleges that in Holland an autistic man in his twenties who had been bullied and had long felt unhappy was ‘euthanized’ by his doctor ‘on this basis, and at his request’. This is a shallow interpretation of events; Yuill neglects to give the fuller context. This was, in fact, a highly unusual and complex case which received a great deal of attention and was minutely examined in a 3,000-word report by a regional scrutinising commission that ultimately gave it the all clear. Multiple doctors and psychiatrists, one of them a specialist in autism, were involved, not just one. Space doesn’t allow me to give all the details, and there is always privacy involved in interactions between patients and doctors. The upshot is that outsiders rarely get to know all the facts. If they did they would, more often than not, end up saying, ‘Well, if only I had known that’ instead of jumping to conclusions.

Equal care is taken in Canada, where legislation was first introduced in 2016. A recent poll showed that only 42% of Canadians supported assisted dying proposals for those with intractable mental health conditions (which can, incidentally, be even more troublesome than physical distress), while 77% supported the legislation as it stands. In response, the proposals were shelved, to be re-examined in 2027. Even eight years after legalising assisted dying, Canada is still cautiously fine-tuning its approach and respecting the democratic will of the people—hardly the hellscape portrayed by Yuill.

Yuill concludes his submission with the sentence: ‘There is wisdom yet in the famous old Christian precept, Thou shalt not kill.’ In reply, let me quote the former archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, who changed his mind in favour of assisted dying after seeing cases of true torment: ‘The old philosophical certainties have collapsed in the face of the reality of needless suffering. …  In strictly observing accepted teaching about the sanctity of life, the church could actually be sanctioning anguish and pain—the very opposite of the Christian message.’ Kevin Yuill is free to choose to suffer an appalling death, should he have the misfortune to face such end-of-life circumstances. But his view that everyone else may not choose to avoid such an end is incompatible with the very heart of humanism.

More on the assisted dying debate

National Secular Society podcast on the 2021 Assisted Dying Bill: Emma Park interviews A.C. Grayling and Molly Meacher, Baroness Meacher

Bishops in the Lords: Why are they still there? by Emma Park

Assisted dying: will the final freedom be legalised in France? by Jean-Luc Romero-Michel

The post Opposition to assisted dying is incompatible with humanism: a rejoinder to Kevin Yuill appeared first on The Freethinker.

Thank you American Atheists for the opportunity to address this convention, my first time doing so and hopefully not the last. I speak here not in my capacity as a board member of Humanists International but as a concerned atheist committed to seeing the flourishing of freethought around the globe. I speak here as a fellow human being determined to slowly undo whatever obstructs the free exercise of reason, the rights and liberties of non-believers, and the realization of a more secular world.

When I founded the Humanist Association of Nigeria in the 1990s, American Atheists was among the organisations that I contacted. Most of what I read about atheism and freethought mainly concerned what organisations like yours were doing: promoting the separation of church and state and equal rights for believers and non-believers. For many years I corresponded with the leaders of American Atheists and I received your magazines and read about your activities, including the challenges you faced trying to grow and organise atheism here in the US.

So make no mistake about it: what you do here in America, here at the American Atheists, inspires many people across the globe, including atheists who live in places like Sudan, Malaysia and, Egypt where atheism and humanism dare not mention their name.

While we may be continents apart, our destinies are shared. Christian nationalism is not only a threat to democracy and human rights here in the US but also in Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana. Many African countries face additional threats from traditional religious superstitions, Islamic nationalism, and separatism. That is why atheists need to rethink and reenvision how they organise around the globe, bearing in that atheism is not American. Humanism is not Western. The exercise of freethought is universal. The yearning for freedom without favour and equality without exception is global.

The world is undergoing rapid change. And as the world is changing, so must the way atheism is organised. The world has become more interconnected than at any other time in history. And as the world interconnects, so must the way we build freethought communities. Today more than ever, we must commit to promoting atheism without borders and secularism beyond borders.

As you are aware, two years from now, American Atheists will be hosting the World Humanist Congress. This international event brings together atheists, humanists, rationalists, secularists and, other non-religious persons from different parts of the world. The Congress provides an opportunity for non-theistic people to meet, socialise, discuss, and debate issues of common interest and concern. I am looking forward to that event and I believe that you are looking forward to it, too. As we convene here and warm up to congregate in Washington, D.C. in two years, let me share my hopes for the future and my thoughts on and visions for a new direction for the atheist and humanist movement.

When our forebears met in 1952 and founded the International Humanist and Ethical Union, now Humanists International, they knew that the values of church/mosque-state separation, the civil liberties of non-theists, and the freedom of religion and from religion would only grow and flourish on Earth if the non-religious constituency connected and networked beyond national borders. They knew that for atheism and humanism to flourish in their fullness, their outlook must be global and become transnationally effective. They knew that in the face of global inequalities, resources must be shared. They knew that freethinkers must be creative and innovative in organising. They knew that atheists must cooperate for their shared vision of shared prosperity to be realised.

But seven decades and two years after that meeting, the atheist/humanist movement has largely been consigned to one part of the world, the West, while religion rages with force and ferocity across the globe. Non-theism has not become a transnational effective alternative to dogmatic religion and supernaturalism as envisaged by our founders. And one of the regions where the atheist/humanist movement has fallen short of its promises is my continent, Africa.

Religion persists in Africa, not because Africans are hardwired to be religious, not because Africans are notoriously religious. No, not at all. Religion persists not because there is something uniquely fulfilling in the Christian or Islamic faith. Religion is widespread in Africa because an effective alternative to these religions is missing; because the atheist and humanist movement has failed to organise and address the needs of the non-religious constituency in the region.

Faiths that Western and Eastern religious imperialists introduced to much of Africa centuries ago still have the adherence of the majority of the population because the atheist and humanist movement has been unable to match the power, influence, and funding of the Euro-American evangelicals and their Arab, Middle Eastern Islamic counterparts. Based on my experiences over the years, I am offering a pact for a global rebirth of the atheist/humanist movement. This pact provides a pathway to a better and more exciting future, allowing us to use what is right with our organisation to fix what is wrong with the movement. It is based on the ideas that we can do more and we can do better, that we are in this together, and that no matter how we choose to describe or identify as non-religious, we are one family and one community. 

The statistics say that the non-religious constituency is nonexistent in most African countries. Why? Because in these places, blasphemy and apostasy laws exist and force millions of atheists and humanists to live in closets and pretend to be religious. Millions cannot express their non-belief in the Christian or Islamic god due to fear of being attacked, persecuted, imprisoned, or even murdered with impunity. I offer you a pact that will help us confront this disturbing trend and ensure that the next 70 years of atheism will not be like the last. This pact, which enables the connection and representation of the known and the unknown atheists, the visible and the invisible atheists, and the recognised and the forgotten members of the global atheist/humanist community, rests on four pillars: education, leadership, cooperation, and community, 

The atheist/humanist movement values education and has in its ranks distinguished scientists, philosophers, and other intellectuals. Unfortunately, the educational facility has been underutilised. Those who are non-religious or are indifferent to religion seek knowledge and nourishment for an ethical and responsible life. We must commit to delivering an effective educational program that satisfies this need.

For too long we have operated on the assumption that those who come on board and join the movement know enough and understand enough about who we are, how to be, and how to belong locally and internationally. This way of operating has yielded limited results. It has not worked for the movement in Africa and the global south. It has not made us internationally effective. We can no longer continue to operate on the assumption that everyone is educated or knowledgeable enough to be and to belong. Joining the movement should include a process of education about the movement, including information about what we do, how we live, where we live, the challenges we face in various places, and how we are grappling with these challenges beyond the concerns and interests of our local groups. We need to put in place mechanisms for continuous international education and reeducation.

Part of education entails doing away with those crude stereotypes of people from other races and regions, abandoning those prejudices and misrepresentations that have hampered our ability to galvanise energies, seize opportunities, and organise atheists and humanists in other parts of the world. At the moment, we know very little about ourselves and others, and because we know very little, we are less involved and less engaged. So we have to commit to establishing and strengthening departments that address local and international educational needs.

This pact also urges the atheist movement to invest in leadership training programs because there are many problems around the world today that, to be solved, require the kind of leadership that humanists, atheists, and secularists can provide. We can no longer continue to operate as a global organisation and community without having in place resources to train our future leaders. We need to establish and run faculties that train and graduate spokespersons and representatives every year. The atheist and humanist movement needs an international program that equips aspiring leaders with communication, conflict resolution, team building, and problem-solving skills, as well as other competencies that they need to be effective representatives. The issues that atheists face in the world today are complex and sometimes life-threatening. They require expertise and the atheist movement cannot continue to rely on ad-hoc, self-appointed, and self-taught leaders to handle these issues.

For too long, we have operated on the assumption that anyone who says ‘I am a humanist leader’ is a humanist leader. In many cases, an email or postal correspondence makes one a leader to be entrusted with local and international roles and responsibilities. We need to review this approach and put in place mechanisms that will attract our best and brightest to lead. Unfortunately, what we have at the moment is not working. In Africa, most young people are unemployed or underemployed. They are looking for paid employment, not volunteer jobs and opportunities. Most young people cannot volunteer. It is the same with the elderly. Most of them retire into poverty and bankruptcy. Tired and demoralised, they cannot offer free services. So we cannot sustainably grow based on ad-hoc leadership and volunteerism. 

We need a strategy to incentivise leadership that aligns with the needs and realities in Africa and the global south. We need a training institute where aspiring leaders from different parts of the world can come together, learn together, and train together. This leadership school will deliver its programs online, offline, or in a hybrid form. Part of this leadership mechanism includes mobilising resources to sponsor, support, and manage aspiring leaders. I am working with Kevin Jagoe and the education department of the American Humanist Association to put together an international leadership course that meets the needs of our time. And today I urge you to support this initiative and help give the atheist movement the leadership that it deserves.

There is very little cooperation in the humanist/atheist movement. And it hurts. As a global minority, atheists must collaborate to maximise their limited resources, grow, and become a force to be reckoned with. If we understand each other and have programs where our leaders learn and train together, then we can work together more efficiently. Our organisations can more effectively collaborate. There is very little cooperation in the global atheist movement because there is limited understanding. Because we know very little about one another, we do very little with one another. Because there is little cooperation, the global atheist/humanist movement has yet to live up to its full potential.

Because we know very little about ourselves—about our needs, intentions, and aspirations—and because we sometimes rely on prejudices and stereotypes to relate to one another, we trust very little and we care very little. And with a low level of trust, a robust community cannot be formed. The challenges that atheists and humanists face in other parts of the world seem very distant and are designated as ‘their’ challenges, not ‘ours’. But if we learn to see the problems of other atheists as our problems, their risks and dangers as the risks we all face, then their progress becomes our progress. If we learn to treat each other with love and respect rather than contempt and condescension, we will forge a sense of solidarity that will be the envy of the world.

25 years ago I travelled for my first World Humanist Congress in India. Since then, I have been to many countries in Europe and Asia, and I have been to Australia and New Zealand. I have been to over 15 states here in the US. I did not go to these places because I wanted to go on a holiday. I did not go to these countries because I wanted to use the opportunity to migrate or seek asylum. I travelled to these places because I was driven by a burning desire to understand, connect, and collaborate with people of like minds. I travelled to these places to forge communities of reason, compassion, and critical thinking. That yearning persists as I speak here. That desire burns in the hearts and minds of other atheists and humanists that I have met in the past 28 years, including those in countries where the statistics claim that there are very low percentages of non-believers.

This century beckons on the atheist movement to respond to the yearnings and aspirations of freethinkers and secularists across the world with a renewed sense of hope, vision, and commitment. Let us be that generation that worked and connected atheists in ways that had never before been the case. Let us be that generation that forged a sense of solidarity too often missing, too often ignored, but so much cherished. Based on a commitment to all and responsibility from all, let us work to fulfil that need to belong and to be loved that lurks in the hearts and minds of non-theists across the globe.

There are risks and dangers associated with atheism. It is in addressing these risks that the atheist movement has grown. The risks that atheists face in places like Sudan, Malaysia, Afghanistan, and Indonesia are not dangers that we should flee from but threats that we must confront and face down. They are opportunities that we must seize, to test the power of our ideals and values. Let us answer this call to duty, rally our energies, and realise a more effective global atheist movement. Let us overcome the complacency that has limited the growth and development of freethought and stop making excuses. This is our chance. Our moment is now. Let us provide leadership and forge a sense of fellowship and community that befits an outlook which finds its plenitude in this one life that we have. 

Atheism in the 20th century was judged based on the progress that freethought and secularism made in the West. In this century, it is different and it will be different. Atheism and freethought will be judged based on the progress we make in places like Africa, Papua New Guinea, Bahrain, and the rest of the global south. And this progress can only be realized if atheists do more and do better. And we will!

Further reading on freethought in Nigeria

The price of criticising Islam in northern Nigeria: imprisonment or death, by Emma Park

Secularism in Nigeria: can it succeed? by Leo Igwe

Protecting atheists in Nigeria: the role of ‘safe houses’, by Hank Pellissier

How I lost my religious belief: A personal story from Nigeria, by Suyum Audu

The post A new pact for atheism in the 21st century appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Frank Turner is an English singer and songwriter whose music I have loved for years. His songs are wild and varied, sometimes sad and sometimes happy but always somehow life-affirming. He is a patron of Humanists UK and his secular and humanistic style, while rarely explicit, shines through all his music (at least to my ears). His tenth studio album, ‘Undefeated’, is out on 3 May, and in February I interviewed him about it.

Topics covered include Frank’s artistry; humanism and atheism; history and cancel culture; the greatness of Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift; raucous middle age; the perils of social media; and defiance.

The Freethinker has not interviewed many creative artists lately. As someone who believes that godlessness and art are entwined, in that art is one of the things that makes life in a purposeless universe worth living, I could not resist the opportunity to talk to Frank. As such, this interview might feel a little different—not least because there is a lot more casual swearing than usual. So, be warned. Frank is a rebellious singer with a punk background, after all. Indeed, his individualism, discussed below, is an example of freethinking in an artistic context.

I have also tried to keep the informal verbal flow of the conversation intact in the edited transcript. Selected audio excerpts are included alongside the transcript.

You can pre-order ‘Undefeated’ here.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: ‘Undefeated’ marks your return to independent music and it was recorded in your home studio. Why did you make that choice and what effect do you think it has had on your music?

Frank Turner: It’s a funny thing, the whole independent label business, because I’m not sure how much anybody else really cares about it. But it’s important to me. I have always been with Xtra Mile Recordings. For five records, starting in 2012, I was licensed to Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company. It was an experiment, and I expected it to last for maybe one album. I imagined I’d be dropped instantaneously!  

I am quite proud that I finished my deal rather than getting dropped. At the end of the deal, they were keen to continue, and I was not. I don’t have any ill things to say about the past, but it felt like the right moment to return to the warm embrace of the independent world on the label side of things, and I feel very good about it.  

It’s not that I was ever really creatively constrained per se in the licensing years. But there were moments when I had to expend some firepower, if you like, on maintaining my creative independence, and that is no longer the case. I’m the wild, drunk captain of my own ship now, and very nice that is too.  

So I have now produced a record, which was awesome. That is not to say that I think I should have produced all my albums—that’s not true at all. Another part of it is that one of my lockdown projects was to learn how to produce music in order to produce other bands, and I’ve been doing that with the likes of The Meffs, Pet Needs, and Grace Petrie, among others. And I thought, ‘Wait, hold on, I could do this for myself.’ And I had demoed my last few records in more and more depth before the recording. So even for my previous album ‘FTHC’, it was a process of replacing my demo tracks with better quality, better-played performances. And I thought, I can supervise that. My band are amazing, they can be part of that. And on we go.  

I don’t want to use the word ‘comfortable’ because that sounds kind of flaccid, somehow. But I feel confident in where I’m sitting creatively at the moment, and that feels good, and I feel like I’m putting my best foot forward.

On your blog, you wrote that you ‘still have something to share with the world’ in ‘Undefeated’. So, what exactly is it that you want to share?

It’s important to say that it’s entirely legitimate for certain sections of the world to say that they don’t give a fuck about what I want to share, and that’s all good.  

In ‘Undefeated’ there is a lot of stuff about nostalgia. There was a moment in time when it was going to be a concept record about an argument between me and my 15-year-old self. It didn’t quite stay that high concept, which is probably for the best. But there is a fair amount of that kind of thing running through the creative DNA of the record. And there are songs about impostor syndrome, life in the creative arts, London Tube stations. So, lots of different things!  

I try to be quite strict on checking myself on whether I am repeating myself, or whether I am making a record just because that’s what I do. That seems robotic to me. And it seems creatively indefensible somehow. People can argue as to how successfully I’ve checked myself on this. But personally, I feel that I have new things to say, and people can listen to the songs and judge for themselves.

You are very keen on having a distinctive creative voice in your music. One of the pre-released songs from ‘Undefeated’, ‘No Thank You For The Music’, is very much about having an individual voice and having things to say as opposed to bowing to musical conformity. Where does that spirit come from?

I had the fortune or misfortune (to be decided at a later date) of being obsessed with punk and rock music when I was growing up. There is a sense of independence and defiance and rejection that comes with a lot of that music—everything from The Clash to the Sex Pistols and Black Flag through to all the modern stuff like Bob Vylan.  

I would also say that in terms of making a life out of being a writer and being a performer and all the rest of it, I don’t really see the point unless I’m doing it on my own terms. I’m not trying to complain about my lot in life. There is a fair amount of costs in my cost-benefit analysis of what I do, but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs. That is why I still do this. It’s fantastic. I’m very privileged. I’m not complaining. But if I was not free to have my own voice and to be my own writer and my own artist, then I’m not sure what the point of doing any of this would be for me. I’ve never been doing this because I want to be famous or because I want to be rich—fucking lol [as in ‘laugh out loud’, pronounced ‘lawl’]. The sense of being under my own steam is very much the point.  

‘No Thank You For The Music’ is a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the gatekeepers of this world, and I’m very proud of it. I’ve always thought the idea of ‘cool’ in the creative arts was dumb. Fuck off! What does that even mean? And how lame would you have to be to care? More than a few times in my career, people have attempted to throw the insult at me that what I do is not ‘relevant’. I just think, what kind of a fucking loser cares about whether art is, quote-unquote, relevant. I don’t listen to music and I don’t engage with other types of art while looking over my shoulders to check whether other people agree with my opinion. Don’t be such a fucking coward. 

There are people who make it their business to try and gatekeep what is and isn’t ‘cool’ or ‘in’ or ‘hip’ or ‘permissible’. I just think that that is laughable. Those people should be laughed at. I think that they should be hounded from polite society with jeers. Just fuck off and leave everybody alone. I hope that that comes through in the way that I present my music, but it’s also about how I listen to music and how I engage with music as well. And I hope that younger people have the courage to ignore those types of people.

I love the line ‘Bees shouldn’t waste their time telling flies that honey tastes better than shit’.

I must admit, and in public for the first time [this interview was conducted on 8 February 2024], that that is actually a line from a friend’s grandmother. When I heard that, I thought, ‘I am putting that in a fucking song, goddamn.’ Credit where it’s due!

You are a patron of Humanists UK and, though your music is not explicitly godless (with some exceptions, like 2011’s ‘Glory Hallelujah’), it is very secular and humanistic. It’s about the love of life and humanity in the here and now. Is that conscious on your part?

It’s a reflection of how I see the world. My maternal grandfather was a priest, and he was a very smart and a very wise man, and I loved and respected him very much. In a way that the historian Tom Holland would endorse, I’m obviously culturally Christian—that is, in the way that Western culture broadly is post-Christian at the very least, up to and including modern progressivism. So that informs the way I see the world. But I don’t believe in the supernatural. I think that nature is super enough, thank you very much! But I’m wary of getting too deep into the Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens type of angry, finger-pointing atheism. That just seems a little needless to me a lot of the time.  

‘Glory Hallelujah’ was intended as a sort of atheist hymn. But at the same time, I never really wanted that to be my central cause in engaging with the world. But we play it from time to time and people enjoy it.  

Occasionally I get people who write me letters telling me that I’m going to hell. We got protested in Norfolk, Virginia, many years ago by some evangelical Christians who said that I was Satan. As somebody who grew up listening to Slayer and Iron Maiden and the like, I thought that was fucking awesome. It made my day. An absolute career highlight.

I think that ‘humanism’ is a useful word, though in many ways it is quite a nebulous word. The idea of attempting to engage with the world in a morally and ethically coherent way that is not reliant on theism, broadly writ, is something that interests me, and something that I support. But again, I’m at pains not to batter people over the head with this stuff.  

There’s a clergyman in the US who writes appreciatively about me and my music, and I think that’s great. I think it’s lovely. A little bit more pluralism and ecumenism in the world at large would be a good thing. I’m very comfortable hanging out with people who I don’t 100% agree with. And I think more people should get behind that.

And that clergyman isn’t the only one. There is a Catholic guy, a friar I think, who writes me private correspondence. He sends me long philosophical discourses which, when I have the free time to engage in philosophical debates, I will get into. There’s a lot of mutual respect in the room, I like to think. I find it very flattering that somebody wants to engage with anything that I put together in that kind of depth. It’s like, ‘Jesus Christ, dude, you’ve thought about this a lot!’

I absolutely agree about engaging with people who disagree with you. As it happens, we’ve published a few articles quite critical of Holland’s views on Christianity recently.  

The first thing to say is that I’m an abject fanboy for The Rest Is History, the podcast Holland and Dominic Sandbrook host. I think it’s phenomenal. I’ve been to see them live. I want to be their friend! They’re very good, and their approach to history is refreshingly dogma-free. History is something I care about a lot.  

I remember that there was a wonderful moment when I saw them live. Sandbrook commented that the business of being a historian is not a judgemental business. We shouldn’t judge the behaviour of people in the past and weigh them in a balance and try to find ways of feeling superior to them.  

That’s a misapprehension of what the study of history is supposed to be, in my opinion, and indeed in Sandbrook’s opinion, and it was quite comforting to hear somebody say that and see him get a standing ovation for it. That gave me a little bit of hope because the flipside is a kind of airbrushing, Maoist approach to history (and I know that’s a loaded description). That approach is bad news, both for our own historical record and culture and for the people who engage in that way with the world. I don’t think it’s very healthy.  

Another pre-released song from ‘Undefeated’ is ‘Do One’, which is another ‘fuck you’ type of song, isn’t it?

I’m glad you put it that way because I think it is a ‘fuck you’ song. ‘Do One’ is the first song in the album, and the first line sets the tone: ‘Some people are just gonna hate you’. There’s a wonderful quote that I read a few years ago, which was very psychologically useful to me, which came from, of all people, Eleanor Roosevelt. She essentially said that it takes two people to be humiliated. Ultimately, to be hounded, cancelled, chained, or whatever word we want to use, you have to agree to play the game on some level. And there’s something really liberating about being able to say ‘fuck off, I’m not playing.’

In the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty unimportant, but I’ve had people come at me on various issues over the years. There have been times when it was fucking horrible, and deleterious to my mental health, and there have been times when it has felt really unfair and done in total bad faith.  

There have been times when I have felt that people were picking up on an ill-phrased thing that I said. I do think it’s important to take that on board sometimes, but more often than not it’s a bad-faith form of argument.  

It’s been something I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with and being affected by. And, as I say, it’s been catastrophic for my mental health at various times. But there’s something liberating about just saying, ‘don’t care, not playing, will not engage’. In practical terms, I don’t reply on social media and I don’t read the comments.  

There were days when I would be losing my fucking mind because of a couple of tweets from someone. And my wife would just be like, ‘What are you doing? Stop caring about this one person.’ That’s the other thing about the human mind. You can scroll past a hundred people telling you you’re great, but one person calls you a bastard and three days of my life goes down the toilet thinking about it.  

So the point of ‘Do One’ is essentially that I’m not playing that game anymore. And it took me more time than I would like to admit to figure that out, as the song says. I don’t want to be one of those people who just feeds off the hatred. With a certain kind of mindset, the people coming at you just become flies bouncing off a windscreen. You sleep better once you reach that point.

I think I have learned how to pick my battles a bit. There are days when one wants to engage with the good-faith arguments. In my line of work, it’s easy for people to confuse bad faith cancel culture and legitimate criticism, and I try to steer the right way through that. I’m certainly not above being criticised in terms of my ethics and actions and music.

I’m actually really interested in good music criticism. There have been times in my life when I’ve read a critique of an album of mine and I think, ‘Yeah, that’s a fair point’. There’s value in that. Historically, you can look at some of Bob Dylan’s output as being part of a conversation with Greil Marcus. There are fewer and fewer music journalists who write music criticism at that level these days, which is a sadness, I think.  

I’m not trying to sit here and say that I’m fucking perfect or anything like that, but hopefully, I can tune out the haters to a degree as well. In many ways, ‘Undefeated’ is saying, ‘I’m ten albums in, motherfucker.’ After that amount of time successfully touring and successfully releasing records, my music can’t be meritless. It’s landing with someone, otherwise I wouldn’t still be here.

So you feel that you have earned your place, to put it another way?

Hopefully, yes. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

You said of your previous album ‘FTHC’ that it was an attempt to be more rawly personal. Can the same be said of ‘Undefeated’?

I would say so, but in a slightly different way. I’m still at the point of figuring out the vocabulary to describe exactly what I mean by that. I’ve been using the word ‘defiant’ quite a lot. But ‘FTHC’ is quite an angry record, in retrospect. There’s a fair amount of bitterness in it. There are a lot of tracks about childhood and stuff that are not happy-go-lucky songs. In ‘Undefeated’, there is definitely a fair number of middle fingers being shown, but there’s a smile on the face at the same time. It’s a more fun place to be.

That’s not true of the whole album, though. There’s a track towards the end called ‘Somewhere Inbetween’ which is one of the rawest pieces of writing that I’ve ever done in my life. I’m both excited and nervous for that song to be released because I think that it’s…’unforgiving’ might be the word. Hopefully, the record is not monotonal, not monochromatic.

It’s an age-old question, and it applies to writers not only of music but of essays and memoirs and even novels, but how do you find the right balance? How much do you reveal? Can you ever fully reveal everything?

It depends on what type of art you are trying to make. I don’t think the Scissors Sisters spend very much time thinking about making confessional music, but they make great art. My taste of music leans towards the confessional, towards the raw and the brutally honest. Arab Strap is one of my favourite bands. I remember hearing their album ‘Philophobia’ for the first time, and just staring and thinking, ‘Is this motherfucker for real? Is he really saying this stuff out loud? Like, we can hear you, man!’ So I’ve always been interested in that sort of art.  

There are constraints on it, of course, one of which is consideration for others. It’s perfectly legitimate for me to be as raw as I want about myself. How legitimate it is for me to be raw about somebody else in the public forum is a more complicated question. In 2013 I put out a break-up record that had 13 songs about one person, and she was not appreciative of that. And I think that that is a legitimate response.  

It’s important to note that there is some artistry involved in the confessional style. I could sing out my diary, but I’m not sure anyone would give a fuck. The creative trick, the magic trick at the heart of it all in some ways, is to take the personal and make it feel universal, or at least that’s how it is in my corner of writing. Art is about empathy to a large extent, and I’ve spent most of my time as a writer trying to find a way of expressing my feelings that is useful, or that is interpretable, by other people who live different lives. I want it to be raw, and I want it to be honest, but I also want it to be accessible. And that’s a neat trick, and it’s not an easy one. If it was, we’d all be writing better songs. Finding that balance is tough. In a way, that’s the centre of my working life, looking for that balance.

At the risk of seeming entirely obsessed with songwriting, there’s a wonderful Leonard Cohen line—well, first we just need to establish the fact that Cohen was the greatest songwriter of the 20^th century.  

I’m so glad you said that—I completely agree! I say it all the time.

I like Dylan, but Cohen is an infinitely superior songwriter, in my opinion, and now people can shout at me. But the line is, ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in’.  That’s one of the most profound couplets that I’m aware of in human writing. And it says something about the creative act as well. Finding that moment of damage can also be a moment of revelation.  

Salman Rushdie once said of the first three lines of Cohen’s ‘Bird on the Wire’ that, ‘Put simply, if I could write like that, I would.’ That’s some compliment.

It’s interesting to compare songwriting with other kinds of writing. Songwriting is a more bite-sized medium to work in. I’m sort of terrified by the concept of a novel. The idea of trying to sustain a creative idea over that amount of linguistic output gives me the fear, I’ll be honest with you. But, as that quote sort of outlines, the flipside is that there is a concision to good songwriting. That’s the thing I enjoy sometimes, and I think that’s what sets songwriting apart from poetry. In a song, you’ve got eight lines before you’re back in the chorus, so whatever you’ve got to say needs to be said now. I suppose you could add another 25 stanzas, but then you end up being Genesis, and nobody really wants that. And Cohen is the master of that kind of concision. I actually have a ‘Bird on the Wire’ tattoo in reference to that song. And that line, ‘like a drunk in a midnight choir’, is the most perfectly concise image. And God rest his soul. 

When you mentioned the break-up album, I thought, ‘Was that your Taylor Swift phase?’ And that makes me wonder if, looking back, you see distinct phases in your career?  

Yes, there are definitely phases in my career. If you look at the career arc of many artists—like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Springsteen, Costello, Nick Cave, people like that—there often tends to be a slightly odd middle-aged phase. Whether Dylan being a Christian or, indeed, Cohen producing great songs with Phil Spector in the late 1980s, but with terrible production, or Neil Young being sued for not sounding like Neil Young. There are these creative lull moments for many artists. Actually, one of the reasons I’m terminally obsessed with Nick Cave is that I think that he’s somebody who sidestepped that, and I’m curious how he did so.  

Of course, it’s pretentious of me to compare myself to all the people I’ve just listed, but cut me a break. I feel like I’m in a moment where I’m trying to be raucously middle-aged. I’m 42. That’s definitely middle-aged. The world is full of variously named generations constantly trying to pretend that middle age and old age start later because they’re getting close to it. Fuck off, man, 42 is middle-aged! I’d like to be raucous and ill-mannered in my middle age rather than soft and flabby and reticent. 

Grow old disgracefully.

Exactly.

Incidentally, it’s worth throwing in that Taylor Swift is clearly an excellent songwriter, musician, and performer, and I think that the general disdain within which a certain type of person in the music industry (and it’s usually a guy) holds Taylor Swift is so obviously sexist at this point. Just stop it now. (Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the MAGA conspiracy nuts here.) She’s the artist of her generation. That’s the fucking end of that conversation. She’s arguably bigger than Michael Jackson, now. And, like Michael Jackson was the artist of the eighties, and there is no one to compare, so too with Taylor Swift. I think she’s a great songwriter, and I just had to get that off my chest.

She completely screwed my album chart plans, because she’s putting out a record two weeks before mine is released. And do you know what? I’ll let it slide.

‘Undefeated’ is about middle age, as you mentioned. So, what’s it like being middle-aged? To what extent are you the same Frank Turner you were 20 years ago?

Aside from some very basic fundamentals, not much. And that’s how I want it to be. It’s a well-worn quote, but Muhammad Ali said something like, ‘a man who is the same at 40 as he was at 20 has wasted 20 years of his life.’ I don’t want to be the same person. There’s a curious sense of proprietorship that a certain type of music fan has that they want you to stay how you were when they discovered you, and I sympathize because I can see myself having that feeling about some musicians that I like, but also: fuck off, you’re boring! Life is about change, and I want to change and develop as an artist. I don’t want to repeat myself.

Again, this is not an original thought, but my experience of getting older is that there is a quid pro quo. Everything hurts more and hangovers last longer, and I spend more time worrying about sleeping than I used to—all this sort of shit—but I’m more confident in who I am and what I think about the world. That feels hard-won to me to a degree, and I’m grateful for it. And that feels like a direction of travel as well. I’m not sure that that’s a process that has reached its apotheosis for me just yet, and that’s fun. I like that idea. I like the idea of being in my 70s and really not giving a fuck. Good for me!

That reminds me of Rushdie again, who is one of my favourite writers—

I strongly agree, by the way. I think he’s absolutely sensational. I’ve just finished [Rushdie’s memoir] Joseph Anton and it was amazing.  

Actually, I think it’s in ‘Joseph Anton’ that he says this: something along the lines of his 40s being a man’s prime.  

That may be more true in the world of novels and fiction writers than it is in the world of musicians. But here’s hoping we can buck that trend.

Further reading on freethinking and secularism in art and music:

Porcus Sapiens, by Emma Park and Paul Fitzgerald

Reading list against nuclear war, by Emma Park

Can art be independent of politics? by Ella Nixon

Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman, by Frances Lynch

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

The post ‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner  appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘Thought is free, or it isn’t thought.’ 

This fine remark comes from Emile Chartier (1868-1951), a French thinker, writer, teacher and humanist best known under his pseudonym, Alain. He was a prominent intellectual figure in the France of the 1930s, but is unfortunately little known in the Anglophone world, and sparsely translated into English. He remains one of the rare thinkers to make the bridge between philosophy and literature: ‘the finest prose of ideas of the century’, as the contemporary philosopher, André Comte-Sponville, has said.

Having trained as a philosopher and started a career as a teacher that would lead to the prestigious lycées of Paris, Alain began in 1903 to contribute short columns to a radical local newspaper in Normandy. From 1906, this became a daily exercise which he continued right up to the outbreak of the First World War, making a total of over three thousand pieces. He called these brief essays propos (not an easy word to translate, implying both ‘proposals’ and ‘remarks’). Their concise and vivid style soon attracted a loyal readership and they were collected into published volumes. The starting point was often a precise fact or event, something seen in the street or read in a newspaper; at first mainly comments on politics, their subject matter broadened to include philosophy, literature, education, nature, religion.  He wrote, he said, to provoke his fellow citizens into thinking for themselves, to wake people up.

To return to the opening quotation, that thought is not thought unless it is free, this encapsulates a theme that runs throughout Alain’s work. As he wrote in his intellectual biography, Histoire de mes pensées (1936): ‘I’ve not reflected upon anything as much as freedom of judgement.’  What is it to think freely?  He provided two lapidary definitions. ‘To think is to weigh’ – penser, c’est peser, almost a pun in French. The second is perhaps his best known quotation: ‘To think is to say no’ (penser, c’est dire non). The second half of this quotation is even better: ‘Note that the sign for “yes” is that of a person falling asleep; while to wake up is to shake the head and say no.’

To elaborate: ‘The problem is always the same, we have to control appearances, through the view of a free mind, which arouses and re-arouses doubt and proof together… we have to begin by not believing everything and so navigate the problem with our own strength alone, to find ourselves lost and abandoned as was always the case for a human being who rejects pious lies, and to recognise ourselves as completely deceived by appearances, and to save ourselves by the constructions of understanding alone.’ He also gives this definition of ‘mind’ (esprit): ‘at bottom the power of doubt, which is to raise oneself above all mechanisms, order, virtues, duties, dogmas, to judge them, subordinate them, and replace them by freedom, which only owes anything to itself.’ This link between the freedom of the mind and the freedom of the individual can be seen as a precursor to the existentialism of the 1940s associated with Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus.

I have hinted at the variety of Alain’s interests. His propos, which he continued after the war, have been gathered into many published collections, the best known of which is Propos sur le Bonheur (one of the very few books of his to be translated into English, as Alain on Happiness). He also wrote major philosophical works after the war.  He is probably best known in France for his views on politics; he also developed sophisticated theories of perception and the imagination, but for the remainder of this article I shall focus on his humanism and views on religion.

As a thinker who avoided labels, Alain did not call himself a humanist as such. A label is a summary that must always leave something out. But it is clear enough that he is very close to it, in this definition: ‘the aim of humanism is freedom in the full sense of the word, which depends above all on a bold judgement against appearances and seductions… Humanism always aims at increasing everyone’s real power, through the widest culture – scientific, aesthetic, ethical. And a humanist recognises as precious in the world only human culture, through the outstanding works of all periods.’  We can see in this description the activity of the teacher he was, and remained in his writing. The ‘widest culture’: in his philosophy classes, as well as Plato, Descartes and Kant, he also taught Homer and Balzac; he wrote books on Balzac, Stendhal and Dickens, and commented on the poems of Paul Valéry, as well as on the arts in general  – the humanities, as he preferred to call them. Humanity lives in its works and that is where to seek it out: ‘human works, mirrors of the soul.’

Another area of humanity’s manifestations is its festivals, like Christmas and Easter. Alain reminded his readers that these are essentially pagan festivals which link us to nature and are, at the same time, powerful symbols and expressions of human feelings. Christmas promises rebirth, of which a newborn child is an image. Or, in another propos: ‘the images of Christmas are astonishing and even, when looked at closely, subversive. The child in a crib, between the ox and the ass, with the adoring kings from the Orient, this means that power isn’t worth a single grain of respect.’ Easter is resurrection of the earth. All Souls’ Day ‘falls where it should, when the visible signs make it quite clear that the sun is abandoning us…There is harmony between customs, the weather, the time of year and the course of our thoughts.’  

Alain remained firmly anticlerical all his life. In fact, in 1897 he managed to earn a headline in a local Catholic paper in one of his first teaching posts, after casting doubt on the existence of the devil and hell in a public lecture. The newspaper assured him, ‘No offence to the young man teaching philosophy in the lycée: Hell exists.’ Parents were advised to withdraw their children from his lessons. Yet he recognised that religions, like festivals, are also human constructions and activities. An anecdote he often recounted is that of being asked by a fellow soldier during the war, who had noticed that Alain was a non-believer, what he thought of religion. ‘It’s a story,’ he replied, ‘a fairy tale, which like all stories is full of meaning. No one asks whether a story is true.’ 

Alain’s meditations on religion culminated in a work published in 1934, Les Dieux, translated into English in 1974 as The Gods. Religious stories and practices, he argues, ‘are not facts, but thoughts.’ They express truths more vividly than theoretical and theological statements. Likewise, the gods themselves are human creations. ‘The gods refuse to appear and it’s through this miracle that never occurs that religion develops into temples, statues and sacrifices.’ And again, ‘the gods are our metaphors, and our metaphors are our thoughts’. There is no transcendence. There is nothing behind the signs and metaphors. All the mystery is man-made.

A further implication is that factual and historical questions are rejected. It does not matter whether Christ existed or not, whether he said this or that, here or there. The Gospels are less a historical record than like a great work of art that continues to speak to us. What matters is the truth in the story. When Jesus attacks the Pharisees in Matthew 23, for their shows of religion and their hypocrisy, what matters is whether what he says of them applies to some human beings, which might even include oneself. To ask whether Jesus actually said these words is to postpone that self-examination. In short, it is the morality taught by religion, explicitly and implicitly, that is important. ‘It is never the dogma that proves the morality; morality, as far as I understand it, supports itself; God adds nothing; paradise, hell, purgatory add nothing.’

The Gods also has a classification of religions, drawing on Hegel and Auguste Comte, which presents Christianity as a development of pagan religion, and an improvement in that it rejected sacrifices and oracles. It made everyone, slaves included, brothers and sisters. Alain liked to quote an anecdote from Chateaubriand’s Les Martyres. A pagan and a Christian meet a poor man. The Christian gives him his cloak. The pagan, knowing that the gods sometimes visited in the shape of a human being, says ‘No doubt you thought it was a god’. – ‘No’, replied the Christian, ‘I simply thought he was a man.’

For Alain, Christ appears as a new god who is human, who has lived the life of human beings, who was ‘weak, crucified, humiliated’ and who rejected power and force. He represents the free mind which is the final judge of all power, though the church, unfortunately, has always tended to associate itself with power. ‘The meaning of the cross is that the highest model of man lived poor and scorned by the great and that he died, punished for his virtues which denied ambition, desire, evil. It was a miserable fate, ennobled by thought, ended by an executioner.’

It is an interpretation of Christianity that leaves out the unrelenting god of the Old Testament. Stripped away are beliefs in miracles, in life after death, in divinely revealed truth, in original sin and redemption through sacrifice. There is also a refreshing avoidance of arguments about the existence or non-existence of god. (In fact, Alain has an argument that existence is not susceptible of proof.) To put it briefly, he interprets Christianity as a humanist religion.

This article can only give a taste of the richness of Alain’s writings, which are concerned with what it is to be a human being. How should we live? How should we live together? These questions do not age.

Find out more

There is an excellent website dedicated to Alain’s work https://philosophe-alain.fr/  Most of the material is in French, but there is also some English content: translations and a handful of articles, including a longer treatment of his discussion of religion.

The post A French freethinker: Emile Chartier, known as Alain appeared first on The Freethinker.

Know your place, woman!

In February, the National Secular Society (NSS) complained to the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator about a sermon given to the good folks of Rosyth Baptist Church, a registered charity, in which the ‘reverend’ Chris Demetriou clamped down on any uppity women who might be among his flock. As the NSS reported: ‘[In the sermon, Demetriou] explains a wife “should submit to her husband’s leadership” because “that’s the Lord’s pattern for us”. She submits to him “out of obedience to Christ”.’ (It should be noted that Demetriou has belatedly—and rather lamely—responded to the NSS’s complaints.)

So, there you have it. From now on, should any women disagree with anything I write in the Freethinker or elsewhere, I shall simply employ Demetriou’s Defence: know your place, woman! [Praise the Lord! – Ed.]

Know your place, infidel!

In a new report for the UK Commission for Countering Extremism, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens warns that ‘Anti-blasphemy activism in the UK is gaining momentum and showing signs of becoming increasingly radicalised.’ Meleagrou-Hitchens has provided a valuable summary and analysis of the threats posed by Islamists to free thought in the UK. It is eye-opening even for those of us who pay close attention to this sort of thing. And, as he astutely notes, it is not just non-Muslims like the Batley schoolteacher who face Islamist intimidation, but ‘heretical’ Muslims too—Ahmadi Muslims in particular, one of whom was murdered in Glasgow in 2016 for his beliefs. At a time when gay MPs have been scared by Islamists into giving up their seats, and when even the Speaker of the House of Commons is more or less openly expressing his fear of Islamist violence against MPs, Meleagrou-Hitchens’s analysis is essential, if also alarming, reading.

From Pakistan with terror

Meleagrou-Hitchens reports that much of this ‘anti-blasphemy activism’ is linked to ‘the emergence of a UK wing of the extremist Pakistani anti-blasphemy political party, Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP).’ This is unsurprising, given the long and ignoble tradition of Pakistani Islamists’ interference in other countries (the Pakistani government’s support for the Taliban in Afghanistan being the most disgraceful example)—not to mention the equally ignoble tradition of persecuting infidels within Pakistan itself.

Just this month, the BBC reported that a young man has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani court for the crime of sharing images and videos offensive to Muslims. Despite all this, Pakistan remains a ‘major non-NATO ally’, thus sullying the name of an organisation that, for all its past and present crimes and follies, is now one of the world’s great bulwarks of liberal democracy. So it goes.

A note on ‘extremism’

Michael Gove has produced a new official definition of ‘extremism’ that is both broad and vague, and therefore a threat to free speech. There are many problems with having the state define what constitutes ‘extremism’ in the first place—it is a contested word and concept, one liable to misuse by governments wishing to muzzle the opposition. What business is it of the state to define the limits of acceptable political discourse? What business is it of anyone to do so, unless they want to shut their critics up?

But the Gove definition is particularly dubious. As the NSS put it, it could include ‘those who seek to “undermine” the country’s institutions or values’, a group which would include opponents of the established Church of England and the monarchy (the NSS spoke before the definition was made public on 14 March, but its concerns still apply). On the one hand, then, the UK Commission for Countering Extremism (!) is rightly concerned about Islamic ‘anti-blasphemy activism’; on the other, the government seems to want to erode free speech in this country even further.

By the way, would blasphemy not be considered ‘extremist’ by the votaries of the various faiths? Indeed, it was not so long ago that we had an official blasphemy ban on the law books. The government’s attempts to counter the phenomenon nebulously described as ‘extremism’ is a little too close for my liking to a ban on blasphemy—even on free speech tout court.

The Scottish Hate Monster

Meanwhile, Scotland’s long-delayed and authoritarian Hate Crime Act will come into force on (appropriately) 1 April, with ‘non-crime hate incidents’ also being recorded. Thankfully, a Police Scotland video has resurfaced to put us all in our places. The narrator, in condescending faux chummy Scots, informs us that the ‘Hate Monster’ will grow within us every time we commit a hate crime. The criminal urge can just creep up on you, it seems: one moment you’re a bit peeved and ‘then, before ye know it, ye’ve committed a hate crime.’ A sound basis for prosecution…

Being Scottish, I have long had concerns about the Hate Crime Act. In 2022, I went so far as to say how shameful—and terrifying—it was. And this in one of the heartlands of the Enlightenment, no less! I can easily see how things I have written (including in this very Faith Watch), and things which have appeared in the Freethinker generally, might fall afoul of the Act or be seized upon by some offence-seeking enemy of free thought.

With Michael Gove and Humza Yousaf fighting for our freedoms, who needs tyrants? All I can say is that we at the Freethinker have no intention of being silenced.

Of rum and Ramadan

The month of Muslim fasting and prayer began on 10 March. There is no objection to people freely practising their religion, of course, but let us not forget the closeted apostates and liberal or non-practising Muslims around the world forced into doing so on pain of ostracisation—or worse. In Nigeria, for example, 11 Muslims have already been arrested for the crime of eating during the hours of fasting. That is why it is nice to see the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) planning to have a picnic in defiance of religious bullying this month.

Apparently, 23 March is Atheist Day, which I would normally find very silly except for the happy coincidence that it falls within Ramadan this year and is the date on which CEMB invites everyone to ‘take a shot of Rum for #atheists and #exMuslims across the globe’ using the hashtag #AtheistDayRUMadan. I for one will join in, though probably with whisky rather than rum. Happy Rumadan!

Ramadan and the Uyghurs

While Ramadan can inspire Islamic bullying and tyranny, it is also a good time to remember the Uyghur Muslims, who are facing genocide at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. Their plight has faded from the media as other horrors have risen up to capture our attention, but they should not be forgotten.

For them, Ramadan is a dangerous time indeed. As the Campaign for Uyghurs put it:

‘The blessed month of Ramadan is also synonymous with the extreme torture and hardships perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as it wages a brutal war on Islam amidst the ongoing Uyghur genocide. The CCP ludicrously deems any public expression of the Islamic faith as “religious extremism” [there’s that word again] and outlaws religious practices among the Uyghurs, including fasting, owning a Qur’an, and praying. During Ramadan, Uyghurs are forced to abandon their fasts, consume non-halal (prohibited) products, and engage in other activities that contradict their faith. If they refuse, they are subject to severe punishment.’

So even as I have no sympathy with religious belief and practice, I feel a little softer towards Ramadan these days than I normally would. Of course, the only thing is to be consistent in one’s advocation of liberty: just as nobody should be compelled to practice religion, nobody should be prevented from doing so if they freely choose it.

Alexander and Hephaestion redux

In happier news, one of the most famously gay places in all of history has legalised same-sex marriage. Despite the best efforts of the Greek Orthodox Church, the first-ever gay wedding in the Athens City Hall was conducted on 7 March. Nearly three thousand years after Achilles and Patroclus, and more than two thousand after Alexander and Hephaestion, it’s about time! Perhaps now is a good moment to revisit Mary Renault’s beautiful novel about the latter pair, Fire from Heaven (1969); it is a personal favourite of mine, and its sequels, The Persian Boy (1972) and Funeral Games (1981), are also well worth reading.

I can’t resist an apt quote from Fire from Heaven here. Alexander has just expressed his love for his closest friend: ‘Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning bolt.’

The continued decay of subcontinental (and global) secularism

In last month’s Faith Watch, I wrote of Narendra Modi’s ‘assault on India’s rich secularist history’. Well, here we are again. Less than two months after Modi opened a new temple to Ram in Ayodhya, his government has announced that it is set to fulfil another Hindu nationalist dream by enacting the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which was passed in 2019. Even the name of the act sounds slightly sinister.

As the writer and Modi critic Mukul Kesavan wrote in 2019, when the act was just a bill, ‘Couched in the language of refuge and seemingly directed at foreigners, the CAB’s main purpose is the de-legitimization of Muslim citizenship.’ He went on to describe it as one of ‘the greatest institutional threats to Indian democracy today.’

With Modi and his party up for re-election later this year, it is no wonder they are so flagrantly pandering to their Hindu nationalist base. Modi is likely to win a third term, so for how much longer will India be able to retain the title of the world’s largest secular democracy? Meanwhile, with Donald Trump, darling of the Christian nationalists, tying with and sometimes even surpassing Joe Biden in the polls, the world’s oldest secular democracy might also be preparing to self-immolate this year.

Perhaps nations like India and the US have forgotten the value of secularism. They should look to Iran, where a poll run by the state found a huge majority in favour of secular government. And, in a rebuke to all those who so vacuously celebrated World Hijab Day on 1 February, it also found that most Iranians are opposed to the mandatory hijab.

Should India and the US choose to abandon their hard-won secular democracies, they will miss them dearly—and they will have to fight for them all over again. At least the ideals of secular democracy will survive among those who most appreciate its worth.

Yet more papal piffle

The above words could be applied to almost everything every pope has ever said, including Pope Francis’s recent intervention wherein he might as well have told the Ukrainians to surrender to annihilation (having forgotten his church’s historical complicity with fascism, Francis has now reportedly joined Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping in congratulating Putin on his recent election victory), but I have in mind a book released earlier this year: The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger. I read (though ‘endured’ might be a better word) this book, intending to review it more fully, but it is so bad that it is not worth the effort. Instead, I shall limit myself to a few reflections.

First, why is a respected university press publishing a book almost entirely composed of theological waffle written mostly by committed theological wafflers? They may as well publish a Cambridge Companion to Scientology written by L. Ron Hubbard fans. If Catholics (or Scientologists) want to publish this stuff, they are free to do so – and they certainly have the resources with which to do it. And there is no reasonable objection to the publication of historical-analytical volumes on religion and theology.

But a serious academic press printing what amounts to mumbo-jumbo? I look forward to a future Cambridge Companion to John Frum Worship consisting entirely of pseudo-sophisticated analysis by Melanesian acolytes of the eponymous cargo cult. (Again, anthropological study is an entirely different thing.)

The Ratzinger book opens breathlessly, with the editors placing their subject alongside Aristotle and Shakespeare in the depth of his influence (in his case, on Catholic theology rather than philosophy and literature). He is also compared with Augustine and Aquinas (of course), but at least that pair had the excuse of living in periods of relative ignorance. The editors and contributors clearly think of Ratzinger as a great and humane scholar. A useful tonic to this hero worship is Daniel Gawthrop’s 2013 book The Trial of Pope Benedict, which (so far as I am concerned, anyway) exposes Ratzinger as the nasty, authoritarian, reactionary old bigot and bully that he was.

Here is an example of theo-waffle from Joseph Ratzinger, as quoted by a contributor to the Companion, so that the reader can judge for him- or herself this towering intellect:

‘The truth cannot unfold except in an otherness open to God, who wishes to reveal his own otherness in and through my human brothers and sisters. Hence it is not fitting to state in an exclusive way: “I possess the truth.” The truth is not possessed by anyone; it is always a gift which calls us to undertake a journey of ever closer assimilation to truth… truth is disclosed only in an encounter of love.’

As with so much theology, this babble is reminiscent of the worst stylings of the postmodernists. It is an irony that conservative theologians like Ratzinger, who abhor postmodernism and the like, sound so much like them—and carry about as much intellectual weight, assuming as they do all the things that they need, and have signally failed, to prove before they even begin and building an absurd and abstruse system on top of those assumptions. Change a few words here and there, and the most sophisticated Christian theology can be rendered into a postmodernist, or even a cargo cult, tract. (And it is beyond me how the above quote can be squared with another contributor’s statement that ‘the Catholic Church, for Ratzinger, is…the Spirit-filled infallible authority…’)

Here is another example, this time from one of the contributors, whose simultaneous pomposity and meaninglessness might make even Jacques Derrida scoff: ‘[F]or Ratzinger, communion is the fundamental figure of reality, created and uncreated, and historically mediated relationality is thus disclosive of the deepest meaning of being.’ Thus disclosive of the deepest meaning of being—magnificent.

According to Ratzinger and his Cambridge companions, Christianity is a pre-eminently and uniquely rational religion. Curious, then, that even its most ‘sophisticated’ defenders fall back on such fatuous language (all the better to befuddle, I suppose). There is also the awkward fact that Ratzinger himself, as discussed in the book, admitted that silly doctrines such as the Trinity can only be accepted on the basis of revelation—after all, they do not do very well under rational scrutiny. And what of the plain superstition that is literal transubstantiation? Or intercessory prayer?

Worst of all, the Companion barely deals with the thousands of child rapes that Ratzinger was arguably morally culpable for. When it does, it is to excuse him and to warp the record to portray him as a saviour rather than an enabler. On moral as well as intellectual grounds, then, this book is almost as rancid as its subject.

I cannot think of an excuse for Cambridge University Press here. Would they take an obvious work of fiction, complete with its own metaphysics and theology and imagined history, and allow deluded people who believe that the fiction is real to write so sincerely about it?

There is a Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, but, so far as I can tell, none of its contributors believes in Aslan or Gandalf or treats fantasy as reality rather than literature—and it now strikes me that the papal piffle that fills the pages of the Ratzinger companion would be much more at home in the back-end of some anthology of third-rate fantasy.

Further reading:

Secularism, women’s rights, and religious charities

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

Blasphemy and free speech in the UK

Blasphemy and bishops: how secularists are navigating the culture wars, by Emma Park

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle?

Blasphemy Month at the Freethinker

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons, by Bob Forder

Freethought in Pakistan

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

From religious orthodoxy to free thought, by Tehreem Azeem

Indian secularism and Hindu nationalism

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

The post Faith Watch, March 2024 appeared first on The Freethinker.

2023 has been an eventful year for free thought, humanism and secularism. Below, Emma Park and Daniel James Sharp look back on some of the major issues that have been debated in the Freethinker this year.

I. Free speech, religion and the culture wars

Free thought and intellectual progress are not possible without a shared culture of free speech, open debate and a willingness to engage with different points of view. One of the Freethinker’s concerns this year has been with attempts to repress free speech, especially in the UK and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and in the context of the ‘culture wars’.

In Ireland, a new bill on hate offences threatens to undermine free speech, not just about religion but on a variety of the most sensitive topics – in other words, topics on which open debate is crucial. In Wakefield, England, in February, a non-Muslim woman, presumably under pressure, donned a veil and made a humiliating public apology in the local mosque, because her autistic son had brought a copy of the Quran into school and it was accidentally scuffed. And Puffin has made attempts to censor Roald Dahl in the name of ‘sensitivity’.

Free speech at universities also remains under pressure, as illustrated by the case of Professor Steven Greer, who was hounded by Bristol University Islamic Society in a smear campaign that was supported by academic colleagues who should have known better. Daniel reviewed Greer’s book about his experiences.

Across the pond, Professor Alex Byrne’s contract for a book critical of gender identity ideology was cancelled by Oxford University Press, but has since been published by Polity. From a different perspective, former vice chancellor Julius Weinberg argued that ‘freedom of speech is not as simple as my right to express my ideas’.

To supporters of democracy in Hong Kong, the culture wars are all but an irrelevance. The suffocating control of the Chinese Communist Party, said Kevin Yam, forced campaigners across the political spectrum to work together.

II. Science, philosophy, and humanism

As well as exploring the issues of the day, the Freethinker has also explored some of their deeper philosophical and historical contexts.

We interviewed the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett about the relationship between philosophy and science, meaning and consciousness in a godless, Darwinian universe, and New Atheism. With historian Charles Freeman, we discussed the richness and variety of the ancient Greek mind and how the coming of Christian orthodoxy put an end to that tradition. And we caught up with the humanist and author Sarah Bakewell to explore different traditions of humanism.

Meanwhile, Matt Johnson and Daniel Sharp both contributed articles about one of the most famous freethinkers of recent years, the late Christopher Hitchens.

III. Islam and free thought

With the rise of Islam in Britain and across the West, it has become urgent to consider how far the religion can be compatible with Western values and approaches. To explore this question, we interviewed Taj Hargey, possibly Britain’s only liberal imam. Other contributors have explored the need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought around the world, why the hijab is not a good symbol for women, and whether it is possible to distinguish between religious and political Islam.

IV. Secularism

Secularism is the principle that religion and state should be separated, and that religion should have no undue influence on public life. In the UK, thanks to a combination of political apathy and entrenched privilege, we still have an established church and unelected clergy in Parliament. Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer, spoke to the Freethinker about why he introduced a bill to disestablish the Church of England.

With a general election on the cards for 2024, Stephen Evans of the National Secular Society discussed where the political parties stand on faith schools. Two recent events in which the NSS participated revealed some of the challenges involved in secularisation. Daniel also argued in an article for Only Sky that the Church of England’s record on gay marriage is another reason to hasten disestablishment.

Other contributors to the Freethinker have looked at secularism, its history and future, in Québec, Turkey and Wales, and the strengths and weaknesses of French-style laïcité.

Did you know that, while the advancement of any religion, as well as of humanism, is considered a charitable aim under English law, the advancement of free thought, atheism or secularism is not? See Emma’s piece for New Humanist.

V. Israel and Palestine

One of the year’s biggest events—the Hamas attack against Israel on 7 October and the ensuing war—has produced a wide range of often emotional and heated responses. In contrast to all this sound and fury, the Freethinker has published a series of articles dealing with the conflict from different and often disagreeing, but rationally and charitably argued perspectives.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid wrote about the ‘leftist postcolonial apologia’ for Hamas and argued that the Israel-Palestine conflict is, at root, a religious one, while in Emma’s interview with Taj Hargey, the imam was staunch in his support of the ‘occupied and oppressed’ Palestinians. Hina Husain wrote about her Pakistani upbringing and being inculcated with Islam-based anti-Semitism. Finally, Ralph Leonard responded to all these articles, arguing that the conflict is, in fact, inspired more by competing nationalisms than religious impulses.

VI. Republicanism

Free thought and secularism have been closely intertwined with republicanism in British history. The Freethinker has reinforced this link since its beginnings in 1881.

This year, we have continued in the same spirit of religious and political anti-authoritarianism, publishing a review by Daniel of the republican activist Graham Smith’s anti-monarchy book. Later in the year, Daniel interviewed Graham Smith in person at Conway Hall. Meanwhile, Emma delved into the archives to discover the connection between the Freethinker and Republic, of which Smith is the CEO.

See also Daniel’s article on the republican Thomas Paine’s influence on Christopher Hitchens and Tony Howe’s discussion of an even earlier famous British republican, John Milton.

VII. Free thought history

In June, we were saddened to hear of the death of Jim Herrick (1944-2023), former editor of the Freethinker. Bob Forder, NSS historian, wrote an obituary commemorating Jim’s lifelong dedication to free thought, humanism and secularism.

The composer Frances Lynch wrote a guest post about her rediscovery of Eliza Flower, a radical nineteenth-century composer associated with Conway Hall, who was neglected by the historical record because she was female.

We have also been reflecting on the history of the Freethinker and of the various non-religious movements in the UK. Former editor Nigel Sinnott kindly agreed to let us republish an article he wrote for the magazine in 1970 in which he discussed the complicated historical relationship between humanists and secularists. Historian Charlie Lynch introduced the recent book he co-wrote with two other academics charting the history of organised humanism in Britain, which Emma has also reviewed for New Humanist. And Bob Forder argued that free thought and secularism are inseparable.

VIII. The future of free thought

Artificial intelligence has made great strides in 2023. (We even used Dall-E, a generative AI model, to illustrate this post.) Given the exponential pace of development, it is clear that the implications need to be monitored very carefully. For instance, there are concerns that ChatGPT may be biased in favour of certain interpretations of Islam. And artificial general intelligence (AGI) may be just around the corner, making ethical oversight all the more urgent.

Emma and Daniel spoke about the nature of free thought and the challenges facing it today and in the future on the Humanism Now podcast, on Freethought Hour and to the Reading Humanists. Emma also spoke to the Central London Humanists about Pastafarianism, arguably the world’s fastest growing religion, and a topic about which there is much to say.

This year also saw the publication of two intriguing books about the impact of digital technology on free thought, one by Simon McCarthy-Jones, and another by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan. Emma interviewed Laura Dodsworth for the Freethinker and reviewed both books for the Literary Review. We will be looking further at the implications of digital technology for free thought in 2024.

Finally, a request for your support…

The Freethinker is an independent, non-profit journal and completely open-access. We are funded by donations and legacies given by generations of readers back to the 19th century – and not by big corporations or billionaires. To keep us going in the future, we depend on the generosity of readers today. If you believe in the importance of fostering a culture of free thought, open enquiry and irreverence, please consider making a donation via this link.

And don’t forget to sign up to our free fortnightly newsletter, to keep abreast of the latest developments in free thought in the UK and around the world.

Postscript: a merry Christmas of sorts from Christopher Hitchens…

The post Year in review: 2023 appeared first on The Freethinker.

The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, raised eyebrows recently by suggesting that Labour in power would be ‘even more supportive of faith schools’ than the current government.

Given the current administration’s enthusiasm for faith-based education, it is hard to see how this could be achieved in practice. It may have been an empty gesture, a case of playing to the gallery – Starmer was speaking during a visit to a state-funded faith school. But if he is serious, the implications are worrying.

Labour’s uncritical support for religiously segregated education is alarming – especially as religiously segregated often means, in practice, racially segregated too. In pluralistic societies, inclusive secular schools can be powerful agents of social integration, forging connections that transcend the boundaries of race and religion. In a world riven with religiously motivated conflicts and tensions, it is unwise for the state to fund a form of education that restricts exposure to diverse worldviews and to critical thinking.

Britain’s Muslim, Jewish, Sikh and Hindu faith schools are largely monocultural zones – silos of segregation that do nothing to foster greater social cohesion. Interfaith work between schools is often offered as a remedy to this, but it is a poor substitute for a school in which children of different backgrounds are educated together and mix with one another every day.

Earlier this year the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child urged the UK to end the use of religion as a selection criterion for school admissions. Starmer’s promise not to ‘tinker’ with faith schools signals his intent to do nothing about discriminatory admissions.

The evidence is clear, though, that religious selection also acts as a form of socio-economic segregation. Recent research additionally reveals that Church of England and Catholic primaries ‘serve as hubs of relative advantage’, less likely than community schools to admit children with special educational needs and disabilities.

It seems that Labour’s promise to ‘break down the barriers to opportunity’ only applies where it will not upset religious interests.

Probably the biggest clash between education authorities and faith schools in recent years has been over the introduction of relationships and sex education (RSE) – particularly the requirement for this to be LGBT-inclusive. Catholic, ultra-Orthodox and Muslim activists have objected to requirements imposed on schools to teach pupils about sex, the existence of same-sex relationships and the legal rights of LGBT people. Good quality RSE needs to be evidence-based, impartial and free from ideology of all kinds. It would be shameful if Labour’s keenness to appease religious groups were to allow faith-based prejudice to undermine the subject, leaving faith school pupils in the dark and young LGBT people feeling isolated.

The 50 per cent admissions cap is another area where religious groups are lobbying for privileges. This is the rule that where newly established academies with a religious character are oversubscribed, half of their places must be allocated without reference to faith. It is the only meaningful effort we have seen to promote inclusivity and address the problems caused by faith-based schooling. However, Catholic and Jewish groups have been lobbying to get it abolished. In 2018 they almost succeeded, but Theresa May’s government eventually backtracked in the face of vigorous opposition. It would be bizarre for any party to resurrect a regressive policy that risks increasing levels of discrimination and making integration less likely. Yet under the Conservatives, the cap remains under review.

When it comes to faith schools, all the major parties appear minded to maintain the status quo.

The Liberal Democrats have typically advocated a more inclusive approach to state education. In 2017 the party passed a policy to support an end to religious selection in publicly funded schools. But the policy failed to appear in the 2019 manifesto – and there was no mention of reform to faith schools in the party’s ‘core policy offer’ on schools that was set out at their conference in September.

The Greens, meanwhile, are much more upfront about their vision for an inclusive and secular education system. Their education policy is underpinned by sound secularist principles and includes ending the state funding of faith schools, removing religious opt-outs from equality legislation and abolishing the archaic requirement on schools to provide daily acts of collective worship.

The Greens would also prohibit schools from delivering a form of religious education that ‘encourages adherence to any particular religious belief’.

England’s outdated model of religious education is certainly ripe for reform. Faith schools still teach the subject ‘within the tenets of their faith’, which means the subject is often confessional in nature, rather than objective, critical and pluralistic. Even in secular schools, RE remains compulsory yet separate from the national curriculum – and heavily influenced by religious interest groups, through bodies called standing advisory councils on religious education (SACREs), which determine the syllabus for each local area.

Both Labour and the Lib Dems have promised to review the curriculum if they form the next government. This ought to include replacing religious education with a more relevant subject that promotes critical thinking while giving pupils a solid understanding of diversity of belief and non-belief among the UK population and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. But whether either party will be bold enough to wrest this area of the curriculum away from vested religious interests is another question.

Whichever party forms the next government, it is imperative that they tackle the scourge of unregistered schools. An estimated 6,000 children are being systemically undereducated in illegal and often unsafe ‘schools’ that teach a narrow, religion-based curriculum without oversight or adequate safeguarding.

This year, the government scrapped proposed legislation which included measures to address this issue, such as a register of children not in school and new powers for Ofsted to act against schools which operate covertly. Despite junking the Schools Bill, in which these proposed measures were contained, the government insists that it remains committed to the bill’s objectives concerning unregistered schools. Labour has also pledged to crack down on unregistered schools but suggested it would take a ‘different approach’. What that may be remains to be seen.

But it is not enough to focus solely on the illegal sector. The more diverse our society becomes, the more integrated it needs to be. Faith schools build division into the system by separating children along the lines of their parents’ culture and religious belief, encouraging them to identify with this from an early age, rather than allowing them to make up their own minds about who they are and what they believe. Schools that educate children together without imposing a religious framework on them or discriminating against some in favour of others are the only model that public money should support.

There is also a big question mark over the sustainability of the Church of England’s role in state education. Church attendance is at a record low. Data from the latest British Social Attitudes survey suggests that just three per cent of those aged 18-24 – tomorrow’s parents – would describe themselves as Anglican. Yet the Church of England runs a quarter of primary schools in England and is the biggest sponsor of academies. Despite all the talk about faith schools offering choice, it is already the case that in many areas of the country, families have little or no option other than a church school.

The Church of England is currently targeting schools as part of its plans to ‘double the number of children and young people who are active Christian disciples by 2030’. It is a sign of how privileged the established church is that so few politicians appear willing to question its exploitation of state schools as mission fields for Anglican evangelism. The more pluralistic and secular Britain becomes, the less appropriate will it be for churches to exert influence over state education.

It is unfortunate that, for the upcoming general election at least, faith schools are unlikely to be on the agenda. But the case for inclusive, secular education will only grow stronger. Politicians cannot file it away in the ‘too difficult’ department forever.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

On religion in schools, see further:

Faith in education, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

Religion and belief in schools: lessons to be learnt, by Russell Sandberg (Freethinker)

Post-Christian Britain and religion in schools, National Secular Society podcast

Unregistered (illegal) schools with Eve Sacks, NSS podcast

A new Catholic school for Peterborough, NSS podcast

The Church of England’s influence over education, NSS podcast

The post Faith schools: where do the political parties stand? appeared first on The Freethinker.

I first encountered Eliza Flower (1803-46) in an online search for women composers from Essex during the 2020 lockdowns. My search was part of a ‘Women in Music and Science’ project with Chelmsford Theatre, called ‘Echoes from Essex’. I found only one piece of a capella choral music, ‘Now Pray We for our Country’, but it was exactly what I needed for the project. It was by a composer called Eliza Flower, whom I had never come across before. In the spirit of those strange times, we made a virtual recording of it: the choir consisted of just six members of our Electric Voice Theatre singers, who recorded several parts each in their homes and sent them to us for assembly. The result of this early foray into virtual singing transformed what had been an intriguing score into a moving hymn with qualities quite unlike any I had heard from this era. (Recording by Electric Voice Theatre here.)

Here was something quite remarkable: a piece of sacred English choral music written in the 1820’s which displayed many of the traits of secular European romanticism. The latter movement would not become widespread in the UK for some time – at least not among male composers. Flower called for sharply contrasting dynamics and tempi. The rich and dramatic harmony she deployed, coupled with her use of contrasting chorus and soloist ensembles, suggested that this work was written for no ordinary church choir.

This was just one hymn. However, as I would discover later from a letter written by Eliza herself to Novello, it was a hymn that Felix Mendelssohn was ‘most pleased’ with.

Where had all these ideas, packed into one short piece, come from? Was there more? There had to be more!

The words Flower had set to music, although adapted from those of an American preacher, were patriotic and almost jingoistic in their fervour towards England. They were almost patriotic enough to have deterred this fervent Scot from looking further – but the quality and innovation of the music kept nagging at me. I was impatient to discover more.

We were, however, still locked in: a feeling that was, I suspect, familiar to many women in England during Eliza’s lifetime, who were either hemmed in by societies’ expectations or forced to work, and legally dependent on their male relatives, with no prospect of freedom.

In time, I would discover that Eliza was not constrained in these ways, but was set on a different path. Unlike most women of her time, she was encouraged and educated by her radical parents to think for herself and to seek to fulfil her potential. My initial idea of her, constrained in a drawing room, encased in stays and stiff brocades, would turn out to be far from the truth.

Once normal life resumed in 2022, I investigated further at the British Library in London. There was more music!

The staff handed me a published pot-pourri of Flower’s vocal music, a large manuscript book bound with others from the same period. As I opened it, I was taken aback by the full-page drawing of Eliza. She certainly did not have the look of a starched Victorian lady, but instead of a gentle, bohemian soul, with her hair in soft curls on her shoulders and a face which shone with love. The artist, Eliza Bridell-Fox, had made the portrait in recollection of the composer after her death. Little did I know how important these names would be to Eliza Flower’s story in different ways.

On the opposite page was the index, which pointed to 182 pages of music. This page was full of clues to Flower’s character and outlook on life, but at this point I just wanted to read the music and listen to it in my head – since singing out loud in the British Library Reading Rooms is unfortunately not permitted. I could not take it all away with me, but I copied as much as I could and, when I returned home, began to sing and play the music, and to share it with my colleagues in Electric Voice Theatre. This was the beginning of an adventure that would lead us to Conway Hall in London, and to a performance based on that index page and the variety of work that it represented.

As I explored the music, I found unexpected harmony and structures; wonderful melodies, hymns, songs and ballads; and a strong and clear voice for the rights of men and women at all levels of society.

But who was this woman, creating music at one minute for Christian services, at another for the salon, and at the next for workers protesting in the street?

Thanks to the Conway Hall Ethical Society, at the invitation of Dr Jim Walsh, and to the efforts of researcher Carl Harrison and librarian Olwen Terris, my understanding of Flower’s music and ideas began to grow. When Holly Elson, Conway Hall’s Head of Programmes, introduced me to Oskar Jensen, a music historian, a new world opened up.

Oskar’s wide knowledge of Flower and of the musical and political history of the nineteenth century began to fill in some of the many gaps in her story. As we brought our own pieces of this fascinating jigsaw puzzle together, a fuller picture of Eliza Flower began to emerge as a highly regarded, prolific composer and radical feminist. Alongside her sister, the poet Sarah Flower Adams, she had exerted a profound influence on the move from Unitarianism at South Place Chapel in Finsbury towards humanism and the creation of the Conway Hall Ethical Society. The sisters’ contributions to the cultural and political life of the period were so important that when the chapel closed down, their portraits and archive were moved to Conway Hall, where they still hang in pride of place in the library, flanking a much bigger painting of the man usually credited with this move, William Johnson Fox. It seems this was, like so many other important historic events, a team effort. Yet gender bias eventually erased Eliza, and to some extent Sarah, from their shared history.

The beautiful drawing of Eliza discussed above holds the key to her story. When Eliza Fox, who became Mrs. Bridell-Fox and an artist, was only 11 years old, she was taken away from her mother by her father, William J. Fox, to live with him and Eliza Flower. They set up house together in the face of deep societal disapproval.

The courage this must have taken for Eliza to take up such a precarious position, totally reliant on Fox’s continued regard for her, can scarce be imagined.

Little Eliza Fox (the artist-to-be) went willingly to this new household. She loved and admired Eliza Flower, who, along with Flower’s sister, Sarah, had been part of the Fox household since their father’s death, with the then Reverend Fox as their guardian (after the break from his wife in 1834, he would eventually be removed from the Unitarian ministry). Reverend Fox, at the time minister of the congregation at the South Place Chapel, worked closely with Eliza Flower on his speeches, sermons and publications, and on the chapel’s political, spiritual, and musical direction. They grew closer, both spiritually and, apparently, in other ways, until in 1834 the break was made with Mrs Fox, who lost not only her husband, but her children too.

Not all of Fox’s congregation were happy about this arrangement, nor were some of the couple’s friends. For Eliza Flower, who by this time was a published and well-known composer, there was also the prospect that her music might be rejected by an outraged public. As a composer, her music fell into three distinct categories, each connected by her profound belief in equality and justice. I will now look at each of these categories in turn.

1. Sacred Choral Music

The hymn of Eliza’s that I first discovered turned out to be part of a book of ‘150 Hymns and Anthems’, published by Reverend Fox in 1841. Unusually, most are settings of poetry by the many freethinkers in Flower’s circle of friends – people like her sister Sarah (author of ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee’ with exquisite music by Eliza) and Harriet Martineau. These free thinkers expressed their ideas about morality with less emphasis on God than you might have imagined. 

Take Hymn 139, ‘Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter’. Its lyrics are a poem by the Corn Law Rhymer Ebenezer Elliott (1781 – 1849), containing a moral that is still relevant today (recording here):

But Babylon and Memphis

Are letters traced in dust:

Read them, earth’s tyrants! Ponder well

The might in which ye trust!

…

They fell, because on fraud and force

Their corner-stones were founded.

Eliza’s setting has more in common with the drama of a Bach Passion or Handelian cantata than a hymn fit for congregational singing. As reported by South Place Magazine in September 1897,

‘South Place was at this time (1833) like other Unitarian chapels, until Miss Flower… commenced a reformation in the musical part of the services, which rivalled the attraction to the chapel of its excellent Minister. Miss Flower’s musical genius, knowledge, and feeling enabled her to exercise a kindly influence over the choir… which would not even have come into existence without her.’

Eliza was one of the first people to champion the move away from the use of music as part of a religious service in the Unitarian denomination towards secular chamber music, as she began to include art songs in her repertoire (see below). This legacy continues to this day in the Sunday Concerts at Conway Hall.

2. Art Songs

These beautiful songs often brush on the themes of love and nature, but some present a quite different approach.

Over 17 days in 1845, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden held their extraordinary Bazaar. A musical score entitled ‘Free Trade Songs of the Seasons’, with music by Flower, was published by Novello to support the Anti-Corn-Law League at this event. The texts, by Flower’s sister Sarah, combine the familiar art song trope with the struggles of poverty-stricken labourers.

These songs were also intended for the drawing room, a place where ladies could pass on their clear message to their menfolk, who had the political power to change things. The Free Trade Songs were a very particular form of protest song, full of trills and turns, recitative, melismatic passages, harmonic surprises and strong melodic lines. The final Winter song moves in a choral march towards the last category of Flower’s work: the protest songs.

3. Protest Songs

Flower wrote many of these with Harriet Martineau, a feminist author and influential campaigner against slavery. Together, Martineau and Flower formed what Oskar Jensen has described as probably the most powerful protest-song partnership of the nineteenth century in the UK. Many of their songs became popular anthems, sung by thousands of protesting workers in the streets – most of whom would have had no idea that their voices were carrying the words and music of two young ladies.

William Fox, too, provided some of the texts, my favourite being ‘The Barons Bold, On Runnymede’, which, written in 1832, has the feel of a jolly Gilbert and Sullivan patter song avant la lettre. The words encourage us to ‘join hand in hand’ and stand up against the power of kings and state, so that ‘our wrongs shall soon be righted’.

Fox continued their work after Flower’s early death in 1846, but distanced himself from her memory. It is not clear why he did this, but it may have been partly in order to avoid scandal: he was intermittently a Member of Parliament between 1847-62. He stopped promoting Flower’s music, compounding the deeply ingrained bias faced by all female composers. This is demonstrated by research recently published by Donne, an organisation promoting women in music, which shows that 88 per cent of music played worldwide in major orchestral seasons is by dead white men. In the Victorian era, composition was seen as an abstract intellectual activity, more suitable for men than women. Eliza Flower was considered an exception during her lifetime. Unlike her contemporaries, Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, she was not required to subvert her talent in favour of a musical husband or brother, but was free to express herself as a progressive composer, determined to leave her own musical mark. Yet this same memory was deliberately ignored after her death by the man to whom she had devoted her life. As John Stuart Mill wrote in a review of Flower’s music in 1831,

‘There are not only indications of genius as indisputable as could have been displayed in the highest works of art, but there is also a new ascent gained, a new prospect opened, in the art itself, which we welcome as a pledge of its keeping pace with the progress of society.’

As Robert Browning wrote to Eliza about her music, ‘I put it apart from all other English music I know, and fully believe in it as the music we all waited for.’

Yet like many women today, impostor syndrome loomed over Flower’s life. In a letter to Vincent Novello, she tells of her meeting with ‘Mendelssohn the grand, great as his music, as great an artist, (but not so good a man)’.  Mr. Novello had encouraged her ‘to send those sacred songs to him, but I shrunk… They were however shewn to him – (not with my consent). His praise was worse than censure. I did not want opinion, but help. He said I had genius…’ However, Mendelssohn also implied that her musical ideas were irregular and would not be popular. Despite Mendelssohn, Flower was popular in her lifetime. With our project to revive her music, we hope she will be again.

Frances Lynch and the Electric Voice Theatre, together with Oskar Jensen, will be performing in Conway Hall’s historic library, Red Lion Square, London, at 19.00 on 27 October 2023. For more information and to book tickets, click here.

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In northwest Nigeria last year, Deborah Yakubu, a college sophomore, was stoned and beaten to death and her body was publicly burned, after she ‘blasphemed’ against Islam in a WhatsApp group. Usman Buda, a 30-year-old butcher, was stoned to death by a mob in June 2023, after he was accused of blasphemy in the same region. Mubarak Bala, President of the Humanist Association of Nigeria (HAN), was arrested over three years ago in the north-central city of Kaduna after he posted ‘sacrilegious’ statements on Facebook. He remains in jail today, in the Counter-Terrorism Unit of Abuja Prison; their main foe in inter-jail soccer matches, he tells me amusedly, is the Armed Robbery Unit.

Atheists in Nigeria are in constant danger of losing their jobs, families, freedom, human rights, and their very lives. Belief disagreements in this nation of around 220 million (and growing) frequently explode into violence: over 6,000 Christians were hacked to death in a recent 15-month span, and the bloody trend seems to be escalating. 

Security is needed. What’s the solution?

Humanist Mutual Aid Network (HuMAN), a not-for-profit organisation based in the US, has responded to this emergency by launching three ‘Safe Houses’ in Nigeria to provide sanctuary to non-believers. Abuja Safe House, Maiduguri Safe House, and Minna Safe House are secular oases for groups of 5-7 individuals, but the structure and goals of each heretic home vary widely.

Abuja Safe House (also known as ‘KaZoHa’) is now the irreligious residence of five women, one of whom is Amina Ahmed, Mubarak Bala’s wife. The couple are pictured in the photo at the beginning of this article, which was taken in late 2019 when the sanctuary was launched, just a few months before the arrest of Bala, who was its director. There is also a three-year-old boy at the Abuja Safe House: Sodangi, Mubarak and Amina’s son. Amina and the rest of the freethinking quintet survive financially with proceeds from their Fruit Juice Bar, funded by HuMAN. They also manage an online community centre for Mubarak Bala’s international support, and they guarantee shelter to atheists and LGBTQ people who are fleeing or hiding from persecution. 

Abuja Safe House residents are state-protected because Abuja, the nation’s capital, strives to be secular and tolerant. The godless group is also out of the closet, and comfortably active on social media. Any drawbacks? Yes. They do not own the property: it is leased annually, the fee paid by Humanists International (HI), which also provides legal aid to Mubarak Bala. 

Bala maintains near-daily contact with Abuja Safe House. He envisions its future goals as: ‘1) financial independence, 2) acquisition of a permanent non-rental residence, 3) expansion to accommodate more humanists at risk, 4) establishment of Abuja Humanist Primary & Secondary Schools for kids – like Tai Solarin’s Mayflower School.’

Maiduguri Safe House is a completely different establishment because it is situated in the Boko Haram-infested northeastern state of Borno, where publicly declaring oneself as an ex-Muslim would be suicidal. The six residents here are all young men, living together in happy liberation from suffocating Islamic rituals and the narrow eyes of suspicious neighbours. 

On their HuMAN webpage they have their faces blurred, they are all anonymous and the safe house itself is hidden behind a tall brick wall to guarantee safety from neighbours suspicious of their lack of conformity with Islamic ritual. On the plus side, the Maiduguri atheists own their property, purchased partly with funds generated from their World Peace Internet Café (funded by HuMAN), an ice cream factory (also HuMAN-funded), and a still-in-progress campaign to pay for the roof. 

Maiduguri Safe House is one hundred per cent male, high-security, closeted, and financially stable. This is in sharp contrast to the female, out-of-the-closet, state-protected, but economically tenuous abode of Abuja Safe House. According to ‘SMK’, a resident here, the top goals of this safe house are offering refuge to humanists who are physically threatened because they have abandoned religion; providing safety to ‘Almajiri’ (children abandoned by their parents at Islamic centres); creating strong unity between local humanists by living together; and teaching one another vocational skills which they can use to become economically self-reliant. 

Minna Safe House, in Niger State, is a third option that expresses HuMAN’s most idealistic vision. The seven housemates here include men, women and children with various stories: they may be LGBTQ people, ex-Muslims or ex-Christians, well-educated or illiterate, but they are all bound together by their renunciation of blind faith. As in Abuja, the Minna Safe House residents are out-and-proud atheists, with their smiling faces posted on HuMAN’s website, and their namesakes and occupations listed. As in Maiduguri, the Minna residents enjoy home ownership: the four-bedroom unit was inherited by HuMAN’s Africa Director, Saliu Olumide Saheed. Like Abuja and Maiduguri, the Minna Safe House gains income from its HuMAN-funded businesses: a grocery store (co-funded by Atheism United) and a barber shop. 

The ambitions of Minna Safe House exceed those of the other two sanctuaries, though, because it aims to also be a beloved community centre. Future plans include a community garden, with produce shared with needy locals in weekly community meals. Additionally, its Humanist Preparatory School is generating enthusiastic local support; the school will emphasise English learning, because that skill is highly desirable for Nigerian employees. Minna Safe House is also setting up a Humanist Clinic, organised by a housemate who is a trained healthcare worker, to provide first aid assistance and medicine to the local community. The clinic also plans to serve nearby refugee camps and rural villages; last year it delivered interventions for malaria, cholera, polio, hepatitis, HIV, scabies and dental care. 

Saliu Olumide, who serves as the Minna Safe House director, strives to operate the sanctuary on the basis of humanist and mutual aid values. ‘We are creating an egalitarian community,’ he says, ‘where everyone works to contribute to the common good of one another. What we have, we will use together and the excess will be stored for rainy days. No one will be left out, we will attempt to even out the system of greed that’s made life difficult for the oppressed and rural in Nigeria. It is our ultimate goal to succeed until we are role models for anyone who wants to create an active, successful community.’

Maiduguri Safe House also conducts multiple humanitarian projects, focused primarily on the Almajiri. Last winter, with HuMAN funding, the Maiduguri crew built a wood-and-aluminum-siding structure that protected 120 Almajiri from the seasonal wet and cold, and it supplied them with wool blankets, mosquito nets, and free computer classes. With the help of HuMAN funding, they have also been able to feed widows, provide medical assistance to refugees, help widows start sustainability projects, and operate an internet café and an ice cream factory.

The Humanist Mutual Aid Network (previously known as the Humanist Global Charity, and before that, as the Brighter Brains Institute) is not solely dedicated to providing safe houses in Nigeria. It also supports its mutual aid partners in Chad, Zambia, Uganda, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines and the USA (Appalachia). Many of these efforts are collaborations with other groups like Atheist Republic, Burmese Atheists and the Humanist Alliance Philippines, International.

Is Nigeria doomed to always be dangerous to freethinkers? Safety varies geographically – the Muslim north is more dangerous than the Christian south – but ostracism exists everywhere. Atheists are often disowned and disinherited by their families, and barred from schools and employment. Safe Houses (on the HuMAN model) can simultaneously deliver freedom of belief, freedom of sexual preference, and freedom from poverty, prejudice and violence. Moreover, if they deliver humanitarian services to their neighbours, atheists will be regarded as, so to speak, ‘good without god.’

Perhaps Safe Houses can be set up throughout Nigeria, running from north to south, to serve as an ‘underground railroad’ for non-believers? Mubarak Bala would like to see many more established – perhaps one in every Nigerian state.

Bala hopes he will be released from prison soon. Whenever that happens, his initial plan ‘is to unite all the secular groups in Nigeria, such as Lagos Humanist Assembly, Atheist Society of Nigeria, Hausa Atheists, Northern Nigerian Humanist Association, Tarok Thinkers, Proud Atheists. I hope to bring them all under one banner, under HAN or ASN or Nigeria Secular Movement.’

After that, his long-term goal is ‘to lead Nigeria politically, but I have to adjust to the new reality, that I am too lone a voice, too vulnerable to dare the standards. I need to be diplomatic now for our community to be safe. I hope this new strategy works. Of course, my eventual aim is to be in a position to end religion permanently, without being killed in the process.’

Further Freethinker articles on Nigeria:

The price of criticising Islam in northern Nigeria: imprisonment or death 

Secularism in Nigeria: can it succeed?

Mubarak Bala: update on a ‘blasphemer’ in Nigeria

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The post Protecting atheists in Nigeria: the role of ‘safe houses’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Life

Readers of this journal, particularly the older generation, will be saddened to learn of the death of Jim Herrick in Cambridge at the age of 78.

Herrick read history and English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then worked for several years as a schoolteacher before emerging as a stalwart of the freethought, secularist and humanist movement and an important personality in all its organisations. He contributed as speaker, as manager, organiser and campaigner and, most of all, as writer and editor.

Over 30 years, Herrick wrote numerous pieces for the Freethinker and New Humanist, including book, theatre and cinema reviews. He also published five books: Aspiring to the Truth: Two Hundred Years of the South Place Ethical Society (2016); Humanism: An Introduction (2003); Humanist Anthology: From Confucius to David Attenborough (1995); Against the Faith: Some Deists, Skeptics and Atheists (1985); and Vision and Realism: A Hundred Years of The Freethinker (1982).

Against the Faith reveals the depth of Herrick’s understanding of the freethinking intellectual tradition and its roots. In his introduction, he noted the wide range of backgrounds of those who have contributed to freethought, ranging from fiery activists and politicians, like Paine and Bradlaugh, through poets, historians, scientists and philosophers (including Shelley, Gibbon, TH Huxley, and JS Mill), to polymaths like Bertrand Russell. In his review, Harold Blackham (Freethinker, June 1985) wrote:

‘Jim Herrick shows himself learned and acquainted with the ideas of his selected representatives, and is direct in expression… His temper throughout is cool and fair, and his material is controlled by judicious and perceptive comment.’

After leaving the teaching profession, Herrick’s first employment was as Assistant General Secretary of the BHA. In June 1977, he became General Secretary of the NSS, serving until August 1979. 

Herrick was assistant editor of the Freethinker from October 1975 until he took over as editor in January 1977, a post he held until to August 1981. In 1982, he published Vision and Realism, his centenary history of the magazine. In 1984, he became editor of New Humanist, and then, in 2002, literary editor, until his retirement in 2005; he also served as editor of International Humanist News.

Herrick’s association with the NSS, begun in the 1970s, continued until 2009, when he stepped down from the Council of Management.  He also served as one of the society’s vice-presidents. He was a long-term member of the Board of Secular Society and GW Foote & Co. (publishers of the Freethinker) and served as Chair of both; he was also a trustee of the Rationalist Association, which publishes New Humanist. In 1996 he received the Distinguished Humanist Service Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), and in 2022 he was the recipient of the International Rationalist Award. Herrick was a founder member of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association as well as acting as its Chair.

Herrick and the Freethinker 

According to the authors of The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain (2023, p. 239), a book recently published with the support of Humanists UK (HUK), Herrick told the research assistant Jessica Douthwaite in a 2018 interview that he left the Freethinker because he was ‘tired of all the anti-religious stuff…bashing the church’. In the concluding pages of Vision and Realism, published the year after he left the Freethinker, he recorded some of the ‘ill-feeling’ and verbal slights that had passed between some members of the National Secular Society (NSS) and the Freethinker on the one hand, and of the British Humanist Association (BHA, now HUK) on the other. The secularists spoke bitterly of ‘narcissistically Intellectual Humanists … disinclined to fraternise with working-class people.’ The humanists responded with pointed remarks about the ‘essential sterility of secularism’.

Yet in the same book Herrick also emphasised the ‘diversity’ within both the BHA and the NSS, and the fact that ‘there was overlap of membership and activists’. He characterised the purpose of secularism as ‘criticising religion and propounding social reform’. In the May 1981 issue of the Freethinker, he seemed more positive about the role of secularism, freethought and even the magazine itself than his later comments in The Humanist Movement might suggest. As he put it:

‘The major issues of our time such as disarmament, race relations, unemployment and equable sharing of the world’s resources of food and energy, do not allow us to look to the future with easy optimism. Freethought – the “best of causes” – will continue to clear the ground by exposing religions where they obscure issues and cloud thought. The secular humanist outlook… will continue to provide an essential ingredient of civilisation. Long may the Freethinker flourish.’

Herrick and humanism

Denis Cobell, NSS President from 1997 to 2006, knew Herrick for over 40 years, and regarded him as a friend. In his words:

‘Jim was not a self-publicist and was quietly spoken at meetings when matters of dispute arose. He displayed patience, kindness and objectivity. He was committed to what was once known as “the best of causes” and always went well beyond his duty.’

Herrick’s own view of humanism was poignantly encapsulated in a letter to the Guardian (24 August 2002), in response to claims by the indefatigable Giles Fraser that ‘the humanist agenda is almost entirely parasitic upon religious belief itself’. Not true, said Herrick:

‘The “unspeakable” may be experienced by humanists listening to a string quartet, or touching the depths of love, or acknowledging the puniness of self in the face of the vastness of the universe. There is nothing easy or empty about humanity and reason’.

Further obituaries of Jim Herrick: Humanists UK

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